The Unswung Bat

2008-11-04T20:04:00.000-08:00

WE WON!

In my words: Damn right.

In the words of a friend: SUCK ON IT JOHN MCCAIN, YOU LITTLE BASTARD!

AHHHHHHHH that feels so good. So good. Like, eight years good.

2008-11-03T14:09:00.000-08:00

Action Items: Great Raymonds in History

For future action, here below is a Google-compiled list, reproduced exactly as it was compiled to me by Google, of "Great Raymonds in History." The nature of each Raymond is shown as Google computed it, and thus it is how each person would represent themselves if only they could speak to us.

A Google-compiled list of 20 Great Raymonds in History and their Nature

1. THE GREAT RAYMOND (MAGICIAN, SUBJECT OF FASCINATING FACTS) | www.magictricks.com/raymond/

2. RAYMOND A SPRUANCE (NAVAL HISTORIAN, AUTHOR OF BOOK: "THE QUIET WARRIOR") | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_A._Spruance

3. ALONZO PEARIS RAYMOND (D. 1904 "as a consequence of great exposure, hard work and hardships.") | freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~raymondfamily/alonzo.html

4. RAYMOND BADACH (DELI OWNER) | www.raymondsnj.com/history.html

5. ERIC S. RAYMOND (HACKER HISTORIAN) | oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/raymond.html

6. DANIEL RAYMOND (ECONOMIST FROM HISTORY) HISTORY ARTICLE: | muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_of_political_economy/v032/32.3frey.html

7. RAYMOND APPLE (JEWISH HISTORIAN) | www.unswpress.com.au/isbn/9780868409276.htm

8. RAYMOND HOOD (ARCHITECT, ROCKEFELLER CENTRE) | www.archiplanet.org/buildings/Rockefeller_Center.html

9. RAYMOND IBRAHIM (AUTHOR, TODAY IN HISTORY) | jihadwatch.org/archives/023059.php

10. RAYMOND (OF DAIMBERT, GODFREY AND RAYMOND, THE WRITERS OF A LETTER TO THE POPE) | history.hanover.edu/texts/1stcru3.html

11. RAYMOND A FOSS (FAMOUS POET) | famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/raymond_a__foss/poems/22180

12. ROY RAYMOND (CALIFORNIA CABERNET MAKER WITH SONS) | www.epinions.com/review/fddk-Wines-By_Name-All-Raymond.../fddk-review-BE7-51F72EC-38B8685F-prod1

13. RAYMOND A BEHR, DR. (PEDIATRIC/ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRIST) | www.healthgrades.com/directory_search/physician/profiles/dr-md-reports/Dr-Raymond-Behr-MD-EBC93EEA.cfm

14. RAYMOND R SKYE (WAMPUM HISTORIAN) | www.realpeopleshistory.com/raymond-r-skye

15. RAYMOND JOHN CHAMBERS (HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT ACCOUNTANT) | Findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3933/is_/ai_n8862550

16. KANDLER, MRS. RAYMOND (EDITH) | boards.ancestry.com.au/surnames.kandler/35/mb.ashx

17. RAYMOND GUBBAY (PROVIDER OF CLASSICAL MUSIC TICKETS) | www.raymondgubbay.co.uk/composers.asp

18. BARBARA RAYMOND (LONGTIME WESTPORTER) | www.westportnow.com/index.php?/v2/comments/longtime_westporter_barbara_raymond_dies_at_83/

19. URI RAYMOND (PATRIARCH, RAYMOND'S HARDWARE, PORT SANILHAC MI) | www.raymondhardware.com/AboutUs.chtml

20. SAINT RAYMOND OF PENAFORT (SAINT) | www.saintraymond.net/history.shtml

2008-08-05T19:38:00.000-07:00

From this valley they say you are going

My grandmother died on Saturday. I heard this Monday when I went home to meet mom on her return from a trip to Anchorage to be with the family. It was good--and unusual--that almost the whole immediate family lived there, especially considering how much they all moved around and have no roots in the area other than those they quickly fabricated. When they have no history, my maternal family will quickly stubborn one into existence.

This powerful bullheadedness is, as you might detect, a bit of a family emblem. Mom said that grandma died as she wanted to. She wanted only her immediate family there, none of her grandchildren, both to prevent us from having the memory of her dying and to draw in the most familiar people in her life while she waited. Mom also said she eventually wasn't even afraid. Though she still had bad stretches where she couldn't breathe and panicked, she was telling everyone that it was natural, what was happening to her.

So grandma had the death she wanted. She was the only person who still called me "Ani" (pronounce it "Onny"), a nickname my mom called me by when I was very young. Grandma always called me that--more the older I got, I swear. I don't remember the exact last time I said goodbye to her, and I'm glad for that. If I did, it would stand falsely as a summary of our connection. I'm left with a long and gappy memory of her. She was as stern and unbending a figure as I have ever known--more so, much more, than any other family member I can think of. But she wouldn't say anything against a view of yours she did not share. I know she was very kind and intelligent, perceptive and different, and worried. I miss my grandmother, and the question of when I, personally, lost her troubles me.

Her ability to find her good death leaves as strong an impression on me as the fatalistic sprit underlying all her wise deciding. She chose what was dearest and steadiest in her life to die beside, which is the first thought to almost bring tears to my eyes since the news began to hit. But she didn't choose to save her life when she could have. I'm unsatisfied we'll ever explain that habit well--is it unrequited curiosity that pulls you to die, fear and rationalization, disenchantment, disappointment, loneliness, weakness, shame, a complicated enjoyment of the object of your guilt, a simple act of mental avoidance? I don't know whether she reached any conclusion or was covered by an iron shield during the worst of it. I know my grandfather, who was exhausted, awoke magically ten minutes before she died, and she became calm when he came in to be with her.

If we have such control over the things we know about, if we can sweep away, more or less, the obstacles we'd hate to encounter even in the face of death, then why does it seem so right for everyone to do everything too late?

Love,

André

2008-04-08T18:01:00.001-07:00

I'm not dead yet

This year will be hard. I'm not going to have any of my own time, and I'll have to be very clever to have enough time for the stuff I've committed to do. I think next year I'll go hollow out a boulder and live in hermitage, enjoying only the simple burdens and absences of a contemplative life, like crickets chirping, hunger, the inability to have odd bumps diagnosed or cuts properly treated, and the sense that those facelike imaginary patterns in foliage are actual people.

2007-10-12T22:19:00.000-07:00

An adjective est mort

And you can have my overblown tragic pronouncements when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.

I like to use up all my adjectives for a day at once, so I can coast by on clever nouns, gentle pronouns, verbs, and truculent adverbs. Statements simply made ease the strain of communication. Poetry is a consolation of restriction...or in restriction...or just a restriction. I argued the point to a stump today. Is "today" adverbial?

The point is...the stump is...

That is to say...

What I'm getting at is...

...

Well, at least I'm not dead yet.

2007-09-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

I am not now now have a ever been a member of a sexy party

Just in time, a pack of Jack Kerouac books (nice alliteration) came by buzzer and obnoxious deliveryman (what did I say?). How they won me over: the first one's title is "Why Kerouac Matters."
He ain't much of a writer, but I'll give him a shot on the strength of that title and how fucking weak I'm personally feeling at the moment.
I'm an anemic kitten. I worked an extra day and a half and set rigid deadlines for the news section, and got all the copy in—written, edited, ready to go—by 8 p.m., only to see it all fell apart in a production bottleneck and clusterbomb explosion of fuckups, and no one knows why.
I have my theories, but like my crappier books and more pointless writing, they don't satisfy.
I slept in the office. I may die of mesothelioma. Or whatever you get from instant coffee.

[Away for a moment—where could I have been? Was it a tragicomic interlude? Did I prepare a bisque? The answer to these and more: yes. Microwave bisque is gross. Embracing my American heritage, I'm throwing money at the problem...it's 12:18, class is at 2 and in the meantime I can have anything I want near U of T for breakfast.]

How the hell am I supposed to finish a piece for this newfangled writers' group this Friday? Would Miz Laura notice if I brought one of her own, earlier projects to the table under my name...? Maybe I'll just write down the proceedings of the meeting, imagined in advance.

[A second interlude, y'ain't invited to the details, but it were loud, here.]

Is this anything? G'night, anyone, I do not know what I'm tired of, but I am so God damned tired of it.

A deep breath and regrouping: sitting in on a meditation seminar this term, gonna see what that's all about. Enlightenment pending, compiling inner peace...

2007-09-07T22:18:00.000-07:00

2007-08-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

Encore

There's a shopping cart in the ravine
The foam on the creek is like pop and ice cream
A field full of tires that is always on fire
To light my way home

"It's just a little soggy, it's still good, it's still good."

2007-08-08T18:12:00.000-07:00

Blue puppies

The phone is off the hook.

Here are someone else's writings.

Four Short Crushes

Well, well, well.
     Just look at you, walking into this dreary bar and lighting the place up like the noonday sun at midnight twirling your long, auburn hair pensively as you search the room--for what?
     For a soul mate, perhaps?
     (I know, I know--I hate that phrase, too. Maybe that will end up being one of those things we both hate.) Maybe a few weeks from now, lying in your bed on a Sunday morning, I'll ask you, "What's your least favorite word or phrase?," and you'll say, "Soul mate," and I'll laugh till you say, "What? Tell me!," and I'll tell you how I knew that from the moment I first laid eyes on you, and then we'll have sex again.
     But I'm getting ahead of myself. You haven't even noticed me yet. That's O.K. I can wait.
     Maybe when your gaze settles on me, and we lock eyes in that mutual Hitchcockian tunnel-vision effect where the camera is, like, pushing in at the same time it zooms out, or however that do that, you'll come sit down next to me and we'll--
     Now you've spotted the friends you came to meet. They look like good friends.
     Maybe they'll be my friends, too.
     Our friends.
     Your eyes just came to life like emeralds lit by subterranean torches, and as you move across the room toward your friends you shriek at them, "What the fuck is up, yo?," in a voice so piercing that the entire bar goes silent for a moment, and I have to check my glasses to make sure the lenses didn't crack. You continue to bellow your every utterance (including the lines "Jagermeister is the bomb, dawg!" and "Just 'cause I'm a white girl don't mean I don't got some serious junk in the trunk!" and "Random! Random! Random!"), and the bartender leans in and whispers something to his bar back, and they look at you and laugh.
     You must be a regular here.
     (Duration of crush: seventeen seconds.)

Oh my. What have we here? A rainy night in the city has cleared the sidewalk of all but the most intrepid pedestrians, and those who didn't brave the elements have no idea what they're missing,
     Because there you are, gliding along on your bicycle, just a few feet in front of me.
     You're obviously not one of those tedious hard-core cycling enthusiasts--no skin-tight black spandex for you. No, just a simple white T-shirt (soaked through to the skin, clinging to the small of your back) and a long blond ponytail, whipping back and forth like the tail of a cartoon pony, as those long legs of yours pump the pedals and you raise your face to the sky, letting the raindrops freckle your cheeks with sweet diamonds of moisture.
     Dare I try to catch up with you? I'm on foot, carrying a bunch of shopping bags, but you've paused at a red light, and--what the heck? I don't know what I'll say to you, but even the clumsiest of introductions on these glistening nighttime streets will give us a romantic how-we-met anecdote that we'll love telling for years to come.
     Caught you! Here I am!
     And there you are. I see now that you're a dude. My mistake. It was the ponytail that threw me off.
     (Duration of crush: thirty-three seconds.)

Another restaurant dinner with my boring girlfriend, another lecture about how I never really listen to whatever she's yammering on about.
     But how can I listen--how could anyone?--when across the room, alone at a table, reading the newspaper and nursing a glass of white wine, is a silent confection like you?
     You, with your jet-black hair (like a latter-day version of Veronica from "Archie") and your skin so pale that the bubble-gummy pinkness of your pouty lips seems almost obscene, especially when you scrunch them up the way you do every time you lick your forefinger and turn the page.
     And I know you see me, too. Your first glance betrayed a glimmer of recognition--as if you knew me but couldn't remember from where--followed by puzzlement, your eyes entreating me to silently remind you, which I couldn't do at the time because my current girlfriend was staring across the table at me, apparently waiting for my answer to some kind of relationship question I thought was rhetorical.
     And so it goes. For an eternity, it seems--through the entire meal, until I watch you ask for the check, and pay it, and get up to walk out of the restaurant, and my life, forever.
     But what's this? You're crossing the room toward me? So brazen--just as I knew you'd be. Are you going to surreptitiously slip me your number, written on a sugar packet, perhaps dropping it in my pocket as you fake-jostle me, like a spy handing off microfilm?
     My heart beats like underwater thunder in my ears, until you tap my girlfriend on the shoulder and she sees you and says, "Hey!," and you say, "I thought that was you!," and I realize that you are one of my girlfriend's college roommates.
     After you leave, my girlfriend tells me a hilarious story about how one time in college some guy broke up with you, so you found some photos of him nude with the word "Patriarchy" written on his chest in Magic Marker which you took for an art class, and you sent them to his parents and then posted them on your blog, where you apparently like to write incredibly detailed confessionals about the asshole guys you always end up dating, and also, while you don't use the guys' real names, everyone knows that the guy you immortalized as Pencil Dick is actually a guy I used to work with.
     (Duration of crush: forty-five minutes.)

So silly does my impatience now seem, stuck as I am in the Starbucks line during the morning rush. But that was before I noticed you in line ahead of me.
     And now that I've seen you--with your gossamer hair still damp from the shower, with your well-moisturized ankles strapped and buckled into high heels that make you wobble and sway like a young colt just finding her stride, with your scent of lilacs and Dial, and, most of all, your sense of calmness and serenity, which makes me wish that the world itself would stop spinning, so that gravity would cease and we two could float into the sky and kiss in the clouds, giddy with love and vertigo--
     Now you're at the register, and the dreaded moment when we part without meeting rushes toward me like a slow-motion car crash in a dream.
     You've been at the register for, like, fifteen seconds now, still scanning the menu board with those almond-shaped eyes that would make Nefertiti herself weep with envy.
     Seriously, you've been to a Starbucks before, right? I mean, it seems like there are a lot of choices, but most people find a drink they like and stick with it. And order it quickly.
     But maybe I've caught you on a day when you've decided to make a fresh start. To make a fresh start, to try a new drink, to walk a different way to work, to finally dump that boyfriend who doesn't appreciate you.
     O.K., even if that were the case you could have picked out your new drink while you were waiting in line, right? I mean, come on.
     Well, you've won me back, my future Mrs. Me--by turning to me and mouthing, "Sorry," after you finally noticed me tapping my foot, looking at my watch, and exhaling loudly. Sensitivity like that can be neither learned nor taught, and it's a rare thing indeed. The rarest of all possible--
     Jesus Christ, you've ordered your drink and paid; do I really have to stand here for another forty-five seconds while you repack your purse, the contents of which you've spilled out on the counter like you're setting up a fucking yard sale or something?
     That's right, the bills go in the billfold, the coins go in the little coin purse, the billfold and the coin purse go back in the pocketbook--no, in a side pocket of the pocketbook, which seems to have a clasp whose design incorporates some proprietary technology that you haven't yet mastered.
     I think I hate you now.
     (Duration of crush: five minutes.)
     - Paul Simms

Beagle Or Something

The composer's name was Beagle or something,
one of those Brits who make the world wistful
with chorales and canticles and this piece,
a tone poem or what-have-you,
chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one
whose eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears.
The music occupied the car where
I had parked and then sat, staring at
a tree, a smallish maple,
fire-gold and half-undone by the wind,
shaking in itself,
shocking blue morning sky behind, and also
the trucks and telephone wires and dogs
and children late to school along Orange Street, but
it was the tree that caused an uproar,
it was the tree that shook and shed,
aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered
I was supposed to have one--for convenience

I placed it in my chest, the heart being away,
and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking,
golden-orange, half-spent but clanging
truer than Beagle music or my forehead pressed
hard on the steering wheel in petition for release.
     -- April Bernard

"I know how two people can be talking to each other and thinking 'oh, they know exactly how I feel,' but really they're talking about blue puppies or something."

2007-07-22T12:05:00.001-07:00

Prior thoughts revisited upon me unexpectedly

It is really unfair how I seize on the small recognizable things. I do it with you, all, I know no other way to know a person than to catch them with one of their own. And I work as hard to do it as to not realize that as soon as they don't show me their own, I won't know what's with no-one.

So this is an education?

This poem was in my head (no man is an island entire...bell tolls)
This poem was in my head (and light and labor past)
This poem was in my head (your cloud words...amoeba, sigh, divide, begin; So sorry I can barely say to be full of invisible words).

A great deal was up around me. I have been digging a while—depth equating with extent of knowledge, familiarity, commitment even, in a football-teamspeak. Being that it is impossible to dig across the entire surface of ground (without blasting the excavated earth into space), depth means high walls. Tempting to say I've dug an island, in light of the first poem, but an analogy is an analogy is an analogy and like us they only go so far before they give out.

I've not dug a moat around a little patch of ground. There, only, was air filling the cleared space between matters I have not disturbed. Is a hole the air or the walls, is a house the inside or the structure, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Yeah. What is the sound of one dumb question? Dumb meaning mute, is it the same as one dumb answer? If these walls could'a talked...

But a great deal has come down, and the thing to do isn't to frame statements, which will only come out asinine no matter how they sound on the inside; the thing is only to pick through the new-broken chunks and pockets and inspect, decide what what is, and where I want to put all this dirt.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying.

2007-07-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

Extended coverage

In what may be the least ignoble of his public deeds, prez. Bush set an example about getting screened for colorectal cancer. Not that he set out to publicize it, but there was obviously going to be no hushing it up since it involved making Cheney acting president for a few hours (they state that he spent the morning reading, not that you'd ever know...). ABC News paired the political note with a detailed overview of the surgical process: "Well, the preparation the night before is the difficult part, euphemistically we call it 'cleaning out the bowels.'"

May it be his epitaph.

2007-07-18T22:01:00.000-07:00

Well that was frightening

I don't know how to feel about not being able to confidently say that that was the scariest few minutes of my life. The steam main explosion happened right outside the building I'm working in. What we saw out the window was a huge shower of rubble and dust, while the floors shook and the roar just got louder. Yeah, what do you think was the first possiblity we thought of? You think you are going to be skeptical when an explosion is underway in your very immediate vicinty, possibily in your building? No. The in-charge part of your brain astutely notes that it's so unlikely for you to be on the seventh storey of an office building, which is shaking, as a solid wall of debris pelts all the windows and something near and BIG roars, that—hey—who knows? All bets are off, and speculation that the deafening sound could come from a falling building, or an exploded plane, ain't so much of a stretch as to not be worth taking into account.

And not only am I proud to say that despite starting from the seventh floor far from the stairwell, I was the fourth person out. Nothing you can say can change that. I would'a lived. And I wasn't pushing or cattle-driving—in fact, it was impressive to see that even people on the edge of hysteria were being decent. Not helping each other really, everyone was more or less panicked, but not hindering or anything.

I, and the editor-in-chief, and two other people with their heads screwed on, however, were far too busy getting the living hell out of there. Let me be clear: when our canoe got caught in a deadly storm, six miles from the middle of nowhere, with Andra in front and me steering, I was rowing for her at least as much as for me. That was sketchy, and awful, and I never want to be in a prolonged life-or-death situation like that again. Or even a short one. The point is, this time, I was alone and running for me. I don't know how or whether that's better or worse, and like I said, I'm good not knowing.

This was not a life or death situation, as became clear once outside. The street was ripped open and out of the three-lane-wide gash was blasting what in the fraction of a second I saw it looked like an avalanche in rewind. What from my vantage looked like the entire guts of Manhattan were erupting through the street. The steam pipe rupture happened at the crossroads of 41st Street and Lexington Ave, which is to say, at the northeast corner of my building, half a block from where I was standing at the fire exit. That initial geyser, I'm now told, was taller than the Chrysler building (easy to judge, since they were almost side-by-side). I saw a wall of rubble coming out of the ground and thought, as I turned to run in the correct direction (I still didn't have my bearings but that one point of reference was all anyone needed) "up from the ground is good." And it is: Whatever's blasting out must be getting forced, which limits it and makes it controllable. It's localized, the mere fact that I've seen it is reassuring even if at that instant I've no idea what could cause it, and, more to the point, monstrous plumes of rubble shooting out of the ground just doesn't scream "terrorist").

Of course, I didn't stop to look back till I was two blocks away, and then only for a moment, and by that point I was already running upwind, knowing full well that demolition debris can have a ton of bad pollutants that are nothing to be cavalier about. One thing I can say of every Bovee and Begun I've met is that we are not damned fools. Someone was very kind to lend me her phone so I could call my uncle, who works in the building next door, and my aunt at home, and from there it was just a long walk to the next train station, after I picked up a 72 cent notebook at the first drugstore I decided was far enough away. Different people have different ways of dealing with shit. It was not, as it turns out, a disaster. It was maybe a travesty, but only if they should've done something about the known risk. Which in my opinion they damn well should have. Certainly it was more than a SNAFU.

