beyond the periphery

the word zoom is an onomatopoeiac sound that indicates swiftness.
that's what wikipedia tells me. swiftness. motion. speed. rushing.

to take myself as quickly as possible from this place where I am...

...to a place farther away. somewhere else. changing my position.

and my perspective. (do you see the interstate, right on the edge?)

you can zoom in. or out. around. past. (there is the copper mine.)

is there any preposition that doesn't work? (and look, the salt flats.)

go fast enough, and you might get lost. (wow, that's the west coast.)

far enough, details get lost, too. (but then you can see Greenland.)

and maybe there's something out there you never even considered.

google's map starts tiling the surface of the planet so it repeats in a strange kind of scrollable loop. I know that isn't really what the earth would look like from such a distance. but seeing it that way is interesting. it could be wallpaper. it could be an endless chain of hand-crafted continents around the neck of some gigantic cosmic personage. it could be the artistic result of that gigantic cosmic personage dipping this lovely spheroid in greenish bluish ink and rolling it across the floor of the universe.

this fascinating map tool gives me one way of pinpointing my current location and moving myself little by little further and further away, until that single point gets blurred among so many other points and I am forced to reconsider what it is I'm looking at.

I need to learn how to zoom out of my own head, sometimes. does google make a tool for that? they probably do.