Tag: tarnished scientists

finally, a pause

Friday was close to being a complete write-off. First I went downtown to take someone’s photo, only to stand about waiting for an hour in the cold, at home a note sent through the digital, “stuck in a meeting, sorry!”, my lack of cell phone stranding me yet again. Things cheered up briefly when I walked home to find an invitation to a job interview, only to find out, once I’d trekked back downtown, that it wasn’t for legitimate employment, but instead with a guy who wants a girl to “boss around” his home. “Oh good, you’re pretty enough.” Pardon? I explained he should be advertising in the personals section and left, but not before he referred to special needs people as “feebs”, (the second person to do so in my presence in as many days, ugh), and demanded I pay his bar tab. The entire experience lasted perhaps a total of fifteen miserable, uncomfortable minutes, but felt like a shotgun blast to the day. Walking home from that was even worse than the morning’s photography failure. And, of course, at soon as I’m home again, home again, there is a voice mail message with my name on it, from the non-profit I interviewed on Wednesday, “we’ve gone with another applicant”.

But David got home in time for me to borrow his bus pass to go to the Ayden Gallery opening, where I met up with my brother Kevin, in from Montreal, his friend Nicholas, and Diego, recently back from Spain, and the art was nice and the company nice and Diego gave me a pretty necklace as a holiday gift and we got slurpees on the way out of the mall and cadbury cream eggs and there was a clutch of hipsters at the bus-stop all wearing fake mustaches and it snowed a little and I got to show my brother Nightwatch when we got back to my place and everything turned out pretty well after all. Hooray.

Saturday was significantly better. Kevin took me to breakfast at Locus, one of my favourite Vancover restaurants, and we wandered around in the thin crust of snow a bit, talking about our mutual love of Montreal, before I dropped him off at a friend’s place and bussed home. He’s grown from an angry, unpleasant child into someone I am glad to know, for which I am thankful. It spills from me like water in cupped hands, brimming past the edges of our sad memories of childhood, a slow moving river that is going to take some time to get used to.

Then Aleks came over and napped in my bed with the cats for awhile before driving us over to Andrew & Sara‘s for an in-house Molly Lewis concert that was stuffed to with spectacular people. She sang about Myspace and having Stephen Fry’s baby and generally charmed the heck out of everyone and for the first time all week I relaxed. It was wonderful.

Eventually the clever after-party dismantled for a trip to The Whip and though outside it was cold, it was beautiful, with snow, real snow, the dry, enchanting stuff, floating down like feathers after a televised pillow fight. We sparkled up the street, running in bursts then sliding along the frozen road on the flats of our shoes, arms akimbo, all transformed into ten years old. The group splintered at the bisto-bar, breaking off to different tables, mine against the far wall, the kitchen party, with Michael and Andrew and some folks from Seattle. We talked about terrible twitter jokes and a scandalous lot about nothing, but it was as full of odd glory as the weather, if inevitably more silly.

When it was time to go home, we skated down the road again, sliding even farther, whooping with cackling laughter, occasionally colliding, but never remembering to fall. Plans were made, Sherlock mentioned, and I fled down the street, trying and failing to get Andrew with the one tiny snowball I managed to make. S. drove me home, spinning the car down one of the back streets near my apartment, just because he could, with the sort of wicked joy usually reserved for roller coasters and haunted houses, toothless darkness and danger followed by ice-cream in the sun.

wish I heard his voice more often

BABIES AS WEAPONS is the most twisted thing you will see today, even if you’re a regular at ModBlog. It’s the inelegant site of XenoSapien, a man in the States who believes he is “suffering from deep feminist-culture side-effects.” I hope he never discovers gifs, as the flame motif is bad enough already. (Warning: for reasons unknown he plays inappropriate music very loudly). The front page has a pencil sketch named MyPain of a woman dressed as a stripper about to whip a prostrate man with a baby that’s still attached to her by an umbilical cord that snakes from between her legs. For added wtf, the diapered baby seems to be angrily shouting into a microphone. The entire thing gives me the quesy feeling he watches Wicker Man and touches himself on Friday nights.

  • “NASA can no longer afford the future.”
  • Plans for making a Jacob’s Ladder from readily available parts.

