Tag: vancouver

I miss my ghost

My monthly bus-pass ran out yesterday, so I mostly got home on the back of a strangers bike. I’d never ridden on the back of a bike before. It was fun, though it feels precarious. Stopping was an adventure.

“I’m going a long way still, mind if I catch a bit of a lift?” When he’d stopped at the light next to me, I saw he had foot-pegs on his back tires. He grinned when I asked, pleased to get such an oddball request. He gave me a ride to Main Street. I told him children’s stories for my fare, “and then the prince took out his cleaning supplies and began to scrub away the ashes”, leaning over his back in my long inappropriate coat and top-hat, my hands slipping a bit on his jacket. He pedaled away laughing.

It only occurred to me about a block later that we didn’t exchange names. Sometimes, I am too stupid to be brilliant. That’s two strangers in a row who’re probably going to be telling stories of That Weird Girl They Met. (I hope I get my book back. He said it would take him a week to read.)

  • Fredo Viola has new video up.
  • Public Domain Film Torrents.
  • Marimba Ponies. thanks Cherie, happy wedding.)

    • reminders, to love who we can, that fire, and whose feet have walked these streets

    ScanImage250

    It’s strange cycling in the darkness before dawn. The cars aren’t expecting you. They are tired, they are balancing coffee against the ever-present rain. Everything looks like a sad slow song, a woman singing, her heart broken six months before when she came back to find a note taped to the door, “I don’t love you anymore.” My glasses had covered up with rain and the streets reflect like they were made of water, so it feels a little like blindly flying. Sterring myself onto the dotted line, I let go of the handlebars and thought of death, how so many people believe there’s something after, that it’s a door. My hands up, I tilted my head back and let cars slide by on either side. There are no stars here, no souls to carry me home.

    The viaduct I was on curves between our two stadiums then arcs above what used to be Expo 86 but is now just leveled industrial area turned into closed off parking lots awaiting miraculous rebirth as condos in time for the Olympics. From bicycle level, on one side you can see water, on the other, the Sun Yat Sen gardens, the beginnings of our thin Chinatown where they filmed the opening of Global Frequency. Late at night it’s usually empty, you cycle along it and feel like the sole survivor of some strange war, but traffic slowly gathers after six o’clock, gaining a crucial morning momentum. Dangerous. There’s no space for anything but a breath between the cars and the cement side guards. I’d forgotten what hours weren’t safe anymore. It’s been so long since I’ve ridden such a strange quiet time on the highway. Traffic lights are still ignored by taxis but joining them are people speeding and people too slow to remember the gas pedal, how it makes the machine roll forward.

    I could have touched the vehicle as they’d passed. The wind lifted my artificial hair and it danced, a perfectly timed stunt-driver minute, as cinegraphic as a pearl. I looked back again, up, and bitterly smiled. The only truth in stars are that they might not be there anymore, the light we see is such a shadow, and that they travel.

    I looked down after the cars had passed, wondering if they’d even seen me, and quietly said out loud,

    “Some people would think that was lucky.”

    It’s a strange mood, feeling invisible, feeling like that woman after she smoothly drops to the floor and leans on the door, note in her hand, hurt too dry to drip from her disbelieving eyes.

    parsley and vitamin C can induce miscarriage without too much sickness

    Oh world, I can’t get back into my own heart. I used to think in high-hat hits and long pulls across strings, lines of hasty love letters and joyful peeks into a wonderful immediate future of visits and living with me. Now I’m dragged down into a strange bitter sea of praying recrimination and I don’t know how to write a ladder out. What I need is practice and enough trust that I can begin to give some to other people, but though I’m watching, I’m not finding. A half-price muse is no muse at all.

    Page 10 of Jesus Monkey Pants in Space is up, wherein I am a righteously angry school-teacher.

    “What colour are your eyes?” he mused aloud. Granite, flakes of shale, sea shaded amber, petrified tiny stones, glazed over, delicate, pale, green. An acoustic colour, reminiscent of charm bracelets, her chrome charming laugh. Her head bows, dropping hair into her face. She doesn’t want to contradict him. He’s too kind, this place too bright. She has had gray eyes, she has had soft blue. When they are green, it is easier. When they are green, they understand the subtlety of what she needs. She doesn’t have to ask.

