Month: September 2004

I have found a new love and it is this. A specially shaped camera lens and processing method to ensure images are always in focus has been developed. For someone losing their eyes, this is life. Being unable to focus a camera hurts more than being unable to read streetsigns and almost as much as not being able to recognize dear friends from across the street.

People have been telling me their secrets again. Serious confessions. It’s been a long time. Personal traits and doings and history. Pieces of self that would be frightening for the world to know. I collect them. Men twice my age, crying into me in corners of parties. I keep them all. I hold them sometimes, these treasures. Watch memory refract through them and shine with strange light. The intense leavings of evenings and mornings and five o’clock phonecalls from across the country. I’m not sure why it’s back, this phenomenon. I suppose it means in a way that I am back. This used to be common. This used to be part of how I connected to every last person I knew. Jewels they gave me. Self and importance. “You will hold this for me, my most precious knowledge” With some it’s as if they fill me. It’s closer than anything we could express with hands. Other peoples secrets, a precious gift I cannot repay. Somehow the semiotics reveal themselves. Though my secrets are whores, showing themselves to whomever asks the right question, somehow these people, these strangers and friends, they trust me. I can’t figure out how they tell that it’s safe. Never once have I given away these what are not mine. I’m baffled but it somehow seems like tithe. I remember. You bless me with your respect. I am tied with softest silk. This is your secret name. I say it and burn and die.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow opens here tomorrow. Have to fit that in somewhere too.

just figuring schedule

Skatia wants to play. He’s stalking my feet in little bounds, happy to be out of the cage. Outside it’s wet and gray, the null textured sky that I’ve never seen in any other city. All the lights are off, and the ferret bounces in the cold light looking a little bit unreal. Strange to think there’s a sun behind that thick cloth of cloud. A burning furnace of fusion drained to pale by water vapour.

I’m warming up glazed chicken in the stove and somehow I feel like it’s winter. My hand reaching out to turn the knobs shot me into a frame of mind that says cold and white and still dead air. Alistair is out there somewhere hiking with a group of friends. I can almost feel what it would be like on a day like this. The sound of water dripping from the dark heavy green of the forest pattering on my hat and my glasses fogging from the heat of my effort versus the chill in the air. Can it be that somewhere I own a scarf? Please give me a sister to borrow clothing from someday. The lad, he left his shirt behind last night after Six-String Samurai. I borrowed it to sleep in on Saturday night. It’s a black t-shirt with a red dagger worked on it in embroidery. Goth enough to drink wine in, but the rhinestones make it forgivable. My collection of other people’s clothing grows monthly. Left behind a little tub of Nutella too. I do what I can, but I suspect I’ll take a spoon to it some time today. There’s only so much a girl can resist.

In the right frame of mind, this is my kind of day. Losing myself in stalking from one place to another in a mans trenchcoat half a size too big for me. Almost a day to climb the industrial towers. I really think I could take you there. My heart tells me you’d climb the ten stories of stairs for me. The distinct plinking sound of our feet on the metal mesh fire-escape. Reminds me of ink. I used to draw in it, made fresh from the wetted block. I still own the stones. Pooling ink blown by breath across paper from back when my mother put me in arts classes. The air smelling of greasy pastels and acrylics. I never liked what I made, but she did. She still insists I’m an artist and I wish she didn’t. I could never Create. If there is a bitter wound in my soul, it’s that knowledge. Such a confession. I was told once that I was a Muse and it made me cry. Growing up with passionate parents who burn with fire, it’s my failing that I haven’t any. I remember the light from my classes and the paint spatters on the gray cement floor.

This is what I woke up to this morning because I think J loves me slightly. “If I eat your heart, I’ll also bite your soul” Silence of the Lambs hadn’t an ounce of the class this music does. The book was dull and the movie uninspiring. This, on the other hand, I’m watching on repeat.

It rubs the lotion on it’s skin or else it gets the hose again.

To go with it, have a taste of Warren afterwards. He’s hoping to turn some tricks. I can attest to the fact his voice is just as sickly sweet.

