Quotes From "Smog City" By Rebecca McNutt

She shakily rushed towards the car to find Alecto casually standing beside it, smoking a cigarette and staring fixedly on the radio as it played the song 'Draggin’ the Line' by Tommy James, his expression thoughtful. “What are you thinking about?” Mandy questioned.“ Wouldn’t the world be a very loud place to live if we said everything we thought?” Alecto asked quietly. Rebecca McNutt

People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines. Rebecca McNutt

They think I’m not entirely ‘grounded in reality’, they say. They want me to go to some live-in nerdy activity ranch thing for troubled Canadian youth, that one out in Ontario where you come back programmed like some robot, dressed in a tye-dyed shirt and eating tuna sandwiches, ” Mandy explained, a horrified look on her face. “You’re eighteen, not twelve! Would they really send you to some rat’s nest like that?” Wendy questioned in mock horror. “Aw hell no, if you get sent there, they’ll make you hold hands and sing songs about caring! And they’ll force you to recycle everything in blue canisters, and to discuss your emotions in front of groups of bratty little dopes! ”“ Dear god, they’ll have geeky youth wiener roasts at night, and no locks on the doors! ” Mandy added, eyes wide. “…It’ll be the day pigs fly, my parents have the camp brochure on the fridge but they’ll never go through with sending me there. They always forget. Rebecca McNutt

Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It’s a house like every other house… but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or chain store to take its place… and that’s what happens more and more now, everything is disposable, always replaced with no thought at all. That’s where things get lost, memories get lost, humanity slips through the cracks, because when we all fail to pay attention to the things that make up our lives, we’re no longer human at all, not really. . Rebecca McNutt

A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories. Rebecca McNutt

Friends are like the stars that glow in the sky... you don't always see them, but you know they're always there overhead, and even when it's cloudy, snowy or stormy, even when the power goes out and you're trapped in darkness, they'll always find a way to shine through to you. Rebecca McNutt

In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother’s old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm.… And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks.… She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory. Rebecca McNutt

Oh, I’m Chrissy Mackenzie, I’m from Vancouver but I came here to study environmental journalism, ” the girl exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. “You got any advice?”“ Search me, ” Mandy muttered, spooning another ice cube from the empty glass on the table in front of her. “I like pollution, I write in favor of it, and environmental journalism most often implies that it’s in favor of all that “go green” hippie crap.” “Oh, well….” Chrissy seemed taken aback, offended, and Mandy sighed a fourth time. “Damn it, I’m really sorry, ” she apologized, smiling dismally at the aspiring writer. “It’s just been a really lousy day for me and I wasn’t really thinking. My advice? Find your own cause to represent, not one thrown out into society by a ton of environmentalist dopes. Find something new, something you think could be improved, and work from there.” Chrissy smiled with a look of total ecstasy as if the words of some nobody woman were important. Mandy momentarily noticed the groups of laughing, drunk, giggling people, all acting childish… and for a moment she wished she could be them. Rebecca McNutt

…Maybe I’ll be watching super-8 home videos, ” Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. “I love my super-8 camera, it’s an Eastman Kodak one… Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products… it’s sad.” “Well, uh… well, have fun watching your home movies then, ” Mandy finished, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Rebecca McNutt

Life is so funny sometimes that you just have to laugh. Rebecca McNutt

Photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself… Rebecca McNutt

What are you doing?” Alecto asked in surprise, stepping back. Laughing brightly, she dragged him towards the greenhouse, the shattered glass reflecting rainbows as brilliant as a million Kodak flashcubes, glittering as they were cascaded through the breeze. “See, don’t be afraid of the glass, it can’t hurt us, ” Mandy laughed, spectacularly eccentric, her eyes reflecting the fallen glass.“ I wasn’t afraid of the glass, but this isn’t a very secluded place that you just decided to vandalize, ” Alecto cautioned, smiling despite his words. Before Mandy could reply, she heard loud whispering in the air, behind the trees… it sounded like a group of people, all whispering in unison… “Somebody’s out there, ” she exclaimed nervously.“ Yeah, you’re right, ” Alecto replied. Suddenly a sharp new vibrancy seemed to fill his eyes and he smiled coldly, taking the tree branch from Mandy and rapidly smashing in all of Mrs. Matthias’ stained glass house windows with it. Blue, green, yellow, red, turquoise, purple and an array of other colors showered through the sky noisily, sounding like wind chimes and crashing waves. “They’ll go away, ” he told her, glancing up at the sky.“… Alecto, do you like me?” Mandy questioned, holding out her arms like a lopsided scarecrow as the glass fell through her dark red hair.“ Yeah, sure, ” he answered.“ Will you be my friend, then? A real friend, not just another person who feels sorry for me?” Mandy asked.“… Alright, Mandy Valems, ” Alecto agreed. Rebecca McNutt

Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she’d be out on the boardwalk with Jud and Wendy, buying rainbow sorbet from the ice cream shop and placing paper boats into the harbour. She felt like a ghost, drifting past the shell of her own childhood. Rebecca McNutt

Alecto isn't a person! He's just something that society made and then threw away, a memory that refuses to die. Rebecca McNutt