But for about a minute, it was really bad: everything was shaking, everyone was thinking, and not without reason, that the floors might come down—imagine, a combined earthquake and rockslide hitting out of nowhere when you're in a high building, and try to think a comforting thing. We didn't even know if the exit was safe. It didn't "feel hot," but so what? Just before we opened the door someone shouted "Nonononono NO!" It's a bad feeling to think you're (maybe) trapped in a building in mid-disaster(?!). Buildings, being generally designed as static, should not be mid-anything, ever. Midwestern, maybe. Maybe.

In case you're inquisitive and don't already know, I've assembled a few lessons in convenient sentence form, that they may be taken into your heads for consideration through reading, rather than direct experience, or that they may be taken out of my head and massaged around into something I like better:

The silence of concentration is common and seldom noticed; that of disbelief, unsettlingly different. José Saramago said silence has nothing to do with noise, silence is when birds turn and fly away.

Panic starts with the sound of silent disbelief and someone saying "um."

In a situation so very bad-seeming that you want to wake up, a big chaw of your brain fixates on the elephant (or explosion) in the middle of the room. Possibly it's yelling "NO!", that one syllable stretched from one end to the other of everything you know, possibly that's just the light tubes humming, who has time to wonder?

Meanwhile, the talented tenth of your brain, the clever strip stapled but not talking to the bulky panicky muppet brain, is a master of ignorance and displacement, seeing not the elephant but the directest course of action leading away from it. Meanwhile it very wisely chooses not to notice how fucking frightened you are.

Five minutes later, everything is okay. Five minutes after that, everything really is okay. Standards change over time. Then suddenly ten minutes later you realize you're having trouble tying your shoes.

I need to learn the email addresses of the rest of my family.

Katee Sackhoff is gay? Dammit!
Nope, she's not. We win again!

2007-07-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

Extended Coverage

Dave in particular, but to anyone else who knows, too, why do people use MySpace?

2007-07-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

A cry in the dark,

That was the name of the "dingo ate your baby" movie. You in my class in grade 5, or maybe 6 remember. That sentence is short a comma, I'm sure of it. Two clauses that shouldn't be open to each other are fused in mutual juices like Siamese twins, not because of malice but redundancy, that is, absent absence or the lack of a nothing skin that confirms you are not me. Does not confirm you are me. Everything reduces in language, but I am a seeing a dark garden scintillating with fireflies that puncture the dull gray air with their tiny spikes of light that show the existence or needlessness of God, one of those, and I have no words for that. And anyway the sentence is better itself like that; is correctly deformed.

The Mexican wolfboys who became trampoline artists did so, they say, because they were tired of being a side show attraction, wanted people to come to see them for a skill rather than a condition. Though the posters for their new act, I'm sure, said come see the trampolining wolf boys. From the energy of the first act, the second is launched. Wolfboy is the new Madonna, is the new multi-stage Saturn V.

Energy! Maybe the dingo ate your baby.

Energy negotiatiates so it is alright for we'll say a trampoline skin to try to be both up and down at once. It brokers an accord between two states (S0 and S1, before and after, making possible during) the imaginable alternative being untenable.

It's never the right time to be pragmatic, especially ever. Clacking teeth.

That couple would've been better off if there'd been no dingo, you could say; when the woman went to jail her man put his everything behind trying to find the dingo, or even a few bitemarks where it'd been.

The scalar quantity of energy has positive or negative magnitude and no direction, and it is what makes up your mind.

I'll tell you a secret ("tell you" a "secret?" Energy!): If I ever am give up into the right time, I have let myself be hit by a train. Notwithstanding, I might stray, next to the tracks as it hurtles through. When I wandered at night, an overlooked luxury among many heaped on highschoolers, I once drifted past a girl toeing the yellow line on a subway platform, observing her steps like listening to a violin solo, and in a voice that was a baby's, singing, as the subway train, brutally and out of nowhere, displaced the air a pucker from her cheek. The distance away from your face your lips travel in the average kiss. her fascination was unbroken like a sentence without a period.

If she was singing Mariah Carrey. Who is no Madonna. Either she was high, or that's how she was.

If she was singing with her steps, who cares about a train?

Another secret is that where I hope to god I'll go when the other choice is to sell off my books, is a dark scrubby wilderness of ropy dry roots and thorny bits and drums, where I will camp me out around a fire and, in the fullness of time, cook maybe some chicken legs and listen to the wood sing high-pitched soft notes, and sit and the burning meat smell will get into the nostrils of one of those quiet big moving things around you that aren't there till you see them, and she'll lurch into the camp site and I hope she'll eat some chicken.

And the fine sand-glints flying past on the ground like where the fireflies in the air were grains of mica on a rock discovered held to light and turned because special, dryness etching a minor light stillness into the rushing blur under the wheels. I won't look at them, I hardly did when they were fireflies. A firefly flew into my computer screen, once, twice, three times before getting frustrated and flying off in a state of consternation. One landed on my arm. Saved, as by divine grace, from my mosquito-conditioned reflex.

The kids when I get home from work laugh, giggle and ask restlessly when--"when!"--do I want to go on the trampoline. Play monkey in the middle. Tag. Isabel's too slow to play tag. That's 'cause she's a fool. No! I'm am not no I am not! Hunter's calling me a fool. And in short order he will, with a dumb look on his face, accidentally-on-purpose shove her with his nine-year-old shoulders and she will without even thinking about it counter with her five-year-old hands and in no time, but all of time is measured until you arrive at units of no meaning, they will be a snarl of sibling brutality. Or just as easily I'll say we're going outside, come on, and all will be forgotten, even the fact that Isabel's too slow to play tag, and I'll even the odds in monkey in the middle for her. But while we're out I can't say anything, only move like an animal, a horse with a boy on his back.

When I sit down on the carpet with my laptop in front of me and Isabel comes for me to imagine her up some amusement, she doesn't think for an instant that I'm the one who needs it. I pick up with one hand the duckling-colored stuffed rabbit on the floor, and Isabel lunges to grab it, and like that it's the struggle of humanity in the universe. Ms. Bunny Rabbit scurries back and forth, she darts, thinks, reacts, she turns her head to the sky in mute pathos, and when the other's claws are on her and there's no escaping the pull, it's so important to her for no reason she knows of to wave faster and faster that pink scarf which is sewed onto her hand, goodbye! Goodbye! And the contest ended I turn back to my laptop and for a while in her world Isabel becomes a bunny, somberly and with effortless concentration. A deep breath and crouch: hop!

And I, eventually, move outside, where it is becoming increasingly dull and gray, the fireflies having done what they came to do and retired. So you've got a train schedule in your wallet, and you've got maybe there's a dingo right behind some of that dark everywhereness.

It's what you don't have to be told when it means what you hear it. You're staring like someone who knows they're staring like an animal. It is the disbelief before a confrontation, what plays in your ears while the other thing gets close. It is it is it is it is it is

So this is what education is?

2007-07-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

How it Bes

That's pronounced "bees."

For three weeks, while I'm at work I want to put stuff on my blog, but when I get home I'm too tired and I've got better things to do in my one or two hours of free time than spend it on Blogger. So that would be that, except I am clearly not one to abandon my blog. So instead I'm going to try jotting down notes whenever, and posting them at the end of the day.

It will be disordered, clipped and fragmented, and probably lacking in extrinsic or tangible benefit to the reader. Or will it...?

This is a colon:

One P. Hilton (whose by-all-reports lame interview nonetheless tripled Larry King's ratings and who without fail prompts lengthy "news" stories every day, with oddball pictures and screamer headlines like "PARIS REVEALS NAKED FEAR") is now a "celebucon" in the lingo of the (brilliantly trashy) NY Post. This, presumably, is a development from her "celebutante" status in that paper last week. I could care less for updates on the woman, but the linguistic workshop that is entertainment reporting is thrilling to see in action.

A CNN guy, talking about P. Hilton's effects on Larry King's ratings: "She's the number-two guest we could possibly get. The number-one would be Osama bin Laden. What does that say about us?"

A fourth century holy relic was recovered from a Queens pawnshop. Two
dudes of a Grecian ethnic extraction were arrested for stealing it from the altar of a Queens, NY church.

Romanian cinema flourishes in NYC!
Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest!
Mitulescu's The Way I Spent the End of the World!

Incidentally, that first one links to the Onion AV club. It's one of my favorite things to read currently (there's a long list of favorites, but I read a lot), especially since I have to pore over trade journals like Variety for work. Being an initiate of such jargon as tenpercenteries, shingles, skeins, starrers, bow and prexy, and the neutral, clipped language of these industry reports dictating the course of entertainment media over the next few months, AV club features like "recent celebrity quotes in context" strike me as downright fabulous. There's also a clever set of charts explaining celebrity identity. What I love about it is the style and originality. What kills me is that people actually do need this kind of help putting Hollywoodish things into perspective.

Saw Ozomatli yesterday in Central Park, for free. At the end of their set, they jumped off the stage and started a parade through the audience, nearly causing all the security staff's heads to explode. Most awesome. Then they started a beachball volleyball conga line thing.

Sometimes I do then again I think I don't.

2007-06-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

Smuggin'

It's like Drew's watched the Rick Mercer boxed set.

News section's to be done soon, stop. Maybe 1 a.m, stop. Am getting motorbike from crazy lady, stop. Am well, send my love to Mr and Mrs Randolf, expect be home by September, stop.

2007-06-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

On Fire

Much like Oz the wizard, BAD house has been both great and terrible to us, and we are returning the favor. In this analogy, the man behind the curtain represents, I think, the ant colony living in Dave's toolbox. Pay no attention to them.

PARTY! Come prepared for festivities, revelry, and maybe even some shenanigans. If a certain someone brings his Wii, we shall endeavour to hook it up to our newer TV. If anyone else brings extra Wiimotes, well, then (hypothetically) we'll have more than two.

Theoretically, we will in fact burn down our house in effigy in our backyard. I am most interested to see whether this scheme will go off. We have all the matches we need, but we're shy on actual lumber, so I propose to have everyone bring a piece of wood out of which we'll construct our voodoo house and burn the whole thing down.

WHERE: BAD House, 35 Nealon Ave, Conjunction junction (north of Chester station, near the shores of opportunity, literally as far from funkytown as geometrically possible)

WHEN: 6 p.m., this Sunday (3rd of June)HOW: Through a complicated socioeconomic gestalt

BRING (any and all): Yourself; your friends if they are affable, generous, young and rich; party stuff; Wiimotes and multiplayer games which are totally a good idea to play in a befuddled and/or raucous crowded room; Magic tricks and nice hats.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: Bring something entirely wooden--a log, a 2x4, a beloved childhood toy, Mark Wahlberg's lone facial expression, a stick you broke off a tree on the way over, whatev's. If we get enough, we will make a house out of them and burn it in the backyard.Think that covers everything, see y'all down at the ranch.

2007-05-14T04:02:00.000-07:00

Reflections on the First Newspaper Night

Holy fucking hell!
Where'd I go so damned wrong?
Stone hops on taut water.

Got a certain poetry to it, don't it, Captain? Aiya. There will be a reckoning. And by reckoning, I mean "the act or instance of estimation or computation, taking the relevant matters into consideration to settle accounts or regard something in reference to a fixed or accepted basis." Or else heads will roll. Well, mine, anyway. And I don't believe mine head was made for rolling.

Enough with poetry! It is time for prose and line breaks!

One of my dudes at The Varsity,
one of my associates, so it goes,
identifies himself as bangla.bhai@... in email addresses.
An infamous terrorist in Bangladesh, this Bangla Bhai,
with an Old West twist to his name. Bangla Bhai (the Bengali Brother
[See? English and Bengali: not actually so far apart])
of the JMJB, caught and hanged by Bangladesh not seven weeks ago—
but my associate stole his name long before that.
He almost went with itsthejews@... but reconsidered:
"someone would get offended," he said.
A very thin set of people finds it funny.
Not people who think "Jews," and not people who think "Muslims"
and not people who suck in greedy scowls whenever they hear the nouns
"TERRORISM" or "ZIONISM."
Not even a little bit funny at all.
And that is why I like it.

Schedules are everything. What's happening? Put it in a calendar, and put the calendar in a calendar, and set the alarms. Context first, then the text inside, and let the damn subtext figure itself out.

2007-04-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

.

"7 / 10"

2007-04-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

Prières en Sports

"There's this idea that God isn't to be worshiped, isn't outside our imagination. Intead of God over all, He's your buddy—in evangelical Christianity, there's a growing tendency to look at God in a very subjective, even narcissistic way. It's God as therapy.

"When an athlete prays for a win while other players on the other team are doing the same...to think as though your personal performance equates to God's plan is a pretty confused thing to do."

- Sports and philosophy guy sur CBC

"The Lord deserve some of the credit for our win today."

- Some evangelical football player

"Drop-kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life."

- A song of some sort

***

I'm writing this on a nifty tablet PC majig that recognizes my (!) handwriting and renders it as text, albeit text that that needs some going-over, which divides my writing attention in previously unheard-of ways. So I sound different.

These sorts of things—the difference between writing on a keyboard vs. writing with pen and paper, or even between pen and pencil have interested me for, well, awhile. Same with reading techniques. But for even semi-serious writing, I don't really like this having to scrutinize every word twice to make sure it rendered right. Oh well, fun to try. Would have been fun to leave all its miswritings in place, now I think about it.

Whulp I'm off: been co-opted into yardwork detail. Now go and judge a book by its cover.

2007-04-15T01:04:00.000-07:00

I do, I did.

I am still, be it said, getting hang of the four defenses against libel.

   those being:
   truth (this shouldn't be shaky)
   consent (waiting for that one to come up)
   fair comment (all the damn time--look it up)
   privilege (?)

If you think I haven't, by the end of typing this, proofread it sufficiently, you would be wrong.

Then, however, you also wouldn't be you.

So.

On cowardice, of those who know my name, Adom Jeffers alone was thus far cognizant that midway--I think it was midway, maybe somewhat more far--

through a cross-country race, I quit.

Walked. Walked for maybe a whole minute!

marking the slant, obv.

(To mon ami: sorry. He helped me out: 'comment ça va' or something like it, he asked)

And I started again so late--even at that level of competition, five second's rest is much.

Charitable, very, to call nothing else blunt. I once thought (I do still think, but in early age thought) very literally, cross-country The Race.

Across the country: was there any more race? No! Ocean, only! Splash! Choking on salt and tuggy undertow! Though even in first grade I rationalized: surely it was only a distance equivalent to the breadth of Canada, run (by the CC runners, so I'd fabricated) over the course of a year. Olympian, worth the singular article and capital R. But doable.

Why in god's name--?

But I certainly did, mon ami.

My two best long-distance races (oh, I am definitely a long-distance runner, even if one who made bad mistakes) ended in me throwing up.

actually, my very best, my medal-winner, did not (good for me, I brought home my lunch and a medal to boot)

but the other two...

Most unpleasant successes. Or, to borrow from First Year, [they] brought the inside out

   (gross; uncalled for)

that is, unravelled, as evolution; or, the down- and up-side of natural selection

(so uncalled for. But I did win that medal).

Just so: embarrassing, that first editorial. But, dear God, how I'm ready to slather my brain, or heartblood, across a page, provided it's the right one (it hasn't). And on the other side--bread (why not!) in the sandwich (?! I ask) with my poor head as meat--one leaden, firing straight as fuck.

I do not want to be forward
I do not want to be straightforward I don't
want--sometimes, and too often--
I don't want to be.

   'nite.

--

But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they

2007-04-13T04:20:00.001-07:00

April 12th, 31:13 a.m.

I hear birds outside my window. It's snowing. Why, why, why must you always pretend? asked Ms. Kenton. And then I laid down and waited to complete.

Essays are dripping like rain off a black bough from my hands, and I'm not doing anything I particularly should but shivering a little and clicking the keys. Or the other side of that is I'm doing great, 85s and 90s great. I just waited, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.

I was Tommy D. in elementary school and Kathy in high school and Stevens at various points and Farraday in spare moments. Tommy was the rightest but, unfortunately, at odd moments and with the usual result of some violence. And he did let them take out his guts when the note came for his fourth donation. I even saw Ezra Pound twisting his mustache back there.

What's the meaning of that obfuscation? All you've done (this is the André from the universe where André lives in a one-floor house near San Francisco) is smush together a few characters you've thought about for essays. Farraday and Pound you barely even mentioned in any paper!

He will go on. He has learned to communicate with me across the zero-point barrier, by thinking the exact negative of the thoughts he wants me to hear. I haven't learned the trick. I can only assume he has gifted spies who watch what I'm writing, or a wildly accurate imagination. The opposite, I'm sure, to my fuzzy one.

Hell, I bet right now he's just bought some big callous-headed koi for the pond he worked on the last couple months that his wife smiles about. Well that's certainly something. There must be some trouble in his life, though--just money (a serious problem, but boring) or what?

Oh, he goes on, but he knows when everything starts to go wrong. The skid point, when it hits, shocks his limbs rigid as mine--makes me a good skier, terrible soccer player, running ability unaffected.

That shock to the limbs, I know, is what keeps him up all night or stuck in his garden looking at a koi pond. Oh hell. That's just not true. He forgot about staring into dark shallow water late into the night.

Or if you like, 7:13 the next morning.

And there's the pair my little essay-writer, you can pretend well enough to know it:

I can-
not go
on I
go on.

2007-04-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

Every Essay Makes it Worse

I'm writing an essay about...never mind. You don't care what it's about. I don't care what it's about. I can't remember the last time I really loved writing something. I'm sure it was long ago, I just can't use my brain properly right now, so I can't remember.

And I'm only half-done. Oh Fuck. Someone shoot me in the face. Seriously, I'm sure I'll be fine. It'll wake me up.

*** *** ***

Wow, my eyes must have been pretty bloodshot, or my mind awfully bruised, to have left that saying how every essay "make it" worse. As it is it's a pretty damned shoddy thing to say, but at least it's grammatical.

On other notes, I do believe that Oscar Wilde never actually died, but instead flies across the face of the planet, possibly travelling through the interwebs through means obscurely technological and sufficiently witty, fighting evil and making eyes at things.

After this essay, I've two more books needed read for another essay, after a fiction thing and an exam. I might be a news editor as of tomorrow morn—later this morning. I might be a comment editor. I might have a news piece to throw together on the fast.

Growth, pressure, conditioning, tensility, catching, vine-clearing, lightning and the instinct of recoil. Five hundred pounds of spanish moss (the lower case denoting) hanging like a bag of pennies. Soft active ground and a boardwalk. Looking across the continent to the other coast (Pacific) and a dry room of wood the color of skin, of wooden shutters and heavy books palming the varnished clerical desk and lighted in slats that wash their color, and the smell of fuzzy green from a rock-pond nearby and drawer handles the color of worn pennies, and a hand at the back of the heavy neck.

I wonder when the branch breaks.

2007-03-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

Tragicomedie

Malaise! Mac Hall me manque, avec son style idiosyncratique--c'est un mot Francais, n'est pas?--et "Australian Indoor-Rules Quidditch."

(Maintenant, les douleurs.)

Mais! Qu'es-ce que c'est que ca? Ils sont revenus! En formes tout blancs et noirs, comme des etres sacrées...ou profanes!

**

This comic I like came back, in afterlife form. It's not Herzog the Vile, sadly, but the late Mac Hall.

Also, guy from there showed me this thing, which I will now be showing you by writing its name in letters using my keyboard.

Minus

Word to the wise, used, soggy peppermint tea bags look like rotten clammy turquoise fish turned inside out. I hate them.

2007-03-16T05:23:00.000-07:00

Stayed up all night. How come? Just couldn't sleep. Wanna know why? I don't believe you.

I'm tired.

Dear god, I have a busy day ahead of me. And two more after that.

2007-02-06T18:52:00.000-08:00

As We Know It

Wow.

nuclearweaponarchive.org. Try it sometime. If you've got an imagination or a head for orders of magnitude, have a look at Section 1: Types of Nuclear Weapons.

God damn.

2007-02-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

Oh my god

You could make stuff like this up, but apparently you don't have to: Thirsty moth drinks the tears of birds.

There is a new best animal, ever. Goodbye, cumbersome platypus. I, for one, welcome our delicately feathered, thirsty insect overlords.

Part of the reason it was so funny to me is, as if it wasn't already such an image, I just read this poem last month in a book on dreams: The Man-Moth. Read it, you'll see. Poems are coming to life, and they're after our tears.

2007-01-17T08:52:00.000-08:00

We're All Going to Die

In five minutes.

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

Look! Good News!

"It's amazing that he was frozen," Glen Markham said as he gazed through the nursery window at the squalling newborn.

"I thought the only thing you could freeze was a crab. You freeze a crab and defrost it, and it'll come back to life."

Oh those crazy parents with their observations and cute ideas about baby names. The AP reporter who decided to put that quote in is my hero.

Cells saved from flood now baby Noah

2007-01-14T15:34:00.000-08:00

Integration

Old men with babylike faces, and vice-versa, are an old trope of sappy writing and preachy philosophical poems, so it was a tiny bit jarring to actually see one on the subway. It took me half a second to determine which one—neonate or geriatric&mdashhe actually was, since out of the side of my eye, with only small face visible, he could have been either an infant on someone's lap or a hunched-over gramp. Really. Turns out he was the latter. It was like seeing a before and after picture fight.

