Month: March 2005

I woke up today feeling ill at ease. My body is slow to respond with anything that isn’t annoying or hurtful. I must have pushed myself too hard dancing, or at least that’s what I’ll say if I’m asked as it’s close enough to true to count. I would be lying if I said I was well, if I denied that I feel ill or that I would rather live today in silence. There’s no one here to talk to though, they left sometime in the morning when I wasn’t aware to the world at all. Maybe if I knew how to get angry pointing outward, maybe if I knew how to complain without being hurtful and cruel to myself when I’m upset, I would be able to keep down something more substantial than a glass of juice. I’m not used to stress, I’m not used to lacking words. This clamp beneath my skin is punishing and constrictive. I wish I could take my heart out like a glistening wet jewel and unfold it to show where it’s been wounded. Prise the angle of hurt from the evidence to puzzle together a picture of the weapon. I want to give it into his hands like torn origami of the most exquisite sort, lit from within, lined by shattered crystal like safety glass fractured.

I’m in a queue, waiting to take my vocabulary back.

I don’t know who you are, but I want you to leave.

Darren scribbled on one of my pictures today and I am beyond honoured. It’s just a little five minute mess-about, but I think he’s made something pretty out of something which was only the barest seed of expression. It’s now like soot was blown over something frivolous to bring out the lines of a story. Part of me admits to wanting to adore this man, he’s enchanting in every conversation we’ve had. Even on-line, Darren makes me dance with smiles on my face. Here’s his portfolio. I highly recommend giving it a look. These are what he takes time on and they are like flowers on a vine, swaying in sunlight, caught in the corner of your eye.

Welcome to the new people, again, by the way. I looked at my user info today and found the numbers had changed. I hope to eventually catch up and find out who everyone is, but feel free to introduce yourself. I love that there’s people here, sharing days from all over the world. It warms me to imagine the network we must create, that our section of internet is inescapably made of people, of voices, words and pictures. I want the world to be a little smaller every day. I want to be able to look out and see every continent we have available to explore, every view of life with a window attached to a person.

Here, have some music.

Plans for world domination were sidetracked by Christy’s birthday. You are all very lucky, I would have forced you all to become pleasure slaves in my palace.

She’s dreaming of green, waving like water in wind. Long sad drawn out sighs of filmy material, and it’s clinging to her. The colour is hard to concentrate on, it shifts from lime to something almost black. There’s something alive in the cloth, the way it molds itself to her is comforting and quiet, like she was made to wear this as a second skin, as if she was emitting it herself like a radio wave. In her heart she can feel her chest as a cavity, the ribs a blind cage holding nothing.

Michel has created the first page of our odd little child, Jesus Monkey Pants in Space. I’m intimidated, but my role so far merely seems to be splattering him with shreds of story seed inspiration. He’s given me the basic beginning, the first three pages which are to be sketched next. In it, there was the phrase ‘Satellite Angel’. It’s exploded in my head into a fractured image of the glory at the end of a cable. Vast strata wings of intricate girders and wire tatted together into a filigree infection crawling up the glowing flesh into a crown of thorns and interference aura. The eyes are signal snow and the hands are tipped with welcoming metal claws. I imagine suddenly feathers of shining crystal, a voice like a sub-machine gun, sinews like Botticelli painted old train engines instead of women emerging from mythical oceans. Glass skin contagious to touch, glass skin luminous as cream in evening. The mouth smoothly opens and the sound of electricity pours forth, filling the heart with joy. Singing wires, tonal emotion.

I’m assuming the stance of another gender for Mike’s show tonight up at SFU, genderqueer cross dressing dancing and a show. I expect there to be at least one shirt entirely made of glitter. My hands don’t remember how to get the knot right on my tie, but I’m feeling the shift of solid hips settling into me without thinking about it. I don’t have to concentrate to be a boy, it holds my body like I was made to be someone who sits with open legs and wide held arms. There’s barely a shift, honestly, I tend to think a little too evenly for that. My eyes see equality where there isn’t any and my fingers trail across the edges of many cliches. (Oh come on, baby, don’t be that way.) It’s a blue collar rejection letter, the way my flesh expects my partners to be either sex or both, the way I slide my hands up the chest expecting to find breasts or down expecting to slip between folds when they’re pressing iron into me. I’m bad that way. There’s a beat I follow and it’s likely pounding over the floor at the gay clubs.