    Today has been full of unexpected phone calls, disco light moments, when the blare of music fades into almost silence at the exact moment you see her face. Theatre people, friends, night and day. Someone’s finally read my pen written letters, public transit edited. A long distance shout from an ex-lover, three defeated countries away, sunburned voice peeling across the lines, unexpected and welcome and a little puzzling. I love him, but why now? Little mirrors refracting light, circling in the room. Another chrome ring, pick-up-the-phone – a potential investor, in town from Memphis, surprise, someone I’ve been considering handing the project off to once I get it up on its feet and properly connected to my city. (We all know I want to leave.) I’m cancelling my plans this evening so as to see him.

    Just as a reminder: Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo opens tomorrow at The Western Front. Further details here. I’m going, are you? Especially quick comments have a chance at a comp.

    • how on earth can I sleep with nightmare tectonics


    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    It’s the people absent from my bed who are changing my name, eroding at my identity like a negative space sketch of rain. I can’t help but recall my conversations, the blankets inspire me, the delicate, familiar movement of taking my glasses off and putting them on the windowsill. I’ve been setting my eyes down on various surfaces every night of my adult life, slowly evolving into someone who doesn’t like to be on top because I can’t see my love’s face from so far away. I remember Marc’s laughter, his climbing strong melody as he cradled my glasses and explained to me very carefully where he was putting them down. Another windowsill. Like mine, to the left, but not the same at all. A queen size bed but we still managed to fall off the sides. I remember Lidd crying, viciously attacking the life given to him, threatening to smash my vision to the street below. Too much alcohol, too little faith. I could see myself in a mirror then without them. Worse now, my astigmatism, my trained lack of sight. I remember lots of things, voices attached to shining blurry faces. Different colours. Lindsay, he had a desk with a computer from 1995. I put my glasses down next to the keyboard, under the red guitar that hung from the brick wall. Lindsay, whose chocolate hands made my skin look like iridescent milk.

    A flash to Lung taking a picture down his pants on a dare, how we discussed Oliver’s skin tone as something to photograph nicely against mine. To my silver haired scientist twisting away from my camera, hiding under the blankets, breaking my heart. The beautiful images Alastair would send me long distance, driving my adoration from over a thousand miles away. Kyle was so beautiful I could have cried.

    Repetition with improv over the top. Notes of fire, of searing words. Burning too hot, too fast, too aware of the desperation inherent in oxygen, a poison gas when taken straight. I didn’t like the wall sized mirrors in that fugitive hotel, how they turned my blurred body into a pale shifting ghost, messy hair and all. Not to say I don’t find hotels mirrors friendly. The man who is named the evening star, he grasped the delicacy of my blindness right away. Gently murmuring about his father’s death to the glow of craving a cigarette, he ran his hands along my arms, guiding me to where I needed to be. I took a picture in that mirror, wearing his shirt, my hand upraised, a final thank you and eventually, later, a good-bye. He undid the buttons and every doubt I had about my body fell off me in shards, never to return again.

    These are the things that stick, a hundred final scenes. Kissing a man in a restaurant, only a few blocks from my apartment. Touching his tattoo and wondering briefly, the closest I’d flirted with infidelity, if anyone would see us. All a long time ago now, these memories held like dried flowers, delicate perfumed things, willing to break details if handled roughly. Photographs seen from the wrong end of a telescope, out of proportion, fading when the phone-calls do.

    —

    The Moon Festival starts tonight at 7:00. Renfrew Ravine Park, at 22nd and Renfrew.

    Easy to get to by transit: Take the skytrain to 29th Ave. Station, then take the Arbutus bus five minutes to 22nd.

    My fire show tonight starts at 7:30. There will be fireworks, an underage contortionist, a band made of eight trombones, a percussionist, and an erhu, and half my crew are delinquents, including one multiply convicted arsonist.

    If any of the fire people on my list would like to come perform, I can toss you into our finale if you check in with me early enough.


    I dream of being allowed to like someone


    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    On a bad day I’m a once favourite plaything that someone got dirty. Now they put me back in the box once they’ve seen what they’ve done. Good days aren’t much better. Either way, he smiled when he was sleeping, and the music playing was in synch with the industrial trucks outside. I fell back unhappily dreaming to that moment, notes of piano and large crashing stares, the threatening movement of birds in the sky.

