Tag: flickr

I am so impressed by these people.


lurching down the mountain
Originally uploaded by Pumpkin Patch.

“Right, so there are a colony of nerdy D&D-playing medievalists who gather in Mount Royal Park every Sunday to run around screaming and slapping each with swords made of duct-taped iron bars and shields made out of the lids of recycling bins. Shit, there are even dudes with nerf arrows, flails, battle axes and big fuckin’ hammers. One guy had on an entire suit of chain mail armor.

Anyway, a cabal of local hipsters decided that this Sunday was going to be different. This Sunday, the hipsters were going to dress up like zombies and come marching out of the woods to engage the nerds in glorious battle. We were there to witness and record the hilarity that ensued.”

dry skill


zeigfeld – ruby deremer
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Draw a line. Draw another. Connect the two with a side swipe of the pencil. Eventually a picture will form, I am told, like shapes in clouds. After hideous amounts of dreary practice, I have come to the conclusion that I lack the skill. My lines become crawling scribbles which if they are animals should receive a final benediction. When I was younger, my inflicted punishment was art classes. My mother wanted to raise me to be an artist, (actually, no, an Artist, can’t forget the capital A.), and so put me into a program of anything that might take me. I kneaded my way through sculpture, spun my way through pottery, orated Antigone, stained my clothing painting and incessantly got my hands in the frame in an animation class.

My mother, of course, loved everything I made.

Now I’m left wondering how much of it has survived, tucked away in file folders, hidden in her papers like squirreled away nuts of a particularly bitter flavour. The only attribute found shining in the dust has been my practically useless ability to create three dimensional structures without reference. The classic example being lanterns. I can make practically anything you like. (Once a tesseract construct was almost accomplished, but the material wouldn’t stand up to it). But, the inevitable, you have to tell me what to create. I don’t have the creativity to think of more than basic tattoo shapes, little figures of people or winged hearts.

I wonder sometimes if I’m a disappointment to anyone else. Bred a gypsy, I’m supposed to be creative and imaginative and bright, and yet I don’t find any of it within me. Instead I apparently wander around being different. I’m serious, lacking a basic understanding of being silly, and there’s no spark to light a precious grin of recognition from people who carry that enviable madness my homeless life tried so hard to sink into me. I want to start meeting people whose parents wanted them to be doctors and lawyers and accountants. I want to see if the feeling matches up, the mean aura of self-annoyance.

Somebody give me something to riff off of? Please, somebody implant some ideas. I am a waiting garden.

Administrative Assistant



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

The kitchen is clean. I am considering celebrating. Those of you who have visited recently know the implications of that statement. For those of you who haven’t been so unlucky, it seemed for awhile that my roommate was observing a strict regimen of experimentation, hypothetically breeding new species of super fruitfly. It was all for science. It had to be. That was too many of the little annoying gnats to be otherwise. Now that the kitchen has been cleaned, I will take on the bathroom in return. A serious exercise in scrubbing shall occur, oh yes. Time for the cool clean taste of bleach. I would still like to know where to get a carnivorous plant to placidly hunt down the remaining kamikaze insects, but for now, I am no longer living on the edge of a war zone of dishes. Insert the ticker tape parade here.

As part of making the self a home, I want to map out my new body rules, examine minutely the fresh schematic I returned with, but I think they’re still in flux, still settling and finding their edges. I don’t like people casually touching me now. Arms around my shoulder, legs against mine when we’re sitting four to a couch, I’ve been avoiding it. Instead I sit apart. Family is exempt, as they usually are. Not the blood relatives, but the clan I’ve created with empathy adoption and matching personal mythology. It’s odd and unexpected, a new layer of adaptation to paste into the mental environment. I require space now, room for my skin to breathe.

