A Post Called Untitled

Lo, I live, and my hunger is unfathomable.

My mind is a diving board. A little goblin is springing up and down on it Make of this what you will.




-----
It's a terrible cartoon. You know who you are.

Hey Skeezix, You Ain't Cool.

Another what now? Mostly these days I'm trying to mollify Lucas. Seriously, an unmollied Luke is a slimy force to be reckoned with. A force of nurture. He comes over and starts imparting his customs and social cues to me, with a vengeance, like an angry mother chimp. Precisely like that, in fact. I'm still cleaning up from last time (I forgot to check under the couch).

The day our vacuum cleaner died a raccoon cub charged headlong into my bedroom window. It split the outside mesh from top to bottom when it bashed its head into it and almost tumbled off the roof. Now I think the ancient machine was the only thing keeping them out.

Maybe it threw off a supersonic carnivore-repellant hum. Possibly the raccoons carry a primeval awe akin to religion, focused by the totemic Hoover. I sealed all the windows and pushed a dresser in front of mine. I think I might board them up. Fools that we were to question those who came before us and left that vacuum behind. Too late I find faith in a bitter catechism of their scrabbling claws and the harpyish trill their frenzied cubs loose at the insane moon.

A Mind Like That

I need to get my hands on yesterday's Sunday Globe, to see for myself the banner headline "Kim Jong-Il: Crazy or Crazy Like A Fox?"

Yesterday was my first night as Copy Editor for the Varsity. Basically, it was awesome. The work was fun, everyone there was into -- hell, obsessed with -- honest-to-god print culture, peripheral at best in the rest of the places I spend my time. And I like that obsession. The work was fun, I'll be on the masthead, and I can point to any page of The Varsity and say I helped do that. Also, there was pizza. For those who are counting, that's three points out of a possible four.

The fourth point is for psychic powers, lightsabers, miracles, achieving enlightenment, or robots. So three is still very good.

The catch is that work started late afternoon and went on for 9 hours. So I got home at 2 a.m., and now I'm tired and seething with the deadly rage, always so closely underlying my cool millionaire-playboy facade, that takes over when my carefully cultivated restraint starts to waver. Tired, angry I am, and a little insulted over a religious matter involving a Brahmin, an endangered tiger, 47 lbs of cinnamon and a potato blight. I may respond with passive resistance. I may just go my own way. He assumed too much. I just knew too much.

Does that make me crazy? Like a fox.

Actual writing to follow when I can, you know, string words together to make sentences that develop and convey ideas . . . since you're all so into that sort of thing.

All Day and All Night

Walking home: If my life were a day, what time is it? Let's say I'll live to be exactly 80 years old. Average, I hear. Not too long, but not too short. I eat alright, I exercise, we'll see. Say the day begins at first light, at 4 a.m. 'cause it's that time of year. It goes till 4 a.m. the next day -- infer what you will.

So when I turned twenty, a quarter of the day was done, or six hours. Two more years is a tenth of that again, or 36 minutes, and six months is a quarter of that, or 9 more minutes, for a total elapsed time of 6 h, 45 m. It's 10:45 am, and time for a shot of coffee and a run. Shit, there's stuff I was supposed to have done by now.

=====

Zivy flopped, sweating and stunned, onto the cement block in front of her apartment, blinking the stars out of her eyes. Detroit was gray-tinged and huddled into mutually invisible neighborhoods, colder and smaller than she'd imagined, though the former was presently a welcome surprise. She'd have to get around more. She clenched and unfolded her fists to squeeze blood back through her white fingers. That was from carrying her piano upstairs. Seventy solid kilos in a hard, clunky box. Then she'd sprinted downstairs to make sure her other stuff was still there.

Would've loved to know somebody local, she thought. Or waited till christmas break and dragged a friend down to help. Oh well. Two suitcases left. She tried them both at once, grunted, and started the climb.

Later, leaning against the shut door with baggage at her feet, she surveyed the apartment. All at once, it was hers, instead of some speculative space she may or may not decide to pay for. Possessions secured and survival probable, she began to think about familiarizing the place to her.

Items to obtain: an aquarium with some species of fish that won't die. The thought broke from nowhere -- she'd never had a fish, didn't know how to keep one. She wanted one, though. Maybe start with a goldfish and see how that goes.

