n: vb: the spice of imagination
Burrow is staying with me this weekend. (She just got a new XKCD t-shirt and it being super squealy happy about it). 2 o’clock tomorrow we’re going down to Suspended, Boca Del Lupo’s WinterRuption show at Granville island with Nicole and Duncan.
At four, she’ll be playing bike-polo at Grandview Park, and then we’re going to SinCity in the evening with Wayne.
You are invited to any and all of these things. (Bike polo, obviously, requires a bicycle.)
I am almost too sick to move today, though I’m not as bad as I was last night. It started on my way over to Korean Movie Night after work, just something suddenly wrong with my stomach that doubled me over in the street and left me choking into the gutter at Broadway and Commercial. Surprised and thinking I was far closer to Christopher’s than I was to my own home, and knowing that if I went home, I would be alone, I decided the best thing would be to continue to movie night. If nothing else, if I was going to be a little out of it, there would be people to make sure I was safe. This proved to be the best idea, as eventually my illness surpassed all expectations and left me doing my best impression of wretchedly dying in the bathroom. Today I can keep water down and hobble around with some semblance of remaining upright, but my fever is still ridiculously bake-breakfast-on-my-forehead high.
I’m trying to get a ride home somehow, because otherwise I’m stuck here, is anyone available?
Course, this seems to fit my week fairly well, the pattern of a nice day ending in misery. Like, as if to off-set the fact that I was attacked by police dogs after SinCity, the nice mild hero who came in to mend the internet last week, (name of Robin), kept me company at work yesterday and bought me a darling little cactus from the florist next door to replace the one I accidentally neglected to death. I don’t think this one flowers, nor are the spikes soft like my last one, but it has sharp prickly little spikes, which is pretty neat. I’m rather pleased about it, actually. My new little cactus. It never would have occurred to me to buy one for myself, I felt a little too wretched over the death of my windowsill garden to replace any, so it’s good to have a second chance. No longer shall I feel a drifting pang of guilt when I walk into the neighboring florist.
Canadian content: Evelyn, The cutest little dead girl.
Kitsilano is an uninhabited kingdom at three in the morning. There are no cars and certainly no pedestrians, so when I walked into a pitch dark alley and heard someone running up the street I’d just turned off of, I turned around to mark how they passed, figuring it’s only safe to keep tabs on one’s surroundings. A jogger, I thought, running their dogs. Wrong. A large serious man with large black dogs burst into the alley mouth with an unexpected ricochet of violent barking and ran at me. Stunned, I stood my ground and braced myself. One of the dogs jumped at me, the one not on a leash, and grabbed onto my arm, trying to pull me down, which is perhaps the only thing that saved it’s eyes. Police, it had to be police. Sure enough, as I was dragged down to one knee, the man pulled out a flashlight and shone it directly into my eyes and tried to shout over the barking, “VPD! What are you doing in this alley?!” In a flash of anti-clever, I yelled, “What?!?” because what else could I do? Miss Manners doesn’t talk about these things. Half wrestling with what I think was a Doberman, I was not very capable of wit.
He called the dogs off, though they continued barking loud enough that house lights were clicking on up and down the lane, and asked me again.
“I’m going home!”
“Are you sure?”
“What, yes! Of course I’m sure!”
“Why are you in the alley?”
I shook the dog off and stood up, incredulous, resisting the urge to kick it.
“I’m going home. I go in the back door. What are you doing here?”
“Strangely enough, there was a report of a woman in someone’s back yard.”
“What? Strangely enough!? You attacked me with dogs because someone was in a back yard?”
At this, he had the decency to begin pulling the dogs back, though he wouldn’t take the flashlight off my face.
“Just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, ma’am. I would recommend in future that you only walk on designated pathways.”
Then he took off, leaving me blinking blindly in the alley, wondering what the hell just happened. My immediate urge was to drag poor Sam out of bed and go cop hunting. It was just too outrageous to parse on my own. Instead, as I woke him quietly blathering about big black dogs and barking, “It was all BARK BARK BARK, you don’t understand,” unable to understand how he’d managed to sleep through the noise, he calmed me down and put me to bed. I was still incredulous the next day, but it was easier to feel less persecuted in the morning.