Hair in at ponytail snug a the base of my neck, body bound underneath my gentlemans jacket, fingernails scraped clean of enamel, I feel rather at home like this. It’s nice to look down and see my feet, (though the stud earring feels wrong). I look younger, I’m going to have to show me ID at the door. Last time I did this, I had a handful flurry of phone numbers to throw away. I felt guilty for the trees. If there’s time after, I’ll be heading to Lick for the aftermath of a femme reading night.

A passage from “The Colossus of New York” by by Colson Whitehead:

“The light changes and he has that wish again: that every step he ever took left a neon footprint. Every step, from his first to these. That way he could catch up with himself, track himself through the city and years. See that the last time he walked this block he was tipsy or in love. Here determined, there aimless like today, no particular place to go. If he could see his footprints, he’d know his uncharted territories, what was yet, and where never to return. Some of the old stores are gone since last time. What comes at their address is bright and shiny like new keys. New keys fit new locks. It is rare here that the new establishment is more downscale and if only he could make his self and ideas like real estate: ever higher. God knows he has tried to keep up with the changing market but his new shirt will only go so far- once they step inside they recognize the same old merchandise and demur. He has swept up, his brain gets so dingy sometimes, but they will not see his renovations and he is a dead trade, something remembered only by old phonebooks. Blacksmith, knife sharpener. Walk faster.

If anyone has this book, I want it.

Alright, this is worth a mention if anything is: the homosexual necrophilactic duck has won the professor a nobel prize. Yes, the GAY CORPSE FUCKING DUCK WON A NOBEL. An Ig Nobel, but still – we live in a good, grand world. The man who invented the karaoke machine just won one as well. Be happy and joyful. Also, prolonged exposure to country music makes you kill yourself. “The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate.” The most quotable quote there? The effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty, and gun availability.

My eyes flashed tonight, beacons of frustration railing against my inability to explain why I feel trapped in this city. This small growing place made up almost entirely of people from small towns who think they’re finally somewhere big. There used to be farms where there’s buildings now, there used to be moose walking down some of our main streets. I remember when there used to be something special in watching a moose get hit by a semi-truck and walking away unscathed with merely a twitch of its skin and a withering look at the driver behind the now cracked windshield. Now I wonder if they ever cross a highway unmolested by five tons of metal. I think I’m starting to get tired of moose. Tired of moose and sick of the art of the Haida Gwai. I need to be away from totem poles and bears in the backyard. I’ve been to so many small towns, and none of them have anything to give me. They’re a bar and a store and a restaurant, one of them parasite with a gas station. There’s always an upright video game in the corner with a pre-teen boy permanently attached because there’s nothing else to do. Think paper pull tab lottery tickets, three chances to match cherries or bars. A jackpot meaning a beer on the house.

I wish there was a way to see anything new here. I wish I could see home as being something within 100 miles of here, instead of anywhere elsewhere more established. I’m crying for a sense of history, or somewhere that has some meaning. At least I have a reason now for staying, another dream to add to me. I can listen the colour of eyes that tell me about half a world away, about people who have died that I’ll never meet, about possibilities inherent in living together. It won’t last forever, this chain, the pull will erode even this from pain as the mouse knaws itself out of the glue trap unthinking. Escape is the goal, the idea, the final word which blossomed the sun into creation. Seventh day countries born from gold and brown and the theory behind frozen children. To send me away is always the wish of those closest to me, to let me see the world before I go blind.

The camera and crew blocked the way to the bathroom at the live televised breakfast this morning so anyone watching would have caught a stylish purple girl flicking casual V’s in the background behind the announcer.

