SPECIAL HALLOWE’EN KOREAN MOVIE NIGHT TONIGHT.
8 pm at the psychic lady building, broadway and commercial, knock on the lower left windows
swtich your blood out for formadehyde
Month: October 2005
“we’ll cook our food in a satellite dish”
Our mother, a cessation of time. I stand alone, watch the clock, wanting the minute to never turn forward inside me. She is a music box full of the beating of hearts. Patches and sound, sewing them on stitch by stitch with second hand strings. Her skin is written like a music video, split clips of what I used to want when I was younger. She’s a stranger with brightly highlighted eyes. Her skin is as white as the walls. Electric arc, her nails on the tips of her fingers, her nails that hold up the timbres of her voice. I move in slow motion, snagging my shirt on the seconds that are training their sights on the pupils of my eyes. Advertising. My gun is her hair like copper lights, the bullet moves at the speed of dreaming. Her sighs are dedicated. The lights are off.
Two dusty coins fall from my lashes when I blink, holding my tongue between her teeth. Two payments I didn’t think I’d made. I’m staring at rivers turning into I loved you, I’m dry. I could think of what I’m doing, but that would be the end of it. I would have to pick up my mourning shroud and don it, torment children, die before morning. Chords lashing me into a smeared black bit of making up. My palms are sweaty. She is the firmament, marker letters on her chest. Hello, You Have Never Met Anyone Like Me Before. I had a name. I’ve forgotten it.
continually attacked by space pirates
The ravers, upstairs, they dressed like goths for hallowe’en. The goths, when they dressed up, dressed up as a body politic. The room was a black sea of costumed bodies, everywhere PVC and devil horns, fake hair in fantastic formations. There will be pictures up on various websites soon, I’m sure.
Now I’m eating pez for breakfast.
I want to repair my desire.
Tonight was looking to be slightly dismal, the time between work and Aaron’s industrial night seemed quivering with lonely imaginings, but my fascinations have borne some fruit. Brian’s coming over to help me with my costume and play consort to Mirrormask. I’m going to tease him that it was his infatuation with the idea of helping me put my tiny beaded top on that pushed him over the edge of curiosity rather than the film. until then I’m going to finish up my makeup and put together my pieces of silk the best I can without a helping hand, which is to say, barely any at all. I look like some sort of seventies idealistic temple dancer wannabe, plucked from a New York exploitation film with a decent budget. It’s fantastic. I’m debating if I want to try and affix birds in my hair or if it will be too much of a hindrance to the all important dancing.
Which, sadly, I’m going to be doing on a bit of a twisted ankle still. That and my new chemical burn will likely be duking it out as to which can pain me the most before the night is over. See, I was clever and spilled superglue on synthetic velvet pants. Aiden didn’t understand why I didn’t just pull it off my skin. The first clue my witnesses had to how intelligent this minor catastrophe was when the cloth began smoking. I’ve got a patch of raw blister the size of my thumb now, brava. I’m going to pull an innocence trick, however, and pretend that polysporin fixes everything and I can now safely ignore it. Knowing how young I am, I can safely say that all the red will have nicely faded away by tomorrow.
oh for crying: four in the morning
brang braaaang brang braaaaaaang
No, there is no fire, merely the very loud and persistent possibility of fire.
Hooray for living in a building with a cranky AI fire-alarm.
Only three of us went downstairs to the front door. There was me, the artist/short order cook across the hall from Toronto who believes in psychics and doesn’t want the wrong sort of person to see his art, and a girl named Erica, just back from Brazil, who I’ve only just met in spite of the fact she moved in a month before me.
edit: damnit, I think I figured it out., It must have been a daylight savings glitch. Frack.
someone outside is yelling “fuckers, don’t leave without us”
Mirrormask, Sunday, seven o’clock at Tinseltown.
And, HERE! Bloody hells, people, see? Posted proof that I have seen the singing chinese students already. Yes, you’re very kind for sending it to me. I feel appreciated. It’s delightful. I love how the one on the left moves like a warner bros. charactor. I adore the fellow behind them who ignores the entire proceedings, but please, no more. This is old for the internet, mark that time passes faster here. Please send me new things. New beauty! Like this sort of nifty or this. What about the Victory Day video by the Nazi Olson Twin Clones?
related: archie comics attempt to be period.
