Author: foxtongue

I can’t afford what would fix me

Guy: See you!
Girl: See you!
Guy: I love you!
Girl: You are killing me.
Guy: I ought to kill you.
Girl: What?!

—34th Street Station, B Line

The best thing I overheard recently was a girl saying, “Hell, I’d fuck your dad for money.”

…

A blind man on the bus, laughing every time we stop, glad of the sensation like a kid on a circus ride. “Hey guys, what stop are we at?” I glance outside, looking for street signs, “We’re at second.” “Thanks!” Back to my book, I wonder briefly if anyone else would have bothered to reply. I speak up again when it’s my stop, “This is Broadway.” “The near side or the far side.” “The near side.” Then I’m gone, footsteps snapping away on the pavement, out of ear-shot, now invisible.

I can’t help but wonder, with a sunken feeling in my chest, if I should practice with a white cane now rather than later, when it will be more difficult. I’ve cut down on my reading and learned a couple of tricks that slow my eyes from degeneration, but I can tell they’re still getting worse. I close them sometimes when I walk with people to discover how far I can get only listening for the ends of sidewalks, for traffic, for other pedestrians and bumps in the road. I keep my hand tightly around their bicep, or tautly in their hand, and I listen, and walk, and I worry.

One of the more exclusive shows at HIVE2 placed the participant in the role of a convict at a prison. (One woman came back crying). To apply to take part, you wore an arm-band. When they came for you, (the audience was picked two by two), no matter when it was, you had to go or you forfeit. It looked as if it would be harsh, a nasty, hard-core experience, but really, the main body of the experience was ritualistic sensory deprivation. You were dressed in anonymous orange coveralls and a matching orange tuque, then sound dampeners and a blindfold were placed on your head. A rope was put in your hand, and you had to follow, passive, pulled, blind, unable to hear. Hands would reach out, solidly, and guide you through doorways, pull you up stairs. I had been expecting fear or an uncomfortable feeling of powerlessness, but unexpectedly, I smiled, warm and confident in the artificial darkness. “I do this already, minus the barked orders to sit, to stand, to go up a step. This is fine,” I thought, “though there’s no way the other person feels the same way. I hope she’s okay.”

There’s levels and layers to all of it, though. I was alright at HIVE2, solid and strong, but that was mild, a safe visit to a possible future.

My friend Mishi was paired with a seeing-eye dog recently, a sweet and exuberant black Labrador retriever. She says it takes 6 months to a year to become a smooth, seasoned team, which makes me smile, glad that she’s finally got her guide, but shyly, as I try not to imagine too closely what it must all be like.

today’s a low phenylalanine day


David & Lung
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Hey Japan, plz stop. Thanx.

End of the line, the train stops, the bus stops, whichever motion, it’s over. Outside the sky is just as dark as it was yesterday, the day burned down, the night entranced. Rough in the back of the eyes.

I’ve invited Lung and David to come with me to Katie’s wedding. It’s in Toronto, I have places to stay, options, resources, the temptation to stay. Lung’s not sure if he could make it, but he’d like to go. There a chance we could meet Kyle, finally, his lovely lady, and his lots of cats. (Are there more of you in T.O?) I’ve started looking at bus-tickets, knowing the farther ahead they’re booked, the cheaper they’ll end up being. There’s a companion fare on greyhound. A second ticket with the same itinerary for fourty dollars more. Two people splitting the cost doesn’t look like it would be that bad.

The soft drop of gravity when the plane takes off, the wheels as they grind into cloud. Looking down, squares, grid-lock, and a river of motion flowing to another sea, wavy lines representing false cul-de-sac suburb security.

Pregnancy Pact Discovered at Gloucester High School.

sixth severed foot found, (still no mention of the (possible) abandoned-car serial killer)

“Six Feet Under”
“Another Footloose”
“British Columbia Case gets stranger by the foot”
“Bizarre Canadian tale now six feet long”
“The Story’s a Foot”

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp They need to catch this person, the sooner the better. I don’t think I can stand it any longer.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Oh heck, see what I did there? THEY’RE GETTING ME TOO.

situationist comedy

Karriere is a fairly new Copenhagen bar completely designed by over 30 artists, (Robert Stadler, Douglas Gordon, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Olafur Eliasson, etc.), who worked on everything from the name to the interior.

