Tag: flickr

I’m just not used to it


the first taste of winter
Originally uploaded by -Angela.

I woke up this morning and Montreal felt like home. Siz hours sleep and The snow was right, the fallible plans for the evening, the christmas music leaking up from the street. Everything, click. Out there somewhere is a boy who likes me, and I like him, and out there someone laughed when they walked past snow that I had tramped all over in a childish glee. Out there is a city with no pressure, a piece of land attentive to diversity in a way that the language monoculture doesn’t touch.

Walking on snow feels like walking on creaking cotton wool. It’s soft, but somehow the smooth texture catches on itself. I’ve been falling into unmarred pile drifts of it since Thursday. Just tipping myself backward until the white powder ground has caught me. Unreal, I keep saying it’s unreal. The sense of suddenly trusting the earth is novel, a cellular structure worth of edification.

Typing’s so difficult on so little sleep. I’m not sure of spelling as much, my grammar begins to decay, words begin losing cohesion like entropy coming down like heaven. Flakes cold in my lashes. They fly as if feathers to land in my hair and cake around the cuffs of my ankles. Magic and another name for wonder. Light, these crystals, the sun comes up and smooths them out. The wind comes up, flash and glitter. Pulling a white rabbit out of a hat two minutes too late, because I’m already leaning into gravity backwards, holding out my arms as if I’m being crucified, as if I’m reenacting the feeling given to me on a digital platter of my last two relationships. Then the cold catches me, it cradles my body, the perfect pillow formed exact to my specifications. I fit into the cavity made from giving myself up, pretending for a moment that everything’s all right, and I smile. I want to fall asleep, content in the knowledge that one day I too will die and all of this will have worked itself out and into the next generation of fools who think they mean something.

over a year ago, do you remember?


Heaven’s in the backseat
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Here there are no weeds growing, there are no patches of green grass to startle the eyes through the snow and hard packed side-walk ice. The reality is fiercely burning ears, tips of noses too numb to feel, and lips slurring inexpansively from cold. It gets dark quickly with no ocean to snare the sun. Walking down the street is noticing the flash of neon signs reflecting off eye-glass lenses, is watching black trends in coats and scarfs, is wishing for someone beautiful to step out from the crowd to ask your name. I’m feeling like I’m failing at being at peace. I could find something here to capture me, but I’m lost for a direction. There’s so much to explore that all I’ve accomplished is walking. I’m not clicking into place like a missing computer chip, instead I’ve barely scratching a surface I’m not even sure I’ve been allowed to see.

Why aren’t you here beside me? When I’m running on so few hours of sleep, my dreams are always just on the edge of sleep, as if hallucinations are forcing me down into the bed instead of the insistent hand of gravity. Around the screaming edges of my tired lids are dark curls bleeding into my field of vision, the institutional brushes of a fingertip along the inside of my arm, the certainty that a tongue has just shaped the sounds required to speak my name. I flinch away, turning my head into my pillow, and sink into sleep, haunted by subliminal echoes of another bed, the one I would rather be in, wherever that is. I’m not even sure right now. People make fools of places, expose them for the space occupied that they are no longer living in. My memory lies to me, tells me that if I put my hand out, the right hand will take it, swing it to the softest lips my needs spill into and take my heart from it to cradle gently and let me rest. Sleeping lately hasn’t been rest. My heart is soul searching without me, leaving me always on the edge of exhaustion. I’m finding it difficult to follow simple conversation and the native language isn’t sticking to me at all. Instead, I’m shoving off, wandering on-line, trying to find somewhere within walking distance that would be interesting to be at two a.m.

