Month: March 2005

Ryan has started a meme. I am continuing it with one of my favourite songs. Welcome to BadTimes by Laika.

instructions upon receiving badtimes e-mail

Warren’s writing ficlets again and dinosaur flesh has been found. I suppose these make up for my utter lack of chocolate eggs. That and holy hells, this, (albeit brilliant), thread went critical overnight. When I first peeked, there were a total of three comments. (irrh I used yours).

I think, “this is fine.” and I laugh a little at my arrogant idiocy. I wanted candles last night and maybe I’ll want them tonight too, but the urge is slipping away like silk I can’t hold onto, like a balloon drifting upward. There’s more than one item a girl can scatter around the house. I’d take a picture, but my camera is out of batteries. How would I hold it, any way, to show the bruises that aren’t there anymore? What angle of temptation possible exists? I can’t explain the clench of muscle that tears me sweetly with a picture. I don’t know how.

Tonight dancing in a pool of black eyeliner, spiky bracelets, and fishnet stockings, I’m going to look a little out of place. Dress up masquerade like as not, a line-up for the bar and bloodshots cheap mixed mash-up with candy coloured ravenettes. Gravers with black shirts over orange pants. Trigger happy on the floor, hands in the air and obvious shifts in beat and harmony. I’m not expecting anything, not even a good time.

hello and good evening
Originally uploaded by foxtongue2.

It’s raining and two in the morning. I walked Ethan to the skytrain double pace march then wandered softly into the warm night. Interaction with satisfaction and feeling alone. My mind catalogues who I could visit downtown, it’s a short list these days, but a sweet one to ponder. The seawall is lit but barely in some places and lies in darkness if you know where to look. I didn’t stop walking but turned when I remembered my bicycle at Tyler‘s. Travel simpler on wheels and pedal power. Past the miniskirt hookers on their way to a penthouse party, (the disco lights were visible from the water), I stall, colour caught, a flower under a bench shrouded by the plush dark. I’m not sure how I saw it, but it’s there and I pick it up, stiff green stem and pale pastel pink. Eostre colours, goddess blessed. Behind me the scrape of another human, but I ignore them. I feel a match for predators tonight, the feet are likely a saturday night phenomenon. My bike has a flat tire after I unlock it, so I put it back and blow a kiss to the window. Nevermind, a thought discard, easier than litter to throw away, it’s only more night walking, drenched in moist air. My flower was a wand, shredding the night before me in night-time Strathcona, old wooden houses and interesting lights. A neighborhood of artists, the oldest in the city. There are hidden gardens here, I’ve seen them. I’ve sat in them at night with musicians from San Fransisco and talked about style, how I’ll grow into having it, how they wear what the company bought for them, what Burroughs was like to work with. Disposable Heroes in a strange city but under the spell of good people and jazz. That house is by a corner, but the challkboard is gone from the door. No more fridge magnet letters to say hello with, to post poetry with piece by piece. I suppose they, whoever they were, have moved.

The tenements before the train tracks are scary viewed at night. In the daytime, it’s impossible to see how small they are, how it’s like slave galley housing, how the church looks fenced off in a plot so tiny as to take down the tower any day now because it’s displacing too much air. Two stories, three stories, cardboard closet box apartments lit so brightly with orange sodium as to trick the eyes into believing in daylight. Over the tracks are a pathway, a crosshatch industrial tube of a cage. The metal catches at my shoes. It feels sticky and releases the soles with a careful tiny sound of rubber. On that I danced, swooping over the empty tracks hoping to catch the screaming sound of a keening unhappy train. Howl sadness dying in the rain. I stopped, suddenly, on the other side and a block later there were people on a porch. Good friends, it looked like, perhaps they’d had a party and they were the only ones left. Think a candle and one chair, invariably with a girl in, everyone else on the steep stairs. Wine. There were others coming from inside as I passed and one of them, emerging from the black doorway said “Good evening” and I replied, “Good evening,” back while holding the flower to my cheek. I resolved to buy them ice-cream ten steps later, around safely the corner and another block to the gas station.

