atomic-raygun

I was thinking about cap pistols the other day - do they still exist? No idea, but I can see the red paper rolls clearly, amd smell the exploded caps. Love that smell :D Smells can bring lost worlds into existence in a trice - should time travel somehow use smells?

posted by

- 11:53 PM

Comments:

Oh, yes. Absolutely. The cold, damp smell of a concrete parking garage returns me to a doctor's office I vusuted every week, thirty years ago. The smell of sunlight on barley, to an afternoon at the end of the industrial revolution. Burnt gunpowder to the backstage of a royal celebration during the ancien regime. A different smell for a different past, every one personal and unique. Simply the most effective time travel ever invented, as Proust discovered. Still unpatented, I believe. Some difficulty with returning to the present.

# posted by

Young Geoffrion : 19 January, 2008 09:27

wow...what a visceral post that was. The smell of capgun smoke wafting through the air. I was right back there in an instant!

Thanks for the reminiscence!

# posted by

Joonie : 20 January, 2008 16:37

Caps added excitement to childhood in a way that I don't think exists today ... but I think those snakes still exist, that one buys in black pellet form and lights on the concrete. We used to take caps and hit them with a hammer on the sidewalk. That and popsicle-stick architecture ... ah BLISS!!!

# posted by

Ellen McCormick Martens : 22 January, 2008 07:39

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