Month: September 2005

I shan’t admit


091705-021
Originally uploaded by aeillill.

My suppositions were correct, the power supply had popped, and now we’ve got my machine plugged into Andrew‘s. We’re crowded on his bed, clearing big chunks of tasty media off my hard-drive onto various sized discs. When James left me his machine, he left it filled to the brink with wonderful films and brilliant programs. There is almost nothing it isn’t capable of, if I had the skills to take advantage of it or or if it had a damned power supply. Ah well. Tomorrow such problems will be fixed. I have breakfast in the morning with Matthew, which will lead into our mutual appointment with Sarah and drop me off at the lunch reservations I made for my mother‘s birthday.

He tells me he loves me when I say goodbye on the phone. There has never been a voice so sad as mine in my heart when I cradle the reciever back in its plastic bed. I don’t say it back, what need? I am branching, my arms boughs, my fingers as twigs. Someone has offered to teach me to float glass like air in my palms, like dreams. I want to. These lips are remembering his eyes and hair. I feel my Saturday as a wondrous thing. The Party Not Starring Peter Sellers was exquisite. The bit with Chris, at least, he is magic incarnate, and Crystal does things with two sets of tassels that defy the imagination. I won a dance contest while in a corset, though I will never attempt such a thing again. I felt like dying for fifteen minutes after. The rest of it was fairly basic, but enjoyable nonetheless. I reacquainted myself with lost theatre people, Terry, Jacques, darling Chris, and I finally met Bill’s wife ma’am. I touched her stomach where his child is brewing. I saw how he looked at her, I’d forgotten. I can feel his face in my expressions again. When he swung down from his perch, I had to squash my urges to go and hug him, instead I left my smile intact and tried to not crowd him. When I was downstairs in the hall, a staff member asked what I came for. I joked, “To see the show, of course, and to discomfit my ex.”

We laughed, but I’m so sorry to say that it’s what happened. I miss his muppet gestures. In my recent cleaning of my room, I found a picture of him from one of our earlier anniversaries. There’s flowers in his hair and ‘I love you‘ written in chocolate on his chest. The rest of it, I dare not say in public, but needless to say, it was rather touching. I’d put up blue lights on the wall over the bed in the shape of a giant heart. It stayed up for months, though every time we had sex, we would tear part of it down.

I found Vancouver’s secret burlesque bar, Saturday. It’s a room fifteen feet wide, and as long as the block is wide. The second floor is a golden balcony overlooking the dancefloor, and instead of a disco ball, there’s a silver merry-go-round horse studded with mirrors. I fell instantly in love. Terry and Ryan and I arrived just as the very last of the burlesque ended, (two minutes of shadows having sex), and soon set up camp upstairs. Terry is especially brilliant, as he is one of those most precious people who continues to be astutely brilliant when proceeding to be drunk. We leaned over the balustrade and shouted communist political slogans at appropriate moments in between dancing ironically and splashing the people below with ice-water and gin and tonic. Within half an hours, I collected an entire stag party, (with phone-numbers), and commandeered a few of them into affixing a fan to a table for me to have a private dance-floor on the balcony. I felt, finally, like I was having the sort of evening that silver_notebook regularly inspires my jealousy with.

my ex is in the show tonight, maybe I’ll get to meet his wife.

My computer snapped yesterday, a nasty electrical crack that tells of either a power source or a motherboard. The acrid scent resulting leans me toward thinking it was a power source failure. I suspect that my power bar doesn’t have the surge protector I assumed it did and the fridge turned on at an inopportune time. I live in an old building. Currently I’m thefting minutes on my roommate’s computer until I can get it fixed. It’s a highly unreliable way to stay in contact, but feel free to continue sending letters, I will eventually get them, though I won’t be reading my flist at all. Also, all of my phone-numbers are now inaccessible. You have to leave your number when you call, else I have no way of getting ahold of you unless Andrew has your number in his phone.

I plan on sending Ryan out today, in fact, to see what can be done about fixing my quiet machine. I can only twitch on without it for so long without a base madness setting in. Today after work, the distraction is to the THE PARTY NOT STARRING PETER SELLERS, the 10 o’clock showing.

