Tag: schedule

there’s a membrane drawn over my week


axismundi
Originally uploaded by camil tulcan.

A sound like god, what happens when a man covered in microphones walks into a room full of speakers.

I have been measuring things more in my eyes than my hands this week, which leads to interesting bits of missing time that I worry for, as if they’re my children and I’ve abandoned them for that crucial minute too long in the shopping mall where now the only way to get them back is in newspaper articles I clip out and tape to my fridge.

Last weekend, Burrow was in town. I know that for certain. The order of her arrival is written down, there were pictures taken. She stayed over Friday night with Sam, the evening of Meat Eatery. Sam and I had walked to BJ’s after dinner, watched atrocious movies with Bob and his girl-darling from Parksville, then returned to curl up with Burrow asleep in my bed. We were quiet, but woke her unintentionally.

Saturday we crawled out of bed in time for the Fool’s Parade. Sam went home to shackle himself to his desk and Burrow and I rolled like tired thunder downtown and met with Duncan, Jenn, Georg, and her pink-dyed ferret, Silky. The parade was rainy and under-attended, so after coming close to winning the Fool of the Year award with ferret breasts, we abandoned the street for Taf’s. When work didn’t have my paycheque ready, we turned around and walked to the Bay to visit with Eva at her clinical cosmetics booth. It was fascinating, in a quiet colourful way, but not enough to keep Burrow and I from going home to rest before Duncan pulled us out to the graceful Fool’s Cabaret on Main st. Reine‘s mother was there, and Siobhan, a friend of friend’s we went to dinner with after.

Monday is missing, a played out afterburn. I took some self-portraits, but I don’t know if I slept there at home or not. There was one, two ideas. A number, undifferentiated. Something.

Tuesday is more concrete, not only written down, but recorded. Video, audio, photographs. Imogyne and I at Hawksley Workman with darling Sophie. The Cultch in all it’s warmly worn desiccating glory, intimate, red curtained. I remembered all the shows I’d played there. Running through the back when I was a child, that one time making love inside the roof. Downstairs hot-boxing the worn office, how there was once a pane of glass violently shattered in the middle of an orchestral piece, how the beads of my necklace clattered as I bounced and clapped. The music was good too, his acoustic version of striptease sincerely captivating.

After, Devon came over and we stayed up until the last bus, listening to our bootlegs and drinking weary tea. Imogyne eventually went home, and Devon and I talked until far too late, making me late for work Wednesday. The day I went to Andrew‘s after work and Georg and I re-dyed my hair into the colour of sticky quill ink while watching Ghost in the Shell. She came back to my place after, and we let the ferret run free through my apartment as we talked about partners and lives lost, the soulmates of just then and not today and maybe yesterday we knew something and maybe tomorrow we’ll have some hope. She wrote poetry and I woke up in the morning holding her hand.

Thursday I had a date with Sam, a real live date, not one of those on-line long-distance approximations my life seems to enjoy lauding me with. Cleaned up versions of us met at Tinseltown for the Brick preview and had dinner at Wild Ginger before walking out to False Creek to hang out on a water fountain and eat caramel ice-cream. We sat under the moon passing the tub back and forth like a cheap cigarette and talked about some of the same things that Georg did. We’re all divorced, the lot of us. It’s like a curse or a disease catching in all the social circles. It seems like every split has had very little to do with love and everything to do with a basic need to keep evolving, to keep trying to touch forever.

Friday Michael stole me out from under dinner with Andrew, Navi, Ryan, and Eva, and accompanied Robin and I to Thank You For Smoking instead. It was gleeful, with some damned nice moments, (there was a montage of Bad People that slaughtered us like baby seals), and led well into creeping alone up the stairs into Duello for the end of Fight Practice, a small red flower as my sword. I sat on the couch with Lee, letting him show me knife tricks, as people cleaned up and we sat for coffee until it was too late to think of going anywhere else but home. Friday nights, however, traditionally lead into mornings without work, so we survived.

