Yes, I live in Canada. Why do you ask?

Jeepers, I thought last night was unexpectedly exciting, what with successfully hooking Nicole up with Nick for the holidays, finally meeting Dominique‘s new little baby, SURVIVING NICK’S NEW VAN CATCHING FIRE, (no one was hurt. I pulled Nicole out and we put the fire out with snow), and admitting rather bashfully to someone that I wrote about our personal life on the interblags, but today’s news sort of trumps it, so I’ll just get it out of the way and talk about yesterday in the next post…

I’ve just been hired as a cameraperson for Chanukah on Ice.

“Skate to Chanukah music or watch and nosh latkes and doughnuts.
Monday, December 22, 2008, 6:00-7:30 pm.
West End Ice Rink, 1750 Haro Street (Between Denman & Bidwell).
Admission: By donation. Skates are free.”


Which sounds, on the surface, like it’s going to be a Yiddish Icecapades, people dressed as sparkling, spinning dreidel, singing songs and throwing glitter under a rainbow of lights, but apparently it’s something a thousand times more hard-core bizarre. Something I would never have the wit or imagination to think up myself.

It’s a Candle Lighting on an Menorah made of ice, a meter high and shaped like hockey sticks.

Did you get that? Shaped like hockey sticks.

consider

“When my daughter Alison was born, in the tradition of a new parent, I began to photograph her, initially in a separate and private body of work.”

Every day since the last week of October Dominique pops up on my messenger with the same message, “Still pregnant.” A small thing, but powerful, as every time it reminds me she’s carrying an entire human being curled in her belly. Tiny hands, tiny feet, an entirely separate heart-beat. I’ll be glad when it’s born, though not as glad as her, I’m sure, who complains daily that she wants it out already. “I think it’s staying,” she messages me, despairing, “I’m over-due.” I know I can’t relate, not really, though I try, and feel I understand to a point.

I had a nightmare, once, that I was pregnant. I could see inside my belly, which had distended to translucency, and see that the child had sharp, triangular, razorblade teeth.

When the message doesn’t come, I wonder, “did it happen? Is she at the hospital now?” I’m torn between relief and wonder and disbelief, that she could be doing anything so incredible as I sit at my desk and help people with media software issues, until it is my turn to message her and ask, “Not yet?”, soothing the day back into something mundane. Earlier today she had an appointment with her midwife for a membrane sweep, and I was blaming that for her lack of message, while with a less rational part of my brain, I was crossing my fingers until she returned.

“Still round?” I asked, and eventually she replied, “Home again. Think I’m in labour, though.” “Excited?” “Contractions about every four minutes. Will check again in an hour or so. I am SO READY to be vacated.”

I know her contractions didn’t necessarily mean anything, she’s been having them on and off for over a week, but that was this afternoon and I haven’t heard word back since. That hour later check in never happened. Those fingers are still crossed. Maybe she’s having her child right now. I was hoping for a Hallowe’en baby, but November 12th should do just fine, too.

I felt I needed a chatty, rather useless post

4

Quantum Computer may debut next week.

My room looks like it was hit by a bomb from the wrong side of the gypsy tracks. Dominique came over, brought me valentine chocolates1, and finished off the bottle of wine that Michael2 left while I was packing. Evil, it was all evil, and delightful, and delicious. We didn’t pillow-fight in our underwear, but she flashed her panties, which were so rock-star that she broke my webcam.

Things discovered whilst packing: I have significantly more knives than I remember, but considerably fewer movies.
Whosoever has my films, this is the time to return them.

I’m beginning to think I can pack my entire collection of belongings into less than eight boxes. I’m going to try and slim it down to six, so if there’s ever been a non-essential oddment in my room that’s caught your fancy, this might when you want to say so. Guests are having small gifts pressed upon them, random possessions coming to light that I no longer have a use for – music, books, movies, bins of sidewalk chalk, small ceramic squirrels3… The list continues. I’ve started a free-box that I’m going to put in my hallway for people to paw through. It may even eventually move to the lobby.

Merry Lupercalia!

1 my first in two years, but they’re lindt, so worth the wait
2 worst picture ever, he’s rather more attractive
3 my relatives back east were under the misapprehension that I was stuck at age 6 until I went back to live there in 2000. all gifts that arrived previous to that either had pink, kittens, or both in prodigious quantity. now I simply don’t get any.
4 here’s her x-mas video.

I’m more scraped up from folk-dancing on monday than learning to roller blade today. I lose.

