Reality Is a Stage Set

It was nice to be back at work today––loads of good books had been donated–––and it was also, sigh, also a little depressing because––sure enough, the bathroom was dirty and there was no hand soap... 
(I went and found some.)
I find this indicative disarray so disheartening. 

Oh, well.
I always have fun with the books & things, no matter what.

I'd set aside a bunch of vintage figurine planters, meaning to make a display, and today we got a bunch of small fake plants, so I put them together. Yay! 
It tickles me to set up these little scenes.

[Signs by ArtSparker]

I brought home a copy of J. G. Ballard's novel Crash [British Library (BL) article--with further links]––the one about autoerotic automobile crashes?  
I've heard of it, but can't quite imagine what it's like, how it works...
 (It was made into a movie in 1996––totally different than the 2004 movie of the same name.)

I'm interested to look closer at Crash because I always think it's so very strange––and a good key to understanding how humans work–– and it bothers me that we moderns mostly, in my experience, blithely accept cars as ho-hum, everyday things.
The main objection I hear to cars is that they burn fossil fuels.

Really cars are like frightening science-fiction creations--massive metal machines that move at unnatural speeds, easily and frequently destroying people, animals, trees, things...

Don't most of us know at least one person who was killed in a car accident–– at second hand, if not first? 
I can think of several––the worst I was close to being the teenage son of a coworker (in a former job) who was hit in the street after school. 
I was at work the day he was killed, and the weird twist was that my coworker, a lovable, brassy lady, had come in that morning freaked out because driving in to work, she had hit and killed a deer.

___________________

I was surprised to see that Crash was published in 1973––seems so modern––and to realize it's the same J. G. Ballard (of course) who wrote Empire of the Sun, about being a boy during WWII in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

The intro to Crash includes this quote from Ballard that explains why he might see through the mundanity of cars:

"One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set ... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, and home where one lives and all the rest of it... could be dismantled overnight."

 That––reality being "a stage set"––better expresses what I was thinking on my trip than the phrase I wrote yesterday, that "life is a joke".

Looking around the BL site on Ballard, I found this text collage he made in 1958. "Let's get out of time."