The Logues

We are so terrified of beginnings and endings that we invented ways to delay them both. That’s what the -logues are.

Not just suffixes. Little escape hatches for the human animal that can’t tolerate raw experience without a frame. We don’t just live. We preface, annotate, recap, justify. We put a velvet rope around the chaos and call it structure.

A book has a spine. A life has one too, but ours is made of language, and language is always trying to sneak in a backstage pass.

Start with the prologue, that smug little throat-clear before the first real sentence. “Before the main story.” Sure. But what it really says is: I don’t trust you to handle the story without me holding your hand for a moment. Prologues are the emotional bouncers of narrative. They check your ID. They tell you how to feel before you’ve earned it. Sometimes they’re useful. Oftenmost they’re infodumps and an alibi for the author’s insecurity.

And then, like clockwork, we crave the epilogue, the aftertaste. “After the main story.” The part where the author pats your head and says, There, there. The world is not that sharp. See, everyone’s fine. Or at least, everyone’s explained. Epilogues are closure cosplay. The reader don’t understand what I’m trying to say. Let’s explain it for the dummies, like putting up soft lighting as an exit sign. Again, it’s an alibi for uncertainty, presented as resolution, daring the reader to complain.

But here’s the fun part. Stories, like lives, rarely march in one clean line. They lurch. They splinter. They stop to stare at a fire and forget why they were walking.

So we invented the interlogue, the “between.” Between parts. Between books. Between the big chunks where the “real” story supposedly happens. The interlogue is the hallway scene, the cigarette outside the party, the moment your friend confesses something in the kitchen while everyone else laughs in the living room. It’s transitional, which means it’s dangerous. It’s where people change their minds. It’s where you can’t blame “the plot” yet, but you also can’t pretend nothing is happening.

And if we’re still not satisfied, if we’re still chewing the end like gristle, we slap on a postlogue (or postlog), the extra bit after the end. The epilogue’s epilogue. If the epilogue is a handshake, the postlogue is a clinging grip. A second dessert because the first dessert didn’t numb the fact that time is going to take everything anyway. Postlogues are the narrative equivalent of texting “one more thing” after a breakup speech. They’re proof that we do not leave well enough alone. We circle the drain.

And when the postlogue becomes a new prologue? That’s when the architecture collapses into a loop. When you take that “one more thing” from the postlogue and carry it into the next room, you aren’t starting fresh. You are dragging the ghost of the last chapter into the first sentence. The story becomes tautology. It’s how we become ideologues of our own trauma. But more on ideologue down below.

Then there’s the midlogue, the rare creature. “In the middle.” Often tongue-in-cheek, because who in their right mind interrupts the engine room of a story to announce, basically, Hello, yes, you are currently in the middle. It’s the author leaning into the reader’s face like a stage magician whispering, “Are you watching closely?” A midlogue forces you to notice how desperate you are for momentum, how allergic you are to pausing without permission.

All of this is outside the main body, the “real” narrative. But inside the book, inside the room, inside the skull, the -logues switch costumes and become forms of speech.

The monologue is the one-speaker performance. The private sermon. The “I’ve been holding this in” explosion. Monologues are not conversations, they’re declarations. They are where we reveal ourselves and also where we stage-manage ourselves. People think a monologue is pure honesty. Half the time it’s just loneliness given voice. One voice, no friction, no risk of being interrupted by reality.

Then the dialogue, two speakers, the basic unit of human collision. Dialogue is where you find out whether you’re talking to a person or to a bot that has learned to mimic phrases. Real dialogue has a pulse. It’s not two monologues taking turns. It’s mutual contamination. You enter it as one thing and leave it as another.

The duologue is dialogue with the spotlight tightened. Two speakers, and it emphasizes it’s only two. No chorus, no crowd, no escape into group dynamics. Duologues feel like a locked room. They’re intimate and therefore brutal. Two people, two histories, two agendas. In a duologue, there’s nowhere to hide except inside your own cleverness, and cleverness is a flimsy blanket in a cold house.