That is all.

---

Holy crap! Blogger's text editor now writes proper HTML! I ctrl+B bolded the headlline and what did I get? It formatted the text as a span with CSS style font-weight: bold. Shiny. However, google wants me to switch my Blogger records over to their account system or some such rot. Lies and trickery, I am sure. I shall resist, or rather, procrastinate. They can have my database when the pry it from my slack, disinterested hands!!!!!!!!!!!!

I never get to use exclamation points like that.

2006-12-21T22:29:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-12-02T22:07:00.000-08:00

The Internet is Finally Pulling its Weight

Pandora.com

Pandora.com

Pan. Dor. A. .. com.

I typed in "The Shankhill Butchers" after having that song in my head all day, and what I got back made me grin for hours. It's like having your own enslaved Hugh Alter, only without awkward questions and unseemly groveling.

Great thing, or greatest thing ever?

2006-11-22T07:31:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-21T12:33:00.002-08:00

Why are Jews Different from Chocolate?

This question was of high importance last production night at the newspaper. Specifically, why do we hyphenate Jew-lovers and Jew-haters, but not chocolate lovers?

I would've loved there to be no good answer, 'cause the editor-in-chief struck my hyphen from chocolate lovers and then had the balls, or ovaries, to put back hyphens I'd removed from Jew haters/lovers. But I also can't resist solving a puzzle, so it was me who came up with the reason I was wrong. One would not, in context, imagine chocolate lovers to be an amorous couple who are made of chocolate. Jews, however, can themselves be both lovers and haters. There it is.

Go home and write it down.

2006-11-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

Three Pitches

.

.

.

Yer out. Try harder next time.

Well, at least that spaced down the previous entries a bit. Not that that was the idea.

2006-11-08T23:37:00.000-08:00

Why is your head together?

I hate you fucking idiots so much. Here it is:

In response to the attack, Hamas called for attacks on the US. “America is offering political, financial and logistic cover for the Zionist occupation crimes, and it is responsible for the Beit Hanoun massacre. Therefore, the people and the nation all over the globe are required to teach the American enemy tough lessons,” the Islamist group said in a statement sent to the Associated Press.

Here it is:

A barrage of tank shells hit civilian homes, and women and children were among the dead. (There were 19 dead as of tonight).
Hospital officials said 13 of the dead belonged to the same family, and two of them were women and six were children.
"It is the saddest scene and images I have ever seen. We saw legs, we saw heads, we saw hands scattered in the street," 22-year-old eyewitness Attaf Hamad told Reuters news agency.

Here's more:

A local Hamas leader has called for the group to resume suicide bombings inside Israel, a policy suspended two years ago by the main militant factions.

Which was, of course, the point.

Here is Israel threatening to "rethink" the truce with Lebanon.

If you don't feel just a little sickened, you aren't even trying.

You with the Kassam rockets, with the supersonic low-flying jets and the segregation wall, with the money, with Assad and with Bush, with everything. Are these your people? These are not your people. Keep your fucking guns under control.

I hate you so much. For using the word "Islamist" like that. For calling for hate attacks on people you don't know to teach an idiot government a "tough lesson." For executing hate attacks on people you don't, or do, know, to inflame a situation where you have military dominance. For conflating Israel and the US and Americans and Palestinians and Arabs and George Bush and Zionists and mythical "Westerners" and mythical Jews and mythical Muslims and god knows what else. Deliberately. For giving them our tax dollars and arming them. For shooting a 13-year-old girl in the forehead in her house in front of her sisters and family with a sniper rifle through the window. For arranging so these things will happen. For seeing this as a necessary thing. Go die. I won't show a trace of emotion if you do.

I used to be baffled at what looked like wanton provocation. By any side. Could they not see what they were asking for? But for fuck's sake no one in a position of power is that stupid except the supremely self-confident, which I don't see any of outside of Washington DC, and maybe not even there for the next while, thank god. No, in a soulless way it's very smart, what they're doing. Every revenge attack on Israelis justifies the next IDF escalation of course. And Avigdor Lieberman—for one—is better off than he was before. Like Sharon before him. The destruction of southern Lebanon and incredible devastation of their own confessional constituency was a "divine victory" for Hizbollah of course. And Nasrallah is better off than he was before. He says he wouldn't have kidnapped the soldiers if he'd known what Israel would do. That isn't what he said right after kidnapping the soldiers.

Too much of the reasoned discourse is happening behind closed doors, between people who all think the same thing and don't want peace anyway. Want to do away with earnest discourse? Okay, go eat a clusterbomb, there's enough lying around, asshole. I don't hope your kids are among those who get blown up by them, but I do hope very much the horror of that gets into you and doesn't ever leave. The collateral is everything. Your stupid ideas are not. I could name a lot of people who'd agree.

2006-11-06T15:43:00.000-08:00

So Tired

Oh, and there's one more tremendously important thing before I get to the work of reading Tom Jones and writing about Lebanon. I've stumbled upon a way to provide oneself with food during the day without resorting to inefficient and annoying foraging and squirrel-hunting. Dave wanted to call my invention the sandwich, but I say roundmeats on squarebreads, garnished with rustic Mozzarella tablets and foliated cucumber pickle, simpering with mustard. Rolls off the tongue.

Tried seven times to start writing something about roads. I had the Silk Road, and the cotton trail, and I got stuck trying to reconcile them or split the difference. Wrote and cut about 10 pages, and boy was it junk. Instead I'm onto subways, now.

Akk. Back to paper. Nice post, there.

There's a new little taggy thing downstairs, next to the copyright notice put at the bottom of the page to lend the illusion of professionalism. It's a boxlet widget from Amnesty Internation via a design firm called Soda, that randomly displays a blurb from a database of censored web pages.

The idea is to make it impossible to suppress that information, by posting it in fragments on participating sites everywhere. Frankly I don't see it being useful, since the tiny blurb is almost always meaningless outside of context, and the people who can click it and link to the full text are obviously not in countries that censor it. Nevertheless it is a cute idea and I'll wear the little tag, though its Green/pink color scheme clashes with the Blue/Gray/red scheme here. Well, it's not so much a scheme, more a loose confederacy.

Facebook infuriating mystery no. 1 is solved. My old parole officer from the Manchester PD back in 88 is friends with intrepid historiographic metaresearcher Christine Choi, a compatriot survivor of professor Duffy (though she developed Stockholm syndrome). I may not be a friendtard like Dave, but I am friends with a couple of the same, like Dave, so there's bound to be some seepage. The bar for facebook shennanigans has been raised.

Still waiting for Michael Ignatieff to "friend" me (actually it's one of his campaign gruntlies). I'm gonna do my level best to push the story that he's my brother and we duelled atop Volcano Mountain in 1950. If he denies it, he's so cut.

=====

If I've got nothing to say . . .

2006-11-02T20:17:00.000-08:00

Stuck on a Bus

Always look on the bright side

Concentrate and focus power. I won't be revising like my normal writing. Stet.

There aren't too many things I often refuse outright to do. I think such things fall into general categories of being evil or stupid, gross, or sucking away too much of my will to live. Beyond those, I'm game. I once fought a rocket dune sled duel. I bet a man I could talk him into eating his own beard (and won). I spent a week in a nest of Malagasy Inferno Beetles and installed myself as their king. Shortly afterwards I conquered Madagascar.

If you were unaware of these accomplishments, you, like me, refuse to follow the news. I swore it off after the—I believe the technical term is clusterfuck—of media abuse that followed Sept. 11 (might've been, Sept. 11, depending on who you are). On tv, on paper, news pisses me off and is spotty with lies and meaningless shiny objects, and those that aren't are just shoddy. OK, that isn't entirely true, except for CNN and FOX.

Maybe not that much happens in the world. I understand there's pressure to pad the nightly news out to 22 minutes, and the newspapers need a certain heft to be considered papers of record, but 90 per cent of it is buzz. I've just discovered the word "islamic" had a meaning before 9/11, only it was a cultural word, as in "the Barnes collection contains many examples of early islamic art," instead of a political euphemism for "evil, murderous, and ingn'nt." I fume.

Why I hate the news: Even without the buzz of Islamic and minorities and settlement and military action and election year and lame-duck and insurgent and unemployment and equality and Western and terrorists and security and consensus and roadmaps and victims and losses and international outcry . . . without power words, it's still a situation I wish to god I could ignore, because if I pay attention to it, it wraps around my head and closes off my senses and mouth.

You heard me, the news is a situation of its own, that gets in the way.

Notwithstanding, I do work for a newspaper, and plan to continue pulling such crazy stunts. I am a hypocrite with a heart of some sort of electroconductive metal. I also exaggerate a little. I skim newspapers as much as any regular person. But I don't dig, or follow stories. Because when there isn't misrepresentation and other lousy reporting to get angry about, there's the news itself. I get tired, dear. So tired I don't even bother articulating it. I drop it and as it falls, it is.

I get almost everything by word of mouth, and I know smart people, so word of mouth is good. Good enough. As long as I don't think about it. God damn it.

In fact, goddammit to Milton's favorite hell, now I have to really try. Why? Two things settin' me off, both of them near the top of my list of situations to make people sad and furious. Bastards making me read the news.

There's France, and there's Israel, or rather the (pretty much) entire Middle East, with Israel as the sand at the core of this pearl of madness. I'd love to ignore both of those problems to death, but that tack has never worked, except for my mom, who let our pet hermit crab bake in the sun while we were at school.

You know what's really fabulous about these stories? They're the same story, and both countries at their centre pretend the problem doesn't exist. Well, Israel is complicated and quietly disenfranchises Palestinians. France is much, much stupider. In égalité-flaky France, minorities don't legally exist. This means that the (rampant) discrimination and targetting of one minor segment of a (legally) homogenous population doesn't exist, either. Some people have jobs, good apartments, and don't get yelled at, others not so much—who knows why?

If you accept this premise, there can be no explanation for the riots of a year ago (which explains why their cause was never officially investigated), whose resurrgence on their anniversary has given 26 year-old woman taking the bus to school horrific gasoline burns over 70 per cent of her body. Why am I linking to that story and not the hideous swarm of one from the other place? Your brain shuts down.

Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here.

I am going blind. I can't tell what's inside the lines and what's out. Aphasia is setting in.

And motherfuckers are making me read deep into the news. What is there to even say about Israel? More than anything I can think of, I think that question is what there is to say. At least of France I can say "France, people of my people, you are so retarded I want to put you in a special school and give you plastic sporks at lunch so you can't fight."

But . . . Should Israel be "wiped off the map?" Hell no. Should it be a country? Hell, maybe. Should Israeli jews be tacitly supported in setting up caravan towns infringing on privately-owned land outside Israel's borders, because, like, God promised them land around there? How many things are wrong with that question? Would these problems exist if there was much consensus on social justice there? If yes to that last, the world is a terrible place and we should all be looking for escape hatches. I'm just banging on the walls.

In Romania I got trapped on a bus, too. It was incredibly crowded. There were two vertical layers of people, and it was not a double-decker bus. Folk perched on the backs of seats, stood on tiptoes against the rear window, were held against the walls without their feet even touching the floor. I was impressed, but I could deal. I even got to the front door of the bus in time to get off at my stop—go me. But when the door of a Bucuresti bus opens, it swings back and inward, sweeping away the feet of anyone standing in front of it and pinning them hard against the wall of the bus, while simultaneously tripping them. Every Romanian takes this for granted. I am not Romanian, as a bruised calf and torn pair of jeans can attest.

I've been compiling that list for 5 hours now, reading and adding and digging for more. It was real easy. I finally had to stop because I'd run out of spare time, and only then did I count up what I thought was a woefully small list, and found it was 55 items long. Those 55 "here's" there? I'm sure I could do one just for Hizbollah, one for Hamas—I'd have to watch out not to put too many Haaretz articles in—I could leave the IDF out of it and just do the Israeli government, private organizations, or settlers.

And you know what this means? If I'm going to be paying attention to that, I have to pay attention to both of my own idiot governments, both of them doing bad things. I have to look at goddamned Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan and, acknowledging a vested interest in it, follow the Maher Arar case! To say nothing of native Canadian land fights! FUCK!

I'm not allowed to put Darfur out of my mind, either. Hell, I've had "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families" since grade 12, and now I'll have to get more. of. the same. And apparently the Mexican army is shooting at university students in Oaxaca, though no one is giving straight news on that, least of all the Independent Media Center whose news service seem to mark each of their own journalists' murders by giving some chickenshit call to "bring the revolution." Never work for them.

I'm reasonably certain I'll die before I'm quite ready to. And there's better shit I could be doing than thinking about all this. If human beings had a responsibility to use their brains and conscience, then wouldn't someone influential have said so at some point?

These are not pleasant or redeeming things. Motherfuckers making me read the news. When there's a hell of a good universe next door.

Darfur, for fuck's sake. All because something got its foot in the door.

Right now, a cloud in the sky looks exactly like vertebrae, 5 of them with spinous processes pointing at the ground, the lumbar spine of an invisible, supine body. What plane or breeze did that? Is it reaching to say it reminds me of strange fruit . . . in the sky . . . from airplanes? Is that cogent? Should I even be looking for cogence? Is there additional value in having a complete picture, or are 5 vertebrae enough?

More questions. Is "Knesset" as much of an obscenity, used in its modern context, as Hizbollah spelled with an automatic rifle in the name of god? H-z-b-gun-l-a-h. I have a problem with that. I have lots of problems with the name of Knesset, but does either of these even matter?

I gotta pick up a copy of Yalla, a student publication at U of T about Jewish and Muslim reactions to the hell in the Middle East. "Yalla" is one of my grampa's favorite words—in fact, I think it's taken hold all along my mom's side of the family, including me. Loosely translated, it means "get your ass in gear." I hope there's something in it about France, and something about newspapers, because they all have the same problem. Disenfrachnisement is the problem, and invisibility, and, I dunno, looking at five bones instead of a body, you know where I'm going with this. Are there excuses? Who the fuck do I think I am?

There's a burning bus. It's not God talking to us. Or it is. Or it's a sick joke. So is the fact that "liberal news-media" is an oxymoron. It should be redundant. What's the response? Is it black humor, "Mr. Gorbachev, shore up this wall."? This isn't the best I can do.

- - - -

If you're not itching to sign my guestbook, I will sneak through your window and sprinkle sand in your bedsheets. You'll know I was just there because of the warm ghost on your pillow. But don't use the old guestbook. It was getting spam of a kind so despicable I even did something about it. Use the new one: the Emergency Disaster Backup Gästbuch. It's efficiently German, and the closest thing to spam in it are my own comments. And Lucas, who's 80 per cent constituted of pork matter.

2006-10-21T22:09:00.000-07:00

Adama's Mustache
March–October, 2006
Rest in Peace

Is anything ever harder than seeing someone close to us move on? It's sure to feel unfair. We think it didn't need to happen, not to them.

I've never used the word fan-service before. It's an idea that under the best circumstances wouldn't have a name, or be a phenomenon people would recognize. A story gains a following, fans start to feel personally connected to it, and in short order they believe they're entitled to a voting stake.

But give it to them, put the snowflake that is that story in their hands, and they will melt it, smother it in their sweaty palms. No, true service to the fans is denying them that contact, proving to them that you run the show, and until you say otherwise, anything can happen, so they'd better hold their breath and cross their fingers.

Adama's mustache caused a lot of talk. Some said it was the mark of a true leader. Others called it his "porn mustache" and suggested that synth pop music play in the background whenever it was on screen. Still others predicted that Adama's mustache was actually an evil cylon that only he could see. Like all great mustaches, though, Adama's paid no mind to any of that talk, but stuck to what it did best: sending a big up-yours to any and all who thought they knew better.

It was just a detail, a thick-stroke dash, but it was central. Animating. Transmutational. It was the plutonium slug at the heart of the thermonuclear reactor. It was a flag defying the barbarians at the gates. It was civilization and nihilism, creation and obliteration. Hoban Washburne wore a mustache like that, just to say that no one alive could take it away from him. Show me Mark Twain with a naked lip and I will show you a man playing by their rules.

Tonight saw the costly liberation of New Caprica, and humanity's narrow escape from the jaws of its persecutors. It also tied off all the loose ends that'd been gnawing at fans. Starbuck's baby isn't actually her baby. She didn't eventually fall in love with her cylon captor after all. Baltar and #6 finally met their baby-of-sorts. Apollo will presumably lose all that weight. That nasty Pegasus cleared itself out of the way in spectacular fashion — after all, if the show were about the Pegasus, it'd be called BSP. They even finally killed Ellen Tigh, although not by pushing her out of an airlock as I'd always been hoping.

All was set right. But at what cost?

They say you died an honorable death. But we have not heard the last of you. You live on in us. Godspeed, old friend. So say we all.

2006-10-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-10-03T13:47:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-10-02T21:32:00.001-07:00

Dispatches from the Secret Cat/Human Samurai Wars

There is no cat word for "mercy."

Toronto, Oct. 3, 2006 -- I just threw an apple at the moon. I did not see or hear it land, but I believe I missed. I also discovered the one good way to meet a cat: in the middle of the night (give or take 5 minutes or so), on the pavement, solitarily. The feline and I met as generals meet on the field of battle, and though soft was his fur, great was his honor. One day perhaps, in gentler times, my descendants and his will live side-by-side, in peace. Yet tonight, as moonlight sanctifies the fallen cherry-blossoms around us, he and I know neither would hesitate to put the other to the sword.

I hope the cat was not radioactive. Of the two cats I know, one is currently radioactive. I understand that if it bites you, you turn into the Incredible Catman. Let the human nations tremble.

2006-09-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

Give Or Take

549 days, about 95 million half-seconds (give or take,) 1.504109 years, with an error of 12 hours. Exactly a year and a half and a day (+/- a half): The time between when she told me what I should be and when I realized (despite all my conditional agreements) that she was absolutely right. Thank you, and goodnight.

2006-09-29T17:05:00.000-07:00

Hydrolysis

[Zoot McEditorialHat: If you're gonna read this, you'd better read it all, otherwise you might take me for some emo brat. 'Tis fictive, yes okay?]

A brine cloud, dark with unresolved shapes, wrestles and spins. The janitor worries at me. Pokes his head into the classroom and asks hawr you doin', brather? I'm muted and surprised. Good question: hawr'm'I doing? Fine, good. Yeah, in about an hour ("an awr, okay. Mmhm-kay"). Peremptory and warming. I curl my fingers to hide the chalk dust, hoping to escape credit for the maudlin doodles on the blackboard. Cough, gulp down the ocean.

Sputter. Impatience is typical and seething. I clack long-uncut fingernails against the formerly varnished wood of the desk, sending miniscule shocks of pain up the back of the digits. This means what? A bone ache sinks my skeleton till I wish I would just fly off it. Pop like a grape and be done. Done and gone. What is this feeling?

I'm wearing my coat indoors. I'm still shivering from this morning, when I woke up under a hole in my ceiling that'd appeared during the night. A blister in the surface of the ceiling, with gray cracks veined around it, had always been a sign of water damage, but I hadn't expected it to break through like that. I especially hadn't expected to sleep through the soaking breach.

The hole was dark and mouse-sized, tunnelling into the grimy, wet-smelling hollow under the roof, and dribbling a few strings of battering droplets on my freezing bedsheets. I'd had cold dreams. I was on an offshore oil rig, a metal island in the Atlantic, with every friend and loved one I could think of. You were there. In a sloshing storm. The massive curling sheet of ocean was indented with millions of sharply edged raindrop craters, swirling with a static roar. We talked. Forty minutes in the shower failed to stop the shaking. It came from my bones.

I've thrown hard and hot stares around all day, though my freezing lungs are empty and my head should be in a sling. Tiny lines appear in my skull, not unlike the antpath cracks that announced the imminent failure of my ceiling, but these are from thermal fracture. I need my skull tapped and the overheated contents drained, till nothing moves in there. A yoghurty stream of a mental substance will slow to a trickle and then crust around the closed wound.

The title of a piece, a bit more subtle than in the days when it just stated the subject, usually focuses attention like a lens on a part of the work that is poignant but a little blurry in its relation to the whole. The title throws it into sharpness, and the moment this happens can announce an important juncture or reversal. This title hasn't clicked yet, and now there's a mess of yoghurt and some chalk dust involved.

Hydrolysis: a chemical process in which a molecule is split into two parts by reacting with a molecule of water. One part inherits an OH^- group from the water, and the other an H⁺. Atomic bonds cleave and reform differently into bigger molecules. Simple systems spontaneously complicate. The opposite reaction points against time's arrow.

Inside an organic being, with low concentrations of reactants, hydrolytic cleaveage reactions are essentially irreversible, the reactants being almost utterly consumed. Because reversing the reaction is, practically, thermodynamically impossible, many metabolic pathways are driven forward by the breaking of certain anhydrous compounds. No. Hold on.

The reaction proceeding in only one direction, the organism lives along that one direction, instead of oscillating between metabolism and anti-metabolism. No, that's not quite right. Malesh. But time is the axis along which pyrophosphate becomes inorganic phosphate. That doesn't go backwards, not -- almost by definintion -- in a living thing. As likely as a child reincorporating with its parents. Time is the progressive irreversible splitting and forward motion of the organic system.

