Tag: flickr

sway me now, when andrew said he saw the car, I thought something else


artist unknown
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

My mind began kindly to me then slipped into exhaustion. By the time I was in bed, all my thoughts were old. I should have called up Brian and had him fetch me over. It occurred to me, he would have banished my bad percussion nightmares. What’s good for me, I’m barely doing it these days. I hold out my hands to all the people who can’t quite help, and expect the rest of me to simply deal with it, forgetting that my reserves have almost entirely been used up. I think of running through a neighborhood, I think no, that place isn’t mine anymore. I don’t have a place anymore. My second home’s been closed to me.

I ran into Bill on my way to Dominique‘s Ghost Train evening. He still doesn’t know what to do with me. Jacques says after the baby is born, he’ll be able to deal with me as a human being again. I only know I could feel his bones through his coat like he was stuffed with sticks held together with fluid grace and days that stretch too long. Scraping himself thinner. Dominique and I talked about him later. She pinned him down with one word as if he were a particularly large butterfly. Elemental, she said, and I replied, he is a forest. I’m glad she knew him, she understands. In three years, no one else had a chance.

I’m dressed as a witch today, all flowing black and glitter. Work allows me costumes this week, so I’m taking advantage of it by dressing like myself instead of a vague corporate whore approximation. Customers have been asking where to buy my out-fits, which would amuse me if they were perhaps a little more polite about it. It’s full time hours this week, because of Hallowe’en. Long shifts of not having a chance to take away sandwiches from across the street. I want to fall down at the end of it, take my shoes off and walk barefoot in some rain. I want to find myself a warm and willing partner to sip hot chocolate with and look out over our little bit of sea.

Mirrormask is playing here this weekend at TinselTown. I hear of a group trip today at two o’clock, which is when I start my shift. The only weekend showing I can manage is the nine:thirty. Is anyone interested? I’m considering dropping in on it before the Saturday Clubhouse Party. I’d get there unpardonably late, if I could but care.

Before I finally fell asleep, I lie in the dark alone for awhile while Ryan and Eva were in the livingroom, trying to pretend that I had my bed to myself, (excepting the ferret I had lodged in my belly). But for the five days he was at DragonCon, Ryan‘s been with me every day for almost three months. The feeling was alien, as if stretching out was a transgression against the basic nature of the world.

come back to my spiders web of beautiful things

  • the conditions in Iraq for subcontracted workers under Halliburton.

    Doing sixty downtown, she’s going to be late for work, but the view reminds her of other cities.
    How the lights and by-ways of freeways work, how it’s strange now to see them in movies.
    I was there, she thinks, and that place, and that one. She can’t see a street she hasn’t walked on.
    The lights of the car behind them catch her eyes in the mirror and she turns her sight to the driver.

  • 85-year-old Seattle woman recruited by marines.

    A man in an orange hoodie picked up a sodden page of junk mail from the street and lay it across his shoulders like a cape, then rushed us. Dominique cried out, “hey look, there’s superman.” and I smiled, but didn’t feel like laughing. I was too tired, too worn by my day. I should have been home hours before, but the circumspection of social maneouvering left me outside. We had just been at a half-empty nightclub, trying to dance to eighties music. Dominique knew all the words. I didn’t. I barely recognized the music and none of the clientele. The rules of the dancefloor were strange, with not enough people to keep any cohesion to the space. Without warning, one might find themselves suddenly surrounded by the small group of japanese tourists or being threatened by the tiny elbows of the tottering girl in the corset who was trying very hard to be something. What, I couldn’t say. Only with Rick and Dominique was I comfortable. I sat on the side for a little while, watching everyone and feeling slightly too cliche to actually be doing what I was doing. I pulled out my book to write in, but decided instead to pull out my camera and threaten Rick with pictures. I shouldn’t be writing what my brain was trying to think.

  • U.S. Air Force testing new transparent aluminum armor.

    Vast layered conversations spanning six topics at once. She should find partners who speak like her.
    “I swore I wouldn’t do this again, but I think I’ve figured out why I’m going through with it.”
    She’s referring to three people. She’s referring to keeping a secret and possibly telling lies.
    She’s explaining why and who and when without them.
    “I wasn’t raised to believe in anything. I never expected to encounter something sacred.”
    Words, meanings. The resolution of a two puzzles pieces finding conclusion.
    He replies, “Religion was never something I had a use for, but sometimes the vocabulary is right.”
    Confirmation, a deduction of between the lines.
    The same path, but one person facing backward, one person blind.

