Quotes by Rebecca McNutt

LED lighting has its place: cold, detached, hollow places like office buildings, factories, fast food chains and public schools - places full of humans but no human emotions. LED lighting really belongs in the apathy of the digital age, where science and technology rules over friendship, love and freedom. Incandescent light bulbs have a warm yellow-orange glow like the glow of a nice fireplace, where friends and family might sit and talk together or where children might open Christmas presents, a glow that can project celluloid films and bring back old memories, a glow that can light the text of a paperback novel. Something that beautiful, with that much power, could never last very long in a time as depressing and uncertain as the 21st century.

We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas for an I-Pad. Celluloid isnt just nostalgic, its an art form and, like it or not, its superior to digital. It lasts much longer, it provides grain and brighter colors, and it takes more effort so that it produces something wonderful. With the inferior binary codes, pixels and untested shelf-life of digital files, plus the fact that these days anyone with a digital camera, even a two-year-old, can make a video and pollute the world with self-photography and cat pictures, film has a lot more integrity and worth than digital.

Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on… places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills… a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels youve got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not “we might have to eat the dog” poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonalds was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor… poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They’d saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera… I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then… this mall doesn’t even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it’s depressing…

I guess if there’s one thing I can say about the 21st century, it’s that the 21st century is all flash and no substance… everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones… it’s sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? …What’s most annoying is that nobody cares, they’ve just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it… none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, “you’re all a bunch of sheep!” and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen… they’re all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they’ve got these days… it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again.

Truthfully she felt incredibly miserable, seeing university students and tourists bustling in and out of the place with their cell phones in hand, texting like there was no tomorrow. Living behind a screen, they’d likely text with their last breath.

Kipster is a perfectly valid word,” Wendy argued, about to write down her score on the little notepad that had come with the game. “Okay, so what does it mean?” Mandy wanted to know. Wendy struggled to come up with an answer, and finally just changed the subject with school gossip. Mandy found herself just ignoring it… it always sounded the same, the same events, same rumors, same secrets, same affairs, but never anything of interest to her.“Well Sarah’s on drugs again and that’s why she did it in Mario’s backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid’s been cutting himself again so he was sent away to Halifax last week, and there’s a festival in Wolfville but Kathy won’t go because Audrey-Rose is going to be there and they hate each other, and….”Mandy had learned two years ago to detach herself from gossip; she’d learned it from Jud’s death. Wendy may have been eighteen years old but she could be immature on the best of days.

Why did you revive me?” Alecto repeated. “Well… uh, well….” Mandy hesitated, her voice full of sudden misery. “They say there are five stages of grief, you know… five stages. denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Not in any particular order. Anyhow, I denied your death, I was angry about it, I bargained with Mearth to try and get her to un-bury your site and I was depressed about the whole ordeal. One thing I just froze up on though was acceptance. I just couldn’t accept your death. It was really cruel the way you died, and I missed you so much… Mearth, my parents, the cops, Dr. Pottie, they all thought I was crazy. When people think you’re crazy, that label automatically dehumanizes you, because people can use it to discredit everything you say with, “oh, pay no mind to her, she’s just this crazy lunatic with a dead imaginary friend.” I just wanted to do something, anything to make it all go away, and I decided that I wanted to revive you.

Tell yourselves whatever you’d like, but I’m afraid it doesn’t make it true,” Mearth sighed, beginning to look impatient. “Step aside Mandy, I have to remediate him, otherwise you’ll find yourself in a whole mess of trouble.”“You can’t do this, it’s wrong,” Mandy insisted.“You don’t have a choice, Mandy! Either you let his life compromise the lives of everybody else in the world, or you let me remediate him and get it over with,” Mearth icily declared.“…Do what she says, Mandy Valems….” Alecto added, standing up and staring with glazed eyes at Mearth.“I can’t,” said Mandy.“…Go away!” Alecto shouted at her suddenly, glaring with narrowed eyes, speaking in a voice that hardly sounded like his own. “Get out of here, Mandy Valems! I hate you, I want you to leave me alone! Go home and don’t ever come back here!”“I….” Mandy started, looking totally shocked.“I said I hate you, don’t you understand anything? Go away, get out of here!” Alecto repeated menacingly, stepping forward in a threatening manner. He looked like a mad dog, shivering as he chased her away from his site. She tearfully took off running, seeming both shocked and horrified, and he watched her leave for a moment with a blank expression, his dark eyes hollow. He looked like he was going to black out, but Mearth walked quickly towards him, for once not smiling at all. If it weren’t for her eyes, she would’ve looked like a person. “That was very cruel of you to do, Sydney Tar Ponds. I thought you loved her,” she disappointedly exclaimed.“I do love her, she’s my friend, and that’s why I said that stuff to her,” Alecto replied forlornly. “None of it’s true, I don’t hate her at all… but I know what’s going to happen and I don’t want her to see it, so I lied to her and told her I hated her… can you explain to her after… why I said all that to her?

