Am chatting with Matthew G, an old friend from Eastern who recently commented on my blog again. Who has a major vendetta against Seth for him being a jerk to his friends. It's kind of weird.

You know what I did on Friday afternoon? I spent fifteen minutes staring at a shrubbery. It was rather extraordinary, or maybe I'm on psychotropic drugs, but as I was looking at the shrubbery, it began to look to me like the side of a tree covered mountain. Each sprig on the shrubbery, instead of being just a sprig, was a little evergreen tree, and I could "see" birds' nests and pinecones. And very clear in my mind's eye were roads winding around the mountain which I half expected to see if I were just to part the little sprigs, and hikers appeared as pinpricks of color occasionally walking along the side of the road, overtaken by cars and buses. They would, if they had really existed, appear as flashes of light as they travelled along the sunny stretches of the road, and then go dark again as they drove under the shade. I saw birds circling over the pines, and, with my mind's eye dipping under the leafy canopy, saw mats of pine needles, underbrush and topsoil, and along the steep sections of the mountain, a grey rock face with loose sections, where occasionally a hiker would, with his shoe, dislodge some pebbles that would go pingpingping! all the way down.

But sometimes a shrubbery is just a shrubbery.

For the rest of the duration of the walk, I'd see other shrubbery, and it'd appear to me as a spreading oak hung with lanterns by which a hundred or so revellers would be eating barbecue and chatting (the children would be chasing each other) on a summer evening (it was about 3 pm after school, in reality), or I'd look at a tree and see a redwood on a knoll that could serve as a house, with round doors and windows carved into the bark, or I'd see a shrubbery that looked like a tree on a patch of hilly and cheerful farmland under which I could sit and read, or I'd see somebody's lawn and see plains shaking under the weight of a stampeding herd of bison. I lost all sense of scale- what was one inch, or six inches, could be the height of a human, or a buffalo, or a tree. It was like I was looking at a bansai world, with my mind inserting special effects.

My imagination riots against the IB.

My monitor burned out on the computer I normally use. I'm getting a new monitor (flat screen) and possibly a CD burner since they're really cheap right now at Best Buy and my parents are on a 'buying electronica' spree. In the meantime, I'm seeing if I can use my old monitor as a fish tank.