Month: February 2006

warm cream talkingpillow sweet nothings, whisper.

reflection another eye, inner different colour, stumble-crawl my knees underneath suddenly the bed, fallen the guitar thunk lands hard. the person the mirror your name whatwhispers-he this time-makesyouhappy.hips jugular, kisses, together a soft machine. inblown, beautiful unexpected things, replied. replied, answered, this, you, lightning storms. hand textures silk silk finehair better than sighs don’t remember anything like this before, too fine, too delightful. we never leave this room, ghost, insubstantial, less-now people have met him. eat your name, cling tongue lovely machines, electricity in the air he. hips, eyes, somethingslides, that feeling before the storm, chest blown, ocean, oceanandwaves, standing pressure. searching this life for someone who understands me cliché love story me now here and understandsees where I’m coming from me. laughter, throat, the feeling of growling, purring, you’re not so hard, shift sly, a side aside, that look here, hands with nothing to hold onto but silk and the wall, that’s because you’re fucking crazy.

madness, he says, you bring me madness.

when he is gone, I feel alright about nibbling on the corners of his food at 2 a.m.

Heinrich Kley
Heinrich Kley

A triff trailer mash-up that hurts in only the good ways, Toy Story 2: REQUIEM.
&nbsp &nbsp link thankfully appropriated from Andrew.

Relaxed, she stands at the bus-stop. Watches a man exit backward, pulling a small wire basket full of fake red flowers, wonders briefly what they are for. A book is folded under her left hand. Her right hand has already fumbled in her coat pocket and found her bus-pass. She’s going to be on time for work with fifteen minutes to spare. She’ll open the store early, she decides, instead of waiting.

In her mind are tiny snippets of conversation caught like film stills fighting against a projector. Nothing stays very fixed, it all moves too fast for words to bind. Outside there is blue sky, her eyes blandly track a cloud as it intersects with an airplane contrail. Seizures, that’s what her thinking can be like. Feelings overcoming her body, twisting her lips or her hands into a smile. Remembering when he kissed her, her eyes warmly close and open again. Curious if anyone else is doing the same, she scans the other faces on the bus. No one interesting today. A cluster of yoga clothing imitators, some people going to work, a couple in the back discussing a television series. Someone is reading a paperback novel but the cover looks too glossy, the book looks too thick. It’s an incarnation of the dime-store novel, the summer blockbuster hit parade. Empty calories and too much talk about weapon specifics.

Her key in the new lock turns harshly. In spite of the extra filing when she replaced the lock with the hardware store clerk, there is still something uneven. An expected alarm sounds when she opens the door, a warning keen, piercing but still quiet. Enough to tell the wrong person that they’ve made a mistake. She half trips on a newspaper someone kindly slid under the door earlier in the morning and pulls the CLOSED sign to OPEN. The useless paper and her bag are deposited on the glass topped counter while she wonders why she never seems to do any of these things in the same order. Some mornings the buttons stick on the alarm console and she has to talk to stoic sounding security people on the phone. She smiles nervously when she does it, knowing she doesn’t have the passwords and not sure if she should care.

Heinrich Kley
Heinrich Kley

A combination of coupled enzymes to construct a simple circuit in which enzymatic reactions correspond to logic operations.
&nbsp &nbsp link cruelly wrenched from the bosom of darling Warren.

My housemate, Graham, is away right now, up with his family, clustering around his grandmothers death. He says in his journal that he got to say to her the things he needed to say before she left. I’m glad for that through the commiserative sadness, though I keep a narrow sliver of being unable to relate. I know when my remaining grandmother goes, it will be barely a family affair. My mother and I will stare at the ceiling a bit, covered with the inevitable and distinctive blanket of pondering about immortality that every death brings. My brothers will ask if we’ve inherited anything and we will ask my mothers sister, Reine, who will be far more affected, the one in charge of all the necessary arrangements that accompany a death. She will tell us of something small that may come our way. Tacky jewelry from her shops, maybe, or an inappropriate coffee-table. Then it will be done. If we were the sort for annals, her passing would be the year of nothing in particular. All the known history in her head is either commonplace or inaccessible. Her drop in the sea has no flavour to leave and savor.

I like how Graham talks about his family. They seem to be a unit, a partition of people that all carry more than just a name together.

not what I thought I’d do



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Charity Larson’s put up another lovely page of Busted Wonder.

