sorry I’m only thinking out loud

There’s a black silhouette engraved in the corner of my screen I find as comforting as a cigarette always seems to be (looking from the outside in). He drinks coffee and talks with his hands almost savage enough I might pick out words. I’m working on the pictures I took at the Cultch for Shane. Some of them burn with light, some of them are too blurry to use, but there’s not one bad picture in the lot. I’m a little proud and yet it’s anticlimactic. They’re everything I expected them to be. Everyone kept mistaking me for a reporter.

BomChickaWahwah.

It’s snowing again. Two days now of brittle sunlight and these flakes floating down like the ashes of someone’s favourite million page book. It makes me want to find a vast pale room with a giant skylight and a hardwood floor and lie in the middle of it with grand orchestral pop music on, just staring up into the sky.

tonight theater begins until sunday


water play
Originally uploaded by lightpainter.

Jimmy Buffet, a musician of some sort according to the blurb on the back, has managed to write novels that blissfully survive every bookshelf razing I’ve had in a decade. Back in 1989, he wrote Tales From Margaritaville, a collection of short stories about cowboy sailors and being in love with the ocean that gave me cravings for fish, which I’m allergic to, and sailing down in Florida. I mention it because I’ve just re-read it for the Nth time and it still carries the same effect. It’s all flying-fish sandwiches and satisfying endings, people in a poisonous paradise doing the best they can and remembering to enjoy when they’re puzzled. He makes me care about football, fishing and golf. It’s a little crazy. I’ve been to Florida.

Though of course, it makes for a great escape from the rain that’s outside, persistently threatening to dissolve the front windows of the store with basic erosion. It’s almost so much rain that it seems unrealistic to try to describe. There’s more rain in the air between me and the opposite side of the street than would be required to fill a backyard pool. It’s like a joke. How much water was there? This much, and then you point to an ocean or a Great Lake and cackle like a demented child. Bloody ridiculous, really.

I’ve been finding solace in the must-see media of the week, Un-Pimp My Ride, a gratifying short series of advertisements from Volkswagon that feature a gang-signing german scientist, (“V-Dub representing Deutchland”), who actually made me laugh out loud. This video was last week, though still wonderful.

And by request: Warren, on his birthday, shamelessly flirting back and forth with Joss Whedon.

IC BEO EGESLIC

Alicia says I’m expressive, resourceful and accepting, so you should all come to her most awesome annual Anti-Valentines Party. There will be 60’s of rum and other various hard alcohols to make you wish you had never been born. Come February 17th, 2006, 8ish. The blender is available, the martini shaker is ready and the place is dying for a party. Your part is easy. Wear all-black, bring hard alcohol, no beer, bring your friends, find some dead flowers and write melancholy poetry to be read aloud from at atop a chair ~ whatever your broken little heart desires. If you don’t know where she lives, then drop me a line and I shall tell you. We can pretend it’s a secret.

Also, please go worship briefly at the altar of Hakkenkrak, the quirky journal of the delightful Christalline, who I never damned well see, because I am stupid.

She made me a pretty thing when I really needed one. Turning this:

into:

Which looks ever so much cooler and is also apparently some sort of vector thing which can be blown up successfully in ways that the original cannot? (& looks incredibly stencil-able, I can just picture the three layers I would choose, which is nice, but oh the vanity involved in stencilling one’s own face. Also the not legally clever.) I don’t actually know a thing about vectors, but it sounds fairly impressive. (Also, the way she has her background do that crazy immobile gorgeous woodblock thing… damn, I wants).

People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t which is perhaps why I am never intelligent enough to corner hakkenkrak for a sunday afternoon. My brain is like a library what won’t shut up.

Which reminds me, here’s both my Johari window and my Nohari. Fill them out, (though I admit a mixture of the two windows would be far more interesting to me). I insist on the basis that I control the wind. Well, no, but I am sad because the boy who is ostensibly my boy hasn’t tried to see me and it’s almost been a week, so it would be neat, and neat things cheer me up. Also chocolate, though as I had incredibly rich chocolate for breakfast, supper and dinner, I’m feeling a bit odd on that subject. See, I’m living a self-imposed week of not chasing after him, no tapping on the window of the hotel or dropping a ring by the front desk at improbable hours. Sunday to Sunday, then I go fetch my clothes in a very mopey manner that feels unloved and pretty well unwanted.

Monday had wind strong enough to break trees, however. Wind strong enough to shift the course of the sun around the corners of taller buildings downtown, which is good and right and as it should be. Wind like to play piano, wind like to breathe for your body as you walk into it. That’s what I head into the day before last, a leap of faith on my way to work. My window felt like the portal of a space-ship with me looking out to the dark clouds tearing into the broken blue, pushed too hard to threaten any sort of rain, too busy trying to keep themselves together as they scud violently across the sky.

I really liked it. I was sorry, for once, that I was caught inside my store. I wanted the force of the blow to touch me, as if the world was putting invisible arms around me, shrouding me in some elemental forgiveness while it shredded my clothes. Last year I was on a bus going across a bridge when an especially classic gust hit. It was like the entire vehicle had transformed into a strong linen sail. It was beautiful, feeling us drift into the next lane with the force of it, as if the wind was going to propel us sideways and off the bridge and out over the water, like we could fly on the strength of it, reminiscent of a raygun-gothic aircraft, (which they’d better damned well go through with it lest I go over there and pluck their eyeballs out to use as ben-wa balls instead), but with orange duct-taped plastic seats instead of jazz music and improbable wood paneling.

Oh yeah, and how cool is this? The Phillip K. Dick Robot’s gone missing! Next trip out, I’m going to make myself some pink lights to defend myself with. (which is also a supremely cool link that’s making the world a better place, so go look, then make some, then send some to me.)

Dreadlock models wanted by the hair salon at First and Commercial in El Mercato.

Yesterday there was rain. Thrumming fat drops that sliced through the sunshine and soaked me as thoroughly as a shower. It was delightful and I held my head up to see. The light was ethereal, sunshine rainbows shattering up from the pavement, it was that hard. It came from a little bit of nowhere and left just the same. Twenty minutes of glory. I wanted there to be someone with me so I could take pictures. It was like the world had turned up the saturation.

Cross processing the streets ahead of time.

Vancouver as been keeping me busy lately, a nice change I approve of. Today there’s two fancy dress events, Meghan’s birthday croquet in a Rose Garden and a rather darker themed High Tea. The disphoria between the two vastly different social circles will be a welcome exercise in mercurial adaptation, something I’ve been missing lately. I have a habit of forgetting to contact other people when I’ve fallen in with a particular social group, but I’m beginning to successfully tear myself out of that cocoon a little. Last night I was handed a furtive slip of paper, BY INVITATION ONLY, twice.

sorry, not the same impact if sized down

found in the journal of nt by ed_dirt:

These were taken last week “south of Longview and west of Nanton” (about midway between Calgary and Lethbridge).

if you’re further interested in nifty cloud formations, you may want to look here and here. Also, a video of a tornado eating a house, general tornado damage videos.