Most interestingly, the cost of certain drinks at the Karriere Bar have been reworked into an installation piece by Kenneth Balfelt, who conceived of a price policy that experiments with perceived social structures. The new prices are determined by how you display yourself and it’s the waiters and bartenders who decide if someone qualifies.

Some examples: Activist and hippie types pay extra for organic soda, unless they’re homeless, in which case they get a discount on cafe cortado, yuppies pay extra for beer, and gay couples who french kiss get a discount on apfelschorle.

There’s many of various discounts, and for all sorts of things, speaking danish when you’re obviously foreign, being a multiracial table, etc., hardly any which seem politically correct, but all of which might prove interesting to interact with. I imagine friends gathering in groups, trying to work out how many discounts they can snag in one go.

cleaning out the closets

I started writing a book this week. “This book begins and ends with a birthday, twenty five years after my story started.” The internet at work was down, leaving me with nothing productive to do except open Word and begin to write. Two hours later, I had twenty five pages and the beginning of an out-line. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, what I’m doing, or if I will finish it, or anything, but I’ve started one.

It’s not the autobiography people have been asking me to write, full of oddball miniature adventures, names changed and details blurred to protect almost everyone involved, but the story of my parents, my dangerous childhood, and how it relates to me now.

As many of you know, my sociopath father, (who I generally tell people is dead), has been sending me letters since I sent him a hello on my birthday last year. He writes a minimum of once a day, though I never reply and rarely read anything. The more he writes, the more ingrown the stories become, the more pathological, until the only way to understand the later letters is to start at the beginning, to see where certain codes began. Now that an entire year has passed, there’s hundreds of replies to my one small note, poisonous, hateful, and full of self aggrandizing lies, that I haven’t even looked at. They’re just sitting there, taking up server space somewhere in the states, not quite ignored, but dormant.

As a body of work, it reminds me most of case studies I’ve read about violent obsessives who paper their walls with scribbles about jesus. The tone is similar, but with my mother and I featured in place of religious figures. My intention is to use his letters as material, as something to respond to. “Find inspiration where you can.” I’m not sure what else there is to do, (perhaps I can donate it to a psychological institution?), I don’t like his bright confusion speaking to an empty room. It feels like I’m neglecting a chore, an old bit of furniture that needs to be painted.

getting everything down to six boxes

via neat-o-rama:

Dave Bruno looked around his San Diego home one summer and realized just how much of his family’s belongings were cluttering their lives. So he decided to do something about it, in a project he called The 100 Thing Challenge:

By my thirty-seventh birthday on November 12, 2008 I will have only 100 personal items. I will live for at least one year (God willing) maintaining an inventory of only 100 personal things. This challenge will help me “put stuff in its place” and also explore my belief that “stuff can be good when it serves a purpose greater than possession alone.”

Lisa McLaughlin of TIME Magazine covered this story:

Excess consumption is practically an American religion. But as anyone with a filled-to-the-gills closet knows, the things we accumulate can become oppressive. With all this stuff piling up and never quite getting put away, we’re no longer huddled masses yearning to breathe free; we’re huddled masses yearning to free up space on a countertop. Which is why people are so intrigued by the 100 Thing Challenge, a grass-roots movement in which otherwise seemingly normal folks are pledging to whittle down their possessions to a mere 100 items. […]

“It comes down to the products vs. the promise,” says organizational consultant Peter Walsh, who characterizes himself as part contractor, part therapist. “It’s not necessarily about the new pots and pans but the idea of the cozy family meals that they will provide. People are finding that their homes are full of stuff, but their lives are littered with unfulfilled promises.”

Dave’s progress blog, guynameddave.