sunshine, lolipops and rainbows everywhere

Thanks to everyone for birthday wishes. They’re appreciated. Today is a day for Heart of the World meetings. However they go, either way, there will be news by tomorrow. Maybe very good news.

There is rumour of a birthday-cake happening tonight. A very specific rumour, it says that cakery will be at my house around 5:30, but it’s going to be a very cozy affair. By cozy I mean small, and by small, I mean tiny. I mean, you are invited if you know you are invited without even having to think about it, you answer Yes when asked if you are in my extended family. Also, the cake is still in flux. It is a cake-shaped wave-form, cake only in potentia. There might not be one, is what I’m saying. It could be only a metaphor. (I am broke and my mother is uncertain how to ferry one over on a motorcycle.) However, there will be ice-cream to go with the hypothetical cake, so that’s alright. Right? Right. Off to the meetings.

knit the community

Vancouver poet RC Weslowski is putting a call out to “all my peeps in the UK”:

He’s going to be in the UK May 31st-June 15th performing some spoken word and comedy gigs. He’ll be in London June 12th – 14th, performing at the Pear Shaped Comedy on the 13th and at the Shortfuse reading series on the 14th.

What he’s curious about is possibly having a place to crash, (couch, cot, etc), for a couple of days, 12-14th.

He says he knows it’s a long shot as you more than likely don’t know him, as this is my journal, but he thought he’d give it a go. Personally, I’d say if you’ve got space, you should do it. Always welcome at my house and a treat to hang out with, he’s clever, fun, entirely personable, and wouldn’t even think to dream of stealing the silverware. I think I can even fairly safely guarantee that he won’t seduce your sons or daughters either, unless you really insist.

If you are curious and have questions please email him in the next day or two at rcarcee@yahoo.ca

A group of peacocks is called a muster or an ostentation.

My Bjork concert pictures have been uploaded.

Hey locals – Sanctuary tonight is your last chance to go dancing with Tyler before he takes off for his globe-trotting whirlwind summer of romance and fame. And if bleakly thrashing goths isn’t up your alley, which I fully understand, you might want to drop by the hospital to visit Steph, who is apparently dying of boredom after breaking her ankle in the last rollerderby. Either way, you’re doing a good deed. (I haven’t been by to see her yet, because I suck, but say “hello” for me, it is on my List of Things To Do.)

Shine, a SF nightclub, has a photobooth hooked up to Flickr.

I wished today for a real studio to play in. Crouching in my livingroom, having only two inches wiggle room, relying on the reflected light of a small hand mirror that I’d precisely taped to my wall, just wasn’t cutting it for me. Someone on MySpace wants to pay me $20/hour to take artistic nudes of him. He’s a hugely muscled man of the sort where I want to pronounce it muskles, thick as several boards with spelling to match. (His punctuation isn’t too hot either). I’m tempted to say yes, but only to connect myself with a shoot that won’t be locked behind a non-disclosure agreement, like the sweetheart shoots I do for women or the kink community boudoir photos. There must be an easier way.

Part of my reluctance to pester my photographer friends is the certain knowledge that I should be hunting more work for myself. Right now the best way to get me out of the house is promise me a meal. I’m wary of rent right now, too, though I already spend as little as possible. Underemployment is making me too nervous to feel I can blithely take a day off to scamper about the woods. I’ve been asked to write articles for a number of magazines, which is great, but it’s all volunteer work, which doesn’t help put food in the fridge. There was a run of film work last month, but it seems to have been a blip on the map, with no real direction.

Dreamy underwater shots by Alberich Mathews.

We live in a silent convocation of decisions.

I sent a letter to my father this morning. Yes, my violent, clinically psychotic, paranoid schizophrenic father who I can only hope is now old enough to be toothless instead of terrifying. (There’s a long shot, wow). There is always a chance the e-mail will bounce back. The address I have for him is very old, from five or six years ago. Here are the results of our last correspondance, from 2004.