Like, Ghosts or Somethin'

Just sorted through the harddrive on my family's computer at home. This is the digital closet, and I've cleared it out. That doesn't mean I threw anything away, other than a few bits of meaningless information about universities, some old games, a pdf about how to disassemble a specific Casio keyboard, and so on. The rest I shuffled into a few different folders and packed into a box, where I can actually find stuff. I never let go of anything. Try and keep that in mind if you lend me something.

It was hard work. One challenge lay deciphering the incredible titles I came up with for important stuff back in "the day." I can see I was a real secretive type. "uf.wpd?" What the hell kind of filename is that? Oh, I see. Pretty much the entire point of this blog (this is obviously not true, but disregard the fact that I'm inventing it for argument's sake) was to crack open this closed-book way of writing and put stuff up inside the interwebs, presentable and with my name onn'em. Of course, some of this stuff I never, ever would have put up -- not because it's personal, but because it's embarrassingly rough.

My music is another thing. I haven't spent much time on finding new stuff these past 2 years or so, between the constraints of time and my laptop's munchkinesque HD. But even so, I'm shocked at how much good music I'm missing. I left a ton of great stuff behind on this PC that I'm gonna have to figure out how to take home. I will drop names, in a form you can easily skip over, 'cause I'm still trying to work out what I want to say about this.

Kamaal the Abstract -- a name after my own heart. Melanie Safka. A buncha stuff by The Odds. All these songs by the Five Blind Boys of Alabama -- "I have never reached redemption, but God knows I tried" is as fine a song as you can hope you hear. Long-Legged Woman Dressed in Black, by Mungo Jerry. Planes Mistaken for Stars. I miss all this stuff, when the hell did I drift away from it and not notice?

We have two dogs -- doglets, the froofiest of undersized canines. My dad has a theory that they have no sense of time, supported by how they are just as maniacally happy when we return from a trip to the grocery store as when we come back from 4 months overseas. I thought it was a weird idea to move forward through time without noticing any lapse, only a baffling change in the present state. But it turns out I do the same thing, and I can do it backwards too. I open an old document or a song from Back Then, and the ends of then and now are stapled together, everything between a closed loop. Removed from the sequence.

It isn't what I believe those in "the business" would call a smooth cut. This exact moment becomes a jarringly life-like glimpse of the future, seen from years ago. I never call the number I wrote down there? I don't go to UBC because of what? That IM session was the last time we really talked? God damn it to hell!

And then the time warp wears off -- and of course this is how things are -- almost. I wonder how well things would carry over that time-stapling suture, into now. That's really what I try to do with this housekeeping.

=====
There's a Hole In Broadway

Day after day, the hole kept getting bigger. Bits of asphault crumbled into it and it grew like is was opening its mouth. People called it a city works problem, but they sent a few workers down there and they never came out, and then they sent rescue workers who took a careful look and shrugged and went in and never came out. And then some scientists went and took a real careful look, and stepped inside and they got eaten, too, which means their results were inconclusive. I mean, New York is still New York, and life ain't about to stop over some monster pothole, even if it does eat people. Still, no matter who you were, the idea of it kind of gnawed at the edge of your mind. You know, like when was it gonna stop? They slapped some kind of emergency pavement on it but it swallowed that down, too.

The ads about it have settled on saying there's nothing to worry about right now, but stay away from Broadway and East 43rd St if you know what's good for you. It was like a gremlin mob was shaking down the theater district. Personally, I was sick of hearing about it, and I know I wasn't the only one. On TV, the radio, at work, everybody was saying the same things about the hole. The same shit, over and over like every time they repeated it they got closer to knowing what they were talking about. It's like the thing was sucking away their brains while it chewed on Broadway. And there were theories.

One thing you can count on crackpots for is a bit of variety. Every lunatic gave it his own personal touch. I got in a cab and noticed too late I was sharing it with a raggedy gray bum, hadda be eighty years old, all tatters and bones. The cab'd already pulled inna traffic an' I thought, what the hell, I'm stayin', an' opened my window and leaned my head as far out as I could without looking like a dog.

The driver laughed. "Say, what you think about that hole inna street shit?" he asked me over his shoulder.

"What hole?" I answered crankily, and he laughed again.

"What hole? Man, I gotta go all the way up 34th St. and back down 57th to go up broadway and he says what. Betcha you know what it's about," he said to the bum.

"Tell you what it's about," the bum bum coughed out, and I rolled my head out the window while he mumbled his theory. Sonofabitch cabbie fucking encouraged him. The bum swung from side to side and puffed as he talked like he was blowing invisible smoke rings and reading them.

