Tag: weather

the child of some ghosts

“I Made a House of Houselessness”,
by Rose O’Neill

I made a house of houselessness,
A garden of your going:
And seven trees of seven wounds
You gave me, all unknowing:
I made a feast of golden grief
That you so lordly left me,
I made a bed of all the smiles
Whereof your lip bereft me:
I made a sun of your delay,
Your daily loss, his setting:
I made a wall of all your words
And a lock of your forgetting.

-::-

We lay on the warm, damp sand of Jericho beach last night as the heavens broke over our heads, lightning splitting the sky open with mad electricity, the afterimage daylight of it shattering the night with a stunning simplicity, wrapped in a synthetic purple blanket on loan from my mother’s ex-boyfriend who let me cry on his shoulder in New York, holding each others hands against the rain. Once I could have dreamed of such a thing, even down to the loud wedding at Brock House that supplied a bizarre soundtrack of bland rock music played by an uninteresting band, but it’s been so long that I’ve been knocked down, that I can’t tell if this is what it feels like to get back up. The rain was almost welcome, a distraction from my abstraction, from wishing I didn’t remember what it’s like to be in love.

The storm had begun hours before, aristocratically sweeping in from the ocean on a glowing push of wind, crackling with lunatic energy, ardent and vehement in its regard. I was upstairs painting in Kitsilano, blind to the flickering flashes of camera shot lightning, radio turned up, on the phone with Brooklyn. I was trapped working, elegantly turning the brush against the edges of light-switches and outlets, stripped down against the balmy temperatures, dressed only in paint, spackle, and my underwear, waiting for my flirtationship to arrive, to pool our time together in front of a movie in the park. I only discovered it when the thunder kicked in, a sound so thick and heavy that when it broke over the house like blood, it set off every car alarm available within three blocks. The sky on fire, the world burning with a classical white light. Sheet lightning, forked lightning, bright, scintillant strike lightning, all crawling across the clouds in high speed, literal, incredible maps of electron flow.

Just the day before I had expressed how much I missed proper storms, those Toronto explosions, wet and furious and perfect as sex, unbelievably satisfying, morphine for my spirit. (We had been sitting on my porch, the same place I had held someone else’s hand and asked if they’d like to go on a date, the air tasting of salt and sweat and the white of his clothes, beautiful, summer incarnate, and been turned down.) The sky had been as clear as ice, only vaguely speckled with altocumulous, more pretty than promising. Yet there we were, wrapped in the weather I had wished for, as if I were a witch that had called it into being, and he turned to me like a good back beat, gesturing at the treasure of the tempest, and said, “The storm followed me all the way from White Rock. I brought it with me, just for you.”

I pictured him driving in, battling the wet road with his low slung sports car, dedicated enough to travel an hour to meet me for a movie he knew we wouldn’t get to, the scope of what the weather must have looked like from there, the scope of his commitment, and thought, “Alright. I can work with this. It is not what I wanted, not what I was waiting for, but this will be enough. With this, I can try again to live.”

oh fortuna

  • Today is Global Reddit Meet-up Day. The Vancouver event is happening at Spanish Banks, (4801 NW Marine Drive), at 6:30.

    Came back to the apartment from a house-warming so late that last night was this morning, that the sky was luminous with promise. I woke up twice today, the first time only long enough to blink at the blue showing in the sky and think through the process of rain, how yesterday’s sheets of water came from the ever present clouds smashing into the mountains, every inch on the ground thinning them, lightening them, how good of the rain to happen, to allow the clouds to rise and float away over the peaks. How kind to give us respite from gray. Then I slept again, and woke to a loud, grating voice outside my window, lecturing two quieter, polite, potentially trapped-be-a-stranger voices on sports, “Look at Yankee fans! Why would anyone wear a hat that says I’m an idiot on it?” and nationalism, “I can’t stand those douchey middle-aged white guys that show up with flags during soccer season as if they were real Italians” and the clouds had returned, as if to protectively swaddle the sky, muffle the derision contained in his opinions.

    • images I keep

    365: 65 - 06.03.09
    365: 65 – 06.03.09

    It snowed here yesterday. Gigantic flakes, as big as my entire eye, in clumps the size of small birds. It was almost scary, how fiercely cold it suddenly was, how blindingly white. It felt like being in another country or traveling through time. January, 1993. Somewhere in the city, I am smaller, cold, looking out a window, ignorant that another version of myself is out there somewhere, speeding along in a vehicle with friends I couldn’t imagine having, to an apartment in a city where I would never believe I’m still living. Vancouver translated by the weather into a monochrome model of itself, a ceramic Christmas display for sale in the back of a Family magazine.

    Oddly, even as the clouds blotted out anything farther than a block away, yesterday’s dry blizzard had me feeling more connected to the rest of the world, as the entire weekend was filled with reports of freak weather from friends all over this corner of the globe. San Fransisco mildly buried, Seattle laughing out in lightning and unexpected cold, cascades of vintage soap flake perfection drifting through New York. It let me wake feeling lighter today, glad that the trees were still heavy with thick cotton drifts of white, even as everywhere else the streets were melting back to damp black, leaving the sidewalks naked of everything but the usual ragged polka dots of spit out chewing gum.

