I still think that maybe I should leave, go to the club, try to wake up closer to my own bed

Frank Warren of the cult PostSecret answers 20 Questions: “For me this was a great surprise. How courage can be more important than talent or technique in creating meaningful art.

When I shut the door behind me and glanced at the photographs lining the wall, it struck me that once I was going to live here. Cream walls, a white picket fence in pencil. He called, “When you’re done, can you come help me with something?” The music was comfortable, perfect. I surprised myself by replying, “You’d better be naked,” as I took the stairs two at a time. His smile at his computer screen made me remember why this was going to be my home, what I gave up when plans changed. Strange to love him still, at a distance. I still want to cut a labyrinth into his short cat-fur hair, but the desire to lean into him is gone. We never kept each other awake enough and I could never bear to hurt him again, not in the slightest thing.

Cold outside, I’m not wearing clothes sensible enough. The plan was to go dancing after the movie, but something else happened. A language was spoken under language, the same that hooked me almost home to that other apartment, the one where I still know where everything is. My mother tongue, it echoes.

Heart of the World seems to have bought an extension. I do not know how long a one yet, I will find out early on Monday morning, luckily before the CBC TV interview.

the hot tub helped, so did seeing Shane and TOFU

Apgar told deputies he was smoking crack in the park, but it was unclear why he was naked or why he was attacked by the alligator.

Getting in touch with people I used to know lately. It’s disconcerting, makes me want to write again though I don’t have the time. I might to make sure I still can, though, sort of like drinking a bottle of lemon juice to prove a point.

One of them, dear soul he is, took me snowboarding Saturday morning – the first time I’ve ever gone. We went to bed late, got up stupidly early, watched the dawn as we drove, then went crashing down the mountain strapped to a stick. Strangely, I think I recommend it. Except the early in the morning bit. That can go hang.

My favourite was the chair lift, being suspended high above the thick white silence and the candy-coated snowy trees.

Bad news, though. I had a terrible collision with a little kid. Some boy on skies with a blue and yellow helmet, couldn’t have been more than ten years old, he smashed into my knees going fast down a hill and almost broke my leg. Sent me flying, knocked the wind out, and all of this still half way up. I could barely walk by the time I made it down, and spent all evening on a cane. Strained ligaments. I’m still hobbling today, but it should be alright in a few days. Just a bloody nuisance.

Today I feel the rest of it, the aches involved in that much new exercise. My hands are tender, my ribs are bruised, like I’m wearing another layer of skin, one that’s an inch farther into my flesh and far too tight.

A greeting-card company is selling pop-up greeting cards based on Robert Sabuda’s pop-up version of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

how on earth can I sleep with nightmare tectonics


Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

It’s the people absent from my bed who are changing my name, eroding at my identity like a negative space sketch of rain. I can’t help but recall my conversations, the blankets inspire me, the delicate, familiar movement of taking my glasses off and putting them on the windowsill. I’ve been setting my eyes down on various surfaces every night of my adult life, slowly evolving into someone who doesn’t like to be on top because I can’t see my love’s face from so far away. I remember Marc’s laughter, his climbing strong melody as he cradled my glasses and explained to me very carefully where he was putting them down. Another windowsill. Like mine, to the left, but not the same at all. A queen size bed but we still managed to fall off the sides. I remember Lidd crying, viciously attacking the life given to him, threatening to smash my vision to the street below. Too much alcohol, too little faith. I could see myself in a mirror then without them. Worse now, my astigmatism, my trained lack of sight. I remember lots of things, voices attached to shining blurry faces. Different colours. Lindsay, he had a desk with a computer from 1995. I put my glasses down next to the keyboard, under the red guitar that hung from the brick wall. Lindsay, whose chocolate hands made my skin look like iridescent milk.

A flash to Lung taking a picture down his pants on a dare, how we discussed Oliver’s skin tone as something to photograph nicely against mine. To my silver haired scientist twisting away from my camera, hiding under the blankets, breaking my heart. The beautiful images Alastair would send me long distance, driving my adoration from over a thousand miles away. Kyle was so beautiful I could have cried.

