Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Out of the Woods

I'm still not quite sure where I am. This town's called Carthage, but that doesn't really narrow it down - there's actually a Carthage near where I live (used to live?) but this isn't it, and wikipedia says there are at least fourteen different towns in the U.S. alone with the name. Unless I happen by somewhere with tourist information or something, I've got nothing to go off of. Not entirely sure I want to reveal my location on this thing, anyway - bad things tend to happen when people do that.

I found some money tucked away in the car's glove box. A lot of money, actually, which means I'll probably be set as far as food and gas go for a while. Once the sun came up, I went into a McDonald's and got one of those weird cinnamon-roll-in-a-takeout-box things, which was disgusting, but it was food and I was hungry. I spent a bit poking around the car, attempted to catch up on blogs (which is a pretty daunting task), and mulled over Angel's post - which I'll get to later.

The station wagon is...more organized than I expected it to be. Back seat's full of papers and books and notes and crazy. I'm not looking through it tonight. The trunk has some sort of nest-like bundle of mismatched bedding and a pillow, but none of it's mine. It also holds my violin and guitar, which I'm guessing is how at least some of the money from the glove box got there. After I ate, I kind of sat in the McDonald's parking lot, and eventually fell asleep in the wagon's trunk around noon. The car was a convection oven, but my clothes were already gross so I didn't really care. I wouldn't be surprised if I'd been wearing the same set of clothes for the past two months. They're disgusting. I need to eventually find a place to shower.

As far as the other post on this blog, well...I actually recognized most of it. The title, "Of things Present", is a bit weird, and I have no idea where it came from, but the rest of it...
I had to google the first bit. Turns out it's from a Portal comic, which is weird because I never played Portal. The comic itself, though, was good. The quote shows up within the first few pages. Other than that, though...I don't think there's really a deeper meaning. Reality isn't what it seems to be, yada yada...I know it's important, but I can't bring myself to read too far into it.
Second one's obviously from House of Leaves. Which is definitely a good thing to read while you're running from an eldritch abomination, yeah? It's more stuff to do with reality, and I think it's also referring to the fact that she's speaking in quotes. It's just another layer of cryptic to hide behind, really, but it's a lot harder to wrestle meaning out of than simple codes.
The third chunk's where it gets interesting. The italicized phrases are from a proverb Robert used in the earlier days of White Elephants (you can use Google Reader to read that if you haven't - just make sure you're following the blog), and the plain ones are from Life of Pi, a novel about religion and a boy who survives hundreds of days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. I can't say much more than that, or really explain the quote, without spoiling the ending. At the very least, though, if Slender Man is a metaphorical tiger here, it's disturbing stuff.
The last bit is from Markus Zusak's I am The Messenger, which has a weird metafictional twist at the end that I'm spoiling as I type. It's more REALITYZOMGWTFBBQ mumbo-jumbo. Really, as vague as all this stuff is, it's pretty damn self-explanatory. It's easy to get what Angel was trying to get across (I think), but harder to understand how it relates to this mess.

It's past 1AM, and I'm starting to think that my best option at the moment is to get on the highway. Staying on the move is supposed to help, and even though it might not work, I've got nothing better to do. Reading blogs this late will just get me worked up and paranoid, which is a horrible idea considering the circumstances. I might be driving myself into a funky sleep schedule by doing this, but I don't really care any more.

Catch up with you guys later on, I guess.
(I feel so awkward not having a cool sign-off)

3 comments:

  1. ... what do you mean, the other post on here? Angel put up four posts.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ...okay, what? I only see the one I've linked, along with my two posts.

    Don't tell me there's some weird EMH/Delmont-esque hidden post stuff happening here. Because that's exactly what I want to deal with right now.

    ReplyDelete
  3. it's really the only reason we could tell it was you, because one of them linked to nearly every comment you had left on the blogs.

    ReplyDelete