I slipped out of the apartment earlier to try and look at the wonder that is the sky. (A pregnant woman survived a fall from it earlier, though elsewhere.) There’s an easily accessible rooftop deck on the twenty-first and a half floor. Through the tiny gaps in the clouds, the stars are a seemingly endless metaphor for a patternless universe. I’m considering finding some of my most solid underwear and going back up. The other part of the roof encloses a heated pool. If I can’t find freedom, I might as well splash my toes around and read a good book. Last night I stayed up reading comic books that James had chosen for me from his prodigious collection. Fast fiction snacks, I thought. Strange little things, not solid enough to take a full bite of. It felt odd to be reading dedications written by people I know in the front covers, like I was deconstructing reality just the tiniest bit. Enough so that maybe when I looked up from the last page, it would be perfectly in time to see an unexpected explosion through the window, chunks of building spinning orange and black into the sky twenty blocks away.

Well, one can hope.

I have a media request of the internet audience again. You folk were so utterly amazing the last time that I figure this particular search should be a breeze. James introduced me to a music video, (download), a few months ago at Quickie Culture Night, DJ Krush – Truthspeaking, (linked here as an mp3). He’s in love with the singer, I fell in love with the DJ. However, his work is easy to find. DJ Krush is high in the hierarchy of wicked hip-hop fusion gods to come out of Japan in the last ten years, but Angelina Esparza’s a bit of an enigma. James has been unable to find anything else of hers in spite of a rather intensive search. If anyone’s got anything, could you toss it our way? Personally, I find her a little generic. Instead of finding her enchanting, I’m left craving more video with this man in it. The depth of personality he’s got engraved in his motion is simply breathtaking.

(my suitcase in my best friend)


super sexe
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Architecture to stretch out in without scraping my fingers on roughly green glass walls. There are no mountains to hem people in here, no ocean to swallow their gaze completely to the exclusion of culture. I blend in. In Vancouver, I stand out in the street as something odd to look at. It’s like a weight lifted, all those people looking elsewhere. I don’t feel like a bare gallery of this hat, these clothes. Instead, beautiful pieces of public graffiti sprayed onto the brick skin of buildings a century old reach out to me and remove weight from my shoulders.

My trip to Toronto is confirmed: I leave on Monday, Dec 19, at 6.15 on train #69.
I return to Montreal on Friday Dec 23.

I’m living with James at Sherbrooke and St. Laurant. It reminds me of the first time I lived in Toronto, when my apartment was at Queen and Spadina. There’s a similar sense of being exactly in the right place downtown to properly chase dragons. It’s like Sigur Ros is playing underneath every creaking step I take on snow, lending me magic and grandeur. Tkch, tkch, tkch. Everything is dusted white. I don’t pad around here. It’s impossible. My feet are encased in big clunky shoes. My feet are clumsy. My feet are walking somewhere they’ve never been. Every curb is a cliff leading down to some improbable country where I’m glad I don’t know the language.

Yesterday, like the day before, I walked for hours. I haven’t done anything yet, but I’ve seen.

beautiful like it’s going to break me


Jhayne
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

The cab driver, a black shadow in a dark cab, asked us where we wanted to go, then turned on house music so loud that the seats reverberated with the bass. “Iz thise alright?” Perfect.

We’d walked to far, my sense of direction ignored for James‘ right of way. He lives here. That way is North. There is snow on the ground, dry powder piles of it that shine into crystal when I throw them in the air. When I laugh, it’s with a new voice. I’m like a child. I love this place. How in every direction, there are people.

There was no grand entrance. They were late, as I knew they would be. Flight times, arrivals. Different than what actually happened. I sat and shared an anemic sandwich with a boy who didn’t speak any english. I liked his clothing, military pants, a coat with antique clasps, a fall coloured tuque. He liked my hat full of feathers. I put it on his head and he smiled. He was gone very quickly, so I left my luggage within sight and went outside and threw snowballs at taxicabs. The drivers liked me. They waved and kept driving. One of them offered to take me for free, but I had no address.

Gladness. Finally meeting Michel, finally being somewhere I don’t know the language, finally having to fend for a little of nothing with people. I was handed a leather satchel. I’m not sure I’d ever handled an object that was ever so clearly a satchel before. We talked about nothing, catching up, explaining computer problems, where in town the chinese food is, how to find, how to, how are you?

