Month: February 2005

The plan : meet tonight before The Heretic at Granville and Robson for ten o’clock.

I want to dance away the metres between here and then. Slide on the balls of my feet in some scientific network of choreography which lets me bypass my empty afternoon. I’ve been trying to get the laundry done for three days and whenever I crawl down to the basement with my bag, the machine has been taken. I tried at four in the morning but it was already full of g-strings and soap suds. Sequins wetly glittering in the low watt light.

There will be a windstorm later, nothing spectacular. I can tell by the trees bowing and waving outside my window. A cold air blast from the ocean tonight. It feels like fall today, the drifting into winter hibernation sway of weather and the sun going down later and later. Whispers of equinox just around the corner and masks made of leaves, like I used to make when I was little.

Strange to think it’s easter next or valentines day. Alicia’s sending out her Valentines Sux invites already. I’m planning on going, like I have every year. Last year Valentines was a depressing waste of time and the one before that I gave to someone but didn’t receive anything back, but her parties are always fun. Groups of people I wouldn’t otherwise get to see, brushing past eachother drunk. Goth folk and gamers, there’s been a core group which has remained unchanged over the years as on the side bit players come and go. I hear some of them are married now, having children, or living in other places in the world. Occasionally I’ll run into some of them in the city and we never quite know what to say. We know eachother, some better than others, but not enough to keep track of anyone’s lives. Bright moments of remembering names.

I want to put some of my past in a vacuum sealed jar and toss it into the ocean for someone else to find. The weight of other people can be a panic button sometimes. When I realize at two in the morning that I’m going to a play that Bill may be attending, I’m fine. When I remember that we worked on it together, I smile. When I realize I’m going with approximately eight boys, I get a moment of panic. I worry for him. It’s a thrill though my body of sorry sounding adrenaline. The reality of such a situation probably won’t matter, I’ll simply be a slut heathen. It’s a rather large chain around me, if I look at it, but I don’t think I’m going to care. I’m better enough that it’s okay if he continues to see me skewed. I know that I can’t help it. I’m myself and I like it.

I woke up this morning to a phonecall. “Hi! I’m calling for Jhayne. This is Sweet Confections! You have won a cake!” I think we need to throw a party to celebrate. This is a limited time offer sort of thing, so I have a time limit on when I need to pick it up. I want a sunny day and ten people in a park, but the weather is unlikely to co-operate. I have another one, as well, from my birthday, that I haven’t claimed. I’ll have to fairly soon. What say a group of us go for dessert sometime soon and I ask after all the details?

My other news I’m going to toss into bold is that I’m going to be a lifecasting model. Fifty bucks for two castings. His website leads me to believe that he sometimes makes bronze, but I believe these are going to be plaster. I’m rather excited, or if not excited, then happy. Moments connecting into place on this one, an experience I suspect I’ve always wanted to try, and I’m getting paid for it. I thought I had someone to go with me, but scheduling may be getting in the way. Is there anyone available to jaunt into North Burnaby with me early Thursday morning?

I always have so many things I’d like to write about and never the place to write them when the time comes. I’ll be on the bus, waiting in the rain for transit to come, and a word will hit me, a phrase related to something I saw that day and there’s nothing I can do about it. I feel somehow that something is starting to infect my brain, some sort of prophet is calling vocal in my head when I’m not listening. Where are the words coming from? I’d like to tell myself I’m imagining it, this growing desire to share the world, show you and you and you the man on the bus who talked like Kurt Vonnegut to his beautiful shining son or the delivery man who mistook me for a hooker on my way out the door because I looked too good to be leaving the house at six p.m. I want to sing knowledge into being, shine it from my bones in a bioluminescent fame. It’s not about proving the importance of anything, but showing a little that maybe everything is. A point of view from a different part of the world. I don’t know what my intention is, I certainly don’t believe I’m any good at this. I can’t even pretend.

Someone wants me to write them a story for them to publish.

Take my heart and crush it in a fist, I don’t know what to do. They want fiction, a certain number of words, more than I’ve ever written at once. They want a story, with plot and idea. For some reason I think of fairy tales, Rapunzel let down your hair and let me write about it. I’d love to take the quills of angels, but it’s not going to happen. There’s rain outside my window and I look out into an empty sky, unfufilling. I don’t know how to write stories. I don’t think I understand how words lock in place together. I don’t want to do this unless I can touch where I need to.

I want you near me. I want you to hold me and let me write to you. I want warmth to take me, seep into me. I want your hands locked around my waist and I want your breath to flutter in my hair. It’s an empty thought, just a palisade regret of another time and place that I’ve never had happen. Digital cloud and air. I need a better chair, for one. One where we can both sit and drowse in being comfortable. Just to be with you might be enough, but you know I want to write about it. Take these hands and let the fingers dance across my black keyboard with the white printed letters. I could never be anything like you are, I could never see that waxy light burning on the inside of my skull. It’s not why I love you, but it helps sometimes, when I miss you. I can take out the pain in the stories and dream us into being. In my mind, your tongue might taste of lemonade and I like it that way, that I don’t know right now because I’m tired and it’s late at night. If you were to stay, it would be anti-climactic and the worst day of our lives. I suspect we’re monomeric and playing attendant to it, our house falling down into something beautiful. I’ll drink to you one day, when you’re not looking, but you’ll hear me. I’ll make sure of it.

