Once more dyed the rich red colour of sockeye salmon

real outfits for the lads: Smug Mountie is drunk with lemonade and power
real outfits for the lads: future redneck rancher is two seconds away from whuppin' you
real outfits for the lads: you can't see it, but this kid's wearing chaps.
Flashy Gene Autry sling style holster, with artificial firearm and Curse of Gene Autry
Real outfits for the panicked Home Front

Vitals

Written by the guy who hums to himself as he paws through the dumpster

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

Design by
Die Schmutz

Worthwhile Palinode Pages:
Humpty's Menu:
one - two - three - four - five - six - seven - eight - nine - ten - eleven - twelve - thirteen - fourteen

Can't Stop the Link:
palinode's bloggier blog
The Modern Word
open brackets
smartypants
friday-films
luvabeans
buzzflash
new world disorder
sex & guts!
the memory hole
national pist
Milkmoney or Not
mirabile visu
The Web Revolution!

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

Me, I wrote this entry myself, I did

Many entries back - too many for me to Google myself to find the entry (although I have no idea why that should make a difference to me, since Google certainly doesn't care how old a given entry is. I think it's just my automatic embarrassment about my older stuff - you don't want to go back and visit the consciousness that so earnestly or snarkily wrote those words, since that's your consciousness, and therefore forever wanting, always bringing up the rear and pretending to head the vanguard. Oh what the hell, the earlier entry can be found here. Scroll down about 2/3 of the page.) - I wrote about vu jade, the opposite of deja vu: the sense that a situation is utterly alien and new. I took a liking to the phrase, since it's so much more useful than deja vu. I prefer to think of vu jade not as the experience of entering a new situation, but of suddenly finding the familiar alien and grotesque (speaking of which, I skipped off to a web page for a few minutes and just flipped back to this document, only to find the vu jade-inducing phrase "familiar alien"). I've always thought that deja vu was a glitch in consciousness, a brief overlap producing a stereochronic1 disorientation. What would vu jade be? A glitch in some neurological a priori retrieval system? (Aaargh, screams the brain: that Corvette doesn't look like "Corvette"! That elm tree holding to the last of its yellowed leaves doesn't look like "elm tree holding to the last of its yellowed leaves"! Vu jade, everybody!)

Anyway, I first encountered the term months bakk in James R. Chiles' thrill-a-minute cautionary work Inviting Disaster. I was looking for a specific reference to AeroPeru Flight 603, which crashed in the Pacific Ocean after someone failed to remove a strip of tape from the left-side "static port" sensor tubes after a preflight washing. Crucial instruments began to malfunction, feeding the pilot and crew a steady stream of disorientingly bogus information. The transcript of the CVR recording can be found here if you're feeling curious, or if you're of that particular morbid strike that likes reading the increasingly frustrated comments and curses of people who are scared shitless, arguing with each other and increasingly aware that they're probably going to die. You know it's bad when the pilot and copilot start arguing about whether the autopilot is even on.

A few days ago I checked the book out of the library and found the paragraphs on AeroPeru 603 buried in a larger argument about the partial meltdown of Three Mile Island (like AeroPeru, a tale about a tiny malfunction and wonky instrument reading). I had completely forgotten the story, the term and the concept of vu jade, but I remembered enough to know that my emotional and intellectual reaction was almost identical to the last encounter. It was the exact opposite of vu jade as I like to use it: a stereochronic2 correlation between my months-old self and my current self. It was reassuring in a bizarre way, since I often wonder just how much self I have, and what exactly constitutes that foam of identity that rides the crest of the present. But there I was, remembering myself reacting and behaving exactly as I would expect me to. It was like two tent pegs pinning down my consciousness into place.

Enough for now. I'm going home. Soup and DVDs await.


1That's my big brand-new sculpted torso of a word. So buff with denotation. Take it for a workout.

2Whoa. Did you see that word again? Man, that's one fine-looking word.

Retracted on 2003-10-02::5:49 p.m.


parode - exode


Listed on BlogsCanada Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com