Edge of Reality

Today is one of those days where I don’t know where I am.

I drove to work and as the sun came up to my right, the clouds started to glow red and pink and purple, texturized with airplane contrails. I stared at the colours and thought, we were meant to be free, we were meant to fly. But I was surrounded by hundreds of others like me, trapped in small metal boxes, on our way to even bigger boxes of glass and wood and steel.

I drove by a plain sign that said Toronto Warehouse Outlet and grew confused for a moment. I’m in Toronto? Yes, I’m in Toronto. This is not New York or Vancouver or London or Reykjavik. Something so familiar to me was, for a second, wholly unfamiliar. Where is my mind going? What other lands has it been travelling to?

I thought, I need more coffee. I took a big swig from my travel mug.

I’m now old enough that I can look back at the breadth of my life and see an almost infinite amount of decisions and choices that were made. I see an infinite number of parallel universes, all the roads not travelled. Then I spend my spare time wandering other roads I can never travel, the ones that involve spaceships and ancient magic and flying like a bird. At night, my mind fuses the two together. I’m living in Accra as a writer and a part time real-estate agent, when suddenly espers emerge from the ground and wage war on humankind.

I’ve been obsessed with the end of the world lately. It started in such a silly way. I was watching an LP for Final Fantasy XIII-2 months ago and I found myself weirdly & excitedly haunted when Serah visited Noel’s world, its grey dunes and roving monsters and dying sun. Imagine being the last person alive. Imagine living on the dead husk of a planet with only shadows and memories to keep you company.

There is a hairline fracture that separates us from the fantastical. Those early morning hours, when my mind hasn’t quite locked onto reality, I peer through a cloudy film and squint at the layers of the world. We are somebody else’s storybook. The storybook is one stroke away from coming to life. Who am I? Where is my mind going?

Thrills and Chills

Despite being immune to such influences in my tween, teen, and young adult years, last night I realized that I’ve spent more time in a state of “scared by creepiness” these last 12 months than I have for the entire rest of my life. Is this something that happens as we get older? Are children simply immune to creepiness? I swear to god that “Elephants On Parade” sequence in Dumbo was plain old fun when I was a kid, instead of the disturbing creepfest I interpreted it as when I finally saw it again in my early twenties.

When I’m talking about the scare factor of creepiness, I’m talking about the sense of unease we get from things that are abnormal, off kilter, but in a seemingly understated/innocuous manner. It’s the sense of not knowing more, of only having a glimpse of the story. It’s finding a human-shaped burn mark on a wall. It’s the sound of a crying child when there is no child to be seen. It’s inanimate objects slowly following your movement through an empty room. Seemingly innocuous, and no harm done, but maybe... what if...

It’s the not knowing that creates creepiness.

But there’s actually a fine line between creepiness and wonderment. No one freaks out when Lucy finds the random lamppost in Narnia, that’s because the book is written with a sense of childlike curiosity. Tone and mood are huge influencers on whether something is plain odd or forebodingly odd.

The one thing that creeped me out as a child and that continues to creep me out to this day: the moon. I mean the full moon, especially when it’s low on the horizon and looks larger than usual. I have no idea why the low-hanging full moon creeps me out so much, it just does. SHUDDER!

Bewildering!

I just received a new comment on this blog; I knew it would be spam because the comment was made on a post I made a year ago, but I was not prepared for the sheer nonsensical brilliance I would find in my inbox.

The entirety of the comment is as follows:

maitri bbsrc automated wanthmph tied rewording toor aimpilatm marshall finger areshops lolikneri havaqatsu

I've decided to pretend that this is a code and Smokey wants me to help him get off the Island. It's much more fun that way.

*happily rejects comment*

Today's Episode Of 'Things That Freak Me Out'

*shivers and looks away*

I Had Totally Forgotten

The tesseract is the greatest thing ever.



See? :D

It's Official...

... I'm never going to play Mario Kart again.

Oh internets, why must you freak me out so?!