Month: May 2005

This is the coolest new thing on the internet.

This also is pretty keen.
created by cmart

This is really pretty too. Yum, cultural enrichment.

Wednesday I return.
Harmony Airlines, Flight 213.
Arrival: approximately 10:25 a.m.

edit: Gate B22

People have been asking about meeting me at the Terminal and I have been saying, “Yes, go to it, the more the merrier.” If there’s enough of us, it may end up being a small party at my place and that is always welcome.

Today I feel beaten, like maybe I was in a fight and I lost, like maybe I was caught stealing from the middle eastern marketplace and am only just escaping with my hands, like maybe muscles are to be hung up at night and I’ve ruined mine by sleeping in them. Today I can feel my marrow.

I like how eye contact here does not waver. How it is possible to have leisurely complex conversations with strangers and never get a name or any desire of it. There is an unspoken agreement that we are both nice people, you and I talking, because, after all, don’t we live here? In Vancouver interaction is so rare that simple correspondence can gain depth all out of proportion. “Somebody talked to me on the bus today” is event enough to be mentioned.

Last night I left the house late. It was dark outside and cold, my metal pen singed my fingers when I first drew it from my bag. In retrospect, I suppose I should have taken a moment for dinner first, but at the time it was inconsequential, my day had too many leaps of tension to dream of food. I overshot my stop on the trolley, too busy being pleased by the architecture of the city to pay attention to streets, and was left in a closed neighborhood that reeked of baking sugar. For blocks the air was haunted by sweetness as if I were to turn a corner and find myself facing the largest iced cake in the world. I must have walked almost a mile in my persistence before I found a cross street that would take me south to Queen. At the bus-stop I met a young man, chinese, who had recently visited B.C. He would ask my pronunciation of all the towns he’d been to. “Then we went to Pen- Pendec-” “Penticton.” “Yes, exactly.” We talked mostly of gun laws and politics, how much safer he feels living in Canada from Bellingham, where he went to school. At Queen st I fell into step with another young man, this one interested in fashion design and live music. After him came a bicyclist, then a bouncer on his way to work.

The Drake was a movie set, a glamorous bohemian trendy set full of electronic hip-hop and young beautiful people animatedly chatting on lush velvet furniture. It was like slipping into a welcome bath scented with ornate wallpaper. I couldn’t help belonging. I was waved to five tables on my first circuit of the busy floor, and everyone looked familiar, as if I had known all of them before and would again. I left with regret, wanting to fall in with these people, this place, wanting to dance and find a young man to love me until I left. Someone to sit with who would hold my wrist and let their eyes glow with my name until the cinderella hour. An entirely new impulse, one I don’t think I could explore in Vancouver.

Lot 16 was an entirely different venue, and not the building I had previously thought at all. Instead it was a long dark bar with a small stage set up with a baby grand piano in the back. Only half full, it was obvious at first glance that every single patron knew each-other. They were all friends and they all played music. Roger was there, looking the same, but this was a sleeker man. More experience, still a working musician, but making a better living with it, touring with name bands. He did the Merrit Music Fest last year. Dull globes of light hung on silver ropes and underneath them the bartender splashed bourbon into shot glass after shot glass. It was his birthday, the big three-oh. The night before he had taken over Kensington Market, eighteen bands in a shopping market with fifteen minute sets. We sat by the door and tried to play catch-up until Roger played, getting free drinks and vaulting over the bar to mix them for others when the bartender went up to jam. The music at first was girl with guitar with a little bit of blues and country, nothing unexpected for an open mike night, but when Roger took his turn, everything changed. He takes the guitar and makes me cry with it. There were four of them playing, a light voiced man at the piano, a shaggy taller one at the drums with a bright orange shirt, with Roger and the bartender on guitars. Together they were so adept at weaving back and forth with raw melody, it was almost painful to be present. After he was down, I left, the music too strong for me, the group slightly too close knit to invade without effort. I was too tired for that and too drained. “It’s been a long day,” I said, and I buried my face in his hair goodbye. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and I walked out again into the night.

it’s four a.m. and officially tuesday now*… but it’s still my sunday

this has all been one day?*

*expletives go here

examples:

fuck me ragged

my wretched disaster

cunting hells

and for your elucidation, Cunt is an English term that refers to the human female genitals. It is an old and native English word, replaced after the Norman Conquest, in jargon but not in the common tongue, by the Latin vagina, originally a Roman term meaning “scabbard” or “sheath.”

So sod off.

I’m going to bed.

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.

I love this city. I’ve been taken in by a Master Domme and her Woman. Upon giving me a housekey and showing me my room, I’m informed that I’m “welcome to bring tricks home as long as they’re clean.”

It’s nice to be among family.

These two are the splendid epitome of kindness. I could not have dreamed of better hosts if I had taken an entire spin around the sun to do so. Part of me truly loves them already, as if I would say Please and Could I really? if they asked me to stay. I’m tired now, exhausted really. I can feel it in my muscles where they meet the bone. I need someone’s hands now to lift them up and give them space so the tendons and bruises may breathe.