    Thank you Ed for the benediction of tasty dead animals. I was scared to look in the fridge yesterday, for fear that you had brought me half a cow or something.

    HOW TO DESTROY THE EARTH.

    It was brought to my attention that I have spectacularly failed to mention that Stephen and I went to the Vancouver Folk Fest last Sunday. Every year for the past seven years, someone has lavishly offered me passes, back-stage, performer, and otherwise. This year it was DK and this year, finally, I not only remembered in time, I had a day free. We met him at the western gate, the one in the middle of the ethnic village of white plastic open tents selling bamboo/hemp/100% pure free-range cotton hippie fabrics, flashing peace-sign LED pins, the essential and required plethora of hand drums, and east indian/african clothing richer than oxygen with colour and glittering threads. The passes he gave us were top of the food chain. Floating through the crowd, we’d come too late for anything but main stage, so we left DK to continue to the other gate and forked off to find food. We had the option of eating backstage with the performers and volunteers, but felt too guilty. Almost everyone else with a CREW pass worked for it, even if only a little. (We missed the super secret little mecca the crew had assembled behind the Tool Tent, complete with an immaculately balanced fooz-ball table and twenty foot hammock, until everything had wrapped, the more fool we.)

    The hot sun made shade prime real estate, so we found some and sat in it while the band that first inspired Bob Dylan took the stage and explained to us with instruments and voices stronger than bombs, in very precise detail, the definition of American folk music. Deciding that Mr. Dylan was made of sterner stuff than I, as the banjos on stage continued to proceed with an overwrought dignity, I got up and walked about, taking messy pictures of the crowd, and successfully tested the efficacy of my special guest pass by half-climbing the sound tower without being questioned. I ran into a few people I used to work with who’s names I wouldn’t be able to remember if you put a gun to my head, who asked me details on stripping down a side stage tent, until I decided it would be simplest to vanish back to where Stephen was dozing with my bag.

    The steady swell of applause broke us and we fled backstage, cutting through to the food tents again. This time we ran into Johnny Fuck, Andrew, who was in charge of the Lantern Parade, Maureen, and the lovely Jess Hill. (If you’ve never been to one of her shows, know it’s higher on my recommendations-of-things-to-do-in-Vancouver list). It was a little like Commercial Drive had moved over six neighborhoods and had comfortably settled in for the night to volunteer. Everywhere there were long ragged skirts, smiling kids with dreadlocks, and people wearing chunky stone jewelry. Middle-aged children still carrying the light for the next generation.

    All Your Snakes Are Belong To Us!

    I had left my jacket in the car, thinking ahead but not all at once. It sounded like some kick-ass music was happening, grooves thicker than industry, as we walked out of the festival, across the bunny fields of Jericho, past the Drum circle, to the impromptu grass parking lot where we had abandoned the car. I was sorry to miss it, as it sounded like it just continued to get better as we came back, but I felt like I wanted to give the market a try, so we wasted half an hour poking at baskets full of five dollar five-wash shirts and tough twists of fiber-femo necklace, and by the time we were back on site, everyone was packing up in preparation for Jane Siberry’s last dance.

    Sunday was Jane Siberry’s last concert as Jane Siberry, as she’s now changed her name to Issa, which means Peace in some romantic sounding language I doubt she speaks. Don’t get me wrong, the ethics she runs her website with are astounding and wonderful, (all of her songs are available as plain MP3s, which means they will play on your computer/iPod and are not loaded with DRM restrictions, and you pay whatever you like for them.), but over the years her music has been stretching thinner, until she stood on stage and asked us why there were roosters in Vancouver as clips of them played overlaid on the sound of running water. Stephen and I sat at the very front, settled with our backs against the fence that keeps the audience from the stage, and I laughed when I realized just how many of the nervous looking volunteers they dragged on stage were familiar faces.