The trialogue is a conversation between three, but in the age of the internet, it’s rarely three people. It’s You, Me, and The Audience. We no longer have dialogues; we have trialogues where every word spoken between two people is filtered through how it would look to a third-party observer. It’s the death of intimacy. We aren’t talking to each other; we are performing “A Meaningful Interaction” for a ghost in the room. That’s why people play pretend on the timeline and escape into DMs for real talk.

And then, because we can’t resist biting our own tails, we made the metalogue (or metalog), the dialogue about dialogue, the conversation that keeps turning around to stare at itself. “This conversation is about itself.” It’s the moment you say, “Why are we always like this when we talk?” and suddenly you’re not fighting about dishes, you’re fighting about the fight. Metalogues can be the highest form of intimacy or the most sophisticated form of avoidance. Sometimes it’s insight. Sometimes it’s a smoke grenade. You can analyze a conversation forever and never once say the thing you’re afraid to say. Like an episode of Sopranos.

So the -logues aren’t just narrative architecture. They’re psychological strategies.

We use prologues to control first impressions. We use epilogues to domesticate loss. We use interlogues to survive transitions. We use postlogues when we can’t let go. We use midlogues when we want to prove we’re in on the joke, as if irony is armor.

And then we step outside the “book” and the -logues become what they always wanted to be: a way to turn living into a genre.

A travelogue is the obvious one, the travel narrative. But notice what it really is: a way to make movement mean something. Because just “going somewhere” is not a story. It’s logistics. A travelogue turns mileage into identity. It says, I went there, therefore I became someone. Sometimes true. Sometimes a selfie with a passport stamp pretending to be transformation. Sometimes more honest than a fantasy going from point A to point B.

A catalogue (or catalog) is a collection, an itemized list. Stars. Products. Books. Lovers. Grievances. Catalogues are how we pretend the world is countable. They are the accountant’s fantasy applied to the soul. We catalogue because we’re terrified that if we don’t name and number things, they’ll vanish. Which is hilarious, because they vanish anyway. The catalogue is an altar to impermanence.

An apologue is a moral fable, old-school but real. The apologue is the story that arrives with its own verdict. It doesn’t trust you to extract meaning, so it hands you a meaning like a pill. There’s something quaint about that, something almost innocent. But it’s also a reminder: we’ve always used stories as behavioral technology. We tell children apologues so they internalize the rules before they can question the game.

Then theres the decalogue. Traditionally the Ten Commandments, but in our daily lives, it’s the personal code we broadcast. It’s the “rules for living” we post in captions—the rigid, moralistic branding we use to convince others (and ourselves) that we are consistent. It’s the apologue turned into a weapon. We don’t just want to be good; we want to be “The Person Who Is Good” in ten bullet points or less.

Then come the people-words, and this is where the suffix stops being cute.

An ideologue is a person devoted to an ideology, often said with a little sting. The ideologue is not someone who has ideas. It’s someone who has been had by an idea. They don’t use beliefs as tools, they use beliefs as a body. An ideologue doesn’t argue to discover truth, they argue to defend identity. Their mind is a fortress with banners, not windows. And the terrifying part is how good it feels from the inside. Certainty is warm. Certainty is simple. Certainty is the most addictive drug that doesn’t require a dealer. It’s the authors who claim prologues are holy and their works are art, because they can’t tolerate the truth.

The final one is the necrologue (an obituary, but literalized). It’s the final “postlogue-as-prologue.” It’s the story we want told about us after we can no longer speak. We spend our entire lives rehearsing the -logues—the prologues to introduce us, the dialogues to change us (which we avoid), and the ideologues to protect us—all so that the final necrologue says exactly what we want it to say. We are trying to edit our own death before we even get to the middle.

If that became to heavy, it’s because truth hurts. Let’s end with the technical -logue/-log words, the science-y stuff that sounds sterile until you realize it’s describing the same human hunger for connection.