His idea was that every forty years the devil visits his old high school, which is in New York, and then the city is pretty well fucked. Last time around they blew up the twin towers. I asked what happened in '61, and he said "Vietnam, asshole," like they fought the whole thing in Times Square. I gotta look at getting a bike or something. The devil's name, in case you wondered, is Adal Goel, and he went to the ?Bread and Roses High School.

Anyway, every-goddamn-one and his brother had something to say about the hole -- the same thing, in fact. I got a feeling like I'd knock the mouth off the next asshole to ask me what I thought about that shit. Lucky for me, I got an inner circle of very self-centered people.

The thing about each of them, if you asked them what they thought about the hole, they’d give you a ticked-off face for interrupting whatever train of thought they'd been following, and say "huh?" No dignified responses or stupid questions, just 'I don't give a damn about some stupid hole, I was trying to talk about me.' They're a breath of fresh exhaust. So after another day of talking about the hole, when I'd had it up to here with the god damned thing and I thought if I pretended to be interested in one more guy’s crap opinion I’d flip out, these were the people I called.

We set up a night out, chose a spot called the Arkadiuz. It’s one of those places everyone goes ‘cause no one knows about it. A hole in the wall with neon lights and a bouncer, plus a bartender who’s long on drinks and short on conversation, which was exactly the cure for a long day of cheap talk.

The drive there took a while, ‘cause the cabbie detoured halfway around Manhattan downtown to stay away from the hole. He had a one-track mind, that guy.

“So, you goin’a the Arkadiuz, right?” he asked me.

“You got it, pal, it’s just off Br-“

”Yeah, yeah, I know where it is. I’ma take a detour, though ‘cuz of . . . you know.”

“Fine, whaddevah.”

“So, uh, d’a fuck ya think ‘bout ‘at shit, huh?”

“I think it’s a hole. I think it eats people. D’a shit else do I care, so long as I stay outta da fuckin’ thing?”

“Yeah, right, I hear ya,” said the cabbie, and that set me off for some reason.

“Everybody, I mean everybody’s got some theory a’ what they think it is. Alligators or a faultline or terrorists. I mean cut the crap already.”

“I ‘ad a guy in here today thought it was haunted, you know, like ghosts or something.”

“Ah, s’all bullshit, fr chrissake. Let’s face it, pal, we don’ know what da fuck it is, and every time someone tries’a find out, they get eaten, so we ain’t gonna find out what it is. And complaining ‘bout it an’ throwin’ around theories ain’t helping nothing, so you can either accept it’s there and deal with it, or get outta town.”

The cabbie didn’t have anything to say to that, so he just shut up. After a minute or two he switched on the radio. It was talk about the hole. For the rest of the ride I listened to a guy sayin’ how the hole was the true grave of Jesus Christ, and we’d better all get our shit together ‘cause He’s coming back, I don’t know, for a night out on Broadway I guess.

=====

I can stay awake all night, but I would make mistakes, alright.

Frozen

Some children's books clear up the misconception that "children's literature" is written exclusively for kids. Anyone over the age of 12 who can read Love You Forever or The Giving Tree without getting choked up is blocking something out.

On the plus side, being called "children's" protects them somewhat from horrible middle-school English class discussions, and things like that. The books go in the same places as stuffed animals, old games, and, until recently, comic books: if you're not using them for your enjoyment, you just don't take them out to examine for any other reason. So they stay safe in the toybox 'til someone feels like reading one. Which is good, because it lets the reader be surprised how much the stories speak to people who aren't kids.

So it's a travesty that The Sixth Borough exists only within the (magnificent but decidedly adult-oriented) novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Children should read it. It should not be talked about at Reading Time or in English class but should be available there, referred to in oblique terms without discussing what it's "about," so that people'll read it if they feel like it.

On a frozen shelf, in a closet frozen shut, is a can with a voice in it. What good is it doing there? What good is the story doing in the middle of a 300+ page novel? Sure, it does the novel well, the two stories become each other -- a dad tells the story to his son near the beginning of the novel, but you don't actually hear it until 200 pages later, because by then you know why it fits in the novel. You can see the novel in it. But a good story does fits external events to itself, largely regardless of where it is. I do believe that was even part of the point.

Thanks for the book, Hugh, been reading real slow so I'm only about 2/3 through.

