Part of this week was spent collecting the last documents required for Irish citizenship, my grandfather’s death certificate and a notarized affidavit of estrangement. Terrific, excepting that only two dollars and two cents remained in my bank account when I was done, an oddly symmetrical notation of poverty. I am very grateful to my friend Myke, who, upon discovering the details of my anemic finances, spontaneously sent me a spot of money, enough for the packet of eggs, bottle of milk, and bag of past-the-date oranges which should get me through most of next week. I’m not sure how I would have managed without him. In thankful return, I ask that you take a peek at his store and consider purchasing his lovely steampunk-y Airships & Tentacles Colouring Book, because seriously folks, that rules. Pass it on!
Tag: friends
They need a hero! What they have, unfortunately, is you…
Congratufabulations to Nicholas and his mad and merry crew of crackpot visionaries! After an improbable amount of work, and slightly too many years, his video game, Dungeons of Dredmor, has finally launched!
I refuse to believe that everyone lives like this
More bad news has come in. If anyone local to Vancouver has any contact numbers for support groups or counseling for families who have lost members to the Downtown Eastside sex & drug trade, it would be appreciated. Information or resource centers available to parents of underage delinquents would also be relevant. Thanks.
setting, the scene
An excerpt from the journal of Metrocentric:
Across from the pub, an office building, presenting to us its side elevation. A column of windows, about half a dozen in height.
In many workplaces people making or taking calls on their mobile phones will leave their desks and make their way to a more anonymous part of the building: a corridor, a stairway, a lift lobby. There they stand and shuffle as they speak – if there is a window they will typically look out of it for all or part of the call.
It was that part of the afternoon in which anyone going back to the office would have done so, and the post-work clientele had yet to appear. I was drinking Bombardier, because he got the first round in and he can’t ask for lager, he says.
Every now and then a face and torso would appear at one of the windows opposite. At one point there were four. Four in a row. “Connect Four!”, I remarked. All this was happening behind him.
Once, when all four fully presented themselves at the window, and none were crouched into themselves in their phone calls, and two were gesticulating, the sun came out; the light fell on all four. The squares of window stood out against the dark concrete. It was like looking at a grand opera stage set: they could have flung the glass aside and burst into song.
calls for a little bit of awe, yes
Happy belated birthday to Illyana Lev Astrid Ainsley! Born Saturday May 21st, her fabulous mum Rebecca went on to defend her thesis and win an MFA only two weeks later.
were they now?
Doug, Tony, and Rafael at one of the public art pieces at the capitol hill subway station construction site.
“Possibly mislaid in some provincial station.”
Lori at Lighthouse park.
On the middle finger of my right hand is a small lump, a callous right up by the first knuckle that used to be known as a writer’s bump, prominent and round, worn into my flesh by countless pens, yet, oddly, I have discovered that my hand is no longer familiar with writing.
The crux of this discovery lay in a love letter I wrote last night, (bittersweet black ink on treasured boutique paper, short yet hopefully sweet), when I found it curious how naturally I remembered my cursive, (how deplorable my style has become!), and my kerning, even as I marveled at how very long it took to manually scribe all the words. I have become more accustomed to tapping at keyboards, whipping down thoughts at 75 words per minute, and the gentle, profound flexibility of word processors that allow me to shift chunks of text up and down a page, than the slow, steady pace of scribbling with ink, although it used to be the activity I did most in a day. Still, I appreciated the process, even as I railed against the pace. It is comforting to fashion an object, to have made something more tangible than my usual twist of digital light.
I have, myself, a small untidy box of such things, collected from friends, ex-lovers, and one amazing, mysterious stranger, that I can never quite bring myself to throw away, no matter how irrelevant their messages have become. They are charmed things, each page representing a strangely intimate glimpse into a slice of past life, time that I would otherwise forget captured as solid state memory spun from stationery, as telling as the rings of the dead trees that made the paper pulp. Riffling through them exposes layers upon layers of emotional archeology, the rise and fall of small relationship empires, describing arcs of meaning all the way from the brief glory before an emotional disaster to someone’s gleaming desire inexpertly pinned to prose like a shoddy taxidermy specimen mounted on sagging cardboard, all broken clauses and imprisoned nouns trapped in a dirty laundry of terrible poetry and too many verbs.
So even if the practice feels antique, even as my hand cramps at the now unfamiliar act of proper writing, even as it consumes resources probably better left for others, I will defend the act forever. Love letters, even as a mad, sometimes callow contrivance of adulation, hypocorism, and art, are how I shall keep my heart.
clan of the cave bear
Another flour dusted portrait of Duncan, my other favourite from the day before he cut all of his hair off for charity.
flour
A flour dusted portrait of Duncan, the day before he cut all of his hair off for charity.
with a baby any day now
Rebecca‘s due date is this week. Exciting times! From our pregnancy shoot in Seattle at the Uni. of Washington.