We went to a party. Games industry, half of it. Someone from work, his wife’s friends, she said. The women, I don’t know to talk to. They nodded and smiled and pretended they knew what I meant when I said, “Yes, but what about?” In the livingroom, we played games. Hold this, pretend it’s a guitar, now rock. Long convoluted streams of referenced consciousness. Michel left early. We’ve come home closer to three in the morning.

It’s not cold like everyone’s been saying it is. It’s warm here, the chill is a soft thing that covers the city like an expensively sugared blanket.

No one can stop me from claiming what I’ve fought for but me.


Eolo Perfido – voyage
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Adventures from the Technology Underground Catapults, Pulsejets, Rail Guns, Flamethrowers, Tesla Coils, Air Cannons, and the Garage Warriors Who Love Them.

The world has left me by myself this evening. My brain is stumbling, wanting to be placed in the hands of someone warm who would curl up with me, knot their hands with mine and drowse into grounding sleep. I feel so incredibly detached, as if I were to know the trick of it, I could lift up my body and float into the ice-cream cold sky. The wind would be unbelievable, the chill worse than a bad piano recital. I don’t want that tonight. I want to murmur, “where are you going?” on the edge of sleep and have someone reach over and comfort me. It’s becoming a stretch into years, that feeling. I’m so bad living in only half marriages. It’s like a sickness, this not having certainty. I enjoy the pauses, but I need something stable. It took so many years of clawing back into an emotional world that I feel as if I’m squandering when I’m trying to be satisfied with small print contracts.

I’ve been mentioning in conversation lately my traveling approximation of childhood. I’ve clarified there was trauma. I was a girl, they were an older boy. My mother was young, my father a violent man. I’ve almost shown the carried scars on my body, graveyards of happy memories I never got to have, but somehow, it just wasn’t the time. In a very strong way they don’t matter. To my mind, I didn’t properly begin until I was seventeen. Before that I was running around on automatic, a seed in a field that never got any water. There were no genuine feelings, only faked approximations because if I didn’t keep up with people, they began to let on that I was too much of a problem. What I want to explain somehow is that past all the months of living in the back of a truck, all those accumulated years in hotel rooms and blank transitory hallways, I can forgive myself for leaving the world alone when I was younger, but not any longer. What I’ve finally gathered is too precious. See? I hold out these hands in spite of everyone. It’s simple. Interaction is the way to stand in front of time and take the force of the blow.

Holy Tango of Literature “What if poets and playwrights wrote works whose titles were anagrams of their names?”.

I’m living close to the line right now. I’m got less than a hundred dollars to live off until I find myself employment, and I get back on the twenty-fourth. It was a matter of keeping my job or going to Montreal. To me there was no question. With the little I was making, there was no feasible way to Save Against A Good Time. Damn the basic idiocy of leaving with as little as I do. If I’m going to go, it’s going to be now. If nothing else, the cold will be a deterrent against staying.

I haven’t found anyone who’s willing to take my ferret and I only have one day left. It’s kind of Ryan to try and make it back here every day to top up his food and water, but I’m not sure I can rely on him to remember. Are there any volunteers in the audience? He’s very sweet and won’t hide anything in a place impossible to find. There’s an issue with him getting into dangerously exciting places like Beneath The Fridge and you’ll have to get used to checking under things before you sit on them, but overall, he’s really quite easy to take care of. Food, water, a twice a week sink bath with dishsoap or shampoo, and he’ll sleep with you at night if you let him, especially if there’s a draught.

The PostSecret Book A hardcover with 288 pages, many of the postcard images inside have never been seen before.

my mother doesn’t read my journal often, saying instead that it feels “too much like prying”

One day I will see my mother in the mirror shrieking through the mask of my father. All of it will still be my face. I can feel it. It’s part of growing up. My hands will look like a drag queen’s, loaded down with silver rings and slightly too big for my wrists. I will touch my skin and try to remember what it looked like before freckles, when it felt like softly licked flower petals.

