Large Hadron Collider or financial market meltdown? You decide.
(The photo is a shot of some beach or another in Vancouver. Yes, that’s me kitesurfing naked in the right-hand panel.)
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I’ve got a new story out in the Halloween issue of Canada’s Taddle Creek magazine: “Deja Yu Makes the Pain Go Away.” It’s kind of a Mad Men meets zombies, although I wrote it before I’d seen an episode of Mad Men. Here’s a teaser:
The worst thing about being dead is the pain. I felt like I was being crushed inside for months after the heart attack.
The kids tried to help ease it before Sarah, my wife — my ex-wife now, I guess — took them away with her. Samantha, my daughter, told me the pain meant my heart was broken. She said it would feel better if I came home again. Jesse, my son, said maybe being dead is like when you scrape your knee or elbow. You get a scab for a while but then the pain goes away.
Sarah wouldn’t talk to me after I died. She wouldn’t even see me. She changed the locks on the doors after she kicked me out. I tried to come back to visit the kids, but she wouldn’t let me in. I had to talk to them through the door, or on the phone. Samantha said Sarah worried I’d give them whatever it was I had. But I didn’t have anything.
My doctor said all the dead feel the pain. He said there are different theories about it. The people who think our condition is caused by all the preservatives in our food say it’s a chemical byproduct. The religious people think it’s purgatory, that we’ll be able to die for good once we’ve suffered enough. The medical experts think it’s the body’s memory hanging on to the last seconds of life. My doctor said if I think feeling my heart attack all the time is bad, I should try to imagine what burn victims feel.
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This is a photo of a beachfront place in Kauai. I wanted to use a photo of Vancouver, my home and property-theft capital of North America, but someone stole my camera.
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My wife is going to kill me when she sees I didn’t make the bed before taking this photo.
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Google is much better at keeping track of your sins. And yeah, that’s where I live.
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This one’s been in my head for a while, but I didn’t have any scotch. That’s my living room in the background, with all the books I keep meaning to read.
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I actually do have bad knees, but I’m reluctant to ask my doctor about them….
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This photo was taken at Kew Gardens, right before The Incident. I’m not allowed to go back for five years now, but that’s all right. I got what I wanted.
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BLDGBLOG has an interesting post on a ghost mall in China, which caught my interest in part because my new book, The Warhol Gang, features a ghost mall of sorts.
The mall even includes “fake herons in an indoor rain forest,” a scale model of the Arc de Triomphe, a “553-meter flying railway known as Kuayue Shi Kong, or ‘Moving Through Time and Space’,” and, perhaps best of all, an entire wing, modeled after Venice and Amsterdam, whose construction was never completed. The buildings there thus have “ornate, generically European facades, but their insides remain shells filled with puddles, unrailed staircases, and random stacks of tile and concrete. The exotic palm trees lining the sidewalk have been invaded by homegrown south-China weeds.”
The article’s author, Michael Donohue, soon finds himself walking past drained indoor water park rides, bored security guards, and “escalators sheathed in dust-covered plastic.”
“It’s not very exciting,” a 23 year-old shopper comments to Donohue. She is sitting on the edge of a decorative pond somewhere deep in the emptiness.
BLDGBLOG also has a post on City of Shadows, an art project by Alexey Titarenko. Creepy and beautiful at the same time. And perhaps not unrelated to the ghost malls.
