Month: December 2005

Longbaugh: You know what I’m gonna tell God when I see him? I’m gonna tell him I was framed.

I can’t turn my back on you for a minute. I’m in from the cold, inspired by darling gunn to fix my dye, so wandering on-line while waiting for all the coloured goo to set. I look and it’s like Warren wrote the news on an especially bitter-hate-world sort of day.

Australia’s on a second night of Race Riots.

The United States, (as insidiouswanker points out), “always so fond of criticizing China for human rights transgressions, just keeps on running with that human rights abuse.” As an aside to that, The United States now ranks behind South Africa in civil rights. (for counter-point: A stylish music clip setting to get the vote message across to South Africans.)

All in the same month, a cram school teacher murdered a twelve year-old student, a Peruvian killed a 7 year-old and left her body in a cardboard box, another 7 year-old was stabbed to death in Ibaraki, and a high school girl was murdered by a fellow student because he thought she was “going cold” on him.

As if to top it, the State of California has just executed a man nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

What the hell people? Do we have to come over there and fuck-start your heads? Make where you live a better place to be, already.
Spread this link around. This one right here.

(my suitcase in my best friend)


super sexe
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Architecture to stretch out in without scraping my fingers on roughly green glass walls. There are no mountains to hem people in here, no ocean to swallow their gaze completely to the exclusion of culture. I blend in. In Vancouver, I stand out in the street as something odd to look at. It’s like a weight lifted, all those people looking elsewhere. I don’t feel like a bare gallery of this hat, these clothes. Instead, beautiful pieces of public graffiti sprayed onto the brick skin of buildings a century old reach out to me and remove weight from my shoulders.

My trip to Toronto is confirmed: I leave on Monday, Dec 19, at 6.15 on train #69.
I return to Montreal on Friday Dec 23.

I’m living with James at Sherbrooke and St. Laurant. It reminds me of the first time I lived in Toronto, when my apartment was at Queen and Spadina. There’s a similar sense of being exactly in the right place downtown to properly chase dragons. It’s like Sigur Ros is playing underneath every creaking step I take on snow, lending me magic and grandeur. Tkch, tkch, tkch. Everything is dusted white. I don’t pad around here. It’s impossible. My feet are encased in big clunky shoes. My feet are clumsy. My feet are walking somewhere they’ve never been. Every curb is a cliff leading down to some improbable country where I’m glad I don’t know the language.

Yesterday, like the day before, I walked for hours. I haven’t done anything yet, but I’ve seen.

I’ve got salt in my eyelashes

There are plumbers here. They’ve been taking a quiet forever of time to fix a little leak we found in the kitchen last night. I don’t speak french, so everything they do has been like a pantomime. Over exaggerated explanations of what they’re doing every step. Wiping up water like sins, tightening screws. I don’t care. Just torture the pipes until they stop, alright? I keep nodding okay and trying to get them to ignore me and get on with it. My head still aches as sharp as a judas kiss, I don’t want to have to pay attention. I want to turn the shower on as hot as my skin can take and stand in it for a thousand heartbeats, then find my way to wherever Michel is hiding in the streets of this gloriously chilly city.

I keep checking my fickle in-box, hoping for some distraction past this waiting. I suppose I could say Screw It and have my shower in spite of them, but I feel that would be awkward. I don’t like the idea of hiding damply away from strangers on the other side of a thin apartment door. I would rather jump the queue and have some privacy.

Ah, and there they leave. What a relief.

Red Cross picks a new, neutral, symbol: the red crystal.

Now my hair tastes like towel fluff.

saint street ell


read straight
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

We walked four hours, returned, and subjected ourselves and Michel to Guitar Wolf. My head is splitting, the result of a nasty accident between it and the fridge door. An explosively loud japanese rock god movie might not have been the most wise decision. Over my shoulder, James is in his bedroom reading a book I cannot see. Tomorrow he goes to work early and I am left alone in the city.

Tomorrow.

I will spend time discovering the schedules required between here and Toronto. (I promise, these words are a rudder for you as much as me.) The train takes five hours. Ryan North tells us that the Secret Swing is gone, torn from the chains, but I still want to go. I suspect I will leave early Tuesday morning. Jessie will be meeting me there, she flies to Halifax Wednesday evening, and I have a holiday present for Katie that still needs to be wrapped. (Darren has yet to get back to me.)

My eyes feel as if they have cracked.

beautiful like it’s going to break me


Jhayne
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

The cab driver, a black shadow in a dark cab, asked us where we wanted to go, then turned on house music so loud that the seats reverberated with the bass. “Iz thise alright?” Perfect.

We’d walked to far, my sense of direction ignored for James‘ right of way. He lives here. That way is North. There is snow on the ground, dry powder piles of it that shine into crystal when I throw them in the air. When I laugh, it’s with a new voice. I’m like a child. I love this place. How in every direction, there are people.

