too tired for anything but 99c pizza

I really appreciate Tilly. Once a shaved-head lesbian who wrote bad poetry, she’s such a heavily blossoming human being now that it gives me hope for my body, for the wreckage of emotional scenery that surrounds it. I love when she explains her past, if she had a job somewhere as a programmer, she would be the power-point perfect love interest for a Douglas Coupland character. She groans along with us at the more delightfully embarrassing habits she used to have, and it plucks out my hiding grin and shakes it in front of my face like a dusty rag.

jacques' b-day

Outside black clouds are chasing sunlight across Davie Street in waves. Shadow, sun, shadow, darkness, chilly, light. I want it to snow. I want flowers to bloom so hard they pop in small explosions. I want my feeling of betrayal to launch into the air and be hit by a large blue truck. The snow would be crunchy as I walked out slowly into the street, and the yelling of the panicked driver, oh my god, I’m so sorry, it just ran under my tires, I didn’t see it, would be quiet compared to the styrofoam compression of ice-crystals under my feet and the scorched flower petals falling from the trees thick enough to blind.

Today will continue Mandarin Movie Tuesdays with The Promise, Chen Kaige’s newest and phenomenally beautiful film.

Perhaps irrationally, I feel this psychedelic cartoon of “Love is All,” performed by Ronnie James Dio of Black Sabbath, explains my ex-husband, Bill, somewhat more comprehensively than I’ve been able to myself. It precisely encapsulates a chunk of the media mind-set that he grew up with on Vancouver Island in the 70’s, one that I’ve always had troubles mentally capturing outside of films like Wizards. It’s like those taupe and dark brown houses that cover swathes of suburbia, little tear-downs always with the same hardware store cupboards and red brick fireplaces, nestled in trees that look like they need pruning, that are like fading photographs of twenty minutes before I was born, when he was a teenager fresh from conquering high-school and discovering Vancouver as the fresh place to be.

I found a picture of him while I was tidying this week. It’s a photograph I insisted on taking from the stage before we mounted a play, possibly The Heretic, in Waterfront Theater. It’s him with a bunch of people who used to be our friends, Johnathan Ryder, his wife Nancy, (still pregnant with the baby), John Murphy, and Tom Jones, sitting in first row. If anyone has a scanner I could use, I would like to make a copy to send to him. I think he would like it.

Download Music: New DeathBoy Track: Anuism (feat. Mog Xykogen)