Day: May 2, 2005

Holy hells, Roger just called me, glittering Kajou of the year 2000. Rom and the Bomb, fluffy hair and all. Jenn might remember the album. I haven’t heard this man’s voice directly in half a decade. I didn’t recall him as sounding so french. This city is a forest with every tree an angel beauty moment. I’m going to be invincible how youth is supposed to be, not scared of leaving the house, not intangibly terrified of picking up the phone. I’ve got a spot to map, marked by the cut of a fingernail. I’ve got certainties I didn’t before. When I think it’s real, it’s real. I can pick this up and hold it up to shine, crystal refraction blinding in light of the silver knife edge that vanished under the weight of breath. Five years ago, Kajou was my best friend. He was a motorcycle ride at midnight. I hope he still is. I miss that wind, the peculiar shutting out of sound the helmet provides. We were riding to Lee’s Palace once and across the intersection to our right was a man with a lizard row of electric blue metal spikes on his helmet. We nodded in tandem to him and bumped heads. I had bare arms and barely any skirt it was so thin against the oppressive freeing heat. I’m going out to the Drake to meet him, why does every city have a drake hotel? but he might be at Lot 16, a place that Montilee and Doug and I drove past on Sunday in our weave around the religious blocking off the streets, in our quest to stalk our friend down. We made fun of it and the goth looking Good Charlotte wish-we-were’s hauling gear out of a station wagon out front.

He’s going to call Nick, see if he’ll come too. When I brought back pictures of him, Mishka thought he was so cute that she couldn’t understand why I came back at all. I never understood, I simply saw a blonde elf.

Books I’ve been reading lately have been pushing me into wanting to write. I’m not used to this desire and I’m certainly uncertain what to do with it, but I have a pleasant rainy evening at the computer in a lovely house with cheery people conversation drifting up the white stairs like an auditory treasure touched with light jazz. I’m tempted to try creative non-fiction, because that’s what I write in my dwindling use paper journal. (The pen cannot keep pace with the keys and so is used on transit only, leaving me with practically illegible pages as a matter of course). I’m stuck not knowing what parts of my day to press to the white light of the digital page, which colours compress well, which conversations take well to being dialogue.

I’ve never talked about writing with anyone before, let alone anyone who considered themselves a writer, before Saturday night with Merilee. Processes have started in my head, the realization that maybe I might have a chance to make something, create something, even if it is not the holy awe fiction my hands crave to pour out like light. Barring that, when headlines are Vatican claims to millions, “Condoms don’t stop AIDS” it behooves me to share, to point anyone I can at this. Communication can solve things, can render ineducation inoperable. Is that why I have this thing? Every time I explain why I keep a journal to those who don’t have one, I smooth my heavy skirts and come back to my line about how the dissemination of information is sexy. Then I look up and explain heatedly that this is where my friends are, where it’s possible to meet people not profiles. I have no soap opera on my flist, I have photographers, writers, university professors, and the occasional cross-dressing scientist. I have tried to find the blogs they complain about and in spite of the Random option, I’ve never found one. Instead I find automata who writes down her life in Juneau so poignantly that I want to spend time in old yellow-glass-over-the-lights kind of bars to track down these people she meets every day or quitevolatile who captures still frame moments of scintillating pretty and introduces us to her friend who did the cover shots for Rasputina‘s latest album. I wouldn’t be in Toronto now if it weren’t for these people. I wouldn’t be as well educated or this likely to meet splendid people.

(Hah, there, perhaps I’ve hit on it. Livejournal infers luck upon the user).

ridiculous truth thought # 1703:

post-modern relationships are the new black and the new irony

I’d forgotten what this city does to me, how I throw out my arms in supplication over and over and smile to the wind. Being here is weight removed, a wooden trap burned away. Warren‘s leaving today as Montilee and her love puppet Doug already have done, (darling Phil Jimenez left Sunday too), and I’m thinking I’m going to follow suit. Hit the train station, add parity. It’s going to hurt to leave. I love sitting backward on the streetcar, the wide expanse of windows giving me a continuous flowing view. I feel like I’m flying there, like I’m in an airplane, gravity a hand large enough to cradle me. It was comforting today to walk up Yonge street to College and touch buildings with my eyes as I passed, look up and see the place where I first learned to smile. I needed it. If it had been Vancouver, something might have broken.

I smile now, thinking of my weekend, of the social strangeness that I helped birth. Warren collects interesting people and I’ve been discovering that when we get together, we are slightly unstoppable. Montilee and Doug and I decided to ambush him yesterday outside the comicon, having no reason to go in again past the tall man with the cane, but when we collected we decided that, well, we were going to break in because that was more fun. From that point on, we were ninjas. Around the side we stalked, perfect timing giving us illegal access in. Doors were opened, left opened, security had its back turned. We were naughty children until we found out that as we were walking through vast empty halls, he had crept out the front, escaping the nerds. It’s hailing again. Then I turned coat and became professional folk, demanding the address of the Guest of Honour. Not only did they spill the hotel, they also sent us to the front to ask location and directions with no questions asked. “Of course, that’s where most of our guests have been staying. Are you driving?” I was impressed with the efficiency of our whole situation and amused that a random girl with purple hair and a top-hat could waltz all over them without a blink. If it had been my hotel, I might have been a bit nervous. As it was, we cackled in the car before calling him down.