Tag: friends

if I were related to James Burke, it would be illegal for me to seduce him, which would shameful


the brothers ire
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I just gave my copy of Pattern Recognition to a stranger on the bus. I struck up conversation with him because he’d been hassled by the police while we were waiting. Trafficking, I figured. He looked the type. White sports clothes, white glass stud in his left ear, had that attractive young latino look going for him. Perfect black goatee and perfect black hair, though hidden mostly under a bandanna. He asked what I was reading and I told him, inscribed my name and phone number in the front and handed it to him right before he had to get off.

Today’s been busy. I got up a little early but got out a little late from playing phone tag with one of Cale’s friends. She’s been kicked out of her house and I offered my apartment for a few days or at least as a little storage space while she gets her feet under her again. It’s tough to come home and find the locks changed. I understand. My mother’s boyfriend stole my keys once and would hang up when I phoned. Slight differences in essentially the same situation.

Late, for once, was alright though. Raphealla had already been scheduled to open the store for me today so I could hit up the Office Of Vital Statistics for my Change of Name application. So after my back and forth with a crying Chloe, I plucked my ferret out of bed and went down to the Bureau and picked up my form. There was an unexpected line-up, but nothing deadly, just enough to instill me with nervousness about the whole thing.

I brought my ferret because a student of Alastair‘s needed one to map for wire-framing. That all went without a hitch. Skatia was picked up from Hypatia at around 4 o’clock and returned sometime around five:thirty. The students, an Italian couple, were very nice about it and loved him dearly, in spite of the fact that he slept more than he ran around to give them footage. After work, the barflies at the Waldorf, including James, the bartender, adored him too. Spoiled him rotten even, as apparently he has a taste for beer and pecan pie. I’m going to bring him back for visits on quiet nights. It’s a surprisingly comfortable place to spend time. I would never have guessed.

However, I knew full well that the strip club that Mike picked in New West for his Going Away To England Birthday Party tonight is notoriously terrible. Mugs & Jugs it’s called, and the name, I think, explains almost everything. It’s full of tacky lights, atrocious rock music and inhabitants whose parents drank when pregnant. We had an alright time, some of the girls displayed such amazing feats of anti-gravity on the pole that we actually watched them for more than five minutes at a time, though we didn’t get Mike as drunk as everyone had apparently promised him. Nick tried, it’s true, but he was barely slurring when Rick and I, the last ones standing, brought him to the Skytrain. I waved goodbye from the opposite platform then had to go back to get my William Gibson book, Pattern Recognition, that I’d forgotten at the club, dodging vacous drunk skater kids to do so.

listening to deep forest so as to connect myself with the first link in this entry. it makes me happ


next to city hall
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Strangely, I found myself in a house last night that I used to be intimately familiar with. It’s a small place just off Cambie, an odd little duplex left over from the sixties. Almost ten years ago, the tree out front had bicycles lashed to the length of it. It used to be a party house. If there was a crowd gathered out front, I would just walk in. Being there again was like looking through an incredibly distorted photograph. All the furniture was gone, replaced, different, but the underlying structure remained identical. I remember sweeping things off the tile counter that separates the kitchen and the dining room and using it as a small square bed. I curled with candles in my hands in the little window nook, my bare toes against the old thin glass, offering fire to the smokers congealing on the tiny porch next to it. Now Alec lives there, with his twin brother, gradually filling it with strange mechanical bits of home-made light-up furniture and rich vintage finds gleaned from local alleys.

I met him Friday, at Alicia‘s delightful Anti-Valentines party, and we spent from there until 7:40 this Sunday evening together. If he never talks to me again, I’ll quite understand. However, I found him marvelous company. We stayed up late last night watching Six String Samurai and, honestly, anyone who doesn’t question my sleeping with a knife is probably that much closer to being okay in my books. Thank you Alicia for the goodly gracious idea of inviting him. (Though you’re only half right. He can out-geek me on technicals, but I out-geek him with culture).