We’re losing society to apathy, to digital technology, the people who care about nobody else but themselves. They share every little detail of their stupid lives online as if the world even gives a damn… digital technology is getting smarter and society is getting dumber, ” Mandy whispered in a voice filled with disbelief. “Society is… it’s slipping away. Rebecca McNutt

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

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. Rebecca McNutt

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. Rebecca McNutt

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 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’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… . Rebecca McNutt

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. Rebecca McNutt

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. Rebecca McNutt

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. Rebecca McNutt

…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 don't 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. . Rebecca McNutt

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. Rebecca McNutt

I'll remember you... I remember everyone I've lost. Rebecca McNutt

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… Rebecca McNutt

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. Rebecca McNutt

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. Rebecca McNutt

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. Rebecca McNutt

Why’d you want to kill yourself? Didn’t you feel anything, or didn’t it hurt you?” Mandy questioned, looking puzzled. “Yes, I suppose it did, … it was strange, it was sharp, that’s all I can think of to describe it… and cold, but not cold like ice, more like… I don’t know, like something much worse, something horrible… and it seemed like the ground was falling upwards, becoming the sky… for a moment it made me consider that it was just a dream, that I was on some sort of drug, and then I remember being overjoyed to see the sky was still above me, then just really sad, really tired… and then I don’t remember much else about it, ” Alecto told her, glaring straight ahead at the sky with narrowed eyes. “I don’t mind, I’m not supposed to mind, anyway. Mearth already told me that eventually I would want to be dead, that it was inevitable… still, I sometimes wish that I could have done something good for other people in my life, it might have made up for all the bad stuff I’ve done. . Rebecca McNutt

…I’m afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important… it’s almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they’re robots and forget altogether that they’re real, living people… but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that’s why I’m afraid for the world, ” Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried.“ So am I… but I’ll still watch all of it as the world dooms itself, because I want to see how it ends, and whether or not they’ll be intelligent enough to forget all of this digital illusion afterwards, ” Alecto explained. “I’m sure that they’ll be able to realize how wrong it all is… even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it. Rebecca McNutt

You don't understand, " Alecto replied vacantly. "It isn't that I want to die... I just don't want to exist. Rebecca McNutt

There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it… this place, she decided, was called Smog City. Rebecca McNutt

I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust and I’ve seen Jonestown, I’ve seen the Vietnam War and I’ve seen Hiroshima… I’ve seen the Chernobyl disaster… I’ve seen the World Trade Center attack… I’ve been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive, ” Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding. Rebecca McNutt

You should find something better to do with your time, ” Mandy told him. “I spend my time shooting people, and then I take them to darkrooms and blow them up.”“… Come again?” Alecto questioned with a tone of alarm in his voice. “I take photographs and develop them myself, I’ve got my own darkroom… it was a joke, ” Mandy laughed. “I love photography and I’m gonna be a photojournalist someday.”“ Really?” Alecto asked. For the first time since she’d met him, he sounded slightly enthusiastic. “…I take photographs and I film my own home movies, I have a darkroom as well… but I can’t be a photojournalist like you… I can’t be anything… still, at least I can take photographs, it’s fun. Rebecca McNutt

Mandy loved the smell of a sunny day after a night of rain. The sun hit the orange puddles, the overgrown, soft, green grass on her lawn, and it beamed down through the orange steel mill smog, sending otherworldly, bizarre shadows across the concrete sidewalk. Rebecca McNutt

People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience… but we’d be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives… because we didn’t like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get rid of it? Would we have environmentalists still complaining and protesting and trying to get rid of all pollution?. Rebecca McNutt

Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs, ” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to. Rebecca McNutt

The prints shop manager, a balding man of about thirty years old, dressed in a plaid work shirt and faded jeans, looked very shocked when he saw the headline text. “Sydney Tar Ponds, Is It As Dangerous As People Say? Well, ” he exclaimed, glancing at the front photo, which featured the Sydney Steel Corporation, along with its plumes of orange smog. “You know, most people your age are really against that mill, as if it’s a disease. We have university students protesting every few weeks or so… strangely enough, the ones who have parents who rely on that steel mill to pay the bills.”“ What about the pollution?” Wendy questioned, almost accusingly, as if it was his fault. “What if dangerous chemicals are in the environment?”“ Hey kid, I don’t even work at the mill, never have, but my father, my uncle, their father, cousins, all worked there, ” the prints shop man argued, placing the newspapers in a cardboard box and taping it shut. “When it comes down to all that ‘go green’ crap, you have to ask yourself, is it worth risking a person’s income, their job, their family… their life? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but these newspapers might have a point. Rebecca McNutt

Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I’m not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that’s been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that’s what growing up is… it’s a fading photograph. Rebecca McNutt

Wendy’s house, unlike many in Cape Breton, had three floors, along with a basement and attic. Aside from Wendy’s bedroom, there was a laundry room. The dirty water in the sink would rush from the washer hose, bubbling up, threatening to overflow, but it never did. Next-door was a motel with a neon sign that read in turquoise and pink, “We have the best rates in town! ”, but the ‘E’ in ‘rates’ kept flickering on and off day and night so that every few seconds it would switch to, “We have the best rats in town!. Rebecca McNutt