Tag: argentinians

trying to remember the worth of birth control when all I can think of are his unfair hands

Someone has rewritten the words to Gibert and Sullivan’s “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” as “I am the very model of a Singularitarian,” with lyrics celebrating the drive to transcend the flesh.

I am the very model of a Singularitarian
I’m combination Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian,
Aggressively I’m changing all my body’s biochemistry
Because my body’s heritage is obsolete genetically,
Replacing all the cells each month it’s here just temporarily
The pattern of my brain and body’s where there’s continuity,
I’ll try to improve these patterns with optimal biology,
(“But how will I do that? I need to be smarter. Ah, yes…”)
I’ll expand my mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology.

There’s an MP3 link too.

Today was spent re-arranging the shop I work in, hauling large heavy awkward pieces of pale laminated wood around into hopefully better positions. We need a curtain now. A curtain, a ladder, some screws, and some paint. It’s nice to have carte blanche. I’ve been told that I’m to treat the store as my own, all my decisions will be supported. It’s interesting, like an experiment in culpability. How responsible am I? How capable?

“I’ve listened to your music, seen the way you dress. I trust you.”

I’ve had relationships based on less.

Remember the water? It sprayed like insane rain, kamikaze airborne water trying to reclaim the shore from the sky and bring it back into the ocean. I was so glad you ran through it after me, it felt like a victory. Breakfast, then sitting on damp moss, so British Columbia, so everything about this place that’s sometimes nice. Secrets, so many secrets. I miss you. You’re around and then not, all at once. I remember kissing you, lying with my body pressed against yours on a volcanic outcropping of rock, all soft cliffs and too much ocean view. All those trees. I saw you watching me trip down the path like a child, I watched you smile. How much that meant to me, I’m not sure I can say. It had been so long since I’d felt like anyone wanted me, like I could make someone happy. Therapy for both of us, I suppose. A furtive thing we could call our own. An epoch passed as we climbed the earth.

Evenings like this I wish you were here, free to sleep in my bed, be warm for me in the chill.

My lovers last year, all of them left silver hair on my clothes. Spiderwebs that tied joy down, transmuting me into an alchemist of golden moments, but my last year was longer ago than that. I think of new years in terms of fall. Leaves and seasons changing, halting, freezing. Anything after Hallowe’en is this year, anything before is last. It might be in November this year, my annual transfer from them into now. We met in August, we began in August. The year before last, something new, a man, a burning furnace hanging in the ether, changing my perception of time. Everything counted from the day I took a worried picture that my friend has hung on his wall in Montreal.

This year it might be somewhere in November where it shifts. Before there was my first love returned to me, too poetically pleasing to last or be real. My theater painter, my silly Gavool fool. “Have you met my underage girlfriend?” A genius clown that handed me so gracefully to California (Uber Alles). Flash: tied with ribbons, merry christmas, the light from the window before we moved the bed, a thin string glittering from one thing to another, my decision. LAX = empty regret. Last winter spent in Orange County, adrift in rain and lost without direction. My lovers, before they didn’t trust me, they didn’t tell me until it’s too late.

Next year. New Year, December. My hanged moon, strung up on charming wire, so full before it waned so suddenly. He fell from the sky and destroyed all the tides. I fell down and drowned and my morning star, my most precious thing, my evening dream who surrounded me with words, abandoned me after burning me with a small handful of flame. Hours counted like suicidal moths. Hating how easy I must be. Fifteen people dying in six months. All the ways to count a year. Two jobs gone, three, a night of fire where I finally died. There was no vessel to carry me. When the apple fell, there was no one to capture it, no hand to interrupt its crash to the ground. Everything all at once, so dreadful.

I’m older now, I can feel it for the first time in my life. I see lines inside my face, miniature scars, a map of where I used to live. Pictures from last year, they look too happy to be me, too young and yet, here I am, feeling alright with life again. It took me eight months. It took me a year, a failed one night stand, and a married conductor. It took music and getting away from here, a refreshing life out of the small town. It took the sky and blood and tears and feeling too alone. It was Ryan, it was walking into the water on the night of fireworks and resisting the urge to let my head go under. It was so many things, saving a life on New years, never seeing that girl again. Slapping Matthew, dancing alone, dancing with Kyle. It was myself, finally, and the memories of starry skies that brought me back to me.

Though mostly it was the conductor.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp the good ones are just like that
“No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day.
But, I beseech your grace, pardon me: I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.”

Bringing me back to life to(o).

