About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Tar HeadI have a picture of a dead cat in my phone. A rare and sudden attack of taste keeps me from posting it to my moblog even though it (the cat) is relatively intact.
This ex-cat has been on the verge of the end of GA highway 400 where it merges onto I-85 South, off to the left side, for a bit more than a week now. I know this because I creep past it somewhere between 5 and 15 miles per hour every workday. The cat replaces a raccoon—actually, a pair of raccoons, one on each side of the road—that garnished my commute like furry parsley for the month or two prior, less than a quarter mile from where the cat is now.
The DOT is exceptionally slow here about cleaning up dead animals on the roadside, and I can't really blame them. Except it's probably a job for Animal Control to pick up the furry little corpses instead of the Department of Transportation. Because the DOT would use explosives.
I've been thinking of naming the dead cat. I named the raccoons Boris and Natasha. The male was so much smaller than the female, which probably meant that they were more likely mother and son rather than co-conspirators.
I don't know whether I should post the dead cat's picture or delete it. Not that I'll be able to delete the image from my head anytime soon. My memory is much more photographic than iconic. And there are a lot of random links and associations in there. Everything floats near the surface it seems, mixing, bumping, merging, just like doesn't happen very often with stacks of actual photographs.
Imagine watching a movie composed of all the movies you've ever watched, all sharing the same set and running simultaneously. Characters walk out of one scene and into another one, swap costumes with a each other, give each other voice-overs. Props drift and clump together. A madman runs the lights. And the weird mixes get layered back on top of previous films, blending unreal with real, like the projector is actually a taffy-pulling machine. No take-up spool. It. never. stops.
This dead cat will later show up in the middle of the night on the end of my coffee table, weighing down a discarded sweater. I'll see it on the side of the road occasionally wherever I might be driving, forever—and I'll probably not mention it, because my companions often find that sort of thing disturbing and tedious. This is ordinary. I've developed a strong muscle for hauling the real out of the soup of the non-real. I hope it never gets tired.
Except I know it does. It gets tired when I do. The dreaming starts long before I go to sleep. Because it. never. stops.
Well, not really never. I can meditate to shut it all down, sometimes. But I have to have nothing else to do for an hour or so. And the quietness doesn't last for long.... I lack discipline. And the free time. And a quiet place I can sit when I need it. I am frequently jealous of people I see as more normal. Everyone seems to walk on the surface of the soup I swim and bob and gasp for air in. At night, when they sleep, they take a dip for a little while and wake up refreshed.
I feel like I can never climb out of the water. But boy, can I ever swim deep....
Even more so I envy the phone. It can hold only so much, and it's always very near full. That means every time I add something else I have to compare it with every other image in the phone. And if it doesn't measure up, it's gone. Simple as that. And the overall quality of the images stored in the phone increase evolutionarily over time. Each picture is a new mutation, evaluated instantaneously to see whether or not it is beneficial.
My head, on the other neck, is full of crap and will remain full of crap, with crap sticking to crap so that whenever I try to pull anything out of it, it has long webby strands and clumps of polymerized crap stuck to it reaching backwards forever—and I do mean forever—into the muck. I can never isolate anything from this crap. I can just pull it closer for a little while, and let it snap back when I get tired of holding it up. Nothing ever gets pulled free from the Cronenbergian goo I swim in.
So the cat is here to stay, trapped in the tar baby. I might as well name it.
How about La Brea?
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Vidicon was the buddha but the pay was lousy . |
