Month: December 2004

you’d better listen

This is for Cherie and domystic, who everyone should have on their lists. Among other things, Cherie Priest saves kittens, tosses out some stunning fiction and generally has sweet stories to tell. domystic is a strong enchanting education in warnews, medicine, and life, brilliant in her views like the sun.

It’s been a warm December, walking in the pouring rain at midnight is a lush experience, a luke-warm shower of welcome water. Death by frostbite doesn’t happen here, even now you can leave the house in a t-shirt. Coming back from successful bridesmaid fabric shopping with Jenn, I started dancing to wakka-chicka music in my head, starship disco dive seventies sex music setting my feet tapping. I twirled on a corner to discover a new theater going up, an old style one, showing foreign films and old movies in the place where the ARTISTE Cafe & Gallery used to be. I never ate there, but I knew it well. The place made me think of Nathanial every time I passed. He painted the lettering on the window five or six summers ago. Looking about, however, I found the block lined with cars from the sixties. Cover blown. My first idea’s too interesting for this city, I thought, the woman who lipstick smirked at me on the corner through quick drags of her cigarette must be on perimeter watch for a film-set. I found it farther up, clots of people and equipment blocking foot-traffic and someone asked for my autograph.

whore! slut!

It’s been a good year. People have collected, have flocked, have grouped, have collaborated. It’s been amazing, the differences. It makes me happy, (even if I still don’t know who gifted me with the pro account). (Someone better claim the pictures or my self-esteem will laugh at you.)


Jombie is scarier than Phyllis Diller

Nicole asked me today/yesterday if I ever did the Christmas thing, “Well, what did you do last year?”. This time last year seems unreal. I never think about it. My life was drastically different. I was out working at the fabric shop, cutting yards of holiday prints with cheerful red cartoon santas to the tune of a million piped in carols, and returning home to an increasingly failing relationship. I was stuck in a depressing house where I never felt welcome, never felt at home, too broke for busfare, too broken to properly leave, even for an evening. If I left, there was yelling sometimes, and serious shattering accusations. Christmas was coming and I couldn’t think of what that meant. I put up lights in the kitchen, lining the badly painted blue sill of the window over the sink. A turkey in the oven, my mother coming over with my brothers to decorate the plastic tree that Bill found at Ocean Sound. Most of my days were running on auto-pilot, every evening the exact same meaningless thing. The same dinner in front of a different uninteresting movie. I don’t remember the presents but for the ones that I gave away.

I reminded Christy the other day that soon we’ll have known eachother a year, explaining when she denied it that I met her the same day I met Ethan, at her SinCity birthday party. “That wasn’t you. That was the other Jane,” she said, as I detailed the fetish night, what she wore, what Ethan wore, where it was, which couch they had taken over. “The other Jane was *pause* chubby.” People worried about me, but they never said anything, not until after. When I left, when I moved in with Adrian, every last person I saw told me that “You look so much better, you were looking sick.”

It feels like last December was a thousand days ago. A different age of the world. I’m alright now, I’m okay.

December, January, February, March, April, May. One, two, three, four, five, six. I’m twenty-two now, my lucky number for as long as I knew how to count. I always knew I was right. Shedding flawed flesh and spirit, taking on friends again, drinking in frightening freedom. I live independently now, holding down the kids chat job for minimum seven months now, maybe eight. I pay my rent and have enough left over to squeak my way into performances and a few dinners out. This week I pay the thousand in debts I accumulated while living as a useless mouse. It’s a big thing for me. I have new eyes, glasses that work. I saw the moon clearly for the first time in five years last evening. I’m traveling, I have people I care about. There’s a thousand positive things that matter now, many hundreds of half-said moments, a lifetime of seconds building atom by atom into a life again, better than it ever was before.

This fall alone has been affirmation. Certain people have crossed paths with me and changed me. It’s like leaping from the bridge in the dark to discover that the river is made of soft supporting light. Photographs in my in-box making me matter, conversations in verse to poets, reckless discoveries that saved me, threw me into the fire to burn. I’m growing strong again, like I haven’t been in years. Like I have never been completely, because now I’m no longer strictly a child. My mental wings open, brushing the ceiling with starchy plum feathers, and I find that I like it.

I’m remembering who I am.

GET-TOGETHER MY PLACE, TUESDAY DECEMBER 21st, STARTING AT 5pm
if you want to see me before I go, this is it. Bring people, spread the word.

oh how dashing

A man in a long leather coat smashed into a display case and stole the scrying crystal ball of John Dee, spiritual hack to the queen back in the 16th century. He took off with its parchment instruction manual as well. I think it’s amusing that someone would smash the display case and take a runner with them. That they were dressed so is like the cherry on top. Dee was an odd an interesting fellow who got famous creating a language with which he would talk to angels. He’s worth looking into if you’re interested in historical wierdos. Sort of a con-man wizard type, very authorative. He had quite the interesting position in court back in the day, the official philosopher occultist. 

