Sitting on the dough, the money of the place, he’s remembering a lot. Baker. Wendy. The rented room for the night above the citrus fruit shop. Then it happened *again*, the dream within a dream.
He’d forgotten about the Strange Isle, the Temple of Light exactly 200 meters above it in the air. So much has gone on in Our Second Lyfe now.
And now another strange island, considerably larger in scope, looms before him. Some will call it Retirement Island, especially after the 28th of this particular month of 2022 (February). Actually there’s another, similar sized island not far atall to the east that might be paired with it throughout eternity — probably is. They are definitely a part of the Wild West of Nautilus, although Lands End between it and Lower Austra is just to the south and east as well, a strong focus of this particular photo-novel, 31 in a series of — I won’t say 31 again. I don’t know how long it will last. I consider it a precious gift. 🙂 There are so many advantages of writing in this manner, in this way, in terms of character development over time — through many many photo-novels in some cases; the same with *location* development; and then the final one, the most illusive: THINGS (always capitalized). Concepts sometimes. Examples for it from the current photo-novel include SEED, THROUGH THE WALL, PHEH, 102, NODAL, *BLEH* (different from PHEH), POINT FOLLOWING, WAIT!, LETTER Q, CARDS, MORGAN/MORGAINE, GREEN RING, WHITE TREES, SUN ROSE, HAT REMOVAL, TILE MANIFESTO, NEW PHYSICS, PAST FUTURE, ENIGMA, GRASSHOPPERS, SILHOUETTES, PURPLE/BLACK LAKE BUNCH, OUTER PLANETS, RASPBERRY, and RAINBOW SPHERE. Complicated — illusive — like I said. But maybe the most important in the long haul, stitching together character and location to make a larger picture that can only be, for practical purposes, faintly seen and locally enforced. This is definitely a metaphor for life itself. We continue…
So you see, for example, the phrase “citrus fruit shop” has been used twice in photo-novel 31, although I haven’t included it as a thing — yet. A linking concept is All Orange, part thing part character so far. In the post “Sameness”, we see an orange, circular in design and thus representing the whole, paired with CARDS to form a deeper study. Notice that Alice’s caterpillar is on one of the cards — a “worm” — and wormholes were talked about earlier in the photo-novel. Then All Orange refers to something Wendy saw in this same citrus shop back in photo-novel 26 I believe, when she stayed in the same apartment as Man About Time and Alysha did later, except with Jeffrie Phillips. Why the same apartment? Why an orange referenced in each case?
We can actually turn to the ORACLE (yet another thing/concept but not listed/official yet — *large*) and find WALDROP (another character and thing combo, actually) linked with both Fife and Thelma Lou and understand that Man About Time, second in command to Jeffrie Phillips in Collagesity (still?), is kind of Barney Fife of the “Andy Griffith Show” to Jeffrie’s Andy Griffith. Thelma Lou, his true love, is turning into Alysha — again the citrus fruit shop setting clues us into this. But then we also know that Jeffrie Phillips himself is married to Alysha, but it seems to be in a parallel reality to MAT’s. Imagine this — I don’t think it ever happened in the show but imagine this: Andy — Sheriff Andy Taylor — and Barney, his faithful deputy and best friend for life, dating the same woman… but not just dating her, *married* to her. Both of ’em. And take a look back if you wish at all the symbols from that show we’ve run across in 31. Tailors Tillie and Tealy become Taylors (like Andy and his aunt Bee in the show). Tangentially, Mount Airy, the factual place that translates into Mayberry, the fictional setting for practically the entire show — a cultural archetype by now — is featured in other ways, like through the original Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker. But this just entered the story through a random picture found by Wheeler on the Omega continent. And the tesseract — don’t get me started about the tesseract. Iowa.
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I forgot to even mention Opie — Opp or Campbell O’Pine, grown up and beyond his toy “childhood” starting in photo-novel 8 to become a real, true to life man.
Large.
