Month: January 2005

Ellen’s been doing Dine Out Vancouver. I’ve been meaning to attend for several years, but never quite got my act together. I think I might manage this year though, if someone would be going with me. Anyone here interested?

A phone call a day. Is this expected? I’m not sure.

It’s like I’m skimming over the top of something, like I’ll look down and see trees speeding beneath me.

Ethan claimed earlier that I’ve no decorum, “You may know which forks to use, but if you’re doing it in your underwear, it doesn’t count.” and that set me to considering, weakly pondering etiquette on my way home, looking at my life from different points of view for the fun of it. I was talking with my mother yesterday and it struck me rather forcefully that I move through an utterly different life than she does. I wander a Dance of behavioral substance, where she has rules and structures, modes of guideline. Mine is intuitive, mercurial, dependant on everyone involved and the unspoken agreements which bridge the gaps between us. It occurred to me that my life as viewed by a feminist must be a wretched place to live. It’s been a week of abiding by autocratic requests and not minding in the slightest because I have a taste for equity dipped in legitimate balance. The fairness in such a situation does not escape me.

Bliss is coming over this afternoon for tea and a ferret visit, then I have Robin in the evening. I’ve no clue what to do with him and I seem to be losing my voice. It’s his birthday Saturday, he’ll be seventeen. Tomorrow Victoria is dropping by, then it’s Shane’s Last Show. He and I have an odd waltz, he’s stood me up three times and I still respect him utterly. If nothing else, this man has skill enough for me to want to get up and slam for him. Here’s an excerpt:

If I ever only get up on stage this one time to say this,
it may be enough
You may not be here to hear it, but your friends will
and my words to you may find you though hearsay and empathy
It would be best of you to be here to hear this
but you may not be, but it needs to be said
because You stand and you look at me and poems pour out.
They slip under my skin and they try to take me, licking like letters in envelopes closed.
You give me words that almost make me love you
but not quite
Love rolls from you, desire and want like waves cascading and I admit that when I am alone at night that sometimes I think of you.
What you offer me, what you tell from your dictionary glory. I think what I’m willing to take
because when you stand and you berate me, when you orate and confiscate the words of a thousand angels, I consider and weigh the worth

I think sometime I’ll post my recording of it, but not yet. There needs to be more time to distance things from our current truths. At any rate, Tuesday night is essential, for you who can, as well as I. C.R. did a tour with Tom Waits, and Shane has won almost every award there is to win.

TUESDAY JANUARY 25TH @ CAFE DEUX SOLIELS (2096 COMMERCIAL DR)

SHANE KOYCZAN
CR AVERY
MARK BERUBE
and
GRAHAM CLARK

will be ripping the stage apart with a night of music, spoken word and comedy

DOORS @ 8 SHOW @ 9 $5-7

Wednesday I’m uncertain about. My brother, Cale, wants me to “hang out” with him and his girlfriend, Kate. I believe someone else also has dibs but I have no idea who, and Thursday evening is Zatoichi at Mike’s place. Friday is also maybe asked for, though gods know by who. This whole being slightly ill thing is getting a wee bit on my nerves. My skin feels disconnected from me and my voice wears out in under ten minutes. It’s time to chew garlic and go shopping for some real food. I’ve had enough days of living off oranges and grapefruit juice.

The pains of fought sickness are sinking in like a tepid wind is forcing ache into my muscles. It’s nothing I’m used to, but I feel the germs were fairly won, as are the bruises on the back of my legs from dancing. Mission accomplished and food deliveries thwarted today. Perhaps I may have to start looking at this as a usual weekend. One hopes. Tonight is Ellen’s Game evening and I’m finally going. It’s going to be held at Our Town Cafe, located on the corner of Kingsway & Broadway. I’ve been intending to drop in for ages.

It’s quarter to eight and I expected to come home and be able to sleep, but now I’m awake and likely to stay such.