There was no grand entrance. They were late, as I knew they would be. Flight times, arrivals. Different than what actually happened. I sat and shared an anemic sandwich with a boy who didn’t speak any english. I liked his clothing, military pants, a coat with antique clasps, a fall coloured tuque. He liked my hat full of feathers. I put it on his head and he smiled. He was gone very quickly, so I left my luggage within sight and went outside and threw snowballs at taxicabs. The drivers liked me. They waved and kept driving. One of them offered to take me for free, but I had no address.

Gladness. Finally meeting Michel, finally being somewhere I don’t know the language, finally having to fend for a little of nothing with people. I was handed a leather satchel. I’m not sure I’d ever handled an object that was ever so clearly a satchel before. We talked about nothing, catching up, explaining computer problems, where in town the chinese food is, how to find, how to, how are you?

We went to a party. Games industry, half of it. Someone from work, his wife’s friends, she said. The women, I don’t know to talk to. They nodded and smiled and pretended they knew what I meant when I said, “Yes, but what about?” In the livingroom, we played games. Hold this, pretend it’s a guitar, now rock. Long convoluted streams of referenced consciousness. Michel left early. We’ve come home closer to three in the morning.

It’s not cold like everyone’s been saying it is. It’s warm here, the chill is a soft thing that covers the city like an expensively sugared blanket.

No one can stop me from claiming what I’ve fought for but me.


Eolo Perfido – voyage
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Adventures from the Technology Underground Catapults, Pulsejets, Rail Guns, Flamethrowers, Tesla Coils, Air Cannons, and the Garage Warriors Who Love Them.

The world has left me by myself this evening. My brain is stumbling, wanting to be placed in the hands of someone warm who would curl up with me, knot their hands with mine and drowse into grounding sleep. I feel so incredibly detached, as if I were to know the trick of it, I could lift up my body and float into the ice-cream cold sky. The wind would be unbelievable, the chill worse than a bad piano recital. I don’t want that tonight. I want to murmur, “where are you going?” on the edge of sleep and have someone reach over and comfort me. It’s becoming a stretch into years, that feeling. I’m so bad living in only half marriages. It’s like a sickness, this not having certainty. I enjoy the pauses, but I need something stable. It took so many years of clawing back into an emotional world that I feel as if I’m squandering when I’m trying to be satisfied with small print contracts.

I’ve been mentioning in conversation lately my traveling approximation of childhood. I’ve clarified there was trauma. I was a girl, they were an older boy. My mother was young, my father a violent man. I’ve almost shown the carried scars on my body, graveyards of happy memories I never got to have, but somehow, it just wasn’t the time. In a very strong way they don’t matter. To my mind, I didn’t properly begin until I was seventeen. Before that I was running around on automatic, a seed in a field that never got any water. There were no genuine feelings, only faked approximations because if I didn’t keep up with people, they began to let on that I was too much of a problem. What I want to explain somehow is that past all the months of living in the back of a truck, all those accumulated years in hotel rooms and blank transitory hallways, I can forgive myself for leaving the world alone when I was younger, but not any longer. What I’ve finally gathered is too precious. See? I hold out these hands in spite of everyone. It’s simple. Interaction is the way to stand in front of time and take the force of the blow.

Holy Tango of Literature “What if poets and playwrights wrote works whose titles were anagrams of their names?”.

I’m living close to the line right now. I’m got less than a hundred dollars to live off until I find myself employment, and I get back on the twenty-fourth. It was a matter of keeping my job or going to Montreal. To me there was no question. With the little I was making, there was no feasible way to Save Against A Good Time. Damn the basic idiocy of leaving with as little as I do. If I’m going to go, it’s going to be now. If nothing else, the cold will be a deterrent against staying.

I haven’t found anyone who’s willing to take my ferret and I only have one day left. It’s kind of Ryan to try and make it back here every day to top up his food and water, but I’m not sure I can rely on him to remember. Are there any volunteers in the audience? He’s very sweet and won’t hide anything in a place impossible to find. There’s an issue with him getting into dangerously exciting places like Beneath The Fridge and you’ll have to get used to checking under things before you sit on them, but overall, he’s really quite easy to take care of. Food, water, a twice a week sink bath with dishsoap or shampoo, and he’ll sleep with you at night if you let him, especially if there’s a draught.

The PostSecret Book A hardcover with 288 pages, many of the postcard images inside have never been seen before.

I’ll be there in spirit


fingerprint
Originally uploaded
by hakkenkrakish.

An Evening With Three of Canada’s Most Celebrated Spoken Word Artists

Ivan E. Coyote
Richard Van Camp
Shane Koyczan

Monday, December 12th, 2005

Cafe Deux Soleils
2096 Commercial Drive
door @ 8pm / show @ 9pm
$7-10 sliding scale

The show will also include a fifty fifty draw and mystery bachelor auction.

All proceeds will be used to offset the damage done by the burglary of Mr. Koyczan’s home.