    He left before the afterparty, which turned out to be magical. Walking in, the music hit DK and I like fire sucking oxygen from the air. Ganga Giri was on stage, playing like it was the last time they would ever get to funk out. It was pathogenic. All our free will vanished, replaced by the contagious urge to dance. Outside was just as good, an open space dotted with clusters of folk fest performers jamming together under scarlet tiki torches. In one corner, a man was quietly teaching people to throat sing, and in another there was a fiddle circle that went on for at least two hours. Absolutely fabulous. I told DK that on particularly frustrating nights at home, I think to myself “there is a party just like this, somewhere out in Vancouver tonight, and I don’t know about it.” He laughed, answered, “Isn’t it great?” and we hugged, knowing it was true. There was nowhere more In than that place. It felt like home.

    you could have told me less casually


    naiad
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    When you say, you in the plural, in the too many of you, “I’m not telling my wife,” I have a perception shift as a tense block of knowledge creaks suddenly into place. You are partitioning me away, removing my reality. You are creating a space for me, which has nothing to do with your solid life, that is to abandoned as soon as primary characters arrive. I’ve done this before, had to live as my role is reshaped around me into the idea of my body and grace, I know what you’re doing before you do. When I look down into my lap with resignation, what else is there to do, it is with this understanding. From there on in, your honesty diminishes every time you kiss me. You might not even see it. Every time my hand is held, every time I am told that I am loved or treasured, our light dims, laced with the knowledge that I am an eradicable betrayal that you will want later to erase.

    And then we playfully kiss like sticky children outside a door, we share a glance and giggle at something improbable. I carve lines in the air around your body with my breath like prayer. You hold my hand and trace the lines there, as if you could grant me immortality with the poetry of your smile. But there never is any poetry. As soon as I am out of the room, you can reattribute your actions, decide after the fact what you meant and how you meant it. It burns, your plausible explanations, how you write all the rules, how you’ll still be cruel enough to pretend that I have any say in the matter, as if I had any power except to leave.

    Yesterday the line, “cradling my hips like a warm cup of tea,” popped into my head. When I was younger, I imagined that’s what I wanted. Someone who would hold my body canted to their lips as if I was a chalice of some sort to be poured. It might have even been the word canted that gave me such a fancy. Now that I’ve found a few of those people, I’ve discovered that I was right. It’s comforting to know that not everything I thought would be nice turned out to be wrong. There’s a not a lot else that I still have, not in the long run. I had a golden summer once that taught me how to smile. I cried when it was time to leave and when my then partner held me in the cloak of his obscene hair and comforted me, “Life is long, you will fall in love again, many times,” through my wracking body, I knew he was right. What he failed to explain was how few people would bother face the fear of falling in love, how they would hold back and hold back and hold back until finally, in cowardice, lose their mind and flee to be free.

    edit: p.s. Finland won?? whiskey tango fff?

    mihi cura futuri (but my concern is the future)

    LiveJournal Haiku!
    Your name: porphyre
    Your haiku: in less perilous
    times it was dedicated
    to musique concrete
    Username:
    Created by Grahame

    The preacher called me martyr as he finally found his name, (it’s good to have a name, I cannot write without a name, oh my tarnished scientist, oh my bleeding star), because I give in to the emptiness biting at my heart, because I strive to believe it better to drink the dreadful rain than to be proud and drown in it. I walk out alone, looking at the smoke that passes for a sky in our city and wonder why I’m never good enough company to keep. I have no pure fey and giddy anticipation, it’s threaded through with hard-earned dread. Crumbs from a table. Semantics twisting in. And I’m still terrified to talk to you, still too tired to cry. When everything changed, when the worst happened, it was the supports I never questioned that gave way, that turned from stone to sand beneath my feet. The cement is the same colour as the rain and as the water runs, I feel it must match my eyes. I lost the charm to fly, the meaning. Sometimes I only laugh to let a cold wind out. When I can’t casually say your name without feeling like I’m lying, what can I help but dream you’ll dream of me? My answering machine is silent, except when asking me what I want to do. Press two. Press three or four. I hesitate and hang up.

    Original letters sent by Frank Zappa and the PMRC to various instances during and after the ’85 PMRC hearings on music and censorship.

