the prospect of suffering

Toronto is measured now more by time than distance. I leave at six, get there close to midnight. I still have nowhere to stay.

Traditional News Year’s is coming, as well as another city, and I’ve been considering if it means anything to me. Today as I was cooking my meal for the train, I was trying to tally up my last three hundred and sixty-five days. So far I’ve been instrumental to one divorce and three affairs. Both my lovers this year ran off on me with someone else and let us all find out by accident. I discovered someone else never loved me in return and one that night stands can be frighteningly easy.

All of it adds up to so very little that it hurts me. It used to be that my passions repaid me in kind. I don’t know what happened or how to fix whatever it is that shattered. Where is the bowl I kept my heart in? The one I used to offer in dreams to passing strangers as an alms cup. I want to think that my soul is racing to find me and that all the time in between is time standing still, but I know that it’s crying for no use. Apologies aren’t coming, I’ve been forgotten somehow. I’ve seen this face before in the mirror, it’s unhappy. At least when I’m not in Vancouver, I don’t have to think, “He’s walked this street.” It’s like changing where I live in my head. There’s a hi-hat hit and a deep thump of bass and the place I was forgotten isn’t inside me anymore. It’s in front of me, on this keyboard, and I’m emptying everything painful into the ether for you to see and read and maybe understand. You’re out there, it happens, just like everyone else. Why did you never call me back? Only the musician ever told me how to find him.

I see your picture, all of you, any, and I smile with a sting in my ribcage. I lie down my walls and I let you in again like the best kind of refrain. I love you, yeah yeah, baby, let’s do it again. The part of me that marries people is still carrying you.

Do-wop-she-bop-pretty-damn-bang.

There are some basic elements that pain shares with surprise, but I couldn’t tell you what they were right now. I’m too busy trying to open my unfinished business like a dried flower in my mind that’s going to draw me back to Vancouver. All I can find is a job offer, Creative Director of a Friendster-type website, and maybe that I need to pack my things properly. My dream machine is hiccoughing, refusing to process anything that isn’t movement forward. What I need versus what I get. The end of this story has yet to be written so maybe I can fight my way through the ranks of mediocrity with a pen. Ink my skin the same way some people use school to charm the corporation. Electric glass pages, as many as I can collect, strapped to the back of my night time invitations. Writing like lyrics, writing because it’s what we came here for. I want to feel my hand in the hand of the world, keening with me that things have to change to be better, that what we have isn’t enough to live off. There’s too much starvation and not enough education.

I just might get that tattoo here. Just to carry something with me.

the closest I’ve ever come to begging

I stepped outside with no direction except away from the fear. Years long, it lay unjustified until tonight. Solid, it destroys, shreds. My feet stopped at the edge of the street and I watched my hands gather snow into a little ball. This runs deep. I’m beginning to feel my lack of sleep like a knife. Every hour I laid awake in the past week is now a weight tied to a vice that’s seizing my throat closed. I didn’t look away when my body stood and began to walk. I was too busy locking my joys away in logical conclusions that describe why I should always know better. Who am I to ascribe worth to my self? This is the argument. This is the cause and self-hatred. Hope should never be let into my house. It has keys and is cruel. The piece of snow my body heat turned into ice became a metaphor and I threw it violently down, away, and didn’t look when it shattered.

>slowly

I did not ask to be let in to their room, but I was welcomed. My coat was told to come off, my scarf and shoes as well. The hat was to live on the back of the couch, come stay. It’s cold outside and we’ve made things with chocolate. My sad suspicions told me this was a bad idea, this was a moral test I would fail, but I stayed because the welcome was genuine and it is not their fault that I am wary and wounded. I sit pointed away, a puzzle composed of elbows and knees that fold into themselves and touch nothing else, and I am hesitant to speak, to intrude upon these people who were not planning for me, who do not know me except as an accessory, but I am handed a cat and expected to be at ease. Expectations and cats are fabulous pieces of social control. Peer pressure, peer pressure, watch some of our television and learn to be a little more real to our eyes.

I should have left when my trust kicked in. Comfort isn’t allowed right now. I should know this more thoroughly than anyone. It hasn’t been at all this year. Instead my lessons require stronger aversion therapy, because look – I’ve made the same mistake twice. When he came in, I put down my dignity, the very little I’m left to scrape together, and invented gods to pray to, so that it might rate some significance to another human being. I never should have come without being called. It was a very cold walk home, long because I couldn’t see through my salt stinging pretence of integrity. There are no angels, only people with wings. A woman stopped me half way when she said, “Hey honey, don’t look like that. If they see you’re broken, they won’t want you.” My feet gave out and she kept walking. Tomorrow I’ll find out if I bruised my knees, all I know now is that I can barely feel my fingers.

There is no distinction in writing this down, but it allows me to communicate with the ether. The vast formless place that language came from. I have been realizing this is my spirit guide, this is my starving on top of the mountains. I try to make here worthwhile with information dissemination, as if every link were an apology to the possibly hypothetical reader. Of course everything here is public. No matter how useless or sacrificial I am to my needs, no matter how exasperated I am at myself for pretending to worth, if it weren’t, this would be the equivalent to screaming into an empty box, closing it, then expecting to hear echoes the next time it’s opened.