Earlier than that, Friday, I was caught being ridiculous at my workplace by someone off the street I vaguely hope will either never see me again or spread the legend farther. See, the computer had been played with by the owner, James, the previous night and something he did had destroyed the sound card drivers. Silence drives me crazy. It was hours before he called me back and I received permission to do a RESTORE on the system. Hence, singing Gorillaz at the top of my lungs, trying to echo off the very back wall, and dancing on top of the counters in a lull between actual bouts of working. In my defense, it happened gradually. First I was simply singing, then louder, then dancing as I put shoes away and filled out little bits of paperwork. Finally I vaulted up and did the deed, shaking booty for the entire walking world to see. We have incredibly large front windows. People think I’m strange, but really, it’s just that I forget what I’m doing.

The year 2005 may have been the warmest year in a century, according to NASA scientists studying temperature data from around the world.

I made a brilliant deal at the club tonight. Nicole and Matt brought me to Sanctuary and by chance we sat next to a friendly stranger. When I first began talking to him, I asked why he wasn’t dancing. When he replied that he’d recently wrecked his ankle, I politely enquired how he’d hurt himself. He clipped a starling while sky-diving, he said. He’d been bringing his seven year old nephew up for a run and had turned on his back to show him what falling through a cloud looked like. Hitting a bird is a one in a thousand chance, he said, in an airplane. Million to one when you’re free-falling.

I was impressed.

More so when I found out that he’s illiterate. “How on earth did that happen to you?” I asked, taken entirely aback. He grew up in Northern Ireland. A bomb blast when he was twelve. “Oh right, you’re the people who leave bullets in your post-office walls.” A quarter of his bones are now made of steel, his right hand is warped, and his skull is almost entirely artificial. He still knows Gaelic, however, as that’s what he’d been taught as a child. Home-schooling, apparently, though he’s lost almost all his mandarin. (go figure?) So I struck a deal. First, before I entirely had a grasp of the bizarre situation, I offered to swap some English for some Gaelic. When he’d filled me in a little more, explaining that it hadn’t been for lack of language programs with incredibly impressive pedigree, I offered something different. He chooses the book and I read to him in exchange for Gaelic lessons.

He stopped mid-thought, struck by that. “I just might, you know. That’s a new one.” I hope he takes it.

I’ve invited him to Korean Movie Night. I drew him a map.

IC BEO EGESLIC

Alicia says I’m expressive, resourceful and accepting, so you should all come to her most awesome annual Anti-Valentines Party. There will be 60’s of rum and other various hard alcohols to make you wish you had never been born. Come February 17th, 2006, 8ish. The blender is available, the martini shaker is ready and the place is dying for a party. Your part is easy. Wear all-black, bring hard alcohol, no beer, bring your friends, find some dead flowers and write melancholy poetry to be read aloud from at atop a chair ~ whatever your broken little heart desires. If you don’t know where she lives, then drop me a line and I shall tell you. We can pretend it’s a secret.

Also, please go worship briefly at the altar of Hakkenkrak, the quirky journal of the delightful Christalline, who I never damned well see, because I am stupid.

She made me a pretty thing when I really needed one. Turning this:

into:

Which looks ever so much cooler and is also apparently some sort of vector thing which can be blown up successfully in ways that the original cannot? (& looks incredibly stencil-able, I can just picture the three layers I would choose, which is nice, but oh the vanity involved in stencilling one’s own face. Also the not legally clever.) I don’t actually know a thing about vectors, but it sounds fairly impressive. (Also, the way she has her background do that crazy immobile gorgeous woodblock thing… damn, I wants).

People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t which is perhaps why I am never intelligent enough to corner hakkenkrak for a sunday afternoon. My brain is like a library what won’t shut up.

Which reminds me, here’s both my Johari window and my Nohari. Fill them out, (though I admit a mixture of the two windows would be far more interesting to me). I insist on the basis that I control the wind. Well, no, but I am sad because the boy who is ostensibly my boy hasn’t tried to see me and it’s almost been a week, so it would be neat, and neat things cheer me up. Also chocolate, though as I had incredibly rich chocolate for breakfast, supper and dinner, I’m feeling a bit odd on that subject. See, I’m living a self-imposed week of not chasing after him, no tapping on the window of the hotel or dropping a ring by the front desk at improbable hours. Sunday to Sunday, then I go fetch my clothes in a very mopey manner that feels unloved and pretty well unwanted.

Monday had wind strong enough to break trees, however. Wind strong enough to shift the course of the sun around the corners of taller buildings downtown, which is good and right and as it should be. Wind like to play piano, wind like to breathe for your body as you walk into it. That’s what I head into the day before last, a leap of faith on my way to work. My window felt like the portal of a space-ship with me looking out to the dark clouds tearing into the broken blue, pushed too hard to threaten any sort of rain, too busy trying to keep themselves together as they scud violently across the sky.