I want an end to my unpredictable crying.
The air is full of tiny birds, wings fluttering too quickly. The tips of them are creaking against the stress like lungs choked with down. A cough and they scatter. There’s nothing to show where they were. Wind does not keep drawn lines, the beloved parabola exists only in our minds as a memory.
Unrelated: walking across a field, a thick flock of seagulls let me walk into the middle of them before taking up into flight and circling me perfectly. How callous I am, I thought, that I have too much science in me to experience this as a holy sign. Instead, I understand the way flocks stay together, what leads them, guides them. I know how to spot the lead bird. I’m not fool enough to pray.
I didn’t sleep from Saturday until noon Sunday. I have done more clever things than argue the socio-technological implications of ancient politics and family units until the sun has risen, it’s true, but I was in excellent company and the sun always rises.
Now you’re gone, leaving echoes of somewhere I used to feel at home. You walked away and I felt such a pain shoot through me, as if there was no such thing as mercy. I know you’re trying and that gladdens me a little, it seems a better place for us than that dire muck of misery that you’d put me in so carefully. I’m scared that when I see her, this her you’ve written about but carefully did not mention, she’ll be wearing something I gave you or I’ll have to see you love her. As serious as rain, it’s the only thing I can think of that could continue to ruin me. It’s stupid because I’m grown enough I should know better. I insist on it. I should be a better stone. You don’t know what to do with me. I hand you the pulsing ball that drives my blood and you drop it. I fall apart inside.
Delightfully, I had some especially kind partners on the floor to distract me last night, the sort where we take hands and whirl into something highly inappropriate for industrial music. Liam teaches me swing dances, for example, and Jonathan tangos with me in his kilt and big stompy boots. It’s gleeful when he lifts me up above his head and spins. I can feel him laugh through the music. (Note to self, call the man already). See, I’m everything shy of vices, so dancing is one of my only ways to salve this years constant and irritating sense of loss. I feel like I hang myself from my bones and when I move, it might even be with a heavy sort of elegance. Every twist of joint a kindness, a violent whispered argument in the dark behind my closed eyes, sounding like lovers who don’t want to wake the neighbors.
Course, my body feels like holy retribution today. Everything aches and spasms. Walking without limping has been a proven impossibility that I’m counting on a deadly hot shower to repair. In fact, I think that’s the next step. Hooray for adventure.
  I fell asleep once in front of tending a fire, an over sized teddy-bear as my pillow. When I awoke, it was startling. My hair thrown back, my feet half under me, the long slender piece of wood I’d used to prod the burning logs poised like a weapon over my baby/bear, I became a flame bronzed sculpture of the classic pose a woman makes protecting her child. Perfectly confident in myself and my action, I awoke the devil’s daughter because the sleeping bear Must Be Kept Safe. I was ready to spring, defend.
  I’m a little worn out from feeling like that all the time. I would appreciate respite, a chance even to merely rest aside someone else who is responsible for guarding others, like the two of us together would not have to be quite as alert to ward off danger and so have a chance to relax.
I have been silent here not from lack of content, (quite the opposite), but because my ex-roommate, James, in a fit of infinite wisdom, decided to take my modem with him when he moved out and hasn’t answered his door yet when I go across the hall to ask for it back. Tomorrow I plan on leaving a note. Thank you for the concerned letters. I am not as absent as the internet currently claims I am.
    My New Year celebrations began as whispers in water. Distant from the occasion, I was swimming through SinCity, (click for pictures), nothing astray from the usual. Dancing, moving, the occasional warm hello. Matthew passed me while I was talking with Sarah and I ran my fingers through his hair when his back was turned, as I used to do. He held me close for a moment, said he was sorry, then walked away.
    Counting down from five seconds to midnight happened on the dance-floor. The music calmed, we stopped thrashing about and reached out for each other, holding hands with whomever was next to us. There was an announcement of free champagne at the pool table. “Five,” we shouted, “Four.”. We started jumping with every number. “Three. Two.” and at “One”, I put my hands up and threw a prayer. May it all be right again some day. I miss you.