In every direction, people are screaming drunken syllables. Hallowe’en has hit, and delightfully so. I’m sitting in front of my computer, hearing all the crowds in thier houseparties. Imagined or real, I’m too tired to care. I should have stayed downtown, the costumed crowds were a balm to my scratched life. I felt like I could have stepped off the bus and been enveloped into the shiny masque crowds lining outside almost every club. Instead I went to a meagre house-party. The smooth story of never knowing how to celebrate meshing well with my over-all lack of positive focus. I know in reality, I would have paid cover, been unable to properly dance on my twisted ankle, and been relatively ignored by everyone present. I tend to feel affinity for the old idea of the wall-flower. A passing ship, she’s probably spoken for. I don’t drink and this adds to my apparent unnaproachable aura of being in dance clubs, excepting the cliche sleazy people. It’s slightly deadening, like bubbles of lassitude are being forcibly pushed into my bloodstream and making me dizzy.
There have been so many moments leading to nothing in particular lately. I feel like I get nothing done at work, though I am thanked for being so specially fantastic every day by at least twenty people, because of the minor war currently occuring between the manager and the owner’s panic-attack neice. There’s a dichotomy there I don’t appreciate. This place is so full of strange drama. Every time there’s something wrong, I want to whistle past it, get on with finishing the tasks at hand, but this majestic battle of thiers is eating at my life. When I’m not at work, it doesn’t effect me, but it’s constant as the stars inside the shop I’ve been spending full time hours in, and it’s killing me. I need a better place to spend my days, one with tiny ladders to climb. My happiest moments are when I’m thinking of a stolen afternoon that’s getting on too many weeks ago. The memory will be wrung of blood eventually, but until then a smile creeps into my body and I lean into the glow.
sway me now, when andrew said he saw the car, I thought something else
My mind began kindly to me then slipped into exhaustion. By the time I was in bed, all my thoughts were old. I should have called up Brian and had him fetch me over. It occurred to me, he would have banished my bad percussion nightmares. What’s good for me, I’m barely doing it these days. I hold out my hands to all the people who can’t quite help, and expect the rest of me to simply deal with it, forgetting that my reserves have almost entirely been used up. I think of running through a neighborhood, I think no, that place isn’t mine anymore. I don’t have a place anymore. My second home’s been closed to me.
I ran into Bill on my way to Dominique‘s Ghost Train evening. He still doesn’t know what to do with me. Jacques says after the baby is born, he’ll be able to deal with me as a human being again. I only know I could feel his bones through his coat like he was stuffed with sticks held together with fluid grace and days that stretch too long. Scraping himself thinner. Dominique and I talked about him later. She pinned him down with one word as if he were a particularly large butterfly. Elemental, she said, and I replied, he is a forest. I’m glad she knew him, she understands. In three years, no one else had a chance.
I’m dressed as a witch today, all flowing black and glitter. Work allows me costumes this week, so I’m taking advantage of it by dressing like myself instead of a vague corporate whore approximation. Customers have been asking where to buy my out-fits, which would amuse me if they were perhaps a little more polite about it. It’s full time hours this week, because of Hallowe’en. Long shifts of not having a chance to take away sandwiches from across the street. I want to fall down at the end of it, take my shoes off and walk barefoot in some rain. I want to find myself a warm and willing partner to sip hot chocolate with and look out over our little bit of sea.
Mirrormask is playing here this weekend at TinselTown. I hear of a group trip today at two o’clock, which is when I start my shift. The only weekend showing I can manage is the nine:thirty. Is anyone interested? I’m considering dropping in on it before the Saturday Clubhouse Party. I’d get there unpardonably late, if I could but care.
Before I finally fell asleep, I lie in the dark alone for awhile while Ryan and Eva were in the livingroom, trying to pretend that I had my bed to myself, (excepting the ferret I had lodged in my belly). But for the five days he was at DragonCon, Ryan‘s been with me every day for almost three months. The feeling was alien, as if stretching out was a transgression against the basic nature of the world.
come back to my spiders web of beautiful things
Doing sixty downtown, she’s going to be late for work, but the view reminds her of other cities.
How the lights and by-ways of freeways work, how it’s strange now to see them in movies.
I was there, she thinks, and that place, and that one. She can’t see a street she hasn’t walked on.
The lights of the car behind them catch her eyes in the mirror and she turns her sight to the driver.