Repetition with improv over the top. Notes of fire, of searing words. Burning too hot, too fast, too aware of the desperation inherent in oxygen, a poison gas when taken straight. I didn’t like the wall sized mirrors in that fugitive hotel, how they turned my blurred body into a pale shifting ghost, messy hair and all. Not to say I don’t find hotels mirrors friendly. The man who is named the evening star, he grasped the delicacy of my blindness right away. Gently murmuring about his father’s death to the glow of craving a cigarette, he ran his hands along my arms, guiding me to where I needed to be. I took a picture in that mirror, wearing his shirt, my hand upraised, a final thank you and eventually, later, a good-bye. He undid the buttons and every doubt I had about my body fell off me in shards, never to return again.

These are the things that stick, a hundred final scenes. Kissing a man in a restaurant, only a few blocks from my apartment. Touching his tattoo and wondering briefly, the closest I’d flirted with infidelity, if anyone would see us. All a long time ago now, these memories held like dried flowers, delicate perfumed things, willing to break details if handled roughly. Photographs seen from the wrong end of a telescope, out of proportion, fading when the phone-calls do.

The Moon Festival starts tonight at 7:00. Renfrew Ravine Park, at 22nd and Renfrew.

Easy to get to by transit: Take the skytrain to 29th Ave. Station, then take the Arbutus bus five minutes to 22nd.

My fire show tonight starts at 7:30. There will be fireworks, an underage contortionist, a band made of eight trombones, a percussionist, and an erhu, and half my crew are delinquents, including one multiply convicted arsonist.

If any of the fire people on my list would like to come perform, I can toss you into our finale if you check in with me early enough.


don’t you remember?


011 by Lung.
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I walk by the house like hanging up on an answering machine. It’s dark and I’m too delicate for this. Easier to walk home, continue, and not dare to put my hand on the gate. Footsteps the tempo to an old slow song. Lyrics winding through from my feet through my spine. “Hello, I’m so lonely, And it feels like disease, Come and stay, stay beside me”. The air like velvet wiping my face with the back of my hand. Child’s play, this is easy as child’s play. Something I never could understand. Tag, you’re it. My books were always thrown into puddles. My desk always full of sticky wet chewing gum. A young man walks past me, tastefully dressed in an unexceptional way, and offers me drugs. I hesitate and wonder what to say. I tell him that he’s not what I need. He looks offended a moment, as if I’d insulted his hair, then shrugs me off and walks on. I can’t wake up from this, because it’s not a dream.
Britain art project photoblog: “Little hand-painted people, left in London to fend for themselves.”

Talking with Alastair earlier on his black leather couch, the one I have the photographs on, he said, “All I offered you was stability. I think you wanted more than that.” I replied, “Stability was nice, I appreciate stability.” “I think you needed more from me. I think you needed romance, attention, affection.” “That last one, yes. That was what I needed the most”. A little peculiar, it was a miniature revelation, realizing how that’s the only base-line of my demands, just like he used to always give me. Two years almost and practically nothing’s changed. He’s better at communicating as I am more sad. He was never scared of me.

I want Edward Teach panties, so I can have pirate booty

The BodyWorlds Exhibit opens today at Scienceworld! (His website’s been updated, it’s nice now. Really).

I went with Alastair to see it when we were down in L.A. It’s beautiful and liberating in a way that’s difficult to describe. I wanted to cradle every body, kiss thier eyes and know thier names. I stared and I stared, I crept as close as they’ll let you to try and memorize every exquisite detail. The exhibition is full of moments of deep, abiding, and very surprising glory, where you find yourself suddenly enraptured with unexpected appreciation for things you’d never think you might see. The volunteer application sheets they have on-line require that all applicants have “Solid comprehension of moral issues regarding death and the displaying of human bodies.” I suspect I would fail the test, if there is one. I am brimming with admiration for what Von Hagen has done, I am delighted in respectful awe, but I doubt I have any idea what other people’s moral issues might be. Mine are unperturbed, only upset that there are not more of these shows, that it is not at least mandatory for school-children at the age of nine or ten.