I kind of like that.

It would be nice to have someone to gently walk with on that potentially painful day. There would be sweet balm in looking away from the framed silver to the honey eyes of someone who never knew my parents when they were young, but remembered me. I already find her gestures hiding inside of some of mine. Instead of worry, I think of memetics, and I ponder how ancient this particular arc of form might be, passed from daughter and son to yet another generation again. How many movement phrases are from my great-grandmother, my great-great-grandfather? I tilt my head in conversation, trying to pretend that I’m not as shy about being silly as I am. I look up under my glasses feeling like a shadow. What parts are from other people? I can casually recognize every ex-lover who left a fingerprint in the evolution of how my muscles drape my bones, but how I do see the first woman who raised her eyebrows in disbelief the way my family does? How much of my mind is echoes? Long circles spiraling outward from what I’ve read and who I’ve seen.

I have this joke: “Yes and then we all wake up to be butterflies.”

It makes me think of Steppenwolf, “TONIGHT AT THE MAGIC THEATER. FOR MADMEN ONLY. PRICE OF ADMITTANCE YOUR MIND. NOT FOR EVERYBODY.”

I don’t seem to know anyone anymore who’s read the book or even seen the movie. Sweet Hermine, sweet Marie, whores just as afraid of death as he is. Kill me, they say as he says, I am going to throw myself off this bridge. They’re shadows of who they would rather be, trapped in feeling empty because their lives fell short of their expectations. It resonated with me the first time I read it, (at age thirteen? fourteen?), the same way I decided that Henry Miller should only be read by people past thirty. There’s such a sense of being drunk on failure, reveling as a disaster of loss, that children should be told to wait. I knew then that I didn’t want to grow up to be these people. I know now. The tricky part is noticing the doors out when they pass by, knowing that to grasp the handle is not to be plunged into the dark but let out into the light. It’s not freedom I want, but liberty.

“and by contraption, I mean my computer, not my cock” (uminthecoil andrew)


Burrow
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Bless the day that I walked away with a smile on my lips and tears that were glad to be. I ran for the bus wanting to call out his name as the cry that would stop all time. My eyes shone, said the man who sat next to me. How do you do that? I’m young, I replied, and went back to my book.

There’s a mirror in front of where I sit to type on my computer and if I look up into it, I can see the white of my hair framing my face like the colour of ashes rubbed into the roots of my hair. Some days it’s good to remember what I’m like from the outside.

Also, pirates.

Often, almost always, I’m living hand to mouth. I try to get used to being a little bit too hungry but instead I’m always hoping that my tongue will have the strength to claw me out of where I am to somewhere greater than myself. It can be so frustrating. I find, though, that there is a side-effect of running under the line for so long. Gradually, my requirements fall. It’s almost that aphorism: the less I have, the more precious what is left becomes. As if bird crumbs have grown into mountains, complements arias, and even if they don’t love you down to their bones, what they offer is more than enough simply because they’re smiling to see you.

  • Scratchless CD blanks keep data from touching your desk.

    I’m not scared anymore. That’s terrible and yet I thank you. You were set up for those shots across the bow. All hope was swallowed in the cold of another morning, darkness and rain making for a miserable one foot in front of the other, and I had to let you know that it was okay. That no matter, I am too tired to need very much, too broken down to dust to invest my care too much. You’ve been that face that swims across my dreams close to morning for over a year. That I can kiss you now, that I have a chance, love, this makes for no illusions. This only keeps me warm.

  • Bike helmet covers shaped like brains, frogs, mohawks, etc.

    Burrow is here, finally we get to connect. She’s come up from Bellingham a few times and every instance, schedules have conflicted. It’s a shame, as I most undoubtedly don’t have enough professional clowns in my life. If the bicycle circus takes off, she’ll be up once a week a least. She says she’ll teach me to clown properly. Bwah-hah. (okay, no. She said heh heh heh, then HA HA HA. She’s reading this as I type it). I’m starting to think about wearing make-up.

