Rebecca McNutt

Tell yourselves whatever you__ like, but I__ afraid it doesn__ make it true,_ Mearth sighed, beginning to look impatient. __tep aside Mandy, I have to remediate him, otherwise you__l find yourself in a whole mess of trouble.___ou can__ do this, it__ wrong,_ Mandy insisted.__ou don__ 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.__ can__,_ said Mandy.__Go away!_ Alecto shouted at her suddenly, glaring with narrowed eyes, speaking in a voice that hardly sounded like his own. __et out of here, Mandy Valems! I hate you, I want you to leave me alone! Go home and don__ ever come back here!____._ Mandy started, looking totally shocked.__ said I hate you, don__ 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__ for her eyes, she would__e looked like a person. __hat was very cruel of you to do, Sydney Tar Ponds. I thought you loved her,_ she disappointedly exclaimed.__ do love her, she__ my friend, and that__ why I said that stuff to her,_ Alecto replied forlornly. __one of it__ true, I don__ hate her at all_ but I know what__ going to happen and I don__ 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?

Why did you revive me?_ Alecto repeated. __ell_ uh, well_._ Mandy hesitated, her voice full of sudden misery. __hey 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__ 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__e crazy, that label automatically dehumanizes you, because people can use it to discredit everything you say with, __h, pay no mind to her, she__ 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.

Kipster is a perfectly valid word,_ Wendy argued, about to write down her score on the little notepad that had come with the game. __kay, 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.__ell Sarah__ on drugs again and that__ why she did it in Mario__ backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid__ been cutting himself again so he was sent away to Halifax last week, and there__ a festival in Wolfville but Kathy won__ go because Audrey-Rose is going to be there and they hate each other, and_.__andy had learned two years ago to detach herself from gossip; she__ learned it from Jud__ death. Wendy may have been eighteen years old but she could be immature on the best of days.

Bernie believed in God. He believed that God wanted people to enjoy life to the fullest, not drench themselves in aversion and prejudice.

I guess if there__ one thing I can say about the 21st century, it__ 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__ 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__ most annoying is that nobody cares, they__e 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, __ou__e all a bunch of sheep!_ and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen_ they__e all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they__e got these days_ it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again.

We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not __e might have to eat the dog_ poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's 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__ 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__ even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it__ depressing_

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 you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

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__ likely text with their last breath.

Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn__ care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn__ just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life__ best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.

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 isn't just nostalgic, it's an art form and, like it or not, it's 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.

People always say that digital cameras are much more stable than film cameras, but the truth is that digital cameras, or any kind of digital technology, is one of the most unstable things in the world. A film camera can last decades if you know how to look after it, but digital things can break down instantly. A violent storm, a nuclear bomb, even something as minor as a cracked screen or the releasing of newer models, can make a digital product just a block of useless metal.

There's no reason that anything should ever become obsolete, whether it be VHS tapes, celluloid film, print books or even the previous versions of a computer operating system, as long as even just one person still wants them around. After all, one thing leads to another, old inventions are the basis for new ones, inventors and designers and scientists and hobbyists worked hard to create all these things, so don't they deserve some respect, enough not to have their ideas buried in the dust by the latest trends and fads?

Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses.

I might be the hazardous waste site that polluted it, but Cape Breton Island is still my home.

Typical Pollution, they__e always living in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In keeping with your policy of bringing Pollution the latest in death and violence, and in living colour, there__ going to be something entirely different_ death without remediation.