happy 62nd birthday christopher walken


Yes, I can play french horn… And?.

Signals of history now:
Pope receives Last Rites.
Biometric Lock foiled when thieves steal finger.

Wet again. Rain and rain and rain and rain. No hat now to keep the water from my eyes and alone I’m not an umbrella girl. Syncopation, footsteps, walking. The trees are heavy with the water in this anti-nature preserve pathway lined with hookers in puffy jackets. This place straddles the sell-your-sex industrial and this cities only culture of neighborhood. I am solicited once a week. Patterns pattering, would anyone like to go to IKEA with me next week? I want a bracket shelf and a lamp where the light-bulb does not explode. Once is an accident, two is a hazard.

SinCity, true to form, is here with another mention on the f-list. We group are going for the 4pm show at Capital 6 on Granville street. Some are meeting beforehand at Taf’s at 3 for food across the street.

I talked to Brian today about time in motion, the endless stream of observation and extrapolation. How today I’ve been immersed in the splendour of what happens next. Control and decency, the power play of the common form. I have something in my head today. I can’t see it, as it’s inside my skull and has a firm grip on the back of my eyes, but it’s taking up space. It was good to babble blather to someone who doesn’t expect me to speak in a linear fashion. I had to firmly school myself, however, against Tyler‘s insinuations from a week ago. There are some ideas that I don’t appreciate having planted in my head. I hope he gets the job he’s applying for, however. When Matthew and I took Robin to Constantine, we went for burgers and strawberry lemonade first and were served by perhaps the best waitress ever to take an order. Her name is Texas, go give her money. She gave us a pitcher. The thought of both her and Tyler working in the same place is a guarantee that we’ll be regulars.

He’s filming tonight and last night. A body double running from an alien in muddy fields. My image of him doing this is dada enough for me to want to be there, standing on the sidelines with cups of hot chocolate. It’s called Slither. It can’t be good, but I’ll go opening night with him and we’ll cheer and throw popcorn.

it’s going to be two days in a row

At least I’ve found my wright brothers kite.

I opened another set of boxes today. One seems almost exclusively filled with small cement cats. As well there was an illuminated medieval letters colouring book from when I was four, a purple glass pyramid, and a dinosaur tooth. At the bottom, under the cats, I found a pocket size journal filled with someone else’s handwriting. None of these items are likely to be particularly odd on their own but taken as a whole, they’re making me laugh at myself. There were letters in another box, to myself from when I was in grade ten. “Are you even there to read this?” This is getting to be too interesting. I’m stalling trying to read all the papers I’m finding. At this rate I’m never going to get to inspecting the plastic champagne flute full of rare earth magnets and pieces of twisted silver solder or the instruction pamphlet for the pyramid, let alone drag another box into the room from under the livingroom table.

The second box I chose was entirely filled with fragiles secured in plastic bubble wrap. One bulky parcel unwrapped to reveal a clear glass christmas jar with a decorated tree enameled on. Inside it was half full of marbles and half full of ribbons with a few amethysts I’d carved with runes filled in with gold tossed in for safe keeping. It brought to mind Sunday, when Matthew had told me stories to keep me awake to combat my possible concussion. I looked at him through dangerously drowsy eyes and asked him to tell me about his childhood, tell me something I didn’t know. He replied by he recounting his most epic battle of marbles. It ended in a three way defeat, all contestants with bruised and broken fingers. He promised to teach me how to play. When he came over this evening, I had already hidden the jar aside behind a musical wind up clock and underneath a silk scarf patterned with the heavens that I found in the graveyard when I was fifteen. Other people had arrived and were arriving, filling up the livingroom in preparation for movies, but I took him into my room and closed the door. “Sit on the bed, darling, close your eyes and cup both of your hands in front of you. No, wait, we should put something in your lap to catch anything that falls.” He said I was making him nervous and I replied by telling him to leave enough room for me to sit with him as I draped a black skirt over his lap. “Close your eyes, no peeking.” I can’t imagine what the glass jar behind my back might have sounded like. Something clattering and hollow sharp. When the cold globules of glass began to rattle from the jar, pouring into his hands, I told him to open his eyes. It was a look of wonder. “These are oilies,” he exclaimed, and began joyfully rattling off the names of the different sorts that I had spilled into his hands to overflowing. Galaxies and speckles, cat’s eyes and champagne.

They were forgotten on my bedside table, wrapped in pale grey silk, but I know I made him happy.

  • Death Charged in Graveyard Theft
  • Real Dolls used as models in book of Photography
  • An interview with David Bowie & David Byrne
  • mortal voices wake us, and we drown

    I’ve been spending all night up with Myke, (who is apparently damned attractive, no really. I have pictures to prove it. His hair is worse than mine. I love it. We could destroy entire shops of brushes with our hair; with the right kind of weather, cities would fall under our combined static.) He’s half convincing me to come down to Ohio for a visit. Yes, a little voice inside my head says, that sounds exactly like something you should do.

