Déja Gu*

I went out to Sunset Park on this gorgeous (though disturbingly warm -- it was 65 degrees!) day to fetch my new videocamera which I bought on the occasion of my unclehood, whose delivery I missed (the camera not the baby) because who really can be home all day to sign for a package if you are gainfully employed? (People with doormen, okay. But still, there's got to be a better way.)

Anyways, the hinterlands of Sunset Park/Bayside near 1st Ave are quite interesting architecturally -- lots of quiet, massive warehouses on the outskirts of a right cozy mixture of Mexicans and Chinese (I've still yet to go on my taco crawl out there). So there I was, walking down 51st towards the DHL facility, when I pass this completely burned out truck parked amongst all the other cars on the street, and I immediately thought Falluja or some war-torn area in which cars are routinely hit by the occasional rocket launcher.




And then I remember the page I came across as I was googling for the exact address of the DHL spot I was heading (query: "dhl sunset park 51st brooklyn 1st ave"). The top link was to this ABC news story of 2 years ago, August 2005, about a mysterious transformer explosion that set a truck on fire. Could it really have been the same one from two years ago? I asked a guy standing out on his front step right in front of the charred carcass, "What happened?" He just shrugged his shoulders, probably from every other passer-by asking him the same question every single day for two years. Or, it just appeared there and he really had no idea. Anyhow, it was strange having seen the article "randomly" and having the adjacent knowledge from the Google search result.



This reminded me of a term Kevin coined to explain his experience of having become so intimately familiar with the streets of Tel Aviv from playing Counter Strike that when he found himself in the actual city he experienced what he called "ludic proxy" -- or, this phantom architectural knowledge gained from a computer model -- which allowed him to "know" to duck into various sidestreets because he knew where they would lead.


* I know there's a council in France which decides which words get officially added to the French lexicon, and if they ever decide to add "googler" this might be how it plays out:
Je google
Tu googles
Il google
Nous googlons
Vous googlez
Ils googlent

Q.E.D.: déja gu