Month: April 2005

Nicole is half asleep on my bed, her red hair nicely meshing with the jewel-tone pillows. I vote she stays there. (I’ve made her a LiveJournal, fluxamonia). We gave up on my friend earlier and romanced Brian into coming to the hot tub with us. It feels odd to be talking with people while I’m blind, but I’m dealing better with it now that I’m practicing. I have to rely entirely on tonalities and gross body movement. It’s interesting and scary. Brian had an audiophile evening scheduled after, so Nicole and I returned to my apartment without him and settled into recovering from an overdose of warmth. Later tonight is Cafe Du Soliex poetry slam. Kyle will be there in spite of his recent tonsil removal. I commend his bravery and expect to act as interpretor.

Meanwhile, download this. I particularly appreciate the Tetris.

Lung, (alois), is a local photography god. He’s just come back from China and Vietnam, bringing enchanting goodies home. Sincerely I say, go look at him. His photography journal is well worth adding.

I arrived home today when the sun was rising, pre-dawn light scratching against the black, welting it blue. I woke wanting to chew on things, to dig my back teeth in and grind the world between my molars, using my hips to appeal to my beliefs. For the sake of momentum, I suppose I should get dressed and try to start some sort of day, but I’m being caught by interesting things and lovely conversation with delightful people. I’m waiting on a golden man today, his voice on the telephone or his fingers on the keys. Perhaps until then I’ll continue wrapped in a sheet and sitting in a pool of burning star. When my hair has dried, I’ll call him, telling time in the most old fashioned way.

BoingBoing has picked up something I’ve been explaining to people lately, about how we hit the oil peak it the 70’s. When gas prices started hitting a dollar, I began to be curious where on the curve we really were. I hadn’t quite expected us to be so far down the right hand slope.

Ethan brought me to a party last night. We walked from my house east toward Burnaby until we came upon a house full of girls with plastic earrings and boys with indie band t-shirts. Walking into the kitchen, a man stopped me, “I know you from somewhere. You’re the purple girl! You’re Jhayne!” I said, yes and he replied, “I don’t know where I know you from.” It was a good introduction to the night. I felt transplanted without any roots until I found that there was talk of making a fire in the backyard. There was a brick hut for it and people who didn’t know what they were doing. Half an hour later, I had flames as a visible low red above the chimney by almost four feet.

Bloody Squamish Days.

I close the door quickly when I’m like this, and I can’t bear to look at you in the thinning sliver, because then I’ll lose it. I won’t be able to wait for you to get far enough away. I couldn’t bear it if you heard me, this is too shameful, too full of everything you shouldn’t see. I let you taste the humour in my blood, the scarlet flow that grins and flashes teeth, but this I keep away from you. You’re too nice to me. You don’t need to die a little everytime the moon is full. It’s a neglect leftover maybe, it’s the intensity that tides bring when they wear away the shore. All of it tastes like iron and salt. All of it drips down my wrists to taint my world with too much need.

Modified Fusion Fashion Show II.
April 19. $6.
A Burlesque, Comedy, Dread Extensions, Visuals, Art & Fashion Show.
Shift at the Lick (to the right of the Lotus).

You don’t understand what you do to me. You take my skin and wear it like a tongued kiss to steal. I don’t know what you need from me, I don’t know what I can give to you. I want to spread my legs for you and like it. You’re red upholstery to stick to on a sunny day when there’s nothing ahead but miles waiting, horizons waiting to be superseded with the logic of an oncoming train. You’re the crunch of gravel under bare feet in winter, icy shocks I stand up straight to harden my souls for. If I could have another you, I would do it. Splice your genes dripping from my lips as clear sticky syrup so I might look you in the eyes, destruction in my wake, knowing I could keep you. It seems hard, but maybe it’s time for you to spend a lonely night alone and awake. You were kind enough to comfort me, you were sweet enough to desire me. It might be time to set yourself in my position. Staring at the ceiling, trying to imagine where your dreams are going. I know your hair is mingling on hard pillows, a colour match scented with perfume. Maybe you’ll curl like I do, trying to bury yourself in your own flesh to take your mind away from an impending end half a city away. Instead of feeling alone over washed cotton sheets, sometimes I want to walk naked outside in the rain, walk parting the waters like a biblical saint. I want to kiss you to sleep. Instead of this, I want to hold your body close to mine and sink my teeth into your breath. You are remarkable, you are holy to me. I don’t know how to remember.

