Author: foxtongue

new icons when I wrote my newest resume

I barely know me. I stand in doorways, unblinking, standing and speaking words of conflict. I collapse on the sidewalk in heavy rain and half an hour goes missing. I hold him warmly close to me with a smile in my mind. I put my head to the side and try not to cry. Inside of me, things are changing. I remember compromise. You say this wasn’t your intention, I say that’s okay. You say and I say then they stood up and had too many words to say. Remember, this is what a little bit of love looks like.

I don’t like that I carry this so she won’t have to.

Every part disparate. I’m still unbalanced, so much is broken. I’m tidying now, brushing the pieces into a pile for later sorting. Which loss caused this jagged edge, which loss caused that. This year was many. I could make t-shirts. Arrested, Fired, He Lied, They Died. My humour’s the right sort. On the back would be a list like tour dates.

Which reminds me: support my Jesus Monkey Pants. I have this one. It makes me sexy like Snakes on a Plane would, which is something I meant to mention weeks ago. I have an excuse, I’ve been eating multitudes of candy bars. They’re not very healthy, really, and they’re making my thoughts shake. They popped into existence to fill the space left by the cessation of hallowe’en proceedings and they’re cadbury tasty, which is to say, not as good as pumpkin pie. I miss my pies. I didn’t carve a pumpkin this year, so I didn’t bake. Ah well, the Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible. (Also an ancient thing, I know, but it fit. You want something new, go find out about the underground city in Briton that’s now up for sale. Then buy it for me. I will send you nekkid pictures. Lolz. Now bugger off.)

I really should be in bed by now, but I’m waiting for dye to set in my hair. My hands are flecked with purple, a nice reminder of what the bathroom will look like in about twenty minutes. I’m being patient, though I don’t feel like it right now. The bed’s empty, it’s all cold tumbled gold pillows and scarlet bands of silk and I feel like the faster I fall into it, the quicker I can pretend it’s morning. Red shift myself into a different day, one where I might be sleeping next to someone. Alone is not terrific for me now, but I can deal with it. Alone without promise of company, however, is bad.

Nicholas will be here tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it. He and Esme are coming in from Victoria for a concert and dinner at Andrew‘s with me and Ray. He asked for Chris too, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I deked out of rehearsal today before I could ask. There were issues with my roommate James that needed sorting, and tonight was really the best time to get it done with.

p.s. world, send new Explosions In The Sky, Porcupine Tree and Bethurum. thank you.

took my forever to figure out what that was


Tattoo by John Lind
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Circumstance, strange attempts to convey information that isn’t being said. I feel asleep briefly yesterday, half way across town. I fell down later, washed with lead, like my skin was too heavy for my limbs. I wondered if I should have let anyone touch me, if that was the key that brought down the castle walls. I talked with my mother last night, she seems to be doing well. She’s tired, but these days, aren’t we all? Everyone has too much to do, too little to live on. We’re a batch of children, looking up the sky and hoping for something better to come along and pick us up.

Tiny birds and unexpected candy are the hallowe’en aftermath littering my room. The candy will be consumed, translating well into a litter of empty wrappers. The birds will require more effort. I need to twist their wired feet back into the rail over my window, place them in positions where they might look out at the world. Inside each head, I need to replant dreams. Take tweezers and carefully insert the gleaming ideas like glass beads behind their jet black eyes. I took them out when I brought them in public, so they wouldn’t be damaged from what they saw while riding in my hair.

Today’s Breakfast at the Urban City Cafe will be held at 1:45. Come one, come all. For those not in the know, this is becoming the new institution. It’s almost daily and a bit like an antique social salon. Breakfast is five bucks for a full plate of mostly organic tasty.

this is an oldest story


sarah boyer – freshmeat
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I have found my laughter from where it was hiding. This time, for the very first time, it’s allowed out of the closet with tears still in its eyes. When I grew up, I grew up in a strange canadian cultural vacuum. I would stare out the window of the truck at all the houses gliding past and wonder what real people had inside thier houses. What was on the other side of so many doors? I lived in hotel rooms and on some basic level, they’re all the same. Clinical transiency. Fake flowers, soulless bedspreads that match the thick ugly curtains, television remotes that you either find next to the miniature fridge or bolted to the table. Cable is an option, but there’s always an ice machine that clunks in the middle of the night. I used to pad out into hallways and sit against them sometimes, because it was a light I could read by. Anonymous. The trick is that they’re always anonymous. The furniture is not your furniture, the life you live within those walls belongs to no one. I grew up being not real people.

My body jerked me across my bed when I woke up this morning. An unfamiliar hand had touched me on the shoulder. Left over reflexes I really should work on controlling a little better. I was up late, reading, unable to think about my tomorrow. Too many things. I have a livingroom picnic this afternoon with Brian. We’re putting down a blanket and making sandwiches. If I was a better person, I would suggest we pretend we’re on a beach somewhere, but I’m not. So I won’t. Breakfast today with precious friends led into a pleasant walk up the drive and some actual grocery shopping. It’s like my world spun around. A smile has been affixed to my face. Someone I don’t know stopped me on the street on my way home with my bags, “I see you all the time on the drive, but I’ve never talked to you, but today I felt I had to say something. You’re really pretty when you’re happy”. He was my height, with dark brown hair and a slightly crooked baseball hat. I wouldn’t recognize him again.

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.