I wanted to sleep before I went to work, but I couldn’t get my eyes to stay closed

I was alone since the day the power went out. Mark left me, went to the city to find out what was happening. The radio had said something about war and we were worried. He was supposed to be back in five days. Terry visited on the third day, dropped by with a treat of fresh coffee. Kind of him in such hideous weather. That was the day the storm began in earnest. That was a two hour hike from his place in four foot snow with barely any visibility, something I wouldn’t dare alone. It was too cold. Too dangerous. The forest was ice and the sky above an inviolate gray. I kept the house warm with wood that Mark left. There was no shortage. It was an antique thing, our stove. I loved it. I could burn kindling for a month and not run out. The fire lit the house with an orange gold that made the walls glow like pictures I’ve seen of churches.

I never have any idea what I’m going to write down when I sit down at my keyboard. I don’t make notes in my head, except in jest, “Dear LiveJournal, today Sophie tore my clothes off while we were pretending to be porn lesbians on the trampoline. I’m not sure how to mend the skirt, it may actually be ruined.”

The man of her dreams was slightly taller than the fellow standing in front of her in the grocery store line-up, but she thought, “Yeah, I could take that one home.” Her glossy beauty magazines gave her a litany of interesting things that never happened to her and she was beginning to notice. Hauling her white plastic bags out to her car, she realized that there had to be a change. She sat behind the steering wheel, staring off into space, unable to move, unable to decide what to do next.

I wonder occasionally why I do this. What impulse it is that tells me that words are piling up inside my head, pestering me, when there’s hardly anything with form, anything with any foreseeable purpose. When I’m asked, I say I use this place for networking, for spreading the word, for collecting interesting everything, but half of what I put here has nothing to do with any of that, I’m sure.

Weighing his options, that’s what he was doing, narrating silently a litany of why he should go any direction. He was twelve and running away for the sixth time that year. It was June. This time it was because he caught himself being condescending the same way his teacher used to be. His glance fell on a cloud floating above him and for a moment he tried to imagine what he would look like from the cloud’s point of view. A tiny speck, he decided, a blue one, because of his torn jeans and baseball shirt. A plane went by, drawing a pale white line behind it on its way to Indiana. “I’ll follow that”.

bustedwonder made a sketch of one of my favourite photographs


she knows what kissing’s like
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Mice infected with the Bubonic Plague are missing.

Sitting on the floor felt like a miniature picnic. Instead of a blanket, I had a book. Instead of a park, I had a closet-room full of costumes. Raising my eyes from the page to fetch my grapes, my head brushed the petticoats of a dozen frnech maids waiting on hangers, my hand grazed the hems of a dozen schoolgirl outfits. Next to me was a box of ballgags and next to that was one of garterbelts. My back leaned against a cheap plastic mirror and I faced a drawerchest full of stockings in crunchy plastic packages. It’s quiet there, the soppy unimaginative music can’t find me in among the skimpy pieces of cheap fabric. I didn’t think it was possible to suck the soul from a Phil Collings song. Work had been dragging, the clock, I swear, occasionally ticking backward. Customers were few and young and silly, boys laughing nervously and winding up the annoying hopping penis with feet.

Light bulb malfunction at school sends 18 to hospital with radiation burns.

Later was better, the day got it’s feet under it and began to stride. I had a pleasant interlude with a friend of mine from SFU, teaching him how to use a paddle in such a way to leave marks before he remembered who I was, and Aiden snuck in breifly to ask me to dinner while my manager was vaccuming the back. I learned how to properly mark costumes down as restocked, something that had been baffling me, as every employee possible had told me to do it differently, a practice rumoured to be common in retail that I had never encountered before and hope to avoid in future. I’m trying to grasp the essentials of shop-front politics, but so far I have only, “Don’t volunteer any information that doesn’t sell something.” which doesn’t seem incredibly helpful.

A blind man is accused of raping his own guide dog.

