|| -------- -- -----  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 148--5/24/97 <-------  ||  OsoaWeek  ||  Issues  ||  Book 12  ||  -------> (Cup OWis148, Created v1 (4/27/99), Copyright 1999) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = OsoaWeek Book Twelve 5 "OsoaWeek148" by Frank Edward Nora, Lord of Obliviana, Tarb 6193 (5/24/97), copyright 1997 OBLIVIANA REGISTRY NEW REVOLVERS None NEW CUPLINES None. NEW CUPS Text Zope (ZPTZ) *OW* LORD OF OBLIVIANA Mon 5/19/97 * 12:38 AM Week Five of the new Obliviana website. I did the weekly update for Week Four a few hours ago, pretty half-assed. All I added was "Text Zope". But hey--it's better than nothing! Compared to the state that Obliviana was in before this new initiative, I'd say it was pretty good! Thunderstorm outside now. Where is Obliviana at? I want to get more specific on the Fonosta/209 aspect of Obliviana. Start off with the Forge of Wander (FOW), the board of 209 squares, 11-by-19, such as can be seen in two variation on the main page of this website. Cups can be put into the squares of the FOW. Cups contain information. In the world there is chaos which is distressing and confusing and destructive. Onto this mess we impose order, and meaning, and life. It is a major idea that you need a combination of order and chaos to live a full life. Unfortunately, we are getting more and more chaotic in these times, causing much distress and confusion. Obliviana is like an anchor of order in this environment of disorder. The FOW is theorizied by me to be a thing encoded into reality, in the same general way that the number 3.1416..., pi, is encoded into reality as the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. Order, life, vibrance. There are numerous instances of the FOW in Obliviana, but they are all linked. You can think of these various layers as being one on top of another, like shelves. Or you can think of them of occupying the same space, like channels in a TV signal, where one at a time is "tuned" into. And your Fonosta is built on one of these FOW "planes". It is your own little personal "world" in Obliviana. It starts off blank, and you build it with Friction Enhancers, which are actions that take place in the real world. Obliviana stands against "virtual reality", where an artificial world, especially one in which you have an "artificial identity", becomes a place where you retreat from the real world. There is a line that is crossed here. True, watching a movie is a retreat from reality, and you "become" the protagonist in a sense, but this is an immersive experience which does not cross the line I am referring to. A full implementation of VR where you become and are represented by an avatar that is some character besides you is something which would likely cross "the line". In Obliviana, computer life is used as a means of enhancing real life. Friction Enhancers are challenges, things to do in the real world. An existing thing which is similar to a Friction Enhancer is a "scavenger hunt", where you have to go out and find a number of diverse items. In Obliviana, once you complete a Friction Enhancer, it is "poured into" a Cup as information, and is placed on the FOW of your Fonosta. This is the way Obliviana works, at a very basic level. Goodnight. 5/19/97 * 9:52 PM Find me in a funk of sorts, work hard at the "real" job, the 9-to-5 to 11-to-8 or whatever. Worked 10 hours on Saturday, then 10 more hours today, Monday. Should make some decent overtime. Very tired out. And I went on a little jaunt, to Penn Station and Manhattan Mall and stuff, bringing back sights and sounds of my train commute which ended almost exactly a year ago. I feel there is some "animating" force missing from my current Obliviana System. I mean, you have the Fonosta FOW, you have Friction Enhancers, you have Cups, you "pour" the Friction Enhancer accomplishments into Cups... then there's the thing with Racetracks... but what else? What is the missing element here? 10:41 Massive thunderstorm outside. 11:-6 PM Denice: People. (Me: Competition. Comparison.) Frog. Number on back, hopping. On a log or something. Blank now. Murals with lists. Four murals. Two on top of other two. Bottom left all black. Other three white. Top left written in black. Top right blue. Bottom right red. White backgrounds. One little man looking up at them. Tried to read them... each list of 4-5 things. Word "full" is coming. Definitely were instructions, things to do, things that were missing. Word "all". Scrambled letters... If people sat down and wrote goals they wanted, and things missing in their lives, and using Friction Enhancers to accomplish them. Dealinbg with luck and opport. Take chances you wouldn't ordinarily take. Me: Idea of interconnected FEs. Or mutliple FOWs in your Fonosta! Different color schemes! I thought of this before, 2-color checkerboard themes... Aha! The idea of filling up lists with Cups, and having a variety of "sets" of FE Cups which you can use to "complete" various forms. Ah! This new "Merlin" electronic game I bought today has the same structure! Complete quests to "get" a symbol. So specifically, as I swish warm salt water in my mouth, this idea establishes that Cups which contain completed Friction Enhancers are a sort of "currency", and there are, for lack of a better term right now, "Symbols", which require a specific set of FE Cups, such as "2 Mallballs, 2 Pebbleswitches, and 4 Cup 14s". So you'd have to do all those FEs, and make them into Cups, to get that "Symbol". Now, of course, I have to determine what these "Symbols" are all about. Thunderstorm seems to have settled down outside. 