Censearchip: exploring search engine result differences returned by different countries’ versions of the major search engines. (The Web and image search functions of four national versions of Google and Yahoo!: the United States, China, France, and Germany.)

Summer is over and I’m not sleeping well, though I should be alright. My Oliver-inspired Pirate day is getting posted around as it should be, {it’s come around back to me from three different sources today}, and people are saying they’ll come. (My man Crow: “I was almost an innocent man!”). Last night I was ship building. Stephen supplied all the construction materials, minus silly string and blue glitter, I made the body of the big one, then Michael came over and made me a mermaid and an anchor, and Ed helped make some brackets for the ropes. Cardboard boats with broomstick masts, it looks like the big one will fit three to five people and the little one will fit two or three. That way we’ll have a main ship and an attacker. I plan on simply chucking them off the balcony instead of wrestling them down the stairs when Tuesday comes. Should be fun.

Bush ‘Slush Fund’ possibly courtesy of the Canadian softwood lumber industry. (hell.)

I brought Sam two baby frogs in a fishbowl and a green mint cupcake for his birthday Monday and we curled up in a chair together and talked. It’s comforting to have him back in town, extra special to feel safe and warm while being given small stories from Burning Man. I’m glad he went. He said he didn’t miss me because I was everywhere he looked there. Funny how the man keeps me sane, like he’s a shadowy mirror of a relationship or a wish I made as a child on the dried out fluff of a dandelion.

looking as if an angel had been threatened with a baseball bat


taking a break on metropolis
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I sat on top of a news-box downtown for half an hour with a book in my lap, trying to tune out the religious zealots handing out sheets of paper with the word Jesus at the top. Too exhausted to run for the bus, I was twenty minutes late. No one was there. No one came. I did not expect them to. Dinner had obviously been decided without me. No way to contact my friends, I decided to gather my chores in hand before I went back to the hospital. Official visiting hours are over, I thought, and I am having difficulty imagining myself mouth that I am Devon’s wife.

The drugstore felt hollow, as if somehow I had fallen into a facsimile. I stood in the hair care aisle and let my eyes scan the products without me, looking for the word Organic. In my head, I would try to concentrate on the mundane task I was undertaking, but instead I would glimpse Devon in surgery, a garden of stars unconscious on a table, the illusion of a slight flash of the metal knife as it sliced into his skin. Eventually I chose two bottles of shampoo and turned to find soap. The cheap soaps are sometimes the best. Less scent means less chemicals. Small thoughts that have nothing to do with what went wrong or his face on the bed.

Earlier, I had to re-set my day’s plans. Alicia was to come by for eleven and I had set my day by that. Things came up however, as they often do, and it was two o’clock before she could swing by for her errand, so things red-shifted over a bit. I had dinner with Andrew instead of Alastair, and instead of going to a fencing demo, when I got off the bus across from Duello, I followed random impulse and turned left into Gastown. There’s a shop there I rather like, crammed with odd antiques and paper masks. In the basement there’s a chinese chest full of hundreds of small drawers that can steal an hour if your life if you let it. This time, however, I knew exactly what I came for. At the foot of the stairs is a small display of golden music boxes, the sort you crank by hand to hear the music. They’re louder when you place them on wood. I sorted through them as efficiently as possible to find the one that played the Beatles song, She Loves You.

Going back to Duello, I fell into step behind a man I didn’t recognize. I heard him unlock the school doors above me and cursed a wee bit, knowing that meant that I’d missed everyone. I poked my head in anyway, curious to see if I was wrong. “Who’re you looking for?” “I thought to catch Devon.” “He’s in the hospital today.”

