Tag: friends

Any time it snows, parts of my brain shunt into being six years old. This can be rather embarrassing, like when you’re about to turn on someone and be upset for them unclipping your bra when you told them not to but your eyes have caught sight of magical fluffy little frozen clumps of white falling from the sky, so instead your lips blossom into a smile and the smallest little happy voice spills forth with, “Ooooooh…” and you forget to dish out what’s coming to them until it’s way too late and rather pointless anyway.

Blixa Bargeld, lead singer of the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, does commercials for Hornbach, a home improvement superstore. Here they are: Mosquito killer, Paving stones, a Power Drill, and Paint.

Brian collected me from work Saturday like an exhausted figurine. After dinner, I crumpled in the car on the way to a birthday party, a tired pile of black fishnets, velvet, and feathers, the air escaping my deflation taking the shape of an hour’s worth of clarifying how sick I am of me and mine meaning more to me than I do to them. He’s very good for me to talk with, he’s too soothing to get bitter at. Always he drowns me in affection. After the first unsteady hour, where my independence wants to lash out and kill him, I begin to relax. The next little while, all my carefully locked away pains want to leak out, but that too goes away. They grow tired of fighting with me and go back to hide again where I’ve put them to stay. It’s a trick I’ve learned to have. Hurray for trained repression. One day I should count how many people there are who are allowed to embrace me, allowed to find out what I’m really saying inside my head. I suspect the figure could be counted on one hand.

TUESDAY, (not tonight, my mistake, verysorry hope this catches you in time, etc), at 9:30, there’s will be a group of us at Tinseltown go seeing what they’ve done to Aeon Flux. You should take part, yes yes. Strengthen our community through entanglement of social possibility

Thank you to the lovely people who came over last night after Graham and I cleaned up. Andrew, Nick, Ian and Ethan – your dishes are a sweet testament to your arrival. I’m sorry I fell asleep during disc three of Aeon Flux. It’s been so long seeing some of them that I’m not even sure which episodes I missed. I don’t even know what time I fell asleep, the only time I looked at the clock was at six:thirty when I noticed it was light out and the ferret needed into the hall.

This is for Ray:


“Doomed love! Pharmacology! Futility! Insane machines!
Unholy creatures! Dismemberment! Infection! Body modification!”
The Not-So-Secret History of ‘Aeon Flux’

Today is my last day at work.

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?

it’s been a busy week


derek
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Last year, they said, they were crying. They didn’t know what they were doing, if who they were was worthwhile. I can’t imagine why. They haven’t told me yet. Last year, I was so happy that I ran instead of walked. That my feet were faster than my thoughts. Last year at this time, the boy I was trying to be in love with, he was so far away that I couldn’t sleep, knowing that we were living in the same time-zone wasn’t enough. This time last year, there was a painter. He would trace my body like a sculpture and we could never find enough to talk about. We were just tying up loose ribbons of who we used to be. It was enough. This time last year, I was up until early morning because eight hours difference was perfect. I used to watch the dawn lick the sky when I was talking in fingers. Last year was freedom before I went to L.A.

This year, I’m going to Montreal. The play I was in has kicked me out for it. I will be gone too long, nevermind I have my lines and planned on forcing Michel and James to play parts for me to work blocking around. I understand. Time is time, and it’s unreal. It only stops in hotel rooms. (It’s like my childhood didn’t exist). This year, I’m pearlescent with the heat of events hitting me, like if I were into that sort of thing, I wouldn’t sit down for weeks. Winter is upon us, fog has eaten the city for three days. Thick ashes of potential rain billowing across every street, erasing the world in portions of thirty feet.

I walked past a murder scene at two in the morning on Saturday(Sunday). It unfolded like the pages of a book, every increment walked giving me another details. Trees coalescing into police, all the sounds of the city being replaced by a constant quiet chattering buzz of ear-beads and car radios. No one was talking. The street was lined with officially identical cars, every one empty with a laptop glow.

Last year, they said. Last year, what? Everyone has little stories, it’s our dream. I want to collect them all and make them matter, but I have no idea how to do that. Last year I was living, this year I haven’t been. Last year turns into this year, but when? There’s some period of time, like how August brings change. I think I’ve been partnered, but all I know is that I’ve a lover. I think I’ve found family, but instead they were tribe. I think I’ve found my friend, but I’ve been introduced by others as their significant other. Instead of meaning, I’m just watching. Hoping with a terrified heart that they still like me, that I’m not the imposition that I think myself to be.

I can’t see the logistics, but I don’t care what’s in my bank account.


andrew dimmit – urban clowns
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I leave Vancouver for Montreal on Saturday December 10th, 9 in the morning. I’m returning December 24th in the evening, arrival expected around 8pm.