A homologue is a corresponding thing, related by origin or structure. In biology and chemistry it’s lineage, echo, family resemblance stamped into the material. Homologues are nature admitting it reuses patterns. Same blueprint, different masks. If you want to get existential about it, homologues are is the universe’s tell that novelty is often just remix.

An analogue (or analog) is a counterpart by similarity, especially in tech and engineering. Not same origin, just similar function. The analogue is more or less the same as metaphor. It’s how we understand new things by mapping them onto old things. An analog is the bridge your brain builds so it can understand the unknown.

Homologue: we’re related.
Analogue: we’re comparable.
And that tiny difference is basically the story of human relationships. We keep mistaking analogues for homologues. We keep mistaking analogues for homologues. We confuse resemblance for kinship. We date someone who “feels familiar” in the same way our nervous system chases the same pattern like a dog returning to its own vomit.

That’s the dirty secret hiding under this playful suffix parade: the -logues are how we narrate our compulsions.

You want a prologue because you don’t want to begin naked.
You want an epilogue because you don’t want to leave unanswered.
You want a postlogue because you still want to be wanted.
You want a catalogue because you don’t trust your memory.
You want an apologue because ambiguity feels like standing on a balcony with no railing.
You want to call someone an ideologue because it’s easier than admitting you’re one bad week away from becoming one.

And maybe the most uncomfortable part: you are writing -logues all day without realizing it.

Every time you rehearse what you’ll say before you say it, that’s a prologue.
Every time you replay an argument in your head with better comebacks, that’s a postlogue.
Every time you tell yourself “the lesson is…” that’s an apologue stapled onto your own life.
Every time you scroll photos to prove you existed somewhere, that’s a travelogue for an audience you pretend you don’t care about.
Every time you reduce a person to a label, that’s a catalogue entry.
Every time you talk about “how we communicate” instead of what hurts, that’s a metalogue trying to keep the wound abstract.

If you watch closely, the -logues is a taxonomy of the ways we refuse to be where we are. The ways we keep trying to step outside the moment and narrate it from a safe distance, like the narrator can’t bleed.

And So We Come To The End

And now we move to real life. We’re not in story mode anymore.

Surprise: I coined a new word because old ones couldn’t keep me safe anymore.

(Even this paragraph is a delay tactic.)

Finalouge (n.):
The moment you stop narrating your life and just… live it. You didn’t achieve closure; the narration ran out of fuel.

Key idea: It’s not “the end.” It’s the end of your alibi (the story you tell to postpone action).

Difference from other -logues:

• Prologue: “I’ll start once I’m ready.”

• Epilogue: “Let me explain what this meant.”

• Postlogue: “One more note so you don’t forget me.”

• Finalouge: “No more footnotes. I’m doing the thing.”

The finalouge isn’t the end of the story. It’s the end of the commentary track. The moment you stop writing introductions to your own behavior and instead let the day be blunt, physical, and uncaptioned. It’s the small mercy of doing the next thing.

Premise: For one day, you are not the protagonist. You are the intern.

Rules:

1. No Director’s Commentary.
   If you start explaining your motives, you’re allowed one sentence, then you must take a physical action (open doc, wash dish, send email, put on shoes).

2. Replace philosophy with a prop.
   Every time you want to “reflect,” you must touch a tangible object connected to reality: keyboard, toothbrush, frying pan, coat. The joke is that existence has UI.

3. Proof-of-Work beats Proof-of-Intent.
   You may not say “I’m going to…” unless you also say when: “at 10:30.”
   Otherwise you have to say: “I want to, but I’m not scheduling it.” (This is humiliating in a useful way.)

4. Two sacred metrics (not three).
   Pick two for the day, max:

   • completed work (deliverable)

   • health (movement/food/sleep)

   • money (invoice/outreach)
     Two forces tradeoffs. Three becomes bureaucracy again.

5. The Finalouge Benediction (end-of-day):
   Ask: “What did I do today that didn’t require an explanation?”
   That’s your actual life.