    Precious Lasilana and I were meant to skedaddle off to the Annex House-party on the heels of midnight, but it didn’t quite work out that way. First there was a brief medical emergency, a friend of ours, incautious with a high-tension social situation, had an anxiety attack and had to be sent to the hospital. Then we lost each other in the morass of black fishnets and too tight corsets. Finally Nick found me, told me that she was outside waiting. First, I thought, say my goodbyes. A hug for Christopher, a faux swoon for Meghan, and a moment being lifted off my feet by Ross, and I thought I was gone, but no. I turn and there he is, that annoying bane.
I’m going now.
Ah, I hope you had fun. Good night. There is a motion for a hug.
First you’re going to kiss me for New Years.
I don’t think I could handle that.
It didn’t ask you if you could.
I don’t have a choice in the matter, eh? He smiles.
No, I don’t believe you do. Find us a dark corner.
    On the back porch, in a tiny pool of space that the smokers have left by the rail, we stand together, quietly examining another with words. “How have you been?” “Stressed, you?” “Maybe worse, hard to tell.” “Yeah.” We hug and something snaps and melts, it’s small, but I can feel it in his spine. Our faces are both buried in hair, in shoulders, our arms are warm. We pull back to see again and abruptly, Richard yanks open the door from inside, “Matthew, Jhayne, sorry, it’s an emergency, you have to come now!”
    I begin to laugh, because how consummately flawless is his timing. If we were a film, this would be the moment where the music changes. Our heroes interrupted. I kissed him anyway, and then we ran impossibly quickly, hand in hand through the thick spiky crowd of heavily made-up women in towering heels and men in leather kilts and g-strings, all the way from the very back to out front the building.
    On the ground, propped up by the wall, is an unconscious girl in a green fairy costume surrounded by too many people who don’t know what to do. Immediately, Matthew and I pull off her panicking friends. Lasilana is already there, she had caught them trying to pour water down the girls throat in a poorly thought out attempt at reviving her and now as we arrived, she began holding people back, trying to calm them down, giving us room to work. I took her clammy body from the cold wall, lean her sitting sprawled against my own and tilted her head back against my arm, trying to open a clear passage for air. We get her name, Jennifer, from one of the smeary tear-faced friends and I begin saying her name, pinching her lightly, checking the tracking of her eyes. Her breathing was laboured as I checked her weakening pulse. Matthew gets on the phone with the paramedics.
    One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand, feels a little like the counting inside from earlier, but she doesn’t get to four. I switch quickly from her wrist to her neck. Still no pulse. Four is simply not on the agenda unless I do something. Matthew is busy on the phone, almost standing on the street, and I can’t see Lasilana. I assume she’s behind one of the cement pillars calming crowd people, so I go it alone.
    The heel of one hand in the middle of the chest, between her breasts, the other on top of it. I press down hard, pulling toward me sharply, press down again, again, remembering what to do without any consciousness. She coughs, fiercely gasps, and her eye-lids flutter. Something comes up that was blocking the air in her chest and her heart thuds almost audibly. I count eighteen a minute. The world spins again.
She is alive.
    I sit with her body against me, one hand holding her jaw forward, trying to prompt a response from her until the medics arrive. I don’t even know if anyone saw what I did. We interrogate the fiance, find out that she’d only had one drink, but also a pill and a sip of something that might have been GHB, but nobody knows for certain. We can’t find the guy who gave her the drugs to confirm anything, but at that point, it didn’t really matter. His description is fairly generic for a fetish club, he probably left after midnight. If we’re lucky, he was from out of town. In the end, we sent the fiance into the ambulance with her and explained the effects of shock to her friends. Lasilana lit up a cigarette and Matthew and I fell into each other.
    Again, I begin laughing. “Are you laughing at me?” “No, love.” I take his hand and we begin dancing to the faint music coming through the wall of the club. We’re calm and in control. I am, in fact, for a while. My forehead rests against his chin, then I start crying, just a little, through the smile. It’s a painful fairy-tale moment. Together we saved a life, together we’re singing softly to the music, I never meant to hurt you, together we’re dancing almost as flawlessly as we worked as a team.
