Month: April 2011

I’ve never been to NYC

Given that my recent job interviews have all fizzled, my relationship has horrifically dissolved, and my birthday is fast approaching, I have decided it’s finally perfect timing to use up my plane ticket to visit Van Sise in New York city*.

I fly out of SeaTac to NYC on May 20th and return June 2nd.

I am going to miss Rafael’s Folklife and a few other things, (my original birthday plan was to set up a Whole Beast Feast, hit up the 40th Annual Folklife for a day, then hitch-hike with some strangers to the 10th Annual Sasquatch Festival for the rest of the long weekend), but given my present circumstances as a connoisseur of sad situations, it just seems like a better idea to be gone. Every night my dreams ache, my body wrenches with unhappiness, yet in the morning, I can’t seem to find reasons to be awake. I lie there motionless, wrapped up in nothingness, unable to conjure any appetite for life, any thread of grace, any desire at all for my bland, banal hopes or disembodied future. If I had a job or were in school, I’m sure it would be different, I would feel that my life was moving forward instead of slipping away, but as it currently is, a lonely narrative of inevitable failure after inevitable failure, all I want is to be away from here, all I want is escape.

*Originally we were going to wander around the southern states, visiting Atlanta and New Orleans, rounding off the trip, if we were lucky and it was delayed, with the last Space Shuttle Launch. Instead his work got in the way and the already-purchased plane ticket was cashed in for credit and put aside for a visit with him later.

I wish you could have been there

Lung and Nicole at the Burrard Bridge secret stairs

I took Lung and Nicole to a film shoot at the Burrard Street secret stairs last week, where we took a ton of pictures. The sound inside was beautiful, like the ocean on a rainy day, but heard through a megaphone, crackling and thrumming and incredibly comforting, and the light was so perfect it was almost unreal. I’ll post more pictures later, as I get to them.

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Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, (and my personal favourites: Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood), slyly lampoons Harper with Election 2011, a Dark Fiction:

A vacuum cleaner salesman comes to your door. “You must buy this vacuum cleaner,” he says. “Why?” you say. “Because I know what’s good for you,” he says. “I know things you don’t know.” “What are they?” you say. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “because they’re secret. You are required to trust me. The vacuum cleaner will create jobs.”

“Where is the vacuum cleaner made?” you say. “In another country,” he says. “So the jobs will be created in another country? Not here?” you say. You believe it’s your right to query: It’s your money and, come to think of it, you pay this guy’s salary.

“Stop bickering,” he says. “I am competent. That’s my story and I’m sticking it to you.” “I’m not bickering,” you say. “I’m asking relevant questions. How much will the vacuum cleaner cost me?” “I can’t tell you that,” he says. “Why not? Because it’s more than you claimed at first?” you say. “Or because you don’t really know the cost?” “I can’t tell you that, either,” he says. “But you have to pay.”

Canadian Olympics Poet Shane Koyczan adds his voice to ShitHarperDid.com

“Wasted Vote” by Shane Koyczan

Shane Koyczan and the Short Story Long have come out with a haunting new track just in time for the May 2nd polls,
reminding people that there’s no such thing as a wasted vote, only a wasted election.

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    • my life as a misery ghost

    Portal 2: Exile Vilify, a hidden song by The National

    Monday: It was just after midnight when he opened the door. In the interest of brevity, I will leave out the next three hours, excepting my desire to be wanted, kicked in like a knife, a piercing pain that has yet to fade. Suffice to say, A. has gone away. Like in the old stories, antique, anonymous and trying, everyone a letter instead of a name, places expressed as an initial and an em dash. Off to the sanitarium, he cried!

    After: I sat crumpled in the street where I had been dropped, left salty eyed blind and exhausted, my glasses on the hood of a stranger’s cold truck, too tired to stand, even as the the night evaporated as thoroughly as the warmth on my body where his hands had apologized and cradled me goodbye.

    So that, for now, is that. After a multitude of absences and various failure situations, he has decided that he is not currently capable of being responsible in regards to my un/happiness and has withdrawn from my life. I do not know when he will return or in what state, but it is my hope, however small, however sad, that he will come home to me when he can.

    scraped empty

    When I have said “I love you” I have said
    Nothing at all to tell you; I cannot find
    Any speech in any country of the mind
    Which might inform you whither I have fled.
    In saying “I love you” I have gone so far
    Away from you, into so strange a land;
    You may not find me, may not understand
    How I am exiled, driven to a star

    Till now deserted. Here I stand about,
    Eat, sleep, bewail, feel lonely and explore,
    Remember how I loved the world, before,
    Tremble in case that memory lets me out.
    Islanded here, I wait for you to come —
    Waiting the day that exiles you to home.

    by Valentine Ackland

    Tonight is the first night of Passover.

    I am meant to be taking photos today for an art exhibition in New York. I am meant to be doing laundry, looking for work, applying to be an enforcer, editing my belongings, putting more of them for sale, and processing pictures from Seattle and yesterday’s shoot with Shane’s band at the Cultch. I am meant to be showered and dressed and fed. Together, sharp, useful, active. Defined. There are things to do, tasks to conquer, opportunities waiting. Instead it is as if the air itself has thickened until even breathing is an effort. I am suffocating, a captive unhappily complicit with my aching inactivity.

    It has been a week of silence. Out of respect for my love, for his dismissal, his vanishing outburst, I did not call for days, even when the wet beauty of thunder and lightning was too much to bear, when it cracked me as open as it did the sky. Even when I felt that all I could possibly desire was his voice kindly speaking my name. Instead I bruised my fingers knocking at his door. Small gifts in my pockets, a snub nosed bottle of imported ginger ale, a tiny square of rich, hard to find chocolate, my hand raised once more to the wood, knuckles swollen into a pale rainbow of purple and blue from repetition, (less painful than the quiet), but to no answer, even when his vehicle was parked in the drive. At home the phone would ring in a quick, beautiful burst, but the numbers were wrong – the wrong people, the wrong names. Outside would be footsteps, car doors slamming, false hope leaping up in my heart like flames. Every night, sleep became farther away.

    When Friday slid into Saturday, still without word, it became obvious that the relationship had been abandoned, released into the wild without even the courtesy of goodbye.