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|| -------- -- ----- A E R I E O B L I V I A N A . singular book of text wandertainment by Frank Edward Nora ------------------- ----------- OSOAWEEK--ISSUE 090--4/12/96 <------- || OsoaWeek || Issues || Book 7 || -------> (Cup OWis090, Created v1 (4/27/99), Copyright 1999) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = [[BEGIN090OW]] [[01090CV]] * * * O S O A W E E K 0 9 0 * * * April 12, 1996 "The weekly ezine of Obliviana Super Occult Amusement!" by Frank Edward Nora CONTENTS 01 090 CV--Cover 02 090 LA--Lord of Obliviana 03 090 SU--Superior OsoaWeek090, April 12, 1996 12th issue of OsoaWeek Book Seven Written by Frank Edward Nora Published weekly by Obliviana Super Occult Amusement (E-mail address in transition) 1-800-OBLIVIANA http://www.obliviana.com/~osoa All contents copyright 1996 Frank Edward Nora Regarding this file, you are free to make digital copies, so long as they're not altered or sold. All other forms of reproduction require permission. An Obliviana Cup containing this file will be available. Stay tuned for more details. ASCII Characters: 13929 / Words: 2575 / Lines: 336 Days late: -1 *OW* [[02090LA]] Lord of Obliviana Fri 4/5/96 * 7:30 PM * home * Tarb 3707 I finished last issue a few hours ago, but I've been lethargic since then. Think I might have screwed up one of the Tarb headings, but who cares. Just ate some strawberries on the cusp of badness... I had to pick out the ones with mold and other suspicious markings. That and a massively old, stale Dunkin Donuts coffee roll, which I threw out, was the only food I had in the apartment. Last night I came to realize that I don't like "Friends" anymore. It's absurd, but the show seems dated now! It's so... so... so 1995. Yeah. I know that sounds stupid, but it really feels like the world has changed in the past few months... passed another marker... Jesus is on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Folks seem to be full of bad philosophy about Christ. I was a devout atheist as a kid, but now, I can see the reality of Christ. Not that I'd worship him. Or anyone else. Yeah, the world has changed. And so have I. Goddamn, Muppets are on tonight and I'm NOT GONNA MISS IT this time! I have to decide if I wanna go out with Pete tomorrow... been toying with the idea of exploring New Jersey... maybe I'll do just that! Done. Yeah, we're gonna go explore South Jersey. For those of you not from the Garden State, there's like this whole half of the state--the south--and no one knows what the hell is going on down there. I mean, you got Atlantic City and Cape May and stuff on the coast, but I'm talking inland. The few times I've been down there, I've been utterly baffled. It's like being is a massively different part of the country or something. I know this must sound weird, I mean, with Jersey being one of the smallest states and all. But keep in mind, it's also the DENSEST state, with the highest population density, by far, of any state. You can usually drive a few minutes from wherever you are and come up with a place that you've never seen or heard of before, and which holds unique marvels. In my plans for Obliviana, one of the eight Core Revolvers is Forge of Wander, which is all about New Jersey. It's funny--after I decided to assign the name, which I've had for a long time, I realized that New Jersey IS the Forge of Wander... the origin of meandering... the birthplace of the modern understanding of 209... So I want to understand the Garden State better. I mean, I'm familiar with a lot of NJ, but the South part is still a mystery to me. We're going down below Rt. 195, man!!! Where am I? I am at an interesting point in my life. My life is simplified. A lot of the crises that have been in my life are fading. I guess the main thing is that I have reconciled my conflict with myself, which was the main problem. That conflict has supernatural tinges, and I don't think I'm being overly dramatic, but I'm not gonna get into it here. It's three weeks to the launch of Obliviana, a launch which it's hard for me to imagine right now. It'll have to be a work in progress, I guess. It's the infrastructure of the thing that I'm concerned with at the moment... accepting all that E-mail, updating my WWW site, all that. And what about OsoaWeek? Where's OsoaWeek going? Well, OsoaWeek has always been meant as the place where all the stuff going on in Obliviana in a given week is recorded. And there's no reason that that's gonna change. I mean, up till now, OsoaWeek has BEEN Obliviana... the stuff I write... that is what Obliviana has been. If you look back at OsoaWeek001, you can see that I hoped to get regular readers, and that never happened. I mean, I haven't even had an E-mail