    “Too precious to discard, too painful to keep.” It’s nice, no matter I don’t know how much it’s meant, no matter that I said it first, months ago, the sentiment is appreciated. It sums up so much of my painful year. It casts the right kind of glow to what happens next. He steps back, holds me a step away from him. “I think it’s time.” We’re gleaming, mischievous now. “Are you sure?” “Can’t think of a better time than now,” he says, and I can’t help but agree. There’s tears in my eyes still a little, but my heart must have shone like the moon on fire that moment. I begin to take off my rings and Lasilana approaches, “Would you like me to take those?” She proffers her hand, “Yes, please. Thank you.” I’m so glad.
“Are you sure? I’m not sure I can do this.”
“Never more sure of anything. I owe you more than this.
  Really you should be giving me a swift kick between the legs.”
“But then there would never be any children and that would be a shame.
  You might want to close your eyes.”
“No thanks darling, I want to see this one coming.”
    My hand felt like frostbite. As the snap of impact echoed off the building he put a dazed hand to his face and blinked his eyes. My fingers were imprinted white across his left cheek as if they’d been painted on with chalk. “Now I know why men roll with punches.” Lasilana approached and gave me back my rings, asked if he’d disappointed me in bed. We laughed and said Yes, but that was old news. “Not even with both hands and a flashlight” he said. I felt like we’d just starred in a series of events that had the strange accuracy of a post-typewriter conspiracy.
“I’ll call you.”
“That would be good.”
Then Lasilana and I, we walked out into the night like two vessels setting forth to sea.
For the first time in a long time, I felt beautiful.
Oh my wrack and toil, oh my heart and stars. The body aches today. Every joint feels violated and every muscle abused. On some very fundamental level, every snap and creaking pop declares dancing a success. I suspect I went into it somewhat violently last night, non-stop from nine-twenty to two-thirty. I jumped on people, was swung around by people, and was generally given plenty of open space, no matter how crowded the dance floor. All while running soley on an energy drink and some candy bars bought from the club vending machine. Take that, groaning machine. However much it hurts, I’m in better shape now.
a video of plants with eyes
There are some more videos of fake robots in the directory.
After my shower, I discovered two puncture wounds, equidistant from one another, on opposite sides of my neck. My best guess is that this is the price paid for hugging people with especially spiky collars. It looks odd, however, as if I were a product of some traditionalist sort of mad scientist who pulled the tiny plugs from my neck before letting me out. Too obvious, you see. I didn’t kill anyone who kissed me, however, so obviously I’m getting better at being in a cuddly public. I’m curious as to what sort of lipstick some of them used, as it took some scrubbing to remove it from my chest this morning, but I’ve no way of asking. Who are you people? I’ve no idea. My livejournal was brought up a few times, entirely by these people I don’t think I know. Apparently there are plans to friend me in the works, so that I might begin to, but so far no one’s followed through. Perhaps they too are lying in crowded knots of wanting to never move again.
A 13-foot Burmese python burst after it tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole.
I eye the car-seat and laugh to myself. This is my little escape. I could cut off all my strength with this. I could hold up the pillars of any quiet holy place. The back windows have stickers in them, obviously applied by tiny fingers. This is my beehive caged in the bones of a lion. Instead of pulling down stone, I will pull down delight. It’s just as devastating. Again, I’m not going to be alone, even when I’m by myself and standing in the rain, looking at the sky, and wondering what England is doing. We all have to tie back our hair some day, but my day was last year and this year once more, like a heart-felt coda was hit. Time to let it down. This is my scarlet banner. I will wrap it around my body. Your whisper. Life came crashing down, wasting, and now it’s time for me to remember the outline of my shadow. It’s not as scorched into the wall behind me as much as it used to be. Remember that icons are (beautiful/fallible) painted. Taking a hand in mine, over the lines, I did that. It made me happy. I never knew how before and it’s obviously the season to recapture the flag. My big guns are that I make them laugh, that my affections are devoted, that my hands remember how to pull hair airtight over the keys.
