Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Blah Blah Blah |10:42 AM| Yeah yeah, couple posts with this publishing session. My apologies. Not having the process automated anymore is a pain in the ass. I wonder if SSI's can grab from other websites? I'll have to take a look.
This is worth reading. It's a full text of "The things they carried". As far as I can tell, it was scanned in, and converted to text by OCR software. It keeps missing the periods between various numbers, (an M16 is said to weigh 75 pounds unloaded, and then 8.2 fully loaded.), and at one point it scanned "he" as "lie". With a little guesswork, though, the story is all there.
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Sunday, July 27, 2003
Luggage |9:34 AM| I saw someone's possessions on the sides of the street. From the looks of it, a box had fallen off of a car, and sweaters, some books, and assorted knick knacks had been spread across the highway. It reminded me of back when Vorpal's last moving trip turned sour, and a box of his had hit the street. It had apparently been filled with (among other things) star wars toys, and other relics from his childhood. He seemed very broken up about it, but in a way I think random chance had done him a favor.
Was he really going to pull those old star wars toys out and make laser blast noises with his mouth? Was he going to re-enact particular battles the way he'd want them to go? Nah, he'd just probably watch the DVD's. But he wouldn't want to throw them away, they'd been so close to his heart and in his possession for so long. He was just lugging them around because he felt the obligation. Now, shattered plastic shards gave him a guilt free way out of the obligation.
It occurs to me that I need to get rid of all this stuff, these things I haul around in boxes from apartment to apartment. Some of the boxes haven't been opened more than once in 2 address changes. Sometimes I think I may have left an object of importance in one of the boxes, and I'll search them. Otherwise, I just haul them around.
With this current move, I'm going to end this behavior. I'm going to use a scanner, and a digital camera, make a record of all these items and then dispose of them. A CD with the images burned onto it should suffice. A scrap book of objects, and I don't need to haul them around.
While still driving, I watched the debris trail thin out over a mile. How much of a person's life was represented in that one or more boxes of nearly random crap? Did they miss it? Did they actually need that ugly sweater, that the wind had draped across a crash barricade?
I continued driving, back to my home. I wondered if I could scatter myself in the same way. I imagined the car coming apart around me, body panels giving way to dime-sized shards, revealing steel safety struts. The steel bent, then ripped like paper, disintegrating as if made of dried leaves in the wind. At 70 miles an hour, the raw bits of my car were left behind instantly, fluttering around in the wind created by passing trucks, settling onto the side of Mopac Loop One. The seats, the tools in my trunk, the dashboard indicators swirled backward, the engine lifting as one piece only to burst in dandelion seed-like dander. The tires unspooled as rubber thread, the wheel rims scraping away as sparks and chalk, the axles snap with the sound of a pine knot in fire, sudden and satisfying.
The steering wheel I toss aside, and then it's just me, in a sitting position a foot or two off the ground, at 70. I glide forward and the friction from the ground as I contact it immediately starts me spinning, then tumbling. Coming apart my skin and clothes are a mist of color, my bones are dust, and my point of view becomes the miles across which I am spread.
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Blah Blah Blah |10:42 AM| Yeah yeah, couple posts with this publishing session. My apologies. Not having the process automated anymore is a pain in the ass. I wonder if SSI's can grab from other websites? I'll have to take a look.
This is worth reading. It's a full text of "The things they carried". As far as I can tell, it was scanned in, and converted to text by OCR software. It keeps missing the periods between various numbers, (an M16 is said to weigh 75 pounds unloaded, and then 8.2 fully loaded.), and at one point it scanned "he" as "lie". With a little guesswork, though, the story is all there.
(0) comments
Sunday, July 27, 2003
Luggage |9:34 AM| I saw someone's possessions on the sides of the street. From the looks of it, a box had fallen off of a car, and sweaters, some books, and assorted knick knacks had been spread across the highway. It reminded me of back when Vorpal's last moving trip turned sour, and a box of his had hit the street. It had apparently been filled with (among other things) star wars toys, and other relics from his childhood. He seemed very broken up about it, but in a way I think random chance had done him a favor.
Was he really going to pull those old star wars toys out and make laser blast noises with his mouth? Was he going to re-enact particular battles the way he'd want them to go? Nah, he'd just probably watch the DVD's. But he wouldn't want to throw them away, they'd been so close to his heart and in his possession for so long. He was just lugging them around because he felt the obligation. Now, shattered plastic shards gave him a guilt free way out of the obligation.
It occurs to me that I need to get rid of all this stuff, these things I haul around in boxes from apartment to apartment. Some of the boxes haven't been opened more than once in 2 address changes. Sometimes I think I may have left an object of importance in one of the boxes, and I'll search them. Otherwise, I just haul them around.
With this current move, I'm going to end this behavior. I'm going to use a scanner, and a digital camera, make a record of all these items and then dispose of them. A CD with the images burned onto it should suffice. A scrap book of objects, and I don't need to haul them around.
While still driving, I watched the debris trail thin out over a mile. How much of a person's life was represented in that one or more boxes of nearly random crap? Did they miss it? Did they actually need that ugly sweater, that the wind had draped across a crash barricade?
I continued driving, back to my home. I wondered if I could scatter myself in the same way. I imagined the car coming apart around me, body panels giving way to dime-sized shards, revealing steel safety struts. The steel bent, then ripped like paper, disintegrating as if made of dried leaves in the wind. At 70 miles an hour, the raw bits of my car were left behind instantly, fluttering around in the wind created by passing trucks, settling onto the side of Mopac Loop One. The seats, the tools in my trunk, the dashboard indicators swirled backward, the engine lifting as one piece only to burst in dandelion seed-like dander. The tires unspooled as rubber thread, the wheel rims scraping away as sparks and chalk, the axles snap with the sound of a pine knot in fire, sudden and satisfying.
The steering wheel I toss aside, and then it's just me, in a sitting position a foot or two off the ground, at 70. I glide forward and the friction from the ground as I contact it immediately starts me spinning, then tumbling. Coming apart my skin and clothes are a mist of color, my bones are dust, and my point of view becomes the miles across which I am spread.
Labels: Vorpal
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