    At one point we were picturing how I would explain such a conversation to my mother:
    “I met this nifty fellow on-line. He’s an artist, yes, you like that sort of thing. Yes. No, he’s trying to talk me into staying with him in Ohio.”
    *holds phone away from ear for five minutes*
    “No mum, he thinks I’m neat, apparently. Yes, he’s older than me. Of course he is. Everyone is, mum.”
    *five minutes*
    “Mum, I’ve been following his journal, of course he’s not a predator.”
    *now ten minutes*
    “No, there would be things to do in Ohio. He’s got a friend with a sideshow I could pester until they let me join. (Lemme send you a link, they’re all blockheads. No, that’s actually a term, mum). They’d love me – I have those pyrotechnics tickets which let me buy explosives, and you know I could make my own glittery out-fit. I think it could be a good idea.”
    *this is where her head might actually implode a bit*

    People I don’t know answered my poll with things like phone numbers. I am almost curious enough to call, but I think I would prefer to talk to them here first before doing anything as rash as showing up on a caller ID. The other thing I learned was that I should likely get this AIM thing. Speaking on anonymous oddities, however, who has been sending me the random Depeche Mode? I appreciate the thought, but I really don’t need anymore. Honestly. I don’t think I can take it. Bad enough that Daleks are attacking British Parliament.

    The sun is blinding hungry today. I turned my lamps off an hour ago and the light only became more apparent. The brighter is gets, the more it hurts. The glare from across the street is already too much to look at. It will be a good day in spite of it, I suspect, if only because we can start a Jerry Falwell VS the Pope Deathpool and kids have actually started killing each other over video-games, so both the left and right get to cry verification today.

    Things Not Saxophone

  • Tequila!
  • I’m tired of crying. I quit.

    I’m desiring your company, I’m desiring the ability to stroke the vessels which carry your blood and pluck from them all wounds and harmful mannerisms. I want to press my lips to your flesh and suck out your pain like marrow from the bone. On my eyes are the memory of you curled on my bed undressed. Hands to head, I ran my fingers through your hair and cried. Everything is coming apart, tiny skeins of skin, water salt running down to wet your face. If I could see you as glass, look through your flesh like water, I could do it. If I could taste your heartache like colour. This is a strange little solo, drama of the saddest sort, my mouth pressing out breath after breath that I would give to you if only I could convince you to take it.

    I want to hold your ruby pulse in my hand and feel it flutter like a caged bird and take the thorn from its paw. A want to scrawl a map of creation on every inch of your body, use the holiness of truth to protect you from nature’s most subtle fury.

    Then I stumble again, the block that kills me, makes me hide and quiver and die inside.

    I can’t tell if you’re lying, you’re so good at not telling me anything. I cannot claim that your love is not important, that it does not drive me to getting up some mornings, but every badly written word stabs me to my quick. Indiscretion is a hateful gift. It lets me know that you’re hiding still behind convictions that I’m not allowed to see. You can’t take this away from me. It’s mine now, a gift you gave to unwittingly, like your devotion.

    Now my heart is being broken too. I can’t do this anymore. My soul machine is spreading too thin. The skin’s going to break and let everything in.
    Spikes, darling, fucking spikes of pain.

    People I’ve never heard of answered my poll. Hooray!

    I worry about you. I wake up in a panic of tangled blankets and I’m pulling on pants halfway out my door before I realize that I have no idea where I’m going. Urgency strike, zero hour. I see bland hallways lined with beds superimposed on my apartment and I don’t understand. Is this refraction of last nights film? Must be, has to be. There’s no other option. Never before have I done this in the daytime. One evening, many years ago, I had been idly discussing the merits of various authors when the urge to leave had hit me. Mid-conversation I stood up and said, “I need to leave.” and I had dragged myself as far as the bus-loop before I realized that I didn’t know where I was supposed to be. My companion at the time asked me over and over what I thought I was doing. I was so frustrated that I yelled at him. I don’t KNOW where I’m supposed to be, I just know here is WRONG! I felt so flaky, so idiotic, pacing back and forth attempting to figure out what it was I was suddenly remembering. I felt like a cat before an earthquake. Later I was asked, “Why weren’t you at the funeral?” and I almost cried. It had been then and somewhere out in Burnaby. There was no way of knowing, there was no peripheral knowledge I could have based my unease on. It’s a little piece of me that I utterly loathe.

    Heart Attack & Vine.

    There’s sun outside and I see it dripping down my window like rain. This is a Tuesday which isn’t framed right. Lief is coming over, and Robin. I haven’t seen Lief in a long, long time. I wonder what we’ll talk about, how we’ll catch up on things but I’m distracted. I’m concerned that I need to be somewhere still.

    to forestall a letter

    I woke the other day with my eyes still closed, certain that Matthew was next to me, but when I turned my body to hold him, he disintegrated into a cloud of black feathers. This morning was different. I closed my eyes half an hour after the dawn and fell deeply into dreaming. Someone was with me, someone I’ve never met but know rather well in sidelong ways. We were in a room I used to have and I explained to them that this wasn’t my home but the room my mother used to keep for me. Our interaction was odd and strangely real. My subconscious has undue verism that I can’t escape.

