mahiwaga

I dreamt that ﾐA彡 and I lived in post-apocalyptic Southern California after the sea level had risen 60 meters after catastrophic melting of the ice caps. The U.S. had collapsed, California was (once again) it’s own sovereign state, and the center of global power had moved to China and to South America.

The main industry in post-ice-cap-melt California was hacking into corporate databases and reverse engineering electronic and high-fashion designs to 3D print cheap knock-offs, and one of the hackers in our commune had discovered that we were going to be invaded by Paraguayan pirates (because at this point in time, Paraguay was no longer a landlocked country. And with the collapse of Argentina after Buenos Aires was swallowed by the sea, Paraguay annexed large portions of southern South America, reaching all the way to the Pacific Coast.)

Everything that doesn’t kill you outright will eventually give you cancer. That’s just life.

• Bacon and Cancer • 2015 Oct 26 • mahiwaga
• Rice and Arsenic • 2015 Oct 26 • mahiwaga

And as Andrew points out, things that are supposed to get rid of cancer can totally kill you outright, or even give you cancer.

So by now everyone knows what the noun “bling” means.

Bling-bling • Wikipedia

But I am wondering exactly how to parse “bling” in Drake’s hit song.

And I know when that hotline bling
That can only mean one thing…

First off, he uses it as a verb. Nouning a verb is itself not a difficulty. So maybe he just means that his cell phone makes a sound suggestive of the glitter of jewels and precious metals.

Still, maybe it’s just an alternative pronunciation for “blink”, particularly since “bling” and “blink” really just vary by a single terminal consonant.

• bling /blɪŋ/
• blink /blɪŋk/

Or maybe, it’s a portmanteau of “blink” and “ring”.

The Genius lyrics annotation suggests a different interpretation.

It just occurs to me now that Adele would’ve been the perfect soundtrack for my life from late September 1995 up until very late September 2014.

It’s kind of funny how I didn’t realize until after the fact that my brother and my sister-in-law and B+M used the same song at their respective weddings for their walk in, even though I was actually in my brother and my sister-in-law’s wedding and had to listen to it multiple times during the rehearsal.

But it was really this song that started it all, all because I had missed my turn and had to make a U-turn. In the main, it was astounding to realize that someone had loved me, even if that had been long ago, and the window has long since passed. But there is a part of me that is wistful about lost chances.

But things had to be the way they had to be for me to meet my love. I’m not gonna say “everything happens for a reason” because it’s too trite to say it, but, you know….