Apparently I think in rhyming scheme tonight, how upsetting. Can I escape & call it spoken word?


ziegfield
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

And with you I am not be. The waves push forward to the base of my throne and mock me. Immolation is the key here. Flames reaching past the wind to pull my hair in the middle of the night in a foreign city. Listen, there’s a sound here. It’s a heartbeat keeping time with surprise. It’s all very self involved though I think you’re seeping into me, humility a flag I bear that no one sees because the cup is not full but half empty. It’s like I can hear you laughing. The whole we are stardust thing and the sand is burying my feet in the salt that the earth gives us to dream about. Horizons go in both directions. Over there is another world. Youth bears crosses the way wiser heads never will. We speak of light and ruination and think we mean it. Mind the ship, steer the storm.

Break for chorus.

Here’s the King Kong Trailer for those who asked. He fights dinosaurs. Over the Girl. Yes. It’s got some wicked style, nothing artistic, but as a cliche homage it seems like it’s going to push the envelope. Game On.

Take the Bridge, it’s faster.

It’s tiring, hearing your name used in conversation casually. My reaction wants to sit and pour a cup of tea, forget that what I mean to you is not what you mean to me. I’m a girl, a scary thing, a creature that should have a bit more whimsy. Taking the chance was worth it, a koan I know by heart, a catchy pop hook that I hum incessantly. Music on means it’s time to hike up my skirt for freedom, give the soldiers something to think about on the front line as I bide again. The quickest I’ve ever kissed somebody, I swear upon that question about colour, but remember the gold is a state secret. There’s no other way to pay the tariff fee.

starlight on fire

Running underneath every train of thought are rails spun entirely from unknown quantifiers. Perceptions as metal shining blind to the horizon. I find there’s an imaginary border between hypothesis and knowing, one I don’t know how to measure. My mind takes the substance there and fashions it into flowers that drop from my lips, the blessing curse of the youngest daughter, and I hold them up to light, examine the colours for clues, but I’m not always satisfied. I want to plunge my finger into the center of them and taste the idea pollen living there. It’s intimidating, this habit, like living with angels aiding my foot-step tongue or pre-determination haranguing me daily to hang in there when events turn too stressful. Occasionally, I am appalled by how much I take for granted, how much understanding of the world I assume. I used to be uncomfortable with the entire concept, that the unconscious flow moments of big-picture recognition that are sublimated inside me somewhere represent an axiomatic system of balance. Every day I expected to realize that the patterns were only hyperbole moments of tying moments together conveniently enough for belief to kick in, (there’s a word for it that William Gibson is fond of, but it escapes me at the moment), but every year has been proving me wrong. Over and over again I’ve been justified in my unwritten understanding of the underlying motivations in various aspects of inter-person relationships. It’s almost tiring.

Certainly, it’s also been occurring to me that if a person walks around with enough self-confidence, people become willing to bend around them and so the same effect is achieved though through a different channel. This is, however, too irritating to consider. I tend to discount anything that regards my social circles in such low esteem however ego filled such a statement must seem. It’s sort of an automatic assumption that in spite of the fact that most of us are odd in some way, we have ourselves sorted to a healthy point, a mind-set place where outside requirements are nothing more than they should be and that validation comes as much from within as without.

we speak of


poison oak
Originally uploaded by lightpainter.

Art-O-Mat, perhaps one of the most worthwhile ideas I’ve come across in a long time. Pimp it out, please. It deserves to pay the rent.

Never is a word you can outlive, in spite of it being so decidedly forever. It tastes like feathers, a black shimmer coating the tongue as oil covers puddles with wondering rainbows. I’ve been weak lately, drained of all confident measure I kept as true. The sky is no longer anything to look at, instead my head hangs, my eyes drop down to carefully look for the next step as my feet swing forward. It used to be that I trusted them, propelled by gravity and momentum, to step securely and find land, that solid ground from which I could move the world.