I really liked it. I was sorry, for once, that I was caught inside my store. I wanted the force of the blow to touch me, as if the world was putting invisible arms around me, shrouding me in some elemental forgiveness while it shredded my clothes. Last year I was on a bus going across a bridge when an especially classic gust hit. It was like the entire vehicle had transformed into a strong linen sail. It was beautiful, feeling us drift into the next lane with the force of it, as if the wind was going to propel us sideways and off the bridge and out over the water, like we could fly on the strength of it, reminiscent of a raygun-gothic aircraft, (which they’d better damned well go through with it lest I go over there and pluck their eyeballs out to use as ben-wa balls instead), but with orange duct-taped plastic seats instead of jazz music and improbable wood paneling.

Oh yeah, and how cool is this? The Phillip K. Dick Robot’s gone missing! Next trip out, I’m going to make myself some pink lights to defend myself with. (which is also a supremely cool link that’s making the world a better place, so go look, then make some, then send some to me.)

just a slice of life in general, I had something more to say but it got lost behind the couch

My mother writes a splendid explanation of her time at the University of British Columbia.

Earlier this week, Jenn came down for breakfast and gave me a packet of glow-in-the-dark fridge letters. I just opened them tonight. Sliding one nail under the plastic and attempting to pry it free of the thin cardboard backing launched every little letter violently airborne and straight into all the stove elements. I was impressed. After fishing them all out with a twist of wire, I’ve written GOD IS VENEREAL on the freezer and left the rest of the letters to the other occupants on the apartment. (Of which there is going to be one less as of March, as Ryan is officially moving in with Eva instead of continuing the sham of living with me and Graham.) It seemed the easiest thing to write, but now I’m vaguely concerned at my frame of mind. I seem to remember that the most common message in the english language is HELLO.

Neried rants a good shot at explaining her being a mother.

Nothing lingers like the realization that almost my every reference lately to interesting conversations has begun with “We were in bed and..” It’s like a bad habit, it brings to mind all the wrong connotations, like I prefaced with “and we were taking off each other’s clothes..” instead. I stop. My sentence echoes in the air as I halt midbreath and wish I could reverse what I just said. Thankfully, my friends understand. It’s possible they’re used to me. I’ve forgotten. This week I had the treat of a late night outing with someone who knows all my older friends, the clan of theatre folk who are a generation ahead of people like Antonio and Mimi. It was like a rewind on a few years. It was a gift. The nicest thing he said to me, “You were like you are now.”

My dear friend Joseph is about to be laid off, so if anyone knows of any work in Montreal for aerospace engineers…?

It’s a wedding. They are dressed in their best clothes, lying on a hill. They look like a carefully staged moment for a documentary on the history of stock photography. Her lips are painted pink. From his hang a flower picked from the grass beside his hand. Posed on the brink of conversation, they are skirmishing with words, throwing a miniature fit in avoidance. “Congress is preparing an investigation, and I will work with members of both parties to make sure this effort is thorough.” she said. “I don’t believe you,” he replied. “Look, that cloud’s shaped like a stork.”

Nicholas has been spending slightly too much time on-line.

One of the perks of my job is free long distance phone calls to anywhere in Canada and the U.S. As I have a few stretches of hours wherein all I’m doing is upping my freecell score to ridiculous levels or reading a book, I’ve been encouraged to try it out. This offer sounds like cool water in the scorching sun to me. I like this opportunity to get some of you a little better, to get to finally greet my family in a different medium. If you want to hear from me, simply fill out my little poll. Store hours of operation are 11 – 6 PST.

singing you’re one of my only friends who knows my love

Good morning to the new lunar year. On the Chinese calendar it’s my year, the year of the Dog.

The roof of my mouth feels lightly of electricity. Yesterday was falling backward, a door opening accidently, opening onto a room full of people I never see and don’t think about often enough. I have a new ring, a silver thing like the branch of a mother of pearl tree. I have eyes too open to see sleep properly. The parade through China Town was extremely beautiful. Ray and I bought explosive paper twists, you throw them to the ground and they spark and bang. I fell in love all over again every time I dropped one to the pavement. I took a slew of incredibly colourful pictures, but I will upload them later, when I am not rushing against the time I need to be at work.