I’ve got a boy here, unusual, he came in wearing oatmeal pants and a trademark belt. He protested quietly when I took them off, but he went to the bed I insisted he needed. Now he’s asleep, asleep for hours, actually, on and off while Dominique and I talked. I wonder what I’m doing with a boy here, thick hair on my pillow, listening to another person breathing. I’m not the sort to let them in, not like this, stripped down to nothing but a lack of pretensions. A wild sort of comfort has overcome me, like he belongs. It’s hard to explain but very simple. I would wear his ring. It’s conversation strung out over days, little pieces of hard hitting truth from the mouths of minor gods. Torment, agony, and memory. Nepanth is no muse. It’s nice to match someone so well, we both have our wounds, we’re both made of scars.

Actually, frighteningly enough, I’ve been asking “how much of us is made of self defense” because we understand so well. I’ve come to realize that I somehow managed to hide mine in plain view. It’s apparent but clear and see thru to those who get the joke. My shield is my honesty, my willingness to layer my skin with everything people hide inside. I colour and flavour it with a trick of wit, a cynical tongue sharp as smoke on the lungs. There exists the illusion that I’m difficult to touch because it’s already there. Simple plan, but effective. I think if I had been born a boy, I might have taken the path he did. Charm rather than loving tongue lashings. I’m female, I’m allowed to play with boundaries in a way he can’t. It’s the road I rather, the words I prefer to say. If the right people read this, I’ll be having some very interesting conversations in the upcoming days. Such a thing, here, what I am admitting, it’s almost scary, but they won’t see this. They’re not around in my spreading internet luxury play. I don’t know who is, though, so I may still.

This discovering there’s a person in my head is never easy.

The Heretic is back up but only for two days!

For anyone who missed the Heretic (directed by Johnathan Ryder and starring John Murphy) or those of you who would like to see it again, it is playing in the Solo Fest this week (starting tomorrow). There are only 2 shows.

Thursday Feb 3rd at 8pm
Friday Feb 4th at 11pm

Shows are at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island; tickets at the door or through Festival Box Office, www.festivalboxoffice.com or 604-257-0366.

Last time this went up, I hurt for two days from laughing. I am damned well going.

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“John Murphy’s slyly hilarious one man show, The Heretic, one of the most stellar productions of the Fringe.”
-Colin Thomas, The Georgia Straight

“The Heretic is a scary, brave and ferocious attack on Judeo-Christian religion and its doctrines. John Murphy’s performance is reminiscent of Lenny Bruce. But this is no simple rant. The writing is clever and sophisticated, the production slick and the acting phenomenal. Easily the best show I saw in this year’s fringe.”
-Jerry Wasserman, “The Afternoon Show,” CBC Radio One, Vancouver
TOP 2 PICK! – Georgia Straight Critics’ Choice Award

“For those of us who find ourselves in a very God-haunted world these days, where the acolytes of the Almighty seem to be continually at each other’s and everybody else’s throats, Christian O’Connor’s The Heretic comes as a darkly comic catharsis. This story of a Roman Catholic man, tortured by religious anxieties, who resolves to become an ‘evangelical atheist’ could hardly be more timely – of funnier. John Murphy gives a masterful turn in the lead role – and indeed in all the other roles in the play, moving between radically different characterizations with what has almost become his trademark pell-mell precision. This range is remarkably vast, with all the requisite variations in tone and speed to keep watchers riveted. He is supported by a wonderfully witty script (“It’s Yahweh or the Highway!”) that, for all of its boisterous blasphemies, ends up being a rather profound commentary on the nature of the religious impulse itself.”
-Bryson Young, Vancouver Sun

“Vancouver actor John Murphy’s wickedly funny one-man revue is so stupefyingly irreverent, we’re probably going to hell just for laughing at it. Murphy aims to be provocative and succeeds.”
-Pat St. Germain, Winnipeg Sun

“a hilarious script, great acting and a technically superb show. Actor John Murphy’s performance is flawless. The comedy is fast-paced! along with some serious insights into the fear of death.”
-Cheryl Binning, Winnipeg Free Press

“.a wild ride of a play that’s both hilarious and deadly serious. Extremely well written and equally well executed”
-Linda Harlos,CBC

“.constantly funny and provocative.”
-Silas Polkinghorne, Saskatoon Star Phoenix

“BRILLIANT! CONTROVERSIAL!
.funny and insightful! .Wildly pleasurable and unpredictable, kind of like a Disney Land rollercoaster ride in the dark!!!.Check your guilt at the door brothers and sisters.”
-101.5 UMFM Radio, Winnipeg