We survived well, in fact, not doing a damned thing until somewhere after two in the afternoon, until the body-call to breakfast was too deafening to ignore.

not what I thought I’d do



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Charity Larson’s put up another lovely page of Busted Wonder.

Hands like sand falling through water, a smile too of something the same. Eyes that scratch the ceiling of shyness, colour storm-skirting the edges of decency. Laughter of coffee, small movements ducking the head away. Laughter of hiding like inside a box of perfectly warped glass. Hanging a shot to dry between the lips, watching wrist to elbow, it’s recalled in an instant, the taste of soft intimacy holding hands with polished copper, the mix of colours, the white cream roses cloudily blooming in clear licorice alcohol. Lightning and thunder, the gravity hand of wind in the basement, part of later, not yet.

Pick up the gift, make the liquid vanish. Magic tricks, sleight of nothing up my sleeve. Everything will be alright. A toast to sitting here, a toast to being alive and smiling.

I joined a gamelan earlier, helped them carry heavy instruments to a waiting truck behind the Museum of Anthropology. I joined a lesbian burlesque troop the day before and scheduled the day I begin my fencing lessons.

Now Mondays are Korean Movie Night, Tuesdays are Gamelan, Wednesday will be Ghost In The Shell until we’re done, Thursday have fencing, and Fridays will be the Funk-Motown night starting March 3th at the Waldorf, (the day a group of us are going to watch NightWatch on opening night, want to come?). Suddenly I’m having to peer around corners to find time for taxidermy. Unexpected, this shift of personal physics. I feel domestic, tamed.

Here’s a trailer for Harry Kim’s still-in-progress Dave Choe documentary.

It’s been a year since Hunter Thompson died.

Bollywood to re-make Fight Club.
The music at work is ingraining my embarrassing penchant for the perfect tawdry pop song even deeper, almost dangerously so. Every day I discover a new happy new content-less Eurovision Song Contest grade techno-track that I’ve never heard before and put it on repeat for half an hour. Around the world, lah lah lah lah lah. I haven’t added Nena to my playlist yet, but it’s getting close. Beware.

It’s getting too late for me to be awake again. I did this yesterday and regretted it. I should go to bed, but now instead I’m writing and vaguely worried that the cursed pigeons might start up before I’m done. I’m swimming in tiny paragraphs, sticky strings of words that don’t lead anywhere I know how to share. There was a study somewhere that showed that people could swim as well in syrup as they could in water. No word as to what kind. I’m thinking in involuntary movements, prompted in response to memories in flickering diorama on the inside of my skull, projected there from old songs. This is where I lived on someone’s couch, this is where I lived in the studio. The next track reminds me of when I had a bed made of an old apple crate. Rough with splinters, I filled it with dollar store pillows and second hand stuffed animals. It took up a third of the room, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t a place I wanted to live, the north shore a place of subtle degradation, it was just what I could afford on my under-the-table job as an unskilled carpenter.

For the few who asked after my week and what’s in it, the plan thus far is as follows: Tuesday night is a local couchsurfers meet-up at Celebrities, Wednesday will be a run of as many episodes of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex as we can stand at Andrew‘s, (yes, you’re reading this, you are invited), then Thursday is Patti‘s Mad Hatters Tea Party and the Midnight Bike Ride that convenes at Grandview Park.

dear holy mother death, my music is wierd

I have wrapped myself in pixels and lost myself in who I used to be a little more. This means my feet are returning to stone. I haven’t been writing as much, which felt awkward, but perhaps it only reminded me what was gone. In the abandonment I’ve made a new friend, an else person, someone sweet to talk to me out of sleep. The free long distance option has been illuminating. The light’s been blinding me until I fall down smiling, cradling my joy within my body through incredible acts of will. Sparse news, but breaking important to me.