She retrieved a clove cigarette from her purse and put it to her lips. I hurriedly offered her a light with my lighter.

“I want to sleep with you,” she said.

So we slept together.

-Haruki Murakami

“This General Motors Futurliner was one of only 12 such vehicles ever built. They were introduced in 1940 as part of GM’s “Parade of Progress,” spun out of the 1933-34 World’s Fair, themed “A Century Of Progress.” There are nine known Futurliners that have survived. Three are in operating condition, including this 1950 model which sold at an auction last week for US$4,320,000.”

  • Vintage UK electronics ads.

    The day before yesterday, I felt like terrible company. Saturday night I simply crashed. Blearily I answered the phone a couple times, tried to wake up enough to get myself together enough to go to dinner with my friend, failed, and finally closed my eyes. There was a knock on the door a little past midnight, Andrew and Ian to pick up some electronics pieces, and a bit later, Matthew to tuck me in, but no one stayed and I fell back into uncomplicated darkness, tangling my ferret in my hair and forgetting to dream.

    • I’m bleeding dye

  • British woman weds dolphin.

    Something about me wants to learn how to sing soul music, that drum machine spoken word that focuses on notes like inspiration and cleverly explains every bar-tab feeling that love ever wracks up inside our hearts. These words aren’t enough some days. I desire chords. I keep being put on the spot next to pianos and feeling entirely inadequate as my tongue searches for something I know all the lyrics to. I’ve lost all my known songs, all I’ve got left are children’s tunes and the thin skin of pop songs that don’t stand up to scrutiny. A man suddenly startles from a couch. “You’re not a musician are you? That would be a shame.” “No, I’m not. Really I’m not. Why would that be so bad?” “I would haff to stop what I’m doing right now if you are.” “What?” “I don’t let myself ever do this with musicians.” Understanding glitters in her mind and her lips quirk. They laugh while the others look on uncomprehendingly. He leans back, settles his head back on the pillow, and she continues to be pleased. I wanted to sing. I swear. Please believe me. I would give up every ounce of hesitation I showed so that you could have had me sing for you. Hands on the keys and I felt like magic was real. I felt like I remembered, the first time I left for the city, the first time I met you. I will never stop wishing you’d called. The phone silent in my pocket felt like a John Cage piece. Four hours and thirty three seconds before I step on a plane marked only by the absence of vibration, of tone, of hello where do we meet. Those hands, so slight, pulling rabbits from my jaded hat. Sound.

  • Second chord sounds in world’s longest lasting concert.

    Does anyone have a scanner? I have a lovely Polaroid of Andrew, Mike and myself that I insisted be taken by an unkempt vagrant downtown who was wandering around asking tourists to pose for a fee. We’re standing in the middle of Grandville street at night looking like nothing better than drunk kids. I would like to have a digital copy of before anything strange happens to it. I’ve never had a Polaroid before and I’m pretty sure I’ve never looked like a yuppie’s girlfriend before either. The novelty is slightly addictive. I want to wear it in my hat like an antique PRESS pass and ignore people who stare at me on the metro.

  • John McDaid’s brilliant sci-fi story Keyboard Practice is now free online.

    Larry called on Friday while he was driving down the highway home. We fell immediately into comfortable conversation. I was glad, still am. I’ve been feeling him as living farther away lately, no matter that Missouri’s a hell of a lot closer than Paris, because the frequency of his posts dropped lately and there’s been less content. My distances are measured in information, not geography. Every letter typed is a drop in a river. I don’t have to close my eyes at night to see it. I can be walking barefoot through cold mud, whirling glittering scarves over my head, and think, ah, so-and-so would like to do this with me. I can tell. They write that way. As I was discussing with Rick, on the bus Sunday, grammar and punctuation can mean so much on-line. The entire language changes to make up for body-language, for visual cues. Sentence structure is suddenly crucial in a way that doesn’t effect speech. Typing the word “like” or “um” every three words is unacceptable, though I’m sure we say them more often than we’d like to admit. Spelling takes on the measure of your education, typos of your intelligence. Code overshadows everything read, as LOL translates to “well that was enough to make me smile”. It makes me wonder how well I transliterate to page. I’m told that I smile more in person than on-line, but that my typos are less. What about you?