As I’ve been tagging all my entries in spare moments at work, from the first post onward, I’ve been discovering that reading my archives is strange. I spoke of certainty, of sanguine waters that I swam in, and I think, “There is such a difference in me now.” My teeth have been pulled. Since last fall I have lost so many core attributes that I feel like I must now be dying. I let myself be sublimated. I recognize it, because I’ve done it before. The easiest symptom to identify is doubt, for me it’s an echo of a ghost limb from where I’ve lost the hands I would reach with. It’s both easy to remember and hard because the evidence is behind me now, my love is no longer fierce. Only my sadness continues to be profound, and that has been dangerously mixed with frustration and hate. I need a cure and again, it’s not up to me. I carry the sickness, not the inoculation.

the price of bread and plane tickets


control yourself
Originally uploaded by sucitta barlow.

We ask how atoms exist, how they create the water that washes our ports of call and hither, how we can split them to see what’s inside, how we can re-arrange them to discontinue the latest brand of sickness, but how often do we consider the tiniest grain of sand as perhaps a piece of emotion? Do we think of the volatile structure when a drop of salt water drops from the eye?

I ask for travel, a pair of stamps added to the inner passport pages. I remind myself that I am standing on the edge of a bridge that I am building myself, shaking dust from my fur to cement the rocks I’ve placed floating upon the waves, and that there is an opposite shore with enough wonder to make this worth it no matter I cannot see it yet, no matter how arduous this seems, this continual collecting of government minted grains in my hair and hands. The results that came back don’t tell me that I will have blisters, instead they say “Your friends will stand by you.”

lafinjack found something enchanting today, beautiful portraits by Andrzej Dragan that look like meticulous paintings.

In return, the flickr this post is a tiny pane that looks into an example of the delightful works of Atticus Wolrab.

as well, odd music: macha loves bedhead – believe

My ghodmother was over today with her Girl. They look beautiful together like the sun and air.


pirate

1. His hair has been as long since the day I met him, a dark sweep of night shot through with starlight. I think of Samson as he hangs up the phone to pick up his plane tickets. Paper printed like money drinking miles like the liquid of lover’s kisses I’m rummaging for answers in my little head attic, colour topped but still blonde on the inside, a box of coffee creamers full to the top. How will I ever forgive myself for subsisting on so little for so long? Drips of milk, pull back the paper, there’s only so much laughter left in the reservoir. I don’t have words to fill it with, I don’t have interaction that isn’t taking me for granted. My den of thieves I kiss at night, opening my lips against those that stay closed on the matters of names and meaning. I don’t have to be chased, but the proportion of need is becoming inverse to my reasons for staying. I swore I wouldn’t do this again.

pirate

2. My life is an in-joke. If you stare at my picture long enough, I will crawl out of the screen and try to find where you hid the chocolate. I can’t help it. I like meeting people. I like taking my way in for granted. I tickle hearts and make them laugh. If I could market this, I might have a more interesting job, though mine’s plenty good enough for right now. At last I finally exist. I’ve been awhile without it. This reaction is new and my skin is too tight. Your monitor settings are wrong, they make me twitch. Got to deguass, take a shower, de-recontextualize my prescience with my passions. These shoes are made for walking, but more so are my feet. I don’t have any damned boots, they ran in the water.

pirate

3. Growing up strange, I believed that everyone had dreams of telephone poles, of the crackling pop of black wires. The piercing sound that went with them would wrap itself deep within my heart, a thin wire cry that tightened around my ankles and wrists every time my father hit my mother. Dusk a method of being, it helped me dispense with personality. Volatile lately, because I don’t know how to tell someone how to be a support beam, a stationary wall moving in love with me. Childhood never prepared me for faith, that was the story of the monster under the bed, something told only to children on the television machine. Recently, my body has changed, liquefying into a spikier shape. Last week or the week before, I broke a bottle at someone in a bar. There was a chance meeting, his suit ill-fitting. He asked me how I was, and newly holding the jagged mouth of the bottle in my right hand, I told them in a dead voice to ask me again.

pirate