  • U.S. finally gives up on upgrading missile defense.

    • Plastic, a new proposition. I remember that stuff. It sears.


    Another Japanese Tale
    Originally uploaded by Simon Pais.

    Cold one o’clock in the morning. An idea. I’m sitting on the rim of my bath, suddenly overwhelmed by how tired I am, staring into nothing. This is alone with thoughts, head tilted, leaning forward, hands on knees. This could be a portrait. Controlled tense, muscles for blood flow. It’s chilly. Toes, hands, working inward from the edges. Inside my shoulders, underneath. Hold, two, release, two, next. Madness in the family. The inclination to sell the soul for not enough. I touched teeth like gamelan bars with my tongue. Ping. Tense. The thought. The idea that affection is tied to appreciation. A skill. A factor attached to how our eyes cried. There’s something different, of course I’m allowed to trust this one. That’s the trick. Hands out, fingers stiff, concentration focus, the smaller groups of muscles. The long curve of inside wrists.

    “In the further the tower becomes a favourite place of condemned men and jumpers with a parachute.” The pigeons are awake.

    A place to kiss sixty cycles of vibration remembering your name. That line again. Wrapped in memory, sporadic, thick. Eyes close and grin. The girl response, duck of the chin, eyes and pulse. How long and far and quick and deep and how very little can we ascribe to meaning but this. Question, query, I stand with joints popping, sinews complaining of the temperature, the lack of movement. The culmination of decision. Toes curling, protesting the artic linoleum. The idea. Standing, the mirror lowers into view. This can’t mean as much as crying.

    Hypothesis: It’s all about commitment. Not the theology of the reluctant dutiful, but the soul threshing terrible awe. The trick now might be to build a time machine or a portal to another dimension. One where our shadows have as much substance as life.

    I caught myself purring at work today. I was late, over so, but under by chance. Early, but not as early as I should have been. Another girl reached out from under my skin and stretched, breaking a film that had coated me. Commiseration should have limits. Same denial. If this is breaking apart, it is slow entropy, and better for it. There is a term for this similar to crawling through ashes. Another culture would say it’s a crime.

    This may be the healthiest undertaking since I lived home, a third a continent apart from this.

    I figured what the hell


    snsterkddz_sm
    Originally uploaded by illf0.

    This is going to be a busy time. Likely good, all things considered. I require some distraction, lest I find myself bitter.

    Tonight is Indie Movie Night at Sara’s house.
    Tomorrow night, Antonio & Mimi are having a slumber party.
    Saturday is Jenn’s Hallowe’en Birthday Bash.
    Sunday is Sukkot, which takes me firmly out of the picture.
    Monday is Korean Movie Night.

    So Tuesday then. Is anyone interested in going to see the Wallace & Gromit film, Curse of the Were Rabbit, on Tuesday?

    On an entirely unrelated note. I have a bit of curiosity to throw at you all. You’re an incredibly diverse group of people, and perhaps perfect for this sort of query. My recent sense of wrongdoing has to do with some fairly basic ettiquite, I thought, but he’s claiming that it’s all in my head.

    So, the question posed:
    If you’re in a casual sexual relationship with someone, it’s only right and proper to inform them before you take another partner, no? Otherwise you’re being rude to the point of possiblly endangering them, right? This is my assumption, and the assumption of everyone I know, minus the one, so I want to know, are we just an exceptional group of people or are we an aberration of some kind?

    hiding in front of everyone


    The Mask
    Originally uploaded by MemoryMotel.

    I checked because I knew I would have been written to. An entire paragraph was there this time, a little window of wondering about. Wandering about. A room full of people and a small commiseration. I remember this. Lying down together. I remember and hands. Glass as an element, as a metaphor, as something to see through, something that the eyes read, something that allows us to see outside when we are within walls.

    I met with my friend Andrew this afternoon before breakfast with Ryan, and he gave me a tour around his area of the university. It felt like a treat. He’s lovely company and I think I might have visibly drooled a little while scanning the titles on his bookshelf. I’m looking forward to attending his lectures. I don’t get credits, but nor do I have to pay. A damned good deal, in my books. It’s my first time looking forward to school, though I admit being on campus feels irritatingly like hostile territory. These Are Not My People, This Is Not My World, E T and C. Academia’s foreign in ways that surpass language and delve directly into conditioning. I’m comfortable in an agora atmosphere, I was never wired for muted halls lined with lockers. I prefer to have words inside my head instead of on silky paper on my wall.