address, for months now. But that's gonna change. This Book of OsoaWeek isn't turning out so bad. I mean, there's no Severe Repair, I know, but the Lord of Obliviana features have been ace. (Ace?) I mean, I've really been pouring out the radiances of my soul and stuff into these ASCII characters. I feel so much more comfortable just sitting down and WRITING, with no planning, no revises, nunna that. Just writing and creating something engaging in real time. Yeah. I think that these Lord of Oblivianas are real valuable, to me and to Obliviana as a whole. I mean, I AM Obliviana. Right? Without me, there would be no Obliviana. And hopefully, soon, there WILL be an Obliviana, for real--something that they'd write about in Wired magazine... 10:01 PM Just wasted two hours watching TV. The first half-hour of "Sliders", possibly the worst written show on television. Then "Muppets Tonite", which was definitely a disappointment. It utterly lacked the soul of The Muppet Show, which isn't hard to fathom, considering that Jim Henson's been dead for five or six years. Then I watched The X-Files, and I realized I saw the same one a long time ago, but only the last 15 minutes or so. So about Obliviana, right now I have a wide variety of themes in the eight Core Roadways. But I've been thinking about that, and I'm thinking maybe I should narrow the focus of the themes. I don't know. And the task of developing the Fonostas for each Roadway is also before me. So, I'll explore South Jersey tomorrow. Who know... maybe I'll meet Conductor Girl somewhere down there... Sat 4/6/96 * 10:47 AM * home * Tarb 3711 I got up real early this morning... six something... and before 9:30 I did the laundry, washed the dishes, cleaned out my Jeep, took out the garbage, went to the supermarket, and had breakfast. I had a really fuckin' weird dream last night. I was in full bridal gown, and I was trying to get a room at Walt Disney World's Contemporary Hotel. At the main bank of check-in desks, they were lowering metal gates for lunch hour or something. I wandered around, remembering (from another dream (!)) how the elevators went all over the place, in all directions, and how they were a thrill in and of themselves. Then I went into a really dirty bathroom, went into a nasty toilet stall, locked the door, and took off the gown, figuring I might have more success checking in if I wasn't in drag. What the hell that dream means, I don't know. I mean, I often have Disney World and bad elevator dreams, but this is the first time I remember wearing a bridal gown! Geez... 12:16 PM Going to South Jersey soon. Just got a computerized call from AT&T--I pick up the phone, say hello, and a computer goes "Hello, this is AT&T with an important call for you. Please stay on the line and an AT&T representative will be with you shortly." Then some fucking music comes on and another voice says "All representatives are currently helping other customers. Thank you for holding." So I hung up. What the fuck? I never heard of anything like this before. I guess it's to relieve operators of the time-consuming task of calling people. Anyway, the phone rings again about a minute later with a real human, and I rant and rave about the computer call, and she says she'll note my account that I don't want to receive computer calls. Ha! Anyway, I tell her I'll pay my bill on Monday and that's that. This technology man... it's fucked-up... Sun 4/7/96 * 10:44 AM * home * Tarb 3717 Set the clocks forward today, what a pain. The trip to South Jersey went very well yesterday. I set the Storm to 10/11-17/19, and we did some freeform Pebbleswitching. We headed down Rt. 206 from Turnpike exit 7. Lots of trailer parks, video stores, and liquor shops. We were gonna go bowling in Vineland, but we passed right through it and onto Cape May, where I had the notion of going on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, which I saw on the map. I had to piss a lot... at one point I pulled to the side of the road by a swamp and pissed, pretty much in plain sight of passing cars. We got to the Ferry and it was awesome... it was a gray late afternoon... and I pulled into lane 5... my Jeep was in the middle of a vast pavement, no one else around... we went into the cool building and played the first game ever of modern Vamershee... On the boat, the cashier at the snack bar was a fat weirdo with a Star Trek emblem on one of his collar and a witchcraft pentagram on the other... I had nachos and O'Douls... it was cold and it started to rain as it got dark... in Delaware we turned around and got right back on the Ferry... the ride back was even cooler... we played game after game of Donkey Kong... I had forgotten how much better the arcade version is than any of the home versions... another