Darker Desires
31 August 2010
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Articles
My First Decade at The Orgy
by Vesperae
SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - September- October 2010
In the Summer of 2000, UC Santa Cruz released its first working map of the Human Genome Project online. The world had somehow managed to survive the Y2K bug and widespread anxieties anticipating technological armageddon. Barack Obama was an Illinois State Senator. Microsoft was putting together an appeals strategy after being declared a monopoly in U.S. District Court. The massively over inflated dot–com market speculation bubble had unceremoniously burst and collapsed. Napster forced people to consider the meaning of copyright and intellectual property in the digital age for the first time. Survivor and the first U.S. version of Big Brother pushed the collective acceptance of our voyeuristic tendencies to new extremes of "reality." American Beauty was the Academy Award winner for best picture. DVDs and DVD players were becoming affordable for the mass market, and Netflix was in its first full year of business. Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter hadn't been imagined yet, and very few people had ever heard of hanging chads, Al–Qaeda, or Haliburton.
23 July 2010
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Articles
Like Starting to Smoke All Over Again
by Vesperae
SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - March-April 2010
It can seem so strange how we process and integrate traumatic events and change in our lives. It's been only a little more than three months since I was confronted with FSCs and the personal loss of commercially produced cigarettes, but it actually feels like years have passed for me in this short span of time.When we lose anything that is a substantial long term part of our everyday experience - a relationship, a job, a loved one - our lives change so fundamentally that we need to adjust to the newness of the absence in seemingly everything. That which was familiar becomes suddenly a little different, because we're suddenly a little different now. And in those moments of feeling slightly out of phase with our worlds, we can sometimes gain insights and a new perspective on the familiar. We can sometimes see little things that we had forgotten or didn't see before, feel things that we had forgotten or didn't feel before, and think about things that we had forgotten or didn't think about before. And since we're relearning our worlds in thousands of little ways, time dilates.