Oh, and another thing. The "Emergency Disaster Gästbuch" link just above the Armadillo of Shame leads to a newly established refugee guestbook, while my main book is undergoing some form of civil unrest. It's brought to you by Ze Germans. Help me make it a sprawling, perturbed mess of a guestbook like you do so well.

How to Fall Asleep

Tell yourself, whatever you do, not to move. There's a little clock in your head, and your problem is, it's still ticking. Like one of those self-winding watches, every time you budge, to turn or rearrange your sheets, it resets. Shuffle, click. Try to keep that in mind. You will find reasons to move. You might feel hungry the minute you lie down, and decide to ignore your appetite, try to get to sleep anyway, only to hear your stomach growling louder, agitating against this tiny famine and refusing to let you sleep till you eat something. Unless this happens very regularly, it's hard to plan for, and will often force you out of bed. Afterwards, you might have left the kitchen sink dripping, and think you'll be kept awake all night by the gentle tapping. God forbid a car alarm should—
       —Go off! Disrupting your whole patterned being, it puts a huge dent in the flow of your night. Those sirens sounding outside put you in a frenzy, even though you keep still: your mind clenches into a red ball of surprise, your body tells itself to react and not to, to be angry and not to. You practically have to move, if only to swat at your pillow till you cool down. But moving will fracture the unity around you. You move, and instead of sitting stock still, everything in your room shifts in relation to everything else, exploding from a flat picture into a bristle of separate shapes and corellated vectors. That isn't what you want. That's day and movement. Ideally, everything blurs together as night mills on. So don't pay attention to any single thing. This can be very hard. Is your furnace noisy? Do your pipes hiss? Does your lover, shamelessly asleep, breathe loudly next to you? Think of these as noises without causes or names, and so not really noises: features of your ears, purely sensory, not sonic, phenomena; artifacts of perception. Extend this. Your window glowers with star light, probably, or street light, or moon light. Again, this is a scene painted on the inner surface of your corneas. Nothing is beyond it, nothing is even in it. It's one thing, in you. There are neither streetlights, nor heavenly bodies, nor anything else that creates that light—certainly not a dim market square, paved in heavy cobbles thinly lined with spiky grass, with hedges of banana crates and chipped empty tables, a bench or two on the sides, and bookstores and butchershops facing in. That doesn't exist. In a reversal of the normal relationship between human beings and the universe, the world is because you see it. You are the god of your own unravelling. And your fallen angel is an itch between your shoulderblades, agitating, threatening to pry apart the harmonious aggregate you're balling together. The traitor, needling you in the trough of your spine, insists on special recognition, on treatment as a unique circumstance, requiring specific action, not caring that your design demands that everything settle into one block with no gaps. If you can think your way around the itch, good. But make sure the cure is not worse than the disease. Kundalini yoga may overcome the physical sensation, but risks focusing your mind when you need it to diffuse and bleed blackly into watery night. Therefore, Kundalini yoga is counterindicated, as are timed breathing, visualization techniques, and any mental game or recitation. Passivity, of mind and body, is crucial. Don't even react when the mattress seem to knurl your back or prod against your joints, or when your nostrils and mouth are dry. Move like a skeleton: only in the feathery moss between your ribs, and the roots knobbing through your pelvis or displacing the occasional vertebra. Some myths say the world grew from the body of a dead giant. Others say it's somebody's dream. Combine these. Combine whatever you can. When you stop sorting everything into different corners, and tune nothing out but hear nothing either, and feel no comfort or discomfort, and neglect the senses of time and place, then, unmoved, these things settle on you, a weight of thought-matter, a hazy solid with no edges or margins, lacking internal division, having only the recognizable quality of weight, multiplying, forcing you down, contributing to your stillness, pressing your mind out of its daily shapes, holding your body in a pose of exhaustion, until the space between your being and this weight is so small that it almost disappears, until your refusal to distinguish, your absorbing the world into yourself, so that all you suffer or do takes place within you, ends finally with you smothered by the undifferentiated mass you have taken in, with you joining that unthing in your unspace, swallowing yourself down till there are no legs or arms or chest or shoulders, nothing but head or mind, or the smallest piece of you that exists, and that held between your own teeth.

---

Finally.

Other "Peeps'" Work

You go girl.