11:59 PM These "Symbols" have to be a logical aspect of the system I have been developing. "What have you built?" It has to be about competition. Developing your Fonosta in different areas, in different ways. Like I mentioned... Maybe a Fonosta is made up of, say, 8 FOWs, each with its own color schemes and themes and stuff. Gaming and the game aspect is manifest at all levels of Obliviana. So perhaps the FEs are done with the motivation of being more powerful int he game... Time for bed. 5/20/97 * 6:22 PM Home somewhat early from work. I don't feel well. I called the doctor's office before. Doctor is supposed to call back, but who knows how long that's gonna take, if he even gets around to it? A lot of chaos going on now and in the past few days. The move at work. The thunderstorms. And now me being sick with something. And the whole time, I'm trying to figure out what the missing element in Obliviana is. Could it all be connected? I don't know. I gotta shave. 7:07 PM Okay. Here it is. The "Symbols" are are of the "Fonosta Device". Remember that the phrase "Your Fonosta Device" popped into my head back in my apartment in Iselin. "Device", in this sense, referring to a graphical symbol. In short, Your Fonosta Device is an image you present to other in Obliviana. The "Symbols" I have been referring to are indeed graphical symbols which will be released as digital artifacts--in limited quantities--and then you make Your Fonosta Device with these "Symbols" that you have "bought" with your Friction Enhancer accomplishments. 7:53 PM MOTIVATION This Fonosta Device idea has an aspect that is vital to Obliviana: motivation. In fact, I believe that this motivation is that which is the "animating force" which I referred to before. The lure of developing a better and better Fonosta Device is the motivation for doing Friction Enhancers. 11:25 PM Going to doctor tomorrow at 2:00 PM. Taking a sick day from work. Looked at houses with Denice before. Found one that seem like a possibility, in Belleville, a few blocks from her parents' house where she currently lives. Now, back to Fonosta Device. I see FE Cups as having perhaps a graphical nature on their own... but there might be a reason not to have this... that graphical elements should be hard to come by and special. These graphics will be color and will exist within a FOW board. Your Fonosta Device is your identity in Obliviana. A glance at Your Fonosta Device will tell people a lot about you in Obliviana. The ostensible theory here is that these graphics are given like medals or certificates for accomplishments. This is true, but the Device itself and its elements will be the real focus. One possible problem would be people faking their accomplishments. Therefore, a higher force needs to be involved, and indeed it is. This is because it is wholly impossible and undesirable to police people in this matter. The higher force is 209, as a Primal Aspect of Reality. Your Fonosta Device represents, to some extent, Primal Forces, and the SYMBOLS are just that--symbols. They represent something that exists at a Primal level. I think it will all work out. Now I need to get into some specifics. I should have some time tomorrow to do some work in this area. 5/21/97 * 7:04 PM Well, I went to the doctor today, took a sick day from work. Apparently I have a rather interesting condition: a stone in my salivary gland. Doesn't seem to be very serious. I may have something else as well, an infection or something, but it doesn't seem very serious. I got a new pipe today, and I just put some honey in it to help break it in, to help carbonize it properly. It wasn't pre-carbonized. Pipes are great smokes, and are massively cheaper to smoke than cigars. I mean, I just bought three 2 oz. bags of pipe tobacco, good stuff, for about $4 a bag. For $4 you get a halfway decent cigar. A 2 oz. bag is good for, what, 10, 20, 30 smokes? I don't know. Thing is, you have to invest in some good pipes, but you can get a decent pipe for about $20. The one I just got is very nice, and was about $20. You're supposed to have at least seven pipes if you smoke every day, one for each day of the week, so they don't get overused. I got seven now, but a few of 'em are crap drugstore models. Well, the corncob pipes are drugstore models, but they're okay. 7:30 PM I need to get my work on Obliviana in order. As you might know, if you've read a lot of issues of OsoaWeek, I am in a constant state of questing after the nature of Obliviana. I am always asking "What is Obliviana?" The situation I'm in is that I don't know the answer, but given a proposed answer, I can tell if it's right or wrong or somewhere inbetween. This implies that the answer is buried somewhere deep in my mind. With this model, it might