Maybe it's Maxwell's demon pushing pieces the wrong way. My nerves are shutting down. My skin is cold and rosy with un-deoxygenated blood, cells turning the O₂ back at the border. Is there bitter almond on my breath? Does that make sense? Can I find someone who knows?

I can't write. A brine mist of prior shapes and intimations wrestles and spins, I can trace its holding lines. I am back at the beginning, and writing in the style of wasted poets. I can't write. Caught in the churn, up, under, breach, choke. Claw back upward like the scheming or insane—but in either case dying—faith healer poisoned and hypothermic in the frigid river Neva. Be furious, rake and buoy. I'm exhuasted, dear. Pull me. No. Me: Swallow the ocean. Pave a highway on the sandy bed. Lay down.

Pick me up, dear, from the bottom, leave me up, Lord, ev, er, y, day. The janitor worries about me. Pokes his head in my room and asks hawr you doing brather, to which my surprise can't find a convincing response. Hawrm'I doing? Fine, good. Yeah, in about an awr (at 6:00 p.m.). Ducking back, running over the same old ground, (what have we found?). Mmhm-good. Peremptory and warming. I curl my fingers to hide the chalk dust, hoping to escape credit for the maudlin scribble on the blackboard.

Impatience seethes. I can't wait to leave the building, to get through the crowd. On the subway I'm impatient -- for what? To get home? I'm going! To go blank and slack. It seems like I'm hyperventilating, but I know really I'm breathing out to try keep down an internal pressure. Otherwise I know I'll explode.

If I walk home alone, will the moon fall on me? What year is this? If I push myself back through those tiny pathways, water flying up through the ceiling, freezing spatter withdrawing through the dream, antimetabolism, is there any chance of future becoming past at all. Is there. And

=====

Do you think you can tell?

2006-09-24T19:54:00.000-07:00

Sleep is a perverse dictator. I stayed up till 2 a.m. last night -- which is about my median bedtime. I woke up at 9 a.m. and thought about going back to sleep, but uncharacteristically decided to get up. And felt good, though tired. And after a shower I wasn't so sleepy. In fact, I apparently woke up so well that now, at 11 p.m., I'm not tired at all. Why this be I cannot begin to guess, beyond the foregone conclusion that sleep is a perverse dictator. I should be thankful it hasn't had me thrown in a lobster tank to be drowned and torn apart by crustaceans, or sentenced me to the boats.

Oh well. I did something today, which makes the day okay. Yay day. There are other things, that is, I feel like there's room left here and I should be saying other things. But instead what I'm getting is that feeling that detects the end of a phone conversation, when you run out of things to talk about from a distance and need to either meet in person or go do something else. Not sleeping, in this case.

=====

And I am still in the kitchen. And. But I remember -- or am I here, remembering the kitchen? -- scuffing the pavement under skyscraper nightlights. Boxes of star. Whichever. It is as though the sidewalk tile sucks my foot down each time I raise it. The ache in my heels is dull and doesn't end. It makes me tired.

But I remember, for a moment like the water on the rock, another time, when it took an effort to keep the rubber of my shoes on the ground. Avoid turning off into an alley and releasing the concentration that kept me held, coming unglued from earth, and revealing myself for what. I.

Am in. Kitchen. Flying through the shivering empty sky.

=====

Cut short. Too bad.

2006-09-22T09:13:00.001-07:00

City of Dreams

I have time, technically, so I'm gonna click out another entry, of sorts. Only an hour, though. I have exposés to write and a breed of crabfaced warrior monstrosities to create. Try and separate fact from fiction in that statement and I bet you get at least two things wrong. Barring that, you are a clever ninja sleuth and may come over for celebratory shortbread cookies anytime.

I am already overschooled. That's not to say over-educated -- I got lots to learn -- just that the gurgling side-effects of university are starting to froth dangerously over the rim of my brain. My cup runneth over . . . with terrifying ooze!

[SFX: Per-i-lous-musiiiiiiic].

Margret Atwood, damn her zombie heart, dropped out of her PhD program because, supposedly, all the critical theory was killing her writing. Many authors do both things (writing and the ridiculous, sometimes invaluable metawriting bullcrap criticism that informs our English courses). I don't know what kind of robotic, compartmentalized brains are wired to these dual-beings, but they have given me something very rare: an argument in which I'm on Margaret Atwood's side.

Seriously, I don't know how a person can write naturally with a zillion lectural formalisms and critical gizmoleters chipmunking in the background, or, god help them, actually serving as inspiration. A story that sets out to illustrate a point is at best an anecdote. A story that follows rules or critical formulae is not a story, it is the aborted fetus of what should have been an essay. Notwithstanding, Lost in the Funhouse is fantabulous and proves there are exceptions. Or does it? I can't get these things out of my head. Out, damned reader response! Out I say!

Thank god for shit like this.

=====
City of Dreams

The sores were spreading, hard white grains surrounded by pulpy red. Now it hurt to open my mouth, to purse my lips to whistle. Eating anything but spongy bread amounted to torture. I tried smoking, on the theory it might anesthetize them. I smoked a cigarette, it made it worse, I smoked part of a joint, it made it much worse. I smeared baking soda on the wounds. It was pasty and tasted like a crotch. It felt a little better. I almost cried.

There was an episode in my deep past -- I'm thinking this now in my kitchen, fishy bicarb water drooling through my beard as I pause in momentary relief at the undignified cure. The past-past, the impossible time, it shines clear as dawn, warming the cold roots of eyelashes and shelf of my brow (they seem physically to swell) and makes me wince.

When I was very much younger. When I was. I was standing on cold sand, the tea-colored sun warming everything but the wet grainy bottoms of my feet, the bicarbonate breeze puckering my nipples and causing me to unthinkingly clamp my armpits. When. Jerome. Was shooting barefoot along the waveline, jumping over bubble-fringed fingers and splashing down to break them. Was picking and choosing pebbles to drop into the slingpouch of his t-shirt, dripping wet and clinging to his tiny maniacal frame. His hair was fat bristles crosshatching down his neck and spitting droplets down his back. When holding his t-shirt like a satchel in one hand he lost his balance and pounded face-first into the knuckles of a wave.

I was there when he turned over, a powdery trail of half-moons shows I'd run over the sand. More and more defined as the beach got wet and crunchy. Picked him up -- his face was hot as he cried. When a couple moments. And he later. But it was his pebble hoard he was crying about. A few were fallen into smooth dents in the sand around him, retrievable, but most were washed away.

"I found a tooth."

He was looking for fossils, bear teeth or dinosaur claws, like we saw at. Thought he'd found one, in the lost pebbles of course. On the edge of nervous breakdown over the loss of his find.

We pulled a few other ones from the ocean hands to calm him, and made a promise of a trip back to the museum and ice cream. One fat blocky and essential rock we kept swirled pink and white like raw fatty meat. Afterwards dull and he ignored it but now lacquered. Tears of cold seawater drip off the gleaming. Irridescent with waterskin lit and leaking back to the ocean, but permanent enough because I recall it wet and shiny but rough-to-the-touch. This is meaning to illustrate depths becoming surfaces, and in a more literal way to suggest the permanent status in memory of transitory experience, standing out against the lackluster stretches of nonimportant static experience, and I am in the kitchen.

=====

Should we awake, to find it gone, remember this our favorite town.

2006-09-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

News from the Court

I have a schedule document, the Fantabulous Agendums of Reginus von Kingpants (fear me! for I am He of the Kingly Pants -- pants of king-ish qualities!), hotkeyed on my laptop. Whenever I have to remember something, I simply hit the easy-to-remember combination of ctrl+shift+windows+t (for "time") and jot it down. Amazingly, it's been working out for me. When it fails, I resort to asking one of the pants' retinue to remember it for me, but they tend to ignore me and kowtow to the magist'ry of my regal pantaloons. They are a bunch'a phonies.

Today (ctrl+shift+windows+t) it tells me I must -- must, absolutely -- Read 2 chapters of my Women's Lit book (or, as my prof would harpoon me for calling them, "chapterettes"), drop off a Work-Study special application dealy-widget, and pay my VISA bill. Also, floating around with no date attached, it seems I've committed to buying me a mortar and pestle, for coffee I believe.

All these things being so, I've not much time to write right now. Yet I go on, persevering through cruel circumstance, my stride bolstered by the divine right of pants.

=====
Bad Press

Rosaline was afraid of the fallout.

"God, do you have any idea what the cover-up alone could mean?"

"The cover-up, do you have any idea what the exposure will do? Think about it, Ros. Hell, the longer we keep it to ourselves the more we're asking to be hushed up."

"Shhhhh!"

She didn't have a chance of changing my mind, and she knew it. It'd been such a strange trip getting all the facts, the payoff was irresistable. I can't see how there'd be any money in it, beyond the inevitable book deal and publicity, but to have my name attached to it, indelibly -- to something everyone, everyone in the world, would talk about for a long time! Forget about it. As soon as we get back to civilization, I'm running to the phones.

It all started with a damned book review. After two weeks of threats, Saul -- my editor -- finally got me to write up The Da Vinci Code.

"I don't want to," I cleverly replied, "get Mike to do it." Mike was not the brightest or most senior member of the paper, so I picked him. Saul was having none of it.

"Shut up," he adroitly shot back.

"Go to hell," I offered, I thought graciously, by way of compromise. We debated the matter till the third time he fired me, for emphasis, whereupon I conceded the point, under protest.

Once saddled with the job, I had to rush to find someone to do all the work for me. Normally there's no problem with this, since most people who actually read book reviews in the paper don't read the books, and vice-versa. I've gotten away with dozens of skim-quote-make-something-up jobs. That wouldn't work, though, since just about everybody who read the Da Vinci review was sure to read, or have already read, the god damned book, I had to find a way to make my assessment of it look convincing.

-----

This story has an end, really, I'll get to it.

=====

In my women's lit class, a pack of handouts went along the right side of the room and stopped. When the other side complained, the prof tsked "there a strong bias against the left in this class." I hate everything she stands for, except for the stuff that isn't postmodernist.

I added titles to all the "things" below. I avoided that before, having the idea that the title of the blog post, and the accompanying picture, would have some obscure bearing on the fiction scrap, and that was enough. But I just realized that, unless you read this every day (and despite obsessively going over and revising my stuff, I don't even do that) you're liable to miss stuff if you scroll down, and I want you to actually read those bits. And who knows, maybe say something in the Emergency Disaster Backup Gästbuch.

I'd be at peace, and I'd have no desire, if I'd lived right

2006-09-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-09-16T12:45:00.000-07:00

The Devil's Arithmetick

I said 30 entries in 30 days, no more or less -- you didn't think I quit, did you? 1 down, and 4.0 tomorrow, and I'm outta here.

I am actually really good at managing time. I don't usually feel like it, but when I try to, I can do exotic and frightening things with a watch and an agenda. My incredible talents are usually dormant of their own accord, as I don't tend care much about scheduling. Sometimes, though, I find I must actively suppress my emerging superpowers, because I am terrified at their true extent.

Two days ago, for instance, I sat down, wrote all the things I wanted to do on a scrap of paper, and divided the day into 30 minute segments in which I would finish everything. And I did. However, so precise was my time management, that I found my self seriously struggling to decide whether I should go swimming or floss, the latter activity consuming 5 apparently critical minutes of the former. Fear me, for such are my powers.

To make up for it, the next day I missed a 3 o'clock class by planning for it to start at 4 pm. Seems the prof and the other 40 students don't feel they need to think about what's convenient for me. U of T is such bullshit.

In other news, I'm getting a job at U of T! Probably! Huzzah! Actually, this is quite a nice one. The Varsity, the newspaper I've been volunteering at since June, needs a copy editor, which they badly need to correct mistakes in their stories. For example, here's a nice line from one of my pieces, after it was hurriedly revised by a harried editor:

"After a mob of 6,000 drunk partiers pelted paramedics with beer bottles and torched a car at last year's homecoming party last year, Kingston police is warning that at this year's homecoming at Queen's university next year it may use riot police and tear gas."

Who happened what? When did it where? See, now, what he meant to do was change it from saying, basically "last year police warned about next year's party," to "police have warned about this year's party." That's a good edit. Instead, it exploded. So I've got a reference from within the Varsity and hopefully I'll get to work. Shortly afterwards, I'll take over the newspaper world and become the next William Randolph Hearst. Yay! I've already bought a charming wooden sled to refer to in my last words.

=====
In the Cursed Parlor of Mme De Bovary

Meanwhile, within the cursed Parlor of Mme De Bovary:

Cecil was at the folding table practicing with his cups. I could hear him from my perch within the camera obscura. Imagining it in the darkness, I was bored with the trick but infuriatingly curious about its secret.

He would present his audience with 5 cups, call forth a spectator, and shuffle the cups with diabolical ease, catching a sliding four golden bells between them. When he stopped, the watcher would pick one. No matter which one was picked, the others would levitate, and inspection would reveal a tiny jinn, quivering and straining, under each of the floating cups. Then he would pick up the other cup and all four bells would tumble out, the gasps of the frail jinni drowned out first by their ringing and then by the invariable applause and admiratory chuckles.

The bells were an obvious prestedigitory trick, of course. Any one of us knew a dozen ways to gather them under one cup with no risk of revealing the subterfuge. In the early days following his disappointment at Oxford, I witnessed Maxwell performing his famous appendectomy on the prince using the crudest of these techniques. When the prince died anyway, not of sepsis but infected horsebite, the prevailing demonology took a severe blow, but fortunately the publication of Morlaye's Balance and Vacuum wasn't far off.

=====

I was going somewhere with this, maybe I'll remember where.

There would be songs, sung by a choir

2006-09-11T23:07:00.000-07:00

This Counts

I got to 368. It was hard, for counting, because I was imagining a different person for each number. It was an interesting thing for someone who has trouble inventing personal details.

Holy fucking monkey hell. If you do only one thing this year, including breathing, go see The Protector. Just do it. I have never laughed so hard at a movie that was simultaneously so ridiculously awesome. Do it. Yes, those are gong mallets in the picture. At no point is it explained why the temple is on fire and full of water. And this is very nearly the least absurd scene in the movie (at least until the viking walks through the door). Literally, he walks through the door.

=====
Getting Downstairs

I pushed a cow down a flight of stairs today. It seemed like the only option.

2006-09-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

Inconceivable!

Today certainly was a day. School tomorrow. Jiminy jilikers! I'm confirming, on a personal level, the notion I had going into university, that I wasn't going to get onto a particular career path, but for experience, you know, with things like breadth and depth, and also length, that would help me be better, possibly in some sort of way. It is three English courses for me, plus another half course for my Writology minor in the winter, and meantime jobs and internships or some funky "extern" program the U of T is running, which I believe is a money laundering/pointless slavery operation. U of T has over 175 years of experience with these sorts of things, so I'm sure their handling of it will just be awesome.

=====
Last Morning on Earth

Supposedly, Gray Ran was waking up at 6 a.m., making himself a tiny cup of coffee, taking time to do it just the way he likes it -- burning some cardamom pods and sprinkling in the ashes, breathing their black and acidic smell and licking them
off his fingertips -- and walking off of a bridge. He'd paced the route out, looked it up and down, thought about how long it would take, what song he'd sing to keep his jitters at bay, planned to do it early so he wouldn't have traffic or a screaming bystanders be the last things he heard.

He'd told no one. That, he reflected as he lay in bed that morning, had been a mistake. He should've told at least one person he knew, in a conspiratorial way. Make it sound like a joke, but with a pebble of weight to it, a half-second stare. That way he'd have something driving him -- if he tried to do it half-assed or gave up, that one other person would know, and think he was, deep down, chickenshit.

He did not tell anyone, and anyway, he thought, maybe that wasn't so bad. He had more flexibility with things if no one else knew. Only a little less bad than dithering on the precipice would be screwing something up from being too tired. He had a moment of terror at the thought of being struck, just after tipping over the brink, with the feeling of having forgotten something. That feeling that sometimes struck him 15 minutes out of the house, already in rush hour and with no time to go back, would be so much worse when there was no more time to go back, and never would be again. One plunging second of biting regret, no thanks, thought Gray Ran. Besides, who wants to die tired? Would he fall any faster with heavy eyelids, he mused.

What could you possibly forget? badgered a dogged faction of his consciousness, long as you remember yourself, the bridge, ground, and gravity are pretty much covered. A looser body of impulses, which liked to get on the nerves of this zealous first one, told it to shut up, and dug into his pillow.

Gray got out of bed at 1 p.m., less than thrilled, more than sulky, at living another day. Or half of it. He brushed his teeth a little viciously, channelling some of his spite into innocent gums. He thought, when I won't get out of bed to kill myself, something's really not working.

A woman had emailed him, a friend who thought she was still recovering her footing with him after a bad attempt at dating. It'd been two years ago, and she still thought he was all needles and pins over it.

Hey Gray, (he thought, she thought he thought it was cute)

Kirsten and Claude have been talking about going to see that new show, the one with Zivy Gavriel on piano, and i'm trying to actually make it happen. Come! I was thinking saturday night would probably be best, drinks at my house after. There anyone you want to bring? I hope I'm not barging in with this or anything, but it'll be fun! Anyway, it seems like ages since all of us have caught up. Hope everything's good in the meantime, I've been taking care of myself. Give me a call sometime.

Judy

Gray could formulate no response beyond pushing his laptop aside and turning on the TV. He did not want to have drinks at Judy's afterward. He did not want to bring a friend. He wanted to tilt off the lip of security, tumble into the space above the valley, watching the bridge vanish upward, into the city. It was too late for coffee. It's 2 p.m., thought Gray Ran, and I'm still very alive. In fact he was downright healthy, though too groggy to really notice it. Fuck.

=====

We all pick and choose. In the month following 11, 09, 2001, I was told hundreds of thousands of people died. About 100,000 of them died all at once, in an earthquake. I remember that peripherally. This happened to me, and I remember it because it put me in shock. About 17 stupid documentaries and sob-shows are on, upcoming, or have just wrapped up, to say nothing of the damned movies. I'm avoiding all of them (except for one very dry CBC one I sort of drifted into) and trying to figure out just what exactly to do on September 11. Last year it was flying Rome-Amsterdam-London, and that nearly ended, literally, in 4 catasrophes. No foolin', it was a jinxed trip. Maybe go for a walk in the park and start counting to 100,000. Lunch with dad tomorrow seems like a good plan too. And, of course, education!

2006-09-09T22:41:00.000-07:00

Simultaneous

I probably owe you no explanation, stop hounding me! I thought I'd go back and forth from writing the part below and this, the blog-post proper, but that was a damn fool idea. I wrote until I was finished, and then came back up here, which I should've expected. Fortunately, no one was hurt as a result of my miscalculation, though I did have to fire several engineers. The bottom line is, I just don't need so many engineers, and when the fits hit the Sean they're the first to go.

One thing bears mentioning about today: Andra took me rock climbing and I was the first of us to try and finish a 5.8 route. Andra went after me and did it faster, and then Caedmon went last of all (last climb of the day) and scrambled all the way up like a pale and skinny spiderman. So, like spiderman. But I was there first, before it was cool. There were a couple other people watching, too, though I believe they were only resting their necks and arms after finishing a much, much harder 5.12b. For those of you who don't know, a 5.12b equates, approximately, to shooting yourself in the stomach.

Andra would love to climb every week. Two or three trips a year is fine for me, where climbing gyms and 5.x courses are concerned. There's no pressing need for either of those things, but those of you who've never climbed a rock should be embarrassed to call yourselves primates.

=====
A Delivery

Strike while the iron's hot, that's what they say. Of course, now everything's almost always cool, yes, come in, I can sign it. My hands are fine. In fact, I understand my writing is considered to be worth something. Thoughtful of you to ask.

That's a portrait of my first wife, isn't it? And a trite place for it, but what could I do? The plan, I think I remember, was to have a nail there for it and put it up anytime someone came along who would irritate me if they didn't see it, but I felt bad enough about taking it down that I never did, and now I think I'd fall and bang my head on the mantelpiece if I tried to do it myself. Do you happen to be much of a decorator? Yes, I can sign for it, don't you have a pen?

Junk. I'll get my own.

This is a very good pen. I've had it since I was 20. Or so. It was one expense I allowed myself during a very bad year. Have you been at your job long? I would've jumped at it, then. You read about people who've had twenty unrelated jobs in their lives, railroad conductors and loggers and schoolteachers and fruitpickers. Factotums. I couldn't imagine, and god it's terrifying. I would be out walking around at night, and get home and almost cry that I hadn't been sleeping, getting ready for the day, to do better and make accomplishments to hold onto later on.

I would be exhausted when I got home. Sometimes I would've run. Often the day would end in sitting, thoughtless and scared in an easy chair. The day drained like a departing flood until the last drop ran out and my parched sense of time had only the night to draw from. I'd still wander like that now and stay up late shaking and holding my head if I could manage.

You'd get so sick of thinking about the things, the jobs and businesses other people have and how they got them, it all seems so natural and sobering. You'd go stand in front of a mirror to get drunk.

Thank god I no longer feel the urge to see myself. There's not a mirror in this house and I'm more familiar with my first wife's face forty years ago than mine now.

