Spent the early afternoon reading, thinking, writing, in Nanny’s bedroom. It’s too bright though, and the inside of my eyeballs are lit up like lamps, and the floaters are really distracting. Around 2 ATL I put on my new red hat and go for a walk – up the treacherous hill, past the Catholic church, and turn left into town. Go to Tim Hortons, have a double double (the second for the day, since Michelle delivered some to us earlier) and sat and thought. Two memories came to mind. First, as I sat at T.H., was the dream I had as a child in the 80s. At that time I dreamt I was in Campbellton, and bombs were falling from the sky. Soviet planes flew overhead. The explosions caused the sidewalks to come apart in their square sections. This had been a nightmare, not terrifying as I recall, but anxiety causing. I told my Dad about it the next day and he told me not to worry, we wouldn’t be bombed (this was equally true of Clare as it was of Campbellton). My thought sitting at Tim Hortons and looking over the town was that it would survive a nuclear war. There’s no reason to bomb it at all. This also means it would be a good place to hide a war criminal (though in a town like this, one would have to be careful about rumours).

As I walked back, approaching the playground by the school, I remembered the time (again in the 80s) that the plow had created a great mound of snow in the front of the school (Jean Marie-Gay) we played on that mound at recess until in melted. I lost my mitten playing on it. We would climb to the top and then jump down, and also slide on our bums, since we were all wearing snow suits.

Having been watching as this decade unravels, this time without a name (people do not speak of the decade the way they said “the 80s” and “the 90s” since no one knows what to say —> I find this quite odd, since it’ll be another 20 years before it’s truly applicable again, and thus will go out of fashion —> but then again, every century has delt with this haven’t they, and Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot about being the first to climb the Eiffel Tower, “a million years ago, back in the 90s”. That is, the 1890s, which brought a smile to me when I first heard it in the Shakespeare by The Sea production of 1999).

Having been watching the decade unravel, watching the style of the 80s turn to the style of the 90s, and now, the style of the 90s turn into this decade, my feeling is that this time is both more prosperous and stylistically appealing, but that it is also far more vacuous. One could almost compare it to the screen of a laptop (upon which this is being typed at the moment). The liquid crystal display fades in and out depending on the angle, but also presents a rich colour when viewed dead on. But it is only an inch or less thick. The increasing defeat of those who believe there is something more than buying things, and the increasing presence of the “inauthentic” in all ways, creates a shiny mirror of what? A mirror too shows a world without depth, a world reversed from what we’d consider the actual.

At least I have this laptop here —> now with cd in the drive, headphones on, and Fischerspooner singing about hypermediocrity.