Tag: affection

saved from my own ways by beautiful boys

sanfran leap
San Francisco 2008

My summer is about to explode. It has already started, a little, (I sneaked into a rave on Friday night, spent Saturday on a cross-Atlantic guitar lesson with Richard, Saturday night with dear friends at a dinner, blowing people’s minds with synchronicity, and Sunday at an epic wedding that involved a boat, a full-sized, bright red, radio controlled dalek wedding cake that shouted EXTERMINATE, (part gluten free, too!), a hexacopter ring-bearer, and friends from six or seven countries), but this past weekend was just the amuse bouche.

My comrade Nathan is taking us to Cirque Du Soliex’s Totem tonight for my upcoming birthday, then we’re leaving on Thursday evening for the Sasquatch Music Festival. The line-up is absolutely fantastic, many of my favourite bands are playing, (Elbow, Mogwai, Die Antwood, The National, Cut Copy, TuNe-YaRds, etc.), and it’s going to be our first road-trip. I almost cannot wait. I feel like a little kid, counting sleeps.

Then, on the way back, Nathan is dropping me off in Seattle and I’m going to California for my birthday, courtesy of my ability to fit into a suitcase AKA a sweetheart’s business trip to the Google mothership! Flexibility pays off. Apparently I’ll be flying from Seattle on the 26th or 27th and staying for approximately two weeks.

I leave Canada in four days, but know zero about my flights or even where or when I’m to meet up with my dear B. It is so strange and yet delightful to know I am to be travelling, but not know when or precisely where to. It’s like a trust exercise with the universe that I am surprisingly completely fine with. Are we meeting in Seattle? In California? Where? No idea. I have zero information, but it’s.. gratifying? It feels proper. Makes it more of an adventure, for sure.

I imagine I’ll be taking the train a lot back and forth between SF and Silicon Valley for the first week and tucking in for work during the days, but other than that, my time is open. B. will only be there for the first week and mostly busy with work, which is a bit sad, he is smart and sassy and wonderful, but I’m still thrilled. Once I wave my kerchief goodbye to him at the airport, I’ll couch-float with friends in the Mission or the Castro or the Tenderloin.

The only plans I have so far: Jed and I are making sultry eyes at Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind on May 30th, (come with us!), and Richard has informed me that must visit him at the Vulcan on the first Thursday in June. And Morissa says I can use her house for a birthday dinner party! (Party date as yet to be determined). Other than that, it’s almost all a giant question mark. Do you know of anything going on in SF between May 26th and June 6th-ish? Let’s adventure!

Then I’m back to Seattle for a week to go to the the Georgetown Carnival and the Power Tool Drag Races and all that fun stuff. Maybe play some flaming tether ball. Mars and I are learning to be friends again, too, which makes Seattle much better to visit. I don’t know if B. will be around, but I hope so. (If he isn’t totally sick of me after sharing a hotel room for a week, that is. “Why are all the towels stained scarlet?”, “Why is my pillow purple?”, “How did the room ceiling end up covered in glow-in-the-dark stars? Are those constellations.. accurate?”)

I plan to return to Vancouver on June 15th, immediately put my passport in for renewal the day I get back!, collect certain papers from my mother, Vicki, that she’s bringing back from Ireland, do all of the laundry in the world, maybe throw a quick Vancouver-based birthday party, then head out to Ontario. The plan is to go to REcon (June 23rd – 29th) in Montreal via Waterloo courtesy of Ian, my besty who wants to drive up from Ontario in my fine company. Improbable, yes. Possible, very. I owe his cat Dewie about a thousand snuggles. And I think he’s starting to get tired of carrying his favourite Internet Girl around in his phone à la Her. And Audra has offered us her charming AirBnB apartment in Toronto for a couple of nights, (she has a cotton candy machine!!!), so we could home base out of Toronto and visit with people and stay up late in the city rather than having to go back to Waterloo. I’m sure we’ll use it, as I’m five or six years overdue for a visit and the good people just keep piling up. I even have an uncle there I’ve never met who seems supracool. Why don’t I live in Toronto? I Do Not Even Know.

We’ll be stopping by in Ottawa on our way to Montreal, too, to stop by the river market and stuff our faces with scrumptious berries and sugary beaver tails and APPLY FOR MY IRISH PASSPORT WITH THE EMBASSY! Happy birthday to me! I’m Irish! I HAVE EU AND EVERYTHING. As of, like, six days ago. My mother, bless her, went to Ireland as part of a Canada Council art project with Paul and took the packet of my needful documents with her, followed the very detailed instructions, and has filed my birth with the Irish government!

REcon is apparently a marvelous time, too. It’s run by Hugo, who I love to hang out with at CanSec. I’ve never spent as much time with him or his friends as I would like, so this is perfect. And apparently the Circus Festival starts in Montreal on July 2nd, so maybe we’ll get away with sticking around for a day or two longer for that. Either way, I plan to get fat and happy on delicious food, hug a lot of people, dance my face off, and ride a lot of city bikes. Christine wants to go to the new Cirque show, Kurios, too. I approve. There will also be chocolate and a stop by Santropol. Oh yes.

And no, I don’t know anything solid about flight dates on this trip yet either. IT IS ALL A FANTASTIC MYSTERY.