“we’ll cook our food in a satellite dish”

Our mother, a cessation of time. I stand alone, watch the clock, wanting the minute to never turn forward inside me. She is a music box full of the beating of hearts. Patches and sound, sewing them on stitch by stitch with second hand strings. Her skin is written like a music video, split clips of what I used to want when I was younger. She’s a stranger with brightly highlighted eyes. Her skin is as white as the walls. Electric arc, her nails on the tips of her fingers, her nails that hold up the timbres of her voice. I move in slow motion, snagging my shirt on the seconds that are training their sights on the pupils of my eyes. Advertising. My gun is her hair like copper lights, the bullet moves at the speed of dreaming. Her sighs are dedicated. The lights are off.

Two dusty coins fall from my lashes when I blink, holding my tongue between her teeth. Two payments I didn’t think I’d made. I’m staring at rivers turning into I loved you, I’m dry. I could think of what I’m doing, but that would be the end of it. I would have to pick up my mourning shroud and don it, torment children, die before morning. Chords lashing me into a smeared black bit of making up. My palms are sweaty. She is the firmament, marker letters on her chest. Hello, You Have Never Met Anyone Like Me Before. I had a name. I’ve forgotten it.

  • hallowe’en to download music: devils & dead friends

    • continually attacked by space pirates

    this one's for those who didn't show upthar?another name for pirate treasure

    The ravers, upstairs, they dressed like goths for hallowe’en. The goths, when they dressed up, dressed up as a body politic. The room was a black sea of costumed bodies, everywhere PVC and devil horns, fake hair in fantastic formations. There will be pictures up on various websites soon, I’m sure.

    Now I’m eating pez for breakfast.

    I want to repair my desire.

    Tonight was looking to be slightly dismal, the time between work and Aaron’s industrial night seemed quivering with lonely imaginings, but my fascinations have borne some fruit. Brian’s coming over to help me with my costume and play consort to Mirrormask. I’m going to tease him that it was his infatuation with the idea of helping me put my tiny beaded top on that pushed him over the edge of curiosity rather than the film. until then I’m going to finish up my makeup and put together my pieces of silk the best I can without a helping hand, which is to say, barely any at all. I look like some sort of seventies idealistic temple dancer wannabe, plucked from a New York exploitation film with a decent budget. It’s fantastic. I’m debating if I want to try and affix birds in my hair or if it will be too much of a hindrance to the all important dancing.

    Which, sadly, I’m going to be doing on a bit of a twisted ankle still. That and my new chemical burn will likely be duking it out as to which can pain me the most before the night is over. See, I was clever and spilled superglue on synthetic velvet pants. Aiden didn’t understand why I didn’t just pull it off my skin. The first clue my witnesses had to how intelligent this minor catastrophe was when the cloth began smoking. I’ve got a patch of raw blister the size of my thumb now, brava. I’m going to pull an innocence trick, however, and pretend that polysporin fixes everything and I can now safely ignore it. Knowing how young I am, I can safely say that all the red will have nicely faded away by tomorrow.

    oh for crying: four in the morning

    brang braaaang brang braaaaaaang

    No, there is no fire, merely the very loud and persistent possibility of fire.

    Hooray for living in a building with a cranky AI fire-alarm.

    Only three of us went downstairs to the front door. There was me, the artist/short order cook across the hall from Toronto who believes in psychics and doesn’t want the wrong sort of person to see his art, and a girl named Erica, just back from Brazil, who I’ve only just met in spite of the fact she moved in a month before me.

    edit: damnit, I think I figured it out., It must have been a daylight savings glitch. Frack.

    someone outside is yelling “fuckers, don’t leave without us”

    Mirrormask, Sunday, seven o’clock at Tinseltown.

    And, HERE! Bloody hells, people, see? Posted proof that I have seen the singing chinese students already. Yes, you’re very kind for sending it to me. I feel appreciated. It’s delightful. I love how the one on the left moves like a warner bros. charactor. I adore the fellow behind them who ignores the entire proceedings, but please, no more. This is old for the internet, mark that time passes faster here. Please send me new things. New beauty! Like this sort of nifty or this. What about the Victory Day video by the Nazi Olson Twin Clones?

    related: archie comics attempt to be period.

    In every direction, people are screaming drunken syllables. Hallowe’en has hit, and delightfully so. I’m sitting in front of my computer, hearing all the crowds in thier houseparties. Imagined or real, I’m too tired to care. I should have stayed downtown, the costumed crowds were a balm to my scratched life. I felt like I could have stepped off the bus and been enveloped into the shiny masque crowds lining outside almost every club. Instead I went to a meagre house-party. The smooth story of never knowing how to celebrate meshing well with my over-all lack of positive focus. I know in reality, I would have paid cover, been unable to properly dance on my twisted ankle, and been relatively ignored by everyone present. I tend to feel affinity for the old idea of the wall-flower. A passing ship, she’s probably spoken for. I don’t drink and this adds to my apparent unnaproachable aura of being in dance clubs, excepting the cliche sleazy people. It’s slightly deadening, like bubbles of lassitude are being forcibly pushed into my bloodstream and making me dizzy.

    There have been so many moments leading to nothing in particular lately. I feel like I get nothing done at work, though I am thanked for being so specially fantastic every day by at least twenty people, because of the minor war currently occuring between the manager and the owner’s panic-attack neice. There’s a dichotomy there I don’t appreciate. This place is so full of strange drama. Every time there’s something wrong, I want to whistle past it, get on with finishing the tasks at hand, but this majestic battle of thiers is eating at my life. When I’m not at work, it doesn’t effect me, but it’s constant as the stars inside the shop I’ve been spending full time hours in, and it’s killing me. I need a better place to spend my days, one with tiny ladders to climb. My happiest moments are when I’m thinking of a stolen afternoon that’s getting on too many weeks ago. The memory will be wrung of blood eventually, but until then a smile creeps into my body and I lean into the glow.