Hands like sand falling through water, a smile too of something the same. Eyes that scratch the ceiling of shyness, colour storm-skirting the edges of decency. Laughter of coffee, small movements ducking the head away. Laughter of hiding like inside a box of perfectly warped glass. Hanging a shot to dry between the lips, watching wrist to elbow, it’s recalled in an instant, the taste of soft intimacy holding hands with polished copper, the mix of colours, the white cream roses cloudily blooming in clear licorice alcohol. Lightning and thunder, the gravity hand of wind in the basement, part of later, not yet.

Pick up the gift, make the liquid vanish. Magic tricks, sleight of nothing up my sleeve. Everything will be alright. A toast to sitting here, a toast to being alive and smiling.

I joined a gamelan earlier, helped them carry heavy instruments to a waiting truck behind the Museum of Anthropology. I joined a lesbian burlesque troop the day before and scheduled the day I begin my fencing lessons.

Now Mondays are Korean Movie Night, Tuesdays are Gamelan, Wednesday will be Ghost In The Shell until we’re done, Thursday have fencing, and Fridays will be the Funk-Motown night starting March 3th at the Waldorf, (the day a group of us are going to watch NightWatch on opening night, want to come?). Suddenly I’m having to peer around corners to find time for taxidermy. Unexpected, this shift of personal physics. I feel domestic, tamed.

Here’s a trailer for Harry Kim’s still-in-progress Dave Choe documentary.

(((awakening in a tiki ballroom))

Kyle and I crept down the familiar black wood stairs behind the bar, “Want to see where I go when I pull my ghost act?”, and came out into the vast industrial vintage kitchen that dominates a third of the basement. I’m familiar with this place, but in the dark, everything looks different, as if the room is religiously slumbering, waiting for a second coming of a sacred pastry chef.

Exiting the kitchen into the hall, where the bar is, to the left is the entrance to a low thatched ceiling Tiki Banquet room, all low slung chairs piled haphazardly and woven bamboo walls, and to the right is the entrance to the Polynesian Ballroom which, when the lights are on, is dominated by a long colourful mural put up somewhere in the late forties, the sort of thing you tend to only see in movies unless you live in L.A. or San Francisco. However, it being somewhere close to two:thirty in the morning, the place was abandoned. In the dark, the mural is ignored in favour of the elegant farthest wall, made almost entirely of black and white glass.

This is what we walked into, the stained glass our only source of light, transforming the ballroom into a warm cavern of a room, dark as unwashed velvet. It was a movie moment, a cinematic young girl’s dream of where she’d lose her virginity.

We were talking about fathers and how they’re different from dads. How I’d had one of each as time progressed and how both of them were eventually terrible. I settled our things, strawberries, alcohol, his back-pack, three layers of our jackets, on one of the black tables scattered around the room as Kyle went up onto the balcony and fiddled with switches until he’d found us an unassuming light. The green carpet glowed.

My head in his lap, his hand in mine, my eyes slowly closing with exhaustion, we talked about the shattered crystal balls that were our childhoods. How our hell-raising had taken entirely different forms. Mine almost entirely after dark and secretive, away from my mother, his open to the point where his mother had to fight to keep him out of special schools. We swung ridiculously between being serious, out-pouring our personal history of hurts, and laughing at the futility of the human race. We both want to leave this place better than we found it. When the ice-age comes, if we’re not colonizing the stars yet, we’ll be standing on the side, waving flags and rooting for the Earth.

If you call it love, we’ll cut you.

She sang to herself, as she waited, about the death of dreaming trees. She was almost asleep, but she still smiled when she heard him singing in reply from the next room. When he returned, he’d found she’d shifted from lying on the couch to lying on one of the shining black tables scattered around the room. His reaction was delightful to her, an outburst of sweet awe-struck vehemence so gratifying that it occured to her that she might take up lying on chilly tables in dimly lit rooms as a hobby for the rest of her life.

we stayed up late but were nourished by light in the gloom.

