Month: March 2005

I’m serious when I claim that you’ll regret it if you follow this link. It’s rather special, actually. The most precious bit was that I was listening to Carmen Miranda singing Chicka Boom Chick when it began playing. It almost synched.

I’m torn between wishing dearly that this sort of thing tweaked even a tiny bit of revulsion and wondering with slight trepidation what will finally break the bar the eels set for me, cause, yeah – if dead octopus don’t tweak me, my blood is turning to jade.

Still like me?

The beautiful Andrew and I have been talking tonight about poets and love, how words can be stones and water and the flesh can melt from bone with the music of them. I’m not like him, I can’t make sweet pictures to illustrate my devotion, my interaction between poet and penitent. I can barely explain to myself the words required to examine my pleasures. The people I love are too precious for shoddy description. I need to vivisect, dissemble the defences in place. I have too much evidence that it’s in the way. The poor man who slept with me last night, I attacked him in my sleep, waking suddenly out of dream to one hand pinning his backward and a muffled voice, “You’re a dangerous girl.” There must have been a trigger but I’m not even sure what it was. I assume a hand strayed in unconsciousness somewhere. I’ve not a clue. I simply know that my reactions have to calm down.

Isaac turned to me at the bar tonight, “So you must be Angela.”

What an illusion I must make.

My love, I want to drink him, upturn his body until the DNA unravels enough for me to catch an end with my teeth. I want to pull it straight and touch myself with the prickly strands, tie my wrists with it and offer them as supplication to sate his deepest desires. I want to dissolve into something formless, a drug (for him to taste with every moment of living joy) flaying pain away, stripping bare the tonal casing of every last tooth until I can hear the nerves sing with my breath. I can’t be sentimental in the face of such uncanny sweetness, of such bold moments of stolen heat. Leaving him home is as romantic as a chemical burn, as soothing as lye on the tongue. Leaving plays the nadir card, eclipsing all joy with indisputable depression, when will i see him again. This dreaming relationship, my blood is singing with it like the note has been found to make it vibrate and it carries his name. If I could, I would find a way to arc sparks from my two hands, amperage enough to make them burn, to make light enough to keep my guilty partisan desires hidden away in a darkened versailles cellar as filigree as a faberge creation. This is not strictly a predecessor problem, this is coaxing sensuous lips into a demonic pact. Wants versus respect, I am aware of an anticipatory incomprehension, this matter whittling itself down to release on the tip of our garnet minds. Hesitation closes doors and opens an ocean, I’m losing my heart like a debutante bride to the dilettante youth.

After work I stalked out of the house for New West yesterday, hours late to Jenn’s Bridal Shower. I sat on the train in a hopeful panic. Will they still be there? Do I have Marcella’s buzzer number? If not, will the balcony door be left unlocked? Can I even climb to the third floor in these particular shoes? I tried to write about how I feel about my relationships, about the people in my life. I wanted to magnify emotion until it seared the page, explain to myself the complexities, but instead I was distracted, wracking my mind for my lack of white feather-boa gift. She’ll forgive me, I decided, as I swung off the train.

Kim saw me as I trudged up the monstrous hill and waited for me, holding a boy in check with her. I’m assuming it’s her beau, though I could be wrong. She assured me that people were still present let me in the back door, choosing herself to continue outside rather than navigate the ridiculous stairs that riddle the building. Navi opened the door, with Marcella behind her, bright colours startling almost after the drab hallway. Jenn was in the living-room, sitting in a small sea of pastel bags filled with fluffy paper and satiny nightwear. (There was a frog, yes, an inimitable frog this time; apparently a “pyjama holder”. In go the sex toys, I say, she was also given a beginners bondage kit.)

I left smiling, but weighted. I reflected that time is starting to insist on cajoling my life in some semblance of continuity in spite of my refusal to think ahead to summertime. There’s so many moments between then and now. I might have travelled, I might have visitors. There are a numberless strands of option rendering, far be it from me to cradle any assumptions past that I continue to love those I love.

At Commercial I pulled myself from imagining Bill and I across the street, two oddly moving figures in black trenchcoats waiting for a bus to take us home, by singing with a stranger at the bus-stop, a drunken man named Zod, and his two friends. They were going to the Masquerade, an option I had discarded for the hour, but they didn’t know where they were going, didn’t know what neighbourhood they were about to harmlessly wander into, so out of a sense of fun and responsibility, I plyed my trade as local guide and pointed us to the Maritime Centre. We arrived fifteen minutes before the party ended. I shucked off my dress, made wings out of leftover shimmer plastic paper from Jenn’s, and wandered. I regret arriving so late, the floor was slick from dancing, it must have been serious fun.

R.C. found the whereabouts of an after-party and when the hosts began flicking the lights, Travis and I set off to find it, temporarily collecting again my people from the bus at the 7-11 up the road. We left them there, setting off across a field with our slurpees, then over an unnecessary fence, not finding where we needed to go, of course, but having fun. There didn’t seem to be anything at 1800 block Triumph until, as we were giving up, some cyclists in costume pedalled past. We called out, asking where the party was. They didn’t know either until one of them found it just around the corner. They returned with his passenger missing and chivalry kicked in. It might not be our party, but stranding small girls isn’t particularly a good idea. We grouped and got the buzzer number off someone on the porch. Finding the apartment was easy and exactly where we’d been looking for.

I woke this morning unable to understand why I felt like I was underwater. My limbs were light, buoyed by an unexpected lack of tension. Then my eyes opened.