At that, I turned and ran, another impulse. Down the stairs, across the street, down the hill, straight to Waterfront train station, where Randy happened to be standing inside the hall. Seeing him, standing perfectly as if framed for me to find him, I recognized my impulses as the impelling force of cinematic timing and I laughed. I stopped running and walked up to him. He covered the mouth of his cell phone for a moment, “Hey Jhayne, I’ve got news for you.” “Yes, but what hospital?” We stood chatting for close to ten minutes, glad to be in company, “I just talked to him, he’s obviously not dying,” then took the train together. As soon as the doors opened on Granville station, I began running again.

There was a group of boys on the escalators, seven deep on either stair, pretending they were surfing. Such was my blithesom running that I decided they were an obstacle I wouldn’t wait for, rather I made thier day by jumping up onto the slippery thin metal divide between them and dangerously running up that instead. They cheered, but for safety’s sake, I didn’t look back down. Another two blocks and I was on the bus, feeling as if my legs were going to mutiny if I forced them one more step.

trying to remember the worth of birth control when all I can think of are his unfair hands

Someone has rewritten the words to Gibert and Sullivan’s “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” as “I am the very model of a Singularitarian,” with lyrics celebrating the drive to transcend the flesh.

I am the very model of a Singularitarian
I’m combination Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian,
Aggressively I’m changing all my body’s biochemistry
Because my body’s heritage is obsolete genetically,
Replacing all the cells each month it’s here just temporarily
The pattern of my brain and body’s where there’s continuity,
I’ll try to improve these patterns with optimal biology,
(“But how will I do that? I need to be smarter. Ah, yes…”)
I’ll expand my mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology.

There’s an MP3 link too.

Today was spent re-arranging the shop I work in, hauling large heavy awkward pieces of pale laminated wood around into hopefully better positions. We need a curtain now. A curtain, a ladder, some screws, and some paint. It’s nice to have carte blanche. I’ve been told that I’m to treat the store as my own, all my decisions will be supported. It’s interesting, like an experiment in culpability. How responsible am I? How capable?

“I’ve listened to your music, seen the way you dress. I trust you.”

I’ve had relationships based on less.

Remember the water? It sprayed like insane rain, kamikaze airborne water trying to reclaim the shore from the sky and bring it back into the ocean. I was so glad you ran through it after me, it felt like a victory. Breakfast, then sitting on damp moss, so British Columbia, so everything about this place that’s sometimes nice. Secrets, so many secrets. I miss you. You’re around and then not, all at once. I remember kissing you, lying with my body pressed against yours on a volcanic outcropping of rock, all soft cliffs and too much ocean view. All those trees. I saw you watching me trip down the path like a child, I watched you smile. How much that meant to me, I’m not sure I can say. It had been so long since I’d felt like anyone wanted me, like I could make someone happy. Therapy for both of us, I suppose. A furtive thing we could call our own. An epoch passed as we climbed the earth.

Evenings like this I wish you were here, free to sleep in my bed, be warm for me in the chill.

My lovers last year, all of them left silver hair on my clothes. Spiderwebs that tied joy down, transmuting me into an alchemist of golden moments, but my last year was longer ago than that. I think of new years in terms of fall. Leaves and seasons changing, halting, freezing. Anything after Hallowe’en is this year, anything before is last. It might be in November this year, my annual transfer from them into now. We met in August, we began in August. The year before last, something new, a man, a burning furnace hanging in the ether, changing my perception of time. Everything counted from the day I took a worried picture that my friend has hung on his wall in Montreal.

This year it might be somewhere in November where it shifts. Before there was my first love returned to me, too poetically pleasing to last or be real. My theater painter, my silly Gavool fool. “Have you met my underage girlfriend?” A genius clown that handed me so gracefully to California (Uber Alles). Flash: tied with ribbons, merry christmas, the light from the window before we moved the bed, a thin string glittering from one thing to another, my decision. LAX = empty regret. Last winter spent in Orange County, adrift in rain and lost without direction. My lovers, before they didn’t trust me, they didn’t tell me until it’s too late.