)when what hugs stopping earth than silent is
more silent than more than much more is or
total sun oceaning than any this
tear jumping from each most least eye of star

and without was if minus and shall be
immeasurable happenless unnow
shuts more than open could that every tree
or than all life more death begins to grow

end’s ending then these dolls of joy and grief
these recent memories of future dream
these perhaps who have lost their shadows if
which did not do the losing spectres mime

until out of merely not nothing comes
only one snowflake(and we speak our names

e.e. cummings

Not ten minutes ago, I was woken up in the Waldorf Tiki Polynesian Lounge by unfamiliar staff members nervously peering over me. “How did you get in here? Where did you come from?” I answered them with an amazing string of surprised expletives and shook Kyle awake, at which point they sighed with relief. At first they hadn’t seen Kyle, because he’d curled up under all my wool hair, snuggled in like a bunny. All they’d seen were two kids, mysteriously asleep in their hotel, with clothing and miscellany scattered all over the ballroom floor.

My life, on occasion, is surprisingly perfect.

If, by some mystical chance, there were no rumours before, now they shall be flying on the wings of crows and angels, fluttering from mouth to mouth through that hotel as fire and laughter.

Written Thursday, February 24th, 2005: “Take comfort that some of the fear is mutual. We are savage flowers, bleeding at the roots, utterly convincing.”

It’s been a year since Hunter Thompson died.

Bollywood to re-make Fight Club.
The music at work is ingraining my embarrassing penchant for the perfect tawdry pop song even deeper, almost dangerously so. Every day I discover a new happy new content-less Eurovision Song Contest grade techno-track that I’ve never heard before and put it on repeat for half an hour. Around the world, lah lah lah lah lah. I haven’t added Nena to my playlist yet, but it’s getting close. Beware.

It’s getting too late for me to be awake again. I did this yesterday and regretted it. I should go to bed, but now instead I’m writing and vaguely worried that the cursed pigeons might start up before I’m done. I’m swimming in tiny paragraphs, sticky strings of words that don’t lead anywhere I know how to share. There was a study somewhere that showed that people could swim as well in syrup as they could in water. No word as to what kind. I’m thinking in involuntary movements, prompted in response to memories in flickering diorama on the inside of my skull, projected there from old songs. This is where I lived on someone’s couch, this is where I lived in the studio. The next track reminds me of when I had a bed made of an old apple crate. Rough with splinters, I filled it with dollar store pillows and second hand stuffed animals. It took up a third of the room, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t a place I wanted to live, the north shore a place of subtle degradation, it was just what I could afford on my under-the-table job as an unskilled carpenter.

For the few who asked after my week and what’s in it, the plan thus far is as follows: Tuesday night is a local couchsurfers meet-up at Celebrities, Wednesday will be a run of as many episodes of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex as we can stand at Andrew‘s, (yes, you’re reading this, you are invited), then Thursday is Patti‘s Mad Hatters Tea Party and the Midnight Bike Ride that convenes at Grandview Park.

listening to deep forest so as to connect myself with the first link in this entry. it makes me happ


next to city hall
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Strangely, I found myself in a house last night that I used to be intimately familiar with. It’s a small place just off Cambie, an odd little duplex left over from the sixties. Almost ten years ago, the tree out front had bicycles lashed to the length of it. It used to be a party house. If there was a crowd gathered out front, I would just walk in. Being there again was like looking through an incredibly distorted photograph. All the furniture was gone, replaced, different, but the underlying structure remained identical. I remember sweeping things off the tile counter that separates the kitchen and the dining room and using it as a small square bed. I curled with candles in my hands in the little window nook, my bare toes against the old thin glass, offering fire to the smokers congealing on the tiny porch next to it. Now Alec lives there, with his twin brother, gradually filling it with strange mechanical bits of home-made light-up furniture and rich vintage finds gleaned from local alleys.

I met him Friday, at Alicia‘s delightful Anti-Valentines party, and we spent from there until 7:40 this Sunday evening together. If he never talks to me again, I’ll quite understand. However, I found him marvelous company. We stayed up late last night watching Six String Samurai and, honestly, anyone who doesn’t question my sleeping with a knife is probably that much closer to being okay in my books. Thank you Alicia for the goodly gracious idea of inviting him. (Though you’re only half right. He can out-geek me on technicals, but I out-geek him with culture).