The people I love, I paint them as half a myth, partially a ghost, and as clear as faulty memory can make. I think of one in particular, so vulnerable without their glasses. I wondered at the time if that’s how different my face looked as they smiled into me through an expression clear as the sky. Here, take my hand, take me upstairs again. My acceptance an open letter, addressed to nothing. Made of laughter, the ink of my hand wiping my mouth. Shining laughter, the word rill. Teeth like the trigger to procreate. Such a gentleman, all euphemisms and too much poetry, enough and more to fill me. Hit with words, I entertained what I could keep, the bare minimum of what I could stand. Such a denial of the closest thing I have to a fetish. The cream of my curiosity, oh. It was thick, it was all I could do. The idea at the time was to not miss him the way I wanted to, the way my blood was telling me to, so that like now, I could wonder. I could question and write these invisible love letters, trying to pour my problematic methods into explaining why I was impossibly putting everything off so I didn’t have to carry him with me, so that I could have his weight to look forward to instead of around my neck.

Time, of course, bends wills better than wind does trees, and curiosity will find pleasurable answers in the unlikeliest of places. In the same day, I was given him to freely write to, but never to anything else, as well as a repository for my starving affection. It’s like free insurance, that wedding ring, a name for the noose to hang my weakness from until it quits kicking. That word could is no longer directionless. I don’t think, how long since last year, since the year before that. How long until I see them again. Instead, I think how every perfect vision blinds itself with time, how unsteady all my life has been, how my rocks threw me into the water to drown, so how damned nice to have new ones. And only a block away.

On my off days, I feel like my emotions displayed here are a compilation tape with a relationship theme. The first song says that every time I see you, I understand the meaning of “swept off my feet”. The second song considers the effort of movement as I forget to breathe. The third tries to breathe as it tries to remember the last thing you said to me as I tried to resist the urge to kiss you until you know what I mean, sugar sweetness segue into all the days I spend alone that don’t armor me, but pretend, but really break me down. Middle of the tape and I’m skinned. Minute by minute, the music watches where your eyes trace, as if by some resident understanding of your gaze, I’ll be able to train it to stick on mine, to watch it shake and take me in for the finale, the poignant fuck moment of eyes meeting until they can’t and close instead.

It’s like I should take up a hobby, but I’m already beginning to fill up my days as my schedule calcifies. Korean Movies take up Mondays, Gamelan will be every Tuesday, and the drop in ballroom dancing is on Wednesdays. Kendo is looking to end up on Thursdays for lack of anywhere else. I have a suspicion that Kyle has weekends more free than other days, though at this point, I could be entirely wrong. All my tricks of gleaning information don’t work well without a modicum of input.

Speaking of hobbies, I’m finally picking up my mink corpses tomorrow! Waiting for me in Terri‘s freezer are two skinless mink, a male and a female, Dahmer style, she says. Bloodily packed, so fresh off the floor that the corpses steamed as they were placed in the clear plastic bags, they should be an adventure in kitchen misappropriation. I’m glad there’s two, as I’m certain that I’ll botch the first skeleton somehow. I’m considering attempting to boil the fledgling crow corpse tomorrow too, if I have time before ice-skating, or at least dip it quickly into boiling water and plucking the straggling feathers out to start. Eventually the finished product will be a flying mink skeleton to put in my window next to my angel mouse. I need to get some silver jewelers wire with my next paycheque and maybe a pair of tiny pliers, if no one has a pair I might borrow, and try to find out how to bore very tiny holes. Glass eyes are always tempting as well, though I don’t want to spoil the pure effect of wax polished bones.

Once I find how mink are to work with, I’m likely to make more. Bliss suggested dropping by various pet stores for dead birds, which is a far more reliable than my method simply finding them on the street. Slightly more sanitary as well, probably, as so far I’ve been carrying them home bare-handed and relying on my ridiculous immune system to take care of whatever germs I might have touched. They might have other dead pets as well, she said. Things like hamsters and guinea pigs tend to expire at the stores, creatures much more size-suited to budgie wings or cockatoos. Aside from being beautiful, I want my flying creatures to be improbable, not impossible.