I was taken care of in every way that never matters to me. That’s why I forget, you see, because needs and desires are different ripples on the dance floor and my body can twist without me. Bread is nothing, but oh, holding my breathe for me. (‘?o baby i wouldn’t like Death if Death were good:for when(instead of stopping to think)you begin to feel of it’). The heart, that’s what insists on guiding me, that’s what needs to be fed when it complains. There was a warmth in my hips when he sat with me. I remembered how suddenly his hands had defined the curves of my memories, but I knew by the tilt of his laughter that I wasn’t going to be let in where I’ve needed to be. Out(in)side is still starving, there is more than an empty two days. There’s a few years backed up, complaining, waiting for me to address them in some grand speech. Last week I whispered to them. “Remember that name you’ve always kept secret? It’s talking to me.” Last week I forgot who I am, and persisted as who I used to be. See, last year I knew how to smile.

  • Ted Dewan designed a series of “DIY traffic-calming happenings,” including living room furniture sets in the middle of the road.
  • Atheist group offers free porn in exchange for Bibles.
  • Steadman, a band that released their whole catalog as MP3s when Elektra folded, is seeking donations.
  • I can’t see the logistics, but I don’t care what’s in my bank account.


    andrew dimmit – urban clowns
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I leave Vancouver for Montreal on Saturday December 10th, 9 in the morning. I’m returning December 24th in the evening, arrival expected around 8pm.

    These strange anchors in my life, I’m visiting with them tonight. Chains several years long, I’m always the only one. Over in decency, I’m singular, the bed. This one, he cried once. It meant a lot to him that I held his hand. We see each other more now, but less. His computer’s broken, our connection severed. This one, they confessed beautiful things looking at me with eyes like sand, my fingers trapped in his hair. It’s all been waiting for the blossoms to burst into fire. Time creeping along on little cat feet, giving me more reasons to be wanted. This is picking up the pieces I dropped a year ago, two years, three. If this is growing older, I like it. I’m better suited, pin stripe and today a historian stopped me in the street. This will sound ridiculous, but you’re like a chic version of a rich person from the middle ages.

    Sunday night, a group is getting together to go to Lady of the Camillas. 8pm at the Havana, tickets are either $15 or half price if you can pretend to remember the password, some long complicated word beginning with L.

    The picture framed in my closet used to be in a movie theater. I wonder if somehow metaphorically, it burned down this week. Unborn, our friend yelled at us. All of this wasn’t allowed, so instead we held our breath and closed our eyes. Nothing changed but perfect timing. It’s a little rescue.

    Tonight Jason, Jeff, and W. Stretch are hosting a gathering in New West, Benn Neufeld is finally having his house-warming over by Commercial and First, and the Work Less Party are having their Circus party down at the Maritime Centre. I’m going to attempt to hit as many of these as possible, armed with the knowledge that at each place are people visiting who I otherwise would never get to see before I leave. Burrow is up from the States for the Masque, for example, and this is the first time Benn has lived in civilized confines for something like a year. It’s now nine:fifteen. My clock says go.

    (secretly) I turned around (to love you)


    tinted vintage by onfinite.com
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Start Again: Blue haired calling. Blue haired, one-eyed. Wisdom like a bitmapped earth, programming the tree to find all the answers. Breaking fast with genius, reminiscent of the night before the night before, lasting impressions of that would be really great, that would be enviable, let’s spread disease through the pommels of guns. DNA discussions, eggs on the plates, grasping for a cure to AIDS. We walk to Broadway with time still left in our pockets. We sit where I sat last Sunday. Half a million dollars at this meeting, I got to go. People walking past, strangers with bags, with different coloured jackets. It’s winter time.

    Work is a back-seat exploration into self-pity glad I don’t know how to drive.

    Start: Missed rehearsal, missed Sophie. Very simply missed my walk to the bus-stop. Missed a bit of everything. My eyes were closed. Open now, the phone rang. My directer, in a panic. Fluster and worry, flashing to life, spending the night. The telephone, answering questions, reassurances. Exhaustion trying to claim me back but now I’m awake. I’m got left-over chinese food on the stove, I’m going to be a gourmand’s nightmare. Toss it all in one pan, toss it all around with a fork, drip out the grease and call it food. I’ve got creases on my belly where my clothing pressed too tight in my sleep.

    Work is a multi-lingual dull burning drive into why am I not done yet with this?

    Start a year ago: His hair is tied in a kerchief, nothing imagined, but I like it. This is cotton street. Blue print patterns, every line a perfect curl. Cleaning, I found him in a photograph, behind me. I was so sad, corsetted and dismal. I can feel the black behind her eyes, I am surprised. I’d forgotten the day. How my love would not come to my show. Instead, this one crept behind me.

    The door opens, I am blinded.

    how is it possible that I never knew about this?

    I have been informed about something wonderful. Something stupendous. Dammit! If it’s been only a few weeks earlier I could have seen Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead!

    There is a theatre in vancouver that I could LIVE at.

    http://www.placebo1183.ca/

    We must go. We must go and go and go and go and become so regular that they let us go for free.