"People will think what I want them to think!” – Charles Foster Kane"

we're still eddying around our metaphorical tree of life, hoping we'll finally see the light before we all go down the drain together.  Well, I think we're here, to what I expect to be its final form - though I'd understand the sceptics out there who know I don't know my own mind half the time and are in a wait and see state of mind themselves,  and I get that, I get that.  I'm just by nature open to new information and consciously or otherwise having an eye out for improvements.  And I'm on rhe relatively benign end of the fickle-mindedness spectrum.   You don't need to worry about me waking up one morning and deciding to slap a tariff on all the penguins living on some remote island; or threatening or invading or outright seizing your neighbor and former best friend's home; or waffling between the two horns of the eternal dilemma: do I chuck these losers down some unescapable ice hole in a swamp teeming with alligators or maybe Alcatraz, or do I leave 'em BBB, free to whistle away their happy lives while tending my crops or servicing all my personal needs in my gold plated pleasure palace?  What to do, what to do, what to do.  So many difficult choices, when you're the king of the world and no one can protect you from your innate stupidity and simple-mindedness.

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So, the big reveal.  To everyone's great surprise, Cortisone Dreams looks very much like its soulmate Tyenne Travellin' - both of them long, hopefully very long white ribbons scrolling out before you in two long, perfectly straight parallel lines, separate but equal, until they finally come together as one out there on the horizon somewhere like train tracks crossing the Mohave Desert.

So if you want to get a sense of what this will look like, you could refresh your memory by taking a quick peak at TT and see that it's chunked up into segments, each of them consisting of posts listed in chronological order for ease of readership, but with the segments themselves placed in reverse chronological order, oldest first.  More or less like reading a book back to front because the sequence of the chapters is reversed.

The point here is to come up with a more effective solution for managing very long narratives, where current events are at the top and easy to see.  We have a few other innovations we're going to try out here to see if they're effective or not:

• The blog will begin with an About section, which will remain permanently set at the top of the blog.  If new posts get added to the About section, they'll be placed immediately in their correct permanent resting place, not in the Recent Posts section, so you might watch out for that. 
• I'm going to put more information into each header: a timeframe, and some sort of tag or search word that you can use the search box to jump to some segment you know is far out there near the horizon but don't want to spend your whole afternoon running down the tracks trying to find it.  Because as compelling as the Grumby Bottle Opener's life story is gonna feel once it gets a proper telling, it's not worth getting heat stroke over or risking getting jumped by some bloody cholla.
• The chronological narrative part of the journal will roll out in direct chronological sequence, newest segment at the top - in other words, in the opposite reading direction as all of our previous journals as well as of most other journals on the site.
• The laminar, chronological portion of the journal will be broken into segments (chapters), but with the chapters in reverse sequence, more or less like reading a normal book structured with chapters in reverse sequential order so that the most recent entries are visible at the top of the blog, rather than at the bottom so that they'll be visible when you first open the journal.
• We will probably reengineer the companion journal, Tyenne Travellin', to follow this model once it's proven to be effective.  Note though that 'chronological' will have a different sense between the two.  In both journals entries will be ordered in date-posted sequence; but in this one, as you've seen already, the individual posts are decidedly asynchronous and will jump around randomly and chaotically as the mood fits us and what we choose to talk about the day.  Trust us, we'll eventually get back and fill in the gaps of our stay in the hospital, but it could take us awhile getting there.
• The journal will contain both a table of contents (the chapters of the book), so you can see what other chapters have scrolled opposite the front page while you were off doing your own thing, so you can jump to them and catch up if you wish.
• The journal will also create an a set of multiple appendencies for sections of the journal that don't fall within the primary narrative.  Both the TOC and appendices will be the final material of the book so they don't shove the narrative off the front page.
• We're going to come up with a tagging scheme, with each section branded in such a way that you should be able to jump directly to it using the search function provided by the website and maybe even Google.  We'll discover what works in the doing and come up with something functional eventually.

• The vision for the index is that it will be sectioned to identify not just the main line but also tangential domains this blog decides it wants to include: stories of the lives of others and photography are two of many examples that come to mind.  It will also include the search handles you can use to jump to a section that interests you, if in fact anything here still interests you other than worrying about whether I'm still crazy and scaring or threatening the lives of innocent people.

• We're going to retain the 'newest entries' but redefine its purpose and usage so that it only includes two types of posts.  One is new or recent entries in the non-sequential part of the blog: the lives of others, or photo galleries, or parts of our family histories that lie outside the point in time that this journal commences at - our family history, origin stories, my time in the army, and on and on and on.  These will all be instantiated as Appendices, and we'll figure out how to group and categorize them as we develop and add new material.  It is likely that the set of appendices will see a lot of churn over time, with similar ones merged or split and with individual posts repositioned to their new home.
• The second usage of the New Entries section will be to elevate any previously posted entry that has been modified significantly enough that we think it zshoukdncome to your attention.  The point is to avoid the tedium and frustration of scrolling through a long journal trying to figure out why it's come to the top as one of the most recently modified journals on the site.  The goal when we're done here is that everything you need to know about what's new is visible at or near the top of the journal.

So that's probably enough on the structural view for now.  The proper frame of mind is as if this were any other software product, and the intent is to learn by doing to see what works and what doesn't, using a mental model of continuous improvement.  Feedback is welcome and encouraged.  All are welcome to be part of the design team and offer opinions and perspective on what you find effective or not.  And if you just plain don't care for it, that's fine too.  There are plenty of interesting lives out there, more than you could ever hope to keep up on anyway.

There's more for be said, about why we have two tracks and how they're related rather than just have one, but hold that thought.  It's warming up and I want to head out to Powell Butte again to see if the volcanoes are visible this time and if there are any sapsuckers around today.  What an easy mark I am!  What have I seen - maybe three or four sapsuckers in my whole life that I was aware of?  Still I keep looking, just like for that peregrine falcon on the Sellwood Bridge.  What a sapsucker for punishment, if there ever was one.