Subject: Hi dad, it’s my 25th birthday this week

In truth, I don’t know why I’m sending this, given what or last communication degenerated into, but somehow I feel that 25 is one of those vaguely landmark ages, and I wanted to try to say hello again, and at least let you know I’ve made it this far.

Course, there’s always the possibility this will bounce back. This e-mail address is from a newspaper clipping from many years ago. The paper’s gone yellow and brittle, easy to tear. I’ve kept in one piece, though, not even sure how. It’s just been one of those things where every time I clean my apartment, somehow I manage not to throw it away.

I hope you do get this. It’s been a very long time. I haven’t seen you since before I was ten or spoken to you since I was twelve. I hope you are feeling better since our last letters, and have gotten some medial attention. I don’t usually recommend little coloured flakes of chemical to anyone, but there’s always new pills on the market, you know, maybe some of them will help.

At any rate, good luck in your endeavors, whatever they may be, and happy birthday to me.

Bad grammar makes me [sic]


Canon Powershot S2 IS User
Originally uploaded by Airchinapilot.

Summer is about to break upon the back of my birthday. I’ve been tracking the pulse of my cleaning with small packages I’ve been randomly sending through the post office. Some of them might not have been successful gifts, but it’s stimulating, and I tell myself it’s not a test. I dreamed last night that my room had finally been scoured clean; to see my shelves empty was like to see with a strange light.

As I’ve been dissembling the strata of my things, the waste and wrack of past romances has been floating to the surface from hiding places, inside the pale pockets of long lost envelopes or messily scribbled in the elusive margins and days of old calendars, and successfully distracting me. Sometimes it is only images, imagos, ghost trapped in a gesture or the form of a book, as if these objects were merely receptacles for memory – a muted production line of manufactured what-if’s, to handle them is to release precise chemical triggers.. These letters and gifts, small inscriptions that say I love you my darling, my sly kitten cat, enjoy this, smile, until later, I love you, I cannot put them as easily aside in a pile like I do ticket stubs or Christmas lights, they arrest me, trap me in uncertain amber, instead. I do not know what to do with them. My practical reasoning says to let them go, recycle them, but would it be injustice? I hesitate. These once meant something visceral, but my emotions reach no immediate consensus. If I feel nostalgia, it seems to be really only a scented-hanky kind of nostalgia, the vague wish that clutters antique shops or even that cable documentary-type nostalgia for people and places I’ve never known, not a longing for the relationship we had, but a longing for our “relationship”. As if the letters represent the sort of dusky melodrama that movies and TV tell us we should want rather than most of what was actually experienced, day-long crying jags, sharp elbows that defiantly attacked me in sleep, or worse – a savage belief in astrology. Mostly I have been putting on cheerful California sunshine riff music, thinking of my delicious April, and spinning them out the door. However, once they are gone, they are gone – unrecoverable. When I am older, will they matter again? Will my feelings loop back, recursive, and successfully recapture the singing nervous system these words used to bring? I simply don’t know.

As the digital age reaches out to swallow more and more people, I find my papers feel less and less essential. I prefer the talismans I carry now, that are objects instead of words, useful as well as meaningful. Every day I wear a striped scarf that I stole, was given, took, carried, love, and still, a month later, it almost feels like something he has handed to me, as if underneath the black and gray wool, there is a way to continue to touch his hands, thread my captured fingers with his, or meet his eyes like seeing the playground wonder of the milky way again after spending years trapped under a city sky. It is not something I can imagine growing tired of carrying around, like these aging piles of paper, or consider putting into storage, a trait I find wasteful. It is true the memory connection will fade, as such things do over time, but the scarf will remain a scarf, cherished for its protection from rain and its soft ability to muffle the wind.

the Prof. Snape vs. Ozzy Osborne guy was wearing an ascot, no kidding

I was stood up for dinner, but I had a nice chat with C.R. Avery and sat in the park while Rowan practised with his lovely musical pirate trio, the Creaking Planks, (where I ran into Sean McG, who claims his new clean-cut look was given to him be a group of nuns who drugged him ), instead, so that wasn’t terrible. Nicole rescued my night entirely and possibly even my weekend, too. We went for dinner at Fet’s, theatrically discussed my attempted mugging, her terrible attempt at getting out of the city for the long weekend, my irrational emotional traumas, and the gnome themed bar she found herself stuck at in Squamish.