    Calling on the Vancouver web: A soundproof space is required for the late afternoon and evening of November 18th. I’m told it’s for a student film about an alien abduction. The ideal space would be a grotty basement with a drain in the floor but privacy, accessibility, and that it’s okay to scream are the most important. They’re willing to rent, but the most they could afford is $100.

    With apologies to Max Ehrmann as initially I was only trying to remember the Desiderata

    I don’t know you, but we refuse to go placidly amid the noise, which is good. For once, the haste is ours. I warn you, however, this is familiar; how I bring joy. You’ve crawled into my life smiling with a whimper and the promise of bang, both unexpected, and I find myself bound to your responsibilities because I like you in spite of them. Unexpected is understatement. You steal what I steal and replace it with truth spoken quietly with affection. We avoid the loud and the aggressive, and violence escapes us, vexations to the spirit, except in our hands clutching at each others hair. That knowledge is comforting to me. If you don’t look to force your religious opinions or your political surfeits upon others, than I will keep respect in my heart warm and welcoming and stand with you as far as possible without surrender. As long as those traps remain empty, it is not my business how you continue your life apart from me. As long as there is love there, I need not concern myself. If you choose to adopt a child and raise it, you have my utmost respect. My concerns will remain with myself and I will offer as placid a pool as possible and attempt to rinse myself of my frustrations. If you choose to raise that child into a specific lifestyle, that’s fine, as long as religion is not an excuse for intolerance. You are already braver than I. (When half a million people led by their religious leaders gather in a 21st century city to protest a law that gives opportunity for two people who love each other to raise a child, it gives me pause as to whether this is a world that I would ever want to introduce a child to.)

    I am usually complicit in the world, not comparing myself to others, for there are always be greater persons than myself in my estimation, and I make every effort to know as diverse a group of people as I possibly can. Diversity brings the new, insights and experiences that I would never have discovered had I remained wrapped in my own existence. But fundamentally, I don’t know why you like me. My mien’s been trampled, there are only a fistful of similarities left; we are on good terms with most people, we find good humour in the world, we listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. My skeleton is not made of such fine stuff as yours, it was spun messily and without comfort. I feel outdistanced.

    My employment leaves much to be desired, but I do my best when I am present, however much I would wish to be elsewhere. When I leave, I wish to leave a positive impression and a place where I remain accepted. The world is a frequently hostile place, I want to have as little negative impact as possible. If I am to raise my voice, it should be to combat intolerance and promote distinctiveness. It is my own blindness to virtue that gives me discomfort where I’m positioned, not a lack in the striving industry of local friends. I want that as clear as the happiness in your eyes when you see me smiling back at you, granting without cynicism that you are not enough for me to stay as much as I am not enough for you to leave. In my adoration is hard knowledge sharpened on ‘I should have known better’ that states with great clarity that there can always be another human being to capture me, that there are enough souls alive to capture you as well, that we can’t find ourselves alone unless we choose to be, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. I was not raised to be a child, though I had a right to be, instead I was raised to be strong in spirit. It may yet save me, but not from you. You are a piece of the universe unfolding the same way I am. It would be a gift to let go of everything I hold so tightly, but I don’t know how.

    With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
    it is still a beautiful world.
    Be cheerful.
    Strive to be happy.

    your basement’s on fire would make a delightful in store euphimsim


    ScanImage171
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    There is something startling about the first kiss. It’s always a surprise, even if you’ve known for a year that it was coming.

    I wore a police cap in the store today. It kept falling forward onto my eyes, resting on my glasses and obscuring my vision. Someone said it looked too appropriate to be sexy and I laughed. My sleeves are pink silk today, and everything else is covered in wine velvet. I look as if I dressed to span three centuries and I forgot to brush my hair. It floated in a tousled corona of cloud around my head until I went out into the rain to fetch us tea from the Starbucks on the corner. I stood a minute outside the shop while my hands were slowly scorched by the cups of hot water and looked up into the sky, fascinated by the feeling of light wind and water falling out of the heavens, feeling a moment like I was alive instead of pretending to be infatuated by a little grinding retail life. It soaked me enough that I could tie my hair in a passable knot and be done with it. I’m fairly certain my manager didn’t notice the delay. She stands outside intermittently and smokes.