seem like a better course of action to just try and pry the information out of my mind. But you have to remember that the quest itself is a valuable experience, and by experiencing this quest all my life, and especially the past ten to fifteen years, I have become a much better person. That is, if the answer just popped out when I was 15 years old or whenever, I'd have the answer but I wouldn't have been able to do anything with it, because I didn't any experience in business and life and all the other things I'm going to need to really make Obliviana a reality. Therefore, if my circumstances are planned in any way, perhaps by myself in a former existence, they can be seen to be very functional in terms of making Obliviana an eventual reality. So you get some idea of my situation. And it just goes on and on and on. Until I answer the question. Until I know what Obliviana is. With the breakthrough I got yesterday, everything in Obliviana is falling into place. So I just want to go over everything and see where I'm at. And, as I mentioned in a recent issue of OsoaWeek, I am making my thought process public, for whatever reason. I guess because it might be somewhat interesting to read, especially if Obliviana ever takes off and becomes a big thing. So, here it is. [1] FORGE OF WANDER Obliviana begins with the Forge of Wander, which is a board, 19 squares with and 11 squares high, making for 209 squares. It is represented in its most basic form as a "checkerboard", with alternating black and white squares, the corners being black. I came up with the term "Forge of Wander" a long time ago, and I have used it in many capacities before finally using it as the name for this basis of Obliviana. The name itself is very descriptive, as the board is a thing from which unplanned movement comes from. Wandering is very related to freedom. In my first days at Drew University, there were "icebreaker" session where people got to know each other. In one, you had to introduce yourself amd then say that you liked something that began with the same letter as your first name. At the same session when Phil Smith said "Hi, I'm Phil, and I like physics" (which established his college nickname as "Physics Phil"), I said "Hi, I'm Frank, and I like freedom." So, freedom is a central theme in Obliviana. [2] FONOSTA I remember clearly being in my apartment in Iselin, NJ, and walking into my bedroom after going to the bathroom, and it was sunny out, and my apartment was very messy, and these words popped into my head: "Your Fonosta Device". I took the term "Fonosta" to name a person's identity in Obliviana. Way back in OsoaWeek001, in July of 1994, I introduced the idea of Fonosta, and began offering Fonosta registration. This idea of having an identity in Obliviana, and having it registered, is another central idea of Obliviana. Identity is at the core of many problems that people have. That classic question of youth, "Who am I?", is never so much answered as it is forgotten or suppressed. That is, people stop asking the question and think they have it answered, but wind up being all screwed up later in life, still not really knowing who they are. Obliviana can answer the question "Who am I in Obliviana?" Whether or not it can answer the much deeper "Who am I?" remains to be seen. Fonosta is very much focused on being "official". That is, you Fonosta is registered and maintain along with other Fonostas, in an official way. This registration will be done by my company, Obliviana Super Occult Amusement. But if my company ever becomes corrupt, other registration organizations can take care of it. I am concerned about this because I believe that any company can drift from its original intention, especially after the person who is the driving force behind it is no longer involved. Just look at Disney today, thirty years and five months after Walt Disney died. It's become a twisted and perverted version of what it was under Walt Disney himself. So I don't want to promote the idea the OSOA is the sole organization capable of sanctioning Fonostas. Quite the contrary, I want to establish Obliviana above all else as an IDEA. Fonosta has several aspects which have been cosistent for some time. Fonosta Number is a sequential number, wherein each registered Fonosta is numbered in order of registration. Fonosta Name is the name that is used to identify a Fonosta. It must be a single word that is listed in the dictionary. I wrote recently about the idea of "superheroizing" yourself, which is germaine here. Fonosta Device is the aspect of Fonosta that I had a breakthrough in yesterday. It is, simply, the graphical image that representes "you" in Obliviana. It is contained in a FOW, but is not restricted to squares. It is made up of "Symbols" (which I have to come up with an official name for), which you earn by doing Friction Enhancers. Now, being that Obliviana is a digital world exists as a "Little World of Racetracks", it makes sense that Fonosta will also have a "Car" aspect. Cat, Sunglasses, Sword, etc. 5/22/97 * 1:06 AM I just saw a show on the Jonestown Mass Suicide. It seems awfully easy to mentally enslave someone. This is a very worrisome observation. A little