Author: foxtongue

ow… ow ow ow ow…… OW

Oh my wrack and toil, oh my heart and stars. The body aches today. Every joint feels violated and every muscle abused. On some very fundamental level, every snap and creaking pop declares dancing a success. I suspect I went into it somewhat violently last night, non-stop from nine-twenty to two-thirty. I jumped on people, was swung around by people, and was generally given plenty of open space, no matter how crowded the dance floor. All while running soley on an energy drink and some candy bars bought from the club vending machine. Take that, groaning machine. However much it hurts, I’m in better shape now.

a video of plants with eyes
There are some more videos of fake robots in the directory.

After my shower, I discovered two puncture wounds, equidistant from one another, on opposite sides of my neck. My best guess is that this is the price paid for hugging people with especially spiky collars. It looks odd, however, as if I were a product of some traditionalist sort of mad scientist who pulled the tiny plugs from my neck before letting me out. Too obvious, you see. I didn’t kill anyone who kissed me, however, so obviously I’m getting better at being in a cuddly public. I’m curious as to what sort of lipstick some of them used, as it took some scrubbing to remove it from my chest this morning, but I’ve no way of asking. Who are you people? I’ve no idea. My livejournal was brought up a few times, entirely by these people I don’t think I know. Apparently there are plans to friend me in the works, so that I might begin to, but so far no one’s followed through. Perhaps they too are lying in crowded knots of wanting to never move again.

this is for two

A 13-foot Burmese python burst after it tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole.

I eye the car-seat and laugh to myself. This is my little escape. I could cut off all my strength with this. I could hold up the pillars of any quiet holy place. The back windows have stickers in them, obviously applied by tiny fingers. This is my beehive caged in the bones of a lion. Instead of pulling down stone, I will pull down delight. It’s just as devastating. Again, I’m not going to be alone, even when I’m by myself and standing in the rain, looking at the sky, and wondering what England is doing. We all have to tie back our hair some day, but my day was last year and this year once more, like a heart-felt coda was hit. Time to let it down. This is my scarlet banner. I will wrap it around my body. Your whisper. Life came crashing down, wasting, and now it’s time for me to remember the outline of my shadow. It’s not as scorched into the wall behind me as much as it used to be. Remember that icons are (beautiful/fallible) painted. Taking a hand in mine, over the lines, I did that. It made me happy. I never knew how before and it’s obviously the season to recapture the flag. My big guns are that I make them laugh, that my affections are devoted, that my hands remember how to pull hair airtight over the keys.

Tonight is SinCity. This means dressing up and dancing from 9 until 2 in the morning. I’m going to be exhausted by the end of it, and I’ll be lucky if I can walk the next day. Exactly how I like it. I need to let go and stomp around in a giant evening gown. It will help. My angel will be movement and my devil will be my entire lack of breakfast. Brian’s picking me up from work, however, so perhaps we can remedy that. Now it’s time to leave for work, a bag stuffed with black tulle in one hand and a corselette under my shirt. Black and rhinestones. Black and pale skin. Off to sell sex toys and stockings and very short skirt Little-Bo-Peeps. I’ve received a strange gift, one that may let me loose myself from this job, but I’m not certain yet. I want somewhere to go before I leave.

Scientists have taught dolphins to produce music, namely, the Batman theme song. Next, the escapee killer dolphin form a revenge team, sing their own themesong while hunting down nerdly scientists.

everything that you are, because this crown of love won’t fall from me.


E smokes a cigar
Originally uploaded by George H..

I love re-dying my hair. Colours get everywhere, marking me guilty of vanity, guilty of having more fun than blondes. Red like roses, like letterboxes, like the inside of your lips when we kissed that once and my eyes were closed. That’s my hands now. That and purple. Purple like a Kate Bush song. In the shower, the dyed water is bright enough to blind and I have to watch where I touch else I leave vivid murder prints on the walls. It makes me giggle.

The Arcade Fire has made music geeks exceptionally sexy. One member, particularly, stood out as an embodiment of everything Right with them by the way he played accordion like it was a superhero power, hips out and mouth howling, his mop of curly Dr. Egon hair falling into his steamed up glasses. Another played the tambourine as if it was an enemy he could kill with physically demanding theatrics. Wolf Parade was equally intense, a squeezing wall of traditional everything that made rock and roll dangerous to the adults experience, all the way down to the seething mass of crowd that shoved me to front and center at the expense of my breathe and balance. The lead singer still looks too wrung out to be alive and sings like he’s going to continue past us all on sheer adversity. (The other lead singer, the man on the electric piano machine, he came into the shop yesterday. It cheered me up immensely when he didn’t buy anything.)

Most concerts end with the finality of the period at the end of a favourite novel, but not this one. They crowded both bands onto the stage for the first encore, bringing up a member of the audience to look lost among them, then took their instruments into the crowd for a second one, leading the crowd around with a charming skeleton version of a New Order song. I’m terrifically glad I went. I feel as if my life would have been less interesting without them. If anyone’s got a full album of anything Arcade Fire, I would greatly appreciate it, as all I have to listen to are carefully collected little scraps of from ‘Funeral’.

a contract signed with a kiss like the x of an illiterate pirate


powerbooklounging
Originally uploaded by pinkbelt.
  • Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’. (original study here).
  • A proposed bill hopes to make criminals out of unmarried women in Indiana who conceive
    “by means other than sexual intercourse.”