God, I felt so trapped then. But my possibilities, the ones I owned, though restricted, were more then than they've been since. I was free in the night to be invisible and in a hurry, huffing down the sidewalk, free to run home to the apartment I could barely afford, with my horrible job that couldn't possibly be really mine but seemed to be the best I'd get. Or to turn around and run through an anonymous park through streetlights and past a cluster of mumbling junkies. Also free to scare a pizza delivery man carrying a box 'round the corner, with my stupid running. Or to buy more than I should, or work less, and worry about the bills. Free to run home to my first wife, who wasn't the one I had wanted. Or to pretend to myself that I hadn't dreamt about another woman, but also to pretend I was hers anyway, while my wife slept untouched.

And to run home and write. I couldn't stand to look in a mirror at any point after something had come into my head that I hadn't made up on my own, but'd been spoken to me by someone I'd made up, which was better. I hated to see my own face reflected until after it was all written down. And I'd run home like my baby would die if I slowed. Run while my throat got thick and scratchy, and fall through the front door and into a drink of water, thankfully refrigerated, from the least dirty measuring cup 'round the sink. Relish everything stupid in your life. I'd run at night, through a horrible job and a first wife -- I had no second -- a quorum of addicts and the alarmed look of a pizza man, and so much that scared me to death for some stupid reason. It isn't just what you do that matters, finally, but also how. I did it the way I did. Love everything. Yes, I said I'd sign it, give it to me already, if you want me to stop talking.

=====

See? Some better.

2006-09-08T22:06:00.000-07:00

Food Stamps, Stomach Cramps, Magic Lamps

What was I thinking a minute ago? I remember. I was thinking how it's very easy to think about what I've failed to do so far, and what I want to do in the future, but that balancing point of actually doing it (sitting down, cracking my knuckles, and having a glass of water first, natch) is the foe. The enemy, which I must burn fires and suchlike, put on war paint and cast magic spells, before fighting.

I was thinking how the Chance always seems to have been crucially missed, frighteningly looming in the near to-be, or meaninglessly right goddamn here. That is, writing down what's I'm thinking right now has knack for looking like a useless waste of time, but afterward it's invariably unveiled as having been a golden opportunity gone now, forever. As someone said (somebody did, but I forget his name, Google it) "I've lost too much, or rather failed to keep . . ." and then he probably finished his sentence.

With this in mind, I'm embarking on my favorite kind of race: an endurance one, in which neither distance, nor duration, nor speed matter, and in which no actual running, or even movement above the carpal tunnel, is done. Except when I scratch my head. I am not talking about national novel writing month, but that is in November, Google. I don't want to try to write a novel in 30 days, because that would be horrible in progress and product, too. But 30 posts in so many days seems reasonable.

======
Hockey Stop

They seemed made of glass, and when they spun I worried in a dumb and nervous, dad, way that they'd hit something and crack. Swarming on the ice, sliding, whipping past each other in fabulous near-misses. I used to want to skate, I've probably actually been about, I dunno, ten times in my life. Twenty, maybe, since there was one winter we went skating a lot. It happened at the whim of my parents -- my mom, in fact, dad's a skiier, I was for summer sports like track and cycling -- and so was highly variable, one of the things that was different about each year.

Unlike my sister and I, my kids asked their parent to take them skating, bugged us about things like getting their skates sharpened and signing up for lessons. I took piano lessons, my mom couldn't stand piano music. Could, only barely. I can only barely stand to see the my kids, insufficiently bumpered by snow clothes and helmets, whiz around the ice amidst what seem to be three hundred gladiatorial twelve year-olds with lead shoulders, chugging elbows, and knives strapped to their feet. Unlike my mother, I would have liked it if they'd asked to play piano. Even if they mashed the keys and were tone-deaf. Music mangles more prettily than limbs, and is easier to fix or ignore.

======

That there? Fictional. You can tell by how it hasn't happened, because A) I have no kids, and B) if I did, they would be into way cooler things than skating. Puh. Like being godzilla. I have a feeling they would do nearly as much of that as possible. Also, rather than frizzy hair, it would be spiky and assertive. So no one's saying that's good fictional stuff -- although, be fair, that was just the intro, I cut off just before the part where Seaworld offers to trade 3 orcas and a bunch of sea lions for the kids -- but that is okay, because there are 29 more just like it coming in the next that many days. Ideally, they'll get longer and better, but I guess I'm starting with a stationary jog. Or a bit of a stretch.

What the hell is this blogger beta crap. Sonofzebitch, more stuff. That ze bitch has too many sons.

2006-07-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-07-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

Last Son of a Bitch!

I love Superman, but this is hilarious.

Superman is a dick.

2006-07-06T08:11:00.001-07:00

Not Only Fat, But Sassy As Well

I just realized that I am carrying around three good, big novels in my backpack, reading them all. By accident. I just picked each of them up at a different time 'cause I wanted something to read and ended up with all of them at once. I win.

Dave thought Brian Williams (the new Tom Brokaw) was John Williams. I do believe John Williams would make an awesome news anchor, provided he was given freedom to arrange and orchestrate the nightly news. Fuck yeah. In fact, however, when John Williams wishes to be Brian Williams, which is seldom, he has to crawl through a sticky tunnel on the 7-1/2th floor of a drab office building. He avoids doing this because within 24 hours he is ejected onto the side of the New Jersey turnpike, a hassle.

Knock knock?

Who's there?

Superman.

I win again!

2006-07-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

Jesus, Viggo

Oh, don't give me that look.

Dear Viggo,

I've taken a few days to think about how to say this, and I think I've got it figured out, but this isn't easy for me, and I don't want you to think I'm trying to be cruel, or vindictive, or doing anything less than trying to help us grow as people. Maybe as two different people, maybe too different.

I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I wasn't. Blockbuster was out of Baltarstar Galactica, and Ultraviolet, so I picked up A History of Violence. Otherwise I probably would never have seen it. I almost got Sideways, which I've been meaning to see since it came out. But no.

Ultraviolet is at least completely honest about the kind of movie it's trying to be. That's what this is really about. Honesty. See, in that movie, there's a war between The Government and some people who caught a DNA-enhancing disease that gives them superpowers including the ability to change their hair and clothes' color.
Our heroine deems that the best way of infiltrating enemy complexes is to curl up into a tiny hamsterball shell, Metroid-style, roll through the walls, and pop out, guns a-blazing. Her sword is inscribed with lines of Sanskrit characters for no reason whatsoever! Now that is a movie I can get behind. On Canada Day, some friends and I discussed a theoretical Actionest Movie, which begins with 2000 people in a large room with guns, and after 2 hours only one person is left. No pretense, no front, just complete openness without shame or apology.

AHV, on the other hand, hisses sweet lies through its black teeth till you part with your 6 bucks and rent it. Cronenberg you bastard! How dare you include with your artsy mumbling rant a documentary on whether or not it's "Too Commercial for Cannes?" For me, there were exactly two things going for this bad joke of a movie, and they overruled my better judgement, namely: 1) Ed Harris, and 2) you, Viggo Mortensen, kill a guy by stepping on his neck. How a movie where ten guys die in brutal close small arms and hand-to-hand combat could be so boring, so damned unaffecting, is beyond me. Andra and I managed to watch the whole movie by making fun of it throughout — the overwrought symbolism, the hyperstupid bad guys, and the god damned precocious little girl ("I'm sorry I wandered off, mommy, but look! They have the new Vespa dolls!")

Ed Harris was magnificent. For all 10 minutes of the movie his incorrectly-presumed-important character was in.

But Viggo, how could you get involved with this? You were the star, I went into this movie on your say-so. In retrospect, I guess it would've been hard for you to've messed up playing Aragorn, and I forgot about Hidalgo, and that in your spare time you write poetry that Time magazine says is of the "spare, dark, ruminating kind" and appear in movies called "A Walk on the Moon," so I had kind of the wrong idea going in. But Jesus, man.

Now listen, don't think I was expecting an action-filled adrenaline fest. Please. I know better than that. I looked forward to a movie about a guy who used to kill people, then tried to get away and invented a new life story, but the mob tracked him down. See, now, I see in that the possibility for an interesting story. I mean, it's all there in that poster tagline. Instead, here are 96 minutes so pure of plot that it amounts to one single, stage-setting event followed by absolute nothing. The rest is silence, and an interminable metric Fuck-Ton of it, too. The so-called story has all the dramatic grip of a bowling ball being dropped onto a carpet, falling with a dull thud: The premise establishes that this thing will happen, and then it happens, and then the movie ends!

Maybe you should've been in Sin City instead, Viggo. You'd do well as the ex-Navy Seal in Hell and Back. Frank Miller can get away with that kind of pseudo-plot for a few reasons. First of all, he revels in all the clichés he has to use to pull off the story, and if he doesn't manage to show us something new about them, he at least gives a virtuoso demonstration of why they caught on as respectable clichés in the first place. Second of all, everything that happens in one of his books is tied to great artwork that perfectly compliments the story.

This latter is closely related to the Big Thing his stories have over AHV: they're aware of the fact that they are fucking graphic novels! I haven't seen the movie version of Sin City, but I know whoever did it apparently tried hard to replicate the stylized, blocky sharp-relief and coloring effects of the novels, not to mention capture their tone and let it help carry the plot. That's just respect. I wasn't surprised to find out that AHV was based on a graphic novel. Like I said, that's the only form I know of that can get away with such a straight-vertical-drop plot. But Cronenberg apparently decided to Make Something New with it, divorce it from the source material and present it as a realistic Cinema Thing.

I'm not trashing that idea, but if, as with most graphic novel, the story's interest is inextricable from the form and visual elements, well, he should've changed the story a little. It's not like he couldn't do it, he managed to film (with heavy but cool modifications) Naked Lunch, for crying out loud! He can handle this! All he had to do was shore up the parts of the story that were using the conventions of graphic novels as a crutch. Then again, maybe story isn't so much his thing. He does seem to specialize in weird shit, graphic violence, gruesome sex, and instinct-driven amoral acts that make you think about themes and stuff. I guess I should think of his movies as some sort of time-synced multimedia art installation instead of an audiovisual story. Which is to say, I shouldn't pay to watch them.

When Ed Harris isn't onscreen and you, dear Viggo, are not breaking some chump's neck or shooting his jaw off through the back of his head, the only interesting parts of the movie are technical things and Filmmaking Stuff. And I am not interested in those things. Yes, I am aware that Cronenberg used that same fly-buzzing sound to represent both death and guarded secrets. I see he is having Tom/Joey's family watch him through the window (in a tilted perspective, through a screen) as he talks to Fogarty and his men, as though they are removed from both the immediate danger and the reliable truth. I am sure there's lots of Filmmaking Stuff I missed, too. It's in there, I dig. So what?

And Cronenberg made it clear that the title "A History of Violence" refers to 1) your character, Tom/Joey, who has a history of commiting violent crimes; 2) the nature of violence throughout history; and 3) Darwinesque hintings at the principle of survival of the fittest. "I am an evolutionist to the core," he says.

He rhymes prettily, Viggo, but don't be taken in. To give some substance to his last claim, Cronenberg played up the struggle between Tom's son and that sharkfaced jock, Bubba or Hutch or whatever. Indeed, I grok that this battle is meant to show that the boy inherited something of the violent nature that he wasn't even aware his father possessed. Cronenberg managed to get Ebert (god I hope he gets out of the hospital alright) onside with that one, a respectable achievement, but don't let that get the better of you. For what it's worth, I think it's facile. It's dumb and overplayed and lame, as a plot device (it actually isn't used as such, as there is no plot to manipulate) as a thematic cue, and just as Something That I Can Stand To Watch.

And as for Jock Angryface, what the hell is his problem? He resembles the character Flash in the first Spiderman movie: they both had hugely unreasonable aggressive, bullying tendencies and submoronic behavior, but Flash was acceptable and this guy just comes off as hackneyed and strained. He makes me angry, yes, but not because of what he says or does. Rather, I'm just mad that he's such a bad piece of writing polluting this movie. Why, then, can I live with Spiderman's Flash? Because Flash was a pastiche. Because people accept things like him in comic books, where minor characters will appear in only a few small panels and have that space alone to present their entire being. Larger-than-life, hyper-exaggerated archetypes are the accepted currency of character development there, even for major villains and heroes, and Spiderman did a good enough job looking and acting like a comic book that it could pull off the same schtick. Go back and watch Willem Dafoe's mirror scene. Now that's true to form. There's even an actual frame, f'r Chrissakes.

As a side question at this point, regarding the Darwinian thing, I'd like to ask why so many Artists With A Message who use Science in their Statements rely on ancient, turn of the century research. Why are they only reading things from a hundred or a hundred-fifty years ago? Not that survival of the fittest is debunked, but the study of evolution has a lot more to say now than it did back in the day when it was inspiring social darwinist misinterpretations. Short of a few sci-fi readers and John Updike (who will write about anything because he's that great), no one writes any poems or stories, or anything out of more contemporary science. And it's not like it's that abstract. Why did the artsy types stop reading after The Descent of Man or The Interpretation of Dreams? I've got my answer, but it's depressing: it's all they studied in school.

I think it's a holdover from literary realism, which tried to appear objective by putting on airs of being scientific and disciplined and neutral observers. In its defense, at the time scientists were putting on airs of being scientific and disciplined and neutral observers, too. But that's changed, both for scientists and artists. Still, when an artist uses a scientific rationale for their work, a lot of the time they still do so not only with that same old attitude, but with that same old science!

Look, Viggo, I can practically see your eyes glaze over and I know this isn't what I set out to say. It must seem like I'm just venting on you, but — well doesn't this bother you? How many times have you heard some crappy script or artist's statement flouting Jung, or even Maslow, or Einstein, the nuclear option for rationalizing crazy new-age ideologies. Here's the thing: stories and music and all that can stay relevant much longer than scientific publications. Those go out of date by the month, now. So if you, or Cronenberg, or whoever, thinks science can shed light on humanity like it's supposed to, then why should you, or he, or whoever, be content with reusing the same old ideas that were being kicked around back then.

And no, I'm not calling Cronenberg a realist.

Maybe if I'd seen his name on the box (I hadn't realized he was the director) I would've thought twice about picking up AHV. I mean, I've seen Crash and Spider. I saw the latter film with Andra, and couldn't understand how she could have enjoyed watching it, until she pointed out that Ralph Feinnes is the sort of person so innately watchable that she would gladly sit through two hours of footage of him taping string to walls and sneaking around an empty house — essentially, Spider.

I would've known what to expect. I would probably have picked up Sideways, instead. But Viggo, let's be honest, it's not about Cronenberg, it's about you. When I pick up the DVD box, all I can see is your big, tough, lovable face, so full of experience, so feeling. You know that. You knew it! It didn't even occur to me that movies have directors. They just have you. Such is your power, Viggo, and your burden. Upon whose good name do you think AHV's status as Blockbuster's 4th most-rented movie is founded? C-Berg's? No, no. You've got a lot of mistreated, angry people to make it up to. I, personally, am waiting for you to show up with flowers. Or maybe a decent movie, you don't even have to buy it for me, a rental's good enough. I've already given you more than a few suggestions. Impress me, Viggo. Remind me why I thought you were special in the first place, or maybe we should just spend some time apart. I don't know.

Feeling cheated,

- André

2006-06-29T10:47:00.000-07:00

Big Time

8:47 am. Wake up, me. Click. 8:47? What is this? How dare I awake now, knowing I have work to do today and need my brain to function at peak level, with the decent amount of sleep that requires. Self-sabotage? Fuck that.

11:07 am. Click. Uh? Why always on the 7s? I'm groggy, my brain not quite up to speed, so questions like that seem to matter. Read till I'm awake.

12:03 am. Close the book. Slap (shutting the book). Ah-ha! I've broken the rule of 7s — victory, self-determination. I, above those wretched, broken people who let fate toss them around, I make my own choices. Captain of the ship, laughing at angry winds. 12:05, quick, get out of bed before it's 12:07.

Today comes with work to do. Today there is studying, observing to be done. Questions that I alone bear the responsibility for asking. Today I have my first Assignment for the Varsity. And of course, the news editor knows, I was the natural choice for the job. The clarity, the utter transparence of our few communications — as though the words themselves evaporated from the page and formed a mist, sinking into his mind, reforming perfectly the picture of a place, the thoughts I had there, their deepest meaning. And responding so quickly to his email alerting we writers of upcoming stories, just thirty, maybe forty minutes. Of course I'm the one for the job.

And clearly it's well within my ability, a milk run. But what if I'm way off, if I didn't size up the story right or have the right angle going in, and I get thrown off? The Varsity ends up with 600 words — 600, that's all, such a tiny plot of real estate to found my reputation on — of garbage. I am a rookie batter, no one has seen me play in this league before. A strikeout could come just as easily as a homerun, and then it's set in stone, it's on the record. It was the wind, I'd say, and the crowd, I just wasn't used to such a crowd, and my nerves were jelly, and then a sharp blast of wind hit me just as the pitch came. Years later I'd remember that pitch, and in moments of total recall I'd see the knowing look etched on the pitcher's face. Gotcha. And know he planned it that way, he thought "I'm gonna bag me a rook" and waited a a second or two longer than usual, till he felt that gust kick the back of his neck and he let me have it. "Can't believe it actually worked," I'll imagine him saying to his buddies at the sports bar, swapping old stories and laughing at their former audacity. But no one will believe me. Sure, whatever. Some rookie blew it and says it's not his fault. And they'll go back to whatever they were doing.

It's been easy this past month, being on the Varsity's list of writers and waiting for an assignment to come in. Being able to say (if anyone asked) "Oh, I'm writing for The Varsity, it's U of T's campus paper." Or, if the issue wasn't paid work, but rather what you're doing with your time, "volunteering for The Varsity." Volunteering. Freely. Out of sheer idealism and grit, belief in the freedom of knowledge, will to pull myself up and change the world. "You know," I'd say, "gotta keep the people informed."

The people. Of U of T. In summer. Once a month.

Informed. This guy.

No actual writing of articles, but still the assurance, the satisfaction of being on the list, unadulterated by any need to perform, that alone was worth something. Proof, no doubt, that I am what I say I am. A writer, Out There, Watching, reporting, subverting, whatever I'm saying I am right now. It changes. I am mutable. In me are all things.

I will go downstairs and write about this, as I eat my cheerios and eggs and drink my coffee. I'll write for what feels like hours and look up when I'm done, and find it's only 12:30. The day unfolds before me like a book, showing two pages at a time, what's beyond unknown, but suggested by the shape of things now. A plot, or a rambling tract, at least, direction.

"This is it?" pipes my coffee, hissing from the cup. "What is this, you being creative?" As it happens, I am prepared to discuss this.

"Shut up."

"Nice comeback," it says, burning my lip. I glare.

2006-06-25T22:29:00.000-07:00

Superman!

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.

2006-06-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

A Post for Erica

I'm not really a fan of any sport, except for running, the sport of kings who are, I don't know, being chased. I do like playoffs, though. I just got home and watched the last period of Game 7 to see the Hurricanes win the Stanley Cup. Blast! It was basically a 2-1 win for Carolina, with them getting a third, empty-net goal when Edmonton took out the goalie to go 6-on-5 with 2 minutes left. I had to admit, the Oilers had a damned hard time keeping the puck on Carolina's side of the rink. Oh god, Kid Rock's being interviewed on the ice. TV off.

The announcer talked about how it's now thirteen years since Canada won the Stanley Cup. There was an awful lot of questioning in the immediate post-game interviews whether it was a shame that Carolina had to play Edmonton, and whether the team would've felt better if they hadn't had to win at the Oilers's expense. What are you supposed to say to a question like that? What an annoying question to ask. Maybe the Carolinians felt guilty because half their team is Canadian.

2006-04-28T01:52:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-20T22:08:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

Sitting on the Dock of the Bay

Fishin' for sympathy about his girlfriend man in the next computer booth has said "you know what I mean?" no less than 30 times in the past 3 hours. The half-interested girl he's miserably chatting up seems to take his side or at least nod along, which is easy enough when he gives it so monotonously. He should maybe join the Bush Administration. I think the core of their governing strategy, it might lie in the brainkilling but you have to listen drone, too. Carp their way into whereever they're going—Iran, pants, what have you.

While I was typing this note, he said it 3 more times. His middle-eastern accent makes the phrase sound vivid, tired, and resonant as in a hollow, which it is.

Anyway, here is something else.

Dust Jackets

Hang it all Otis Redding, you said:
You missed the hike across-country,
last chance to wander on your feet
pulling up grass pages leafing in the wind as you go
to scatter on your last shoreline. And we're not doing it again.
Those grasses don't grow back, and anyway, we're out of ground.

For want of something firm, grasshopper legs flail in empty space
or maybe water,
futilely: our backs do the work of legs now, after the ocean stretched out to snatch us.
Or maybe we crept down the beach thinking we'd float face-up and stare, at
stars or sun or seagulls shitting overhead, sky sliding and rocking in the swash.

Us sinuating on the waterskin, with waves hugging us like dolls.
And us pageless covers (our senses fallen out),
instead bracketing sometimes the ocean, sometimes the air,
muck and sunshine and water and the stray other cover that slips into our binding and holds.

