Yesterday was a definite day of downswing. Mood, luck, Stuff, all rock bottom. Today? Is less than halfway through and already feels like that moment on the way up to the top on a swing, when your insides go over with the force of the lift and the iron frame around you shudders and lurches as your weight and momentum tug on its anchoring, and the wind and sun hit you in the face and it's all too exhilarating to be frightening even if it does feel like you're about to fall off. Today, so far, is good.

And this news article on measuring quantum effects without them realising that you're looking is just the icing on the possibly-existent cake. Apparently, if you can manage to observe reality without changing it, you discover that it is EVEN WEIRDER THAN YOU THOUGHT. Somewhere in the back of the universe, I can hear laughter. ^_^

In other more local news, it's so good to be awake and alive and not half dead with exhaustion for a change. ^_^ I even have a story blocked out in my head, which is great as I've been utterly useless at getting anything into pennable form lately. And today there will be pub food, and useful work, and friends, and also Judgement Day pay-per-view over at Mark's... yep, stuff is good. Life++.

Laters,
The Navigator

PS Also, new best thing ever: Body Shop's brazil nut body butter. I have no idea how it goes from smelling of warm and creamy and, well, brazil nuts in the jar, to smelling like WKD-Iron-Brew-over-hot-charcoal[1] on me, but the fact that it does is frankly just fantastic. Win!

[1] You will learn strange things from pouring alcoholic libations over a disposable barbeque. You may also discover the most unimaginably wonderful caramelised-sugar smell in the world, seriously... ^_^

Overheard last night:

navigatorsghost, frowning at a large sheaf of paint swatch cards: "I want something pretty to stare at while I'm in bed." *pause* "So since I'm single, I'll have to paint the ceiling."

In related news, I am apparently still a teenage metalhead. I've been trying to work out what colours to paint my room and I've told myself "not black, it's too much of a bitch to paint over and the landlord will hate me." Because I am trying to be grown up. Unfortunately it turns out that every colour scheme I know how to do a decent job of uses black as a base colour...

I think I have an alternative scheme now, but just in case anyone here is a frustrated Changing Rooms star... what colours should I paint my room? Answers in the comments please!

Laters,
The Navigator

I had a dream last night that I was in the middle of nowhere with a few people I know, and we were looking up at the sky and I saw what must have been a million million shooting stars all at once. It was as though the whole sky had always been one great dome of clear glass, and someone had smashed it and all the pieces were falling at once. I don't know why I dreamed that, but I'm just posting it because it's the kind of image you want to remember.

Having mentioned that... the rest of this post will now consist of stuff I want to show to everyone. In no particular order:

I've just discovered Tiny Ghosts. This is a strange little photocomic that isn't really "comic", but a sequence of little thought-provoking two-sentence stories. Mental jumping points, if you will. Some of it is a little too sentimental for my taste (the anti-war ones and the more mawkish romantic ones in particular sometimes cross the line) but the more macabre, weird or just plain leftfield ones are great. This one in particular struck me with some nameless sense of realisation, and left me looking round like I'd just seen the world slip sideways an inch; this one feels awfully believable; this one is sheer poetry.

I think my absolute favourite has, though, to be this one.

Meanwhile, also in the department of visual arts, I was talking to Koi while it was sitting with its graphics tablet the other night, and asked "draw me something Black Metal?" The result? This, which is absolutely awesome though you may have to adjust your screen brightness a bit to actually see it, looking at how it's come out on the work monitor. ¬.¬ Thank you Koi!

Finally, I've been haunted of late by a piece of music. I was in the cinema and caught the trailer for Babylon AD, and my ears instantly pricked up and I went "I know that piece, where do I know it from?" My brain distantly pinged a flag that said Sunshine, and, yes, it's the same piece of music that was on the trailer for that! It turns out to be called Lux Aeterna, and has appeared in about a million different guises on various movie soundtracks/trailers including Requiem for a Dream and, apparently, a trailer for The Two Towers. It's also on Youtube, where it's been used as a songvid piece for every remotely heroic/depressing fandom you can think of. Seriously, have a listen to a few of the versions. It's a gorgeous, spectral piece with a refrain that makes me think for some reason of the mirror scene at the end of Prince of Darkness - it sounds to me like a key, like a song that if played in the right place at the right moment could unlock our reality and create a gateway to another one. One where there's something that really, really wants to be on our side of the gate... and that we really, really don't want here, even if we don't know about it yet. I have no idea why this song affects me like this, but...

Okay, post long enough for now...

Laters,
The Navigator

Or, Weird Things I See On My Travels, part one of an occasional series. [Like the coconut brigadoons I posted about once in another journal, years ago (only baked once every hundred years, get them quick before they disappear!)]

Ahem, anyway, I went down to London on Wednesday/Thursday last to see zeldenthuis, and her house is out near Crystal Palace so I went that way on the train. And somewhere just outside Tulse Hill station, I saw the strangest thing.

You see an awful lot of strange things from London trains at the best of times. The city is so old and dense and crooked and the lines are cut through parts of it that were never really meant to be exposed to public view, and you get to see all the rooftops and backyards and the ways the walls fit together without paying more than lip service to Euclid, and the strange graffiti tags and the broken things and rusted things and abandoned things. It's always different and always beautiful, and I love it.

But outside Tulse Hill, there's a chunk of land that looks like it might once have been allotments or a scrapyard, the kind of rotten brown belt that you find in patches all over urban Britain. It butts right up to the tracks, almost, though on a lower ground-level. And it's covered in... caravans. A couple of the mobile type, several more of the static kind that my grandparents lived in and called a mobile home and that in America would be called trailers.

And all of them are on legs. They've been balanced precariously on timber frames about twelve feet high, the legs looking so flimsy I'm not even sure how the weight of them is supported. A couple of them are double-stacked, one lower, one above, like bunk beds. I'd have taken them for abandoned derelicts, piled up high out of the way so that other things could be shoved underneath - they all looked worn and faded, paint peeling, grimy lace curtains or nothing at all at the scratched and rain-stained windows - if it weren't for one thing. They all had little ladders. Flights of rickety wooden steps and narrow iron ladders, leading up to gantries in front of them or straight in at the doors. Perfect little masterpieces, if only urban decay were definable as an architectural style.

So, who in the world would live in an old trailer stacked on pilings round the back of a South London railway line? I can only wonder. I hope they're as cool as the kind of people who would do that ought to be.

Laters,
The (thoughtful) Navigator