n: vb: the spice of imagination
Every time I do a mail-out, I get to find out exactly how painfully out-of-date my address book really is. My in-box immdiately gets multiple replies from from Mailer Daemons and Do Not Reply‘s. In order to recitfy this sorry state of affairs, I’ve put together this little poll so that !!you too!! may be invited to my Spectacular Happenings (TM).
You are most cordially invited to
Jhayne’s Fashionably Late Birthday Party
located at 2nd & Cotton, just off Commercial Drive.
Saturday, July 15th
from five:thirty onward.
Just follow the chalk arrows.
BYOB, friends, instruments, sweets, savouries, BBQ-ables, bubbles, whatever-you-like.
Re-post as appropriate.
June 9, from 8pm to 1pm with live entertainment beginning at 9:30.
Sunbury Hall, Sunbury Park, 10409 Dunlop Street, North Delta
(Arrangements are in process for a shuttle to and from Scott Rd. Skytrain)
Tickets: $20, $30 for an open bar. They are to be paid for in advance. Please RSVP at geminifest@yahoo.ca
No Guest Shall Be Admitted Without a RSVP Response Card. Pseudonym Formalwear and Mask are Required.
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Speaking of parties, I need a venue for my birthday party. My apartment has grown too small for the number of people who’ve been asking what I’m doing this Saturday. Does anyone have a flat bigger than mine they would be willing to put up for a night? Or a house? House preferable, really. Back yards and porches are a double plus for any party, in my opinion. We’re an exceptionally non-destructive group, the worst we’ve ever done was set off confetti bombs and I’ll vouch that you’ll get ice-cream.
“Tories to legislate fixed American-style election terms“: this is worrisome. Currently, it’s up to the prime minister to decide when to call an election any time up to five years. The idea is that the government should fall when it can’t pass legislation. Otherwise the electorate has no recourse, they have to wait for however many years to oust the government and get one that does have the support of the people. Right now in the U.S. George Bush’s government is hovering around 25-28% approval rate. If this was Canada they couldn’t get a bill passed in the House of Commons, but in the U.S. they get two more years of Bush. Another reason why fixed terms are bad is that only half the time the government is running for reelection (i.e. trying to please voters). Shouldn’t they try to please the voters all the time instead of whenever the election looms around?
KindelingBoy Michael is having a party tomorrow evening to celebrate his final freedom from Too Much School TM.
My cool news today is this letter:
Hi,
Just a head’s up to let you know that I’ve added your blog, Dreampepper, to the British Columbia Blogs directory and aggregator at publicbroadcasting.ca – if for any reason you do not want your blog listed, please let me know and I’ll take it back down immediately.
Cheers,
Justin
I don’t know how they found me, but the list looks pretty small, so I’m pleased. Apparently the main criteria be that they’re well written, been around for awhile, and update frequently, as well as having that undefinable “something”.
Max Headroom creator made Roswell alien.
Deathboy makes a song based on the very first episode.
This week has been a successful book of matches, every day burning when I strike it with my eyes. I feel like a chemical reaction, sparkling and fizzing, exploding strong-box secrets and licking what’s inside. If I were Rapunzel, this would be me letting down my hair, suddenly afraid that my princes were just a dream. This would be taking myself and my bedding and my famous blue raincoat to wind my fairy-tales a rope, offering them a way in instead of a noose, banishing my fears, losing them one by one like beads from a broken string.
AXE’s GameKillers advertisement series.
Adidas Idicolor viral-marketing films. (watch PINK especially)
party at my place
housewarming : housecooling : birthday : publication
tuesday, march 21st
8 o’clock
call for directions
604. three too, one poem
Strangely, I found myself in a house last night that I used to be intimately familiar with. It’s a small place just off Cambie, an odd little duplex left over from the sixties. Almost ten years ago, the tree out front had bicycles lashed to the length of it. It used to be a party house. If there was a crowd gathered out front, I would just walk in. Being there again was like looking through an incredibly distorted photograph. All the furniture was gone, replaced, different, but the underlying structure remained identical. I remember sweeping things off the tile counter that separates the kitchen and the dining room and using it as a small square bed. I curled with candles in my hands in the little window nook, my bare toes against the old thin glass, offering fire to the smokers congealing on the tiny porch next to it. Now Alec lives there, with his twin brother, gradually filling it with strange mechanical bits of home-made light-up furniture and rich vintage finds gleaned from local alleys.
I met him Friday, at Alicia‘s delightful Anti-Valentines party, and we spent from there until 7:40 this Sunday evening together. If he never talks to me again, I’ll quite understand. However, I found him marvelous company. We stayed up late last night watching Six String Samurai and, honestly, anyone who doesn’t question my sleeping with a knife is probably that much closer to being okay in my books. Thank you Alicia for the goodly gracious idea of inviting him. (Though you’re only half right. He can out-geek me on technicals, but I out-geek him with culture).
Earlier than that, Friday, I was caught being ridiculous at my workplace by someone off the street I vaguely hope will either never see me again or spread the legend farther. See, the computer had been played with by the owner, James, the previous night and something he did had destroyed the sound card drivers. Silence drives me crazy. It was hours before he called me back and I received permission to do a RESTORE on the system. Hence, singing Gorillaz at the top of my lungs, trying to echo off the very back wall, and dancing on top of the counters in a lull between actual bouts of working. In my defense, it happened gradually. First I was simply singing, then louder, then dancing as I put shoes away and filled out little bits of paperwork. Finally I vaulted up and did the deed, shaking booty for the entire walking world to see. We have incredibly large front windows. People think I’m strange, but really, it’s just that I forget what I’m doing.