Tonight is SinCity. This means dressing up and dancing from 9 until 2 in the morning. I’m going to be exhausted by the end of it, and I’ll be lucky if I can walk the next day. Exactly how I like it. I need to let go and stomp around in a giant evening gown. It will help. My angel will be movement and my devil will be my entire lack of breakfast. Brian’s picking me up from work, however, so perhaps we can remedy that. Now it’s time to leave for work, a bag stuffed with black tulle in one hand and a corselette under my shirt. Black and rhinestones. Black and pale skin. Off to sell sex toys and stockings and very short skirt Little-Bo-Peeps. I’ve received a strange gift, one that may let me loose myself from this job, but I’m not certain yet. I want somewhere to go before I leave.
Scientists have taught dolphins to produce music, namely, the Batman theme song. Next, the escapee killer dolphin form a revenge team, sing their own themesong while hunting down nerdly scientists.
Two days and two misapprehensions. Happy birthday Chris, you’re twenty-four now. I think that’s to mean something, but for the life of me, I don’t know what. Have this link, at least, it’s word heroin. It’s been a hard spring, burning into a difficult summer. There’s redemption somewhere, we just have to figure out where to find it. I’m sitting in my home, armo(u)ring myself with unlikely colours, with the strength I have in my body that a writer gave to me. I am hoping that if harm befalls me, if my heart stops, if he is there, it will set my blood to boil and I will flower into flame and burn again. Twist my hair around my finger and speak some magic words that will lighten the weights that drag my feet from dancing again.
I’m not allowed to love you. It’s the same script, all over again. Audience of one. The evening is just beginning and I’m thinking of brake-lights, red glow into the distance. How cars will trail in long snakes through the mountains away from here. The freeways of L.A. were like that, incredible embers speeding past and forward and always going, just going, flying between yellow lines and white. There, however, without a vehicle of my own, I was lost, a child trying to catch up with little tiny steps. My legs were tied, my sight unable to see unless I was near the ocean. Here there is water, there are mountains, there are miles filled entirely with trees. In a way, it’s a cage all the same. I’m tired of it, I’ve done this place. My precious people, I want to shake their roots free of dirt and set them walking our of here with me. I’m glad James got away.
Navi is asleep in my bed and Ryan‘s out fetching supplies for SinCity tonight. I’m alone with a rabbit and a ferret, though they’re kept separate now. We’ve found proof positive that rabbits are genetically food for ferrets. It won’t matter if they’ve seen one before or even know what to do with one, it will try to drag it away and eat it. The rabbit, Kitty, has escaped unscathed, but perhaps not so me. Now I know Skatia can attempt to be sneaky, I want to see it again. Again, the thought occurs to me to fetch him a mouse from the shop to have.
I’m very sorry I didn’t get those who weren’t with us in line, (Beth, Rick, etc), your costumes were lovely.
If you’re willing to dress up again, I’m more than willing to point a camera at you.
I know I love someone when I’m helpless. When I’m lying along at night and can’t sleep because I remember their voice too clearly. Anger drains to missing them, being lonely without them. I hold onto my hands, I curl my blankets around me, and I can’t continue anything but madness. My in-box is the last vestige of contact and as yet, it’s been empty.
Sunday is entirely fancy dress. I have a birthday game of croquet to attend, then High Tea. I need to have my gown cleaned today, it’s next on the agenda next to buying more toothpaste, the odd with the prosaic. Also on the list, change for the bus and monies for SinCity cover. I haven’t begun on my Eris costume, but I’m not terribly concerned. I’ve enough safety pins to guarantee that I could make clothing out of cut up newspapers if I need to.
People have been calling late at night again. I like that, I appreciate that people are willing to take me at face value when I say “call any time, any hour”, but of late, it’s like every time I pick up the phone after midnight, it’s somebody crying. It’s a strange summer theme I don’t understand. I’m not an angel, I don’t grant absolution, but it’s becoming almost a side-line job again. I thought I ditched this years ago, it meant so much to them and so little to me.