    To look at him, he is mild. Slight of build and quiet spoken. To look at him, he is quiet. A smile like beads dropped across the strings of an open piano. His posture is peaceful, his gestures gentle. It’s amazing how little he displays. Don’t judge him until you’ve looked into the eyes of his conversation or the swan necked lullabye of his teeth on your skin. There is nothing weak in his heart, he is calm not complacent.

    Together home is nothing. Only this moment, no more than that. Myth is where they meet, inside urban hosannas of grace and memory. Brickwork songs of sly desire patterned underneath the footsteps of dragons and young princes. Fate is banter, destiny a debate of flushing skin and wondering about regret ahead of time. Home is before morning. Darkness is not so much a refuge as a place, an insidious time characterized by a mutually seductive skill with words, the gratuitous prancing display of modern day courting.

    She’s not that kind of girl, but oh, she is. Shhh. Don’t tell. She’d die of shame.

    I didn’t mean to write about this. It’s too soon to be so blatant about missing you, not that you read this, not that you held my hand the next day when there were witnesses. I’m in the wrong place, but you’re not. You’re so bloody far away from here and I feel like you’ve stolen something from me that I can’t identify in lonely text, only in kisses. Your name, I put it into the internet to learn more about you, and I feel a certain kind of shame. We had a story, a tale of wizards and date rape, of girls drugged and left for dead, of bodies upstairs instead of a cellar. You taught me to swear. It should have been enough, that’s the way of these things. I’m being selfish, wanting to see you again, needing to know that you know what I left you.

    Let me explain, give myself a way out of this self-effacing maze. This being a female, it kind of sucks sometimes. Some of us, we bleed and our hormones drag us toward the people our bodies want to breed with, no matter how in control of ourselves we usually live. Me, I bleed and my body wants to fly into the sky, reach up and touch the elusive clouds, hands buried in the hair of your head. You used my words, my yearning vocabulary. I wanted to say yes, but you scared me. I’ve been alone too long. My showers are shaded like I’m killing children by swinging their heads against the tiled walls and with every drop I want to touch you. I stand in the morning and feel warmth on my thighs. I stare at the ceiling and roll my eyes back into my mind, telling it that I’m unavailable, stop complaining. At night I roll on my side, unable to sleep for the hope flooding my body. It’s annoying.

    So this is me nakedly trying to rid myself of romance, trying to rid myself of your voice when I close me eyes. I’m awake until morning, over and over. A recitative avoidance of dreaming, it’s what I’m singing into the pillow. I’ve been filling my late hours with people, they keep everything away. There are no delicate urges to lay my hands upon them and watch feathers sprout from their skin. Just yours.

    Here the houses look like they were built for a farm or like wild west shacks, wooden two stories with peaked roofs mixed in with California specials, pink stucco’ed things with pebbled glass over the doors decorated with ghostly Japanese fish, as banal as the soap opera digests found for sale at check-out counters. The skyscrapers are uniform glass towers with outward differences that only involve variations in ghastly shades of feeble green. There are no hidden treasures left, even our natural beauties are rip-offs, watered down with tourist-only totem poles and highly priced smoked salmon in little wooden boxes marked with red and black.

    It seems like an aside, but it’s not. I’m attracted to character and here it is such a rare commodity that whenever I find it, I flare out protective, like it should be put on some endangered species list. There are houses here that I used to visit when I felt alone. It was comforting. There’s one out by the University of British Columbia that looks like it was built of lego and glass. I used to have a hole in the hedge that I would creep through at night and sit inside. I would watch the people inside and instead of trying to make up conversations between the people inside or imagine what their lives were like, I went blank. I could feel my general dissatisfaction drain away, because what was in front of my was beautiful. For then, it was enough. I was fourteen and too small to leave.

    Now it’s only a matter of raising bail.

    You’re my attraction, my moth light in a darkness.You are an architecture that let me in. The night was our plaything and we were cats.

    there is no title for this land



    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Dr. Thorpe: My car has a line of spraypainted stencils of ankhs with X’s through them.