After the movie last night, Andrew and I went and found Matthew at a hotel on Burrard, visiting his friend Patrick. Patrick’s wife was there as well, and his two sons. Listening to Patrick is like looking into an unbelievable world. He’s been an american soldier since the sixties, spending time in both Greneda and Vietnam. He’s a thick personable man with a balding head and BORN TO RIDE on his right arm who tells stories like a Hunter S. Thompson. The son of a casting couch encounter, he’s not intimidating in the slightest, I want to vouch for his citizenship. His younger brother went to The Chair in Texas, getting the Death Penalty for the violent killing of five child molesters.

“I got to call down several thousand dollars in tax money once. A sniper killed a four year old, so I knew the first thing to do was to get him to give away his position. This was easy, I used to be a sniper, see, so I borrow a flack jacket off the driver of the tank, a double armored one, right? And then I stand on top of the tank and hold up binoculars and just say “here I am! Now where are you.” I saw a little puff of smoke when he shot me, right on top of one of the buildings. I didn’t really feel it when I got shot, the damned thing just threw me backwards off the tank. So I’m lying on the ground clutching my chest, trying to get my breath back. I said, “You did get his position, right?” and this feller, he says, “Yes captain, but we didn’t need that much confirmation. You’re crazy.” I couldn’t really laugh, right, but I called an air strike. Damn chest wouldn’t stop hurting, I didn’t know that when they shoot you they shoot you twice”

I broke in, “Well, yes, it’s a double-tap.”

He looked pleased. “Well, yes, it is. How’d you know that? Anyway, we stopped the snipers killing anymore four year olds, for a few hours at least. Expensive, but damn wurth it. The two bullets were this far away when we pried them out of my vest.” He holds his fingers up a few centimeters apart, “I don’t know why we kept going back there. No matter how much you wanted freedom for these people, there were always a few idiots trying to shoot you and they weren’t picky about it. I can’t stand for killing children.”

Then he leads into another place, another time. More war.

“We’d come into these villages and they would be empty. There wouldn’t be anyone anywhere, we’d scout around in the jungle, send guys out in all directions, nothing. Eventually we learned, started following the birds.”

His wife speaks up, “They just killed everyone”

“Yeah, mass graves. We’d get the caterpillars in and push the dirt back and there they were. Entire towns a few feet under the dirt. Women, babies, all the old folks too. There wasn’t anyone they didn’t bury.”
She says, “It was the shortest he’d ever been anywhere, but he was more wrecked then than any other time. It was bad. I can’t imagine.”
“I wish there was someway of telling people here.

I want to carry a recorder next time I see him. They’re here until Tuesday, hoping to move here permanently. In spite of the fact that they are everything Americans want to say they are, everything they want to claim,they have to leave. “There’s no tolerance.” I feel somehow like I’m talking with family, it’s unshakable. They’re all an odd mixture of samurai and lakota. They all grew up with horses and guns, they grew up going up mountains and defending they who require the spoken word.

How do we manage to live erasing these people? There’s no room for heroes in this day and age, the day is passing. They had lives that don’t exist anymore. We need inspiration now more than perhaps ever before and yet we’re killing it. Destroying opportunity with faulty government and lackadaisical apathy, sometimes I can’t stand it in spite of the fact that I think I understand it.

Nicholas asked for writing topics earlier today. In my laziness, I decided the most evil thing to ask for would be for his interpretation of me. This was my reply:

Once upon a time, there was a princess. She lived in a fairy tale castle and kept waiting for her prince to come. In the meantime she tried kissing some frogs, but they never turned into anything (except for the one time when it was really a toad and she ended up hallucinating for the rest of the evening.) While she waited, she found herself wondering why she was waiting for a prince in the first place. Why princes? What was so wonderful about princes? And why did she have to wait for them? She thought about it some more and decioded that she might as well go and try to find the prince, because he sure as hell wasn’t coming. One day she climbed out of her bedroom window and climbed on down into the World.

So we all looked for her, of course, but nobody knows where she’s gone. Time walked on, we grew up and somewhere out there the princess is hiding.

Maybe she’s the lady behind the counter of the antique store, collecting unconsidered trifles.

Maybe she’s the girl with the pasties on her nipples from the sleezy peeler bar down on Fourth and McQueen.

Maybe she’s hiding in the bookstore down the road, the girl with the dust-covered lenses and off-colored hair showing her roots sitting behind the counter.

Maybe she’s your best friend, the one with the run down old house in the middle of nowhere and a garden covered in blackberry vines. The one that you drink green tea with, that you talk to about books and life and each other’s love lives, and the one that you never think of as anything else but, y’know, her. The one you go to parties with because neither of you have anybody else, and everybody else thinks you’re a couple and you laugh about it because you know it would never work out; she’s still waiting for a prince after all these years.