game I played was Rastan... a game I used to play in Penn Station NY when there were actually TWO arcades there, instead of none like there is now... then we went to the upper deck and it was the most awesome, 209 sort of experience... it was totally dark, and there was no one else... me and Pete hung out and talked about life... It was a long drive back... Parkway to Atlantic City Expressway to Turnpike... back home Pete came in for a minute, and on TV was this weird show "Night Stand", like a fictional Geraldo-like talk show... and they had a couple getting married... and the guy was wearing a wedding gown... interesting, eh? Considering my dream of night before last... My dreams last night were pretty awesome, too. I met this gorgeous girl, and she was talking about how her boyfriend was a jerk and then we started making out, and I asked her how old she was, and she said 13. I was shocked... her breasts were pretty big and stuff and she looked a lot older than 13... then we were running, videogamelike, along this twisting pathway, avoiding sharks by jumping and stuff. Then I was in a city with the Beatles, and I was talking to like their manager or something, imitating a Beatles nerd, saying, in a nerdy voice, "Yes, I remember the Beatles convention up in Saskatchewan..." and the guy was telling me to stop. Then me and that guy stopped in a pizza place while the Beatles waited outside. I was saying something to myself like "they're just regular guys". The pizza place sold miniature food, and I was looking for it. Like dollhouse-sized pizzas and stuff. Then I went to the bathroom to piss and it was dirty in there and I pissed, but I didn't feel relieved. Then I woke up and pissed for real, thinking about how reality is better than dreams, cuz when you piss, you really piss. 10:59 AM 11:33 PM Gotta go now. Family Easter get-together. Thu 4/11/96 * 10:24 PM * home * Tarb 3744 Trouble with my PowerBook. The floppy drive failed, and in my attempt to fix it with a Swiss Army knife, I destroyed it even further. But I bought two LocalTalk connectors, and I can now network with my Quadra here at home, and transfer files thusly. Over the past few days, I have been refining Obliviana, and I think I have the right idea now. Well, almost. Anyway, I'll get into that next issue, cuz right now I wanna get this one done. Get all Obliviana. *OW* [[03090SU]] Superior SUPERIOR 513 * 3/20/96 How in being human... the same routine every day... how the same thing can seem so different... depending on the state of you... I remember with great affection the times after work on a Friday... take the E up to Davidoff Cigars... smoke one and walk over to the Letterman show... see what's going on outside... play some games at The Broadway Arcade... walk through the brilliant night of the new Times Square... then on to Penn Station and home... okay... SUPERIOR 514 * 3/20/96 Forcing a rug into another time... the tuition money was wasted... and I was studying emergency exit signs of mass transit for the month. We all got psychological orgasms with the Russian video game. To think of how mundane it all was... but then again... I like mundane. Ah yes. A hospital and a dorm. Look. Stories of brave sea pioneerings, and me, in the comfort of the train, looking out, feeling complicated feelings, writing Superiors. All the articles in all the magazines out on the newsstands today. Even if I read them all, where would it get me? SUPERIOR 515 * 3/20/96 You gotta be deluded to succeed. Like, being deluded is being innocent. The flip side is the world-weary, the jaded, the cool. Forget it. At that point, it's no longer "cool" to succeed. What the hell. I am at so many emotional places... ups and downs... it is a side effect of creative genius... distressing, but manageable. I say I am a genius, all that, where is the humility? Goddammit. Humility is in vogue, it's PC. "I don't deserve this award! All the others nominated are just as good as me!" Yeah right. But a little boasting goes a long way. Y'know? SUPERIOR 516 * 3/21/96 The second day of spring. Dear myself, I know how you always romanticize past periods of your life, and I'm sure you'll do it with my present. But remember... no girlfriend... messy apartment... financial instability... a move on the horizon... The idea is that at some point in the future, I'll probably pine for this time in my life... and idealize it... forgetting all the negatives... but I have to say, this is a rather charmed period of my life... cuz think of it... if I had a girlfriend, a neat apartment, all my bills paid on time, and a good home I'd stay in for years and years, would that be good? Um... you know, it might. *OW* [[END090OW]] -------> ------------------- ----------- -------- -- ----- |