Tag: magnus

aaand, he’s just walked in. I am the luckiest thing on two legs in all of Vancouver.

a better view

I did not get to go to Regina Spektor last night, due to a serious of misfortunate moments of Drama ™ where I should have let off trying to respect someones apparent Sudden Dislike For My Company and beat them up-side the head with my presence anyway. Lesson learned. Next time I will be more callous. Yes, I am un-thrilled. Apparently it was a very, very good concert.

However, I was shown off last night and that was wonderful. It balanced out my hot disappointment rather well. We gathered people at the Jupiter Cafe, had a politician buy our drinks, then went to True Confections with Aeon and his wife. We went to bed exhausted, amused, and well. Apparently, when we are tired, we are hilarious. As such, we are clever all the time.

Today I am nervous, as the boy took my measurements when I was distracted and sleepy and seems to be making corset-shaped noises. As he’s ten years out of practise with this city, I’m feeling fairly safe with whatever he’s actually doing. It’s not like he can get very far, she says to herself, doubting.

Predators of the Sprawl

It occurred to me this morning that we have been co-habitating since, essentially, April 1st. I wonder if I will remember that in a year, the most comfortable joke I have ever encountered in my small life. His apartment was an odd compartment, the hotel feels more temporary, somehow increasingly realistic. Our toothbrushes cradle.

Winter is over, the streets are coated in pink flower petals as if the sidewalk was about to be married our shoes, and the clouds are taking on the consistency of still life paintings from places more interesting and decidedly more Italian. Construction continues everywhere, it is still possible to count cranes like a trail of shooting stars, but somehow, I begin to hope in two generations, what is above water in Vancouver will be a fascinating place to live.

(LJ now lets you embed anything, as long as you wrap pointy-bracket lj-embed pointy-bracket around the embed or object tag.)

highly unlikely

A “data cable” made from stretched nerve cells could someday help connect computers to the human nervous system.

Turn off the lights, it’s morning, my hair is tangled. Waking up, I’m going to a memorial right across the street for Zayn Ali, found dead only a few blocks away. Either murder or a running jump from his apartment window. I feel like I should have said hello more, but don’t know why. Appropriation, this inability to touch any grief, this length of bed under me, these red sheets, the rain hissing through traffic outside. The newspaper got the name of his brother wrong. Outside the box, I don’t know if I’m going to see anyone else I know.

Work later, the Dance Centre. Dropping by Kitsilano, staying for dinner, trying to get away before it gets too late. Something to keep the weather off, photographs of Vegas, my house after midnight.

Heart of the World continues Monday. This is all regularly scheduled programming.

I still think that maybe I should leave, go to the club, try to wake up closer to my own bed

Frank Warren of the cult PostSecret answers 20 Questions: “For me this was a great surprise. How courage can be more important than talent or technique in creating meaningful art.“

When I shut the door behind me and glanced at the photographs lining the wall, it struck me that once I was going to live here. Cream walls, a white picket fence in pencil. He called, “When you’re done, can you come help me with something?” The music was comfortable, perfect. I surprised myself by replying, “You’d better be naked,” as I took the stairs two at a time. His smile at his computer screen made me remember why this was going to be my home, what I gave up when plans changed. Strange to love him still, at a distance. I still want to cut a labyrinth into his short cat-fur hair, but the desire to lean into him is gone. We never kept each other awake enough and I could never bear to hurt him again, not in the slightest thing.

Cold outside, I’m not wearing clothes sensible enough. The plan was to go dancing after the movie, but something else happened. A language was spoken under language, the same that hooked me almost home to that other apartment, the one where I still know where everything is. My mother tongue, it echoes.

Heart of the World seems to have bought an extension. I do not know how long a one yet, I will find out early on Monday morning, luckily before the CBC TV interview.

knots, because Jay is a sweet curmudgen

His skin is lighter than mine where the sun doesn’t touch, though we’re multi-racial enough to get us lynched in certain places, (we know he has problems at the border). I can see in the dark how the outline of my wrist – you know this story. I know this story. I will never get enough of his clever mind, his smile, or his hair, but it slipped from my mouth that the latest death.pool bet says he’ll run off with his employer next. I mistakenly used the word “cheat” before demurring that I know he is only as committed as a cat offered a dish of cream. I know the ending already, the cotton candy clouds blow away in a predictable wind. Last time I bled myself dry and then moved to another part of the country. It didn’t change anything.