    Every time I approach the red velvet curtain that separates the store proper from the storage area haphazardly filled with sex toys, I face a a row of unpleasantly shiny vaginas in clear cases winking at eye level and inwardly wince. It’s a vision of cheaply kept entertainment, our back area. The door to our bathroom has broken off its hinges. To the left plastic bins messily marked ANAL (small) and HARD DILDOES in block letters with black permanent marker are stacked on cheaply made metal shelves, to the right is a wall plastered in tiny crabby notes on how to properly run the store written by people who aren’t familiar with what needs to be done. I am continually impressed at how difficult it is to find anything in a place where black marker writing is on everything. LIGHTSWITCH, ALLURE, NIPPLE CLIPS, ALL CROTCHLESS PANTIES, POCKET ROCKETS, REMEMBER TO TURN OFF THE LIGHTS, SOFT VIBRATORS, ANKLE CUFFS, MENS, ALL GARTER BELTS, PLEASE REMEMBER TO REMOVE BATTERIES FROM TOYS BEFORE PUTTING THEM BACK ON THE WALL, BEADS, BOOTY SHORTS. It just goes on, and yet everything is moved every day. It would be an adventure if the prizes were anything I wanted to find.

    today someone called me by my middle name


    Alto Firenze!
    Originally uploaded by Iv0/0vi.

    Traffic at this time of the morning is mostly trains. Heavy rumbles of solid metal thunder grumbling too far away to hear properly, fog horns mournful through the record scratch sound of violent heavy rain. If I were to speak, my voice would be a surprising sound, something too big for the space of my hearing to encompass without setting off a quickened heartbeat.

    Even my music is off.

    Ryan is asleep and recovering from being mildly ill. This was ostensibly to be his last day at work, but they decided to have him on a couple more days before his contract with them runs out. Hours are welcome, he says, and I believe him. We are young and finances not bright. The jobs we have are tenuous, the jobs we have [are/our] small grinding wheels. I don’t have the skills to find myself something better and currently it seems he doesn’t have the will.

  • Red blood cells fitted with artificial tails.
    (quicktime here).

    Respirocytes – Designing an Artificial Red Cell.

    Concern is dawning.

    • A little present for a dear friend, who I know has forgotten these.

    This day last year, at almost this exact time, my friend Jenn came over and visited. I took some pictures and promised to send them to her. I did that, but today I’ve uploaded them. She’s married now. I was a bridesmaid a her quirky wedding. At the time these were taken, she was just barely Steve‘s fiance and I hadn’t punished myself yet for being in love with someone. I like the last one best. We’re both smiling for people particular.

    241 242 243

    I wonder if we can still get away with calling her a girl. I vote yes.

    Damn I miss my purple hair.

    empty time today



    Originally uploaded by Boytoy.

    I’m vacillating between listening purely to The Arcade Fire and what new music I’ve found this week. It’s a difficult decision, Funeral being a powerfully difficult album to put down.

    The lighthouse is fractured, a flash of light explaining very strange pieces of personal mythology. blink The first time I was seduced by a woman. blink Going there with the band the next day. blink Balancing rocks with my missing lover, my best friend, the only person who’d met him last time. My eyes cannot be covered by my hands to shut it out. blink I don’t want to. blink It’s a strange place to think about only because I’m not used to it. I forget it exists. blink A picnic, they talked about making a music video on a sailboat for a song about whales. blink A different lover, but the same best friend. Fire. blink oh Nikki’s hair blink oh how he used to have a temper blink the painter blink the violent drinker blink different people, the time I almost threw myself in. GLITTER WARNING FLASH. One of the only lights you can accurately see across the inlet. The memories creeping into the fabric of the trees and cliffs and water. FLASH. It’s Vancouver, this particular quality of light remembering. The sign on the road. The parking lot hemmed by forest. Running the path. Running the cliff. The water looks like expensive gun-metal silk shimmering in a radio play. Everyone sits and raises the children of conversation in front of the ocean. It’s only human, but how I wish I could swim.

    `Wearing an aura of rugged-intellectual charm like a plastic raincoat …’ — Sam Merwin Jr.

    Fantasy spark: water warmer than this, with you.