All this float, a static suspension, or dynamic too huge and tiny to take apart, piece together, distinguish?
Everything is too big and too small, letters without pages without books without shelves--
Water, stars, space, waves, silt in the wash that is memory, of grass and rock, dissolving into the endless pool--
A country is a book: did we live there?
A bay is a reservoir of pages (wasting time). Is this a landless waste?

Ridges in the water
raised by kicking legs, maybe just splashing fingers, flexing spines,
psychic comic lines radiate from everywhere a person floats,
clashing into spray and meaningless patterns:
The great static foreground, oceantop surface of body movement waterjumps communicating,
falling flat and coming back for more.

---

hung out to dry,

2006-04-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

Two Choices

Bob Lefsetz writes a fine letter. In case you were wondering, that link I posted constitutes 90% of what you will find on the lefsetz.com website. The rest is done by email and internet broadcast. I've been getting his mini-newsletters/rants for about a month now, after some RTA prof told me about him when I was researching the music business for a CanCon essay.

I gave his mail gadget my Gmail address, because I don't care how many people know it. Rather than additional spam, the email bot has delivered me nothing but amusing, highly well-written and opinionated notes about the present, future and history of music in North America. Plus info about a bunch of great bands and even entire music services I'd never heard of. Well, a fair amount of it is just plain rants about the music business, but in interesting writing, and I actually wanted both of those things.

Eh, take a look if it sounds like your cuppatea.

Byron, when will you have the emails again? Whenever I need to contact you I can just knock on your door, but I'm in prolonged suspense now about your unrevealed Stupendulous Email Contrabulance. It sits on a table in my mind, under a blanket, with a spotlight on in, softly humming. I have two guesses about what it is. The first involves aliases, the second involves an indentured gnome and extensive screening and hand-copying.

Which will it be?

2006-04-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

Closing Statement

A full transcript of the defence's closing statement at the trial of Norman DeJesus for the rape and murder of Lisa Thibaudeau.

(Long, so behind an lj-cut)

What the hell is wrong with people? Have you seen this article about the trial? How about this one? Good god.

He was convicted, however.

2006-04-07T12:14:00.000-07:00

Still waiting to find out.

(Pestery, ain't I?)

2006-04-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-04T16:03:00.000-07:00

Screw Grant

Holy Hell, someone done hitted ma' blog with uh ugly-stick. For a whole day and a half, my page layout was catastrophically tampered with. The carblog was smeared all over the left margin like a messy traffic accident, floating DIVs and IMGs, rather than pulling their weight, rested complacently on their own private blocks of space. And those unsightly and embarrassing purple Visited links came back. Plus, all my pictures were gone! But I know what happened, and who's to blame.

The webspace that U of T supplies me, and where most of my pictures and layout files are, went down. And why was that? Because of Hugh Grant, that's why. How do I know this? There's a theory behind that, that's been circulating among the scientists for years now, not really so much a "theory" as a fundamental paradigm overarching this whole "internet" phenomenon. The inviolable rule is this:

Whenever something bad happens inside the internets, Hugh Grant did it.

Remember this principle. Its simple appearance conceals a staggering level of complexity that has the foremost researchers of Hugh-Grant-is-a-jackass grappling with deep and far-reaching implications.

And as for me, I'm putting the Armadillo of Shame on lookout duty until I'm absolutely sure that smirking, meddlesome limey is out of commission. Fuckin' Hugh Grant.

Oh, and sign my guestbook and read this post, even though I call you lazy in it (I say it with love). In exchange, you will live forever (in guestbook-signature form).

2006-04-03T09:28:00.004-07:00

A Funny Thing Happened

Alright, listen close 'cause there's a life lesson at the end of this tale of woe and wonder. Not really, though, but the moral of the story tells you the right time to punch Chad Kroeger in the larynx.

I was walking home a coupla nights ago, up my quiet, residential Jackman street past the elementary school. It was early evening, kind of peaceful, warm, some middle-school kids were playing baseball in the schoolyard. Nice.

This crowd of people is coming down the street in my direction—'bout six shaggy guys a few years older than me. Well, four of 'em are shaggified, doing the long hair, ratty jacket thing, excellent, and two are clean and shiny army guys in spotless uniforms and with those funny hats that're like a cross between a sea captain's hat and a beret. Whatever. They're not taking up the whole sidewalk or anything. We pass, they're talking to each other, I'm, I dunno, walking, not particularly entranced by any of this, but it's a pretty night.

Then when they're about twenty feet behind me, one of the army guys turns around and shouts back "Fine! Be that way! Just 'cause we're not fucking Nickelback doesn't mean you have to like not look at us!" Wow. And the man sounded genuinely insulted, too. Let me emphasize that, though I wasn't staring directly at him or his pals, I wasn't giving them what I believe in showbiz is called "the cold shoulder." I was too surprised to say anything back, and it's not like they stopped walking and stood there, snapping their fingers west-side-story-style and awaiting a rejoinder.

So here is the lesson: when passing uniformed army guys in the company of "civvies," which makes them more sensitive, always make firm eye contact with each one, in sequence, as though staring down a group of wolves in the backwoods, even though you are just passing them normally on the sidewalk. This shows that you respect their killing power.

Also, somewhat less likely to come up but just as importantly, do the same for any members of the band Nickelback. Only, in this case it is not their killing power that you are recognizing, but rather their thrilling power. And if Chad Kroeger's there, actually punch him in the throat. He likes that.

2006-03-31T21:17:00.006-08:00

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

2006-03-27T10:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-03-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

Of Steak and Lesbians

Oh good Christ, listen to this. A party last night, that I didn't really have much time to go to but it was Rachelle's Awesometh birthday, plus it's the only social thing I've done all week. Right at the end, while I'm putting on my shoes, folk are disparaging the oddly popular idea that lesbians are automatically vegetarian, by some sort of dietary cause and effect.

So my clever joke, my attempted ironic stab at saying "hold on, you mean a woman can be one but not the other?" was to suggest that I'd always had the impression lesbianism was a purely nutritional phenomenon, much like a B12 imbalance or an iron deficiency. Get it? Like anemia! Ha-ha! How funny. There's a place for but-I-thought-the-earth-was flat jokes in most conversations, right? And this one didn't strike me as especially dumb.

What I actually said, though, was something like "but I thought that was why they were lesbians, you know, like from a lack of meat in the diet." I was two steps out the door before what I had said clicked in my head, and by "clicked," I mean shouted Wait! No!! FUCK!! With five exclamation points and bold caps lock and everything, as I realized that failing to indicate what exactly was meant by "lack of meat in the diet" left the statement open to the interpretation that I am in fact a jackass, à la "yeah, I'll fix your sink . . . " Honestly, the ability to screen words for such obvious disasters is just one more reason writing—or simply being quiet—is often far superior to talking.

Could I have done worse if the joke had been:

You: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Me: N-gger.

Probably not. In my defence over not being able to keep my words straight, I've got way too much work to do, I'm perpetually tired, and darn you all to heck.

2006-03-21T14:51:00.000-08:00

What Don't You Think?

Frankfurts of the Mind is done, 26 pages long, and totally different from the little bit I worked on here (it was a very organic process: now it's about an angst-ridden half-feline teenage fallen angel chasing his past and coming to terms with his his future, in an amalgm of the Star Wars and Akira universes, set in Tokyo during the Yuuzhan Vong crisis/Seven years after the events of the original manga). *Ahem.* Yeah! I totally wrote that story. Oh, and the title character happens to share my exact name. That's me all the way. Anyway, enough of that, I need you to take part in my Masterplan. Read!

My friends, I desire your help in constructing my evil twin so that we can fight. I have all the cybertronic devices, lazors, and starch-rich vegetables I need to create the body of my doppleganger foe, but designing the seed of purest anti-me that must burn at the heart of its artificial intelligence unit, beneath the padding of browned kohlrabi and potato shavings, requires your assistance.

I wasn't always into building evil-me's to challenge. As a kid I loved playing Password and Mastermind, both games where the deduction you performed had some visual representation. Mastermind in particular was fantastic: you would make guesses at a secret arrangment of colored pins, getting feedback that told you the number of correct colors and positions in your guess, but not which ones were right and which were wrong. That had to be determined by clever deduction. It also sharpened my Masterplanning skills.

I have always liked word games too, so Password, with its gimmicky red screen that made red writing disappear, revealing the blue-text "password" beneath, 3d-glasses style, was close to my heart. Plus it had snappy blue Leatherette sleeves for holding the password cards. This was when I had at my disposal, for at least a couple hours most days, both a Nintendo and an AT&T computer with 3-D Tetris which definitely gave board games a run for their money.

What would've blown the Box and the PC out of the water is if the word-association of Password were somehow compatible with the stark, elegantly layered logic of Mastermind. But I never knew how the hell that would work.

So when I read the description of the silly-named Johari Window, the part where it says "by describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up," struck up a spark of peculiar joy in me. Words, grids, overlap, not stupid-sounding . . . hells yeah.

Still, although I am as vain as I am fabulous, I can't ever recall asking anyone "what they like about me" and I don't think I will. On the other hand, the converse Nohari Window, a grid of overlapping digs at one's character, shows all the signs of the devil's handiwork. As I was thinking about this, it hit me—a way to harness the power of this shifty gizmometer to help complete my evil twin!

I don't want to hear the good things you think about me, I especially don't want to hear the bad things you think about me. Frankly, I don't even want to hear the good things you don't think about me. That too asks for troubles. But I do want to construct a Plant Robot who represents all the most wicked and unwholesome things that I do not stand for. So I thought I'd try doing this _ohari thing backwards. Hence, a Masterplan was born, and one that shant be stopped by those meddling heroes this time. What? Just because I'm the good twin doesn't mean there can't be heroes out to get me. Fuckin' heroes.

Unstoppable Masterplan

Phase One: Go to Not André's Not-Nohari Window and choose the 5 or 6 words that least describe me. By definition, these are the best descriptors of my evil counterpart.

Phase Two: If feasible, buy me a few more lazors, as they are invaluable.

Phase Three: Kombat!

Sound excellent? Good, off you go.

2006-03-20T18:53:00.000-08:00

Frankfurts of the Mind

What do you know?

The Invisible Month

December thirteenth, 2000 (zweitausend). Life is ruled by ghostly forces here. A kind of hostile magnetism keeps anyone in the crowd from bumping into any other of the striding thousands crossing the sullen flagstone, quiet because they needn't talk. Every one, and the odd cluster of two or three bound tight as one, moves without bustle, particles in ideal isolation. Even in the chilled air, no one wastes time shivering or huddling. Each person moves with some task at hand, each one's purpose translated fluently into motion, while the Brownian jitter that should shuffle the crowd is pulled inside, stilled and stilted into a third language, one separated from intent and action, that agitates like the yellow green and blue lights buzzing in the stiff night air. This other tongue may well be German.

My failure to learn the languague (sprache) dogs me up Hauptwache. Like the others around me, I am putting some task into motion, but I have an obviously foreign stammer in my step. The blinking light atop the Commerzbank tower pokes yellow holes in the balance sheet hanging on the horizon that I'm trying to sum up. If I could concentrate, I'd try to find out what holes the missing days had fallen into. I'd paid for them, but had no clue when I might've received them.

The only way to get from my gray-and-brown suburb into Frankfurt, to school, to Valerie--to anything--was with a train pass, a so-called Month Card (Monatkarte) that in true Deutsch style was valid for exactly 30 days, regardless of when the line between months happened to pass. I'd say it was designed to trip people up and and charge them the 80 DM (Deutschmark, Deutsch Bundesbank) fine for travelling with a bad pass, except the Germans seemed perfectly able to keep track of the time and replace theirs when it expired, with no days of overlapping coverage. My classmates kept me up to date, one of the benefits of attending a regular school (Gymnasium) instead of international school like Valerie. Not that I wouldn't rather be in school with her. Doubt I'd miss much about Hederschule. I don't know if the kids who, like clockwork, remind me to buy a new train pass are friends. We copy each others' homework--my English, their math--though neither they nor I need the help. I pick extraneous commas from their compositions like ticks, and expect the same from them for my logarithms (logarithmus), which I do make mistakes with from time to time. But I've always been pretty good with numbers.

The mystery is that I've paid for twelve train passes in a row, never missing a day, and my last one expires a week before my year is up. I'm trying to work it through in my head. Reaching the widemouthed stairs to the subway (U-Bahn), I head underground. For a moment, I'm in warm obscurity when I pass under the shadow of the overhanging pavement, in between worlds, and I feel like I can shudder honestly in the cold. It tinglingly shakes on my shoulders. Then a new horizon tilts to my plane as the pavement becomes the cieling. A different crowd, different like two streams are called different. They're walking faster, but just seem to be about getting out. A pigeon ( . . . I don't know the word for pigeon. Come to think of it, I don't even know bird, just chicken) is hopping in circles on one foot, the other curled tight and held against its body, fleeing one set of fast-swinging legs and then the next, and so on. I rest my back against the tiled wall and watch him (Er) . . . it? for a few minutes while I think.

Days in a year. 365, twelve months. Four weeks each plus change (münze). Twelve months of four weeks was . . . forty-eight weeks? That wasn't . . . yes, forty-eight. I tried not to mouth the words. Thirty days hath September . . . two other months, and November. All the rest have thirty-one, except February for some reason. February had exactly four weeks, then there were four months with two loose days . . . eight days, then, and . . . seven months with three days extra meant an additional twenty-one--twenty-nine days? I did my math again. The cripple-pigeon hopped in more circles. People passed. Yup, twenty-nine days, and wasn't this a leap year? Well shit, thirty. A whole damn month hiding in front of me.

The problem was that a week pass (Wochenkarte) cost half as much as a whole month, which left me with less than I'd planned on. I've had to work at tracking abstract things. Time, money, dates. Exchange rates. Being 30 DM short was $42 gone.

---

Not In The Beginning

A funeral for Oatey the dog. So many options have never had so little meaning to me, but for some reason I've taken on project heart and soul. The kids named Oatmeal (obviously), they loved him, and he died before they were old enough to shake off the loss like grown-ups. I'm not saying I'm not sad that Oatey is gone, just that I wish he could've waited another decade or so like he was supposed to.

Maybe it's good that he went while the kids were still here and still kids. I don't really want the house to empty all at once in ten years. But now he is Karen and Anthony's First Death. Until now their luck, and their relatives', have been remarkable. The grandmas and grandpas are all healthy, no accidents have befallen any of the cousins, and the one great-uncle on Valerie's side is still (against the odds) alive and smoking. I don't just worry about the house emptying all at once, I worry about the older half of the family dying inside of one or two years. It's actually a bit of a relief, in hindsight, that the kids get to practice their goodbyes on Oatey.

But, though grief-stricken, they're also clamoring with questions about how we're going to bury him. At least they have that much of an clear expectation, though I don't know if it's even legal, let alone a good idea. While the kids are putting the scraps they've learned about mourning into action, all I know is that the dog I fed yesterday is lying stiff in the basement, under eight bags of ice and a blanket we've sacrificed to him in the absence of a freezer, a measure I don't expect to give us much time. I'm wondering whether we should give away the rest of his dog food or save it, and how the kids might accept burying the dog in effigy without asking too much about what happened to the real body. Meanwhile I found Anthony in the basement stretched out beside Oatey's body, with the blanket half-hiding his little six-year-old self, rubbing the dog's cold fur with his hands and breathing on his paws—something I showed him when we went sledding last year—and he pleaded "I wanted to keep him warm."

I was younger than Anthony when my mother's cynicism introduced me to religion with angry gestures aimed at the latest round of Bible-quoting fundamentalists appearing on the news, who spoke against abortion and Iran. Against them, she defended the one on principle and the other having lived there. That she was reacting to the emotional predations of the religious right with sharp reason was beyond my ability to notice: at three or four I didn't have an ear for so much subtlety. When they drew her wrathful criticism, I absorbed mainly the wrath, rejecting the other stuff as too big to chew on.

I heard her rail against the hypocrisy of her opponent, and rattle off examples that placed his religion in a lineage dating to Assyria and Babylon, reducing his rhetoric to motives and his motive to stories and his stories to everyone's stories, which she insisted there were only seven of. The idea I got was that the religion and beliefs of these men were common old things, like rocks in the dirt, not the diamonds they seemed to have lodged down their throats when they spoke on the news. I didn't realize my mother cared and knew more than they did about their faith, only that a fight was unfolding between her and what I took for Christianity, and so my loyalties were strongly set.

I don't remember when we did Chanukah for the first time. It would've been Hannuka then, though: I do remember it was before the two months of Hebrew lessons at age ten (or eight, for my sister), that would be our entire involvement in the Jewish world, except for one course I took in college and dropped within—by coincidence—about two months.

Judaism at the time was something I loved, not as a religion like Christianity (these I took to be synonymous), but as a fascinating secret. How could a child not be thrilled by the mystery of being told by his parents to light these candles—in this order—for no reason, while a tape-player sings in a pretty, other language. I'm not even sure why we did Chanukah, it's not like dad wasn't "invited to leave" temple for being an atheist, or like mom believed in god, either

---

It will grow.

Sometimes my reaction to a photo is surprisingly strong; sometimes visceral; pricklingly cerebral other times; sometimes a dumb glut just fills my head and refuses to allow words and ideas to spring together.

While writing this bit I had to look up some pictures of Frankfurt, which caused physical pain. I hate every one of them. Look at them. They probably seem innane. Something in them brings out bad thoughts in me.

I remember those warm ugly nights, I remember those stupid trees, I remember quiet huge spaces, all clearly and uselessly.

I remember the damned Churrasco Grill with the red sign in that blockhouse across the street.

This is the one that holds the rest of them together. I tried to sit under that tree with the Commerzbank Zentrale looking like a church folded into triangles, and write the story I'm working out here.

Just when I finally thought I'd been exaggerating my aversion to Frankfurt, I dredge this stuff up. Well, I've got no real connection of any sort to the geographical place. The pictures just find locations in my memory bring them forward. And man it's shocking how much I hate them spots.

Word

Merriam-Webster, the One True English Dictionary as far as I care, announced their "top ten words of 2005," meaning the words most looked-up online. Their list, in order: integrity, refugee, contempt, filibuster, insipid, tsunami, pandemic, conclave, levee, and inept. What a lame list! Dictionary fans, you've let me down. I guess you heard those words repeated ad nauseum on CNN this past year, and with most of that network's contents, decided you were better off researching the words yourself. Still, also like so much of CNN's content, just because these words were aired again and again does not make them interesting, informative, or important.

Although, conclave? When did that come up in the news?

Also, go read about my Evil Twin Kombat Masterplan and do your bit. Hop to.

2006-02-27T14:04:00.000-08:00

The Ass Olympics

Andra and I had a big discussion of whether "artistic merit" makes for legitimate judging criteria for Olympic events. Surprisingly, I was the one in favor of it. Well, okay, it was more complicated than me simply being "in favor" of "artisitic merit." Suffice it to say we talked at great length and drew a tremendous number of piercingly insightful conclusions. At the end of the day, however, we were left facing the fact that, no matter what sort of reasoning you use to define what is or is not "an Olympic event," someone or something will always be left out. It's like the elusive biological definition of "life." Further confounding the problem, we kept coming up with new events like "Artistic High Jump" (Andra's idea, I was intially against it, now I'm not quite sure why), and "2000-metre Arson" (which, obviously, was mine).

Fortunately, in the case of Olympic events, there's an answer to this problem: More Olympics! I don't know why we didn't think of it sooner, they already have the Special Olympics, for one thing, and the Biology Olympics (I think, though that one probably isn't run by the IOC . . . eh). At certain points in our discourse, she and I were championing the various merits of ballet (a very good suggestion), painting, sketching, and chess—and later a mobile version of touch-move chess performed on rotating platforms to increase the value of physical performance without frustrating the artistic or intellectual component—as Events. Chess and painting were hard sells for the traditional Olympics, so I have come up with a suggestion for a new Olympics, which I'm sure will be but one of many in the Precambrian explosion of competitive diversity when the new polyolympic paradigm catches on.

The Ass Olympics consist of competitive events that one spends on one's ass (with one exception). For clarity, this refers only to the human posterior and not any other sort of ass, be it equid, acronym, expletive, or otherwise. I'm sure there are more than a few A.S.S. acronyms out there, but I refuse to Google it.

So you can see, like the Winter Olympics, these Olympics encapsulate in their name the central characteristic of their events. But what are these events? Surely the Games will expand with time (shut up!) but a short list of potential "core" events would help give our nebulous Ass Olympics some much-needed definition (that one was on purpose).

Les Olympiques du Cul

Stationary, Seated Chess

The Ass Event of Kings

Painting / Sketching Events (Various Subjects as Separate Events)

Another activity often performed sitting down. I believe that events should be grouped according only to the nature of the subject to be painted, and perhaps the medium, allowing different painting styles to compete to see which is the best in evolutionary terms.

Justify Your Ass

This is the exception to the sitting-down rule, although there's no reason why you couldn't be sitting down to do it. Nevertheless, occasional standing would be tolerated, so long as it makes sense. The winner of this event is the one who most successfully represents his or her ass in a primarily verbal presentation, defending it from criticism, analyzing its superior qualities as compared to a hypothetically typical Jederarsch, and developing an argument favoring its extraordinary significance. Marks awarded for artistic merit (so damn difficult to not pun on that!) as well as technical virtuosity.