These strange anchors in my life, I’m visiting with them tonight. Chains several years long, I’m always the only one. Over in decency, I’m singular, the bed. This one, he cried once. It meant a lot to him that I held his hand. We see each other more now, but less. His computer’s broken, our connection severed. This one, they confessed beautiful things looking at me with eyes like sand, my fingers trapped in his hair. It’s all been waiting for the blossoms to burst into fire. Time creeping along on little cat feet, giving me more reasons to be wanted. This is picking up the pieces I dropped a year ago, two years, three. If this is growing older, I like it. I’m better suited, pin stripe and today a historian stopped me in the street. This will sound ridiculous, but you’re like a chic version of a rich person from the middle ages.

Sunday night, a group is getting together to go to Lady of the Camillas. 8pm at the Havana, tickets are either $15 or half price if you can pretend to remember the password, some long complicated word beginning with L.

The picture framed in my closet used to be in a movie theater. I wonder if somehow metaphorically, it burned down this week. Unborn, our friend yelled at us. All of this wasn’t allowed, so instead we held our breath and closed our eyes. Nothing changed but perfect timing. It’s a little rescue.

Tonight Jason, Jeff, and W. Stretch are hosting a gathering in New West, Benn Neufeld is finally having his house-warming over by Commercial and First, and the Work Less Party are having their Circus party down at the Maritime Centre. I’m going to attempt to hit as many of these as possible, armed with the knowledge that at each place are people visiting who I otherwise would never get to see before I leave. Burrow is up from the States for the Masque, for example, and this is the first time Benn has lived in civilized confines for something like a year. It’s now nine:fifteen. My clock says go.

I cursed myself for forgetting my place

I found myself unexpectedly in a pub full of familiar theatre people this evening after rehearsal. As it’s been close to three years since I was regularly working shows in Vancouver, there was a tacit agreement that I belonged, but hardly anyone could place me. Jacques arrived, and when he finally noticed me and said hello, I caught several people relaxing. They’d been worried that I was some strange mis-perception, a mental twitch of a stranger who only seemed familiar. I collected a few e-mail addresses of people I’ve missed talking to. I’ve got to remember to send them an appropriate hello before I go to bed.

“Then she sank down to her knees, grasped the cutter by both hands, took a deep breath and plunged the long blade through the middle of the package, through the middle of the masking tape, through the card- board through the cushioning and (thud) right through the center of Waldo Jeffers head, which split slightly and caused little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun…“

My teeth feel sweet now. Rose gave me a black to smoke while we stood outside socializing after. I accepted, forgetting that I don’t smoke, never have. The tops of my lungs are now complaining, reminding me that it’s been six years since I’ve lit anything up, but I mystified myself by having all the proper mannerisms. I suspect I will either eventually blame the city I live in, as Vancouver is a place where Marijuana isn’t considered a drug by any but the repressed children of the far right, so everywhere there are people with little rectangles of white paper rolled into tubes to be gestured with, or my exes who smoked and so gave me a character to unconsciously pattern. Either way, I was somewhat perturbed by how easily I took holding the soothing crackle of tar and clove.

  • Texas Voters Approve Ban on Gay Marriage.
  • Denver voters make adult possession of one ounce or less of marijuana legal.
  • Kansas education board downplays evolution.

    • here we are, like last year backward


    gry garness
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I adapted too quickly to my temporary work schedule and came in an hour early today. Doubly disappointing as Nicholas and Esme are still around somewhere in Ray’s truck with him and Dominique. Lovely people for lovely weather, though here the weather is all wrong. Vancouver in November has insistently dull light as if all the particles have been sucked out. It should have been cutting and bright, warm welcome blue sky and golden patches of sun on all our sidewalks that catch the fallen leaves and transform them from crispy edged mush to blazing transports of colour. That’s how it should have been. Toronto fall, lightning storms on College street and fire falling out of the corner of the eye to scrape the street with an audible brushing of texture against texture.

    Really, Nikky forgot his bag at Andrew’s and we spent out morning after Breakfast driving back and forth in light rain between Andrew’s house and work, getting keys, using them, then dropping them off, then driving me downtown. Not really what I feel like talking about.

    I seem to be talking to an old best friend of mine again. There was a self imposed hiatus while I put myself together enough to be human again. I get enough phonecalls without inflicting damaged personalities on my more precious people. What I have instead today is an abiding weight. An I-didn’t-sleep-last-night-so-invariably-I-thought-of-you. I was a drawn line against the wall, one of three people in my bed. I watched the sun come up and remembered you beside me. Embedded in the palm of my hand is a photograph of pulling your hair. I have the sound of it all attached. Another beautiful moment encoded under every chipped fingernail. I’m clothed in memory, the fabric of it delicate and blind, the pattern a musical scale like the colour of my eyes meeting yours in the dark. It’s all poetical and very very sad, though you make smiling so easy. Too-easy-there-must-be-a-catch. Ah right.

