think outside the box? what's a box? you must be nuts.

Picture of the Day
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Thursday
October 23, 2003

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Anthropology 101
One cause of society's psychoses is that objects lack stories.
Time was, every so-called object related to some grander
scheme via a narrative, usually a creation myth.1
In contemporary "Western" society, we are
surrounded by objects without stories.2
As a result, people feel disconnected.
What I'm going to do is tell the tale
of mundane objects which surround
me, then I am going to auction the
objects off, selling them as ways in
to the stories they embody. It is an
experiment, a new literary genre. I am
inventing it, so please help me be the first
to cash in. I'll start with this tennis ball. It was
sitting on the floor, the first thing I saw which I knew
I could do without. 99 cents, no reserve. It's only going
to get better, but this was the first, my fuzzy wide world. Yours.

version i

version ii

version iii

1The last remaining people of the 20th century, the Australian aborigines, sang their history when on walkabout, naming the origins of every rock, tree, and lizard along the way. Suchlike is related in Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines.
2"MADE IN CHINA" is usually the extent, and though we suspect slave labor is involved, we quickly block it out, denial being our primary survival mechanism.