charisma and some knowledge of hypnotism and human nature and you can have slaves. But for some reason, people want to deny this phenomenon, this ease with which people are mentally ensalved. Now, a disntiction has to be made here. Jim Jones having his followers drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, that's an extreme and that's absolutely bad. Let's look at the other extreme. Take something like cars. Everyone knows about cars, most people drive cars, people buy cars, sell cars--cars are a big part of life. So are people "brainwashed" to deal with cars so much? Of course not. I know this may not seem like a good comparison, but stick with me. You cannot pass judgement on a cult without believing in absolute values. Cultural relativism and other philosophical systems without absolute values could lead to Jonestown, for example, being interpreted as a good thing, and that criticizing it is tantamount to being a cultural elitist. So we have to apply absolute values in any judgement of a cult or other mind-warping initiative. People follow. People are easy to control. People are weak. People are selfish. People are shallow. So, like, do people just plain suck? No. People are defined by their leaders. You may not like the sound of this idea, but I think it has merit. Most people follow a leader. If it's a good leader, doing good things, the follower is good. And vice versa, with a bad leader doing bad things. Goodnight, I'll continue this later. 5/22/97 * 6:30 PM Some pretty harsh judgement up there about people, huh? This is a very central issue to humanity, and cuts to the central questions of "Who are we, what are we doing here, and what should we be doing?" I think our answer to all this has been infrastructure. Improvements in transportation, farming, building, etc. Our purpose seems to be to make ours lives more comfortable and secure. So what's going wrong? The problem may be that this goal of making life easier is not a good goal. Or rather, not a good ULTIMATE goal. Now, for individuals, the big goal seem to be to become rich and/or famous. If you have a great talent, and there is a demand for it, the system of supply and demand can get you rich. When you're rich, people work for you. Think about someone like, say, Alanis Morrisette. When a person pays $14 or whatever for her album "Jagged Little Pill", that person, or some other person, has to work a certain number of hours to earn that money. With something like 15 million albums sold, and figuring an average salary, and this is very rough, but I calculate somewhere around 21 million hours of work paid to this Morrisette. There is a connection here to cults, which seek to enslave people, or get people to work for them for nothing in return. Or for something that the cult members see as valuable but isn't really valuable. Is there a connection here? Don't worry, I'm just rambling. I'm NOT saying that Morrisette is a cult leader. I'm just making observations. People do not seem to want to forge themselves into producers of wealth, but rather, finagle themselves into a situation where they can drain the wallets of many people. A society of people seeking to enslave each other. And yet only a few succeed. Kind of like the lottery. 5/22/97 * 10:19 PM "Octagon". This word could very well be the missing element of Obliviana. You know how I referred to "Symbols" as an aspect of Fonosta. Well, I was in Metuchen, wandering around in a very lovely dusk, and I came upon the idea that these "Symbols" should have multiple facets. I was looking at a building designed to look old fashioned, which had interesting architectural "towers" on it. I thought of folks constructing buildings along the racetracks, and also souping up their vehicles, and also having signs in their device, and so on. I realized that each "Symbol" could have a number of aspects--perhaps some of them hidden. Then I thought of the question of number, and I realized that eight has been central to all my prototype systems of Obliviana. And then, WHAM it hit me--call these "Symbols" Octagons! And as I drove around, going to Blockbuster and Carvel and walking past a fair and going to Toys'R'Us and playing Mario Kart 64 and then driving home on the Parkway, I realized more and more that Octagons are indeed the missing element in Obliviana! 11:49 PM It's cold again tonight. Isn't it like supposed to be Spring or something, and not be cold anymore? Ah, a great hallmark of Generation X, mock vagueness... Anyway, I have the Octagon. So here's the idea. Octagons become available in different "models" and with a limited number available. You "buy" or "obtain" an Octagon for your Fonosta by "spending" Cups which you have filled with Friction Enhancers and other accomplishments. Let me go back to an idea of a few weeks ago--the Jukewand. I very much like this idea, of slips of paper which are filled out initially, then put in the Jukewand, then you do the Friction Enhancer while carrying the Jukewand, then you take the slip of paper out and finalize the information on it, and then you put the slip of paper into a container with all your other slips of paper, after entering the information into your computer, of