At Share, unboxing, the most appalling kitsch, resin angels, ceramic cats, carved wooden pigs, somebodies entire life collection of dust collectors, knick-knacks, trifles, curios, curated by the most undiscriminating eye, put away into storage, lovingly wrapped in newspapers.

Old newspapers. The highest quality of reading. National Enquirer, the Sunday Sport, Weekly World News. The Columnist, Ed Anger - "My America", tales of Bat-Boy, escaped from a lab and terrorizing the US, lonely hearts, agony aunts. I get distracted reading out the headlines. 

I miss these. I mean, in Edmonton, once in a while I would buy them and laugh all the way through. But they've long since disappeared. Britain, well, they still have them.

But what I miss most of all is the fact that they were all - universally acknowledged - occasionally amusing, but otherwise complete and utter rubbish. 

Nowadays, Fox News, Tucker Carlson - the quality of rubbish is the same but turned to a political ends, and too many believe it. 

And so I read the clippings out loud for the amusement of the volunteers, staff, and sadly think of the time when people were a bit less credulous, more skeptical, when a lie was a lie, and think of the labels we should be applying to our era. There was modernism, post modernism - how to describe the political, social, moral landscape now?

Post-Truth. The Truth nowadays is irrelevant, nobody cares. We live in the Post-Truth era. 

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Category: Blog

Time to upgrade my phone. The camera, it's unusable. Anyways, May Day (Monday Past) spent off with Chris exploring Ainsworth. A few things he wanted to show me - most of which I knew about, and a bit of modest exploring. The clearings around the old farm (hidden up the mountain), dilapidated farm equipment, mining equipment, abandoned cabins, structures, worth exploring - ...

Most of the mines too filled in with water to explore.

Piles of freshly steaming bear-shit everywhere. Lots of whistling to let them know I'm in the area...

 

Anyways, time to upgrade camera. 

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Category: Places

Homeless, raining out, to the Gazebo. Not ideal, others of the homeless have the same idea, there are only 3 benches here. I have a visitor, noticing a trend amongst them - addiction &/or Mental Illness, unemployment, this one, she's talking and it comes out, her own tragedies, mental battles. I listen until it's time to go to sleep, she's off checking her phone, doing some art, other people come and go. She helps to pull my bench in from the end of the Gazebo, more shelter from the rain. In the morning she's left me a stale bunch of buns and a painting (presumably she drew). 

Anyways, starting to wonder if there's something in me that I'm missing, the prevalence of mental illness amongst the homeless; am I that? Or have I become? It becomes harder and harder to chalk it up to mere circumstance, it's time now for me to build again on a slightly more solid foundation... 

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Category: People

..that I'm with a partner and another couple and we're in the basement of the Banff Springs - Not Banff Springs Hotel. We're all walking together, deep, deep in the roots of the earth, admiring the sunless architecture. Grand halls after grand rooms and more grand halls. Everywhere there are mice, hundreds, thousands of them, this is no place to eat, we'll wait until we get up higher in the castle or labyrinth... 

We split from the other couple, they have they're own things to do, and find a room lit with a lightbulb to spend the night. 

The next day, wandering up, up, we meet them again, they have all this green slime food on the floor in the dining room, and the man is commanding his disciples to eat it off the floor, they're all his slaves, peculiar sexual undertones...

I want no part of it, I'm leaving the hotel, my girlfriend, she's hesitant, doesn't want to leave, lingering, she wants to join the cult...

(girlfriend was an unknown, didn't know her at all, as were the other people. Peculiar, disconcerting dream...)

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Category: Dreams
  1. Hacked
  2. The Elves and the Shoemaker
  3. Binoculars in a tiny thrift shop
  4. Charms from Pompeii