    I dream you will come with me to the station when it comes time for me to leave. That you will reason with me the night before, try to hold me as if I would crack, like the light of a candle dimly holding the darkness back. In the morning, you’ll kiss me goodbye and wave, knowing I’ll come back for you. I dream I’m enough to fight for, an ideal with flesh surrounding, not a shell with soft hurt inside. That’s I’m real instead of filler. That there is music to my madness, that it’s not a lost cause again. Another reason to be myself, another reason to stand my ground against the cynic’s world. I dream and think sadly that I’m too young to feel this bitter, but there is no one to cradle my hands and draw my poisons from me. Not in this city. Not in this place. My time here has already been drawn as dry as glass burned back to sand.

    Every single Playboy centerfold ever published, (in order).

    The weather the past few days has been beautiful, sun and wind. I have been keeping busy. Friday was beach visiting then Jacques birthday, Saturday was dinner out with Duello-folk, then the TV on the Radio concert, Sunday was Sunset Rubdown and Frog Eyes, Monday was Korean Movie Night, Tuesday will be the Secret Machines concert, Wednesday is dinner with Nicole and Matt, Thursday is dinner and archiving vintage family-photographique with Silva, and then, as true as the trees let me be, Friday-I-do-not-know. I work this weekend, Raphealla having something else she’s doing, so I will only be available outside of shop hours. If you want to claim some of them, do so now or hold your peace. I have no internet at work, however, so you’ll have to use the telephonic device made so popular by the previous century, TOLL FREE: 1-888-HYPATIA. Handy, no? Yes. Minus the lack of net at work, which leaves my employment stupefyingly dull.

    “…Give me half the chance and I swear I will ride you like my own personal bedside carousel.”

    Villagers who protested that a new housing estate would “harm the fairies” living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again.

    I spent my sundown on the seawall, emphatically sad that my friend is staying in his unhappy relationship simply on the power of inertia. He makes me question everything about every charming couple I see walk by. Are they really happy, are they ringing out joy like cathedral bells when they’re alone as well or are they really sleeping through life because it feels safer than dropping away from security into the chance that I think needs to be taken?

    Sometimes we speak on messenger, when he is at work, when I am away. He typed once, “I do not love her anymore” and I sighed, a sound like mourning, and wondered when he would be brave enough to shape those words out loud. To her, to the world. Either motion would be a step forward. I am helping. I know I am helping, though we no longer kiss. There were issues with trust. I was not allowed to take his picture.

    If we spend time together and speak of these things, I begin to watch smiles and look for loneliness instead of happiness, frustration instead of joy. My eyes search for that vulnerable feeling of being alone. People who are staying for the children, people who are staying because they’ve been there too long. Broken couples obsessed with a fear of the future.

    It’s so many people. I’m distressed. I want to reach out and take them away to a new standing in the world, place them in soft arms that only want to offer a warm place away from the hurt. Reach out to press into their faces an impression of control, remind them that there are many, not just one. I want to take their bodies and strip them, take words as knives to carve away the initial impression of despair and etch instead enough confidence that they remember that they are beautiful.

    I find it unsettling how many marriages I know are crumbling quietly into infidelity. Trying to believe in the ideals of marriage in my world feels like trying to climb barbed wire. My relationships used to be stones, solid things that would last forever that I could hold in my mind as pale and sharp and true as my own flesh. They used to be referred to as marriages. Now they read to me like stories, tiny encapsulated things written on my heart in fading inks, not made to last but to be washed away with bloody time.

    I swear, Bill’s babe must have been born by now, though no letter has come to say.

    trying to remember the worth of birth control when all I can think of are his unfair hands

    Someone has rewritten the words to Gibert and Sullivan’s “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” as “I am the very model of a Singularitarian,” with lyrics celebrating the drive to transcend the flesh.

    I am the very model of a Singularitarian
    I’m combination Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian,
    Aggressively I’m changing all my body’s biochemistry
    Because my body’s heritage is obsolete genetically,
    Replacing all the cells each month it’s here just temporarily
    The pattern of my brain and body’s where there’s continuity,
    I’ll try to improve these patterns with optimal biology,
    (“But how will I do that? I need to be smarter. Ah, yes…”)
    I’ll expand my mental faculties by merging with technology,
    Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology,
    Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology
    Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology.

    There’s an MP3 link too.

