Let me breathe. Let my breath stream past my throat and fill my heart and lungs. I have a graveyard shift Saturday night, then my regular Sunday night shift. I’m re-reading an article on neuromarketing and looking to maybe help edit the Devil’s Chord wikipedia page, trying to stay awake, but it’s not working. Already my body is shutting down around the edges, trying to put me to sleep. Dreaming has been fickle this week, so the chance to collapse without a morning feels too good to be true, but also like a trap. My alarm clock waiting in the stair-well, a knife in hand, shaving seconds off my heart, like the phone refusing to answer up the names and voices I want to hear.
Month: December 2007
a verb’s action noun
Trucks like monoliths, grumbling gods to some sort of travel plan, the kind of yellow covered maps you only buy in gas stations. Row upon row, headlights as big as our heads, snow gritty with gravel, running to skid on the ice, arms silently flung out for balance like sweatershirt wings. We walked through them transformed from adults into children by sheer scale. Machines built by hands like ours, but unimaginable as only a collection of parts, a warehouse of nuts, bolts, and aluminium siding. Machines that growled, spit smoke, carried worlds in their bellies and dwarfed us, our chilled faces, our frozen laughter. The way I wanted to kiss him there, between the vehicles, between history, but didn’t.
Crunching white footprints leading back to the hotel and I still wouldn’t do up my coat.
My trip to Alberta was like a trip to Canada, too. It felt like time travel. Vancouver is warm winters, high heels in December, ocean sunsets, miniature dogs, Kitsilano graphic designer vegetarians with tans, fake nails, and eight word coffee orders. Twenty four hour internet cafes lined with serious young men with short hair, Mac laptops, and Clark Kent glasses, planning on working in video games, dreaming of going to Japan.
I’ve been anti-social since returning, picking my company with exquisite care, unwilling to give up my time away. My trip spoiled me with inspiration, with company, with care. The people I went to see put me back on my feet, lifted me from myself and gave me new direction. As we drove to the airport, he held my hand, and I gave him directions that included I was pretty. I worry that if I give myself back to Vancouver, I will lose the complex taste of these memories, that they will flatten and take with them that precious ice edge of rediscovery that we so sweetly forged together. The cloud machines, the black sticks of prairie fire licking the sky. How terrible to fade, to disintegrate like a chalk-drawing photograph left out in the rain.
It throws me that Mike and Alastair are in the same city this week. I don’t know why, but it does.
not gloating, celebrating
Apropos of nothing, I’m making soup. Glorious soup. So tasty that I’m willing to say that the closest thing I’ve got going to a love affair is currently burbling to itself in my kitchen. It’s six kinds of cheese, (seven heaping handfuls of it, thank you abandoned party food), organic chicken broth, broccoli, and cauliflower, stirred in with with black pepper, cinnamon, and a touch of organic honey. It’s going to be delicious.
raver scabies
his linguistics have burrowed into my tongue
My music on random. Snare snap, three beat four four, lifting on the three. The lyrics are enthusiastically running backwards, something groovy and probably bizarre that I really like. Familiar guitar. I’m not even sure what I’m listening to, I’m only listening with half an ear. Suddenly, my head snaps up. What? I know that voice. Even through backmasking, my blood knows that voice. The Men Of Dreams and Secrets. Billy Nayer Show. My relief when I turned out to be right had absolutely nothing on how hard I laughed when I ran the song in reverse. “She couldn’t get it out and it REALLY, REALLY HURT!”
Hilarious. Certainly distinctive. Like everything else they’ve done.
This charming little film was hand-painted with house paint on paper over a course of several years by Cory McAbee in his bathroom. This should give you an idea of the implicit dedication to creative, sparkling intelligence with which he founded his addictive band, The Billy Nayer Show. I cannot reccomend them enough. Warmly glowing songs that teasingly defy definitive genre, straining at the leash of epic, mystifying humour, no one else in my experience has ever written a song about the smell of sex that’s light, dirty, tuneful, regretful, and oddly restrained. “And all the rest of your friends watched you leave together, so they know.”
They’re also 100% responsible for one of my All-Time Top Five Favourite Films, American Astronaut, a movie so good that it was introduced to me as a way to get into my pants. (Which, in light of recent events, if you look at things sideways and leave out a lot of facts, could be said to have just worked for someone involved with the project. How embarassing.) Breathtakingly impressive, the cinematography’s like an outer space reply to Six-String Samurai, while remaining absolutely unique. I’ve given lectures on how much it kicks ass. Buy it here. Seriously. And then have a movie night. Invite all your friends. Hell, apparently it could even get you laid.
I would write more about it, except the best way to see American Astronaut is to simply find a copy, unplug your phone, turn off the lights, and go in blind.
Don’t know anything about it. At all. Because I said so. It’ll blow your socks off.
To be fair, they’re not for everybody in the same way that not everyone appreciates David Byrne or Frank Zappa, (as I’m writing this, I’m listening to a rather ludicrous short story about a princess who isn’t allowed to keep her kittens unless they can carry their weight in the household), but track some down, give them a try. If we can win even ten more converts, think of the good that would do. Sponsor an album and they’ll immediately send you a wonderful CD, full of hope for the future. By sharing the wealth, you’ll make a difference, for less than a dollar a day! Think of the children!
