I've come to think of units of five thousand days as "childhoods" in a purely metric sense: that's the time it takes something just born to comfortably enter early teenagerhood. And so, today, I conclude my third "childhood."

Before sitting down to type tonight, I read my post "Steve of the 10,000 days," written at the end of my second. It summarized the first two better than I remembered, starting with an expression of deep appreciation for existence and the universe before narrowing to more specific things to me, such as intersections with animals, family, school, technology, and friends.

My actual childhood, the first five thousand days, feel in memory like an unhurried eternity. Yet when analyzed, each day must have clucked so upon the previous like magnetic letter blocks. This new place visited, this basic concept learned, that small revelation deduced, one day at a time, and only five thousand in total.

This "third childhood" is the first I've spent entirely as an adult, having lived almost every day in content solitude – something I always wanted – and almost all in the same humble place.

The priviliges have remained immense, and many were artistic opportunities. One of the most profound was to write, direct and premiere a full-length musical, "RPG", honouring the way video games from my actual childhood inspired so many to think and reason even outside those fantasy worlds, rendered on stage against a programmed audiovisual backdrop. Somehow, the ideal cast for this complex quartet piece – the remarkable Abrah Friberg, Kaleb Van Rijswijck, Candice Lundy, and Brad Anderson – happened to coexist here just before graduating high school and splitting across the country. As it formed, I internally regarded it as "one of the coolest things I had ever done," and I think I will look fondly on it forever.

Thanks to the staff and community at BAAY, mentioned last post, I would re-write and direct a 90-minute musical called The Skylark, performed by 22 focused and talented students around their own five thousandth days. It combined a simple love story with the spirit of a Star Trek episode, depicting a seemingly pre-industrial society's reckoning when its youth discover it once neared spacefaring. Thousands of days can seem brief in retrospect, but those students are adults now.

I also originated a continuinous program for students to develop their own music theatre productions, from the "act one" header to the fully-notated score. I've still never seen anything quite like this for youth, but I never doubted the educational richness, because I've long known that truly wanting to create something means you'll learn whatever is necessary. Over four years, "Creation Lab" produced ten books and brought each to the stage. I was pleased to work with all five-plus dozen students in total, including some permeating regulars who know who they are.

These were all finite projects executed by small groups, but the dedication, teamwork and enjoyment lent them significance that made them feel somehow bigger than even shows in the fully professional realm must feel. Altogether, I count that I've worked on about 88 productions, plus many more summer camps, evenings of improv theatre, workshops, choral music endeavours, recitals, and on and on.

All of this convinced me: if you offer your time and skill, the city of Bellingham will offer you opportunities, and that is one mark of a healthy community and a location to envy.

I still take heart and lightheartedness in knowing and recalling my family and friends. Having moved from Ontario together, my immediate family still inhabit this area, each seemingly following their own heart, I'm proud to note. My sister Katy now has her own immediate family seemingly patterned after ours with familiar emphases on certain admirations and enthusiasms.

Since we were roommates, Doug has haunted the Seattle-Redmond area, working at DigiPen first as a student and now an employee. Kelly, a free spirit on a motorbike, once passed through and chatted on short notice. I believe David remains at Google and occasionally asks me about video games or technology. Kris is now far from "green" as a screen actor around Los Angeles, and these days trades stocks and travels with his two small dogs.

Lars returned to town unannounced one spring for a walk and a request: he was working on a video game and intended to try crowdfunding it. Within two years, I would undertake another of my most cherished projects ever: finally composing a complete soundtrack for a vast, fantasy-exploration-type video game. The finished album for Frontiers was almost four-and-a-half hours of music, and I had the subsequent fortune of working with Lars and developer Ryan Span on other games of varied styles.