    TONIGHT, (Tuesday), at 9:30, there’s will be a group of us at Tinseltown go seeing what they’ve done to Aeon Flux.

    edit: some of us are going for food at the wild ginger before the film. (Think 7:30). it’s the william gibson restaurant tucked away in the tinseltown food-court that has the magical slow-motion exploding tea.

    • what I have to say after all


    janis won’t die
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I leave for Montreal in a week and I’m still quietly lost as to what I should be packing. Warm things. Well, yes, I have about three of those. I have a scarf, a half-stolen plaid shirt that’s missing some crucial buttons, and a fleecy skirt. Now what? I’m not even organized enough to get myself fed in the mornings before work. Ah misery me, I’m feeling rather alone.

    Does anyone want a bus pass for two weeks? I certainly won’t be using it from December 10th to 24th. These little bits of foil and paper are untransferable, I’d hate to see the service provided go to waste.

    Also, someone get this “Will design thermonuclear devices for food” (in Russian) T-shirt, for Graham, k?
    And The Great Equation for Nicholas. Thanks. You’re awesome.

    I should be walking, airing out the musty smell of second-hand cigarettes my coat collects in the back room at work, but I am nervous of what I will find once I get past my first destination. I have a secondary plan, there is apparently a corset stitcher happening tonight at Andrew’s new apartment, but the primary is that for a reason. The scathing thing most close to the thin skin of my heart is the first thing I want to address. There is no turn back time, no peering ahead. I had a half argument about this earlier this week with a partially ex-lover. What’s real is what needs to be dealt with, and what’s now is all that we have to take chances with. What should be done should be done, regardless of imagined consequence. This is what I told him, irritation growing. I was falling in front of someone, hitting the ground hard with verbal feet that were suddenly fists curled in anticipation of the general unfairness of the world. Me, I surprised myself. I’m not used to admitting heat into myself. I usually keep everything I want very under control and very away from me. He said that I was intimidating. I would be surprised except that I’m beginning to get used to it.

    What happens when you begin to reject neglect in the face of everything you want?

    I’m going to dance on my own grave

    Vogue, December '05

    A ghost slid into bed this morning and placed a little kiss on my lips. He was cocaine pale like a stone and as smooth as if water tumbled. I frowned and turned my head, the dead are not welcome in my bed, but he was persistent. My body began to hold the smell of suicide, of unhappy older women trapped in elevators. A long way to hell, I thought. The distance between his chilly hands and the last button of my shirt. The dead are clever, they orbit the lonely like satellites. They are a constant undertow trying to drag dreams too deep, close enough for them to touch. They promise success, but deliver only the cold light of the television. And this one was trying to take off my shirt.

    The other side of time, I might have let him. The static song of his seduction was soothing, calming as a technocratic lullabye. Instead I opened my eyes, reached out my hands, and tangled his wings with the wire and string of my hair. Ghosts are small, collections of mental bacteria built up over uninteresting lives. They are usually as romantic to the eye as a plain white t-shirt. Capturing them is only difficult if you believe in angels and I am too old now. All my bridges with mystery were burned a long time ago. Sitting up, I examined the glow I caught. His eyes were a building tumbling down, a video clip on constant repeat, surrounded by a halo of jasper. A city creature then, sailing his ship through history. I wonder if he regrets how he survives. The lives he must have crept into as a memory, the ambitions and aspirations he’d cruelly siphoned off paper hearts to live off. I swear they have intelligence. Some inbred understanding of language, built layer by layer as they accumulate.

    Romance lasts little over a year, Italian scientists believe.

    she is so pretty, so pretty, yes, like I remember, oh milk, they gave me milk, like pixies, a thousand names, pale like I am now, but to live, oh pretty, fire, flame, smoulder, a lamp dying, oh to touch, rain, blood, she burns, a spoken word, glimmering, pale like crystal, her skin, give me, please, her skin like milk

    Kiss may have been fatal.

