ever since the death, his room was left as it was, somethings lying in the exact same place they were when he was alive. Documents had to be furrowed through, ids rummaged through, drawers examined for loot..

we still thought of it as his room, mother and i, with things stacked exactly as he left them, we felt his presence

when my layoff loomed over my head, my spell was broken and I started searching for my old identities. job7me had neglected parents so much while being ground between job7 and family. scenes would bubble up and i would cry. i imagined i wanted to be back in my childhood home,  him returning at 530 or 6, both coming inside,  getting angry and grumbling and lashing until he went to freshen up, mother getting coffee for us both..

now my own son is a delightful little racoon, obstinate at will, and picky about spiderman, and i couldn't love him any more, that i often think of _him_ in my position and me in my son's, and cry some more. maybe i was an ingrate  

 once i left home for college, i got an social ego boost i'd never had in my home town -

 ( and i now  understand that depressed and rotting is the default state of everybody in small towns, no matter how finely they dress themselves, and arraign the right brands, and  watch the right movies (read the right books, listen to right cassettes in my time) and speak in the right accent, you will always be a small towner.

- and once there and to job and beyond, i could'nt connect with my parents , what with my need for needing to communicate my state in great depth of essence ( i had no idea about depth nor essence at that time, and must've come across as peevish and spoiled... ) , i was a different person, and they would never know - my dad, who had done more and gone farther than me .. i was riding on a cloud of friends and colleagues and posturing and affecting that now i believe to be atleast stupid and fake if not outright manipulative and i wish my to spare my kids from via knowledge ...

now my friends are gone and i can't sit in smoky bars any more i don't drink and cant handle the smoke and can't handle my 'friends' and don't have any actually, have been living under a rock since the first child was born and under a boulder after covid and the second one was born ( and have the muscle tone of a worm to prove it)

now i look back on photos on me, my wife, and children on holiday, scarcely a few years before, and wonder who these young people were and what their lives were like ...

 It showed 49 minutes on google maps. One hour and two minutes and fifty six seconds later, I card-beeped myself into the office.

 At the end of all the paths ...

The gods line the paths, but at the end

At the last step that you must go alone 

There is an empty room

Which you must enter

And it remains empty 

after you do

ontogeny recapitulates philogeny

Thats why the classics and the epics are important 

They become personal maps to follow

 

everything in this pic is now in your pocket.

i for one, think we lost when 

many many low complexity hardware devices got replaced by one insanely complex phone

the number of dimensions of cool in the universe came down to one , which was a spectrum with an insanely expensive iphone at the end of it, and many wannabe androids trying justify charging that much ..

it's easier to carry one device instead of a hundred but no one needs to carry one hundred

different devices different hardware but all the same variation of chip-plastic-boards-magnetic media

brings me back to "steve jobs was evil but i can't put my finger on how"

a bit about my background. i'm a tall guy, and have lived in this town for all my life. i finished school and the pursuant 2 pre college years in the same town. then i looked for work, while watching tv. there was nothing in that town. i watched more tv.

 i used to be a radio-tower-conspiracy theorist. i built my own emr detector and was able to measure cell tower affect in residences. i used to go around to peoples houses doing this. i'd ask them if there were any chronic health problems or irritations or just recurring plain bad luck in their house, and then walk around with my blinking detector which would beep . it would almost always beep , and then i'd refer them to my business colleague who put up 'faraday net curtains' to shield the residents. we've been doing this for a over a year, making a decent living, and i almost believed the science myself. science or not, our remedies evolved enough that they worked, and the complaints stopped almost always.

i remember last june, when the rains had just started, one of our clients called us back saying the shielding wasn't working.  rains had just started pouring, so we said we'd show up to re-evaluate the location and review the shielding, but in a week or so, as the place was difficult to with water on the ground.

at a point on the  road , a kuchcha path took you to the end of the shrub land territory, and then a path led you through trees and stones to their house. it was only a ptah because you could see the disturbances in the grass of the one or two people who had passed that way. the path  disappeared during heavy rains.

i remember clearly, it was a thursday, i was passing the kuchcha path in a bus, and spied a large dull green raincoat man at the end of it, holding what looked like a black pencil box with a blinking light on top, and pointing it towards what looked like the direction of the house. i was wondering if there was a competitor in town, copying my idea ..

my phone rang. i looked at the time as i picked up - it was 12 10 in the middle of the night,  and caller id said 'indian paranormal society'. i heard some static, then the call cut off. very pissing off.