I’m always hungry for a little more than I’ve had in life

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

—R.M. Rilke

I’m floating too fast to close my eyes. My skin is still scented with someone else, the edges of them sitting on a bed, handsome head in hands, hair tied in black wheat warrior knot. I feel like I could make music right now, if only I had percussion. Inside my fingers have been trying to dance to a melody that has everything to do with the sounds of breathing. When I woke up, it was afternoon and the outside world was white. Everything buried and I didn’t know where my body began in relation to this strange acquaintance. Snow and light. Snow and a hand creeping into mine, a sigh, and they turned in sleep, delineating the places where my body began and the universe ended. The dry earth can’t kill me because once again I have meaning.

  • Alleged pope incarnate excommunicated.

    I’m so sorry he didn’t get the part. Later I’ll call in the afternoon, try for a rain check on breakfast. Films are like that. It’s fickle. They drag you in to threaten the other players, they drag you in and blow your face up ten feet tall and thirty million theaters wide. I understand the inclination as much as I understand the way a teardrop tastes.

    Before that, in a few hours time, James and I will be calling Michel, finding somewhere for breakfast, and making our way to the Urban Photography Exhibit currently taking up advertising space all over the subway system. After, James will vanish off to be a psychology guinea pig for some group studying how different artists solve the same problem, and if I’m lucky, I’ll have a date for lunch. Late afternoon, Jacob and I are going to hit up the House of Architecture and the skating rink in the Old Quarter. (On Saturdays there’s a fireworks show above the ice). It feels nice to have days planned again, as if now I’m safe somehow because I’m strong enough again to pull a city around me like a blanket. The stars, they are holes I punched there myself merely by searching for them.

  • Romania shepherd finds 80 human fetuses in forest.

    It felt strange to be at a party where everyone knew about the Zombiewalk. I stumbled, uncertain how to discuss it before I threw language barriers to the wind with enthusiasm. I’m beginning to recognize that I tread every day on ground that other people could never take for granted. It’s taking me over slowly, like the realization that most of my friends tell their friends that I’m a writer. I was so very good at avoiding that particular phrase. Smacks too much of art and creation, holy things, and I am but a girl who walks through the forest at dusk, who leaves before the gods come out to play.

    • I figured what the hell


    snsterkddz_sm
    Originally uploaded by illf0.

    This is going to be a busy time. Likely good, all things considered. I require some distraction, lest I find myself bitter.

    Tonight is Indie Movie Night at Sara’s house.
    Tomorrow night, Antonio & Mimi are having a slumber party.
    Saturday is Jenn’s Hallowe’en Birthday Bash.
    Sunday is Sukkot, which takes me firmly out of the picture.
    Monday is Korean Movie Night.

    So Tuesday then. Is anyone interested in going to see the Wallace & Gromit film, Curse of the Were Rabbit, on Tuesday?

    On an entirely unrelated note. I have a bit of curiosity to throw at you all. You’re an incredibly diverse group of people, and perhaps perfect for this sort of query. My recent sense of wrongdoing has to do with some fairly basic ettiquite, I thought, but he’s claiming that it’s all in my head.

    So, the question posed:
    If you’re in a casual sexual relationship with someone, it’s only right and proper to inform them before you take another partner, no? Otherwise you’re being rude to the point of possiblly endangering them, right? This is my assumption, and the assumption of everyone I know, minus the one, so I want to know, are we just an exceptional group of people or are we an aberration of some kind?

    My ferret tried to run away last night. We think he fell off the balcony.

