Barkerburgh

Every year during the winter solstice holiday season, I celebrate my people’s ancient Sacred and Revelatory Restoration of the Crashed Operating System.

This year, as an atheist, I was planning to forgo it as outmoded and irrelevant to this, our modern world of the future.

My people’s gods are angry and petulant, capricious and heedless.  I was forced to repeat the primal, days-long ritual.

Finally, on Friday I succeeded to my gods’ satisfaction.

Again I am blessed.  For a year.

Another truth about that photo of Riverdale Park.

The shot is moodier than I thought it would be, since everybody is having so much fun and I was in such a good mood. I was walking Photon in the afternoon and the shot just got me.

The night of Wednesday, December 12, 2007, and into Thursday morning, I spent several hours playing Quake II, Warcraft III and Mechwarrior III, and a little Thief. I’d spent an hour or so working on NaNoWriMo 2006 and the TV was on in the background. Once or twice the William Shatner Warcraft commercial came on.

Part of the NaNoWriMo 2006 project involves non-imitative Star Trek replicator type technology which is related to holodeck technology, and I was writing a scene that involved its use. (NB: Star Trek didn’t invent it first. I’d mention Venus Equilateral, but…)

I’m mentioning these as likely influences because when I went to bed, I dreamt.

When I dream, man, do I dream. And I dream in colour.

(more…)

So I go to sign in at this government sponsored think-tank work-shop job-search internet cafe at Parliament and Wellesley.

There’s a bit of a line up, so I wait. But the staffer proceeds to take my card and sign me up on a computer. She tells both me and the client she’s already talking to that she can multitask. Predictably, I tell the other client that she’s a robot from the future. She says, and new paragraph

“Oh, you’re sweet.”

So I say, again predictably, “the last time I told a woman she was a robot from the future…” but I never finished the sentence because what she said caught up with me.

In response to popular demand, here is the Word document version of my 2002 novel, The Word in the Box.

From the Barker Reviews, May 2003:” It is about a boy named Martin who is given a quest; to find a magical word in a box, and that word, when spoken, will make everything perfect and everyone perfectly happy. He’s never been on a quest before, and never met any magical creatures, that he is aware of, and so this quest promises to be both interesting and educational. For him and the reader.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I won’t finish by midnight November 30, but I’ve made such great progress (for me) that I can’t imagine not just-keep-on-goinging (sic).

The last time I entered, which was what, 2002? - I finally finished the story the following May, I guess. I never did a lot of after-draft rewrites on it, just a little tweaking here and there, but it proved to me that I could do it. My personal circumstances were considerably less than ideal at the time, and I still managed to pull it off.

This will be a better story.

I heard a young man recite this on CNN, during an item on the North Carolina fire that killed several members of the Delta Delta Delta sorority and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity from the University of South Carolina. He was speaking about his late fraternity brothers.

It’s a little dated - and even sexist, in the sense that it could - and should - apply to women too, in any age, but I like the feel and the flavour of it.

It doesn’t last long enough.
It takes too long.
It lasts just long enough.

There’s no place to put it, or there’s no room for it anyway, or you forget where you put it just when you really need it.
If you ever remember where you did put everything, you never remember where it all was to start with.

It takes too long to get everywhere and there’s never enough time.
It’s always too far from where you are to where everything all is, and then you don’t want to have to come all the way back.

Even if you’re really interested in everything, it’s way too easy to get distracted by everything else.

It’s too small.
It’s too big.

Some of it costs too much.
There’s too much free stuff.

Everybody else is into it all, too.
You have to share everything with everybody else.

The choice of size, colour and style is too broad.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There’s too many parts of the whole.
Each individual part of the sum is as interesting as every other part.

You never remember everything’s name.
The signage is too complicated, if there’s any signage at all.
The instructions are too complicated, if there’s any instructions at all.

If it was a movie, it would probably be a prize-winning foreign film without subtitles.
If it was a book, it would probably be all table of contents, endnotes, appendix, and index.
If it was a game, it would calvinball. Or fizbin.

If it was a computer application, it would be from Microsoft (which would make Bill Gates God, so never mind that one.)

Christians see everything as Christian. Communists see everything as Communist. Bolivians see everything as Bolivian. Mac users - well, Mac users.

Everything’s too high. It’s too long. It’s too much. It’s too good.

If everything was a poem, it would be the Aeneid. All except for the part about finally arriving in Italy, because you never - ever- get to Italy.

There’s too much to choose from in a reasonable amount of time.

In the end, you never find what you really needed anyway.
You never get what you really wanted either.

But somewhere in the chaos of everything, you just might find your heart’s desire. Even if you don’t really quite know exactly what that is. Or just where it might be out there.  Wondering and searching are half the joy of everything.

If everything was time, it would always be about to run out.

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Edited/Improved Monday, October 22, 2007