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Autumn
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1775
Today it is Autumn. The wind is blowing, the sky a slate grey, colored leaves blowing in waves down the street.
I've enquired about my cheques, any of them would do nicely, I have the children this weekend and it would be nice if they were fed. If I was fed, it's been an entire week living on pasta with butter and rice fried in oil. But there's been no reply. And so maybe I should simply ignore my email for a day or two and see what happens.
There was the call from the conspiracy group, they were meeting up for coffee, but I couldn't go, I had, I have, other imagined appointments.
It's autumn and the leaves rustle down the streets, fill the lawn, the wind bends the trees. The appointments, they won't show, they were imagined.
And so I work on projects, pass the time "finishing things up", websites forever in development have now the possibility of completion, other things as well draw to their final close and I finish them up, work madly upon them and pause only for a cigarette and reflection.
I'm almost out of cigarettes, must ration them, the absence of reply on question of the cheque makes me think that it could be a while....
Change is in the air.
of Wild Bill Hickock
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1439
I'm somewhere traveling through United States, small towns, ghost towns of the American West. I'm at a party with some strangers, one of them is passing around a joint. It's Christmas and the stagecoach comes through - it's not cold, hot desert, but me and some older gentleman take the stagecoach through town - it's being driven by an coolie, who knows my companion and jokes with him - my companion wants him to take a new route through the town, but as there's only one road through town it's kinda tough....
We end up at a Saloon....
The next morning Wild Bill Hickock is there, I'm in this town or another, some archeologists have found the remains of the Eastend boys, I know them, they were a gang that rode down from Moose Jaw in the twenties and disappeared. They disappeared 'cause the Apaches got 'em, and we walk down from the hotel to a star shaped trench cut in the desert, the Apaches had lashed the boys to logs, suspended them in the trenches and then covered them over with dirt. Buried them alive. Some tribal elders show up, they look old, so old the skin has crawled back from their teeth and jaws leaving just the bone and their eyes roll freely in skeletal sockets, they look and nod, "They found 'em" they say...
Now I'm talking with Wild Bill and asking him if he's dead and all, I was pretty sure he was but he assures me he's not, there are these old prospectors showing me the opals and gems they've found in the desert, there are museums everywhere and he has along some famous Indian sidekick I should know, I do know in the dream, but I can't recall his name now. And they're showing me all sorts of stuff, and asking me all sorts of stuff, and we're getting along famously. It's like we're old friends. We trade some things. Then they do the show, it involves Wild Bill spraying a hose around in front of people, he's holding the end by the water barrel, and eventually a bullet makes it's way through and accomplishes some miracle of marksmanship. We're amazed and he's warning us all to stay back so we do, but one of the bullets goes astray and hits the fireworks-for-sale hut, it sputters, then goes up in blazes, everyone "ooohs" and "aaaahs" but then at once realize it's just another part of the show and break into applause...
BABEL
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Babel
- Hits: 1664
Our technology has knelled the death of communication.
And ironic that so much of it has been devoted exclusively to facilitate communication. The internet, the cell phone, the television.
Yet even as these new languages arise, communication, real communication, is becoming extinct.
There is a box of letters, maybe in your grandfather's attics, written from his wife, his lover, his children. Some of the letters are scented, some contain postcards, photographs, some pressed flowers. Postage stamps, postmarks, thumb printed and tear-stained envelopes and pages. There will be no box in the attics of your children, no CD's or flash drives with the memories of your life, the medium is changing. Always changing.
Email, for example. Email, which exists only in the terabyte storage of offshore servers, streamed down wires in 1's and 0's, traveling hundreds of miles to arrive down the street and be read once and deleted. If not deleted, left on a computer that ends up discarded. Or burned to a CD that will in short time scratch and blister, the patent obsolescence making your memories irretrievable. Were, for some rare reason, it printed and read, the ink, cheap, the paper, rubbish, the generic fonts and backgrounds, there is nothing there to ensure it's survival. Of the countless billions of emails sent every day, the trillions of virtual miles traveled, how many will survive even a week? A month? Yet we entrust to them, to our digital cameras and blogs and online accounts and profiles our lives.
And there is the Jargon. The changing language of the technocrati, with communication so easy and abundant, so continual and constant, we develop shorthands to communicate, to sum up ourselves, and we devolve to become our language.
Formats change. Media becomes obsolete, bytes are erased, written over, destroyed.
We are forgetting ourselves. There are no anchors here, and we are carried forever forward on currents of "New and Improved", having lost all sight of shore....
These are songs to this age. Some as ephemeral as the language, the medium, others, I hope, less so.
To the new tower of Babel.
New & Improved
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 2180
Everything is new and improved. I'm not really a new and improved kinda guy, it's not my market, I buy what I have to, what inspires me, and that's it.
But there's a market for it. It's been created, the stage set with 50 years of laundry detergent and dish soap getting better and better, until finally you would think it would wash the sins from the world, yet somehow still it's only laundry detergent...
The laundry detergent was only the marketing research. Then came technology, with obvious and noticeable improvements. The kind that demanded you replace things every couple of years. They caught on to this, the technology people, exploited it by building their products to fail should you ignore the cultural imperative to upgrade. More Memory, more RAM, flat screen TV's, flatter screened TV's, richer streaming content, games and media. Most people have more technology on their desktop than NASA had when they sent people to the moon. It is used in over 90% of instances as a diversion, recreation, an escape. This is the world of New and Improved.
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