    There are days when I want red lipstick. Berry flavour Rita Hayworth silent sex star glimmering red. That perfect moue of a Casablanca kiss red, the disney approximation of vamp that haunts the dreams of old executives who remember the day the princess died. Marylin never wore this red, it’s simply not for blonde’s. This red is for the ghosts of famous prostitutes, it’s for the high heeled goddesses who walk the earth and knock over preconceived perceptions with a slight flick of their tongue. It’s for I’m Leaving You written on that one spectacular mirror that was such a find at the flea market, for that smudge on the collar that tells the other woman that you’re better than them. Deep passionate blood red. The red of fingernails in an 80’s movie, a mixture of the eyes wide shut blowjob of the pretty woman and the betrayal of modern culture burning bras.

    Today isn’t one of those days, but yesterday might have been. I wanted to swim in eyes yesterday. Breathe in that comforting honey warmth that emanates from the sweetest of arsenic hearts and melts all my bones. Instead at home there’s cinnamon. A slender figure of awkward elegance, waiting to find my hand. I worry, but not very much. Lately I’ve been too tired, weary on a starvation level. Not enough calories to keep up with myself. My joints creak and snap when I move, and my head is in continual search for a pillow.

    Sunday : working 2 – 5pm
    Monday : working 5 – 8pm, Korean movie night
    Tuesday :
    Wednesday:
    Thursday : working 2 – 9pm
    Friday : working 3 – 9pm
    Saturday : working 2 – 8pm

    going to kill you

    Last week I was continually busy to the point where today feels strange because I have no plans. It’s like the week starts with Mondays now, for Korean Movie Night, and then everything unfolds from there. Last Tuesday was Beth‘s lovely concert, where I met Edward and Ethan‘s sister, Tiki, then Wednesday was the Brickyard with Chris, Dominique, Alicia, Ryan, Tristan and Aaron, then Thursday was open mic poetry at Cafe Du Soliex with Amber, Friday was Lung‘s photography opening, (where I also met wonderful people), and picking up Scott from the airport for Saturday’s Zombiewalk, which was insanely delightful. Sunday was dropping him back at the airport and Steve’s birthday BBQ, where I’m not sure I met anyone, (not enough to get names, at any rate), though I was the last to leave and that rolled right back over into being Monday again.

    This week is shockingly empty so far in comparison. I’m going to post a schedule in grand Andrew tradition and go from there, slotting in people and events as they’re planned.
    weekly keep track

    putting my head back together


    Padova, rezando
    Originally uploaded by odei.

    Surely seven steps have been taken. Days collapsing in exhaustion, settling yourself back into the city, alcohol aware, wondering where I am. I know that not once has an hour walked by without handing me a card with your holy name written on it. My eyes falling down, unable to speak it out loud without reverberations stirring within my heart. Scripted now, I don’t know what to say. It’s been a week. Every day an anniversary missed. I’m waiting. I gave you something and it’s time you gave it back. It’s been decided I’m a widow now, the grave dug in foreign soil when you decided another bed would be the answer to a question I don’t know yet.

    Tonight is burlesque followed by midnight Rocky Horror at Andrea‘s house. An easy segue, we’ll all be dressed appropriately, though we’ll likely be showing up without toast or toilet paper. Tomorrow I don’t know. During the day on both Saturday and Sunday are Kokoro Dance’s 10th Annual Wreck Beach Butoh performances, something I haven’t been to in years now. Afterward, I’m sure there’s something happening Saturday night. With us, how could there not be? I put down my lack of knowledge to the fact that lately my brain, at best, has been a distracted sieve. Sunday is darling Chelsea‘s birthday dinner, and Monday is the ever-present Korean Movie Night. Tuesday is Beth‘s performance and Wednesday… Wednesday my skull swishes, an empty shell of me. Dominique, were you Wednesday? It was dedicated to someone and it wasn’t for Karaoke, that comes later. Was there a concert? Something to do with Mike? I’m tired, my memories bleeding. Thursday pulls a blank, but Friday is Lung‘s not-to-be-missed photography show.