Just wanted to pass along a cool site I stumbled across through Deadspin. The one I liked the most is when they invert the world and make water land and land water. Really makes you think. Kind of.

I found this article in the NY Times today about a house once owned by Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson. The article chronicles current members of the A.A.’s trips up to the house and the rather spiritual experience of it all.

What I found particularly interesting about the whole thing is how we can imbue an inanimate space with so much emotion. I am not a religious man by any means so I don’t really believe in a “spirit” inhabiting the space, but I do believe that we fill spaces with our own emotions and essence. It’s like they say that there’s a difference between house and home (watch Garden State for Zach Braff’s ideas on this). We inhabit the spaces we live in and pass through more than I think we give ourselves credit for. Michel De Certeau writes about Manhattan like this, in that the city affects us but we also affect the city in the sense that we leave our mark. Any place can be marked with any type of memory, and just passing can change your emotion mood completely. Whether it’s a train station, a restaurant, a specific bench in the park, whatever. These spaces can have immense power despite their inanimate nature. The thing is that we rarely realize that it is very much ourselves affecting ourselves more than the space actually affecting us. It is our thoughts, emotions, ideas, philosophies and everything pushed out and reflected off these structures that really illicits the emotion. That’s why one person can be moved by the beauty of the frescoes of a cathedral and another be shocked at how much time and money must have gone into a monument to an absurdest religion.

But it really is just as Lyle says in Infinite Jest, don’t underestimate objects.