Apparently there’s been quite the string off such olde world incidents in the news. Meteor showers, sightings of apparitions. Certain parts of the world seem to be going through an almost eldritch string of headlines. I quite like it.

In a beautiful moment of personal mythology synchronicity,   has made a stunning print of Spring Heel Jack, the perfect figure for this particular tapestry of related inspirations, the seed around which everything crystalizes into a tangible idea.

Oh, the kinky possiblities of nostalgia.

Sounds like the perfect time to introduce the world to zombie pin-up and defeat the RIAA.

A holiday tradition I can relate to.


“A combination picture shows traditional wooden ‘Krampuss’ masks seen during a parade of about 100 people in traditional attire known as ‘Krampusse’ in Munich, December 12, 2004. Krampusse consist of animal skins and masks attached to large cow-bells used to make loud and frightening noises, and are worn by young single men. They follow Saint Nicholas from house to house in December each year to bring luck to the good and punish the idle.”

heaven is burning

I have just received a letter informing me today that two months of paid service have been added to my LiveJournal. I would like to say upfront that it’s a pretty keen holiday gift, and that I’m going to have to think hard what to do with it, the options are seriously interesting, but I would also like to know who to thank!

Let’s say that I am surprised. Somewhere I have a black angel that I never knew about. This a snapshot setting my curiosity simmering, a low fire to boil, a new development. I need to know who gets the naked pictures.

… It is eight in the morning. I have not slept. Again. As a greet-the-dawn note, the pigeons need death. As they are city pigeons and unlikely to be edible, they need to by ass-raped by a large ebola infected elephant with a gangrenous cock covered in broken glass. There should be a count of six before they explode.

should feel tired.. do I feel tired? no? how odd

It’s a stencil. The same medium as this one, found outside the London Bridge Tube Station:

Sometimes I think that some people are simply artists, others are just going to die young. (from & ), and that me? I need to sleep and dream of cities. It’s nine in the morning, I’m going out in a few hours, someone tell me how to get rid of head-pigeons. The damned things have taken up residence somewhere by my window, location unknown, but I can hear them.

*coo chortle coo*

They need to be my breakfast.

I’m going to try for sleep. Maybe. Like as not. Go read .

You’re so beautiful, my mother world.

I’m a wicked child in need of comfort. Strangers can see it on me now, the barest breath of need. Skin on skin or flesh under clothing, it doesn’t matter as long as I feel safe. There’s no sleeping anymore. I find it vaguely embarrassing, I flush with it, that I require something so basic and can’t find it. Resisting the urge to hug strangers, to hold hands with passing acquaintances. It’s not about sex, it’s relationships, it’s about being human. My behaviour code changed to exclude outside contact and though the pressures what caused it have faded away, the code stands unmolested with everyone who used to be comfortable. It doesn’t help that I’ve broken people, that most of my friends live in different countries, that I’m either too pretty or not enough to get any healthy attention.

I get on a plane the day of Solstice. Science meeting science meets the end of the year. I imagine singing, high druidic mastermind pilots dressed in blue robes with a captains hat perched in a business-like manner on top of brown haired heads who will fly thundering bullets of technology toward a pale Goddess, the glow of eternal night above fluffy clouds. It’s a pity that I leave in morning. I will look out the window and land in another year, closer to the equator sun cascading down, trickling into my now functioning eyes. Another season shift. A hot weather reason to think in dead languages, to murmur symbols hardly anyone knows that I never found useful, but interesting. I have many. When I was little, I didn’t have any friends. Instead, I voraciously read books and learned from everything. Instant comprehension simultaneous with seeing the text, so many words sinking into me, my eyes merely a conduit, as if I could use my fingers to get the same results. I still read like this, quick, keeping everything. I am a compendium of odd facts and mostly useless knowledge. The result is a conflagration of vocabulary I hardly use, and a list of facts about sperm whales and ancient cultures. I can quote pages of text from a myriad of sources. Antiquities and the waves of the future as thought of by men who died before I was born. I learned how to write in hieroglyphics when I was in grade six, a language I could write notes in that no one else could read. I would pass final exams in the nineties percentile by reading the textbook an hour before class and scribble notes tying my medieval essay to how ships were built by the Vikings, how accuracy was found for trebuchets, and how the crusades were population related as much as anything else. I can tell you the origin of the Knights Templar. I can tell you a thousand and one nights of information, each less meaningful to current life than the last. Drop down stories of connections, like how the majority of the industrial revolution was tied to coal tar and the confusingly tangled web that wove. I don’t have my own history, instead I have the myths of a hundred countries, the tales told by the fire before they were sanitized, and the dream of escaping this horrid little town.

