Graham‘s got a friend, Christie McRae, who has an Art Show Opening called ALTERNATE REALITIES tomorrow night at the Bump ‘N Grind Cafe at 916 Commercial Drive. He says be certain to be there, because there’s going to be a DJ and free shots of espresso. He really leaned on mentioning the espresso, so it must be tasty.

Also, Graham and I are hosting Sunday Tea tm this Sunday, so come visit, bitches. I have been cocooned, I need to see your scrubbed faces to remember you exist.

This week’s been full of music and strange adventure. Jon Bartlett lent me Mervyn Peake’s first book, for one, Lung and I went to a porn theater, (which was a far more unpleasant experience than we’d supposed), my mother sang with the Now Orchestra for the improv Metropolis soundtrack for Eye of Newt’s Silent In The Park series, I’ve installed an angel in my house, and begun a drawer of personal goods at Oliver’s. There’s more, but trying to remember everything is like trying to read text in a photograph damaged by salt.

So last we heard, our girl Friday is sitting outside a backpackers hostel, waiting for Esme to come rescue her from the appalling chance that one of her exes, who is now filthy homeless junkie upon the streets of Victoria, may come upon her and attempt to molest her person. American Brand Fear. She’s sitting with her book, appalled at how much she’s read already, and beginning to worry about her phonecall. She only had a moment, did she convey everything needed?

Olbermann’s Special Commentary Towards Bush.

Esme was only late because parking was hard to find. The cafe was nice, (though it’s the only place anyone’s tried to pick me up by telling me that they’re an astrologer), the music not terrible, (Nicholas was playing in a corner that was pretending to be a stage with two friendly middle-aged men), and the drink Esme bought me was delicious, a mixture of hot chocolate and chai I rather liked. It was a fund-raiser of some sort, likely for a cat. A good welcome easy to slide away from.

After we went to a velvety restaurant that floated Goldfrapp softly over a crowd of beautiful people, but it was too late in pretty little Victoria for food, all they had left was small plates of unsatisfying tapas, so we ended up in a second-rate late night chinese restaurant with comfortingly unidentifiable lumps of strange coloured food, the same you’d find in any Canadian town with a population over 1000. I don’t think we got home until two in the morning, full of grease and weak yellow tea.

OK GO doing the impressive treadmill dance live at the VMAS.

Nicholas’ house is a wonder. His “Mad Uncle” renovated it something like six times. Camouflaged to look like any other pebble and glass fronted house, it pretends to be middle-class and rather unassuming. Inside is another story entirely. Nicholas lives in the basement, a 1960’s style wood-paneled German porno bunker complete with secret passages. The walls glows with a shiny oppressive veneer that inspires me to start collecting vintage Playboy covers for us to varnish onto his ceiling and the only way to get upstairs without leaving the house is to go into the washroom and climb inside what, from the side, looks like a medicine cabinet. It actually opens into a tiny carpeted passageway lined with moldering vintage board games that lets out into the floor of the upstairs front hall closet. Upstairs looks fairly normal again, until you take into account the stripper pole in the bathroom and the occasional mad scientist electrical box. (Apparently they make scary ticking noises and, in the past, have genuinely blown up in proper mad scientist style even.)