Sometime while I was out, Alastair sent me a Dear John letter. It’s quietly brittle and contains some rather odd thoughts about me regarding things I never considered to bring up. There’s no way to have guessed that I needed to dispel faulty reasoning as I was unaware of any thoughts along these particular paths at all. Communication breakdown without guitars or passion. That what I consider my Family could be construed as sexual is unexpected, as well as the rather odd accusation that I have no compassion or inhibitions. I miss him and I wish I could soothe such things from him, but I suppose if nothing else, such a letter clearly shows things weren’t working out. It’s almost a list of misunderstandings and implicated I know you better than you know yourself, which begins with the line, “Your idle plaything forgotten as you move on to greener pastures, I wasn’t half the man you wanted me to be.” Something nags at me, telling me those are song lyrics, but instead I shake my head, seeing only pathos I can’t access.

Times like now, I wonder about myself. I construct my days honestly, my actions speaking a candor mean, so how is it that I can be seen so skewed? I’m scrupulously aboveboard. What information is required to mend the glass and show the image clear? I want a friend to tell me how they see me. My ferret is curled up in my bed and I look to him and know he’ll never accuse me of treachery. Damned skinny boys with their charming eyes and closed off souls. Forgiveness shouldn’t be construed as chasing my own tail in a denial of “pathological fear”. The things I’m scared of are more shallow than I’d care to admit. I fear that my friends will die, I’m scared I’ll grow up to be a lunatic, I can’t bear to think of living blind, and I hate myself a little every time I can’t figure out what to do. I have a veracity of thought which denies my inherited viciousness. I’m not that different from anyone else. He thinks I’m scared, a misuse of thought brought about because I refuse pressure. I played that game once under the idea that I never have to again. Now it repels me with almost physical force and I never received time to ease into what was required. Perhaps I should apologize for being artless. I don’t know.

I suppose understanding other people is a tricky thing when emotions are strongly involved. After Bill, I sincerely told myself I would never involve myself with anyone else who didn’t trust me, but I must resign myself that I did it again, which was only stupid. It’s not like there aren’t enough people who would shed blood for me, it’s not as if I don’t live as part of a collective of people who breathe the stuff in the face of devious culpability. Our faith is in ourselves and our integrity. Despite my best efforts, I can’t lie to myself. I know at the time. There’s no healthy survival in this particular devotion addiction. It’s a mistake played three times now, three strikes, you’re out. No self respecting honour for idiot girls after that. It’s like turning on myself, relationships which wear me out, that I can’t afford anymore.

There was so little for me when I was there that it hurt. Hardly did I feel my company was appreciated and now my persistence is rewarded with the accusation of being emotionally distant while I had tried so hard to find something to hold. Apparently my coming down for a month didn’t mean enough, it seems that even when present, even when trapped, I’m unavailable. He looked at pictures I took while I was there and they seemed unreal. I’m sorry I understand. I told him that my recent time in Laguna Beach doesn’t seem to have existed. A white room, the couch here, the chair there, a blue sailors chest for a coffee table. Rain in the morning and it’s all a shrug at having a home, nothing to sing for, nothing welcoming in the morning alone, like memories bleached with age, though I returned Monday.

This week I feel released back into time.

Apparently I’m going ice-skating then to fetish night.

My life is a happy. Thank you Sophie.

I’m hiding behind my killer smile. Pop music blaring, the street feels like it should be drenched with heat. The sun biting the sidewalk with friendly malevolence. Instead the sky is dimming, turning down the switch from impenetrable winter gray to blue-black. Tonight I’m going to a new fetish night after work. As is, I’m going alone, but company would be appreciated. 555 Davie Street, no streetwear. I’m planning on arriving for ten and staying until I can arrange a ride. I might be in the wrong part of the city to act the predatory hitchhiker, but leaving early is about as much fun as walking home at 2 in the morning. I suppose it depends on my dancing.