I've been wanting to post that picture for a while, but it took me until now to find anyone who'd host a 700kb animated gif. U of T won't touch it. How do I know the stick figure in this animotronic internetpicture to the right is a girl? Simple:

1. She is clearly an anime RPG hero (Japanese words, crazy blasting and martial arts powers, superimposed portraits in polygonal frames, speed lines even when she is standing still). Therefore,

2. She is a girl.

Cases in point, all from actual anime RPGs: 1 2 3 4 5 and 6

See? Girl.

Speaking of which, if you've never read Moorish Girl then I decry your Moorish Girl-reading ability. If you have, then I guess you can consider said abilities recried, or if you prefer, retroactively cried so as to negate the original decrying. She also pointed me to failbetter.com for the first time, and has a list of literary magazines as long as the hour hand of the Clock of Szeged, which is to say, 5 cubits (plus 3 centicubits). If her magazine list were the diameter of a bell, that bell would be the Bell of Heroes, and it would weigh 8537 kilos, and I'm sure that makes everything clear.

If you've never read Dawn's blog, then that condition can be easily treated by reading Dawn's blog, plus massive doses of Chloramphenicol.

Scholarly writing makes André hungry for confusion treats. I'm sick of using "this" as an adjective and always ensuring that "it" corresponds to a noun. Times like this, when I'm bogged down with Englishly correctness, I wish I could rap.

Grammar and clarity own my pages so if you were shown my pages you'd be blown away by my prosperity of expression, overcoming your professorly discretion to show you how verbal misdirection is a rarity in my pages, forcing you to atone for condoning your TA's rages doubting the sincerity of my decision to assassinate errors in every stage of revision, so spare yourself my derision by not airing your disrespect 'til you dare to inspect the lines I'm sharing.

Hey, cool, I can rhyme! It just takes me five minutes and the rhymes are all jumbled, so I s'pose I'll never be the next Bunny Rabbit. S'alright.

In Case You Wondered

This is my state of mind, recorded in the margins of my research essay notes.

Gent: Sir, you don't have any legs.

Sir: Ahh! Thank you, gent. (Falls down).

Edifying! Did you ever wonder what I scribble on the sides of my pages when I'm not fully engaged in studious, studiary, studying? Well, I don't care if you didn't, now you know.

This concludes my theatrical interlude, as my essay is headed this way, and it looks both quarrelous and ornery.

I don't hate deadlines, I like deadlines, they just have such a malicious dislike for me that I avoid them whenever possible.

Holy Smokes!

The kitchen just exploded in front of my face. This happened in reality, it did, just a moment ago. Happened with a loud electrical pop, an arching line of fire that lept four whole feet, from the sink to the fridge, and in the arm's length between that fridge and my nose, a white sparking firework went off—bang!—sending crackling streamers to the floor, like what you see on tv shows when a power line comes down. It seemed a hot lightbulb or a small bomb had detonated from out of thin air.

Somewhere in the instants just after the bang, the conflagration seized the entire room, which echoed and reiterated the pop and flash and obliterated itself in a shower of incandescent destruction. All around me, except the outlines of linoleum directly below the soles of my feet, was ashy ruin.

And then the sparks faded and the kitchen was intact and as white as it ever was. Dazzled, my arm still outstretched to reach for the box of tea on top of the fridge, I was left with nothing to show for my fantastic vision except a yoghurt container in the sink bottom slightly warped by heat, and a dent in the sink's steel basin that inexplicably followed the ridge of the yoghurt container's base.

I was relieved to come up with a more scientific explanation (we wired our own ground circuit to surge through the cold water pipe into the earth) than "ball lightning." Cold water pipes are supposed to be safe things to do this with because they go straight into the ground, but I think at some point our pipes must cross or contact, and we therefore should rethink our electrical strategy.

You Lazy Bastards!

As they say in Chicago: Aiya! Did anyone even read this post? Ah, hell, I can't stay mad at you, standing there and being all collective like that. I've been busy too, and it was a long post. So here's the deal:

1. I want to create an evil twin, so we can fight.


2. Being that I am made mostly of animal products, it will be made of starchy vegetables (Dave figured that part out). As I am a non-robot, my evil twin will naturally be robotic.


3. But my evil twin, Not-André, needs a kernel of pure opposition to me blazing at the heart of its AI. Evil twin plant robots don't program themselves, that's where you come in.


