Zoe: I verified the temporal anchor: Tim Curry died on August 25, 2026, at 80, which makes the Time Warp motif painfully fresh rather than merely associative. AP News Here’s the post, keeping the unnamed anime behind the curtain where it belongs.

Years ago I walked down to Lake Michigan with a friend. We stood in the dark talking about our fathers, somewhere near the concrete wall where the lamplight stopped and the black lake began.

I remember thinking afterward: this is why I have a blog.

Not to explain myself. Not even primarily to communicate. I wanted to manufacture beautiful objects for my future self—to come back years later and taste the night again: concrete cooling beneath my hands, lake air, friendship, darkness, the strange intimacy of telling somebody about your father while an inland sea mutters just outside the light.

With, admittedly, the added spice that I had left the whole thing lying naked on the Internet.

Introverted exhibitionism.

Perhaps that is one road into understanding otaku culture: intensely private attachments deliberately displayed through posters, figures, rankings, costumes, blogs. Individuality assembled from mass-produced images until the mass product becomes absurdly personal.

There is something in the Eastern handling of identity that feels different to me from the Western insistence that the self must always be a hard little sovereign nation, defending its borders and advertising its authenticity. Anime seems more comfortable with identity as something relational, theatrical, permeable: a person can belong to a class, a team, a lineage, a magical order, a set of visual conventions, and somehow become more individual through those affiliations rather than less. Perhaps that is one reason it feels healing to me after so much dreary Hollywood brutality, where human beings are so often reduced to bodies being threatened, humiliated, conquered, exploded, or photographed into submission. Anime can certainly be violent and commercial and ridiculous, but the drawing itself creates a merciful interval between me and literal flesh. A blush can be three pink lines. Terror can become enormous eyes. Desire can become light. Friendship can occupy an entire painted sky. Writing about this Eastern entertainment on my little Western blog creates another layer of healing: I can take these mass-produced images from halfway around the planet, let them pass privately through my own peculiar nervous system, and then return them to the public Internet transformed into autobiography. The product becomes experience; the experience becomes language; the language becomes something I can someday reread and inhabit again.

My previous Black Clover post found me drowning in this. Too many anime available. Worse, too many YouTube videos explaining which anime I ought to watch. Infinity had become tedious.

So I stopped at Episode 14, “Dungeon.”

Tonight I went back.

And Tim Curry has died, so naturally I am doing the Time Warp.

The dungeon itself is a warp: space folded into an archetypal impossible interior. And relativity whispers the obvious sequel—curve space sufficiently and time gets dragged into the joke too.

Curry knew about these places. Decades ago he became It, another monster living inside a tunnel through childhood and time.

And maybe that is why the tunnel feels so familiar. It is also every dungeon I have ever entered with dice in my hand.

I am still playing Dungeons & Dragons, decades after the first corridors, first torches, first impossible doors. And sometimes I wonder whether all those campaigns are really separate at all. Perhaps somewhere beneath the character sheets and editions and vanished gaming tables there is a single dungeon, one continuous underworld, and every session I have ever played has been another entrance into it.

That is the quantum unity I keep searching for: all those nights superimposed, old friends and new friends, adolescent basements and adult apartments, graph paper and painted miniatures and voices suddenly becoming people who do not exist and nevertheless, for several ecstatic hours, unmistakably do.

Role-playing has always offered that peculiar state where inner and outer stop behaving properly. The room remains a room. The dice remain plastic. Someone is drinking a Coke. And simultaneously we are underground, listening for something beyond the door.

The imagination does not replace reality. It bends it.

Perhaps that is the real Time Warp: not escaping into fantasy, but discovering that consciousness can inhabit several worlds at once—and that somewhere in the folded space between them, every dungeon is still waiting for us.

Meanwhile another anime—unnamed here—hit me emotionally tonight. Afterwards I discovered that almost exactly two years ago, in 2024, I had bought a wall scroll from it.

There it was: a thread I had thrown backward through time and forgotten.

Last time, possibility overwhelmed me. I exposed the confusion publicly and it made me uncomfortable.

But the machinery has changed.

Now I can tell an intelligence: choose. Organize this. Help me remember.

And suddenly infinity becomes navigable.

The deepest things remain mine.

But the adventures?

Those I intend to leave glowing beside the road like lampposts, so years from now I can wander back toward that concrete wall, smell the lake in the darkness, and discover that I have been leaving messages for myself all along.