    There are small silver scissors next to the bed. I take them and cut the ghost from my body. It’s still whispering, wrapped in my hair, waiting to wreck the party, but quieter now. I’m beginning to be awake enough to think. I lie back in the bed and watch the steel gray dawn coming in. Last night’s phonecall was me drunkenly walking a crooked line. I remember every word he said, how he’s busy lately, how the world is spinning too fast for a visit. His absence must have been broadcasting as loudly as teenagers flirting at a check-out counter for the ghost to have found me so recklessly easy. It’s either merciful or frightening to think that the slippery sound of my heart is so enticing. Maybe I should use some of those orange pills in the cupboard.

    In the kitchen I find a jar the size of a fishbowl to put my new pet into. I spit into it and punch holes into the lid with a fishing knife before dropping him in with a crumpled page from one of my favourite books. The words reverberate and the paper begins to decay softly around him as he makes a little bed. Another happy ending ruined. The idea scrapes at the embers of my ruined evening and fuels my inner annoyance at how easily I push over. If I were a better person, I would stand up for myself, pound on the stubborn shore at the ugly sea that’s been drowning me. This is what I tell myself as I pour myself a glass of water. I pop the pills and notice the ghost is glowing brighter. Feeding him with my saliva was a good idea. Keeping him around will force me to resist the urge to burn this place down.

    a crime in my country


    ultra uwe scheid
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    The angel raises her head, her eyes focusing with an audible click.

    Sometimes I’ll wake in the middle of the night, the sky still dark and broken by occasional stars strong enough to shine through to a city. My eyes are blind without my glasses, I can’t see stars, but on these rare times the darkness lets me compensate. Around me might be other people, might be only blankets. I think, “Where am I going to be?” and I feel myself leave the bed, leave my breath and body full of bones and interlocking chemicals systems and slide into the Other City, where my heart resumes beating. I have an entire life there, a place by the water, a favourite coffee shop, but I can never find it on purpose. Instead, it washes over me, into my cells like some illusive memory of being in the womb. Like when the body remains lying still on the bed, but every neuron firing tells you instead that you are weightless, floating in a fetal position, turning in warm black water.

    Amateur band performs Super Mario theme on marimba.

    There’s a wonderful music store on Commercial Drive that you should all become addicted to. The staff are friendly, with an admirable grasp of anything pleasantly obscure, and the selection is excellent. They sell odd little instruments in the front window and are always playing something you’ve never heard but instantly like. They’ve been doing it for at least twenty years. It’s like it was created for some warm love-story movie that left them behind when Hollywood knocked, but with less pretension. Aiden and I were caught earlier today by a sale table they had on the street. I walked away with Rickie Lee Jones and I’m still wondering if tearing myself away from the afro-european funk they had playing was the good idea I told myself it was. Already I caught myself singing it on the bus while I was reading my borrowed John Barnes. (One for the Morning Glory is now required reading, yo. Find yourself some kids and feed it to them, chapter by chapter.) There’s the reason I hardly ever go in.

    I went in a couple of weeks ago, though. Second time this year. I bought a street kid some guitar strings. His name’s Cody, he’s working at Juicy Juice on the Drive now, (go support him). Ryan and I met him a few months ago, his first day in Vancouver having left him begging for change outside of Love’s Touch. When we ran into him with his newly acquired guitar, I traded it for a joint, man, and he smoked it with me too, so it’s like I traded it for only half a joint, I brushed off my gift by telling him that one-string Deep Purple is a punishable crime. It’s probably true somewhere.

    edit for all of you who jumped onto messenger and asked me: I do not, in fact, remember the name of the store. It is on the block across from Beckwomans and the Santa Barbara market, (the place with the orange bags that’s a few shops down from the BBQ place that catered Jenn’s wedding and the bicycle shop), and is in between the Elizabeth Bakery and the incredibly oldschool italian cafe that goes frankly mad whenever soccer/football comes around right next to the equally brilliant bookstore and the nice little laundromat.