Another story – The clock is heaped with minutes that need to be folded and placed into drawers. Fragments of conversation, of laughter like honey in my throat, of shared yearning after mystery. I am made of clay and I can feel in the dark how the shape of my body fits surprisingly into his (as it crumbles into dust). Everywhere are tiny, running wolves disguised as mice. On the blackboard, my name has been erased. I am a self-portrait, stars for eyes, blindfolded. His skin belongs to someone else. The sheets describe pacing, the threads worn where the line was drawn. Thou Shalt, not. The pillow tells quietly of the hollow curve of a braincase. I didn’t belong there any more than I do elsewhere, but at least it felt safe. There was water in a cup on one side of the bed.

I wonder if when I am older, I will place a cup there too, as they do, these men, these ten minute husbands who deprive me of stability. I don’t like their common habits. I want all of their mistakes to be different, they should continue to be separate creatures in as many things as possible.

My New Year hasn’t started yet. I feel, instead, that I was on the set of a film shooting a scene about New Years Eve. How else to explain where I was, who I was with? Surrey? What? I came home today soaked to the cells of my marrow from working many hours in the rain. Work began at five, where I was on gate. Somewhere around midnight, I assumed my way backstage and made myself available. After the count-down and the fireworks, my time was spent hauling about heavy bits of everything. Work was tear down, strike, a rush of blood to the lungs. The skin of my hands has been polished so raw my nerves are misfiring in interesting ways, I might have split my lip and possibly cracked a rib. Sleep was a couple of sheepish hours in a hotel room, too early in the morning to be morning yet. Then we worked again. This time in a gradual and persistent downpour. Tents had to be puzzled down, missing pieces had me to be made to fit into trucks and lamentably weighty slabs of steel needed to be dragged from one end of the complex to the other. Same with sandbags. I cannot explain how much I dislike sandbags, except to say that sometimes being female’s a bit of a bitch.

(It’s always a bit of a toss-up between letting people be nice to me and accepting the easier, indoor “nice” jobs or going out in the crappy weather and attempting to prove myself a little more to a group of strangers who all assume me to be capable anyway. Mostly I took the indoor jobs and didn’t mind when people called me “sweetie”. They can call me “sweetie” as much as they like as long as they follow orders.)

I might sound like I’m complaining, but really I love this stuff. I chose being on crew over any of the parties I was invited to. (Is it just me or was everyone really slap-dash about plans this year?) I appreciate being useful, as well as chances to constructively use basic physics. (What, you think I can heft things twice my weight without the stuff?) The best part is that apparently I’m to be paid for my hours, which is nice, as I would have been out there anyway. Just tattoo geek on my forehead in invisible ink.

I was going to stay up taking pictures, but decided I was too behind in my flickr account already


Don’t Die Ding by Curiosity Group. Hit play or go to Link

I wavered over the Emily Dickenson, but I took Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman off the shelf instead and gently flipped through it as I sat on the bed, brushing my hair with my fingers, before deciding I lacked the proper background and putting it back. Paul caught me in the hallway and offered me Gravity’s Rainbow, Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, and a collection of short stories by Robert Coover, so now my bag is pleasantly heavy with books I’ve never read.

James Brown died today, December 25th, 2006.

Today’s Sunday Tea devolved eventually into a Jean-Pierre Jeunet double-feature, Delicatessen and City of the Lost Children. Tomorrow, I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’m told I have the option of being picked up in the morning by a “new fangled horseless carriage” to Darwinismas, the celebration in honour of this humble scientist and his epic martial arts hand to hand combat battles with the magical Jesus. I’m not sure how long I would stay, as I’ve also been adopted by the Elliot’s and I’m trying to find time exploring Persepolis.

OddPeak’s Top Ten Most Bizarre People.