course. So the Cups in your Fonosta correspond to the collection of slips of paper you have in your container. Now, once the data is in your computer, you send it to OSOA, and Cups are filled and put into your Fonosta. Now, in terms of the relationship between Cups and Octagons, my initial thought is that Cups are initially "charged", and are then "discharged" when used to purchase Octagons. This idea of "charge" is also used in Obliviana Classic, the boardgame. (Note: I believe this is the first time I am calling the boardgame "Obliviana Classic", though I have thought about calling it that for some time). The eight facts of an Octagon will have to correspond to eight aspects of Fonosta. I want there to be some mystery to Octagons. That is, some aspects will be revealed, while others will remain secret for awhile. So, perhaps, there will be a series of 50 Octagons which are fairly mundane in four facets. But it is revealed that another facet will be "opened" in six months. Six months later, it may be revealed that the new facet is great, and everyone who has that Octagon will be thrilled. Or, of course, there has to be the possibility that the revealed facet will be mundane. Fonosta is centered around the Little World of Racetracks, so driving and vehicles are definitely one facet. Buildings and other terrain features will be another. Signs on the Fonosta Device will be another. I have to decide if there will be a humanoid avatar distinct from the vehicle, or if things will be more abstract. This is a major question. Well, there you go. Another major step forward for Obliviana. Goodnight. 5/23/97 * 10:44 AM Well, I'm not at work again this morning. I have a 12:45 appointment with a doctor right near here to take a look at a "salivary duct stone" that I may have. So, what I want to do in this brief time I have to write is to try and get an overview of Obliviana. Okay. "Obliviana" is the overall term for all of what I'm doing here. "Obliviana Super Occult Amusement", also "OSOA" or "Osoa", is my company, which administers Obliviana. So I am at the helm of Osoa, and through Osoa, Obliviana is produced. Right now the sole outlet for Obliviana is my WWW site at "www.obliviana.com". And I do expect that an online presence will continue to be the main outlet for Obliviana, as opposed to something printed, or a physical location, or whatever. On the Obliviana website, content is presented, free of charge. And right now I do not have any advertising. So I have no way of making money with this current setup. In order for Osoa to be a true company, it has to be able to make money. Therefore, in Osoa I must make products and services that I can sell. Advertising, which I am not adverse to, in the proper context, would be one possible service for me to sell. That is, when I get more than 15 hits on my site. In Obliviana, I will not resort to any sort of dishonest promotion, nor will I cheat anyone, nor will I charge for basic information. So the common method of selling a system by making wild claims and then making people pay to get it is not something that will happen in Obliviana. The most obvious way I can make money is to charge people for the official recording and sanction of their Fonosta, and also deeper access to the Little World of Racetracks, and stuff like that. For example, any Octagon system is going to need to be administered online, and is going to require a log-in account system. Administering a person's Fonosta in this manner will cost Obliviana a good deal of money, so it is wholly justified to charge money for the service. 11:56 AM What I referred to in the previous paragraph is a computer system that would cost big money to set up and administer. While such a system is my ultimate goal, I have to plan the nearer future, specifically, the lauch of Obliviana on July 28 of this year. 11:02 PM Little World of Racetracks. What will be the level of play here? Will it be real-time, arcade-style action? Or will it be more a cool, cerebral weekly-orders based thing? I need to consider this issue in the context of what is feasable and also what is ultimately desirable. In reviewing my notes from last year on the Little World of Raceways, I see a lot of focus on fighting. But now, I am thinking more along the lines of NOT having fighting. Partially this position is a response to the immense overuse of violence in video games. I don't want Fonostas smashing and shooting and burning and demolishing each other. This is really against the ideals of Obliviana. Competition is definitely a part of Obliviana. But violence is not. This newly expressed ideal is good, in that it focuses the range of activities in LWOR. Being a Little World of Racetracks, it is clear that racing will be a central activity here. Moving your Fonosta around a Racetrack. 