Tag: seattle

How could something so affecting last only thirty seconds?

I had a heart-breaking moment at Bumbershoot on Saturday night, an inspiring caught breath experience, the circumstances improbable. Tony and I were crammed impossibly tight into the tiny, toy rollercoaster by the foot of the Space Needle, grinning, teeth bared in freshly minted joy, blazing against the darkness in the glare of the amusement ride lights, when there, at the very top of the first hill, poised like a hammer between one vital minute and the next, was the perfect moon, uncannily full, reflected like liquid heat in the metal of the EMP, trapped innocently so precisely, so exquisitely in my line of sight we seemed even with it, as if lifted into the sky, as if we, in turn, were about to learn to fly. My heart stopped beating then as I became a porcelain doll, created only for this moment, to stare forever into the face of this exact place and time. In that stillness, every detail was preserved, the shaking click of the tracks, the hollow echo inside my eyes. Then I broke it with an even, awed tone, the voice of a calm, holy child, look at the moon, exactly in time. As the last syllable left my mouth, a whole thing, finished, palpable, the fiercely rattling car suddenly swept violently down to the right, wrenching us screaming down, roughly down, and away from that trapped moment as gentle as a butterfly landing in the palm of an upturned hand.

Edit addendum: A local Grade 11 English honours class has been given an assignment to write a “snapshot” or a short moment in time piece where they describe one moment that had an impact on them, and this piece of writing has been chosen to be presented to them as an excellent example of what the teacher wants them to do and how so much emotion can be expressed in a very short space. I’m thrilled. I don’t believe my writing has been presented to teenagers before, only adults and very small children.

give me a sentence fragment, and I’ll give you what I’m thinking

He dances for me as I leave, every time, out next to the bus as I sit inside, glued to the window, helpless but to smile. I breathe on the glass, trapped in my seat, and smear cartoon hearts in the resulting childish fog. I ADORE YOU, block letters, mirror formed, blowing kisses off my fingers, then holding my hands to my heart, messy with roughly mimed song lyrics. Bang, bang, my baby shot me dead. He runs alongside as the bus pulls out, skipping, swinging around if he can to stand on a street light like he’s singing in the rain, while I wave an invisible hanky, eyes locked on each other until we are defeated by the bus turning away.

We are reduced to texting then, once our line of sight is broken, my travel undeniable fact, snippets of poetry 160 characters long. I type awkwardly, all clumsy thumbs, until my cellular gives out by Bellingham, (Bellingham being north enough to be Canada according to the phone company). You are the answer to Samson’s riddle, I carefully type, arduously, letter by slow letter, the sweetness built inside my chest that coats my ribs in honey.

sleep away your troubles

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good

And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

Yehuda Amichai, (translated from Hebrew by Assia Gutmann)

http://isthehorsedead.com

Spent all my time yesterday between work and watching Peter Pan in the park arguing with my computer, shoving at it, wheedling, and just plain being snubbed. I’ve been trying to consolidate my photos, as with the last year of computer havoc, they’ve been summarily scattered over multiple hard-drives, and failing. After days of shifting directories, I have them mostly all in one place, but the result so far has to just been one gigantic folder with thousands of individual photos with no way to sort them except tediously by hand. Right click, new folder. Right click, new folder. Right click, new folder.. That in mind, does anyone know of a program that can collate my photos and group them into folders by date?

Tonight looks like to be much of the same. As does Wednesday and possibly Thursday, all the way until the weekend, by which time I’d better bloody well have a bunch of it figured properly so I can work on my pictures during my eight hours of to and from Seattle or I’m going to be terrible sad. Ray got me a laptop for my birthday, (!!), for precisely such a purpose, and given that it’s Sept. 1st, I’ve now an entire year of neglected material to catch up. I don’t think the battery on it will last the entire trip, but even a few hours of meddling through should put a significant dent in the pile of work still to be done.

Computer complications aside, I can’t overstate how glad I am for this upcoming long weekend, even if eight hours of it are spent on a bus. We’re going to Bumbershoot, a three day music festival friends have played at over and over that neither one of us has ever been to, so even if it turns out to be ten hours on the bus, it will still feel worthwhile for the change of pace and scenery, for the chance to meet new people and try new things. And, of course, to spend more concurrent time with Tony, comforting delicious company he is. (And by comforting, I mean sexy. You hear that, boy? You best be ready.) The more time we spend together, the more convinced I am that he’s wonderful.

I’m missed Pandora Radio ::so much::

Currently I’m in Seattle, tapping away in our new Capital Hill apartment while a nice university student scrubs out the kitchen cupboards for me so I can finally start unpacking. The last few days have been a tangled, righteous haze of putting things into boxes, putting boxes into boxes, sorting boxes, stacking boxes, boxes, boxes, boxes. Tony had barely made a dent in the work by the time I arrived on Friday night, so it was a swoop in and dash rescue, all hauling things around and making space for the hired Saturday movers, (who were accidentally paid twice), working hard until I couldn’t anymore then getting up and doing it all over again. Taking time to just sit for awhile feels like a gift. Yesterday should have been my first day to rest, but there was painting to arrange and cleaning and furniture and figuring out what boxes go where and what’s in them and boxes, boxes, boxes.

(And as I type this, he’s finished.)

Not to say we haven’t been having fun. Other things have been happening, lovely brief respites of love: Willow had us over for a social Sunday morning of waffles at her place with some friends a couple blocks away, and Rafael and Michelle came over yesterday to help me fetch a free Craigslist Queen mattress from up the street, followed by Alex, fresh off the plane from SF, who brought his second Tactical Corset prototype for us to play with, (which fit a charm, let me tell you), and we all went for a nice dinner at the Blue Bistro and a chummy midnight tour of Hackerbot.

Today we’re back to boxes. Tony is working from home, which is nice, and tonight, after errands and chores and we’ve exhausted our usefulness, we’re going to an Emilie Simon concert. Tomorrow we fly for SF.