Earlier than that, Friday, I was caught being ridiculous at my workplace by someone off the street I vaguely hope will either never see me again or spread the legend farther. See, the computer had been played with by the owner, James, the previous night and something he did had destroyed the sound card drivers. Silence drives me crazy. It was hours before he called me back and I received permission to do a RESTORE on the system. Hence, singing Gorillaz at the top of my lungs, trying to echo off the very back wall, and dancing on top of the counters in a lull between actual bouts of working. In my defense, it happened gradually. First I was simply singing, then louder, then dancing as I put shoes away and filled out little bits of paperwork. Finally I vaulted up and did the deed, shaking booty for the entire walking world to see. We have incredibly large front windows. People think I’m strange, but really, it’s just that I forget what I’m doing.

The year 2005 may have been the warmest year in a century, according to NASA scientists studying temperature data from around the world.

I made a brilliant deal at the club tonight. Nicole and Matt brought me to Sanctuary and by chance we sat next to a friendly stranger. When I first began talking to him, I asked why he wasn’t dancing. When he replied that he’d recently wrecked his ankle, I politely enquired how he’d hurt himself. He clipped a starling while sky-diving, he said. He’d been bringing his seven year old nephew up for a run and had turned on his back to show him what falling through a cloud looked like. Hitting a bird is a one in a thousand chance, he said, in an airplane. Million to one when you’re free-falling.

I was impressed.

More so when I found out that he’s illiterate. “How on earth did that happen to you?” I asked, taken entirely aback. He grew up in Northern Ireland. A bomb blast when he was twelve. “Oh right, you’re the people who leave bullets in your post-office walls.” A quarter of his bones are now made of steel, his right hand is warped, and his skull is almost entirely artificial. He still knows Gaelic, however, as that’s what he’d been taught as a child. Home-schooling, apparently, though he’s lost almost all his mandarin. (go figure?) So I struck a deal. First, before I entirely had a grasp of the bizarre situation, I offered to swap some English for some Gaelic. When he’d filled me in a little more, explaining that it hadn’t been for lack of language programs with incredibly impressive pedigree, I offered something different. He chooses the book and I read to him in exchange for Gaelic lessons.

He stopped mid-thought, struck by that. “I just might, you know. That’s a new one.” I hope he takes it.

I’ve invited him to Korean Movie Night. I drew him a map.

he says I’m trouble exactly like you did. I’m trouble and too good. It’s eerie.

In my dreams I’m climbing. My hands grip wooden railings and the edges of bricks. I pull myself over balconies and stand on the knobs of doors. I brush flakes of paint from my hands onto my pants and look over a small inlet to apartments across the water. There is a light there, blocked by a friend I only know when I’m asleep. I think routes, maps that mean escape and freedom and eluding pursuit. Up, I dream, up and over and that way. I am rescuing myself from the ground.

The graffiti in the washroom reads DO IT BECAUSE IT’S FASHIONABLE? VOMIT! WHY NOT? in thin black permanent marker on the door. Later, for a split second, I think I recognize the hand-writing as I walk by a man sitting fetal on the street, rocking back and forth, holding a sign in the air with an empty paper coffee cup. HIV POSITIVE & HUNGRY, PLEASE GIVE CHANGE. I am wrong, of course, it is merely that they are both messy block letters, both made in staining black marker. I am walking too fast, not fast enough. We miss the light and have to wait. My wallet is thick with coins, but there are none spare. I am poor. The quarters are for laundry, the dimes are for carefully counting out at the check-out counter one by one by one as I try to pay for a bag of oranges. I don’t feel guilty, but I turn my head from him as we stop and talk. I want to block my brother from his line of sight. He is eighteen, but he is still too young.

It’s official now that I’m tangled with a hotel ghost, brass numbers drifting through my blood. There was A Talk last night that mostly involved Kyle apologizing. “Where will you be tonight?” “Vanishing.” It was a portrait of everything dysfunctional between us. Ourselves as hungry children who deny that we’re stealing. He said, “like” and “you know what I mean?” a lot. I nodded into his shoulder and repeatedly asked him “why?”

We’re a gordian knot on the bed. “I’ve got too much to figure out right now.” A train-wreck year. “Let me explain mine.” Every five sentences, we’re laughing a little, he’s unconsciously kissing the top of my head. We tell the right kind of stories. “See, this I can live with. This is really nice.” I say yes. “More is too much. You scare me.” “See me twice a week,” I say. He says he’s not sure.

I believe him implicitly when he says I’m scary. Everyone worth knowing says I’m scary.

