A Brief Respite
by Ryan Sproull
Powerful and unseen forces have colluded in giving me the briefest of respites – or “brespite” for brevity. Great torrents of things to be done and appointments to be kept are swirling around me, creating a vortex of deceptive serenity. A little me time – the I in the storm.
Here are some things I didn’t know, and possibly you did not either. Circumstances surround a thing, so you are in the circumstances, not under them. To decimate means to destroy an amount – originally a tenth – not to almost completely destroy. I always thought it meant to destroy something down to a tenth of its original strength. And to be targeted is to be armed with a shield – as any player of Diablo II may suspect. Thank you, Economist Style Guide.
Bing’s gone beta, and helpfully offers me the ability to see results only in the United Kingdom. There is something vaguely terrifying about any page that has “Windows Live” as a clickable link. I have an irrational fear of the words – this sense that Windows is geared to latch on to other Microsoft products like an imprinted duck.
And how about the weird echoes of the Buddha’s life in Osel Hita Torres? He spent his life being protected from knowledge of the world, not unlike the young prince Gautama, and then fucked off. Yee-hah! Disco-dancing and inter-individual lip-locking.
And, finally, food for thought about drugs. How about those Cocaine Anonymous meetings in LA going from six to 75 in three years? Hoooo. Now we’re thinking. Yee-hah.