    It is quiet enough in Andrew‘s apartment right now I fancy that I could almost hear the frequency my freckles vibrate against the rest of my pale skin underneath the constant flooding calm hum of his white enameled kitchen appliances. I would have to stop typing, however, to try my ear to such a pressure test, and I’m rather enjoying the illusion my fingers are giving me at seventy words a minute, that soft sound of rain that appears once I’m typing fast enough. I think I want to be lying in a room with a lover sometime to this kind of sound, this sort of quiet storm of water against a pane of glass. I remember days that almost approached what I’m beginning to want to look for, the sun slanting in through water distorted too much to see through to the trees.

    There’s always trees here, Vancouver is rife with them. It’s our natural beauty, our tourist trap. Snap. Pose for the picture. Tap, that clicking sound as collected water drips from the branches after a wash. Both metal sides of it crashing then crushing your ankle, leaving you unable to walk without a limp. It’s an asymmetrical sound and familiar all the world over. Here it’s background, a thousand thousand moments every day in the summer, the winter, we don’t have real seasons. If you live here, you mention rain. Every day it’s the same. Gray with sunshine. Gray with mountains and ocean and that one single lighthouse that shines with a dull frequency, too slow to pretend it has a secret language, too regular to be kind.

    Why do you live where you are?

    I live here because it’s what I can afford to do. Only once did I have the fiscal momentum to leave and instead I was a fool, stayed for a man. Never again, I swore. Since then, I’ve never had the means to leave, though there might be nothing at all I want more. Instead, I have collected a veritable army of good and clever people, the sort that a person might always want to talk to, as fascinating as a town can allow them to be and so often more. I like to introduce them to each other, spread out the balance of dissimilar personalities, like if maybe I connect enough of them before I leave the network will stay alive without my interference. It’s hard to meet new people, I’ve been at this so long. Instead I dream of strangers and throw my hands in deeper. If I ever disappear, maybe some of them will come with me. Conquer the mountains, the constant rain, the endless small town drudgeries, and escape and be free.

    There are worse ways of living, worse places to be, but when I came back from Montreal, all the wooden houses looked like shacks and all the heritage buildings seemed to me small frontier ideas of grandeur. Everything grated freshly because I’d been immersed again in a city big enough and new enough to keep me happy. No matter how ignoble some moments or how tiring walking through snow could become, it felt so perfect not to be breathing salt, not to be watched when I wandered or recognized every time I left the house. Old story. Small town, little girl. That cigarette adult craving for the big lights and endless entertainment of simply being where it’s possible to get lost. I missed my people, some of them. I wanted them to be waiting for me in coffeeshops or at the Metro, ready to go to a movie or skating on the river, but it wasn’t enough. There are always people, I tell myself. They are only prolific.

    It’s proved true. No matter where I go, it’s always possible to find someone likable. There are too many people in the world for it to work any other way. You’re never going to find that perfect smile unless you go outside, that perfect delightful smile unless you walk and finally say something to a stranger. It doesn’t even have to be clever. Everything can start with one simple shift, one hello or complaint about the current administration. Sometimes I know it’s difficult. The constant complaint of being shy, it rattles in my brain and I do my best to demolish it. Stomp it like an unwelcome insect and let my will find a way to insert that extra glance or wave of hand instead. That tiny thing that informs the world that I’m open to conversation and not as meek as previous impression may have led you to believe. Insist my chosen victim to ignore my book of fairy-tales, mentally erase my out-dated hat full of feathers, instead pay attention to my instigation, my eyes drilling into yours. Instead help me try to bring down the world, let it fall around us as we talk about nothing and finally find ourselves trading phone numbers or e-mail addresses.

    I have a camera again, which helps ease. Ray was sneaky, enlisted Aiden, Nicole, Jenn, Nicholas, and Ryan to chip in and replace my dead lump of circuitry that had betrayed me viciously and inexplicably while I was away. I have to find some way to thank them properly. Suggestions welcome, though it’s highly doubtful I’ll take any naked pictures.

    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?

    It’s time to fake the knowledge of how to write a book


    audrey-kawasaki – grumpy girl
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Living here, it doesn’t come easy, but I suppose it’s what I have to do until I find the funds to permanently leave.