And then I’m in Vancouver until ToorCamp. (That might be for less than a week, oi). ToorCamp is another hacker event, but in Washington State on July 9th. Nathan wants me to go with him, so of course I said yes. Hopefully my passport will have come back by then and I’ll be good to go. I don’t know much about it, except that the people I know who’ve gone in the past are all excellent.

I have also been tapped to work as the Art Director for Hacked Festival, another hacker event from August 11th – 14th, but this one in Vancouver. It’s their inaugural year and maybe I’ll be able to help, even though I’m barely going to be around for the next few months. (Apply to be a speaker or an artist naow!) I’ve told them about my travel schedule, but the founder met me at BIL and he seems to want me involved anyway, so I might end up going through with it just because. If that ends up being the case, that will fit in right after ToorCamp. And right before Burning Man.

I have a number of options for Burning Man this year, but I think I might be tossing a bunch of them over to stay with a lawyer friend from Seattle. Not only do I appreciate him a metric ton just in general, I cannot get enough of his art project, an infrared photobooth. People step inside into pitch blackness, the infrared flash goes off, and though all they see is a small red light, the pictures look like they were taken in daylight.

And then, come September, rest. Playing with ferrets. Adventure is fine, (dying is fine)but Death), but I’m going to miss my ferrets. Pepper and Selenium are the best.

TLDR; If all goes well, I’m going to live out of a suitcase this summer.

Authenticity / Nourishment

  • On November 20th, 1998, the first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, was launched.
  • On November 21st, 1905, Albert Einstein’s paper, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”, is published in the journal Annalen der Physik. This paper reveals the relationship between energy and mass, which leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc².

    “I don’t want to write about you,” I said. Adding you to the narrative would make you real in a way I’m not prepared to risk or handle. This is a place that defines me, that nails my history down to the page, that makes things legitimate, that allows my future self to remember. We were wrapped together as completely as two people might be, but I was not so sure I would survive bringing you back with me, I was not sure I would survive binding you to my story. I do not want to lose myself to a fire again.

    Yet here I am, three in the morning, and the edges of my heart are dripping words onto a page two hundred kilometers from where I just saw you fall asleep. You wear my name on your tongue. I am your voice on the wire. You are terrified, but you remain. I am terrified, but I fight for you. You wear a ring that belonged to my dead. I wear your care as a protective halo. I am tearing down my walls even as you held on to me so tightly an imprint of your hand lived like a welcome shadow on my skin for days.

    We have saddled ourselves with a thin leather of responsibility, but somehow it will be okay. We don’t know where we’re going, but we know we’re discovering it together.

    I wrote this for you in a letter, but want to keep it here in my tender on-line cottage, a decade old and counting: “In the meantime, we don’t have to go alone into the dark night of the future. We can loiter together in the parking lot awhile, get extra batteries for our flashlights, talk about music, look at the stars, make out, ask each other questions, both teach and learn. ”

    So here it is, you’re real now. Welcome to the story. You’re going to like it here.

    • to the man with the hands, this isn’t directed at you at all

    Things That Make Me Feel Better About My Business Plan #23.

    There is a thing that men do that I like. They place their hands directly on my hips, thumbs across my belly, as if to make a frame for my body as something they appreciate as beautiful. None of the women I’ve been with have ever done this. It seems an action restricted to gender or gender roles. The girls I’ve been with were very much girls. They had me lead when we danced, they would put their hand into mine. It didn’t matter that I was younger and my tongue stumbled. I had to be taller, I had to be stronger. Puzzling over this difference this morning, this small, tiny thing, I remembered today how, when I was a gymnast gunning for the circus, my class would practise handstands on each other’s hips. A completely different thing, but with almost the same placement of fingers and palms. Such a small thing, such a tiny thing.

    Postmarks now has a permanent home on the web at http://takemewithyou.org.

    It’s my surprise that it remains a nice gesture that catches in my mind and keeps my thoughts pinned like a butterfly to a cork. I’ve been violated by indiscriminate affection to the point where I’m terrified of kindness, because it lies more effectively. At first I only felt like I had swallowed stones that ached. Every day they ground me into sand, separating every cell into something that was less than it was, until finally the pressure of repeated unfaithfulness began to compress my unhappiness into a new substance, something hard that coats the inside of my skin and helps me grow bitter. It ages me, steals my fire, my wonder, and simmers with black depressive anger, but it protects me from treachery. I’m caught needing what I’ve locked out in self-defence. I hate my lessons, engrained through wretched repetition, that want cheapens, that desire is as shallow and common as injustice and just as fun.

    It’s a beautiful day for global warming.

    Watching my reactions, where words don’t trespass, I see where they flare up like temper at every taste of hope, striking me like a physical blow, dragging a corrosive stain to taint every thought. I try to close my ears, I try not to apply my disillusion, but I don’t know that I’m wrong anymore. I’ve been gambling years for someone to be an exception.

    Lucky this gives me more focus on my project, hey? Yeesh. Which, by the way, is still progressing. I’ve been quiet here because I’ve been too busy to take time out to write anything that isn’t related to Heart of the World. (Which is still getting about 100 new hits a day). I took some time out to post tonight mostly because I don’t have to go to my day-job tomorrow and I felt I could spare twenty minutes. Tomorrow, not so much. Tomorrow I get this sucker clean. We have until December 8th to raise 35,000$CAN.