Author: foxtongue

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Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, (and my personal favourites: Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood), slyly lampoons Harper with Election 2011, a Dark Fiction:

A vacuum cleaner salesman comes to your door. “You must buy this vacuum cleaner,” he says. “Why?” you say. “Because I know what’s good for you,” he says. “I know things you don’t know.” “What are they?” you say. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “because they’re secret. You are required to trust me. The vacuum cleaner will create jobs.”

“Where is the vacuum cleaner made?” you say. “In another country,” he says. “So the jobs will be created in another country? Not here?” you say. You believe it’s your right to query: It’s your money and, come to think of it, you pay this guy’s salary.

“Stop bickering,” he says. “I am competent. That’s my story and I’m sticking it to you.” “I’m not bickering,” you say. “I’m asking relevant questions. How much will the vacuum cleaner cost me?” “I can’t tell you that,” he says. “Why not? Because it’s more than you claimed at first?” you say. “Or because you don’t really know the cost?” “I can’t tell you that, either,” he says. “But you have to pay.”

Canadian Olympics Poet Shane Koyczan adds his voice to ShitHarperDid.com

“Wasted Vote” by Shane Koyczan

Shane Koyczan and the Short Story Long have come out with a haunting new track just in time for the May 2nd polls,
reminding people that there’s no such thing as a wasted vote, only a wasted election.

  • Upvote this video on Reddit.
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    • my life as a misery ghost

    Portal 2: Exile Vilify, a hidden song by The National

    Monday: It was just after midnight when he opened the door. In the interest of brevity, I will leave out the next three hours, excepting my desire to be wanted, kicked in like a knife, a piercing pain that has yet to fade. Suffice to say, A. has gone away. Like in the old stories, antique, anonymous and trying, everyone a letter instead of a name, places expressed as an initial and an em dash. Off to the sanitarium, he cried!

    After: I sat crumpled in the street where I had been dropped, left salty eyed blind and exhausted, my glasses on the hood of a stranger’s cold truck, too tired to stand, even as the the night evaporated as thoroughly as the warmth on my body where his hands had apologized and cradled me goodbye.

    So that, for now, is that. After a multitude of absences and various failure situations, he has decided that he is not currently capable of being responsible in regards to my un/happiness and has withdrawn from my life. I do not know when he will return or in what state, but it is my hope, however small, however sad, that he will come home to me when he can.

    scraped empty

    When I have said “I love you” I have said
    Nothing at all to tell you; I cannot find
    Any speech in any country of the mind
    Which might inform you whither I have fled.
    In saying “I love you” I have gone so far
    Away from you, into so strange a land;
    You may not find me, may not understand
    How I am exiled, driven to a star

    Till now deserted. Here I stand about,
    Eat, sleep, bewail, feel lonely and explore,
    Remember how I loved the world, before,
    Tremble in case that memory lets me out.
    Islanded here, I wait for you to come —
    Waiting the day that exiles you to home.

    by Valentine Ackland

    Tonight is the first night of Passover.

    I am meant to be taking photos today for an art exhibition in New York. I am meant to be doing laundry, looking for work, applying to be an enforcer, editing my belongings, putting more of them for sale, and processing pictures from Seattle and yesterday’s shoot with Shane’s band at the Cultch. I am meant to be showered and dressed and fed. Together, sharp, useful, active. Defined. There are things to do, tasks to conquer, opportunities waiting. Instead it is as if the air itself has thickened until even breathing is an effort. I am suffocating, a captive unhappily complicit with my aching inactivity.

    It has been a week of silence. Out of respect for my love, for his dismissal, his vanishing outburst, I did not call for days, even when the wet beauty of thunder and lightning was too much to bear, when it cracked me as open as it did the sky. Even when I felt that all I could possibly desire was his voice kindly speaking my name. Instead I bruised my fingers knocking at his door. Small gifts in my pockets, a snub nosed bottle of imported ginger ale, a tiny square of rich, hard to find chocolate, my hand raised once more to the wood, knuckles swollen into a pale rainbow of purple and blue from repetition, (less painful than the quiet), but to no answer, even when his vehicle was parked in the drive. At home the phone would ring in a quick, beautiful burst, but the numbers were wrong – the wrong people, the wrong names. Outside would be footsteps, car doors slamming, false hope leaping up in my heart like flames. Every night, sleep became farther away.

    When Friday slid into Saturday, still without word, it became obvious that the relationship had been abandoned, released into the wild without even the courtesy of goodbye.

    yes, I have a favourite sixty belgian girls. don’t you?

    Spending this weekend in Seattle to attend the Ainsley baby shower and take some pictures of Rebecca’s baby bump. It’s going to be a great trip. Not only am I staying with some of my favourite people on the planet, there’s plans in the works for an obscenely epic Friday. If you’re in town, you should come! The rest of you, start your jealousy engines revving. I’m starting with an early dinner in Belltown, the better to attend the opening of a Kris Kuksi show at La Roc La Rue, (also featuring monochrome pop-alt darling Travis Louie), then dropping South to see the Scala Choir hit the stage at the Showbox. Oh yes. YES. Favourite tumbled upon favourite upon favourite. I’m drooooooling. Drooling like a happy kitty. Meaow purr durr.

    Also, reading that over, I am considering that my considerable lack of sleep lately has left me with temporary brain damage.