In 2017, I spent almost a month trying to find the words to comment after the irreplaceable Adi Ashburner died. My script, a seemingly fitting medium, was delivered on video to the Internet, another, for his friends and colleagues who had already shared essays on the impact Adi's presence had on them. If there was a primary feeling, it might have been the feeling that the future versions of the present would simply feel odd without his input. It's inadequate to call his verbal substance "humour," "intelligence," "courage," "ire" or "joy." Perhaps some kind of combination of those, enabled by his inability or refusal to perceive societal "red tape" in light of the mere truth. Or maybe it's better described just as silliness. Or both, uniquely fused. Those written ecomiums for Adi still exist, but more importantly, much of his own material does too: films he made, and much of his writing, and I mean someday to aggregate it here. Adi didn't have even 15,000 days, and I don't suppose I'll ever get to narrate his audiobook. I suspect the life-lasting memories of Adi will be annoyingly tapping me on the shoulder when I write my own.

This site, by the way, which originated almost as soon as I could write and publish HTML, spent the majority of these five thousand days in an almost-closed state. I know now that it should not have been that way.

Facebook seemed worthy of enthusiasm when it showed up to connect everyone, and it still does a few things especially well. But the place it's earned in the textbooks of Internet history, it's earned for good and bad feats. It's clear now: just as individuals shouldn't live in a futuristic trailer park with a management that somehow benefits from the ability to continuously impart suggestions about what to buy, whom to interact with, and which acquaintances they should hear and hear less, individuals should generally insist on the tranquility and freedom to build their own home their own way, then proceed outward from there. And so I decided finally to restore and enrich this site, clutching the mantra that an in-progress something is better than nothing. It seems truer than ever that anyone who really uses the Internet should treat their own site as their own home.

All this happened just after the onset of the pandemic, which, despite its tragic impact, served to demonstrate that technology had quietly advanced to the point where not even closed schools or workplaces could halt much of education or work. "Essential workers" such as grocery store employees were recognized explicitly as essential. And I personally took this turn of events as an invitation to embrace activies I'd always wanted to prioritize more highly, rather than merely between all those opportunities in Bellingham. I even took a full step away from music, hoping to reboot my appreciation after sampling existence through the brain of a non-musician.

And lately, approaching this day, I've been prompted to look at Bellingham differently, and hopefully more as it deserves.

Ontario, the setting of my actual childhood, has remained home in the connotational sense, and I've always missed it.

But Lexie, a newer friend from California who has just moved from her own childhood house, purposely calls Bellingham home because it's a place she chose. That convention made me note that Bellingham, so culturally vibrant as I've described, and as much as it's enabled me to accomplish, is the one place of residence I never chose. I'd come to think of it as synonymous with its routines, but she arrived with fresher eyes from a hotter, flatter area, revering the trails and trees, birds and deer. It was enough that I began to re-regard the area for its more objective identity as a naturally beautiful and benevolent region. Its average person is content to give a nod or a hello, unimposing on the business or aspirations of the next. Any part of the area offers formative experiences as if with open arms, the type that seem to slice into your memory and stay with you forever, and it had somehow never struck me that way.

That became a theme in my mind: there are so many ways in which one, riding the momentum of growth, maturity, and cumulative thinking, can become entrenched or embroiled. That is utile, but inhibiting. Real open-mindedness, the type with which we are born, precedes even our earliest phrasable thoughts. So I looked forward to greeting a morning of conscious willingness not to have preemptively evaluated whatever I could think not to have; not to wield premonitions about language and languages, about vistas and views, about the shapes of letters and numbers, about simple machines or objects or art, about facial expressions, inflections, and personalities. Yes, when taking in the sights around the local campus today, I could mull the wisdom of the allocated funds to remodel the massive gymnasium or the politics behind a contentious renaming of one of the colleges. Or I could let my imagination meld with the shapes and sounds while postulating what video game or novel might use them, visualize mazes in the patterns of the bricks, or feel the abstract physics of a pilot's flying vehicle weaving between the parallel angles of the bicycle-tethering station. In these kinds of ways, I hope "childhood" describes the next five thousand days in more than a purely metric sense.

There are now so many memories, so many experiences, that reviewing my recorded remarks about them has sometimes surprised me. I intend to keep my memories nearby, and my records, should reminders again prove useful. But I won't keep them to restrict me.

Shortly after day 15,000 finally arrived, Lexie happened to speak the simple words beginning this post. Nothing is more universal to life than that feeling of appreciation for existence and the universe, and perhaps not even the "real open-mindedness with which we are born" goes deeper than it.

And now for day 15,001.