Walking across bridges at night used to be one of the more dangerous things I could do. All the hollow butterflies cut out of my tummy silenced when I finally stood on the rail. All the water catching the lights. Why does the ocean never reflect the stars?

A man found dead on a NYC subway car may have been dead for hours before anyone noticed.

It could have happened like this, I could have lay on my back in the middle of an intersection.

Instead, I picked up the phone. I dialed. I said, “hello”.

It’s a heavy on the saxophone moment, an understanding of grace with a long hard breath of sound. “Hello” Yeah, I know that one. Emphasis on the beginning of the word, low on the aich, more air than vibration. “Is this?!” There’s someone in town who knows how to conjure your name, your careful explanation of the hazards of cussing out christians in french. You know the game. It’s like a quick agile dance, how we speak. Soft insinuation this way, a little that way. All of it encapsulated in the way I shape your name. Those eyes, watching mine watch your hands. I remember that ring, but I didn’t think of it at the time. I almost offered to trade. Now I know that would have been meaning for meaning. We’re lunatics.

“Jhayne, can I ask you something?”

“Anything you want.”
“Are you crazy?”

The children were delightful, small tiny voices that didn’t know english. A catastrophe of insane grinning.

Sleepless in Seattle re-mixed as a horror movie.

Mike was upstairs when I wrote part of that, but all I heard was the soft susurration of cars passing by in rain. A very vancouver thing. The room I was in is full of polished steel appliances and red hardwood shelves clumsily full of yellowing books, a modern room cleverly awash in english antiques. The lamp at the foot of the stairs, (which has on the landing a half-size grandfather clock), is a bronze victorian woman, hands upraised like victory, a torch in each hand where the lightbulbs fit. Explosions In The Sky playing quietly, making the moment feel as if it was cut out of a novel about a lonely young professional who is questioning life enough to make an interesting book. It would have the kind of ending where you feel incomplete for having run out of pages.

That was before going to Afrikaa Bombata on Thursday, while waiting for Andrew. My day had been splendid, full of fierce joy. My smile felt like it would crack, I was so happy. Friday was different. Friday was still, flying in a comfortable holding pattern as my absent keys looked for a way to land at the shop, where I needed them to open with. (Raphaella came bringing the succor of sweet responsibility, no worries.) Friday was a dopamine calm. Friday I woke naked after an hour’s sleep in an unfamiliar bed. Friday the door opened at nine:thirty as I was about to tie my shoes and Kyle came in with a metal pail of tea and juice and bottled water.

Turkish court dropped the case against renowned writer Orhan Pamuk

My hero, my clumsily found grace. He lives only a block away from my home. The worst part is that this is perfect timing.

follow back because you all asked me to, because this is one way to say yes, will you marry me?

By Arnaud Frich, two panoramic photos of Paris at night: the original and a captioned one marked with major landmarks.

I stood on the street and it was like an entrance. Breath like smoke dedicated to signaling the weather instead fogging a mirror like the corpse in an Agatha Christy we all had to read in high school as part of English class. From their offered hands to their accented voices, there’s no turning my back on good people. I felt like my happiness had exploded out of some strong box that I’d thought was hidden enough to be dead. That breath again, that mirror lying about the most beautiful woman who ever lived in the world, in this terrible after dancing cafe french fry restaurant dipped in grease and gravy. Too bright lights and scribbling word games on napkins, little finger trap puzzles. The alphabet in spanish, in french, and in effects, hands describing functions and sounds that can only be explained without language in common.

Kick me out of here, kick me out of all my data hacking at my heart that’s been bruised beyond clear definition. I could sing you a sea if you would only remember to talk to me. Off of the street, we’re singing, plates of something congealing that looks like it could pretend to be food in a seventies television commercial for something magical and space-age worthy that comes out of a box. Just add water. This is only for after dancing, I am reassured but already understand. This could only be for after the body has been wrung out in fun and tired, not enough sleep, but this is the lion and this is the lamb. I dig my fork into the detritus and try to remember that last time I’d felt like I’d been let off a leash without suspense. Ah, right. That buggered up. I should never have let him without more clarification than “Are you married?” You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. This however, this could rock me to sleep like the greatest band of all time, Robin Hood taking me in hand to show me the equation that gives me the time in musical notation.