Swivel Chair Racing

No reason the AOs have to all be stationary, or for chair races to be confined to the Paralympics. Hell, we could even have car racing, although that might violate the original spirit of the Games.

The 4, 9, 13, 18, and 45 Inch Poem

Borrowing a page from Harry Potter here, but it's a convenient system for measuring the length of a poem. 45 inches equals 5 letter-size pages (the right size for paper, dammit) with 1-inch top and bottom margins—epic!

The Short Story

One of the fiercest competitions I'm sure. Some division based on length is permissible, maybe into 1-2 pgs, 3-40, and the long-distance Novella. All work to be done on acceptable typewriters, to show typographic mistakes and corrections. All stories to be read by the same number of judges, though not necessarily the same actual people, as language barriers will necessitate a very large judging pool. No matter. Judges must be fluent in no less than 2 of the represented languages.

Calligraphy

Even though it's not as cool as writing. Well, okay, it is pretty cool. It's funny how I used to associate calligraphy almost exclusively with fancy cursive writing using one of those fountain pens that have interchangeable nibs, and now I associate it almost exclusively with brush writing. Weird.

Competitive Sitting

I am sure there are already rules for this inside the Intrawebs. It may be possible to hold pairs events or even synchronized sitting.

Webcomic Reading

Points awarded for accurate and artful summations of plotlines and major events in specially prepared and sanctioned original comics. Why webcomics and not print? Reading webcomics is generally lazier than reading books, and therefore more pro-ass.

Not Eating

Food, ingeniously crafted in hypermodern laboratories to be scientifically delicious, will be cooked in a kitchen adjoining the competitive space, so that its aroma will waft into the arena where contestants sit on couches, being so hungry but refusing to get up for food that is all the way over there. Competitions will be long, and the delicious food will be provided as dinner for the audience, in insultingly clear view of the competitors.

Sit-Ups

Ass on floor at all times.

Cannonball Diving

Ass must enter the water first. Only Cannonball dives are acceptable. Size of splash, as reflected in height, average diameter at base, circular regularity, and estimated volume of water, as well as other measurements yet to be determined, is the only judging criterion.

Staring Contest

I wonder what the long-term effects will be.

24-Hour Blog

No mobile blogging or cellphone shit, no audioblog nonsense, no gratuitous photos (in fact there'll be strict rules about picture use) no bullshit links, and no blogging equipment with a clean white, mac-style interface is permitted. Absolutely no poetry, that is a separate event. Coffee may or may not be disallowed. Competitors in violation of these rules will not be disqualified, they will simply lose, and can and will be physically flogged by judges or spectators during the event. Judges will be extraordinarily arbitrary, arcane, and capricious, but no questioning of their decision is allowed. Ever. Bitches.

Knitting

The main idea is speed.

Sliding In To Second Base

On a track accurately simulating the stretch on a baseball diamond between first and second base, competitors will attempt to slide the greatest distance into second base. There will be strict rules concerning acceptable pants.

That's enough to give the AO Games conceptual room to develop in, I think. Been doing a lot of this list stuff these past days. I'd worry, if I hadn't also written 10 pages. Lists, after all, are the lazy man's short fiction. Then again, blogging is the lazy man's procrastination. I could at least be cleaning the house right now. Ah, that's crazy talk.

Nifty though, that's also 16 items in the list, the same as my uses for labret piercings one from yesterday, even though I wasn't counting these ones as I went along. 16 seems to be the magic number as far as my write-something-anything lists go. Hm.

Anywise, if you feel like learning about dimensions, start at the highlighted text of this article and read the next six paragraphs or so. Or read the whole article, it's nifty. If you're not familiar with the "Coastline of England" bit here's a good rundown of the famous example. I did a ridiculously pointless project on fractals in grade 12 (pointless because our teacher left halfway through the school year and her replacement didn't do shit so our projects—as well as the rest of our mathematical education—basically ceased to exist for the rest of the year. I bet I still have some of the programs I wrote then, I should see if I can find 'em.

There was one where a line of dots broke up into a series of rotating interlocked snowflakes, collapsed into a branch of feathery leaves, and finally returned to the original line. It looked pretty cool. I didn't actually do most of the writing, I just dug up fractal formulae and had the idea of animating them by increasing one of the variables. The sad thing is, I thought that I therefore could not claim credit for it. I realize now that, in math presentations at my highschool, I could have thrust a gumball in front of the class, proclaimed "Behold the Sphere! Mightiest And Roundest Of Platonic Forms And In This Case Delicious!" and gotten about an 85%.

Blast! Oh well.

What the hell is this? It looks cool.

2006-02-25T11:29:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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!

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.

2006-01-25T12:40:00.000-08:00

Higher Learning

Meeting Andra + Swimming Suits + Changed & Showered + Lane Swim Ended an Hour Ago = DAMMIT!

2006-01-16T08:17:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-12-17T11:59:00.000-08:00

What's Been New

First and foremost, let me say that drunken boardgames is a demonstrably wonderful idea, so long as you're not all that attached to the notion of actually playing said boardgames. I think we lasted about two hours before the games got cleaned up, but the night went on. It'd been a while since I'd been at an old-fashioned, liquored up and loud type of party, and apparently this was the true for most of the others too. Not that that mattered, there was plenty of wine and rum, and many a laugh.

I spent a couple hours talking with a soldier guy who was loaded with - in addition to rum and Cokes - ideas about politics, morals and the military and why he'd rather ship out to Afghanistan than the Sudan. He was an interesting, if overly insistent, lad. Then there was still lots of time for general carousing, as well as learning about the Decemberists and finding the true meaning of Channukah. The next morning, those still standing had to look around inspecting the damage and admit that it'd been a mighty fine time.

Other than that, if you're reading this, it means you're not reading this! It's Andra's new blog, which I spent a coupla days setting up. She came up with the look, I made it, and I happen to think it looks quite cool and unusual. First thing you'll notice is it's not a livejournal, ya lazies, so you can just read it anyway, friends page or not.

The "friends" feature is, I'll admit, one of 2 good things about lj, as far as casual users like me are concerned (the other is cuts, which are crazily difficult to imitate in Blogger). Being able to subscribe to a blog and have new posts delivered to your custom Friends' page seems to be all the rage with the kids these days. I actually have a "real" (non-Atom) RSS Feed for this blog that I set up out of curiosity of how syndication works. But no one, including me, wants to bother using RSS readers, so there is basically nothing I can do to make Blogger subscribable like lj is.

Deal with it, punks.

Oh, and care of Lucas, watch this. Now.

2005-11-30T19:43:00.000-08:00

Frost Bitten

This dark brick back yard, and grassless dirt,
stalkshadowed that evokes itself
while I wait in its hollow.
Shackled, that heavy-shouldered
garden hose draped like a plastic boa,
green on the cold metal neck of a fencepole.

Stone, ice breathed
in and being in screeches its grains clean
down my throat, sweats and dampens in the
alveoli of my lungs, and recrystallizes minute
Frost being not in
cold lungs and crunching dirt.

Tufted waste land of ground, garden sometimes, with an
unsettled slope, like a curtain torn
down and left untouched,
to inhale itself on the floor
in the mysterious flattening process,
What slab is on you pressing your grains
so uncrumbled close, stones
barely meeting your
surface with their turtleshell faces,
painted dustmottle marmoreal maps
until the rain will wash them bare
and spiteless merciless thaw bleed the frozen wound in new old channels.

Not interrupting the cold labor of the flayed
garden unmoving under rusted leaves, baredirt
and broken buckets staring up, someone's breath
limns my mind, condensation slacking and tense again
all as one,
and with the next beat breath is veiled and gone.

I would rather freeze to the spot 'til
it come back, or break.
Sun will boil me away.

2005-11-25T11:23:00.000-08:00

I'm Through Messing Around with Snow

I fucking hate fucking snow. I'm exaggerating, I wouldn't really do that, but I do hate looking at or walking in snow.

Snow, I hate you. Go. No, don't look back, just pick up your mess and get out of my driveway. And don't even think of taking off with the salt.

My sidewalk is gonna stay clear goddamit.

Don't get me terribly wrong, snow is fine for flinging around and running through, getting thrown about in by friends and such, making into forts to take cover in, frostbitten and sweaty, redfaced with exertion and frost whilst hilarity ensues. But I don't want it clinging to my boots every damn morning when I walk to the subway station or go out for groceries. Let go dammit, or I'll get the shovel. That's right.

2005-11-16T08:57:00.000-08:00

35 Years Old, Never Kissed a Girl

Did You Know? This post has basically nothing to do with Gord Downie. Damn nice hat, though.

Wow. Here's something: I'm writing a story in which the vandalism of a gay rights-type office thingy plays a minor part (don't be misled, though, the story has nothing to do with anything remotely noble and everything to do with superpowers, misanthropic petty practical jokes, and Great Cthulhu) and so I used this "google" thing and looked up gay rights organizations in Cleveland, that being where the story happens. I really just needed a name, since the role it plays in the story is pretty small.

I got a few names, but what caught my eye was an article about the overturning of the sentence of an man living in Kansas (his first mistake) who, in 2000 and aged 18, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for having consensual sex with a 14 year old boy (his second mistake). Don't get me wrong, 18-on-14-year-old sex is pretty fucking objectionable and, if it weren't for the fact that guys having sex with much younger girls happens all the god-damned time in highschool, I'd have no severe problem with a society having a jail penalty for it. However, the reason the verdict got overturned is that the statutory rape law allowed a "somewhat longer jail term" for the man because the illegal sex was gay instead of straight. In fact, had the man had sex with an underage girl, the maximum penalty the allowable for him was 15 months. Rather than 204. The reason for the difference: "moral disapproval."

Much to the consternation of legislators who bemoan the court's "intrusion on the public's authority to make laws," the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate state interest. So the law was defended as a way of "protecting children's traditional development, fighting disease (my italics), or strengthening traditional values."

Save to say that the man has already served 5 years as a child rapist in a Kansas prison, where, I have heard, being prominently labelled as such can work against you, I believe that's about all I have to say about that.

2005-11-09T19:27:00.000-08:00

760mg
The exact amount of caffeine necessary to rouse the human soul on a morning like today's

The morning is elusive when there's so much gray out, so it took a lot for me to find it. Six cups of espresso, in fact, is what I needed to find and enter that revitalizing moment, so much easier to get to when 9 a.m. is bright blue and warm. This is severe. 480mg of caffeine, daily, officially is too much, therefore I don't plan on repeating this morning's large excess. But for crying out loud, that was after six hours of sleep - not a lot, but damn well enough. I hate this crazy season. I live down here in my body, physically muffled while up there somewhere is a mind diffusing palely down to me through the opaque sky, cold and altered.

Cringe at the bottomless well of coffee if you want, but I'll do what I can to obliterate that eyes-glued-shut gritty exhaustion that wants to keep me in bed all morning. Even being juiced up like a fighter pilot or a truck driver. Or a truck-fighting pilot driver. None of those are things to which I aspire - in fact I fervently hope not to be them, though if I had to choose I guess I'd go with whatever doesn't involve me riding a tank of burning jet fuel barbed with armament - so I'll have to keep an eye on how much I abuse myself into having a healthy cycle of alertness.

Well then, onward to:

Movie Talk with André Beaumont*
Welcome . . . to your Doom!

How I actually look in the morning before a shower and caffeine

I'd like to point out that I've only done this for 3 movies the whole time I've been writing this'n "blog" thing, and those movies, in order, have been The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Revenge of the Sith, and, now, Doom. I notice looking back that I promised not to do it much, and I do keep my appreciation for three-hour-long foreignese, subtitled movies about art and, like, questions, to myself, because I am content to be quietly superior to the unwashed masses that surround me, without feeling compelled to expound on my fabulous genius and sensitivity.

But Doom, well, I can't not talk about it. My suspicion that it was going to be the best worst movie that I'll ever have to see was borne out. It wasn't until after the movie that I realized the six scientists who were the first to fall victim to the demonic Doomery afoot were named after the original team of iD software that made Doom. Dr. Carmack has a prominent role, even. That's positively subtle, as the movie's in-jokes go. The best are entirely visual: every member of the marine squad carries a different gun, each one as big as the wielder's leg and designed by a nasty futuristic wing of Harley-Davidson, and they all have little screens that display the wielder's name, status, and remaining ammo. The sets, I think, come almost straight from the game - slanted corridors maze around, inset with light panels that flicker with no effect on the ambient light, massive bundles of pipes snake orthagonally along the hallways like crown molding, and there are endless grate floors and the occasional meaninglessly stencilled bulkhead or static spatter of undripping blood.

The story, of course, was terrible to the point of causing physical pain if you insisted on paying attention to it. I managed to avoid doing this almost the whole time, with the exception of the '24th Chromosome' scene, a breathtaking moment of cinema which demonstrates in a concrete and visceral way that being stupid can reach a point at which it becomes inherently evil and must be answered by death.

Like the expositional text screens in between levels of the game, the mostly illusory plot was not the reason I enjoyed Doom. I mainly believe and sincerely hope that the makers of the movie - and note that I am making no reference to 'writers' - didn't even try to have a story, opting instead for a progression of segues that keep things moving from level to level. Er, well, yeah.

Technically I suppose the movie's pretty basic. There's little art or impressionism in the things like tight shots of characters' tense faces, or lurking shadowy figures, and sudden shock bursts, and much of the actual killing is just anticlimactic. The movie's not much interested in suspense, either. The one thing everyone was talking about, the sequence in first-person shooter perspective, was, cinematography be damned, Fucking Brilliant. And just so we're clear, I mean 'brilliant' as in cool, not rocket science. Aside from being a whirlwind tour of all things Doom, and providing a moment where we glimpse ourself in a reflective surface and realize that, for no legitimate reason(!), we've switched to CG, this bigscreen level-clearing demo really drives home the point that the movie itself is really just a showcase for the Doom engine, which has mutated into some motor of pure memory, salted with "wait . . . I'm not supposed to die!" tongue-in-cheek moments.

Let me frame my reaction. I played a lot of Quake, which is basically Doom with nominally different weapons, slightly more drenched in trenchcoat Goth blood motifs, and rendered in gloriously moddable chunky 3d - with a soundtrack constructed by Trent Reznor out of old rusty tools and the pain of innocent people.

My friends and me even had a clan, of whose existence all traces have evidently been wiped from the internets. Back in high school, we used to talk about Quake and Quake-like things, kind of a lot. And one of them listened to a lot of Tool and sat in the back of the class with the curtains pulled over his face. Watching Doom was like talking about all that stuff again, in the same ridiculous frame of mind.

If you were cool back then or were some different kind of nerd, for fuck's sake, go watch A History of Violence, or read a book, or go to a pay-what-you-can play on Sunday at 2:30, anything really as long as you're not watching the 50 cent movie. But pay neither time nor money for the movie about which I now write.

If, on the other hand, you know what a BSP or animated texture is, or are familiar with the rhythmic swaying, baton-like in the lower right corner of your computer screen, of the gun-barrels belonging to a succession of incrementally more powerful weapons all of which you have found hovering, fully loaded and slowly rotating, just above the ground . . . if perhaps the idea of devoting serious screen time - hell, character development - to the BFG-9000 strikes your mind's eye like the light from a beacon of gleeful madness, shedding its nonsensical illumination from a perch raised dizzyingly atop a towering monument of highly purified and unalloyed Silly, or of course if you are a 'pixelante,' then I think you will find Doom puts the "fest" in "crapfest." You, without a doubt, should definitely get one of your friends to rent Doom when the DVD comes out and watch it in his basement (I am assuming he is a boy). Doom the game came with a story too small to even scoff at - you'd miss it if you tried - but about a million people really liked it. Why? How do I know, it was freaking high school.

Note: Doom came out in like 1993, so I wasn't so much in high school at first. Rather, I was chasing salamanders and playing four-square in my backyard in Berkeley. It (Doom) was still relatively big by the time I got to high school, since apparently games could do that back then, but Quake was the new Doom. Still though.

*My screen name. "Bovee-Begun" is too ethnic.

2005-10-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

Telling Stories

There is fiction in the space between
the lines on your page of memories

There's a convection, hot and cold, forgetting and knowing: it carries little true and false things up and under again. A surface, pocked with doubts and diving questions, watery surface of a story. Why does it always come back to water? He remembered stories of cloning and stolen nuclear material, told in a lab, and him as an eight year-old paranoid of someone suctioning off his DNA and injecting the stolen chromosomes through the membranes of some foreign egg, him being uncompressed and reconstituted as a frog or some other misformed hellishness. Not that he was to be put off from science: conversation turned comfortingly soon to hyperdrive, artificial intelligence, the measurements and prospects of bones.

Lost in a churn of slides - Can Animals Think? Pannonian Shoreline: 12 MA, arrows weaving to and from Africa - and clay models, scaly questions, a boy floating somehow towards a distant want, islanded just off-path of a mean current that plucks and tows and tosses out to sea. Where is he?

Soaked cardboard boxes with inscrutable labels in black marker, letters two inches high drift by like brown kelp. A flock of tickets, practically a book's worth, to nowhere he's heard of slide by on the warm wavering surface of the water. Brown wrinkled lillies bob by like toy boats. He wonders about long and deepmawed fish or sea snakes. Where he is is insensible, dark and oceanic beneath his neckline, only the theoretical land of those tickets to remind him - where did they go?

Some years later and only after learning to live off the odd flotsam and when to trust and distrust the whims of waves and flows, he washes up on a bed of sand, sleeps on top of where the sun has laid down on the silica grains, gets up with them sticking to his back.

A yelping dog is waiting for him, it runs back and forth from him to some indiscrete whiteness laid on the sand. The body of a fish, same as he worried about in the drift earlier, gapes blind through milky eyes. The dog has not touched it and wags its tail as it watches the boy watch it. He reaches out to feel the dried fish, breathless afraid that it might snap at his hand, and finds its deceptively dull skin still damp and slick, and its gills twitch and flutter. Terrifies the dog, which bolts and then runs back, wagging, and bolts again. The boy follows, finds himself at the edge of a water hole, black and thick as the sea and with creepers draped into it and swirling into its depths.

Falls asleep there, the dog in his arms, warmer than the night air, and awakes wet and gasping, canine nowhere in sight, island inconceivably absent, just a dream?

There is fiction in the space between
You and me

2005-10-20T15:40:00.000-07:00

Potential Difference

Grainy shades of wanting, quantified
sloping pain tracked by a needle
knowing the empty pull of
copper veins, stretched staring
for bare electric motes in chorale
straining over the break
in parallel - blind buzzed and piled
one on the other - and air strengthless
between, carrying nothing, stretch
over the needle, there, how much?

Empty potential, stored cold battery
high and untouched tight wire humming
nothing, but over the break, invisibly
the reach of far-blind dizzy flakes
scatters in my blood, (the needle
shows it), finds the graded span
between that flush far-afield
snowdrift-lonely huddle,
and the surge
home.

It's been so very long since I wrote a poem about physics. This one explains the idea of voltage in clear words we can all relate to. Ah, electrical potential difference, you make my heart beat and always will, what with the sinoatrial node and such. Been a long time since I've written any kind of poem, though. That's the downside of knowing of, and in some lucky cases just plain knowing, so many better poets, it can quiet you down a lot. I can always shrug it off on account of stories being more my thing. I finished a new one. It's probably too big to put up here, I'm workshopping it and then probably trimming it down. I'll cut it from 12 pages to a paragraph and then post the key sentence stand-alone, like an verbal extreme closeup.

2005-10-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

A Practical Application of Google^(tm).

Long Time No Tree!

Hugh at one point a while ago said that, due to the actions of some freakily-named fake cult, a google search of his full name produced lots of pictures of firebreathing gargoyles and temples in the jungle. Sadly this awesome misrepresentation of Hugh is no more. He advised after this tale against google-searching your friends' names, 'cuz it all comes back with porn, no matter what. Probably you could type in "Dalai Lama" and get some kind of action. But I wondered what I'd get if I turned SafeSearch on. Once you filter out the porno-graphy, the internet's a fairly dry mild-mannered place, no?

So anyway, I typed in a bunch of youse guys' names and saw these things in the #1 result spot:

Hugh Alter - A picture of Hugh Alter. Well that's freaking boring.

Meredith White - The gravestone of Mary White from the cemetary in Meredith, Texas.

Dave Clark - Shockingly, the Dave Clark 5

Byron Wolfman - Hardcore pornography. No actually, just this picture: ...But this was #2.

Leora Courtney - THIS child's drawing, which I demand you see now. And when you're done with that one, then (and only then) THIS one! Wow. What bizarrely apt crazyshit. Anyway, the fourth pic was of her playing keys at the Reverb in a clopsified red shirt, and the 2nd and 3rd were bandmates at the same show, so fairly good representing.

Caedmon Ricker-Wilson - Nothin'

Laura DeHaan - The Women's Studies program at North Dakota State University.

Gigi Omar - A dancing Thai chef in purple clothes backed by a Phillipino guitarist in blue civvies serenading on an acoustic jeetar. By which I mean guitar.

