La Montréalisation!

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

Uninvited

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

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

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

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


- - -

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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