I’m going to be away for this, but someone simply has to tell me how the mystery auction goes. It’s essential for my well being.

my mother doesn’t read my journal often, saying instead that it feels “too much like prying”

One day I will see my mother in the mirror shrieking through the mask of my father. All of it will still be my face. I can feel it. It’s part of growing up. My hands will look like a drag queen’s, loaded down with silver rings and slightly too big for my wrists. I will touch my skin and try to remember what it looked like before freckles, when it felt like softly licked flower petals.

I kind of like that.

It would be nice to have someone to gently walk with on that potentially painful day. There would be sweet balm in looking away from the framed silver to the honey eyes of someone who never knew my parents when they were young, but remembered me. I already find her gestures hiding inside of some of mine. Instead of worry, I think of memetics, and I ponder how ancient this particular arc of form might be, passed from daughter and son to yet another generation again. How many movement phrases are from my great-grandmother, my great-great-grandfather? I tilt my head in conversation, trying to pretend that I’m not as shy about being silly as I am. I look up under my glasses feeling like a shadow. What parts are from other people? I can casually recognize every ex-lover who left a fingerprint in the evolution of how my muscles drape my bones, but how I do see the first woman who raised her eyebrows in disbelief the way my family does? How much of my mind is echoes? Long circles spiraling outward from what I’ve read and who I’ve seen.

I have this joke: “Yes and then we all wake up to be butterflies.”

It makes me think of Steppenwolf, “TONIGHT AT THE MAGIC THEATER. FOR MADMEN ONLY. PRICE OF ADMITTANCE YOUR MIND. NOT FOR EVERYBODY.”

I don’t seem to know anyone anymore who’s read the book or even seen the movie. Sweet Hermine, sweet Marie, whores just as afraid of death as he is. Kill me, they say as he says, I am going to throw myself off this bridge. They’re shadows of who they would rather be, trapped in feeling empty because their lives fell short of their expectations. It resonated with me the first time I read it, (at age thirteen? fourteen?), the same way I decided that Henry Miller should only be read by people past thirty. There’s such a sense of being drunk on failure, reveling as a disaster of loss, that children should be told to wait. I knew then that I didn’t want to grow up to be these people. I know now. The tricky part is noticing the doors out when they pass by, knowing that to grasp the handle is not to be plunged into the dark but let out into the light. It’s not freedom I want, but liberty.

there is no higher ground

Does anyone knows where to find a copy of Useless by Kruder & Dorfmeister? I’d be happy for any of their music. What Do You Want Me To Say? by Dismemberment would be good too. I’m running out of downloaded music I like, and Pandora, though useful, runs itself into the ground when left alone too long. I set it to play Lamb and when I came back from a shower it had decided TATU would be a good idea. That I have no iTunes account merely adds to that particular annoyance. When I find enjoyable new music, I have no access to it.

  • Anti-teenager sound weapon.

    Day by day I have nothing planned. There’s a gentle tick tick tick in the back of my head. I’ll be gone in two days and I’m still uncertain what I’m doing. My house is cleaner, my room tidied, but my suitcase is sitting like a guilty house-pet on my bed, mouth open and half empty. I expected a call from Ray this morning, but the phone’s rung once and it wasn’t for me. Nicole tells me I have to face down a mall somewhere. Living in Vancouver doesn’t prepare a body for anything cold that doesn’t come out of a gelati parlour. I mostly have slim pieces of tie-on velvet and little black t-shirts with subtle line drawings of aliens on them. Nothing ready for snow, except for my scarf, and honestly, I’m not sure how many times I can pack that.

    Speaking of aliens, darling theramina posted this link to a video of a contortionist woman with especially extraordinary flexibility that is worth watching if only for the reminder that humans are capable of the weirdest things.

    Part of my shopping dread stems from the time of year I happen to be doing this in. There’s christmas lights in every display window and piped in “holiday favourites” in every store. Fake plastic trees that grab at nothing, offering hope only to little kids and people with real families. (And how many of those have secrets tucked away in sad apartments the other side of town?) I used to make stockings out of silk organza and taffeta edged with rhinestones as an attempt to fight against all the tacky red fake fur and gummy white fluff. This season though, like last year, I should be lucky to find a moment of respite in the places I plan on going to. I’ve no weapons against the overwhelming false cheer. All those beautifully wrapped boxes are empty.

  • A NOLA-area mall’s Katrina-themed holiday display has been gaining coverage.

    Nick, the regular godsend he is, has volunteered to take me down to Army & Navy today. He’s a heavy snow boarding enthusiast, so I’m going to let myself fall into his hands as if in a trust exercise. Is anyone else willing to dive into shopping hell with me? I don’t know where yet. The rare times I go shopping, I do it on The Drive. Someone suggested Metrotown, (Why don’t they ever name these places interestingly? I’d rather spend time somewhere called the virgin-whore complex.), which sounds pretty evil. Unless there’s a store marked WARM SOCKS & SWEATERS ETC, I suspect I’m going to be unsuccessful alone.