    Eventually there will have to be a choice. Someone will have to lay down and die. I can’t explain how much I want to write fiction worthy of this photograph.

    dreaming is ruining my appetite for sleep

    he didn't know I was there until the very last second

    I watched the clock today with the intensity of a dysfunctional bird trapped in a beige-tone plastic coated cage. The sale descriptions on the boxes for latex underwear have the closing line, feel the forbidden sensuality of its stretchy caress. I wondered briefly, when I noticed, if that’s a technical term, because why else would anyone be attracted to the term stretchy caress? This is the same store that sells an item named someone’s Salsa Pussy. Every one of these tawdry products was made by people. Multiple people. There were entire meetings and production facilities and conversations at three in the morning involving asset pitches to different time zones. Whenever I think of people bringing home a product as banal as Inflatable Fat Fanny, something shrivels inside my glands. My conclusion is that working in this love shop is strange and deadens my soul to random desire like hammered lead. People ask if anyone ever buys some of of our more extremely large dildos and I tell them to look it up on-line. Every toy in the store is likely in a video somewhere, and no, women can’t use that, our bone structure won’t allow for it, suckers. Take that. All twenty by nine inches of it.

    then I told him to point the gun at me

    A highlight of the day was sitting alone and writing in my black book, my feet on the counter between the tiny packets of silicone lube and the love dice, (place and position), while the other employees went to point at Al Pacino across the street. They were thrilled, but my personal moment of well being came from hearing R.C. on the radio orating poetry like the rumbling of a chop-top hotrod with candy pinstripe detailing just over some mythical hill of mocking english majors. It was like a light of sanity in the new glo-in-the-darkness. Right, I thought. I know this man. This wonderful intelligent man. I know him enough to want to hug him when I say hello. Suddenly my life wasn’t as bad as reading a magazine in a waiting room. It had been upgraded to sitting like a mannequin on stage, listening for my next line, remembering that I’m scheduled to be human soon.

    Flirting with me was a slight fantasy about going trick or treating. Putting a sheet over my head with holes cut out and hitting up all my friend’s houses. If I had a vehicle, I might have done it. Gathered my courage and knocked on doors to say “Trick or treat, I haven’t seen you in awhile. Happy birthday in case I missed it. Do you have chocolate? I’m hoping for chocolate.” then laughed and hugged them, pulled them close to kiss them on the cheek. I could have dragged as many people as possible over to Main and fourteenth for the maze and fright houses set up by the local gods of spooky and collected treasure heaps of candy to live off of for the next few months. (For a sugar hound, I have an admirable habit left over from a dirt poor childhood of hoarding my rare and precious sweets.) From all reports, it’s not like the local kids went out to brave the neighborhoods for candy. I suppose I should have stood up to my psyche and run with it. Ah well, regrets and hindsight. The movie was pleasant enough and the company comforting. Graham came as some sort of proto-goth, Beth was a string fairy, Herminia was a preppy, and Eugene might have come as a straight boy. I couldn’t tell.

    beat me to it because I forget

    I tried to dye my hair bright pink today. It didn’t take, something deep in my physiology rejecting such a painfully vivid colour, but it’s coated my hands adequately as proof of after the fact. Otherwise, there would be no sign. I suspect it’s the first time I’ve ever attempted to paint myself something so.. cheerful. Here’s hoping that it didn’t take because my body’s learned how to reject falsities.

    Ms. Kelly Foxton does very unusual things with her pet squirrel. Her website is mostly photo galleries. When I link to this sort of thing, can you believe I forgot the day before yesterday to link to the incest baby-death news story here? (similar somehow to the ‘only in the land of the free’ man charged for shocking his 8 year old daughter with electric coller.)

    It’s like I’m slipping.

    Another nice bit of news, a mysterious ‘half-animal, half-plant’ marine microbe was discovered by Japanese researchers.

    Today I had my first time on a scooter and my first time driving one. It was terrifyingly easy. I’ve decided that I need to drop by ICBC and find myself one of those horrid little books on The Rules Of Our Roads so that when I play with such things, it’s legal. oh canada, we stand on guard for thee. My papers from the government should have arrived by now, the ones confirming my english citizenship, so I don’t think that I can stand to trust the office that said they would mail me one. Instead, this might become this weeks miniature crusade for meaning. Seems likely I need one.

    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.

    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.