5/24/97 * 2:43 AM LWOR is on one side of the Obliviana System, and 209ing/Friction Enhancers are on the other side. LWOR is an imaginary world, while 209ing is based in reality. The two are very much interrelated and codependent, though. One of the main problems with 209ing is motivation. Tell someone they should go out and start switching pebbles, for example, and the usual resonse would be "why would I want to do that?" It's very hard to explain the Wonderful phenomenon that is 209. LWOR bypasses such an explanation, and gives 209ing a context that is much easier to grasp. Simply, do 209 and get Octagons, which are vital if you are to excel in LWOR. Sun 5/25/97 * 6:47 PM I do want to record the events of last Thurday evening in greater detail, as I feel they are worth recording, and if I don't do it now, when will I do it? THE BIRTH OF THE OCTAGON EVENTS OF MAY 22, 1997 I woke up with the sound of my Japanese/Chinese caveman drummer alarm clock. But I went back to sleep, and was late to work. It was an annoying day at work. I had to do a frustrating job with these clients hovering over me. I had to leave early, though, to drive Mike Massotto down to the Metropark train station, as I agreed to do many weeks earlier. I left around 4:30, and got on an E or a C train, and between 34th and 42nd, it ground to a halt and didn't move for 25 to 30 minutes. I drew Yargo Trees the whole time, greatly helping me pass the time, as I feared being late. But the train did eventually get going and I got a 5:05 or 5:15 bus, and I think I was fading in and out of conscuousness during the ride, and then I got home and I was in my apartment at 6:15, 15 minutes early. At about 6:45, Mike called me and said "Go into your Jeep now, I'm leaving.", or something like that. So we got going and we hit all this traffic on the Parkway, but we got to Metropark in Iselin around 7:25, and his train wasn't till 8:05. We wove out way through the labyrinthine interior of the Metropark parking construct, and I bade him farewell. Why you should have negotiatiate something labyrinthine just to drop someone off, I don't know. So I left and headed for the cigar store on Gill Lane in Iselin, right across from the Bristol Apartments, where I lived from June 1992 to June 1994. At this point let me backtrack a little to explain the situations that were extant at the point of going to the cigar store. The previous Satuday, May 17, I went to work to help in moving the computers to our new location, and it was a long and draining day of work. On Sunday I notice a little swelling starting in my salivary duct under my tongue. By Tuesday, I felt a pain in the vicinity of my bladder, and I started getting a little scared. I went home early, and called the doctor, and decided to go in the next day. So I went to the doctor in Metuchen, near Iselin, on Wednesday. Before the doctor I went to my storage in Iselin and checked on my stuff. A whole lotta stuff. Then I drove up Gill Lane and that's when I saw the cigar store. I wanted to stop, but I didn't have time, so I figured I'd go the next day, when I'd be back in the area to bring Mike to the train station. I went to the doctor, and once I was done I headed over to the Menlo Park Mall, where I bought a new pipe and some pipe tobacco at John David. Then I checked out the "Target Greatland" store, and then I went home. At work the next day, which was May 22 and part of thiss story, I called my doctor's office and my insurance and stuff, becuase the doctor told me to see and ear, nose, and throat specialist about what appeared to be a stone in my salivary duct. So I made an appointment for 12:45 PM the next day. This is germaine to the story of May 22, as you'll soon see. That doctor visit turned out to be a little pointless, as the swelling had gone down, and the guy told me that these stones usually break up by themselves, and if it isn't blocking the salivary duct, it's not really a problem. Oh well, back to the story. I went to the cigar store, which was very nice, and bought 2 "Free Cuba" cigars, and 2 "La Finca" cigars. These "La Fincas", which were quite good when I smoked them last night when me and Denice went out with Melanie and Inka, were idenitcal in size and shape to the La Fincas I bought recently from a cigar place across the street from here in Clifton, which I feel must be counterfeits, since they were of such poor quality. Anyway, I bought those four cigars, plus a cool light that looks like a pen, plus four boxes of really cool "Swan Vestas" matches from England. From there, I drove over to the doctor's office in Metuchen to pick up a referral form for my visit the next day to the ear, nose, and throat doctor. I went into the office at about 8:00, 8:15, something like that. At first they couldn't find the form, but then they did, and then I used their bathroom, and then I walked out of the office and this is where the story really begins. It was starting to get dark, and it was quite breezy, and the temperature was cool but not uncomfortable. I thought of going to visit my grandmother, but I realized that I had to get home to work on Obliviana, so I didn't. But I still wanted to call Denice, so I crossed a parking lot and called her on a payphone, and left a message. I wanted coffee, so I looked across the street at a Friendly's, and I estimated the difficulty of going in there and getting a cup of coffee to go, and I realized that it would probably be a nightmare, so I decided to head over to the main street that leads to the train station to try and get some coffee. I was familiar with this street because