Tag: ideas

because my brain does stuff like that

One of my morning neighbors, those people I pass regularly enough in the morning to recognize, is a pleasantly unremarkable young man, taller than I am, with short reddish blond hair and a black jacket, who I never would have noticed except for his astonishing, perpetual grin and permanently glued on ear phones. He is thin, caucasian, and completely bland.

Somehow, though I am rarely there at the exact same time every day, and sometimes take a different route entirely, it is more likely than not that when I line up to wait for the light at Pender and Howe, he will be there too, smiling, facing me from the other side, oblivious to the entire world, trapped instead in whatever he is listening to that makes him so happy. He does not notice the traffic or the weather or the time, and only begins to walk when the people around him step forward into the street.

All that said, he still would not have made any impression upon my memory except that one day, the day I truly noticed him, I had a terrible, strong, and wrenching idea as we were passing each other in the intersection. I fancied that what played in his ear phones every day wasn’t music, but screaming.

hold the wheel



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I saw you and looked down. I changed the subject of conversation. You walked past like silver, as if I could touch the air you had just walked through and feel solid flesh.

I counted my lovers the other day, using myself as one unit. My body, my bended bones and muscles, an abacus bead. Click, like this, and he slipped in here and my back arched taut, hips drawing the strings of shiva’s bow. She bit me once, hard, at the bus-stop, one of the first times we kissed. I’m at twelve consensual, my friend at thirty-four. I thought about water falling, how many times I’ve held hands in rain. The contrast of skin colours, how I loved to see my white against the wood colours of tanned skin, how I loved the white of my skin matching the belly that I kissed. I would like to meet a boy this time who wants things I’ve never thought of, tells me the secret names of roses, tells me that he likes touching me in public. I would like to not be shot through with sacrifice.

There’s a girl sitting alone in a room, her music is as lonely as she is and she can’t find anything else. Her clothes are piled on the floor among too many books and papers. She’s scared.

Newly minted life, that’s another thing coming. Bill and I were talking about technology the other day after fireworks, and I felt for the first time in a long time that I was aware, like I’d been roughly shaken from a trance. He argued that new things weren’t that, only the newest illustration of an age-old idea. I pointed out that new species only come from previous iterations of animal, that everything comes from somewhere. The system self-propagating. The New finding you because you’ve put the settings that way. I know enough for two of us. The trick is in the procedure, the knowing how to act with it, the finding out what to do next. I feel distinctly unintelligent because I have so many tools, so many pieces of information, yet no ideas.