    Today was spent re-arranging the shop I work in, hauling large heavy awkward pieces of pale laminated wood around into hopefully better positions. We need a curtain now. A curtain, a ladder, some screws, and some paint. It’s nice to have carte blanche. I’ve been told that I’m to treat the store as my own, all my decisions will be supported. It’s interesting, like an experiment in culpability. How responsible am I? How capable?

    “I’ve listened to your music, seen the way you dress. I trust you.”

    I’ve had relationships based on less.

    Remember the water? It sprayed like insane rain, kamikaze airborne water trying to reclaim the shore from the sky and bring it back into the ocean. I was so glad you ran through it after me, it felt like a victory. Breakfast, then sitting on damp moss, so British Columbia, so everything about this place that’s sometimes nice. Secrets, so many secrets. I miss you. You’re around and then not, all at once. I remember kissing you, lying with my body pressed against yours on a volcanic outcropping of rock, all soft cliffs and too much ocean view. All those trees. I saw you watching me trip down the path like a child, I watched you smile. How much that meant to me, I’m not sure I can say. It had been so long since I’d felt like anyone wanted me, like I could make someone happy. Therapy for both of us, I suppose. A furtive thing we could call our own. An epoch passed as we climbed the earth.

    Evenings like this I wish you were here, free to sleep in my bed, be warm for me in the chill.

    My lovers last year, all of them left silver hair on my clothes. Spiderwebs that tied joy down, transmuting me into an alchemist of golden moments, but my last year was longer ago than that. I think of new years in terms of fall. Leaves and seasons changing, halting, freezing. Anything after Hallowe’en is this year, anything before is last. It might be in November this year, my annual transfer from them into now. We met in August, we began in August. The year before last, something new, a man, a burning furnace hanging in the ether, changing my perception of time. Everything counted from the day I took a worried picture that my friend has hung on his wall in Montreal.

    This year it might be somewhere in November where it shifts. Before there was my first love returned to me, too poetically pleasing to last or be real. My theater painter, my silly Gavool fool. “Have you met my underage girlfriend?” A genius clown that handed me so gracefully to California (Uber Alles). Flash: tied with ribbons, merry christmas, the light from the window before we moved the bed, a thin string glittering from one thing to another, my decision. LAX = empty regret. Last winter spent in Orange County, adrift in rain and lost without direction. My lovers, before they didn’t trust me, they didn’t tell me until it’s too late.

    Next year. New Year, December. My hanged moon, strung up on charming wire, so full before it waned so suddenly. He fell from the sky and destroyed all the tides. I fell down and drowned and my morning star, my most precious thing, my evening dream who surrounded me with words, abandoned me after burning me with a small handful of flame. Hours counted like suicidal moths. Hating how easy I must be. Fifteen people dying in six months. All the ways to count a year. Two jobs gone, three, a night of fire where I finally died. There was no vessel to carry me. When the apple fell, there was no one to capture it, no hand to interrupt its crash to the ground. Everything all at once, so dreadful.

    I’m older now, I can feel it for the first time in my life. I see lines inside my face, miniature scars, a map of where I used to live. Pictures from last year, they look too happy to be me, too young and yet, here I am, feeling alright with life again. It took me eight months. It took me a year, a failed one night stand, and a married conductor. It took music and getting away from here, a refreshing life out of the small town. It took the sky and blood and tears and feeling too alone. It was Ryan, it was walking into the water on the night of fireworks and resisting the urge to let my head go under. It was so many things, saving a life on New years, never seeing that girl again. Slapping Matthew, dancing alone, dancing with Kyle. It was myself, finally, and the memories of starry skies that brought me back to me.

    Though mostly it was the conductor.
    &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp the good ones are just like that
    “No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day.
    But, I beseech your grace, pardon me: I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.”

    lost my face

    Wednesday night I fell asleep with the skin of a bear’s head draped over my hair and face like a mask and bodies sprawled at my feet. I was an urban medieval Frezetti painting. All I needed was a grand gold spear in the hand that wasn’t sleepily curled around one of the black fur ears.

    Last night I didn’t sleep at all. Instead I held someone and let them come back to life. We’re damaged people, love. Yes, I know we are. That’s partially what holds this part of clan together inside our tribe. Family words, meaning country and lover and home. Parents, holding hands. The two of us writing words in the sand, the light off and my glasses by the side of the bed.