    Time slowed in the dark bus to the dark trickle of molasses. Travel encased in warmth and looking out at cold, the perfect orange of sodium lights, dirty highway, I felt my chest packed with string. It unraveled as we drove, sliding roughly out of a tiny hole in the center of my back, as if one end was tied to a rib and the other end behind me in the city. Oh the snow, the light crystals of shine that I would gather in handfuls and toss in the air.

    I wanted to run.

    Last night, for the second time in a week, I was to be found spending the night up in a home that was built from the bricks of a tax bracket that lives indifferent to my existence. But unlike the bed in Outremont that felt comfortable, redolant of music and welcome teeth, the bed here smelled like a museum exhibit, like I had crept into it past glass or a red velvet rope, all untouched history and neglect.

    I fell asleep as the sun came up like a stone, trying to remember Sylvia Plath:

    I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
    Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
    Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
    I am not cruel, only truthful –
    The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
    Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
    It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
    I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
    Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

    Soon I’ll have to explain about Outremont, the people who saved my trip and forced me native overnight, breaking my heart and the language barrier with letting me drive, a grand piano, tango lessons, and singing.

    I’m still irritated that I didn’t bring anything back with me.

    all counting out musical two three six nine

    Ray

    Plane touched down and homogeneity was there to catch me. Hello Vancouver. Where is your snow? Your corniced buildings? Your attention to culture?

    Thank you so much to Ray for being there for me.

    My camera’s died an inexplicable death. Pressing a power button does nothing to dead electronics. I wish it were possible to hard boot a photograph.

    There is more Japan in my room then when I left. Ryan‘s been unpacking. It clarifies my idea of what needs to be thrown out. Slimming down impedimenta is essential.

    I need to be away.

    The ferret feet wrapped around my wrist are charming, his earlier prancing dance welcoming me here tickled the eye. Skatia is novel because he is a surprise. He was left behind when I went native.

    These letters are the ladder I use to claw my way up to sketching everything as well as I see it. When I do it right, you can follow the path to where I was feeling, to the people I dreamed with. I’m too tired for anything complicated right now but these words are kicking out of me, a last ditch hazy attempt at packing some meaning into me before I promise the bed my body.

    See, my time tells me that it’s three hours more into tomorrow morning. It’s like I’ve crawled from the sea in some kind of discovering dream. I look at the clock and it lies to me. Time here is without teeth, unlike the racing exhaustion cradling my eyes I use to scrape my surroundings. That is teeth with a mask. If I wore make-up, I would think that if I were to strip off my face, my skin might feel the sunlight that’s creeping over the curved edge of the earth somewhere far away. I’m changing the numbers in my head. Three to Montreal, Toronto. Five to the Greenwich. The ones I do automatically, as if my cells were vibrating on a frequency that might drag snow from the sky to blanket me, make me feel at home, instead of just here.

    I should be asleep, but I am left alone too long.
    I am wondering how to describe how implausibly and importantly I am missing someone singing.

    My lips aren’t afraid, only the words trapped behind them.



    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I leave today, it makes me feel like the sound of rain on pavement. I wonder if I can hold onto this place. I wonder if when I step on the plane, I’ll be able to breathe. I will sit next to a window and consider what options I had while I fly away from here. This was no vacation, this was touching flesh into gold. There was nothing unconquerable, my only pains were usual. Small situations that always start late at night. These streets have transmuted into a home. How did I fall so quickly? How did I let go?

    Quietly now, come upstairs. Quietly now.

    Every tapestry, when unwoven, will come down to one thread.

    I miss you.

    If I had the chance today, I would not hesitate to say yes before it was too late. My honour can stand up to life’s offers of warmth now that I have vision and the capacity to give up my fighting. I have turned my back long enough, it’s not crippling to pull your body into mine and ask you to tell me stories, it just feels like it.

    it’s been a busy week


    derek
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Last year, they said, they were crying. They didn’t know what they were doing, if who they were was worthwhile. I can’t imagine why. They haven’t told me yet. Last year, I was so happy that I ran instead of walked. That my feet were faster than my thoughts. Last year at this time, the boy I was trying to be in love with, he was so far away that I couldn’t sleep, knowing that we were living in the same time-zone wasn’t enough. This time last year, there was a painter. He would trace my body like a sculpture and we could never find enough to talk about. We were just tying up loose ribbons of who we used to be. It was enough. This time last year, I was up until early morning because eight hours difference was perfect. I used to watch the dawn lick the sky when I was talking in fingers. Last year was freedom before I went to L.A.