Maybe she’s the girl you wake up next to in the morning – there’s an unfamiliar pair of cold feet in the bed and a pair of nipples jabbing into your back and an arm around your chest, and you panic and relax because, oh, right, it’s just her, and you curl up and go back to sleep. In the morning – homemade Eggs Benedict and pan fries, wearing bathrobes and sitting on the porch. Five days later and you still can still smell her perfume on your body. “Call me,” she says, and you do for once.

Maybe you never see her. You stop by the castle and she’s gone, and you never find her again. Too late for you, you should have gone looking for her years ago. The castle’s fallen down now, a pile of rubble. Years from now archeologists will crawl over its corpse.

Down on the street that they call Death Row, it’s another day. The old man with the guitars strum and croak and croon, the pretty spanish boys drive by on their bicycles and the boozers and beggars sit on the sidewalk and try to remember who they once were. Somebody puts on a gramaphone record – Le Quintet Du Hot Club de France – and we can hear strings and brass weaving their way out onto the street.

“The plural of anecdote is not data”.

This person has collected over 600 music videos for download. I’m impressed. I love music videos, they’re snapshot glimpses into a beautiful world where music threads everything into a narrative, sometimes surreal, preferably pretty, in dastardly ways. Andrew and I went to see Oldboy last night and it was like that. Not for everyone, but perfect for me. Serrated humour. Sweet brutality. The undertones of making me cringe. I cried out Marry Me to the main character after he made me wince in spite of my jade blood. Have you ever seen Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance? It’s similar. I want this in my home. A man is captured off the street, framed for his wife’s murder and put into a hotel reminiscent prison room for fifteen years. There’s a television, but that’s his only contact with the world until one day he wakes in a box on a grassy roof. He’s dressed in a sharp black suit and cannot see for the sunlight. From there he’s given the task of finding out who put him there and the why behind it. I can’t believe some of the angles, some of the framing. I want to find the director and pledge my youth to him. A year for every ounce of brilliance you download into my brain. Another year of lasting life from mine for every tricky skill you give me.

Imperative viewing if things like this make you happy: Headless Robot Zombie Science Flies.

Today I can’t remember if I have plans this evening. I can’t recall shaping words which would have defined my Saturday Night. There’s no sun today, only fake television light. Everything is lit from an unseen source. I woke next to me love this morning, and I could feel the smile blossom under my skin when I came aware enough to know the body next to me was a separate thing. We held hands in the dark until the sun came to wake us. Seven o’clock fall in, fall back and down forever.

edit: I’m told apparently that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy are actually made by the same director, (which somehow justifies my ridiculous brain in some obscure way). Apparently he’s making a revenge themed trilogy and those are the first two films. The third is to be called Lady Vengeance. This to me seems a bit odd, as there was no-one left alive in the first movie to continue to a sequel. They killed everyone.

I was inspiration for the evening and all I wanted was to run my fingers through your hair. The entire cast nodded at “he was an angsty goth boy” and it was beautiful. The synchonicity of sympathy, the moment of “we have all been fifteen”. I felt satisfied with my life suddenly, when I saw for a moment how I could laugh at what I’ve been, who I’ve been with, how I have changed and grown. I am older now, and far more young. It’s a gentle reminder. Yes, I’m having to cling lately, counting blessings like pennies saved by a child, but I still know how to smile.

Whenever I am with him, I think to myself that when I am gone from this persons life or they from mine, I will look back and want a hundred pictures of them, a thousand, to look over and hold close, but then I put the camera down and thumb the power button. I don’t know what to do.

I need to take Robin out more before I go. If anyone has any suggestions, they would be appreciated. We’re going to be going to the poetry slams again, so that’s every second Monday taken care of, but I’m uncertain about our Fridays and I can have him Thursdays as well. This city can be so cold to adventure seekers. One has to trespass or creep along, hiding in corners while security guards go by, and he’s not exactly up to sneaking yet. He’s more of a loudly plodding boy, one who knocks things over and takes ten minutes to climb a fence as high as his waist. I’m not sure how the government would react if they knew of some of the things I’m trying to train him to, but I don’t particularly care. I think running is a requirement in life, and so is getting around people who have been put specifically to keep you out of interesting places. I still need to instill curiosity and we’re trying to have him think for himself. Both are new in peculiar ways, but they seem to be taking. I want Robin to be able to function on his own and not mind doing so. I want him to be able to look outside and think, “I want to do something today,” and then be capable of choosing something and participating in the world in the manner proscribed.