In this town no one wants to leave the house, interaction almost requires legerdemain. The lights go dim on people who never left the house past responsibility calling their nine to five names. I want to resist this feeling, this staid relationship I have with my front door and the stairs past it, the bus-stop and feeling hollow. How much of this is a waste of time? Then I see the faces, the thousand bored expressions around me saying over and over, “this is what we are and we do not smile for strangers.”, and I want to cry out frustration, humiliate the mass of morass keening empty platitudes until they all have to focus their eyes and look at something bright and colourful and real. There are countries that barely have telephones, there is more than television shows and office dates and what did they say about who as they rolled out that dazzling false red carpet?

This is for Ray and Benn, the resident LoveCraftians. So is this, (which is “Garage rockers with DV cameras making a mockumentary about a sixties rock festival in Arkham that goes awry when the hippies open up the Necronomicon instead of the Whole Earth Catalog. With musical accompaniment from the Conqueror Wyrms and the Plasma Miasma”), but the Get your own Disabled Doll most certainly is not and this, is most certainly for me. Someone fly me to Alaska? I’ll race you to the top, you betcha. We could drop by Juneau and have a drink at the bar that automata works at and go oooh at her new tattoo in person. As of March 9th, this artificial ice tower has been built to 151 feet high. My favourite quote, (from the nicely amusing narration), “If I’d ah knowed it were gonna get this high, I would not have been so impressed back when it was not so high.”

65. What would you do if you were walking down the street and saw some hot guys standing on the sidewalk? i say “hey sailors, which way to the gym?” (Is anyone else thinking soccer practice now? oh yeaaaaah.)

Two things planned as placement in tomorrow, opposite end spectrum set and match, bookends with nothing between. I’m leaving the house before the sun rises above the mountains, our buildings to the east, for a downtown rude service breakfast, something for charity, then there’s a late night evening of burlesque. Is anyone interested in kicking around during the day? Or joining me in featherboa glory later on at the Caprice? I’m thinking sandwiches on the seawall, reclaiming that bit of city that we don’t visit as often as we should. I’m thinking I’ll wear a skirt, to get that particular swish when gravity hits me in the chest, pulls at my arms holding the chains of the second beach swing-set.

Today I’ve been collecting a rag-tag band of linkery. There’s an advert for a glittery pyro job in Vegas, for example, (I swear, I’m never going to get to use my pyrotech tickets for anything fun here,) and more unsurprising claims to the fall of empire. My only question is “why has it taken so long for this to be news?” It’s only like the last call before the bar closes.

The pictures are starting to come in from Monday. They’re giving me the idea that maybe it’s okay to wear shorter skirts, but certainly not anything like the one I borrowed off Jenn. Black hooker chic, that one is. I think I’ll stick to me own aesthetic. This Saturday SinCity is her Stagette. If there’s a month to come out, this will be it. Arrive before ten. Should be serious fun, though I suspect that the girls will be tailing me, not knowing what to do.

Dreaming time, sweeping wide angle image of youth moments. I’m finally reading Cages by Dave McKean, the book Michel sent me. I’ve never read anything like it. I think the next time anyone uses the word ratatouille in my presence, I’m going to burst out laughing. It makes me grin until I notice my cheeks are cracking. The artistry is obscene, the lines and swirls of carved figures creating life from simple strokes of a pen, a pencil. I’m in awe of it while it makes me laugh. This is a little what love feels like, I think, without the fervour. There’s no involving passion, but so much appreciation.

Tomorrow I’m to meet Matthew at the Elbow Room for a 6 a.m. breakfast. I suspect I might simply stay up the night. He put me to bed last night with few hours before dawn, I could do it. I’m recovered from my earlier the-sound-ice-makes crush of souls skin. I’m free again to be brave. Anne Sexton has left the building. The word discretion doesn’t belong properly with the word partnership, so I’ll leave it at lover and dance with the word melting on my tongue and let it be enough for me.