When I returned, they had arranged themselves comfortably on the front of the house and were smiling confused when I brought them my gift. “Thank you for being kind,” I said, “This will seem odd, but I bought you ice-cream. I was getting some anyway. I do hope you like chocolate.” They didn’t ask me to stay. I don’t think they knew how but unexpectedly I felt very empty, so I didn’t do it for them. Finessing such a thing is simple, intruding without intruding is an easy skill to me. They’re talking about me now, I’m certain, and if I’m lucky, they will recognize me on the street some day, (I would never recognize them), but tonight I did not feel like abruptly becoming fascinating, inserting myself into lives, no matter how little effort would be involved. I feel instead like I want candlelight and my lover with me. I want the window open to let the cold air in and wet body heat to warm us in spite of it.

Larry called today from the Interstate on his way home from MomoCon, which was an unexpected joy in spite of his driving with a broken arm on the phone in the dark, (which leads me to worry slightly). I only regret that I was dulled from my work and distracted by the children’s incessant Second Coming chatter. His sound is lighter than I expected, but I’ve his cadence now, and the flavour of his vocabulary. I’m sure, like with whimsical Dee, it will infect everything of his that I read and take part in. It’s a silly impulse, but I was surprised at myself for not recognizing his voice.

I would like to melt my atoms down to something that I used to be, but am not now. It might have all been dreaming, but somewhere in my cells I remember being a different shape. I remember not having to deal with hips and weight on my chest. I want to write a story for my lover, something warm and pulse washed that takes this vague idea and pushes it out into something new, visible and thick.

I have a thing for myth, a hard-on for fairy-tales. I might, though this has yet to be properly explored, have a fetish for good sci-fi.

There’s a thread of thought here, something to do with gender and how I catch flashes of memory that don’t seem to belong to me, but I know they do. I’ll have my eyes open and see something different than what’s in front of me. My hands will expect another sensation, my knuckles should be thicker like how I remember the scrape of a razor over my cheeks. Then it vanishes like a drop of water into the sea. I’m awake, I’m not dreaming, even if I’m waking in darkness. I can feel her body underneath me, I can feel her hair tangled in my fingers, but it’s not a her, is it? The same eyes and mahogany. It’s like there’s a switch been thrown, like there should be a drug to put me back.

I think Kitsune stream of consciousness, the morph of devouring woman into fox. All the myths are black widow stories when I tell them. I’m serious. I’ll tear out your ivory teeth and hold them on my tongue. There’s sort of a Kate Bush feeling associated with it, like a sweet plastered melody is creeping up on my somewhere in the soprano range. Singing, it’s like singing, but I don’t know how. My fingers are not trained like my voice was not. There is no natural grasp of what I need to say. My tongue is too short for the outburst of emotion to be kind and I need it to be gentle. A dark swirl of crimson, (et al clover), you and I and I and we, it’s the dance again. I need to feel the dance again. I’m losing myself in this, I need to. Blast the music and turn up my inner monologue past hearing.

Succubus, incubus, it’s a spinning whirl of arms entwined. Dreaming of futures that may never were yet. The sound of a page turning, the dry crackly rustle drifting up from the stage. It reminds me of my mouth at his throat, her throat, they’re all the same person, just as my name isn’t Jhayne, it’s something else, something I always considered too boyish, too young. I wonder what letters are in it, but my skin tone’s the same, my eyes are the same colour too. I remember my flesh prodding at your sex, something wet in the nest of fur. It’s impossible and I can hear it under my fingernails so I know it’s real. Hold me down, I’m spent and my body is weak again.

Somewhere in the world today is crawling with catastrophe. People are dying, there are gunshots and soft pools of pain I’ve never seen in person. I’m wrapped in a blanket, purple hair and an obscure band T-shirt with TV On The Radio written on it in curlicue script, thinking about this, and insulated in my first world country.

SCOTUS: What makes you think he is a terrorist?
GEORGE W. BUSH: Well, he blew me up with a car bomb.
SCOTUS: A car bomb?
GEORGE W. BUSH: I got better.

The children in chat are few today, it being easter, they being american, their country becoming run by faith. I wonder if Italy shuts down the same way or the South Americas. Are the streets silent today under the giant statue with out-stretched arms?

Surprise finding shows that plants rewrite genetic code under stress, (they’re able to revert to genetic code that doesn’t contain a mutation that its parents had), perhaps using RNA as a back-up template.

