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Places-Not-Places
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1645
There is a strange connectedness between the places in my dreams that is almost the same as the places in my waking, in my dreams I remember places that are not the places I've been to, I remember them differently, more through emotion, or the deformations of ripples in a pond, as if seeing the place again in wavy and broken reflections, there are pieces of these places that are the same, and I know my routes through them, walking through I remember, and remember again their place in a previous dream, a dream I won't recall when I've awoken, only the familiar, haunting sense of having been there before.
My dreams are a maze, a labyrinth, but there is a congruency, a map that can be drawn through them if you return there enough, and if I could figure it out well enough a correlation of places, a symbolscape that intertwines and weaves metaphor with memory, London-Not-London, Edmonton-Not-Edmonton, Calgary-Not-Calgary, and as of late now Nelson-Not-Nelson. I need to begin drawing these, putting them together, assembling the puzzle, and naturally I think of maps, but maps, they are static, maps to these places are fluid, they are never complete, they fit like a jigsaw only in dreaming and I can't always find my way...
The Backlit Alphabet
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1427
Screen, backlit, black letters on a dazzling white screen, pretty sure it's making me blind, unlike real reading in so many ways...
The screen, for example, 95% light, 5% dark lettering, often other distracting ads, colors, copy. The experience - intended to mimic reading, instead mocks it, scatterbrained ideas scattershot into your brain, always geared to the shortest possible attention span, the clicking from one uncompleted idea to another, becoming broadly informed about nothing as opposed to deeply informed about anything. This is the way of the future.
Then take the printed word, softer, all of it, reflected light, the brightness dulled by the fibres of the page, the pigments in the ink, hundreds of lumens less than the dullest computer monitor, laptop, cell-phone, bookmarks in pages, underlined passages, they will be revisited, found again, contrast this to your list of internet favorites, shortcuts, the hundreds of bookmarks that you've never returned to, that you likely never will, and by the time you get around to it the pages will have invariably expired or moved on.
Reflected, reflective words, your mind reasons as you read, the screen hypnotizes you, slips things past your conscious mind, bombards you with contrary, contradictory information and sets your mind at odds with itself, the backlit alphabet dumbs us down. The words disappear, they were never there, only the spaces around them, the phosphor, lumens of the screen obliterating them, you make sense in the negative spaces, compare this to ink, upon paper, an additive process, the words, the sentences, paragraphs and plots remain, time will decay them as well but at an infinitely slower pace, the plots, characters, themes, the turn of the phrase, they all carry on in memory.
I need to read more books.
Deputies Dogging
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 1901
Were it not so tragic it would be funny, the subject of an SNL comedy sketch.
Apparently outside the Florida School shooting 4 deputies waited with guns drawn for the shooter to come out and give himself up. Or something. None thought to enter the school and attempt to render aid or stop the shooter.
Link: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/23/politics/parkland-school-shooting-broward-deputies/index.html
This really casts the police's "Heroic Narrative" in the proper light. They can only be heroes against unarmed opponents.
On that note, cop decides it's OK to cruise a rape victim. Because she's probably looking to get laid.
Canada, sadly, isn't any better.
Pee-Wee
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 1294
A Ventriloquist Doll, hard to believe I don't have one already, I should, this one's almost perfect...
But it looks a little too much like Pee Wee Herman, it probably is, plastic, somehow both a little too creepy and not creepy enough for me. I'll hold off for something a little bit older and decrepit...
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