Yesterday was delicious fun. It was like a piece of fiction heavily clouded with cultural reference. Dropped in on The Aviator with Matthew, Sophie, Lief, and Andrew, then out to dinner at Taffs. We picked up Mike again, dropped off Lief, and wandered through the rain back to Matthews, [poke] where I mercilessly whipped Andrew at chess,[/poke] and many painfully geeky conversations ensued. If it had been warmer, we might have stolen into the hotel swimming pool across the alleyway.

On the bus this evening I discovered that I know more about comics than I ever suspected. Until earlier this evening, I was unaware that I could Talk them. Thank you Michel and Warren for this sudden gift fount of inner circle knowledge, the shipping dates, the companies. I’m starting to care about your obsessions, damn you both with caramel candy words laced with arsenic for irony. It must be the biscuits. Serve your work up with a little smile, get me trusting you then brainwash me into a little pageant consumer.

I missed Nicole at the train station, (a mismatch of places, self doubting transforming words into wandering. Maybe I was to find her somewhere else. There was a girl with long red hair who was pretty, but not pretty enough. It’s not her, am I in the wrong place? I stood with a book in hand finally, unmoving from a spot where anyone could see me, waiting out the rain. The water stopped falling as the minute hand on the clock shifted tock into half past five. The time of her appointment.) and met with a late Matthew outside of Golden Age. Mike was inside, behind the counter. We took him unprotesting from the customer free zone at six. Sean of the Dead night, (live long haired geekery piling between shifting towers of comics and DVDs that frame his furniture. They blow up a church with an ice-cream truck full of meat! Stacks, layers, compressed sedimentary fossil paper under a litter of poseable action figures and superhero collectibles.) The best part was the opening credits, a message in repetitious movement, like in Titus.

I repeat the nicest mistakes. The ones that aren’t, but should be. The ones that taste like strawberries. There’s a cello sweep of hair and a long held sigh. Someone’s been talking about me, getting a permission, perhaps, of a sort that I’m partially familiar with. It’s always a mass meets inertia situation, but this time she has her own language of words to add. A spice settlement of something I don’t know yet. It’s not another secret, but another stability; these whispered trips into being comfortable. You’ll never know where you know me from until you’re there. Rules of truth snap like the skin of a fruit under my teeth, the feel of a rail under your hand as you step down the stairs. I’ve only been back two days and I can sleep again. There’s a level which tells of suspicion, everything’s too easy, but then I remember all the good things always were.

Your heart, it tastes like the imagination of wine. The source, the honour soft like feathers, soft like a delicate paintbrush used only to trace the arching line over an eye. Morals and eel teeth, stranger things have come from this. Integrity brave like the moon, but I’ve been bruised like the sweetest kisses. Another following a light, another moth moment of fluttering certainty. Here is pride.

Now I know what I look like from the outside, but you are farther, so more so. I can see what I have a chance to become. Not you, but similar. The chance of righteous amusement in every quirk of hand, my tongue.

It’s rainy today and I think it must be sunny in California. Blue skies stretching out across a limitless horizon. Driving in a white jeep, music buried under the sound of freeway wind but for the drums. His hand on the steering wheel, how the fur on his wrist was nothing like mine. We would leave our hand on the others leg, old fashioned touch of appreciation. I’m wondering what’s going to happen today. Who I’ll see, who I’ll talk to, how the interaction dances will play out. I went to dinner last night with James and he explained his theory of why there’s more disturbed people down south. “The lesser crazies are scared of the guns.”

Oh, for a bit of architecture, this place with it’s several parts. Small town listlessness, I’m not under the spell. This city still does not feel like home. Remembering where everything is does not justify staying, but only the opposite. It’s not comfortable, it’s more of a trap. It wants to skin me for my pelt, take my hair and pull my head back, a knife of pleasantries drawn across my throat to catch the intelligence which spills forth. I woke up this morning to my clock radio playing Walking In Memphis. Strata of living in Toronto when I was a kid slowly opened my eyes and I looked at the time uncomprehendingly. I was too big suddenly, too tall for the bed. Where was this place and where were my parents? I was tiny and just learning how to read. I walked in spurts, falling down all the time. My parents scraped the sky.