Greek Day is on Sunday from noon to 9 p.m. Broadway will be closed from Blenheim to MacDonald to make room for vendors, music, performances and dancing in the streets. Bring yourself and your friends and be prepared to shake some poly-rhythmic booty. Liam, Vicki and I will be going.

So the other day, Monday actually, Dominique and I did something extremely silly. We made this sign:

The start of our grand boyfriend adventure

Dominique wrote the sign and, after attaching it to sticks, I carried it. (I lack the skills required to create something so girlish). We only got as far as Penelope’s before someone stopped us. A friendly older man in a white shirt thought it was funny and insisted we go in and show the owner.

Penelope's

Already feeling pleasantly ridiculous, we went in and let everyone read it. The owner laughed, said he wished he was younger, then told us to wait, he had just the person. The first man was then sent out to fetch someone as we assembled for a picture to celebrate our first successfully acquired “boyfriend”. The man returned with Memo, a tall young fellow, who had no idea what was going on.

Memo, it turns out, has only been in Canada a month and is still learning english. We asked him if he could bowl and, with a puzzled expression, he said yes. The other men, with shooing motions with their hands, told him he was to go with us. He acquiesced, which was nice of him, and walked up the Drive with us while we laughed and explained that Dominique had been worried that no one would say yes.

Clap hands.

Our second “boyfriend” was collected at Abruzzo’s, an Italian cafe in the block after Grandview Park. Francesco, a real character, who admitted a block later that he lied in answer to our skill testing question, “Do you know how to bowl?,” so he could come with us. I’ve never met anyone so stuffed with machismo. He was amazing. Dominique describes him as perhaps “the most macho thing to walk the earth,” and she may be right. He has a small tattoo of some sort of horned creature on his right arm and when I asked him what it was, he fumbled around and replied with, “Something strong, you know? Scary, and big, dangerous or a bull or something, really manly. Masculine. Strong. Fierce. Maybe like a demon thing. I don’t know what it is, but it’s, you know, manly.”

her first shot

When it came to bowling, the woman who worked there was better than all of us put together. She threw a strike from the seating area. Through pure luck, we each got a strike too, but I was bowling left-handed to save my wrecked shoulder from agony, Dominique can’t stay upright to save her life, Memo had never bowled five-pin before, and Francesco took everything far too seriously. He won, actually, in spite of our group effort to beat him. No matter how poor our aim, he had some terribly encouraging comment, like “It’s going to be a strike this time, I can tell.” or “Oh good try. Good try. You’ll get it next time.” Memo was an angel throughout, grinning when we had fun swinging Francesco’s words back at him, twisting them from irritating to funny. All three of us found it nerve-wracking, but silly too, how little Boyfriend #2 realized we weren’t appreciating his help. There was an especially choice moment, just after Francesco realized he was in the lead, when he asked if the winner got a kiss. I think I saw Dominique’s hands tighten on her ball for a moment and I know I saw Memo just freeze. Instead of looking at him to answer, I kept my face as straight as possible and answered in a level voice, “I would hope not,” I said. “How painfully antique that would be. No fair at all. The winner already gets to win. I say the loser gets a chocolate bar.”

But as it’s now dawn on the longest day of the year, I’m to bed. This is the television to be continued…

keep jhayne from partying alone


jhayne as a southpark kid
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Jacques LaLonde and Jhayne Holmes present

KEEP JHAYNE FROM JHAYLE

a party of proportion

#340 – 440 west hastings

The Date: Friday, November 25th (today)

The Time: 9:00 – onward

The Goal: $300.00


Pass it on.

The day of the party has woken up. A thick spicy thing, too crisp to cut, with a sky too dull to remember. Another average Vancouver morning. It’s warm, but it’s wet. It’s raining, but it’s held close to our wool wrapped breath. I come home and put Brian Eno and Sigur Ros on to play in an attempt to escape the abrupt mundanity of walking home in the middle of a bland Friday morning full of school kids and transit commuters with sweeping grand songs about nothing at all. It’s that kind of day. (The jury is still out on how it’s working). Part of it is that Dominique kept me out later last night than I had planned and, unfortunately, my weariness has not only continued but spread, creating a fine measurement where guilt, intention, desire, and night come together into one thing. I’m not sure how I’m going to survive tonight. My endurance will be entirely complicit with whoever comes. Mark that file UNKNOWN.