    This year, I’m going to Montreal. The play I was in has kicked me out for it. I will be gone too long, nevermind I have my lines and planned on forcing Michel and James to play parts for me to work blocking around. I understand. Time is time, and it’s unreal. It only stops in hotel rooms. (It’s like my childhood didn’t exist). This year, I’m pearlescent with the heat of events hitting me, like if I were into that sort of thing, I wouldn’t sit down for weeks. Winter is upon us, fog has eaten the city for three days. Thick ashes of potential rain billowing across every street, erasing the world in portions of thirty feet.

    I walked past a murder scene at two in the morning on Saturday(Sunday). It unfolded like the pages of a book, every increment walked giving me another details. Trees coalescing into police, all the sounds of the city being replaced by a constant quiet chattering buzz of ear-beads and car radios. No one was talking. The street was lined with officially identical cars, every one empty with a laptop glow.

    Last year, they said. Last year, what? Everyone has little stories, it’s our dream. I want to collect them all and make them matter, but I have no idea how to do that. Last year I was living, this year I haven’t been. Last year turns into this year, but when? There’s some period of time, like how August brings change. I think I’ve been partnered, but all I know is that I’ve a lover. I think I’ve found family, but instead they were tribe. I think I’ve found my friend, but I’ve been introduced by others as their significant other. Instead of meaning, I’m just watching. Hoping with a terrified heart that they still like me, that I’m not the imposition that I think myself to be.

    the beginning oh whoredom

    I have so much mail to reply to that it’s ridiculous. In form, it would have been half a young tree bleeding sap all over my carpet. A damaged piece of earth trailing broken roots across my kitchen and onto my desk. Printed and slippery, a texture taken for granted more than telephones. In face, it is the trappings of other hands, dancing like slow two fingered rain to flood my computer box. I can’t stop randomly smiling. I look down the other way inside me and feel a tingle flow from the soles of my feet. My world, those gods of laughter, this is the beginning of soon I’ll run.

    When I have time, I will reply to you. I promise.

    Until then, tell your friends, post it on forums:

    You can vote for both COPE and Vision as they’re not competing with each other (one runs for 19/25 seats, the other runs for 6/25). That means: night buses, actual support of four pillars drug program, cheap housing, community policing and no Wal-Mart.

    You can vote if you:

    * are 18 years of age or older
    * are a Canadian citizen
    * have lived in B.C. for at least six months
    * have lived in Vancouver for at least 30 days

    So bring ID with an address and some back-up ID. Stamped letters and parcel-wrappers are good.

    To find out where to vote, go here.
    For descriptions of all candidates in their own words, go here.

    Between my mind and my hands, my words are getting lost. They are collecting in all my joints, crackling when I move. I stretch and a paragraph shattered. Unfortunate, as I need to pretend I’m functionally literate in spite of my complete and utter lack of sleep, and whore myself out some. Because guess what? The time has come.

    Back in spring, I had the misfortune of being arrested for smashing into shards the glass door of a bus with a paper sandled foot. I, having not noticed this misfortune, continued walking home. The police car, lights flashing, was not as unexpected as the police that poured from it to pin me with handcuffs and write me a court date. The ridiculousness of the situation was not lost on me, nor the officers present. All charges were subsequently dropped. However, the broken window must still be paid for, and my time is running out. Translink have begun to call. I’m planning on a colour-in-the-increment thermometer, like we had in grade school for food drives. If anyone’s got any bright ideas, feel free to pass them along. As well, invite friends, invite family. Jacques has asked me to make a flyer image for him to hand out at his play this week. (A weary inability to focus my eyes is demanding that I do that tomorrow). If you care to perform, just give me the say so and I’ll add you to our list of entertainments.

    Jacques LaLonde and Jhayne Holmes present

    KEEP JHAYNE FROM JHAYLE

    a party of proportion

    #340 – 440 west hastings

    The Date: Friday, November 25th

    The Time: 9:00 – onward

    The Goal: $300.00