Oh sweet nothings, how I adore you. {Yes my precious}. Kill me like this and again.

This loose day, twisted as it were around children, is about to finish.

Alright – this is fairly serious and it seems no one is hearing about it.

 The Betamax VCR died more than 15 years ago, but the Supreme Court decision that made the Betamax and all other VCRs legal lived on. In Sony vs. Universal (known as the Betamax decision) the Court ruled that because VCRs have legitimate uses, the technology is legal—even if some people use it to copy movies. Of course, the movie industry was lucky it lost the case against VCRs, because home video soon became Hollywood’s largest source of revenue. And the freedom to use and develop new technology that was protected by the Betamax decision set the stage for the incredible growth in computer technology we’ve seen in the last few decades.

 The short version: We’re organizing a call-in day to Congress on September 14 to oppose new legislation that would undermine the Betamax decision (INDUCE Act).

There’s two days left. Get to it.

http://www.savebetamax.org/

Put me in a dark room full of people. A loud room where talking is difficult. Let the crowd be drunken and let them be respectful with their wandering hands. My radar has powers that I am continually surprised by. Listening to it seems the best solution. I will capture the one person I would find fascinating and fun against insane leatherclad odds. Things are getting kind of ridiculous because I’ve been learning to again. I like it. Interesting times are the ones I like living in, even if they’re small.

I went home with a lad named Alistair last night. Slightly unintentional, but it was either his place or my place. There’s nowhere open for food at four in the morning. Stepping into his room though, I was suddenly quite distracted from the original plan. Bed and a desk covered in editing equipment. Bare bones AV room. Part of me sighed, happy to be home. I even used to have that exact preview monitor. We met in the open air, part of the huddle of people smoking on the back deck that overlooks Blood Alley. When the sun rose, we may have still been awake. I wasn’t going to sleep over. My usual modis operandi is to put them to bed and walk home. Almost snuck out too, the boy lying warm under his covers, when I got sideswiped by sympathy. “Please don’t leave”, the accent thickening as he speaks closer to sleep. He’s curling up, trying not to crash. “It’s just nice to have someone here.”

Certainly, as soon as I click off the light and curl up, he’s awake again. Beautiful conversation in that one. Honesty lilting, lit by the green of computer towers. I think I slept well for the first time in a month.

My friends make me happy. Oh – and you! The scintillating genius! You send pictures like that and you’ll destroy me. Just be warned.

Bill used to sing for me. Out of nowhere sometimes, he would swing me around with one strong hand and sing along to the music throbbing form the stereo. Rich brilliance just for me. My eyes would glue to him, this performance, this gift. I could eat it, his voice, the cream was so thick. He would dance with the voice of a dark throated seraphim. The sound would glow. I could see it in the dark. Vibrant and rich and love. Singing like intense coloured earth, life you could get trace with your hands along.
for Bill

Does it still count as girl music if you have it cranked loud enough to possibly convince the neighbours that the thumping last night was you moving a full size piano in? How feminine can it be when the volume sends harmony spiralling howling into the sky? The crash of the keys is felt in the bones. Fingers can be tasted crashing into the keys. The music being slammed from the instrument. Key of C, of D to F minor now MEZZO FORTE THAT SUCKER INTO THE GROUND! The black glazed case shatters with the strength of it. We’re talking notes fighting dirty. We’re talking cruci-fiction. Tumbling over and over until the speed catches and they gang up to chain you. The black and whites settling their differences to capture and plead.

Oh, oh, oh yeah.

Tonight is SinCity and I’m dancing already.

This
is
going
to
hurt

I believe my tiny little soul is warmed today for utterly selfish reasons. One, I’ve got a fushia feathery mask to play with as if the Red Death were at the door and Two, I’ve been picked to be in the next Noxious Minutia. Hip hoorah. Published on paper finally. Again. A first being printed in another city at least. I could almost count it as an accomplishment. Practically. You know, if I were a writer.

This is so going to be used by my mother to justify her continually pushing me into “careers”. I take a job, I do anything, it’s my new vocation. I know she loves me, but honestly, I’m lacking the passion she believes I require.