Jenn is coming over now, bringing milk to match my cereal, playing the cheerfully complimentary yang to my still yawning and starving yin. We would go out for the traditional breakfast, but we’re broke, so instead I’m providing spoons and bowls and somewhere warm and welcome. Hopefully, I will have tided enough to make a habitable space by the time she arrives. It’s difficult to clean around a sleeping ferret. It’s possible for the animal, just over a foot long, to take over the entire bed. It’s tempting to simply curl up around him, let the day turn awhile without me, and sleep until the heralding buzzer wakes me up.

If anyone is interested in helping set up for the party, please either arrive half an hour early to the venue or call Jacques on his cell phone at 604.812.1496.

I cursed myself for forgetting my place

I found myself unexpectedly in a pub full of familiar theatre people this evening after rehearsal. As it’s been close to three years since I was regularly working shows in Vancouver, there was a tacit agreement that I belonged, but hardly anyone could place me. Jacques arrived, and when he finally noticed me and said hello, I caught several people relaxing. They’d been worried that I was some strange mis-perception, a mental twitch of a stranger who only seemed familiar. I collected a few e-mail addresses of people I’ve missed talking to. I’ve got to remember to send them an appropriate hello before I go to bed.

Then she sank down to her knees, grasped the cutter by both hands, took a deep breath and plunged the long blade through the middle of the package, through the middle of the masking tape, through the card- board through the cushioning and (thud) right through the center of Waldo Jeffers head, which split slightly and caused little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun…

My teeth feel sweet now. Rose gave me a black to smoke while we stood outside socializing after. I accepted, forgetting that I don’t smoke, never have. The tops of my lungs are now complaining, reminding me that it’s been six years since I’ve lit anything up, but I mystified myself by having all the proper mannerisms. I suspect I will either eventually blame the city I live in, as Vancouver is a place where Marijuana isn’t considered a drug by any but the repressed children of the far right, so everywhere there are people with little rectangles of white paper rolled into tubes to be gestured with, or my exes who smoked and so gave me a character to unconsciously pattern. Either way, I was somewhat perturbed by how easily I took holding the soothing crackle of tar and clove.

  • Texas Voters Approve Ban on Gay Marriage.
  • Denver voters make adult possession of one ounce or less of marijuana legal.
  • Kansas education board downplays evolution.

  • this is an oldest story


    sarah boyer – freshmeat
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I have found my laughter from where it was hiding. This time, for the very first time, it’s allowed out of the closet with tears still in its eyes. When I grew up, I grew up in a strange canadian cultural vacuum. I would stare out the window of the truck at all the houses gliding past and wonder what real people had inside thier houses. What was on the other side of so many doors? I lived in hotel rooms and on some basic level, they’re all the same. Clinical transiency. Fake flowers, soulless bedspreads that match the thick ugly curtains, television remotes that you either find next to the miniature fridge or bolted to the table. Cable is an option, but there’s always an ice machine that clunks in the middle of the night. I used to pad out into hallways and sit against them sometimes, because it was a light I could read by. Anonymous. The trick is that they’re always anonymous. The furniture is not your furniture, the life you live within those walls belongs to no one. I grew up being not real people.

    My body jerked me across my bed when I woke up this morning. An unfamiliar hand had touched me on the shoulder. Left over reflexes I really should work on controlling a little better. I was up late, reading, unable to think about my tomorrow. Too many things. I have a livingroom picnic this afternoon with Brian. We’re putting down a blanket and making sandwiches. If I was a better person, I would suggest we pretend we’re on a beach somewhere, but I’m not. So I won’t. Breakfast today with precious friends led into a pleasant walk up the drive and some actual grocery shopping. It’s like my world spun around. A smile has been affixed to my face. Someone I don’t know stopped me on the street on my way home with my bags, “I see you all the time on the drive, but I’ve never talked to you, but today I felt I had to say something. You’re really pretty when you’re happy”. He was my height, with dark brown hair and a slightly crooked baseball hat. I wouldn’t recognize him again.

    sway me now, when andrew said he saw the car, I thought something else


    artist unknown
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    My mind began kindly to me then slipped into exhaustion. By the time I was in bed, all my thoughts were old. I should have called up Brian and had him fetch me over. It occurred to me, he would have banished my bad percussion nightmares. What’s good for me, I’m barely doing it these days. I hold out my hands to all the people who can’t quite help, and expect the rest of me to simply deal with it, forgetting that my reserves have almost entirely been used up. I think of running through a neighborhood, I think no, that place isn’t mine anymore. I don’t have a place anymore. My second home’s been closed to me.