of one time when I took the train to Metuchen to go to the doctor, and I walked that same route. It was a nice street and as I walked down it, I started to feel this wonderful sense of freedom. I know that the rest of the evening was mine, and that I didn't have to do anything the next day till the doctor's visit at 12:45. I didn't find anyplace to get coffee, then I went into a place identified "liquor and deli", and went in, and I asked an Asian fellow for coffee, but he said he didn't have any coffee. Then I asked for tea, but he mumbled something about a machine being broken, but he suggested I head down the street, where a coffee place was located. So I walked down and found a cool coffee bar kind of place, and ordered a double Earl Grey tea, since it was cheaper than coffee, at $1.20, and I only had maybe $1.50 in change to spend. I left the coffee place and decided to walk under the railroad bridge, and the lighting and weather was awesome. Then I crossed the street and walked back under the tracks, and headed into a parking lot behind the buildings on that side of the street. At first it didn't look like I was gonna be able to get over to the street that the doctor's office (where my Jeep was parked) was on, but I found a little walkway through to that street. And just as I got to the dead end of that street, a New Jersey Transit train came, headed to NY, and I just stopped by a row of newspaper vending machine things, just stopped and listened to and watched that train, with lush foliage between me and it, and it was an amazing feeling of freedom that I got. It was transcendent. So I walked to toward where my Jeep was parked, and I looked to my left, over a vast parking lot, to a Blockbuster Video and a Carvel ice cream store. These were two stores I frequented when I lived in Iselin, and it brought back a bunch of memories. Then on my right I saw a building which was built in some kind of Victorian archituctural style, with flared "towers" on each corner, and a black sort of "fence" at the top of each tower. It's hard to describe. A photo would be quite helpful here, but I haven't any, and besides, I haven't started including graphics in OsoaWeek yet. At this point I had the revelation, previously described, in which I got the Octagon idea. I think the whole complex series of events that got me to that point had the purpose of inspiring this revelation. A comment here. This Wonderful Metuchenian dusk would have been there whether I was there or not. Somehow, 209 got me there. There ARE Wonderful situations out there; they just need to be found. And 209 is the way to find them. Anyway, having gotten this revelation, I continued on with this Wonderful experience, and experience which words can do only a small amount of justice. I got to my Jeep, and decided to drive over to that Blockbuster/Carvel shopping area. On the way, I passed one of those temporary fair/carnival things. First I went into Blockbuster, which had changed considerably in the approximately three years since I had been there last. Then I headed for the Carvel, but I saw that my headlights were on, so I turned them off. In the carvel, I got a single chocolate/vanilla soft swirl cone, being sure it didn't cost much, cuz I didn't have much money, and I paid with quarters, and I think the cone was also $1.20. I walked around the supermarket that was next to the Carvel as I ate the cone, and I walked past the carnival, and that sense of freedom was strong. I went around the other side of the supermarket/shopping plaza construct, and got back to my Jeep and I had finished the cone. Then I fired up one of the Free Cuba cigars, and it was awesome--the best-tasting cigar I had had in a long time. I started to drive, but instead of turning left to go back to the Parkway, I turned right, and headed off on a route that I know I used to go on a lot, but which I didn't remember clearly where exactly it went. I wound up getting onto 287 South, and I decided to head over to a shopping plaza across and a little bit up from Menlo Park Mall where I recalled there being a comic book store next to a cool record store. Jim Hanley's Universe was the comic store, and Vintage Vinyl was the record store. I drove past the place, and saw that the comic store was gone and the record store had expanded. I decided not to go in, but rather to head for Toy'R'Us across from the Woodbridge Mall, another place I used to haunt frequently in my Iselin days. I went in and looked for these "Giga Pets", which I had never seen, and which were sold out everywhere I went in Manhattan. There was no sign of them. But I did play Mario Kart 64 for about 15 minutes. It was good to play it, and it verified my theories on 3-D games sucking. So I went ot the bathroom there, and checked my answering machine, and then left and headed home. That was about it for the Wonderful experience. But as you can see, it was so strong an experience that I was moved to relate it in detail in writing. This experience reveals much about Obliviana. It is an important experience for me. And it is a sign that I am headed in the right direction in Obliviana. *OW* -------> ------------------- ----------- -------- -- -----