As if counterpoint to the early afternoon, dinner was splendid. I let myself out at nine to find Ryan and Aiden waiting out front looking incongruous, like a foppish rentboy and his thug pimp or rough and tumble boyfriend, and we walked up Davie to Denman with intent to go to Guu, a japanese pub known for it’s sincerely authentic food and drink. Our plans was thwarted, however, by my fish sensitivity, the air thick enough with it to set me leaning against the outside, choking to breathe, after only stepping foot in the door. It was a pity, the place looked interesting, the waiters shouting orders to the kitchen and the bar crowded by chattering people sipping odd looking beverages. However, we ended up at Moxies, who, before we left, allowed us to order a side dish of dry ice, so I suspect we had far more fun than anything that strange alcohol might have offered.

A Black Velvet Art Flickr Pool.

meme from riotlounge: If you have anything to say to the person who posts this, say it to them. If you love them, tell them. If you hate them, tell them. Whatever you have to say to this person, even if its something you’re having trouble saying, if the person posts this entry, say it to them. You may never get a chance to, so just do it. Warning: Do not post this in your journal unless you really want people to do it. I expect good things but I expect bad things as well, and that is something you have to take into consideration. Not all of what you hear will be good. Comments will be screened if I figure out how. All comments are screened.

My ferret tried to run away last night. We think he fell off the balcony.

There are days when I want red lipstick. Berry flavour Rita Hayworth silent sex star glimmering red. That perfect moue of a Casablanca kiss red, the disney approximation of vamp that haunts the dreams of old executives who remember the day the princess died. Marylin never wore this red, it’s simply not for blonde’s. This red is for the ghosts of famous prostitutes, it’s for the high heeled goddesses who walk the earth and knock over preconceived perceptions with a slight flick of their tongue. It’s for I’m Leaving You written on that one spectacular mirror that was such a find at the flea market, for that smudge on the collar that tells the other woman that you’re better than them. Deep passionate blood red. The red of fingernails in an 80’s movie, a mixture of the eyes wide shut blowjob of the pretty woman and the betrayal of modern culture burning bras.

Today isn’t one of those days, but yesterday might have been. I wanted to swim in eyes yesterday. Breathe in that comforting honey warmth that emanates from the sweetest of arsenic hearts and melts all my bones. Instead at home there’s cinnamon. A slender figure of awkward elegance, waiting to find my hand. I worry, but not very much. Lately I’ve been too tired, weary on a starvation level. Not enough calories to keep up with myself. My joints creak and snap when I move, and my head is in continual search for a pillow.

Sunday : working 2 – 5pm
Monday : working 5 – 8pm, Korean movie night
Tuesday :
Wednesday:
Thursday : working 2 – 9pm
Friday : working 3 – 9pm
Saturday : working 2 – 8pm

mocking my taste in music

As a pleasant lead up to our local production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead that Beth is organizing, I’ve found Hamlet as a text based adventure game:

It’s so unfair! You’re in trouble again, just because you called your uncle – or rather, your new stepfather, Claudius – a usurping git. It’s true, though. Your real dad was SO much better than that guy. Too bad he was found mysteriously dead in the orchard a couple of weeks back. Anyway, your mother (who was, incidentally, looking quite something today in a sparse leather number, er…) sent you to your room, and here you are.

Bedroom
You are in your luxurious palatial boudoir, all of ten feet square. There is a four-poster bed, and not much else. A portrait hangs on the wall. An exit leads north.

Also found on the internet today, Soviet space monkey pants for sale on eBay and a gallery of vintage toy rayguns, (I remember playing with number 70 once. The frontispiece was that strange dry metal that reminds me of badly melted tin.). The news is less futurist and more dystopian. In addition to the unrelenting Katrina clusterfuck, there’s loyalist riots in Belfast and Typhoon Khanun flattened 20,000 houses, and destroyed large swathes of crops, industrial units and infrastructure in Zhejiang province. This puts my wake-up “we’re going to cut off your electricity” phone-call in a bit of perspective. I may be too broke for reliable groceries, but at least I’m not swimming to the store.

However, if I had a dime to spare, I would support Planned Parenthood, Philadelphia, in a heartbeat. They’ve come up with a rather choice way to deal with protesters called Pledge-a-Picket. (Click on the link to take part.)