Next year. New Year, December. My hanged moon, strung up on charming wire, so full before it waned so suddenly. He fell from the sky and destroyed all the tides. I fell down and drowned and my morning star, my most precious thing, my evening dream who surrounded me with words, abandoned me after burning me with a small handful of flame. Hours counted like suicidal moths. Hating how easy I must be. Fifteen people dying in six months. All the ways to count a year. Two jobs gone, three, a night of fire where I finally died. There was no vessel to carry me. When the apple fell, there was no one to capture it, no hand to interrupt its crash to the ground. Everything all at once, so dreadful.

I’m older now, I can feel it for the first time in my life. I see lines inside my face, miniature scars, a map of where I used to live. Pictures from last year, they look too happy to be me, too young and yet, here I am, feeling alright with life again. It took me eight months. It took me a year, a failed one night stand, and a married conductor. It took music and getting away from here, a refreshing life out of the small town. It took the sky and blood and tears and feeling too alone. It was Ryan, it was walking into the water on the night of fireworks and resisting the urge to let my head go under. It was so many things, saving a life on New years, never seeing that girl again. Slapping Matthew, dancing alone, dancing with Kyle. It was myself, finally, and the memories of starry skies that brought me back to me.

Though mostly it was the conductor.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp the good ones are just like that
“No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day.
But, I beseech your grace, pardon me: I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.”

sky question observe place fact


silo tall cherry lake
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

My sleep is crumbling, indifference mixing with a dying anticipation. I expect a signal interrupt. I wake on the hour, mental suitcase in my hand. That phone is going to ring. It makes me nervous, every sound carving the quiet of my room. My body is weary unto bones, aches and heart rate jouncing at the slightest provocation. I stretch and it feels like I’m under water, I have to push against air to move. At my desk is not so bad. I sit, I type.

Chris slept over twice this week to help me sleep, to offer what comfort he can. Exhaustion’s been claiming me in waves, foam flecked gravity sinking my head to the mattress, but I recoil from company now while at the same time require it. A body gives me an anchor, reminds me that unconsciousness is a gift, not only a tiresome chore. There’s no one else I can ask to stay. Chris is getting better. A fragility still underlies everything, but his heart has weathered what it needed to. It is a weight lifted and, underneath my fatigue collapse, I am glad for it. Part of me considers his fever broken.

I’m hoping for a teacher soon, a new skill to capture my attention away from myself and my silences. I’ve been catching myself crying, strange moments when I put my hand to my face and discover my cheek is wet. I want someone to talk to who has the background to understand, who can coax from me what I need to say. I think I may have found one but she’s far away. I’ve been left alone so long I’m not certain of words in person anymore. Alastair helps. We’ve closed our eyes, taken each others hands, and walked through the crusting scabs of break-up to a place where he can talk to me now. I miss him.

I can’t help but think of Baraka



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Alastair is thin, putting my arms around him is like putting flesh over bones. Until today, I’d forgotten how that felt. When I think of him, I think of what he looks like – how he smiled crookedly at me once while standing naked in front of a mirror, how he moved, quickly and fiercely, his drawn angles matching in some brilliant sketch of a walking man – and I glow for a moment, remembering.

When I met him, I thought we would be together a year. Months piling into months, days a flow of photographs and dance music. We would go to clubs together, we did when we were here and we did when we were in L.A. He would always look better than me, but I liked that. That he cared made me happy. I dance like a goth hippy, all waving hands and jutting curves, but he dances like a spider might, crouched black and thin with side to side movements. I can’t blend in as well as he does.

When he ran up to me today, he looked slightly different, like there had been a re-adjust of the system since I said goodbye at the airport. I imagine I might look a tiny different as well. I’ve lost weight again, and my hair’s turned red and gold as well as plum. It was hard to say goodbye, to decide to take that first step toward the plane.

We never were the same after a certain conversation.

Tomorrow we’re going for tea. He’s going to call in the morning. As always, I’ve not any idea what we’ll talk about, but I don’t think I have to. It will be enough to see him, imprint his cellular structure again in my mind.