    Because of the snow I witnessed a beautiful thing today: flakes falling powdery out of a tree’s branches, (limbs sketched in charcoal strokes against the downtown morning), like a small, perfect, localized winter, the circular width of a dream.

    Henchman’s Helper: a webpage filled with live video cams and weather information from around the world.

    wherupon my brain shows its true colours

    Snow snow SNOW snow!! SNOW SNOW snow snow snoooow! SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOOOOOOOOW!! SNOW snow snow SNOW SNOW SNOW snow snow!! SNOW snoooooooow snow snow snow!! SNOW snow!! SNOW!! SNOW snow snow SNOOOW! SNOW SNOW snow snow! SNOW snow snow!! SNOW! SNOoOOW snow snow snow snow snow snow snow! SNOW snow SNOOOOOOOOOOOW!!

    We can’t see farther than four buildings away through our eigth story office window.

    My bus slid on ice and I had to walk to work from Crackton.

    Other buses have also been jack-knifing.

    Meanwhile, I can’t stop singing the snow song or doing the happy snow dance.

    It’s real snow, too. Dry, crunchy, catch it on your tongue beautiful, glittering gorgeous snow.
    None of the gross, clingy, west coast wet stuff.

    When I say I walked to work, really I mean I frolicked to work, wide eyed and happy.

    Dear merciful life, I freaking LOVE snow.

    snowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnow

    SNOW!

    winter foreshadowing at the gate

    The Devil and the Monk

    The clouds are so thick today, the sun has no direction, light merely comes from up. It’s as if the sky was removed by some photoshop freak who took out everything blue or bright and replaced it with a gluey, blank film of gray. They’ve swallowed the mountains, the ocean, and the tops of every building over fifteen stories high. They are omnipresent in every direction, painting everyone in a gentle, damp blanket of light sog. A continual light drizzle with a persistent dewy texture that slowly soaks in, drenching clothes slowly by osmosis.

    It is not a terrible rain, a driving, slashing torrent of rain. It is merely misty. People are moist today. They are standing in archways, dripping, shaking umbrellas, cursing cold feet, disliking the rain, and refusing to smile at the bus-stop. Instead they stare seriously up the street, as far back from the curb as possible, torn between the hope they will see their bus and the illogical worry that their legs will be drenched by a passing car. (With rain this thin, there are no real puddles).

    The Secret Thoughts of Harold Lawrence Windcrampe

    welcome to global warming. it isn’t what you think it is

    Apple Store Paris set to open under Louvre Pyramid.

    For a moment of amusement, I went and took a look at the yahoo-search referral terms that led people to my Flickr. In order, the top thirty are were: postsecret, cute puppies, maine coon cat, topless, oralsex, tiara tattoos, apartments, oldboy, alien animals, lesbianism, opus bloom county, gamelan, goths, animated club gif, cannibalism, sex oral, cute puppies wallpaper, maple leaf tattoo, dionysius god, pussy licking, steven meisal photography, blind eyes, beetle plate, tattoo koi, kris millering, columbia sailboat, lung, licking pussy, ferret, and topless girls.

    Now we know. Go team internet.

    I want to take a day soon where all I do is take pictures. Where I get up, shove furniture out of the way, do ridiculous things with random objects, cover the floor in newspaper, pin sheets to my ceiling, and treat my apartment like a set. I haven’t done it in a long time, though really, we haven’t had the greatest weather lately either. It’s like winter just never got the hint to sod off. If I owned even one light, it wouldn’t matter, I could just set it up and call it the races, but serious as rain, I’m stuck waiting for sunlight in a city where the cloud cover is so thick that two in the afternoon looks like dusk. And the cold! All of the local pundits have dubbed this month Junuary, as if it’s sort of cute that our seasons have shifted by a solid three months.

    Hotel Elda offers a fifteen percent discount to bloggers.

    An impression on a surface of the curves formed by the ridges on a fingertip

    365 day eighty-four: wrap me up
    365 day eighty-four: wrap me up
    View On Black

    Lay me fluorescent against the gray of this sky which breaks open like the sound of a radio played against the mountains, filling the valley with an absence of memories, drowning the city in white rain that falls like ash. Weather traffic, jammed at the mouth of a river, trapped between north and west, connection made, obscuring the setting sun, it tastes like the ocean. Did I give him my number? My words broken, his tangential smile. When I throw my hands towards the clouds, sparks filter down too fast to see. Where did he touch me? Skin stripped with cold, the punch-line is I can still recall. “You don’t understand how nice this is for me.” Pinned to the stones at my feet, under my fingernails begins to darken, my skin begins to shake, but I’m still waiting until it comes again, lips parted, rolling from the ocean, an impossible number of stones tumbling together above me, a love affair in three point six seconds. Cutting teeth, serious, studious, and calm. A voice for me to feel in my bones.

    I stand in the wind, unable to find my face.