A wax paper packet of home made toffee, soon to be marked with the name of her lover, sits on the bed. She is clothed in black rags, shreds of leather, dreams of crackling silk.Tired to the point where her own voice feels distant, her thoughts are a dense forest, decorated with curious wild flowers that are beginning to wilt. In the hall outside her apartment, there are footsteps marked in water. Small, precise as velvet, they can be followed back to the mouth of an oven. Her belly softens at the memory of children, creatures who don’t know how to be quiet. Dusk coils between the harsh trees in her mind, waiting for her to sleep. Instead she smiles as she lies on her bed, as a memory soars bird-like between the huddled branches to drop upon her, swift like hunger and as downy soft as a bleached story.

She sings old songs, stretches her arms greedily above her head so that pale skin can be seen, alabaster fighting against coming night. The bird, its beak opens, drops a pebble into her hand. Her fingers move to catch it, and pulse, the smile. The stone marks the path of a child, unconsciously walking and barefoot, led by a woodsman, too wise for his own good. His head catches on clouds and brambles both. To her flicking eyes, her fingers are handling the shape of a hand, tracing the edge of a family written in curls, and she is not alone.

In certain lights, she would be pretty. Now she is merely strange, clucking her tongue like a pigeon might, cooing protectively over a plate of breadcrumbs and the head of an axe.

the shortest day, the longest night

I woke to find myself alone, so twisted with cold that my teeth had chattered through the edges of my tongue. The blankets had been pulled off me and pushed out of my reach. A fairly clear message in winter. I sat up and curled into them until the shivering stopped enough for me to pick up my glasses. “Happy New Year.” Outside the building, I spat my mouthful of blood onto Georgia St and walked home barefoot, my shoes in my hand. My coat was too thin, a morse code of warmth that travelled over my body in response to the wind. No one spoke to me. Two nights without proper sleep and the sky looked like a renaissance painting as the soles of my feet silently burned across the cold pavement of the viaduct. From where I was walking, too tired to think or care very much, I could watch as, one by one, swinging slowly, the construction cranes turned off their christmas lights and began to smoothly arc across future decades of glass tower living. I uselessly wished only for breakfast, knowing there would be none, and didn’t stop moving until I was home.

not sure what to

HeartOfTheWorldLogo

I would do terrible things to have a website this good.

It’s been a strange week, cradled in stressful days. I walked a city block today with my eyes shut and didn’t make it into work. Tomorrow I will, tomorrow I will be farther away. The Globe and Mail want to talk with me.

Wednesday I’m going to the Penny Arcade Child’s Play 2006 Dinner Auction.

Thursday, a group of us are going into the theatre building.

It’s the small carved lines that I still see, like when I look at him with my glasses on, all I can see is his age – the distance between us for all that we’re very much the same.

paying (back) different people

Leisure Alaska, like a love child of Kashmir and the Polyphonic Spree.

I would like to meet you in a coffee shop somewhere. Accident instead of design. I want that moment of feeling my heart leap in a mix of pleasure and terror when I see you. My stomach stabbed with ice, your face suddenly unreadable. I want us to look like a badly cut piece of film, staggering and awkward and so cold. There might be ashtray weather outside, there might be sun. Either way it doesn’t matter. After painfully polite conversation, we would escape from the public glare of the cafe and find a place to sit and stare out at the world. It would be too cruel to stay where anyone could overhear us.

If you do nothing else this week, click here for music.

Someone else, someone who’s just heard of you.

A restaurant, we’re friends with odd flashes of intimacy that don’t lead anywhere. You walk like a drumbeat and I appreciate how your large hands flutter around your anecdotal stories, pale birds battered by how you frame your history. We’re talking about melodrama, how you declared you would never love again at age twenty-five. I thought that was charming in the way that embarrassing young mistakes can be until I realized that twenty-five is older than me. Then I looked down at my plate.

Later, in your antique apartment full of follow-the-instructions furniture, the music is wildly inappropriate, a random playlist shuffled from a little white box the size of a nineteen thirteen suicide. The urge to write is distracting, but my fingers stumble when they dance across the keys. Instead I get up to watch the miracle of your pencil outlining something that only had a blurry reality inside of my head. I’m caught in a chemical loop, scales of thoughts playing my spine for kicks, ignoring my more rational decisions. It would be unfortunate if it weren’t only two days a month. I think of clockwork, how the victorians made mannequins that played chess. Spinning brass gears and crystal eyes dyed as blue as yours. Hands that held pencils, that could only draw one figure. One figure, perfect, for ever. I think of hands.