…Look, I’m real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot,” Mandy apologized gloomily. “It’s wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution.”“It’s alright, I think she wants to be remediated,” Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did. “You don’t have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you,” Mandy pointed out. “People shouldn’t be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don’t want to.

…Do you think there’s somewhere else, some other place to go after this one?” Mandy blurted out.“You mean when you die, where will you end up?” Alecto asked her. “…I wouldn’t know… back to whatever void there is, I suppose.”“I’ve thought about it… every living thing dies alone, it’ll be lonely after death,” Mandy sighed sadly. “That freaks me out, does it scare you?”“I dont want to be alone,” Alecto replied wearily. “We won’t be, though. We’ll be dead, so we’ll just be darkness, not much else, just memories, nostalgia and darkness.”“I don’t want to be any of that either though,” Mandy exclaimed, bursting into tears and crying, keeping her eyes to the floor, her voice shaky as she spoke to him. “When we die, we’ll still be nothing, the world will still be nothing, everything’ll just be nothing!”“You’re real though, at least that’s something,” Alecto pointed out, holding his hand out in front of her. Smiling miserably, Mandy took his hand in her own and sat there beside him quietly.

I’ve seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly… they can’t kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I’ve seen humans die from smoking them… if I were you I would stop smoking them.”“Why should I? You smoke ‘em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes,” Mandy pointed out.“Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties… for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes… but I’m not a person, I’m Pollution, things like that aren’t dangerous to me but they are to you,” Alecto told her. “It’s not a good idea.

Why do they lie?” she asked herself aloud. “They say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse.

Oh, trust me Sydney Tar Ponds, you aren’t the first Personification to be forgotten by somebody ordinary,” Mearth sighed with a falsely-reassuring smile. Alecto stepped back from her, glaring hatefully. “Sydney Tar Ponds,” Mearth added, “I’ve had so many ordinary people as friends in my life that by now I’ve forgotten all their names. At first it was difficult… very sad… to see them always leaving, dying, disappearing, ignoring, but after a while I realized that they weren’t worth the trouble. I’d rather be in the company of other Personifications. At least they aren’t always dropping dead like houseflies or sailing away to parts unknown. Nil sa saol seo ach ceo, i ni bheimid beo, ach seal beag gearr. Wouldn’t you agree?”“No,” Alecto told her. “I think you’re insane.

Ill remember you... I remember everyone Ive lost.

This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don’t know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I’m sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I’ve lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I’ve done here and I’m afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories…

You’re innocent until proven guilty,” Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones… but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be… maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. “We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed.” The 1960’s and 1970’s were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend’s house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn’t exist… she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn’t fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought… she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles… she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other… the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now.Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light.

With Pollution, emotion is irrelevant, it is not their nature,” Mearth sighed, making a face as if she were talking to an ignorant small child. “I didn’t create them, humans created the Pollution. Cheryl Nobel, Alecto Steele, Albert Sanders, Olivia Campbell, all my pretty little Representations, there aren’t many of them left these days but they’re still very dangerous! They’re here to tell society all about its mistakes! You don’t understand the world of Representations.

If you were me you’d do the right thing, help your friends, because you’re not a coward,” Mandy sighed sadly. “I covered up a murder because I was scared to go to jail and I did the wrong thing… well, now’s my chance to do the right thing, to save someone’s life, because I don’t want you to die.”“Save someone’s life? I’m no one,” Alecto laughed morbidly. “A hundred and twelve years is definitely way too long to have survived. You’d be wasting your time and risking your own life….”“This is my life,” Mandy declared, smiling sincerely. Alecto just looked concerned and very doubtful as the rain drizzled down the roads and sidewalks, towards the harbour where it fell into the ocean, indistinguishable from all the other water in the world.