Matthew came over last night to dream with me. I put on a red dress and purple black striped stockings and late I dragged him out for dinner. Witching hour by the time we walked ot the Drive. Wazubees was open, saviour of the hourly detached, so we sat by the window, grinning to each-other, quietly choking on our wine and water at a man one table over who was far too old to seriously answer his phone, “Yo, Talk to me homie.”

I catch myself headlight blinded by his eyes, his delighted smile, to everything else present. The way he shapes his words, brimming with precious spilled drop emotion, makes me feel like I’m in a story, every word a golden coin. It’s too easy how we co-habit without effort.

“You know, it’s only a matter of time until someone at the bank sees us out together.”
“That will be amusing. What will you say?”
“Well, I’ll have to tell them the truth. ‘That’s my girl friend'”
“I’m a girlfriend?”
“Oh-ho, you and the crossed arms and the leaning back unhappily. What’s this?”
“A girlfriend.”
“What, would you rather I call you my smootchie-poo?”
“Honestly? Yes. That would be better.”

We tried to go shopping after, walking across the dark street to the 24 hour market, but we left with only a small container of frozen strawberries and two cans of red bull. I’d said earlier that I was to take him up on Brittania roof, and so I did. The city gleams from there, a mad gasp of shining light. It’s so hard to make this place look pretty, I always have to be up high or breaking a law. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t be a climber. My movement is lithe and elegant in comparison. I can still climb the wall there, scaling brick with the tips of my toes and fingers. It was freedom to know that I’m that much better, that I haven’t lost everything I used to do.

A fundie kid came on today, asked me if I “believe in god”. I said I don’t particularly care if there was one, one way or another. They replied by asking, wasn’t I aware that god died for my sins? I’m going to go to hell unless I get this through my thick skull. God will put me there.

“Your god maybe,” I replied, “What I believe in is a little kinder to humans than that”
“HOW CAN YOU LIVE AND NOT WONDER WHO CREATED THE UNIVERSE???”
“Created? Sorry kid, have you ever heard of evolution?”

His reply, quoted letter for letter:

“EVOLUTION IS A STUPI D THEORY MADE UP BY CARL MARX, THINGS DON’T JUST HAPPEN BY ACCIDENT, THEY ALL HAVE A REASON FROM GOD”

Now, alright, never minding that Karl Marx is spelled with a K, what sort of “education” is this child receiving?

The United States of faith not fact, under one holy flag we fly, mincing religion and falsehood with a fabricated history where we win all the wars and god spake to us from washington against the dirty red menace, because whiskey tango foxtrot, my loves, this is one strange assertation.

edit: Michel has some brilliant comments to add to the matter,

“Actually, he and Darwin were probably in the League of Nineteenth Century Evildoers or something. So he’s not so far from the Alan Moorey truth. Let’s not forget Richard Wagner, writing operas where it’s evil to pile up all the gold you can get your hands on, and heroes have sex before marriage.”
“And Jesus on a toothpick, I hate your job. Though you deserve kudos for not telling those kids to go fuck an outlet.”

addendum: metaquoted with 100+ comments.
also: an edit of someone’s userinfo

Night Moves has just shown up on the playlist, crashing into me like every year since I was six, when I first saw American Pop in the Drive In. My dad sat in the front seat of the truck we lived in, I think my mum had fallen asleep in the back. We shared a bag of sour candy and he explained where all the music came from, instilling a worship of sound into me one scene at a time. It was dark summertime somewhere in the middle of ontario, the smell of fields coming in through the windows with the sound pouring loudly from thirty car windows, that guitar just flowing in, little chords glittering. I remember women singing on the stereo and people singing along. All of it classic and perfect and so close to meaning something.

We weren’t in love, oh no, far from it
We weren’t searchin’ for some pie in the sky summit
We were just young and restless and bored
Livin’ by the sword
And we’d steal away every chance we could
To the backroom, to the alley or the trusty woods
I used her, she used me
But neither one cared
We were gettin’ our share
Workin’ on our night moves
Tryin’ to lose the awkward teenage blues
Workin’ on our night moves
And it was summertime

Classic rock now, memory entwined on the radio burning into me. It was hard to go downtown with blonde hair, knowing my father lives there somewhere. It’s not him I’m scared of, it’s more the thought of him, the idea of the person. My insane father, violent and strong with years. The address I created to send him letters has been closed. I left it alone for too long. I don’t know if he’s written anything more past what I posted. It’s amazing where this song puts me, how I feel so happy and heavy and wanting all at the same time. The seats were brown, like the molded plastic that hinged over the engine. It was a white panel truck, two tons. In the back was a fold out couch and boxes of music gear, black with silver clasps. When they were driving I would play in the back or sit on the ledge connecting the cab to the back. I was tiny and safe. Every time we got pulled over on the highway, I would have to hide because there were only two seatbelts. I would slide myself inside the cushions and cover myself with an old green jungleprint blanket. There’s pictures of me wrapped in it as a baby. My father had it around his arms the night he smashed the bedroom window into our faces. The night all my training kicked in and I grabbed my baby brother Robin and ran into my room, barricading the door with my chest of drawers. I remember brushing glass out of our hair and hearing my mother crying.

The only charactor in American Pop I ever really felt with, ever really understood was the mad songwriter. Sometimes I almost feel like I know why.

Richard McDowell summed it up nicely. He surprised an answer out of me. Usually I tell people that I have no father, but instead he looked at me and asked, “How long since he fell off the world?”