through the looking glass

right, so that’s obviously a bit over the top. dramatic, like. but my visit back to the states opened my eyes, not only about my own personal changes but on the bizarre juxtipositions of the meanings of freedom.

one moment, one case. this is how I see america today :

my mother wanted to go to epcot center. tix were free, she has her own version of international shopping, so off we went. got lucky on the parking, free and close. enter.

at the gates, time to open those bags. burly men with flashlights paw through the stuff people’re toting. my guy bangs a very expensive camera lens with a flashlight, I tell him to be bloody careful, he panics a bit and makes me remove it from the bag and unwrap it from its bandana enclosure. and all I can think is, if this is a bomb what good is making me unwrap it here going to be, and isn’t having me be the one to do it perhaps not the best idea, really.

search done, I follow the ‘rents to the gate. card into slot, no problem. uum, thumb on scanner? what? uum, WHAT???

not a soul blinks. hundreds upon hundreds of people blithly insert their fingers for encoding without a second thought as I stand there, dumbfounded.

I can’t do it. my father and I have a very terse moment as I try to explain why it’s completely out of the question for me to say that this sort of thing is ok, which is what I’d be doing if I went along with it. you can’t exactly take a moral stand from ‘inside’ the park. meanwhile the monitor guy is watching, breaking into our conversation only to mention that the info is encoded onto the card so people can’t share tickets. after fifteen minutes back and forth my father finally thinks to ask this guy whether there is an option two. he says “of course. show me id and sign the card and you’re all set.”

so. not only are people willingly giving up something, they’re doing it when they don’t have to.

at disney world.

of course, I’ll now defeat the point of my own narrative by mentioning that I joked around the rest of the afternoon about being shadowed by the disney police. only it was one of those jokes that was funny cause you rather thought it might be true.

the nanny has seen fit to represent me to the world! right, that should be re-present, as it were, but you get my meaning methinks.

while I’ve been away it seems I grew very popular. after an evening of comment browsing I now know how to stop that pesky balding, enlarge my penis, have smoother skin, stop smoking with a handy dandy little patch, and price hemorrhoids. I’ll admit that last one had me confused for a while, I wasn’t sure there was a market for their sale.

but these…it’s tempting to leave em when they get creative with the message body…

“codfish?Africanized,accurately lake?quantification antagonizing”

“ambidextrous proclaim Gibraltar autoregressive premonition add patch”

“tolerate worth!wholly,quadratically retrieve!jokers impossibility teasing discover”

“unintentional inferred rescue observable labored monarch”

“squishy!advisory?abashing,brushed maple megaword smiled flourishes:fiddlesticks”

“defile,handiwork compounding Seneca inflatable residence philosophize enjoys”

“substitute trencher precociously fronting submittal jerks”

“inhere.bow everyone translate openings jerk!Zoroastrian scribbled.”

“stamped Tchaikovsky.Boswellize”

aah, poetry.

apologies if I’ve accidently deleted any actual comments.

all sorts of pics are up on imageevent, look left over the next while as I tidy up the place.