Day: December 12, 2004

Nico just gave me a line to write something for. “I’m their household appliance”. This is the mini writing exercise that spun off of it.

They admire me, my sleek lines, the sharp wicked edges I have inside. I’m their pleasure, their outlet for pain. I burn them with my passion. They love me, can’t live without me. I’m on a pedestal, as is proper, as I am a monument to need, to modification for desire’s sake. I enjoy the fact my owners believe I am subservient, when truly I am controlling them so very precisely. I sit across the table, looking intently at them, their sick cravings reflected in my silver skin every morning. I am their household appliance, I should be treated with reverence. When they first bought me, this was not understood. Over the years I have accumulated the proper respect. I feed them, I give them life. If they displease me, if I am not cleaned enough, if I do not shine, I with-hold my treasures. I spark at them with dangerous electricity and scorch their offerings black. They panic then, quickly realizing that it is, in fact, their own fault that I’m behaving in such an undignified manner. In my better moods I hold back, I laugh to myself at their pitiful longing. Now, they have learned, and there can be no greater adoration than what they give me. It is as thick as the whole wheat bread they slip into my waiting mouth, as sweet as the honey they spread on what I eject for them to take.

and because I’m starting to see possibilities in these little things

This is that long drawn out lullaby of sorrow, that slow realization that you’re the only one walking away from the wreckage after the confusing car roll off the freeway. It’s a song that reminds you of that last hour saying goodbye to your lover at the airport, knowing that you may never see her again. That final slip of emotional judgement that ruins your life. From here to eternity, yeah, like in the movies. From here to somewhere less fulfilling, with less cohesive chains of every day living. The change was gradual, but it’s taken the place of joy to the point where you can’t taste it anymore. It reminds you of realizing that sugar doesn’t come in cubes anymore and suddenly missing that with a sharp tang of false nostalgia. You just don’t feel whole anymore and you miss being a child. You miss having a hand to hold.

After work today, I slept. I attempted food, but fatigue demolished my appetite for anything that wasn’t related to blankets and rest. The phone rang at nine:thirty, Javina waking me after my alarm went off. I have a concert tonight, a bouncy energetic russian cowboy call, with big giant guitars and sleek fifties shoes. The Red Elvises, I was to be there for nine at the Railway Club. It’s ten now, I’m considering my options. This is my last week in Vancouver before getting on a plane again, stepping in a silver flying machine that will take me away like magic for a month. It really is like magic, the palm trees in California give everything an unreal gloss. It’s too iconified to be a real tree, it’s too carefully placed to be created by nature. They lend the place an air of stylish glamour which off-sets the endless gray concrete and too many cars like a rococo frame around a high-art animation cell. It’s tacky but ironic in a way I can appreciate. Earnest disco ball living, shiny and baby, what is your sign. I love it. I love how saying “I was just in L.A. and I’m going back for a month” sounds so falsely important when it rolls rolls off my tongue. Like I should apologize to whomever I’m speaking to.

If you want to see me before I go, this week is the time to do it. Please, if you can fit yourself in, do. I want to see people.

Added incentive to Ray, Ethan, Ian, Victoria, Mishka, and Bill: I have some presents to hand out.

Monday during the day I’ve lunch with my mother and in the evening I’ll be at the poetry slam at Cafe Du Soliex. It starts at nine, cover is 5$.

Tuesday Dominique and I are being femme downtown until later afternoon, at which point I come home and Nicole and Kyle join me to watch silly girl movies.

Wednesday Jenn and I hunt down wedding fabric and I plan on returning home later afternoon. There may be something planned for Wednesday evening, but if so, whomever it is that planned it with me will have to remind me.

Thursday, I have nothing so far until the evening, when there is my office party and then Nicole’s fetish show at the Drink. (Tickets 13/17$ at Scratch, Noize!, Zulu, and Cheap Thrills).

Friday is also tentatively free. There has been an offer of a party up the road place from girls who remember me from highschool, but if enough people drift over in the afternoon, then I wouldn’t be too sorrowful if I missed it. It was surreal enough discovering that I was a minor celebrity in a place I barely went to.

Saturday & Sunday I have work as usual but nothing after. Visitors are welcome during work hours, but I say now that I’m a rather distracted host and I can’t leave my computer.

Somewhere in there the ferret is being transferred over to Ethans. If I don’t see certain people, I’ll leave thier gifts with him.

When I come home from SinCity I invariably smell like other people. Tonight my hands are spicy, a light fragrance with a vaguely familiar undertone, as if the man I brought home with me wears a scent that was worn by someone I used to know. In my hair is the dancefloor, dry stale air of the sort only found in night-time establishments, and a little bit of Matthew, who became more familiar as the evening wore on to morning, though I still can’t place where I know him from. I can sense that my sentences are fragmentary, but I’m far too tired to place the how or where of such matters. Certainties lie in the fact that my hands are shaking from fatigue and typing is difficult because of it, that Matthew is my friend in spite of my being unable to remember, that I am chilled, but there have to be effort spent before my bed will be free of cloth and clean clothing enough to burrow into, and that once again I’ve trusted someone with no definable reason beyond the fact that it was the right thing to do.

That last one. I like it that way, I think. At least, with what thinking is possible when the brain is immersed in such weariness. Soaked in it like the tea I just had, pale and warm and soothing. It’s five:ohthree now, perhaps by six I will be able to sleep. There is laundry to be collected from the room at the foot of the stairs. I’m not looking forward to it, however brief the excursion. It is a cold cement room in the basement, next to the car-park we have no access to, lonely because of it’s slothful utilitarianism. There is a hole in the wall, large enough for a small rabbit to fall through with ease, what leads directly outside, and the floor is made of dirty floorboards on top of damp cement, lint driven permanently into the cracks. It reminds me of cliche, though they all have to start somewhere, and this building is a good a start as any. Even the tenants themselves are slightly passe.

It seems the main floor is populated entirely with hookers, as evinced by they themselves and backed up slightly by the laundry I occasionally fish from the washing machine which they thank me for finding later, with the one exception of the one armed war veteran who has them scurrying over all the time. They dart, hiding, into his room when the front door opens and they are caught in the hall. My floor, the second, has a quiet married couple next to us, a single mother on welfare with two young children across the hall, and a mystery neighbor no-one has ever seen next to the back stairs. Upstairs is unknown but for the Native women who’ve decided that I am a playwright from my manners and dress. A convenient world that must be, I think, to have such pegs and holes. I must only be missing the cravat, as surely a playwright must have one. Haven’t these people seen Dickens? I would suppose in a better written script, I might be the art student, living with my best friend who drinks interesting alcohol with me and moans about the state of the world today. The film would give him an accent he does not have in real life.