Hell's Half Acre - Will Christopher Baer
Im getting cozy with the idea that time is circular, that time lost will come back.
Behold.
I find myself outside in the final minutes before dark falls over California and I am confronted by an apocalyptic sunset. The odds of those happening today and not tomorrow seem astronomical or anyway too staggering for my small brain to contemplate right now. The hills before me are splattered with some kind of freak sunlight that appears to exist on a physical plane but is forever shifting from one form to another and is therefore impossible to contain. If only I had an instant camera, then I would never need to step outside again. I despise cameras, though. They butcher your memories and anyway when youre an old man drooling yellow shit down the front of your pajamas and your eyes are long gone, what good is a box of shitty snapshots that have turned green with age.
Nothing is real anymore. The world around me has been systematically reconceived through digital imaging and computer animation until every flower and raindrop is pure and flawless as the flowers and raindrops of the book of Genesis. The new world is brought to life in high-density pixels and is then transferred to human memory. The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.
Beautiful or not, it disappears. The sky goes dark and what are you left with.
The image stored in my head suffers rapid decay and within hours I will be unable to describe the sunset that I have just witnessed without accessing the false but technically perfect sunset that Ive seen on a thousand television and computer screens. I have no personal memories that are untainted by media and marketing and I often suspect that I am dead but still functioning. My heart is raw and pink, a package of ground beef wrapped in plastic. My body is composed of shatterproof glass and fluoride and vitamins and sheep hormones and recycled copper wires. There is no poetry in such a being but neither is there fear. I tumble easily into the void and I am safe as a kitten in the boney confines of my own skull. If I can afford the proper software, then I can download anything imaginable. The physical world is getting less and less realistic by the minute and eventually I will learn to pay it no mind.
I wish I'd written that. But sadly it was written by one of my new favorite authors,
Will Christopher Baer. He's a fucking genius, and can write noir and detective sutff really well.
Im getting cozy with the idea that time is circular, that time lost will come back.
Behold.
I find myself outside in the final minutes before dark falls over California and I am confronted by an apocalyptic sunset. The odds of those happening today and not tomorrow seem astronomical or anyway too staggering for my small brain to contemplate right now. The hills before me are splattered with some kind of freak sunlight that appears to exist on a physical plane but is forever shifting from one form to another and is therefore impossible to contain. If only I had an instant camera, then I would never need to step outside again. I despise cameras, though. They butcher your memories and anyway when youre an old man drooling yellow shit down the front of your pajamas and your eyes are long gone, what good is a box of shitty snapshots that have turned green with age.
Nothing is real anymore. The world around me has been systematically reconceived through digital imaging and computer animation until every flower and raindrop is pure and flawless as the flowers and raindrops of the book of Genesis. The new world is brought to life in high-density pixels and is then transferred to human memory. The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.
Beautiful or not, it disappears. The sky goes dark and what are you left with.
The image stored in my head suffers rapid decay and within hours I will be unable to describe the sunset that I have just witnessed without accessing the false but technically perfect sunset that Ive seen on a thousand television and computer screens. I have no personal memories that are untainted by media and marketing and I often suspect that I am dead but still functioning. My heart is raw and pink, a package of ground beef wrapped in plastic. My body is composed of shatterproof glass and fluoride and vitamins and sheep hormones and recycled copper wires. There is no poetry in such a being but neither is there fear. I tumble easily into the void and I am safe as a kitten in the boney confines of my own skull. If I can afford the proper software, then I can download anything imaginable. The physical world is getting less and less realistic by the minute and eventually I will learn to pay it no mind.
I wish I'd written that. But sadly it was written by one of my new favorite authors,
Will Christopher Baer. He's a fucking genius, and can write noir and detective sutff really well.