4. Go to Not-André's Not Nohari window (though I am as vain as I am fabulous, I don't wanna touch Johari with a pointy stick, and this Nohari gizmo is the devil's work—so it's perfect, just not for me, dammit). From the window of horrible character flaws that appears, choose the 5 or 6 that least describe me. By definition, these will best describe my evil twin.


5. Dance like drunken giraffes, I guess, for soon there will be Twin-kombat!

Make sense? Go, do it now.

Also, why the hell don't y'all sign the guestbook more damn often damn? I know you're reading this without ever having signed anything—is there a thrill to it, you blog pirates? You're messing up the whole system. Is the guestbook link at the top of the page too small? Would it help if I put an armadillo up there? I think I will.

That's What She Said

Seems the health newsletter I edit and proofread is doing a Sex Ed special for the last issue of the year, and, since the head editor and all writers are women, it has a mostly girly perspective. There's only one article that deals entirely with female sexual concerns, and here's the picture someone—a genius—chose for it.

Heh. So there's your sneak peak at the upcoming issue. Oh God.

Anyway, why have only four people pitched in the much-needed advice for my evil twin? You, read, help. Yeah it's long, but every effort has been taken to write it with such whimsmabulosity that reading it feels like your eyeballs are being . . . pleasured by massage gnomes. Yes, that one. Anyway, thanks Andra, Prax, Weija, and the Malacious Sterling von Warhol for your evil contributions.

La Montréalisation!

Fie on they what say Montreal is not the fun. But O, though frosty, fun it is! Not only were the days packed with cool times, but I also got a fair bit of writing and story stuff done. In the meantime we saw monkeys and things, visted some bunch of great museums, and I beat modern art in a double-flawless victory and performed the fatality.

I said I got some story stuff done. In fact, in addition to writing more of the story I'm working on now, and getting a better idea of how it's going, I came up with another, very little story that I like very much and is almost done, and this next thing, which is not a story but I am counting it as the fiction requirement for this entry. Interestingly, both it and the "real" piece can be expressed in the form of a field guide.

The Cunning Ninja's Guide To: 16 Uses of a Labret Piercing

1. Remove the stud and shoot water out of the hole, startling your foes. Cunning!


2. Fashion a colorful false goatee out of feathers affixed to the labret stud. You are now snappily incognito.


3. Thread fishing wire through the hole and dangle a small shiny object on the end. You may use this to distract your opponents or to lure especially tiny opponents until they are close enough to eat. It also allows you to play the cup and ball game with your mouth. Do not pull too hard on the string.


4. Slipping a dog whistle into the socket will let you inaudibly summon hounds to your side. Other possibilities include a bear whistle (for scaring bears), or a duck-call, as useful in hunting as it is in confounding your opponents with the demonic cackling of unseen malards.


5. Insert a drinking-straw through the hole and drink through it, keeping your hands and mouth free for killing or self-defence.


6. As a cunning ninja twist on the drinking-straw option, instead insert a blowgun. You can even conceal the darts inside of the feather-goatee. Cunning!


7. The drinking straw can also be used as a snorkel, conferring instant amphibious capability.


8. Carefully thread a long handled, small bowled spoon through the hole. This will of course be useless for eating, but allows a behind-the-head catapult attack that will catch your enemies flat-footed.


9. Another rodlike attachment, a specially prepared elongated pointy stick, can be used to poke people ahead of you in various lines that you will wait in.


10. Affix a thin chain to the labret stud. This chain can now be used to perform various pulling tasks. Example: mount a crossbow to your shoulder. With the chain attached, you can pull the trigger with a deft twist of the jaw.


11. As an unforeseeable twist, why not apply the labret piercing to your disabled foe? You may now insert a tracking device, a chain to secure them to a dungeon wall, or, in conjunction with earrings, wire their jaw shut.


12. Consider embedding a tiny bomb in the hole, that you can expel with sudden pressure to create a distracting explosion.


13. In Mexico, a certain species of beetle that does not eat or fly as an adult is made into a piece of living jewelery by gluing gems to its carapace. Impressively, the jewelery beetle can live 8-18 months, but must be held on by a ribbon and safety pin to prevent it from wandering off. Tethering one to your labret stud may enhance your image and status in certain parts of the world, projecting an aura of prosperity and command. Cunning!


