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Being chased by a T-Rex
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1271
I'm a passenger in a car being driven down the 3A, sitting in the back seat, and we're being chased by a T-Rex...bigger than a T-Rex even, huge, and it's bearing down on us and I'm crouched on the floor with a tiny axe yelling to the driver "Just stop the car and I'll whack it!" but the driver won't stop, and as fast as he's going the T-Rex is keeping up, alongside us now and roaring through the windows, it'll rip the top off the car and me and my tiny axe, we don't stand a chance...
Long day out handing out resumes, everywhere too busy, this is not the season to be looking for work. Got home exhausted, short nap, this was the result...
The Locker as Metaphor
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1702
I mean to go there daily. It's on the list. Every list, every day.
And most days I find a reason to avoid it...
The locker, it's not just a locker, it's a portal into my unconscious, a metaphor for my every disordered and dangling thought, 10,000 unfinished projects, unsorted arts and crafts, nick-knacks and memorabilia. To the casual eye it's all just junk, but like all enchantments nothing is as it seems...
Mnemosyne, Hades, I'm Orpheus, again and again returning to the cave, excavating paths, deadfall traps poised overhead, toppling boxes apprehended mid-flight by other boxes, cardboard arches filled with crockery, paint brushes, oils, watercolors, acrylics, pastels, mixed media...
Unpacking memories, Eurydice, Eurydice, it's all memory, old photographs, letters, inaccessible memories stored in jumbles of towering boxes, a labyrinth of boxes splitting their sides, buckets running with sand, concentrates, bones and skeletons, chests of drawers and trunks and more chests, crates filled to the brim, ledgers, diaries of expenses, of trivial events, notebooks and sketches, boxes of books, remembered and forgotten, I need to unspool a ball of twine that I might find my way out again, through the overhanging shade, and tantalizing, always out of reach or at the bottom of some great stack or pyramid, another box, another crate, dig deeper, ever deeper...
There are CD's, boxes of CD's, CD ROMS, DVD's filled with music, .jpg's, .gif's, .mp3's and .mp4's, files, pictures, forgotten, lost, corrupted, in unreadable formats, on broken laptops, cameras, tablets, cellphones, flash drives and memory cards, SD, Micro SD, plastic shards of memory filled with copper teeth, unrecoverable, now a decade since last I opened, Vaults and Cupboards full of childhood toys, suitcases and closets full of discarded clothing, a box of stopped watches, shelves filled with old postcards, memberships and passports (and the daughter, assisting, recognizes not me but her brother), like Theseus and the Minotaur, unraveling, unpacking, ever deeper and deeper into the gloom, blind and searching, remembering, ...
Fill the car with boxes, don't check, don't look inside, they can be returned, there will be many trips back here, this place warrants a thousand excavations, sort through, file, discard, transcribe, sell, the work here, years to organize it all...
Life now is measured more by what I've forgotten than what I can remember, I had forgotten but now I remember in this intangible shade, this cave of shadows, of shifting umbras, the photographs of ghosts and music-box hauntings, while all the while digging deeper and deeper, this is where the treasures are. this: in the tomb of all ideas, ideals, I'm my own grave robber ...
each man kills the thing he loves
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Quotes
- Hits: 1270
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!"
- From the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde, A bit long, a trifle didactic and repetitive, reminds me in rhyme and repetition of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". But a great line...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Technology
- Hits: 1483
It's been a long time since I've played that game but when my old phone died I lost a lot of contact numbers. One, a connection I made at the old pub, antique dealer out of Vancouver, especially, he educated me as to collectible antique bangles and I took to Facebook to try and find him. I've a few finds I'd like him to see.
And, instantly I'm besieged with a thousand friend suggestions. Family, of course, and I add the Son and Daughter - the daughter, now all her friends are suggested, and I start to add them, just because I'm a malicious SOB, and she quickly goes on the alert with her friends and warns them away from accepting my requests, and then unfriends me.
Which is a separate post, but kind of funny, a text-message horror film that begins with an overly protective parent getting technology and friending his daughter's friends on Facebook...
Anyways, what amazed me - and will probably bore you - is how many people it came up with that I knew. I mean, hundreds of randoms, but people I hadn't worked with for years, for 2 cellphones, and so it must, somehow, be accessing my location data, old location data, years old, it must know where I'm spending my days, accessing old phone numbers long since lost, and I'm rather entirely amazed. And - equally amazing - the people it doesn't suggest - people that I wouldn't friend anyways but, you'd think, would show up.
Curious.
And then there's the predictive ads...
For example, following a few big nights I start getting ads for Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't need to search for this, I know I party. But - go off the booze for a week or two and you start getting liquor ads before your videos. They're gonna get you one way or the other.
Hmmm. And there are the targeted ads for every search I've ever done, which I would expect, but - and this made me laugh, after the debacle with insurance - both in BC and Alberta, while arguing with ICBC about reasonable compensation for unreasonable delays I start getting ICBC "Insurance Fraud" ads on my YouTube feed...like they're sending them to me!
Somewhere in an invisible cloud I exist as a series of data-points, locations, shops, spending, restaurants, websites, tastes in clothing, food, pornography, my habits - and while I've no fear that anyone will care to look it up, it's me, but it's the same as everyone else, it still makes me think - maybe time to lose the cellphone, and a little less time on the internet...
Despite all this - do you think YouTube could find something I might want to watch?
Depending on how long I live - like an episode of "Black Mirror" - I will be able to recreated, the thousands of posts from my blog used to define me, my patterns, predict my reading, viewing, and my reaction to said media, and while dead in the flesh I'll belong to a sort of Digital Afterworld, a digital simulacrum which mocks my children with bad advice and shit conversation, recommendations to watch terrible movies, read difficult books, DeepFake videos allowing me to Skype my grandchildren in supervised visits...
Whatever happens you can bet it'll be interesting...
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