Every time protesters gather outside of our Locust Street health center, our patients face verbal attacks from them. They see graphic signs meant to confuse and intimidate. They are sometimes blocked from entering the building and occasionally they are videotaped. They are offered anti-choice propaganda and free rides to the closest “crisis pregnancy center.”

Staff and volunteers are also seen as targets. We are all called murderers, are lectured to about committing sins, and are told we will pay the “ultimate price” for our actions.

You can stand with others in the community against these acts of intimidation and harassment.

Here’s how it works: You decide on the amount you would like to pledge for each protester (minimum 10 cents). When protesters show up on our sidewalks, Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania will count and record their number each day from October 1 through November 30, 2005. We will place a sign outside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP. At the end of the two-month campaign, we will send you an update on protest activities and a pledge reminder.


does it start with a key?


Art Direction by Tom Hingston
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

There used to be a story. It was sweeping like the plains I used to drive across with my musician parents. My father would let me steer on the highway because it was so flat. The story was the road, that black line that pointed to a distance I’d never seen before. Yellow dots, cut here. Turn signals and red lights on the tail end of cars clicking their heels together three times. Windshield wipers in time with the rain. I read a lot of books, there in the back of the truck. There were never three seat-belts. When we were pulled over, I would hide. The police thought my mother was interesting for riding a motorcycle. They thought my father was charming and always looked tired. It was the driving. We were always driving.

Refrain, as a verb, asks for a pause, a holding back of intention. He was to call me today. I rang at one thirty, the day has filled up. Tomorrow, that little orange haired orphan doesn’t love you anymore. She grew up in the world of the sugar daddy. His milk is sweeter because he says he loves her and the diamonds on her wrist glitter to blind the eyes. This is the jazz refrain, that impulse to lie on top of the theme with improvisation. There used to be a story, the repetition inviolable. That’s what the word means. Hold one self back, don’t think impure thoughts. Tell the focus to go fuck itself, tell the world that everything is okay with a plastic smile glued to your lips. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.

The easy listening station at work is killing me. I find myself cringing inwardly, holding the product tags like talismans and thinking, “Anything can be endured for two hours. Anything.” Customers are a welcome distraction. They ask questions and I try my best to answer them. Try to be matter of fact about the word anal without the word retentive. My product knowledge is minimal. I don’t have any. When I listen to the other girls, that’s what everyone calls them, the other girls, no matter there’s only three of us who work in the shop and one of them’s the manager, I feel like I’m trying to learn something utterly foreign. The language they speak isn’t mine. This isn’t greek unless that’s what you’re into. The china brush is a desensitizing liquid one paints onto the underside of the head of the penis to sustain erection longer and preclude ejaculation and Leather Cleaner isn’t.

This weekend was your last chance to conceive if you want your baby to be born on 6/6/6.

I knew I went down with the ship when he turned to me with a radiant smile and said, “I’m happy.”

When his eyes looked at me and the sun caved in like a cathedral.

I wanted to say, “when you let your hair fall down, rapunzel cried.”

Instead I turned and walked away, beginning to choke when his hand touched my arm.

I missed posting on September 11th, which is likely for the best, considering how dour my humour has been today. Now it is September the twelfth, and Ryan’s birthday. I found him a present in my room while I was sorting today. I’m minimizing, paring down my possessions as best I can. I want to be down to one box of miscellany, one of books, a computer, a lava lamp, and my mouse with wings by the next month. The furniture will be dealt with according to piece when the time comes. I want out of here. I’ll post what I find that can be given away. Today I threw out a colouring book from when I was young enough to have a sister still, (I was five, she was four, that story may still end with I never saw her again), and the top half of a musical china clown my father gave me when I entered kindergarten. It used to be that you would wind it and it would play The Lovers Song, sort of an Italian answer to Greensleeves.

My city is burning. It smells a little like every neighbor I have is smoking a very chemically treated marijuana outside my window, and ash is drifting down from the sky. At first we thought it was a chemical accident, a nasty edged flame burning plastics somewhere by the water, but the internet told us otherwise. Burns Bog has caught on fire. The last time, almost ten years ago, Vancouver was blanketed in ash for two days. The methane-rich peat can smoulder underground almost indefinitely. This is especially nasty, as that’s one of our most protected pieces of wild preserve. It’s rather essential to our local environment. For one, it’s where almost all of our crows live. They commute every morning to scatter over the city and gather every evening to fly back in an immense trail of flapping black. They’re beautiful.

string them together

Adrian’s finally a father. Send tentative moments of nervous congratulation over to him and A.J. They’re braver than the rest of us. When Adrian first informed me at SinCity, almost six months ago, I actually began to fall and he had to catch me. Apparently that was the most popular response.