14. Research has shown that octopi are highly intelligent. It may be possible to train a small octopus to respond to tactile commands delivered via the tongue, and then thread its tentacles through one or more specially enlarged labret piercings, to perform various tasks including manipulating objects or assisting you in a grapple, as well as creating an intimidating, Cthulhuesque visage that will unnerve your foes. Do not eat the octopus, as it is unconscionable to kill such an intelligent being for food and unhygenic to eat an animal that has died of natural causes.


15. A small pinwheel may be inserted through the piercing and spun using either the tongue or air blown through a pipe. Combining this with a whistle makes for a delightful spectacle!


16. There is no number 16, this was all a cunning trick to distract you whilst a ninja maneuvered himself into position. He could now strike at any instant, or simply vanish with the next breeze. This demonstrates that the best use of a labret piercing, like any other tool in the ninja's field kit, is to furnish the element of surprise.

So yes, clearly that was not a story by any stretch of the imagination, but as I understand it, Christ sacrificed Himself to ensure my democratic right to free speech and I intent to use that right. For ninja lists. Originally there were no ninjas involved. In fact I think use #1 was thought up by Dawn many a year ago, and though she is a Tricky one, I don't believe she had apprenticed herself to the art of invisibility. But I didn't have any other particular theme to focus my labret meditation, and examples using ninjas seem to be one of the default modes of communicating on the internet, so I went with the flow and made it ninjas.

What else happened in Montreal? Oh plenty, but that is a story for another day.

Qu'es-ce qui else est passé? Well, apparently me and Michael-Bergmann, whom I've not met but gather is some type of beau, concur on precisely 40% of Gigi's personality. Shnifty. Though I must say "Johari" sounds like the title of one of those dumb movies about board games taking over the real world, à la Jumanji, Zathura, and Super Mario Bros. Man that last one was an awesome dumb movie, though. Trust the fungus!

Also, continuing my practical education, I have learned that according to Article 2, Paragraph 4 of the Berne Copyright convention, a law can be copyrighted. Did you know that? But news articles can't. It's all here in this pamphlet.

Uninvited

Something woke in my stomach this morning, or next to it. Tentacled and gray - I knew it was gray, somehow - stretching taut, puckered limbs to embrace the organ in a curling, radiant cephalopoid yawn. Sure as a creeper it suckered on to my stomach and I knew the thing was there for keeps. It fluttered a little, pleased with itself, I imagined.

This can't be right, I thought, and the thing turned my statement into a question. I imagined a head, a single eye of some sort inspecting my interior, pinning adenda to my thoughts while it toyed with my viscera. The thing didn't actually scare me, though I must admit I would have liked it to leave. I didn't feel that trying to force it out would be a good course to take. There was a quaking in me, and I realized I was mostrously hungry, my throat was dry, I was a little nauseated and itching to jump out of bed. I made eggs for breakfast, no toast, and then more eggs afterwards when I was still hungry.

While I was eating, my guest lay silent, but I did have an instantaneous sensation of disembodiment, a notion that my head detached itself from the rest of me in order to fall upon the eggs, drawing them in strangely towards its mouth. When I was finished I felt the thing, too, had gathered something from the meal.

At the moment, none of my books interested me in the slightest and the prospect watching tv struck me as unbearably boring, so even though I had nearly two hours before work, I left the house and drifted off in that general direction.


- - -

Not too much is up at this precise moment. I finished off another story, and then after hearing I actually had two more weeks before I'm due to submit a story, I decided I hated that one and was writing another.

A certain Elizabeth left a Christmas message in my guestbook saying "Let's talk." This confuses me still, in its brief obliquity and in the fact that I can't recall knowing anyone who's ever gone by Elizabeth. I suppose it could be the queen, feeling now that I am Canadian we should have a chat about things, but if this is the case then "Let's talk" comes off less as a request and more as an imperious demand. My heart rebels, crying freedom and allegiance to no crown, although if Mrs. Windsor cares to leave the regalia at home I can be persuaded to sit down for interviews at any establishment where eggs are served sunny-side up alongside breakfast sausages and buttered toast.

This reminds me that I've not eaten since waking four hours ago. Not bad, really, as I've spent the time writing and that's how I eventually plan on making the money that I will put towards the purchase of food to be eaten by me. On the whole, though, writing and eating are fairly different activities and I shouldn't get into the habit of confusing them.

Sorry Leora that I have not commented on your blog yet, but I am extremely sketchy at correspondance and can never think of anything to say except for hi. Maybe I will just say hi. I realize you probably still can't go online and read this but once you get out of there it'll be up, along with my comments.