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The sprawl of Eastern Montana.  When I was a teenager, I was introduced to the concept of mediation. I would attend weekly meditation meetings at a local Buddhist dharma center. This was in Eastern Montana in an old large home that had once belonged to a local furniture dealer when things like furniture were still something that shops would have made locally/regionally. Because of where this was located, the meditations were led by old former hippies from the 60s. They would start the meetings with a parable that, for some reason, would always have connections to hamburgers being a basis of society. For example, one parable was about a poor beggar begging for money, so he could eat a hamburger to stave off starvation. He ended up discovering that his favorite warm coat that his mother had given him had money sewn into the lining. His precious warm coat, upon becoming worn enough to tatter the fabric, provided him with the money to purchase a new coat and begin climbing out of pover...

Liverpool.  When I arrived in Liverpool, the YouTube algorithm decided to introduce me to the concept of Hauntology. Hauntology comes from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book The Specters of Marx from 1993. A quick definition being : "Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost." Wikipedia This is to say that the failed ideas and concepts of the past still haunt us today, like how the collapse of the USSR didn't lead to the end of communism. Instead, the ghost of communism haunts capitalism with the notion that there is an alternative to the system that we are currently in. The motivational fear of the Cold War and communists has been internalized (at least in the US and perhaps the UK) to any leftist political movements, with the fear that it is the ghost of Marx that will be resurrected.  This initial video that I ...

  When I was studying French literature, I took a course on literature from the Antilles. One of the literary devices that we were studying was that the people of the Antilles don't always think of time in a linear line, but as a web of causes and effects that blend together. One of the books we read was a detective story where the lead detective would talk to the suspects to trace after the clues. The direction of the dialogue with the suspects was always them sharing their life story with the deceased and how their interactions over time shaped them. It was this idea that actions in the past influence reactions in the future. As well as the idea that a person is not a solitary individual, but a composite of the surrounding society. Walruses of the Arctic Hotel.   Later, when I was studying architecture in graduate school, I liked to think of this concept when designing buildings how the past of the area could inform designs for the present that could direct images of the fut...