I decided last night that I was going to dye my hair scarlet. I smeared flesh red gel stickly onto my brush and then through my hair. I was thorough, I was neat.

It didn’t work.

The damned gunk turned out purple.

I am less than disappointed. It seems that I am now genetically predisposed toward purple hair. Sadly, it is a limping along purple, a timid pale patch of purple, purple that would get run over if it tried to cross the road, so I’ve doused myself in plum to fix it. If anyone would like an almost untouched tin of Punky Colour Red Wine, it is yours with my blessing. Next time I try, I will pick a more ridiculously named red in the hopes of serendipity forcing her tongue into my mouth a little sexier. This time it was like she was counting my teeth, and who wants that? She might take one as a souvenier.

Chris was my brilliant company today. He looks out from under ice lashes and decries politics and history and ethical being in the system we call society currently. He tells of how change is slow, how people are afraid, and yet he paints a picture that educates in all the right ways. I wish I could speak evenly with him, that I could keep up. I learned today that Vancouver is the only municipality in Canada with an ethical purchase policy. In spite of spending time among protesters for years now, I’ve never heard that, but I really like it. I’m glad somehow of our parks that use plants that weren’t sprayed with pesticides, that our city works brew fair trade coffee.

Tonight there’s a group of people going to TheatreSports. We’re gathering at Granville Island, meeting at the doors at quarter to nine.

I’m considering my options in the realm of travel. It seems that I’m going to E3, but I’m not very certain what it is. I only know my hooks have been thrown at me, Road Trip, Technology, Down the Coast, by Andrew and Ian. I’m embracing leaving, the images of highway and blind kinetic energy. Fluttering my hand out a window as water flows by, watching the sun rise and set over unfamiliar horizons. I don’t know if it’s going to be enough to save me, if it’s going to take me out of myself to the point that I can wear my skin again without feeling too small. I’m shearing off tiny pieces of person here, sloughing them off so I can continue to not care a little longer, so I can hold on until I’m hanging by my nails like I do financially. Not taking Robin out lately has been hurting, wounding the pocketbook to the point where I’m beginning to actually worry a little. My work doesn’t cover half of what it should. I catch myself almost relenting when Nico wants to send me a towel.

If my laundry gets stolen again, I’m going to be old again before my time.

My skills are an attic full of dead birds. My hair is full of flame and my lungs murky with fuel. I remember heat dripping from my fingers lighting my chain with blue fire. I would watch it soar above me to flip in gravity like an arcing ball of physics, waiting for me to catch it and bite. They used to have wings, they used to fly. My tongue stings in memory, my elbows chafe with rope. Twist, turn, feet planted never as firmly as they needed to be because it was dance, darling, not serious, no, in spite of the crackle swish of fulmination this close to your face, this close to your hair. Fury when it tore out, treating it like a whip to crack, bring it back, gathering cord in one hand out of the other, play them off each-other, the congregation is beginning to murmur. I remember that. I remember how it would confuse me if I listened, so I tuned them out and only listened to my own artificial wind. I miss it. Never caught in my own photograph, I’d forgotten how rich it was, how much I miss the taste of white gas on my fingers afterward. To the sky, both of them, like embers, like suns. To my back to catch on my neck and twitch, kittens to scratch me with red little welts later, when I paid enough attention to bathe in cold water. Learning never was this fun. I can’t bear to think of it now, but I have to. I want it back again, this home I had, the conflagration surge of death in my heart.

Darren’s making pretties again.

I’m in the process of making a modern day mix tape for Ellen. It’s a group project, everyone making copies enough so that all involved may receive one. I’m discovering, however, that in spite of the fact that I have several thousand songs to choose from, I’m failing short of having some sort of theme. I think I have a nice idea, then “but I’m currently listening to Alphaville, who on earth am I to claim taste in music?”

Oh the shame.

In other news, I’ve been personally asked to participate in B.C. politics as part of “the worlds first serious political party devoted exclusively to sex positive issues” by a friend of mine who’s apparently involved. I don’t know as what and I suspect that I’m to get up and read raunchy poetry. This is my general impression. “Groovy,” I said, “but I don’t have any.” Monday the 18th of April is a supporters meeting. There’s an open invite to anyone interested in the party to drop in. They’re also having an erotic art show, are accepting submissions of art, and are seeking volunteers for the event. Platform, candidates, events and volunteer information at http://www.thesexparty.ca/ I’m likely to spend a day or two volunteering for the sake of it.