I made a brilliant deal at the club tonight. Nicole and Matt brought me to Sanctuary and by chance we sat next to a friendly stranger. When I first began talking to him, I asked why he wasn’t dancing. When he replied that he’d recently wrecked his ankle, I politely enquired how he’d hurt himself. He clipped a starling while sky-diving, he said. He’d been bringing his seven year old nephew up for a run and had turned on his back to show him what falling through a cloud looked like. Hitting a bird is a one in a thousand chance, he said, in an airplane. Million to one when you’re free-falling.
I was impressed.
More so when I found out that he’s illiterate. “How on earth did that happen to you?” I asked, taken entirely aback. He grew up in Northern Ireland. A bomb blast when he was twelve. “Oh right, you’re the people who leave bullets in your post-office walls.” A quarter of his bones are now made of steel, his right hand is warped, and his skull is almost entirely artificial. He still knows Gaelic, however, as that’s what he’d been taught as a child. Home-schooling, apparently, though he’s lost almost all his mandarin. (go figure?) So I struck a deal. First, before I entirely had a grasp of the bizarre situation, I offered to swap some English for some Gaelic. When he’d filled me in a little more, explaining that it hadn’t been for lack of language programs with incredibly impressive pedigree, I offered something different. He chooses the book and I read to him in exchange for Gaelic lessons.
He stopped mid-thought, struck by that. “I just might, you know. That’s a new one.” I hope he takes it.
I’ve invited him to Korean Movie Night. I drew him a map.
Nick Petrie has rented Club 23 west Cordova for his birthday party tonight.
Doors open at 9. Cover’s five bucks.
The company’s going to be delicious and the music two-fold. Mike is going to wow us all with his skills as DJ Spaz, and DJ Heidrogen has come all the way from Kamloops. Be there or be bloody square, yo.
Kissing by the bridge, that’s something for my list of thing’s I’ve always wanted to do.
So with many thanks to the glorious Stephen, Graham and I are back with internet.
Sunday, January first, there will be a chill unwind-from-partying party-gathering at my apartment starting at three in the afternoon.
If you are unaware of the address, either e-mail me at bloodkrystal hot-mail or call three to one poem for directions.
It will also be a welcome home to Graham, who finalizes moving in with us on Sunday, and a chance for the locals to visit with James Everett, who’s only in from Montreal until Monday afternoon.
We’re having a hair-cutting party at Sara‘s house right now. The people around me right are drunkenly preparing to play strip poker, I think with the same sense of hope as young boys that agree to play stripping games with young girls who are loaded down with four layers of scarfs, costume jewelry, and gew gaws in spite of the obvious disparity against their t-shirts and jeans. (Though I admit that Mike may simply be playing because it’s poker.) They are laying down rules and trying to pick on the men, who aren’t complaining.
Sometimes I am almost appalled at my lack of interest in these things. Everyone else is rapt, impatient with their cards, (those who aren’t having sex in the bedroom, that is), and I am across the room instead, lost in the laptop screen, feeling uncomfortable in my suddenly short hair and playing with the music, trying to find something that would be suitably amusing for people to take off their clothes to.
In the darkness I came to the mountainside. A red woman opened the door, velvet and calm, cats twining around her ankles. When I step outside of my work, if I escape early enough, and look up into the welcoming sky, the blue looks as thick as a hallucination. I think I cried in my sleep because there’s a light smeary path of leached dye running down my cheek from my right eye. Just enough tracery of purple to catch my eye in the mirror when I blindly brush my teeth. I look like a comic book character. There’s a curl of it on the back of my right hand too, where my face must have rested. A perfect curl describing the bones of my hand in Fibonacci’s most perfect sequence of gold.
I feel adrift today. For the first time in over a week, I have no plans for my evening after work. When eight o’clock ticks to, I will be rudderless. My feet will be wind upon pavement waves and wandering. It will be cold, however, so I will likely go home. Weigh the anchor in folding the laundry that has eaten my bed from under me and tidy the endless small papers that collect in slippery drifts against my furniture. There are flat surfaces here, I just need to find them again under the detritus of never being home. I would rather that when people come in, they don’t take a minute to wonder where it’s possible to sit.
Jacques and I split the money fifty/fifty, (minus Ray‘s personal donation). He broke even and I’m going to be able to pay my transit inflicted debt. I don’t know how many people came. I would guess a number around fourty. It was a room full of eccentric twenty-somethings and middle aged men, a very two dimensional look into my social life. I wonder how much they mixed. People like Chistoph and Will are likely to mingle with anyone, but so far my only word on the party was Dominique calling this morning to quickly tell me what happened after she, Rowan, Travis and Josh left the party.
There is no buzzer for 440 w Hastings, so people took turns in the cold glass atrium, watching the door. On one shift, I invited in two people off the street who seemed as if they were coming to the party. Turns out we didn’t know either of them, but they looked right. Long coats, long hair, a combined aura of geeky conversation. Another shift was twenty minutes alone, wrapped in my shawl against the chill and finishing Douglas Coupland’s Miss Wyoming until my mother came down with my brother Robin. I was glad of the relief, I didn’t want to miss Rowan playing pop songs on his accordion. It’s delightful. An entire corner of the room dissolved into laughter when they realized they were listening to Nine Inch Nails. Anyone who took photographs, I would appreciate if you would send them to me to post, (fully credited), into my flickr account.
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
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.