    I ran into Bill on my way to Dominique‘s Ghost Train evening. He still doesn’t know what to do with me. Jacques says after the baby is born, he’ll be able to deal with me as a human being again. I only know I could feel his bones through his coat like he was stuffed with sticks held together with fluid grace and days that stretch too long. Scraping himself thinner. Dominique and I talked about him later. She pinned him down with one word as if he were a particularly large butterfly. Elemental, she said, and I replied, he is a forest. I’m glad she knew him, she understands. In three years, no one else had a chance.

    I’m dressed as a witch today, all flowing black and glitter. Work allows me costumes this week, so I’m taking advantage of it by dressing like myself instead of a vague corporate whore approximation. Customers have been asking where to buy my out-fits, which would amuse me if they were perhaps a little more polite about it. It’s full time hours this week, because of Hallowe’en. Long shifts of not having a chance to take away sandwiches from across the street. I want to fall down at the end of it, take my shoes off and walk barefoot in some rain. I want to find myself a warm and willing partner to sip hot chocolate with and look out over our little bit of sea.

    Mirrormask is playing here this weekend at TinselTown. I hear of a group trip today at two o’clock, which is when I start my shift. The only weekend showing I can manage is the nine:thirty. Is anyone interested? I’m considering dropping in on it before the Saturday Clubhouse Party. I’d get there unpardonably late, if I could but care.

    Before I finally fell asleep, I lie in the dark alone for awhile while Ryan and Eva were in the livingroom, trying to pretend that I had my bed to myself, (excepting the ferret I had lodged in my belly). But for the five days he was at DragonCon, Ryan‘s been with me every day for almost three months. The feeling was alien, as if stretching out was a transgression against the basic nature of the world.

    come back to my spiders web of beautiful things

  • the conditions in Iraq for subcontracted workers under Halliburton.

    Doing sixty downtown, she’s going to be late for work, but the view reminds her of other cities.
    How the lights and by-ways of freeways work, how it’s strange now to see them in movies.
    I was there, she thinks, and that place, and that one. She can’t see a street she hasn’t walked on.
    The lights of the car behind them catch her eyes in the mirror and she turns her sight to the driver.

  • 85-year-old Seattle woman recruited by marines.

    A man in an orange hoodie picked up a sodden page of junk mail from the street and lay it across his shoulders like a cape, then rushed us. Dominique cried out, “hey look, there’s superman.” and I smiled, but didn’t feel like laughing. I was too tired, too worn by my day. I should have been home hours before, but the circumspection of social maneouvering left me outside. We had just been at a half-empty nightclub, trying to dance to eighties music. Dominique knew all the words. I didn’t. I barely recognized the music and none of the clientele. The rules of the dancefloor were strange, with not enough people to keep any cohesion to the space. Without warning, one might find themselves suddenly surrounded by the small group of japanese tourists or being threatened by the tiny elbows of the tottering girl in the corset who was trying very hard to be something. What, I couldn’t say. Only with Rick and Dominique was I comfortable. I sat on the side for a little while, watching everyone and feeling slightly too cliche to actually be doing what I was doing. I pulled out my book to write in, but decided instead to pull out my camera and threaten Rick with pictures. I shouldn’t be writing what my brain was trying to think.

  • U.S. Air Force testing new transparent aluminum armor.

    Vast layered conversations spanning six topics at once. She should find partners who speak like her.
    “I swore I wouldn’t do this again, but I think I’ve figured out why I’m going through with it.”
    She’s referring to three people. She’s referring to keeping a secret and possibly telling lies.
    She’s explaining why and who and when without them.
    “I wasn’t raised to believe in anything. I never expected to encounter something sacred.”
    Words, meanings. The resolution of a two puzzles pieces finding conclusion.
    He replies, “Religion was never something I had a use for, but sometimes the vocabulary is right.”
    Confirmation, a deduction of between the lines.
    The same path, but one person facing backward, one person blind.

  • U.S. finally gives up on upgrading missile defense.

  • Kokoro tomorrow instead


    masque
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    We missed Butoh today. However, after an aborted Dominique-Jhayne&Chris are-going-to-steal-Reine-for-breakfast, Chris and I are venturing out to find him a new digital camera. For this we employ our secret spy, our in on the man, Mr. Ferguson.

    My throat is still torn from howling at the women on stage last night. Called Stilettos and Strap-ons, Sylvia‘s group is new and rule-breaking. I entirely approve. As a segue into Rocky Horror, it was fabulous. A family reunion of utterly strange proportion. (No one knew I could femme quite like that, not even me.) We dragged my friend Amber from one event to the next, and I think she had a really good time. An unexpected meshing of social groups, but one I think I’m going to enjoy.

    Is there anything going on tonight?