On Rob Schneider’s website, I’m assigned to get three files.
The first is easy enough; I just drag and download it as normal. But the other two appear to be small variations of a single detail in a deep zoom map.
I might have gotten them already… but are they supposed to be audio files? If they are, they’re very brief and — what can I say? — fake-sounding farts, more like furniture-scooting brraap sounds. I expect no less from Rob Schneider.
I possess a gigantic condom as big as an arm, though it’s almost completely dried out. While trying to demonstrate to my little brother how to use it, the ring at the base chips off immediately. It’d be a waste of a unique object to simply throw it away… but this is difficult. It’s so large it’s useless for anything but a demonstration anyway.
A cottage my dad worked on when he was young, in his twenties. Situated at the left edge of a canal gate, it’s a former industrial drawbridge operator’s cabin, narrow as as a subway line, somewhere in Los Angeles near a museum. Dad was a “2sq/fter”: someone who could take two square feet of soil from their home (in this case Illinois, though my Dad is actually from LA) and transform all the ground on their farm with it. Dad didn’t do that though, he’s just taken care of the native soil and built a charming and solid little shack just above the water level.
I kick off 4 of the 6 teammates on my canoe. The only ones left are one Finnish guy (looks like Willem Dafoe plus angry/sad Moe from the Simpsons) plus my dad. A theme song plays while we watch a betrayal.
Replacing the stove in my house after finding a more matching 1970s stove. The back control panel slides off separately, with my normal spice rack on top of it. I set up a hanging fluorescent click light at the back, near the vent (like the one above my kitchen table in waking life).
I discover RobertBLalonde.com, a web domain of my grandfather’s name, still registered by my dad. I make a phone call to the associated number but hang up when someone answers who’s obviously waking up from sleep.
A character named Jean Auern (an alias of Jean Grey from Marvel) has been alive for 14 billion years. She’s been involved in US politics for 300 million, non-linearly. I learn in depth of these events while traveling through a box of charcoal.
The person I called when investigating RobertBLalonde.com calls back. Jean confesses the truth of shutting down his home, punishing him. She then restores power to the narrow tube apartment, the same one my dad built, just like flipping a switch. I watch as he throws a few stray items out of the way in the narrow kitchen, before a train comes through at a T junction near the end. So he didn’t have to move the things out of the way — he’s been here since before the trains stopped running, before the place’s powers were cut off. So whose was it before him?
Having just re-watched “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”, it should come as no surprise that I just dreamt of Ramona Flowers. I almost forgot that’s basically her whole thing for awhile there; skating through people’s dreams on subspace highways running though their heads. What’s maybe a bit unexpected is was my errant though that I would see her in my dreams tonight, and then actually seeing her. I can’t remember much else.
A huge flat wall of an image, a drawing of yellow red and purple swirls. I used an image like this recently in a project to illustrate stage 3 of Salvia divinorum ingestion.
Distinct imagery with eyes closed: fractal patterns, geometric or vine-like motifs, stable impressions of objects and designs, mostly all 2-dimensional. If visual effects are seen with eyes open, these are often vague and fleeting. Comparable to hypnagogic phenomena sometimes experienced at sleep onset. Open or closed eyes, visions are perceived as “eye candy”, not confused with reality.
Sitting round a table. My Homepie friend Mickey is there, and though I call him Mickey it’s been just so long since I’ve seen him. I obliquely mention cocaine in terms of it being “someone’s favorite”, and he brings out some (or at least what appears to be) on a beautiful hand-carved driftwood table.
Searching the garage in my childhood home, cleaning up my dad’s workbench with my mom — but it’s against the adjacent wall, where the books were. A tiny CFL bulbs roll off the table as we work. I’m exhausted and lay down on a couch on my stomach. A classmate of mine from elementary and middle school, Emily McIntosh, uses a tele-robotically-controlled rat to explore while I then rest peacefully on my back.
While hanging and swinging from a bar out the door to the backyard, I have a creative idea for my website: using vector outlines of patterns to fill with dynamic colors customized to the individual posts.
Like I told the bagpipe bandleader, none of us are really sure how to commemorate the life of a website. Part of that is because, hey, a website isn’t really alive. So it’s a difficult question. How do you remember?
I remember when I wrote about it. There was such beautiful harmony in this clever system of giving people thumbs-up and earning points for photo contests and answering ridiculous yet thought-provoking questions. I’ve long had an affinity for non-binding imaginary point systems, that fact is known to many.
It was sad when I heard that it would be going offline. 
I had a spree-day contacting people I’d met on there once or twice, people I liked but never really kept in touch with. Does anyone reading this remember when Flickr used to be mostly just bloggers with cool pictures they wanted to host? Every photo had an interesting reason to be there; you had to portion out which photos you uploaded cause you only had 20mbs a month to work with. So you only only put up the best ones. Either that, or you shilled out the $60 to become… pro. Lots of websites go through that high-quality early-adopter content-building phase. Consumating never had a chance to outgrow that magical period, and I’m bittersweetly thankful. I sound silly enough waxing about Flickr.
So I’ll just remember it how it always was: silly; playful; packed with interesting people, far too interesting; a perfectly crafted time-waster; the spirit of an age. Not bad for a site that started life as joke personals ads.
It’s possible I might get paid to redesign the San Francisco hostel’s website. Money would be good. With that in mind:
Tan Tan WordPress Reports Plugin tells me the following:
During the past 7 days, your site received 56 visitors (+143%) and 373 pageviews (+604%).
That’s a fact. Pretty amazing, yes? It’s all because I took the time from coding the site and actually posted something. Somebody even took notice and put me on BlogOfTheDay. Wow. You can just write, and have people read it.
This is an important realization to have (and remember) for one such as myself. It’s really easy to be a do-nothing perfectionist. If it’s not perfect—screw it! Here I am, striving forward in my own private multi-day coding marathon, but do the means justify the end? Why have an awesome-looking blog if you only post twice in a month? I feel I should declare some sort of resolution. I know there’s supposed to be a personal challenge statement somewhere around here.
Hm. Now where could I have left it…