Weija Chiang - Nuffin'

Jenny Wang - A different Jenny Wang, either from California - or the Dimension Of DOOM. But #4 was the "real" Jenny: Voilà.

Kaspar Bentonwood - Nothing, apparently he is the product of my imagination.

Kara McIntosh - A very creepy photo from a child beauty pageant. Ewww. Ironic also because Kara's possibly the oldest of all my friends, and therefore least likely to win a child beauty pageant on those grounds alone.

Ephraim Ellis - I'm not even gonna bother, I assume it'll be a headshot or promotional pic, either from Degrassi or Falcon Beach, or possibly that YTV Sci-Fi show. Okay, I tried anyway: his came up with a dreamy off-center black-and-white portrait from the waist up, with hands folded in front of him that said "stay back . . ." but a glittering rogueish grin that said "unless you're ready for this!" It was on www.popgurls.com, and it was about Degrassi.

Mordenkainen - Badass, baby.

Max Hazen - Seriously, about 50 pictures, ALL of them of heavily tattoed men, except for one of a normal-looking middle-aged woman.

Matt Schwemlein - Nuttin

Neil Lamont - A 1940s hockey team from the T.S. Vindicatrix Assn. in the UK. (a.k.a. the "vindi boys.")

Me - No picture

Andra - A really cute picture of her, from her blog.

Victor Ragusila - An old photo of him at the Calgary SciTech Fair.

Rachelle McGill - A hairy centaur baboon. (I'm very, very sorry. Here. Here it is.)

I'm tired now, no more!

In good news I am actually writing a story that'll go up here, along with some respec'able, god-fearing blogging of the sort you've come to associate with my name. And possibly some news on this "Italy" trip I apparently took this summer, if I can call those foggy, distant details back to memory.

2005-09-18T10:23:00.000-07:00

For Anyone I Missed

Those of you without email addresses properly stored on my contacts list take this:

Basically, if it sounds like fun to you, you should come.

2005-08-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

Be râh mioftam

Any of you who speak Farsi totally understood that. It means I'm hitting the road (literally, even - it's cool how English and Farsi have so many figures of speech in common). Of course, Farsi has nothing to do with any of this, except that the final exam for the course made me delay my departure for Italy.

But depart I will, now that I'm done with school. Done for the next three weeks, anyway.

Huh. That seems to be all I had to say. Carry on. See y'all soon, I hope.

2005-07-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

2.1.2.2.

I'm short four wisdom teeth, which had to go as they were making way too much of a fuss. Or whatever teeth make when they're impacted. At any rate I'm still feeling clever enough to write a blog entry.

My wisdom teeth, or "third molars," as they liked to be called, hadn't erupted through the gumline, but they had put roots deep into my jaw, and were leaping out sideways to headbutt my good teeth. They were big, too, a lousy fit for my modestly sized mouth.

Friends who'd had their wisdom teeth taken out warned me how very, very much the recovery period was going to suck, there being so many nerves running through the mouth ready to cause pain and angst. Fortunately I am equipped with four bottles containing pills, each of which in turn contains valuable drugs. Either those drugs really really work, or the puny human nerves lining my jaw were accidentally removed in the operation, leaving their job to a previously dormant, powerful set of backup nerves, fashioned of steel or some similarly ferrous alloy. As it is, I feel no worse than if I'd been punched in the jaw about half a dozen times, which is way better than I'd hoped. We'll see how I'm doing tomorrow.

Also I can't talk, at all basically.

But enough about me, how about you?

Now I'm tired again and gonna sleep for about half a day. 'Night, then.

2005-07-13T01:38:00.000-07:00

Still Green

Yes, well.

One of those late nights at a bar, of which I haven't had nearly enough this year, or this lifetime come to think of it. An encounter, unsolicited and except in one forever sorry spot of bruised soul un-particularly-wanted meeting with an old friend long since lost became the crowning element. The - I hesitate to say it - real value of the encounter was more than anything else in retracing with a friend of old and inarticulable importance some familiar lines of hurt, knowing in advance through that selfish prescience of shared pain that the familiarity would be mutual.

One of the few situations into which I can dredge up a hurtful memory, knowingly and to an extent for my own benefit, without being a total bastard toward everyone else. In fact one of the few situations into which I can drag a painful memory at all, bastard or not. A rare misdemeanor, solicitation of a complicity already established, silently, in one way or another. Proffering as by ritual the reminder neither of us needs. That old friend looked different this time, maybe a sign of growth on one part or both, or maybe on each. I've always been one to wait and see what time and age jointly bring.

I'd say I'm thankful of the event, in the strange way of a disturbance of the old and genuinely uncomfortable, yes, but if you think I'm altogether glad about it you've been breathing the wrong atmosphere.

2005-06-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

This is How we Confirm Reservations in Italy

Sended message!!!! You will receive one ours mail of confirmation of the happened reception of the reservation. Thanks

2005-05-23T03:35:00.000-07:00

Numb as a Statue

't'ain't nothin' special
when the present meets the past.
I'm always takin' care of business,
I've paid my first and last.

I'd dearly like to uproot this insomnia. This latest round has been nice enough to leave me, inconsecutively, ten hours of sleep in the last seventy-two. That is, about five hours total on Friday and Saturday nights, and last night, none. I've been known to say I had "no sleep last night," meaning a minimal amount. This time, though, my brain did not for one minute flip to an asleep state. I gave up at 6 a.m. It was already bright out. Somehow the fact that the world was beautiful regardless was a consolation.

I've just come dripping from the shower. I feel like I might pass out, gratifyingly, from exhaustion. I do not believe this will come to pass. I'm still too busy thinking.

It's an endless rivulet singing through my head that keeps me awake while I contemplate the backs of my eyelids and the conscious acts of breathing. I'm reeling through an enormity of things I'd wish to fix about myself. The inability to shut up and go to sleep, for one. Quietnesses, loudnesses, things too vague to explain or too specific to mention. Things I didn't do or shouldn't have. It's not unlike me - in fact it's happened much more than once - to walk too far after turning down a ride, to make things difficult, walking away from what was waiting for me, for no reason other than to wander longer and worse. I would - have often, come to think about it - more probably press into blank forest than follow a path laid before me in untrodden leaves wanting wear, as the man said. I must want wear too.

To put it shortly (as if I haven't blown that chance already,) the kinds of things everyone stays awake thinking, sometimes.

Actually I want either to drop where I stand or wake up. Or really, both.

I want to count back down from my enormous number to zero and lose those superfluous things, find the truth of the basic state, close my eyes, exhale indefinitely and glide un-knowing through scattering secrets.

Does any of this mean a goddamn thing?

I don't care if it's superficial,
You don't have to dig down deep.
Just bring enough for the ritual.
Get here before I fall asleep.

2005-05-20T22:54:00.000-07:00

Jump to Lightspeed

Anyone remember the unwordable excitement at the beginning of the new Star Wars Trilogy? Not just from the hardcore fans (like me), but normal people too. Everyone was excited about seeing what came next. And the anticlimax was implosive. I'm not even gonna talk about how terrible and ham-handed the two first movies were. I completely wrote off the new trilogy as uninteresting reels of crap festooned with ugly exposition and CG effects. Going to see Episode III was more or less something I did to just wrap up the series because I couldn't stand to walk away from it, miserable though it was.

I should say, though, that when I first saw the theatrical preview for Revenge of the Sith, I began to hold a tiny, guarded New hope. Much like Obi-Wan Kenobi watching at a distance over a young Luke Skywalker growing up in exile on the sandy wastes of Tatooine, I had the sense of a promise - which I needed to protect from overexposure until (and if) the time was right - that the mess of the new trilogy could be overcome, redeemed even. But I did not let myself go crazy about it.

I don't think you might understand how much I liked the original movies.

There was a time when I knew everything about Star Wars.

Every name, every book and its author, every ship, its workings and significance, every alien and planet, the serial numbers of each droid mentioned in any source - the movies, short stories, comics, not the cartoons because those were crap, technical manuals, scripts, novelizations. Seriously, I knew everything.

Not only that, but the story was alive to me, in a way ordinarily reserved for a great book, which, I'll readily grant, the titanic amount of Star Wars material was not. I can't explain exactly what nerve twinged in response to the stories to make them and their characters and ideas so significant, but if you're reading this, probably somewhere inside of you is a little fanatic who knows exactly what I mean. Possibly not, not everyone I know was into Star Wars. But almost everyone was.

I will say, after watching Revenge of the Sith once, from the very beginning they did it right. From the first shot I was excited, a little tense, engaged, and not only that, but - in a way I had pretty much forgotten about - happy with the movie. I was smiling like a ten year-old.

I won't say there weren't a few things they could have done without, some artless dialogue, an overreliance on computer effects that cost a certain needful grittiness and realism. But it all flowed right, and not only that, it did what a story should. It didn't waste itself on worthless setup and premising: everything was layed out right to start with. And nothing was given away from the beginning.

Note that, because it's key. If I was to complain about the first two prequels, I would find their deepest fault to be not the awkwardness of their telling or the gaudiness of their presentation, but their awful, drudgeful, indefensible boringness. Any surprises in them were at how stupid their characters could be, or how much time could be wasted on a scene - or a whole act - with absolutely no relevance. Otherwise, everything in them happened as though events were running along a track that was plainly apparent to the audience. The universe we'd thought was so cool before had been reduced to a landscape of cutouts and automatons unvitalized by any imagination.

Everyone knows what the ending of Episode III will be, but - crucially - the question of how it will come to be seems important. Gripping, even. There was one, central fight for the duration of which my heart was pounding. Also, this movie actually rewards those who have an eye for details and know the story set out in the previous trilogy, whereas the other prequels, it is virtually unanimously agreed, causes those same people to unite in cringing wonderment at how they could have got so wrapped up in this Star Wars thing. I would see this movie again tomorrow at a moment's notice. I'm still jazzed about it - obviously it's reflected in my writing.

Here's the real thing though. I feel like I could watch the old movies again not with nostalgia or just because They're Star Wars, but to see how they all fit together, follow the end of Revenge of the Sith through till Return of the Jedi, follow the story again. I could even read some of the books for new ideas - though I'd be noting style problems and where the language should be changed, of course.

Some of the first stories I really took time thinking up were, like with a lot of kids, continuations of Star Wars stories I'd gotten caught up in, that I didn't feel should've ended where they did or that I wanted to make differently. It's as good a place as any to start being creative, though I've moved a long way away from there. I've just been reminded that it's a great imaginary world to let one's own imagination zoom around in. None of it's real, you know. And with a nudge, unless you want it to be . . .

2005-05-17T13:02:00.000-07:00

Letters from the Bowels of the Beast

I've made my opinions on Scarborough and the satellite campuses it knowingly harbors and abets as well-known as I could without actually getting out of my chair. So, though coincidental, it was appropriate that my mp3 player was singing the songs 'Never Again' and 'Road to Nowhere' as I made my way back into those obnoxious halls. Okay, it turns out that first song's actually entitled 'Not in this Life,' but the point still stands.

Whilst I roamed, the device started playing Pink Floyd's 'Time,' which was suitably bleary, but I was hoping that The Innocence Mission's 'Prayer of St. Francis' would shuffle to the top of the playlist.

The song itself is more than serene enough to reorder a mind scrambled by wanderings of the campus's cynically self-doubting floorplan, even without the beauty of the prayer the music surreally intones, whose words I managed not to actually hear for the first 2 or 3 years I had the song. More to the point, though, the ridiculous UTSC building, which seems to be the bastard stepchild of the Bauhaus and Baroque movements driven insane by a comittee, could benefit immeasurably from a bit of the Franciscan philosophy of simplicity, purity and humility, which has in the past been applied to architecture with great success. Maybe it's just as well I didn't invade that reactor core of confusion with such antithetical principles. I might have opened up a black hole.

But that's an aside.

The building itself, and the elliptical logic of what frazzled intellects framed its fearful asymmetry, deserve nor demand no further comment. This time around I actually found my target - the library again - fairly expeditiously. The key is to start by giving up. If one can relinquish one's worldly thoughts of coming to any point, one reaches a cartographical Zen and finds the forgotten destination in the white space between thoughts. What is the sound of one map clapping?

I passed a couple of sights along the way - the load-critical books are still ducktaped steadfastly to their shelf in front of the library's no-access porthole, and I also came across a curious black metal door, wide enough to force a bison through sideways, that opened into a room no bigger than a closet. By and large, though, I was focussed, and I reached the library in an amount of time no more than triple the theoretical minimum, orders of magnitude less than it took me last time.

I was there to pay for a book I'd lost as part of the wacky adventures involved in my last Scarborean expedition. The staff gave me a choice between paying a flat $140 fine and a second option that cost only $30 but necessitated an unthought-of third trip to UTSC. I was sorely tempted to just splurge, but that annoying work ethic that, thank God, only rears its studiously well-kempt head for sidereal or esoteric matters, won over.

Thus, satisfactorily, concludes my second and hopefully penultimate schlep through the Wastelands. I wonder how Chris and Bettio put up with the daily commute. I burned easily two and a half hours on TTC property, though the second half of this time was cheerfully filled with writing this on the back of a scrounged bus shelter rent ad, and the first half was occupied by various acrobatics of Farsi grammar - an activity at least 5 times (minimum) more exciting than it sounds. Also, it's nigh on 4:30 now and I haven't eaten anything all day, and I'm feeling oddly unhungry. So that's pretty much been André's Fantabulous Tuesday.

The comments things are gone, though the guestbook's there same as always. I'd like to think there's a couple people out there reading me silently and without compulsively scratching responses into the internet. I'll do things like that sometimes. Was that last sentence ambiguous? Not that anyone should take this as an injunction from signing the guestbook.

2005-04-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

Hot House

"André, check out the roof, it's steaming!" says Dave.

"What?!"

"From the sun on the rainwater," he says. I go see.

Sure enough, when I pull open my shades, a gliding mist is rolling past my window, over the roof which is an arm's reach away, and off every other roof in the neighborhood, dissipating as it crosses over the edge. It's quietly a stunning sight, in no small part because it also provides my first look at my absolutely gorgeous surroundings since I put up that curtain at the beginning of winter.

But I realize as I take in the view that those vapors fringing the rooftops couldn't be caused by the evaporation of water in the sun. For that to be, the roof would have to be heated to 100 degrees Celcius. I assume that heating roofing tar that much could be dangerous, and a quick glance at the EPA Air Toxics Website yields the following:

Roofing tar is composed largely of polycyclic organic compounds (POCs, a subgroup of PAHs (never mind)) that have melting points between about 65 and 175 degrees Celcius, depending on the tar's hardness. The benzo(a)pyrene used in roofing tar is a very nasty chemical when airborne, with concentrations of 1.1 nanograms per cubic metre considered significant, and is found to have chronic, reproductive and carcinogenic effects in concentrations of 6 ppm (80 mg/m³) or higher. Heated enough to boil water on, even if the tar were still well below its melting point, it would pose a severe and long-term health risk to people living in the area. Also, our roof clearly can't possibly be boiling hot, or we'd have more immediate problems than tar-related cancer.

So while I look at the scene my brain riffles through my Physical Geography index and realizes that the mist is actually there because our roof is colder than the air passing over it. By cooling the sun-warmed air slightly, our damp roof causes some of the airborne gaseous water to condense into drops of suspended liquid, which make up the fog swirling by my window. My handy index further reminds me that the same thing causes mist beds over lakes and blanks out mountain passes when chilled alpine air sinks down into warmer valleys. Of course, the transfer of heat from the air to the water on our roof causes some of evaporation too, but that's invisible.

Cool. Also beautiful to see after it rains on a warm day when the air is saturated, the temperature just above the condensation mark.

- - - -

Edit: Well, I wrote that a little while ago and took it down because I wanted to edit it more. And I just did. So y'all know, I kicked the ass out of my Physical Geography exam. Finally done with school! 'Till summer school starts! Temporary yay!

2005-04-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

I need a title for this post.

Oh, good, they've rolled out a movie about the Crusades. Sorry, a Crusades movie. Heaven forbid anyone should think that Kingdom of Heaven is meant to teach anything about the Crusades. No, much like a baseball movie focusses intently on the emotional theatrics that can be justified (or not) by the backdrop of a hard-fought series, and is minimally, if at all, concerned with conveying such salient details as the infield fly rule, so promises this historiesque comedia del'arte to be not so much about history as around it. Or in front of it. Standing, waving and doing cheap cartwheels, directly between the audience and the actual Crusades.

"I'm not fighting another holy war here," says the director, Ridley Scott, "I am trying to get across the fact that not everybody in the West is a good guy, and not all Muslims are bad."

"I find your lack of faith disturbing."

As touching as those words are, the trailer for the movie does indeed seem more than a little preoccupied with the idea of holy war. Also, casting the damned elf and surrounding him with blazing fireballs and speeches about honor and steel does little to diminish the sense that the movie wants nothing so much as to make a sensation, any damn sensation. And then there's Saladin, decked out like a Dark Lord of the Sith.

My first reaction to the concept of this movie would involve a lot of question marks and explanation points if it were to be transcribed. I wrote a post on it yesterday just after seeing the trailer, so of course it was junk and I didn't put it up. It generally turns out better if I can wait a day and see if I've calmed down at all, but I just watched the trailer again and I'm as angry as I was the first time. Thankfully I'd already articulated most of this post by then. But look at that. Honestly, look at that. It even has hacky rock music. And a giant ripoff of the Helm's Deep battle sequences. And check out the end of the trailer, when, also just like in Lord of the Rings, "they're here." Only instead of evil orcish hordes, there's Muslims. But it's all in the name of history, to show that They're not all bad and We're not all good. Plus they're filmed at a distance, so you can't see their faces.

So, you know, it's okay.

2005-04-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

Limited Time

Here's something for you to read instead of studying. Be quick, though, since due to some publishing deal it's only online for a short stay before they de-internet it and print the book.

I wouldn't say the story points to some platonic model for writing, but if a lot more autobiographical fiction were like this, there'd be a lot more good autobiographical fiction.

(Click the picture.)

2005-04-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

Running Story

Twice now, in three days,
I've gone running,
   paved Broadview giving into
   a bridge, dirt path beaten
   beside steel guardrail, and the
   cul-de-sac: supermarket parking
   lot.
And twice seen you, too big to be
a hawk,
wings, spread translucent at noon,
panning gold slow circles, preying above,
thrown wide, implicated, sublimated.

I bruise my lungs traversing
the distance you elide in one-tenth my time.
Bird, what injustice they do you,
with that silly German commandment:
"Be aloof."
Lufttiere, you are nothing of the kind,
watcher, mixed like a worm into
this earth.

I come to the bridge strutting that ravine,
Bridle cables, spans and rivets,
     tree river tree trail wind traffic.
Each foot dives for ground
that pushes forward, up,
us
I breathe,
implicated, supplanting
I cannot rest.

---

Quite simply, I run because I don't know how to pray. To quote Little Mike: "Stupid soccer players! Why would you run for a purpose when you could run endlessly?" I made good time today, and saw that bird again, and this came of it. I tore an old notice off of a pole ("Important meeting September 30th, 2004, in the Library - babysitting available.") as palimpsest on which to scratch the first draft, which was awful, of that poem. I don't usually have drafts, first or subsequent, but on the run back I pretty much rewrote it in my head.

Our dishes aggregate themselves on the kitchen counter, almost like coral growth, forming increasingly precarious columns. Now, to satisfy my domestic obligations, I must wash enough of them to at least knock a couple feet off the top, thereby ensuring ongoing stability.

2005-04-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

Hit me Over the Head. Hard.

That time of year? Laid in bed all last night, seeing the walls, the sides of the bed, the white sheet I use for curtains, cast wan-bluish by what moonlight it caught, feeble sail. And I did not sleep. Acknowledging the inevitable morning, dredged myself up from the useless bedsheets to boil and strain myself a pot of coffee. Wrote my exam.

Came home. Laid down on sofa, pulled the heavy artificial-fiber blanket over myself and let it be stiflingly hot. Balled up a piece of blanket to be my pillow, and stared at the living-room wallpaper, which an obscure part of my brain said to be the color of yeast.
And-
Did.
Not.
Sleep.

2005-03-31T09:24:00.000-08:00

A Very Slow Crisis of Faith

A raindrop or two, unheralded and smacking wet tiny starbursts on skin, or on paper - teardrop pops - can be the small precursors of a flood, surging white and breaking. Sometimes. And what about when those overloaded drops begin to land thput! on the heavy ground, drip off of leaves and cedar fans to spatter on the soggy and tangled earth and stay there, not vanishing into the soil, not running off, only soaking more and more.

Will you realize the surface you stand on is only the top of a saturated aquifer, sopping earthy sponge, or not? What about each tree, barken column of water, each solemn blade of grass, rare clover, these tiny succulent leaves, olive-skinned on red stems, a reservoir so deep around you once you begin sounding it. Are you - is one - awash then, suddenly flooded, only by the acknowledgement of what one knows, the reality of a raindrop? Or a tear?

It started raining outside while I wrote this. In the ultramarine light of afterwards, calmly, the rock wall and concrete steps, edged with light, and the flake of sky I could see, looked very different.