    When I’m here, so are you. Everyone reading and here I’m sitting, thinking “what is that sound?” It’s people, trying to find themselves in what I write here, as if it were important. Until recently, I wasn’t aware. I’ve become used to being put aside. The world goes around without me, I think, it continues and carries on. I am the merest drop of rain and the rain will fall forever. New creatures will be born, they will have stories, they will stop and stare at the enormous sky that birthed them and think in tones of wonder long after I have passed my way.

    I should be at a party right now. David Bloom sent out a mass invite to celebrate the fact that it’s not New Year’s Eve. No resolutions will be necessary, bad behaviour will be accepted, but I’m feeling a little lost for some reason. Alone and not a little intimidated, I want to leave the house and instead I’m thinking softly in excuses, It’s late. I hardly know any of his friends. If Bill is there, I’ll make him uncomfortable. Most of all, it’s late, as if they were real. Yet in denial, I still want to have my shoes on. I will leave the house, wrapped in this feeling of abandonment of not. This is what I want to believe. Make myself over into someone who can be brave with this strange cowardice bubble of uncertainty encasing my heart. (This is what I horribly suspect that other people might feel like all the time.)

    Instead, my arms are stretched out, trying to hold onto something beautiful and failing. I’m scanning every face now, trying to see into the future, trying to see who I might encounter as a friend. This city is full of strangers, they look at me sometimes when I walk by them as if I were unexpected, but rationally I know that some of them I will talk to. We will meet some day and speak together, they will tell me they saw me with that hat or the ferret or in bare feet. I’m the red head hippie that girl hated or that boy couldn’t get over. A tragic figure they saw crying. I stand on the street corner like a door I’m looking out of, the traffic a heavy silence, wanting to see that perfect memory unfold before me. The one that I haven’t had yet, because it’s still in front of me, as far away as falling stars.

    Before dreaming starts at night, there’s a time when you close your eyes and pictures begin unbidden through all the caring cells in your body. Mine have been providing me with the sensation of my hands on a piano, my body held warmly against the length of a stranger in time to old familiar music. Behind my lids, it’s not my hands I’m watching, it’s not my feet, the pattern on the carpet or the length of the room between me and that place to stay. I’m not re-evaluating my choices, my flight, my desire to meet those eyes across a room again with an impossible question. Instead, I’m trying to explain with equal grace to those images how much my strange days mean to me. It feels impossible, like climbing a rainbow.

    Where the hell are my angels?

    what I have to say after all


    janis won’t die
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I leave for Montreal in a week and I’m still quietly lost as to what I should be packing. Warm things. Well, yes, I have about three of those. I have a scarf, a half-stolen plaid shirt that’s missing some crucial buttons, and a fleecy skirt. Now what? I’m not even organized enough to get myself fed in the mornings before work. Ah misery me, I’m feeling rather alone.

    Does anyone want a bus pass for two weeks? I certainly won’t be using it from December 10th to 24th. These little bits of foil and paper are untransferable, I’d hate to see the service provided go to waste.

    Also, someone get this “Will design thermonuclear devices for food” (in Russian) T-shirt, for Graham, k?
    And The Great Equation for Nicholas. Thanks. You’re awesome.

    I should be walking, airing out the musty smell of second-hand cigarettes my coat collects in the back room at work, but I am nervous of what I will find once I get past my first destination. I have a secondary plan, there is apparently a corset stitcher happening tonight at Andrew’s new apartment, but the primary is that for a reason. The scathing thing most close to the thin skin of my heart is the first thing I want to address. There is no turn back time, no peering ahead. I had a half argument about this earlier this week with a partially ex-lover. What’s real is what needs to be dealt with, and what’s now is all that we have to take chances with. What should be done should be done, regardless of imagined consequence. This is what I told him, irritation growing. I was falling in front of someone, hitting the ground hard with verbal feet that were suddenly fists curled in anticipation of the general unfairness of the world. Me, I surprised myself. I’m not used to admitting heat into myself. I usually keep everything I want very under control and very away from me. He said that I was intimidating. I would be surprised except that I’m beginning to get used to it.

    What happens when you begin to reject neglect in the face of everything you want?