It’s Ryan‘s birthday on Monday. I had mixed up the date, thinking it was to be on Sunday, September 11th re-wiring my brain for importance. I thought about having party for the Fallen Towers, a wake for the American Empire. Very antique commiserations, a very old world celebration. Fancy dress, champagne glasses we smash in the street, a cake in the shape of a flaming airplane. A toast! Oh land of freedom, we barely had a chance to say that we’re sorry for letting you become what you did.

Out in the real world, the California Assembly has become the first state legislature in the US to pass a bill endorsing gay marriages and pictures of Katrina are finally coming on-line. Someone accused me of harping on about New Orleans the other day, claiming that I was blowing the disaster out of proportion. I have to wonder where they’re getting thier news, because I don’t think I’ve an imagination that could overstate how badly the response was handled, (ex. Hosptial closed for President visit.), even down to the simplest things:“The good news: If you’ve survived Hurricane Katrina, the government will let you register for help online. The bad news: But only if the computer you’re using is running Windows.“

transmigrant‘s been posting some fabulous links on the topic, like this short clip available for download.

—

Carpark North has a video that sequels Human. They’re the same children who work such miracle wonders as love, only a year later. They seem so much older, the wisdom has changed into something far lonelier. I don’t like it as much, I feel it lacks the wonder that makes the first one gasp, but it’s still interesting to see. Click on Media, then Video, to watch them. Human is simply divine. Andrew found a page of films by the same director on Videos.Antville, a multiblog list where people join and post links to “cool” music videos.

As a nice segue, I’ve discovered Sigur Ros‘s new album, Takk, is available for a listen on MySpace here.

—

Once I thought the world turned without me. I stood still in a small bubble that was coated with my name and no one ever saw me. Now I’m recognized on the street so regularly that my friends don’t act surprised anymore. Last night after work, a tall boy approached us at a bus-stop. “I’m a struggling artist, I’ve just released my first CD.” A familiar refrain, the voice of an indie kid who might not be any good, and we don’t have any money, sorry. Mid sentence he stops, “Are you Jhayne?” Ryan laughed and part of me cursed for not knowing who he was. “We went to elementary school together. My name’s Kyle!”

I blink, this is too surreal. My memories of him are as sharp as lonely knives, I used to watch him to try and figure out how he laughed in such a world. He wore a red t-shirt with a neat band logo on it and won all the racing games in the gravel field. The brightest flame of personality in the entire grade, he’s now unrecognizable. What happened to his smile? Where’s his curly mop of hair? “You were the tallest boy in grade seven. I remember you. You were the only one who danced at our end of year dance.” I told him that I hadn’t any money, but there was an ATM at the end of the block. As we walked, he explained to Ryan how I was the weirdest girl in our entire school. “You read books, well, I suppose you still do, but you were really strange.” It occurred to me that he hasn’t seen me in about a decade but he managed to know who I was. Does that mean anything? There’s a guitar on his back, my eyes passed him over anyway. “Would it be safe to say that you were far more conservative then?” He didn’t have any change, so I bought him peanut butter cups at the 7-11 on the other end of the block, handed him his ten dollars and felt uncomfortably like I was being charitable.

We talked a little more after that and I wished him luck and promised to e-mail him. I’m wondering where this will go, what I will discover about the people who ostracized me when I was twelve. Thinking now, I miss the rare kids who talked to me. I think he’s still in touch with some. Brodie, he mentioned, a boy I knew in highschool who wasn’t that bad. Rather sane, by my accounts. He played Seymour when I played Audrey when we put on little Shop Of Horrors. Our strange plant was a cactus covered in shredded newsprint. Apparently he’s in a band now, the Living. They have gigs sometime. I hope to go.