Love Hurts came on the stereo as we were waiting for our bill, so she pulled a scene, I loudly rebutted her “passion”, and we danced briefly, until it was simply too much and we had to leave before laughter terminally overcame breathing. Course, that happened after, while walking past the we-are-musicians-because-we-dress-like-them “jam session” happening outside Turks. I’m wearing LEATHER! He wasn’t shrieking, exactly, but the entire scene was too much. Too, too much.

Sometimes time swells over and spills little events. I suppose tonight is one of those nights.

Who will be at the Bjork concert? Would you like to meet up? Give me a cell number to call and we can play tag at the gig. (I’m going with Joshua Caldwell and Travis Hildebrandt.)

as if anyone cares about this stuff

According to the June 2007 Discover Magazine, the internet weighs 0.2 millionths of an ounce.

I count my skin as fingerprints, distant voices traveling through wires, places I lived that are only names on highway signs where I am now, and the paper pamphlets collected from endless hands on corners, islands of passion in the middle of seas of uniform strangers, all stars of their own films, to which I’m barely an extra. I count my fingerprints as netted truth, minutes caught together in information and joy, the small symbolic poetry of crossing an invisible finish line, arms in the air.

Yesterday I was out of it, eyes dilated, responding to my environment as if my nervous system was watching from outer space. Sounds felt tinny, like my tongue. It started after work on Thursday. Thursday night after my phone-call, I curled up in my duvet nest of bed, (the other half of my mattress is stacks and piles of books), and stared at the ceiling until I was willing to be crazy and simply get up again. Trying to sleep was about as effective as talking to a wall, which meant that Friday began a little loose around the edges. I had red bull and blue curacou for breakfast, and then for lunch, as I helped Silva set up her yard sale, which is when the edges completely fell out and the world began to sway in careful patterns.

It didn’t help that my evening then became the I Braineater gallery opening where my friend’s father randomly accused me of having a birthday soon and then, just as suddenly, ceased to talk to me; explaining, in detail, how one goes about safely blowing up 100 televisions; mildly hallucinating while standing on the corner by Tinseltown, having a deep personal conversation with a man I barely know; wading into a thrashing metal mosh-pit in a dark dirty pub full of kids with ironic Aerosmith t-shirts; possibly breaking some teeth of a junkie who wanted my bag then sitting with a hippie pan handler, tears tattooed under his eyes like a harlequin, to help him tie his shoes; ending up at Organix and finding it full of drunk brazilian boys, (since when did anyone have alcohol at a psytrance night?); finally having to hurt one of them too, just to be left alone; being given a Bjork ticket by a best friend’s ex-boyfriend’s roommate, (the same man who left me to wake up next to an unknown naked scotsman once); then realizing, when I’m home after dancing until I couldn’t walk and barely see, that the machine-gun sun was coming up and I had to be somewhere in a couple of hours. (I suspect that I sent some worrying e-mails to various countries then, but I haven’t the energy to check the damage yet. Nor will I, so fess up.)

So Friday became Saturday, where I got to ache, have more blue curocaou, sit a lot, try not to haphazardly cry, (being a rational human being has no place in such matters, apparently), and be mildly rained on at the yard sale. Saturday I finally slept, but not until something that wasn’t quite 2 a.m. I’m still burned out, but it’s more of a flickering scorch than a hospital ward stay. Such things do not actually “get better” but the machine, after hiccoughs, smooths itself out. Tonight Brian is picking me up after work to help me recover, tomorrow Keith is yanking some of us out to a random island for photos, and I’ve got dinner with not-the-conspiracy-theorist Merlyn. Should be fun, (or at least distracting).