I can see birds flying in the sky on the other side of the window, gliding on air currents like a road to utterly nowhere. They look the same as the seagulls that live south of here and east. I remember looking out the windshield of The Truck when I was little and I knew it was spring because my dad would buy me Cadbury Cream Eggs behind my mothers back. I would try and eat the chocolate before the gooey inside and get sticky sugar all over me and my pink jacket. I remember the white crystallizing in my hair and being unable to get the foil off my hands without industrial effort. Now Cadbury is doing things like trademarking the colour purple.

“One of the disciples seated at the prophet’s feet, thin and on the wane, busied himself taking apart a Rubik’s Cube. “Tell us, Master, about love.” He plucked a red-stickered cube from the plastic bouquet and looked up expectantly.”

When you were little, did you used to lay with your head back, maybe upside down on the stairs, and imagine what it would be like to walk on the ceiling? I would all the time. In every hotel room, I would picture all the little details of stepping over doorsills and maneuvering around light fixtures. These guys have created a room that channels the fantasy nicely. It’s somehow satisfying.

as found at diepunyhumans

A review of a performance by Justice Yeldham And The Dynamic Ribbon Device:

“A barefoot Australian in faded jeans and a beer shirt was strapping on a belt of electronic devices. Two wires led from the belt. One was attached to a large set of speakers and the other was attached to a jagged piece of glass. This was Justice Yeldham and the Dynamic Ribbon Device. The sound man turned on the power and the whole contraption started to hum ominously. Meanwhile our shoeless bloke was squeezing half a tube of KY jelly onto his face and into his mouth. The live music performance was about to begin.

He played the device by rubbing his face up against the glass. The sound traveled down the wire and into a set of amplifiers and distortion boxes attached to his waist. This distressing music then came squealing out of the speakers at incredible decibels, instantly deafening all other sounds. Eyes widened in uncertainty and hands covered ears but he played on. He played with agonizing passion, sliding his face against the glass while flecks of KY jelly flew in all directions. The front row of spectators inched backwards out of spray range and some fled altogether. I was transfixed. As he glided his cheek across the glass he played with the switches on his belt. The squealing noise varied in pitch but never in intensity. It was like electrified teeth rubbing on a blackboard. It was like uncontrolled guitar feedback played backwards. It shouted of sorrow. It screamed of pain. It was art.

“Five minutes into the performance and his mouth was cut by the glass as he played the edge. Blood mixed with KY jelly in a red smear. More spectators fled. The sound continued to attack us in volleys of crazed noise until the final spike as he smashed the pane of glass. Then it was over. I didn’t know whether to clap, laugh or pray.”

-Ravi Jeyachandran on 040604 beirut

I’m on my knees for a reason. I slid to them after I closed the door on you and I put my head in my hands, hiding my eyes from the hall. You can’t see the wet skin behind the glass from where you are, the face trying to falsely smile.

It’s cold.

My friend Dave Littler, of Dave & Vyacheslav, finally has a Livejournal. Once again, it proves to be a splendid networking tool as we have fallen back into touch as a result and are meeting tonight to put heads together on a bodypaint. He’s bringing sketchbooks for me to pore through, to find theme or pattern that I like. I remember my Ex being nasty one evening, “I never knew it could be so cheap to get women naked in your livingroom,” and now I sort of smile. It’s been a long time. A lot has changed.

I should call him, drag him over for an evening of sci-fi movies. It would be killing two birds with one stone. I need to get over my nervousness with phones and I need to wind myself back into being social. My associations of late have been fewer and I can feel that I need to keep base with more people I care about. I starting to feel like I’m not a friend enough. It’s entirely the phone thing, too. I’m aware of that. Like how I haven’t seen Jacques since coming back from California because it would mean calling him. It’s not that keeping contact with the world through my computer doesn’t work – I thought I had nothing to do later this evening until Travis, a Rowan roommate, appeared on-line telling me I should be at a CD release for Cadeaux at the LampLighters for 9 – but I should be talking more with people who live in my own city. It’s left over training from a broken girl that I’m not any longer. It’s the ingrain response of I-will-be-punished for this. There’s not a lot of luggage left, but what there is can be irritating. I can see the flower print problem, I should be able to kill it. Set the damned thing on fire. I never found it useful anyway, it was a lousy gift.

