Secret Agent / Texts
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And Gollum repeats his fate, helping carry away into fire the heavy things that can't be carried anymore.
on the bathroom wall where I'm staying in Paris is this:
I collect personal secrets!
Please send me yours.
I look forward to learning them and will keep them carefully.
Hreinn Fri∂finnson
P.O.Box 851
121 Reykjavik
Iceland
Oh god, my children. My Children! WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?!?
GEOGRAPHY! HELP ME!!!
Not wanting to detract from the stories above (nor to add my similar, if likely more awkwardly worded, version), I'd merely like to mention that it is extremely improbable that without this game I'd have kept my current facial furniture for more than a week or so, nevermind the 2 years and counting it's stared back from the mirror at me and weekly, or more, insisted with lip scratching and asymetry that I trim or otherwise tame it.
Wouldn't it be a better as a starter task for Everyday Life?
Somewhat tangentially, how many times would you have to take communion before you had eaten an entire Christ?
Or is it like homeopathy, or martini-making, where they just shine some light through the body onto the wafer?
Does this even help anyone's thinking on this task? No, I guess not. I'll just go and disappear for a while again and keep trying to fix that video...
Wow. The whole thing is amazing. But I've watched the video 3 times now. Excellent. Even more so cause I never expected to be reminded at once of Constable and Winnie the Pooh.
So you want me to climb onto the roof of the DeYoung? I guess I can give that a go. Never even been inside there before, so it'll be nice to make the trip.
When? I'll SOOOO make the trip over.
p.s. we're trying to set a date for a London one too...
I've woken up from dreaming about SFØ. Normally that would be fine, and I would write it up in the morning. But I've got a cold sweat, the room is warm but I've goose pimple up my arms and on my neck. I can feel a very real adrenaline rush that's quite familiar, and that means I won't get back to sleep any time soon; I was dreaming about Journey to the End of the Month.
Some Dreamworld facts:
JTTEOTM is a high profile game. It works more or less like JTTEOTN, but on an international scale. It started in Canada, and had a checkpoint in Tijuana. Canada included most of Washington state, Montana, Idaho, a bit of North Dakota (dreams can be strange sometimes). The game's running over a month, and we're almost at the end, on our way into Florida. Everyone's excited because we're arriving in the state where judges gave the election to Gore and dozens of politicians (Including Jeb) got arrested for conspiring to rig it the other way. The general political climate isn't hugely different, but there's less war and less terror. So people play more, and a huge network of supporters has grown around the game. Runners can count on communities to take them in secretly, much the way the Weather Underground had friends who were still on grid but ran safehouses and could sort out transport. But some things are independent too, and many players opt for complete disappearance, because the chasers draw on networks of surveillance. This has already caused very public controversy, as police watching their own feeds have turned over information to the public that led to catches in game.
At the start of the game, everyone saw everyone else. A party of about a thousand, everyone trying to remember faces and not be remembered themselves, no one knowing who the seed chasers were. Then the runners getting an hour's lead time to vanish into some other part of Vancouver. I disappear to a drugstore, for hair dye (in the dream I still have hair) and shaving cream. I shave my moustache, and my partner (an old friend of mine, not currently a player, from Vancouver) shaves his beard; we both dye our hair dark brown, trim the back and sides to look generic. In this game, you're not allowed to travel between cities without another player, and most pairs of runners stick together as long as possible. Larger formations happen on an ad hoc basis, but rarely work together for long. But if your partner gets caught, you're still free if you can find someone in the same situation in the same city (of course knowing that your partners have almost certainly met up as chasers in need of partners can advertise more freely). Chasers tend to change partners frequently to keep a given pair from becoming too recognisable.
My partner got caught in St Louis, as did Bex. So for the last stretch, I've been travelling with Scarlett, who's hair is currently a bright but natural-looking red. We'd been working with different underground networks, so between us we have a lot of resources and feel pretty confident going into the home stretch. We've gotten onto the train in Raleigh, and have been on it for a while, though knowing we'll have to get off outside of Orlando. (Did I mention in the dream that the public transport infrastructure is way better? Well it is. The train network is massive. Also, in JTTEOTM, private transport is forbidden, though hitchhiking is not. There are prizes for creative routes, so people are documenting their practices carefully, which makes harder to cheat.) We've seen other people get on the train that we think are players, but it's been weeks, and people keep changing their appearance. No one in this game wears armbands. You have to use your memory from the party at the start of the game. But bystanders have almost certainly heard of the game, and probably follow its events online (documentation of catches is often posted soon after they happen, a few everyday--but there are hundreds of players), so they're accepting of some strange behaviour on the part of chasers even if they aren't a part of a support network. And in this game social norms are a bit bent from the the shear amount of gameplay going on anyway.
Before I go on, go googlemap 'Florida'. Kind of amusing.
So yeah, Scarlett and I are on the train as it pulls into a station in Jacksonville. Trains are only safe while they're moving, so you keep a low profile then but you can relax a bit. For now I'm looking carefully out the window and spot Dax and Burn Unit walking towards the front of the train, suited, looking very sharp. They aren't carrying much, just light bags. "Chasers," I whisper. By the time I've turned around, two strangers and the other end of the carriage are stood bolt upright, scared, staring at me with arched eyebrows. I nod, and they bolt with their packs towards the caboose. Scarlett's already up too, ten paces ahead of me, and I shout "Slow," winking when she turns, not wanting to tell the bystanders what I'm thinking. She does and we keep jogging. Terpsichore and Tiny Dancer go past us. I think I spot Minch ahead, but hard to tell in the hustle. There were more players on the train than we'd realised.
We jog for about 20 seconds. We were 5 carriages from the front, and they might get slowed down by other players behind us. Soon the tension is too much and I hit a door release. A quick peek at the platform shows it empty, which gladdens my heart. We get off and start creeping back towards the front of the train. We can see in, so we're crouching low, moving slowly. There's still plenty of commotion on board. I see Dax go pass, catch someone I can't see. Another carriage on, we see Burn Unit and Spidere conferring. But no one's seen us yet. We get on the next carriage, all non-chalant, and sit separately, but within eyesight. I haul out a book, and start reading. Dax comes from behind me and sits down just as the train rolls out. I'm safe from being caught, but don't know if he'll recognise me. In the dream we've never met. I look up and see that Tom has sat down next to Scarlett. They're chatting away, as Dax and I start to. I spin some yarn about how I'm going to visit a cousin who's in Daytona beach bumming around after an Atlantic Centre for the Arts residency before heading to Istanbul. And how I'm American (which I'm not, in the the dream), because I wan't to distance myself from my real back story. Though that will get awkward if State Troopers board the train as I'm travelling on a fake German passport.
I make an excuse to go to the dining car, but Dax comes with me. On the way back, I pop into the restroom. I scribble a note, in Italian (mine is much better in the dream than in reality), with an acrostic in it that will tell Scarlett what our new drop point will have to be, as we were originally planning to ride to Palm Bay to hitch back. I hide it behind the mirror.
A few minutes later, Scarlett starts to get up, and Tom does too. But he goes into the restroom, not her. He can't have seen me come out of there, can he?
The tension is too much and I've woken up.
And I'm getting tired again, so might be able to get back to sleep. There were more details, but I wanted to get the whole shape down, and enough of it's there.