I’m thinking of going back there
A straggler into my picture sale, this one went to Andrew Brechin,
Vancouver SCA geek, border guard, co-founder of the Topless
Wish Fairies, festival volunteer, & costumed Cthulu impersonator.
“We need to have an arguement.” “An arguement?” “Yes, you go first.”
Your hair, it will turn white with the collected frost from your breath, but it’s beautiful as long as you remember not to touch it. The sun shines for miles over the snow, glitters off your eyes, slices through your intense smile, but the cold doesn’t care. Bother your frozen hair, twist a lock around a black gloved finger, and it will break with a slight crystalline sound like glancing at a lover through a rear-view mirror. The chill will have won.
No one seems to jay-walk in Calgary, I don’t know why. It felt appropriate to jump from the train platform onto the street, to look around the back of a departing train to check for traffic, like it was a gesture immortalized in perfection years before I was born, waiting for us to inhabit it.
Inside the skeleton of the place, there seems to be a newborn energy, a sussurus as one wave of promise flows back and meets the next one sweeping in, like the folds of the sea worn like a dress. It will not live forever, but it seems to hold the eternal promise of apples on the tree, green as metaphorical money. Something sweet to be tasted, as long as you’re willing to let it ripen.
– anatomical socks
– how to use ruroshiki
You will learn the proper art of layering clothing, treating the textures of wool and cotton like gesso and oils. Your wardrobe will acquire a tinge of plaid, a wet dog reaction to rain. Walking inside is for locals, fifteen feet up in uncomfortably crowded pathways and tunnels suspended between downtown buildings. Outside is where it’s at, where all the cool kids hang, freezing.
By the day of departure, temperature adaptation had kicked in, and, except for the rumbling fixation on enthusiastically swollen hockey headlines, the newspaper was less foreign. There was becoming here, a tribe I could infiltrate. Remembering gloves had become automatic. The patterns of the one way streets, a familiar philosophy learned from a minivan.
Without mountains, the sky is unrestricted, the horizon the proverbial dog, tail wagging, waiting to run for days. Limitless. From the highway, North, the city looks like a scale model of an architect’s small, commercially printed card, something kind, with a phone number on the back. Inside invisible bounds, where unkind houses melt into the prairie, the city seems like a crumpled ship, collapsing the possibilities of flight into a very long walk.
  “You’re doing it again.” “Yes, well, so are you.”
and now for something completely normal (zappa will make up for my lack of interesting)
Contractions were still irregular when I left for work downtown. Now, hours later, I’m still waiting for news. Perhaps Xander’s been born already, perhaps they haven’t even left for the hospital. I suppose I will find out soon, but until then, I’m alright simply enjoying the solitude of my work. As a great bonus, there’s a veritable heap of delicious, untouched food left over from a ritzy party that didn’t (apparently) feel like eating, so now my desk is kindly piled with nibbles of fruit, vegetables, and expensive cheese. (There’s even cheesecake dip, a strange and glorious concotion I may become addicted to, though I didn’t know existed before today.)
News on the home front is the same sort of promising, as Marika’s things continue to dominate the living room a good two weeks after they were meant to be out, but new arrangements are beginning to come together around them anyway. Karen, for example, has painted her room an enchanting light shade of green. It’s like perpetual spring in there now. (I think she made an excellent choice.) Soon I’ll have to follow suit(e), continue reshaping my own space. The cats are adjusting well to her. She’s nice to them, and though they’re not quite conquering her lap whenever she sits down, they’ve begun keeping her company when she’s at her computer and following in front of her when she moves around.
Now if they would only stop falling asleep on my books.
We’re planning on having a movie night soon, showing the new Sigur Ros film, Heima, once everything’s settled. What nights are best for you?
required watching
Alex and I prepared by charging our camera batteries. I appreciate glory that can be so mundane.
My mother, bless her heart, found too much worry in the idea of me being on the bus alone at, (gasp), one in the morning, so she hauled herself out and drove me to Alex and Chrissy’s new house on the North Shore, the one they rented especially to raise their child in. Wood floors, a basement, a back-yard with a deck. Perfect space in which to grow. I’m here now, though she’s left, (it was the first time she’s seen Alex since he was six years old), typing from their couch while they try to get some rest upstairs. As I have a habit of making people laugh, I decided that I should sleep downstairs, where I won’t be distracting. Still, though, even from here in the livingroom, I can hear Chrissy singing through her contractions.
It’s really quite pretty.
I feel I have a better perspective on my parents just from being here. Maybe most parents, really, like this is a rite of passage. It feels so adult, waiting for the birth of a best friend’s child, as if a line has been crossed. There’s just something about it I can’t yet explain. Maybe later, after the waiting is over and we’ve seen the child as more than a strange photograph, black, white, and gray. We’re all so happy, run through with wonderful anticipation, that this feels as unreal as it feels important. (I couldn’t help touching her belly and asking Xander, the creature inside, when he’s going to come out.) It feels like an occasion in a way that none of the holidays ever do, like finally, something real. I’m glad to be here, like this, writing everything down.
(I wonder if he will read this when he’s older.)
Hi Xander, good morning. Welcome to the world.
Already we love you and you’re not even here.