    I could almost make a story of what we did, how our bodies shifted to make room for the other on my bed as we lay and we talked, a quiet storm of words. I think we were meeting for the very first time; spending a morning together asleep was the plan. Jetlag and my schedule matching up like a carnival game, all the little ducks shot down bang. He lay on his back and I curled up beside him, pressing my back into his side, his arm my pillow and home. We talked about shelter, how the internet is breeding a new form of interaction that we dubbed digital rain. Taking his hand in mine, I looked down to his fingers and laced mine though, putting it behind me, thinking small self-amused girl thoughts. I began to fall asleep then, in my dream. I could feel the weight of tired muscles pushing me into the bed. When he took my hand to touch more clearly, I stretched out and leaned against him, one leg over his leg. A tiny tense arching acknowledgment was his reaction, inescapably polite, but embarrassingly gratifying nonetheless. Enough for me to twist around and kiss his cheek, in my head laughing at my flash of return arousal. I am a naughty girl. I swept my hair away from his beard and lay myself down on his side. I thought to say, You know it’s not allowed, but didn’t. It would only be stating the obvious. We lay then with legs tangled, stomach to stomach, and fell into sleep, dreaming a new dream, my weight warm and his arms making me welcome.

    Not the sort of thing I’m used to when I close my eyes. I’m accustomed to walking, wandering cities, sitting in plazas I’ve never been to and hope one day to visit. I dream of exploring, flying and talking with the other passengers, with details like the colour of my blanket and how my seat doesn’t quite lean back. I dream of the future, moments that haven’t happened yet and never were. There is a beach with white sand out there somewhere and I plan on finding it by accident, by fate. I dream of memories. I dream of smothered impulse chain of circumstance and social physics, not fictional encounters with denied provocation. I am curious as to what my brain is doing, if this sort of thing will continue or if I will drop back into my endless cities, my greek sylph babbling that lends me to endless moments of disphoric deja-vu.

    What do you dream of?

    sparrows swoop, I’m watching dawn

    Till then, set aside your duress
    It’s a historically messy process
    We these mystical, magical, absurdical, works in progress
    And I promise you
    Like a late night radio waiting for the dead air to be filled
    The music will find you
    Lightning is striking all the time.

    Excerpt of a poem by R.C. written for T. Paul St. Marie, found here

    You know that sound you get when you rub a straw back and forth in the little hole in the middle of milky plastic coffee lids? That’s what the inside of my head feels like. A friction lightness of being with a pleasant glass harmonica sort of timbre, but not as ethereal. This might easily have something to do with the fact that I was clocked in the head rather harshly earlier or that the sun is coming up and I haven’t bothered yet with yesterdays breakfast, but I’m not so sure.

    I feel like music is building up under my skin, notes aggregating blast by platelet. There’s a tide pressure, flowing ebb neap out, it’s time to walk on water soon, it’s time to let the words out. It’s a new sensation, this, one I think I would be agreeable with if it weren’t for the endless cusping. If only I knew how to turn my brain off. If only I knew how to let go of the conscious thought which ties all my defenses together.

    I sent a photograph of me when I was six off to a friend today, spur of the moment sort of thing, not with any purpose in mind but for a picture which matched the words, “some people’s children.” It struck me that that was the last year I had a chance at my own little girl firsts. I wonder what happened to an alternate reality me, one who didn’t go to a foster home. I wonder if she strikes anyone as intelligent or if she would dress like the molded plastic mannequins downtown on a friday night, legs too thin to stand with, she must be an automaton. I can’t meet any children between five and ten without wanting to protect them. I bristle at strangers over their heads.

    candy cane molasses


    fine to me
    Originally uploaded by foxtongue2.

    It’s a hairclip, unremarkable but for its size. It’s tiny, barely fitting between two fingertips, and stuccoed with green sparkles which have worn off the edges. I wore it on a chain around my neck when I went to Toronto until I met Joseph, then he would clip it into his mass of hair and it would hide, occasionally flashing as a startling spark of green in the deep black red.

    As a thing, it is uninteresting, as a history, it has more more personal value. I found it in the washroom of the Commodore, left behind by some random female. I picked it up and held it to my eyes after the show, smiling at myself in the mirror. I was dressed in peasant purple and my hair I don’t remember. It might have been plum or it might have been gold, but it was damp, I remember that much. I had danced to the point of collapse to the opening band, Velvet. Someone had noticed. “Jhayne, we’re heading out.”

    I stepped out into the murky ballroom and a bouncer tried to shoo me out, but he was stopped by the group of people waiting. “She’s one of us, thank you.”

    I laughed as one of them held up my shoes, “You should really put these on, little girl, it’s not safe out there.” and as I took them from him, he reached out and plucked the green from my fingers. “What have you found?”

    It was Dick Dale.

    He turned it over with magicians grace, the colour winking between his warped fingers like a cheap special effect, and took out one of his guitar picks. “I signed this, want to trade?” I said no, and he took my head in hand and carefully placed the clip in my hair.