  • India is missing about 10 million daughters since the widespread use of ultrasound, estimates a new study.

    • there is no title for this land



    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Dr. Thorpe: My car has a line of spraypainted stencils of ankhs with X’s through them.

    It is quiet enough in Andrew‘s apartment right now I fancy that I could almost hear the frequency my freckles vibrate against the rest of my pale skin underneath the constant flooding calm hum of his white enameled kitchen appliances. I would have to stop typing, however, to try my ear to such a pressure test, and I’m rather enjoying the illusion my fingers are giving me at seventy words a minute, that soft sound of rain that appears once I’m typing fast enough. I think I want to be lying in a room with a lover sometime to this kind of sound, this sort of quiet storm of water against a pane of glass. I remember days that almost approached what I’m beginning to want to look for, the sun slanting in through water distorted too much to see through to the trees.

    There’s always trees here, Vancouver is rife with them. It’s our natural beauty, our tourist trap. Snap. Pose for the picture. Tap, that clicking sound as collected water drips from the branches after a wash. Both metal sides of it crashing then crushing your ankle, leaving you unable to walk without a limp. It’s an asymmetrical sound and familiar all the world over. Here it’s background, a thousand thousand moments every day in the summer, the winter, we don’t have real seasons. If you live here, you mention rain. Every day it’s the same. Gray with sunshine. Gray with mountains and ocean and that one single lighthouse that shines with a dull frequency, too slow to pretend it has a secret language, too regular to be kind.

    Why do you live where you are?

    I live here because it’s what I can afford to do. Only once did I have the fiscal momentum to leave and instead I was a fool, stayed for a man. Never again, I swore. Since then, I’ve never had the means to leave, though there might be nothing at all I want more. Instead, I have collected a veritable army of good and clever people, the sort that a person might always want to talk to, as fascinating as a town can allow them to be and so often more. I like to introduce them to each other, spread out the balance of dissimilar personalities, like if maybe I connect enough of them before I leave the network will stay alive without my interference. It’s hard to meet new people, I’ve been at this so long. Instead I dream of strangers and throw my hands in deeper. If I ever disappear, maybe some of them will come with me. Conquer the mountains, the constant rain, the endless small town drudgeries, and escape and be free.

    There are worse ways of living, worse places to be, but when I came back from Montreal, all the wooden houses looked like shacks and all the heritage buildings seemed to me small frontier ideas of grandeur. Everything grated freshly because I’d been immersed again in a city big enough and new enough to keep me happy. No matter how ignoble some moments or how tiring walking through snow could become, it felt so perfect not to be breathing salt, not to be watched when I wandered or recognized every time I left the house. Old story. Small town, little girl. That cigarette adult craving for the big lights and endless entertainment of simply being where it’s possible to get lost. I missed my people, some of them. I wanted them to be waiting for me in coffeeshops or at the Metro, ready to go to a movie or skating on the river, but it wasn’t enough. There are always people, I tell myself. They are only prolific.

    It’s proved true. No matter where I go, it’s always possible to find someone likable. There are too many people in the world for it to work any other way. You’re never going to find that perfect smile unless you go outside, that perfect delightful smile unless you walk and finally say something to a stranger. It doesn’t even have to be clever. Everything can start with one simple shift, one hello or complaint about the current administration. Sometimes I know it’s difficult. The constant complaint of being shy, it rattles in my brain and I do my best to demolish it. Stomp it like an unwelcome insect and let my will find a way to insert that extra glance or wave of hand instead. That tiny thing that informs the world that I’m open to conversation and not as meek as previous impression may have led you to believe. Insist my chosen victim to ignore my book of fairy-tales, mentally erase my out-dated hat full of feathers, instead pay attention to my instigation, my eyes drilling into yours. Instead help me try to bring down the world, let it fall around us as we talk about nothing and finally find ourselves trading phone numbers or e-mail addresses.

    I have a camera again, which helps ease. Ray was sneaky, enlisted Aiden, Nicole, Jenn, Nicholas, and Ryan to chip in and replace my dead lump of circuitry that had betrayed me viciously and inexplicably while I was away. I have to find some way to thank them properly. Suggestions welcome, though it’s highly doubtful I’ll take any naked pictures.

    lost my face

    Wednesday night I fell asleep with the skin of a bear’s head draped over my hair and face like a mask and bodies sprawled at my feet. I was an urban medieval Frezetti painting. All I needed was a grand gold spear in the hand that wasn’t sleepily curled around one of the black fur ears.