The summary is a red flag warning that he’s unreliable company, that he’s not ready for four letter words. I can live with that. “Come back to bed with your dumped non-girlfriend.” He says, “See, you’re scaring me again.” and stops his mouth with mine. My gold lipstick dusts his cheeks and the tip of his nose.

After, he spreads his hands with an expression on his face that I can’t identify. “Where did you come from?” I can’t see him, is he kidding? My glasses are off, I’m too blind. I lean down, spreading wool across his shoulders, my weight on my hands. “What do you mean?” “It’s a good thing, believe me.” I’m grinning. This is the same man I had a water fight with in the bed an hour earlier. The sheets are still damp with beer. He found out where I’m ticklish. “Well, where did you come from?” “Here,” his hands point out, “planet Earth.” I tell him I fell from the moon. It feels true.

IC BEO EGESLIC

Alicia says I’m expressive, resourceful and accepting, so you should all come to her most awesome annual Anti-Valentines Party. There will be 60’s of rum and other various hard alcohols to make you wish you had never been born. Come February 17th, 2006, 8ish. The blender is available, the martini shaker is ready and the place is dying for a party. Your part is easy. Wear all-black, bring hard alcohol, no beer, bring your friends, find some dead flowers and write melancholy poetry to be read aloud from at atop a chair ~ whatever your broken little heart desires. If you don’t know where she lives, then drop me a line and I shall tell you. We can pretend it’s a secret.

Also, please go worship briefly at the altar of Hakkenkrak, the quirky journal of the delightful Christalline, who I never damned well see, because I am stupid.

She made me a pretty thing when I really needed one. Turning this:

into:

Which looks ever so much cooler and is also apparently some sort of vector thing which can be blown up successfully in ways that the original cannot? (& looks incredibly stencil-able, I can just picture the three layers I would choose, which is nice, but oh the vanity involved in stencilling one’s own face. Also the not legally clever.) I don’t actually know a thing about vectors, but it sounds fairly impressive. (Also, the way she has her background do that crazy immobile gorgeous woodblock thing… damn, I wants).

People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t which is perhaps why I am never intelligent enough to corner hakkenkrak for a sunday afternoon. My brain is like a library what won’t shut up.

Which reminds me, here’s both my Johari window and my Nohari. Fill them out, (though I admit a mixture of the two windows would be far more interesting to me). I insist on the basis that I control the wind. Well, no, but I am sad because the boy who is ostensibly my boy hasn’t tried to see me and it’s almost been a week, so it would be neat, and neat things cheer me up. Also chocolate, though as I had incredibly rich chocolate for breakfast, supper and dinner, I’m feeling a bit odd on that subject. See, I’m living a self-imposed week of not chasing after him, no tapping on the window of the hotel or dropping a ring by the front desk at improbable hours. Sunday to Sunday, then I go fetch my clothes in a very mopey manner that feels unloved and pretty well unwanted.

Monday had wind strong enough to break trees, however. Wind strong enough to shift the course of the sun around the corners of taller buildings downtown, which is good and right and as it should be. Wind like to play piano, wind like to breathe for your body as you walk into it. That’s what I head into the day before last, a leap of faith on my way to work. My window felt like the portal of a space-ship with me looking out to the dark clouds tearing into the broken blue, pushed too hard to threaten any sort of rain, too busy trying to keep themselves together as they scud violently across the sky.

I really liked it. I was sorry, for once, that I was caught inside my store. I wanted the force of the blow to touch me, as if the world was putting invisible arms around me, shrouding me in some elemental forgiveness while it shredded my clothes. Last year I was on a bus going across a bridge when an especially classic gust hit. It was like the entire vehicle had transformed into a strong linen sail. It was beautiful, feeling us drift into the next lane with the force of it, as if the wind was going to propel us sideways and off the bridge and out over the water, like we could fly on the strength of it, reminiscent of a raygun-gothic aircraft, (which they’d better damned well go through with it lest I go over there and pluck their eyeballs out to use as ben-wa balls instead), but with orange duct-taped plastic seats instead of jazz music and improbable wood paneling.

Oh yeah, and how cool is this? The Phillip K. Dick Robot’s gone missing! Next trip out, I’m going to make myself some pink lights to defend myself with. (which is also a supremely cool link that’s making the world a better place, so go look, then make some, then send some to me.)