A man in an orange hoodie picked up a sodden page of junk mail from the street and lay it across his shoulders like a cape, then rushed us. Dominique cried out, “hey look, there’s superman.” and I smiled, but didn’t feel like laughing. I was too tired, too worn by my day. I should have been home hours before, but the circumspection of social maneouvering left me outside. We had just been at a half-empty nightclub, trying to dance to eighties music. Dominique knew all the words. I didn’t. I barely recognized the music and none of the clientele. The rules of the dancefloor were strange, with not enough people to keep any cohesion to the space. Without warning, one might find themselves suddenly surrounded by the small group of japanese tourists or being threatened by the tiny elbows of the tottering girl in the corset who was trying very hard to be something. What, I couldn’t say. Only with Rick and Dominique was I comfortable. I sat on the side for a little while, watching everyone and feeling slightly too cliche to actually be doing what I was doing. I pulled out my book to write in, but decided instead to pull out my camera and threaten Rick with pictures. I shouldn’t be writing what my brain was trying to think.
Vast layered conversations spanning six topics at once. She should find partners who speak like her.
“I swore I wouldn’t do this again, but I think I’ve figured out why I’m going through with it.”
She’s referring to three people. She’s referring to keeping a secret and possibly telling lies.
She’s explaining why and who and when without them.
“I wasn’t raised to believe in anything. I never expected to encounter something sacred.”
Words, meanings. The resolution of a two puzzles pieces finding conclusion.
He replies, “Religion was never something I had a use for, but sometimes the vocabulary is right.”
Confirmation, a deduction of between the lines.
The same path, but one person facing backward, one person blind.
Quick brainwhacking clip before I go smother Ryan with a pillow for snoring.
Remember the ten thousand superballs sent pouring down Kearny Street in San Fransisco like a gleeful tide of bouncing doom?
Here’s the commercial they were making.
(For fun, the official site has making-of clips and little explanations about how incredibly wonderful they are for making all this and isn’t it imaginative?)
The music is that sweetly unreal Jose Gonzales cover of Heartbeats, originally a pop-crunchy song about a one night stand, by The Knife. At various times, I’ve been addicted to both, though mostly the original. I like the Gonzales cover mostly for the novelty and for how it reminds me of the little beach-house with Alastair, down in California.
Here is the original, here is the cover. Here are the lyrics.
Does anyone else think it’s an odd choice?
Also, as another odd SF piece of “art”: San Fransisco made of jell-o.
Plastic, a new proposition. I remember that stuff. It sears.
Cold one o’clock in the morning. An idea. I’m sitting on the rim of my bath, suddenly overwhelmed by how tired I am, staring into nothing. This is alone with thoughts, head tilted, leaning forward, hands on knees. This could be a portrait. Controlled tense, muscles for blood flow. It’s chilly. Toes, hands, working inward from the edges. Inside my shoulders, underneath. Hold, two, release, two, next. Madness in the family. The inclination to sell the soul for not enough. I touched teeth like gamelan bars with my tongue. Ping. Tense. The thought. The idea that affection is tied to appreciation. A skill. A factor attached to how our eyes cried. There’s something different, of course I’m allowed to trust this one. That’s the trick. Hands out, fingers stiff, concentration focus, the smaller groups of muscles. The long curve of inside wrists.
“In the further the tower becomes a favourite place of condemned men and jumpers with a parachute.” The pigeons are awake.
A place to kiss sixty cycles of vibration remembering your name. That line again. Wrapped in memory, sporadic, thick. Eyes close and grin. The girl response, duck of the chin, eyes and pulse. How long and far and quick and deep and how very little can we ascribe to meaning but this. Question, query, I stand with joints popping, sinews complaining of the temperature, the lack of movement. The culmination of decision. Toes curling, protesting the artic linoleum. The idea. Standing, the mirror lowers into view. This can’t mean as much as crying.
Hypothesis: It’s all about commitment. Not the theology of the reluctant dutiful, but the soul threshing terrible awe. The trick now might be to build a time machine or a portal to another dimension. One where our shadows have as much substance as life.
I caught myself purring at work today. I was late, over so, but under by chance. Early, but not as early as I should have been. Another girl reached out from under my skin and stretched, breaking a film that had coated me. Commiseration should have limits. Same denial. If this is breaking apart, it is slow entropy, and better for it. There is a term for this similar to crawling through ashes. Another culture would say it’s a crime.
This may be the healthiest undertaking since I lived home, a third a continent apart from this.