For immediate download, some essential holiday listening: Peter Sellers – She Loves you (the nazi version)

The lines on a sheet of music are like the aggressive lines next to the highway that mark the fences that keep you from spilling your wheels off the side and wrecking your car. When we left the plastic tabletop full of drunk girls stumbling past, after fencing poses and flushing excavations into personal history waving conversations, it was decided we would go to a house in Outremont for coffee because there was a piano. I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know who I’m with, but it’s enough to end a war, this sort of delightful finding of company on the side of the road. St. Laurent is behind us and we’re not slipping on the snow around our ankles, instead they’re letting me steer the car. My hands leaning over Cristian, the music conductor, his hands back and away and refusing to touch the vehicle, my body a curve like the road around Mt Royal. It’s not quite a mountain, it’s not quite a hill and on top there’s a cross all made of lights. White unless the Separatists are putting the shoulder to some action, then it turns blue. Politics, left, right, I don’t want to drive into anything, this is already crazy. It’s lucky I’m used to drivers who roll drugs into joints in their laps, but ice is confusing. The tires are lying different contact patterns to stop on the street. I make it past all the stop signs, it’s not my feet on the pedals and it’s all straight and I’m laughing, refusing to look backwards. There was no map, only instructions.

Because sometimes everything you need is in front of you.

This city continues to delight me. It reminds me of my voice.


like a vessel
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

In the wake of spending the night up with three brilliant Argentinians, (bless them and all their lives), my english has been shot all to hell. This entry’s going to be skimming the depths of my language conscious mind trying to keep me on english, pues no he dormido todavía y había muchas tazas de café italiano negro. (James has been very patient and smiling a little too much.)

Running into Cristian, Hernan, and Martin outside of Rouge was like being agreeably attacked by a very vocal choir of sweetly strange muses. An orchestral conductor, a PHD in Literature, and a Haikido expert. Music, Writing, and Movement. I said later that all they needed was a painter to be complete. They were standing outside when the club closed down, a cheerfully noisy trio who liked the hair that was peeking from my hood.

I am trying to get my hand co-ordination back by juggling small oranges in between tiny spurts of typing. I wasn’t sure it was working until I remembered after five minutes of successfully keeping them in the air that I don’t actually know how to juggle. I think it’s just going to be one of those days. Damn, it’s good to be back.

I’d decided to go to the first club on the left side of St. Laurant that had a line-up, as a guarantee of people and quality, and I suppose the red lights and walls inside should have tipped me off, but I was far too involved in random conversation with the airplane designers that I’d attached to in the line-up to pay much attention to where I was. In a strange city, I find the names don’t matter as much. The music on the first floor was painful to endure, so upstairs I found a corner and kicked off my shoes to dance. The wooden floor was dominated by people dancing in little social circles. I felt like an apprentice to aggression, trying to find space where I wasn’t likely to tread on broken glass or get cracked in the face by drunken elbows. Everything that was playing was nostalgic to a generation that I’m not a member of, but I wasn’t going to care. The atmosphere was fun and friendly and the people I’d met were introducing me to their friends at a mile a minute. There was nothing abrasive for once, which was nice, as my week’s been a strange social mash-up of scintillating discoveries and heavy disappointments.

Speaking of which, guess who works at Rouge on Thursdays. Oops. Back and forth, little snippets of conversation that finally culminated with one of those little Talks that decides things. I never knew I could encapsulate so much in such a short space of time, but I’m not above admitting to grieving in a corner. Nightclubs are good places for it. No one will notice in the dark and flashing lights, and if they notice, they won’t care. Shhh. Hush now. This isn’t the time to care. Let’s do it later, when I have scientifically shamed my thoughts into subservience again.

Lights up, the pebbles of glass on the floor finally shining so that I could see them, time to go. Scrape the black tar off the bottom of my feet and find my coatcheck ticket, stop in the washroom and do one final look around. Nothing but a strong nostalgia for my old nightclub job in Toronto working for The Russian. The stairs let out onto St. Laurant and spit me out into enough of a crowd to hold me. I looked up at the windows and saw nothing. (There had been a moment of light earlier, a flash that dazzled my eyes in the dark enough to sting my eyes. When I saw who was carrying the sparkler I thought, reality has to stop providing flesh to metaphor around me.) Hood up, I was getting my bearings, deciding what to do next, feeling like I’d just been written by some cruelly urban Hemingway, when they found me or I found them. It could be an argument. I only know that I met a pair of pretty impish eyes underneath the brim of a cap some five feet away and the voice they belonged to was trying to discover my name.

Of course I walked over. Wouldn’t you? Soon they were singing like a kindling bonfire, sparks flying and shining on the street.