I am aware, however, that I have my life structured in such a way that I require time on-line. Too many precious people live far away. Some of them I’ve never heard thier voice, but I talk to them almost every day. These people are like digital flesh of my flesh, they are part of my tangled family. I only wish I could give something back a little bit better. Michel continues to draw me into educational comics and sends me interesting packages, and all I seem to be able to do is mutter to myself in notebooks at him then fail utterly to decide my letters are worth sending. (I’ve assuaged my idiocy there, though, I’ve sent him a package back). The people who are far away, it’s not like I can help them with their moving or drop by and make them dinner. They have the offer of my home to stay if they’re ever in town, but unlike a friend I offered the same to last night, they’re unlikely to have the chance to take me up on it. If anyone has a thought of what it’s possible to do on-line, don’t hesitate to tell me so.

I was on my knees in a newly cleared patch of carpet, sorting clothes and generally wondering why I have such strange things collected, (an antique hunting horn from the black forest, a stack of 45’s, boxes of lite-brite pegs, handfuls of black feathers – these are what I have to move before I can go to bed), when James came in, took my hand and pulled me from my room to sit me in front of the television. “If I was going to tell you, I wouldn’t have brought you in here.” Before me unfolded perhaps the most beautiful opening to a film I have ever seen.

It began with two people, a man and a woman, sitting on a blanket. Behind him suddenly floats an unexpected cloud of vivid colour, a silk bubble in trouble that he sees first in her expression. He turns to watch as it bows gracefully to scrape the ground, to wreck itself. He stands, she stands. Shock, and he begins running. We see other witnesses collect from the countryside, a car stops and a driver tumbles out, a farmer abandons the field to begin running. They all converge on the failing balloon. There is a man caught in the anchor rope and a scared boy in the basket. Music plays but lightly, so light as to be unheard. The sound of wind and cloth are overpowering and crisply played. This is reality, surreal and harsh and pretty. The men all catch ahold of the basket and they are dragged, torn, and bruised. After a struggle, they manage to land it but barely. There is a pause, then from over trees there is a wind. It fills the balloon and rushes it upward, the sound filling the screen and out and into the heart, capturing them all and their hands, lifting them up into the air. The boy is still in the basket. The men hang, the ground leaving them or they leaving the ground. There is a sense of weightlessness, of something important. One by one, they let go, falling twenty feet to the ground, but for one man, the original occupant of the basket, who remains still clinging to the end of the rope. They who fell gain their feet and watch as the balloon continues to climb into an empty blue sky. It is almost like the taste of silence, it is almost true. The angle changes, POV shift in beauty and from above, we watch him fall. Too high. We do not see him impact.

Enduring Love.
I want to see it again.

Instead, I will likely be setting up a time to watch Dead Leaves, (a seriously captivating animated film), as Matthew acquired it for me along with this bag. This bag which will now be a fixture on my person when I am out of house. (I would accuse him of having furtive motives for such gifts, but really, they’re all quite apparent). I am curious if I will be approached either more or less now that I’ll be carrying such a thing around. My geekery will be hung around my neck like a sentence of death, but as I said to Inevitable Bill earlier, as long as it doesn’t begin spontaneously creating dice, I suspect I’ll be okay. I had a moment of hesitation, but then I rather strongly realized that, well, it’s not like I don’t already get recognized on the street all the time, and not always for the purple hair, hat, the barefeet, funny clothes or the ferret. Sometimes it’s from this journal. At least being known as the girl with the wretched humour could be a step down the geek hierarchy ladder.

Notice to the locals: Wednesday -> movies at my place.
Six String Samurai, Scratch, and Napoleon Dynamite.
start time currently unknown but early evening suspected

It has been noted that it can be almost impossible to give me news. Today is certainly a day I’ll agree. Two people called with news in the past hour trying to tell me something new, but the result was an amused deadpan elaboration on the topic for them. (I suppose I should be slightly bothered that people use me now as a combination newspaper, encyclopaedia and dictionary, but so far it’s just been nicely amusing at worst.) Then there was this discovery – Boingboing blogging about Dschinghis Khan. This makes me think I might be too bleeding edge for my tastes. One of those I need to get out more moments. I sent this video around weeks ago, prompting Nicholas to write a post what actually had a bit of research in.

I’m debating submitting it. Also, perhaps sending this. In either case, flip a coin you idiot girl this is wasting brain, I’m on the hunt for someone who is willing to let me do this to their phone.

I wish I could write about girls the way dys does. I can imagine him as a young emo version of Tom Waits minus the large shouldered cat prowl, but certainly catching concepts on a rough tongue trapped inside a skinny boy who needs to kick the habit of chewing on cigarettes.