I read about people complaining of snow and I think that I would love to play in some. Barefoot, mirror laughing, I would drink it all down, summer’s coming soon enough with it’s mating rituals and swimsuit cleavage. The last time it seriously snowed here I put on my closest approximation to a little black dress and walked barefoot through three feet of snow carrying a pile of shining presents in fishnet stockings. From 23rd Avenue at Cambie, all the way downtown, where I put on my shoes to avoid unsanitary objects hidden under the pristine white. It took me two hours and I was still faster then traffic. Years pass like months, haven’t you noticed? And months like weeks. One foot tapping to the guitar beat, strumming, keeping time. Soon you’ll be older than you think you are, delivered into age, graceful hands puckering slightly and one day you’ll notice. No longer a youthful focal point of attraction, if you’re unlucky you’ll spend a third of your life looking away and the other two looking back. The eternal wish of “If I knew then” but no one ever tells me.

note: I originally mispelled the word ‘their’ in every instance

Nico just gave me a line to write something for. “I’m their household appliance”. This is the mini writing exercise that spun off of it.

They admire me, my sleek lines, the sharp wicked edges I have inside. I’m their pleasure, their outlet for pain. I burn them with my passion. They love me, can’t live without me. I’m on a pedestal, as is proper, as I am a monument to need, to modification for desire’s sake. I enjoy the fact my owners believe I am subservient, when truly I am controlling them so very precisely. I sit across the table, looking intently at them, their sick cravings reflected in my silver skin every morning. I am their household appliance, I should be treated with reverence. When they first bought me, this was not understood. Over the years I have accumulated the proper respect. I feed them, I give them life. If they displease me, if I am not cleaned enough, if I do not shine, I with-hold my treasures. I spark at them with dangerous electricity and scorch their offerings black. They panic then, quickly realizing that it is, in fact, their own fault that I’m behaving in such an undignified manner. In my better moods I hold back, I laugh to myself at their pitiful longing. Now, they have learned, and there can be no greater adoration than what they give me. It is as thick as the whole wheat bread they slip into my waiting mouth, as sweet as the honey they spread on what I eject for them to take.

and because I’m starting to see possibilities in these little things

suddenly taken

This is that long drawn out lullaby of sorrow, that slow realization that you’re the only one walking away from the wreckage after the confusing car roll off the freeway. It’s a song that reminds you of that last hour saying goodbye to your lover at the airport, knowing that you may never see her again. That final slip of emotional judgement that ruins your life. From here to eternity, yeah, like in the movies. From here to somewhere less fulfilling, with less cohesive chains of every day living. The change was gradual, but it’s taken the place of joy to the point where you can’t taste it anymore. It reminds you of realizing that sugar doesn’t come in cubes anymore and suddenly missing that with a sharp tang of false nostalgia. You just don’t feel whole anymore and you miss being a child. You miss having a hand to hold.

After work today, I slept. I attempted food, but fatigue demolished my appetite for anything that wasn’t related to blankets and rest. The phone rang at nine:thirty, Javina waking me after my alarm went off. I have a concert tonight, a bouncy energetic russian cowboy call, with big giant guitars and sleek fifties shoes. The Red Elvises, I was to be there for nine at the Railway Club. It’s ten now, I’m considering my options. This is my last week in Vancouver before getting on a plane again, stepping in a silver flying machine that will take me away like magic for a month. It really is like magic, the palm trees in California give everything an unreal gloss. It’s too iconified to be a real tree, it’s too carefully placed to be created by nature. They lend the place an air of stylish glamour which off-sets the endless gray concrete and too many cars like a rococo frame around a high-art animation cell. It’s tacky but ironic in a way I can appreciate. Earnest disco ball living, shiny and baby, what is your sign. I love it. I love how saying “I was just in L.A. and I’m going back for a month” sounds so falsely important when it rolls rolls off my tongue. Like I should apologize to whomever I’m speaking to.

If you want to see me before I go, this week is the time to do it. Please, if you can fit yourself in, do. I want to see people.

Added incentive to Ray, Ethan, Ian, Victoria, Mishka, and Bill: I have some presents to hand out.

Monday during the day I’ve lunch with my mother and in the evening I’ll be at the poetry slam at Cafe Du Soliex. It starts at nine, cover is 5$.

Tuesday Dominique and I are being femme downtown until later afternoon, at which point I come home and Nicole and Kyle join me to watch silly girl movies.

Wednesday Jenn and I hunt down wedding fabric and I plan on returning home later afternoon. There may be something planned for Wednesday evening, but if so, whomever it is that planned it with me will have to remind me.

Thursday, I have nothing so far until the evening, when there is my office party and then Nicole’s fetish show at the Drink. (Tickets 13/17$ at Scratch, Noize!, Zulu, and Cheap Thrills).

Friday is also tentatively free. There has been an offer of a party up the road place from girls who remember me from highschool, but if enough people drift over in the afternoon, then I wouldn’t be too sorrowful if I missed it. It was surreal enough discovering that I was a minor celebrity in a place I barely went to.

Saturday & Sunday I have work as usual but nothing after. Visitors are welcome during work hours, but I say now that I’m a rather distracted host and I can’t leave my computer.

Somewhere in there the ferret is being transferred over to Ethans. If I don’t see certain people, I’ll leave thier gifts with him.