    Last night I didn’t sleep at all. Instead I held someone and let them come back to life. We’re damaged people, love. Yes, I know we are. That’s partially what holds this part of clan together inside our tribe. Family words, meaning country and lover and home. Parents, holding hands. The two of us writing words in the sand, the light off and my glasses by the side of the bed.

    When I’m here, so are you. Everyone reading and here I’m sitting, thinking “what is that sound?” It’s people, trying to find themselves in what I write here, as if it were important. Until recently, I wasn’t aware. I’ve become used to being put aside. The world goes around without me, I think, it continues and carries on. I am the merest drop of rain and the rain will fall forever. New creatures will be born, they will have stories, they will stop and stare at the enormous sky that birthed them and think in tones of wonder long after I have passed my way.

    I should be at a party right now. David Bloom sent out a mass invite to celebrate the fact that it’s not New Year’s Eve. No resolutions will be necessary, bad behaviour will be accepted, but I’m feeling a little lost for some reason. Alone and not a little intimidated, I want to leave the house and instead I’m thinking softly in excuses, It’s late. I hardly know any of his friends. If Bill is there, I’ll make him uncomfortable. Most of all, it’s late, as if they were real. Yet in denial, I still want to have my shoes on. I will leave the house, wrapped in this feeling of abandonment of not. This is what I want to believe. Make myself over into someone who can be brave with this strange cowardice bubble of uncertainty encasing my heart. (This is what I horribly suspect that other people might feel like all the time.)

    Instead, my arms are stretched out, trying to hold onto something beautiful and failing. I’m scanning every face now, trying to see into the future, trying to see who I might encounter as a friend. This city is full of strangers, they look at me sometimes when I walk by them as if I were unexpected, but rationally I know that some of them I will talk to. We will meet some day and speak together, they will tell me they saw me with that hat or the ferret or in bare feet. I’m the red head hippie that girl hated or that boy couldn’t get over. A tragic figure they saw crying. I stand on the street corner like a door I’m looking out of, the traffic a heavy silence, wanting to see that perfect memory unfold before me. The one that I haven’t had yet, because it’s still in front of me, as far away as falling stars.

    Before dreaming starts at night, there’s a time when you close your eyes and pictures begin unbidden through all the caring cells in your body. Mine have been providing me with the sensation of my hands on a piano, my body held warmly against the length of a stranger in time to old familiar music. Behind my lids, it’s not my hands I’m watching, it’s not my feet, the pattern on the carpet or the length of the room between me and that place to stay. I’m not re-evaluating my choices, my flight, my desire to meet those eyes across a room again with an impossible question. Instead, I’m trying to explain with equal grace to those images how much my strange days mean to me. It feels impossible, like climbing a rainbow.

    Where the hell are my angels?

    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.

    It’s time to fake the knowledge of how to write a book


    audrey-kawasaki – grumpy girl
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Living here, it doesn’t come easy, but I suppose it’s what I have to do until I find the funds to permanently leave.

    Time slowed in the dark bus to the dark trickle of molasses. Travel encased in warmth and looking out at cold, the perfect orange of sodium lights, dirty highway, I felt my chest packed with string. It unraveled as we drove, sliding roughly out of a tiny hole in the center of my back, as if one end was tied to a rib and the other end behind me in the city. Oh the snow, the light crystals of shine that I would gather in handfuls and toss in the air.

    I wanted to run.

    Last night, for the second time in a week, I was to be found spending the night up in a home that was built from the bricks of a tax bracket that lives indifferent to my existence. But unlike the bed in Outremont that felt comfortable, redolant of music and welcome teeth, the bed here smelled like a museum exhibit, like I had crept into it past glass or a red velvet rope, all untouched history and neglect.

    I fell asleep as the sun came up like a stone, trying to remember Sylvia Plath:

    I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
    Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
    Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
    I am not cruel, only truthful –
    The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
    Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
    It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
    I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
    Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

    Soon I’ll have to explain about Outremont, the people who saved my trip and forced me native overnight, breaking my heart and the language barrier with letting me drive, a grand piano, tango lessons, and singing.

    I’m still irritated that I didn’t bring anything back with me.