    • I hesitated at the front of the walk, a flitting bit of pained imagination painting another woman in his bed, but I walked forward anyway. This is my place to do so, I thought, this is my entreaty, my voice, my bloody pain. I am allowed whatever I say I am. Nervously, I tapped on his window and went to the porch. I watched his confusion melt into welcome as he opened the door. “Were you knocking? Come in, please.” I settled in like I was home. The house knows who I am, it tells me hello. The other moving pieces, the western world, they like me.

    We stayed up late. Appleseed on screen and our legs eventually tangled on the couch. My knife edged feeling of assumption dulls when I see that he’s as aware of the placement of my hands as I am of his. His breathing is a give-away, a prize win understatement of I’m the right number of customers. Coughing confetti, coughing something I’m used to. I hold my hand on his chest and don’t flinch anymore. He is going to die, just like we will, but maybe quicker. In the bed he coughs too, my body holding itself rigid in sympathy, letting his body subside before relaxing back into a doll-like pool of blood and closed glass eyes, but we sleep. Our first real sleep in months.

    The morning was an adventure in boundary lines, roommates, that one’s in a housecoat yet I’m in my underwear, where’s the coffee? Fine details lined under eyes, the newsprint, oh we missed it. There’s a good write-up in here somewhere. Lean over and read. My hand sprouts a silver spoon, nothing I was born with and neither were they. The comments are complimentary, which is gentlemanly, and comfortable. Breakfast cuts itself in half to soothe the hungry hearts that exhausted themselves in the previous night while errands start to thicken out of gossiping fog. Head of the house, heed the commands. It’s too late. I’m already lying in the sun on the porch, one arm around a dismembered leg and a forbidden book page one hundred thirty-two. The neighbors look then look away and I haven’t had a chance at the internet yet.

    Sitting in the back of the minivan feels like the television expected childhood I never had. We buy chain and rope and try to find shelves, daughter to my lover, daughter to the inevitable opposite, and sister to my rockabilly friend. We let the parents bicker over music and pretend to dance, letting conversation drift. Leaves on a stream, coloured and dropped from only modern trees. The beat comes from Bollywood, the lyrics hate our guts. I buy wings at the second hand clothing store. Black ones, feathered, they scratch the air when I put them on like a record skipping sound behind me.

    The angel was unexpected. Not a dream, not entirely solid. She pulled his hair. “This was supposed to be prose, what are you doing here? Get out.” From his throat poured heterodyne modulations of voice and information static. “This paragraph can’t start with you here. I need you off my page.” His hands tore from the paper, shredding metaphor, leaving behind crumpled, stained ideas. Frustrated, she kicked them. “These are broken now. Look at the point of view! Ruined.”

    my penicillin makes me nervous

    Blingo

    “DRE: What’d you spend it on?

    Jhonen Vasquez: Just whores. Whores over on Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica. Whores and robots. Some of the whores were robots.”

    ZOMBIES ARE BACK. We have a venue this time. This attack will be a Hallowe’en Dance Party, Monday October 31st, at The Space. (440 West Hastings). Doors at seven, Sean of the Dead at 7:30. Pass on the word. Let it shamble wild and free. More information will become available as I get used to the idea of being a producer.

    on and on until I disappear in a breathing flash of light


    disconnected
    Originally uploaded by Agnieszka.

    At the end of a tunnel, there is a violent expulsion of air from the lungs. It’s my wish, escaping.

    Alone tonight, my place in front of the computer feels both familiar and strange. The people I used to contact right now, in this sort of moment, they’re sort of inaccessible now. Relationships have shifted, contacts have changed. The reliable returned to the garden to breed some more, and my seeds are still waiting for the summer that I didn’t get to happen. Any minute now, I’ll be speeding toward a time of year the door opens and I answer the phone without feeling distracted by particles of over bit-mapped romance, but that minute is sixty seconds away and a week and a month and tomorrow. We all know that tomorrow is a trick question to a six year old, why should I be any different? My life playing on a theme, obviously I haven’t learned all there is to learn of this configuration. With all balance, there is flow. Especially flown in for me, an entire year.

    In my head, I see a girl with her hair wild above her, like fire crackling. Her eyes are barely open. Her hands are flat in her lap and the ominous piano wires from the ceiling are only connected to the very base of each of the legs of the wooden chair she sits in, not to her bones. Her feet are crossed, her toes are pointed, as if she’s remembering the crucifix. Her clear plastic skin reminds me of candy, cloudy and violet, they used to taste like flowers, but they don’t sell them anymore here. When her eyelids finally slide open, you can smell smoke. Smoke like on the edge of an ocean, late at night and haunting guitar, he used to love me, that boy, what went wrong, his name is written in the song that’s playing closer to the fire, the gold of her hair is glinting off the body of the machine.

    When I use the word “ex” as a label, I, too, think of marriages, and don’t apply it to four in the morning when my tongue speaks a language I didn’t think I knew and he rolls over and touches me, warm hands sweeping my hair out of my eyes, telling me that I’m just as important to him as I ever thought I was, but right now is separation. When morning comes, we will be comfortable, but we won’t wear that ring anymore. Instead our story will be that of something akin to lovers but not quite. A salty breeze of underneath my thighs and in between my hating what he did to me, hating myself for continuing to let him mean something to me. A thickly spoken need he coats our every solitary moment with, a dream of pretending that I didn’t break at his ethical funeral. When I use the word “ex”, I mean to describe the man who never went a week without wearing the colour red, the man who made me scream out gouts of velvet cloth in bed, who I held hands with for a stretch of time that looks like three years, that looks like a tiny piece of history that made me who I am. We stripped naked once and took pictures in the kiddy pool on our porch, the amused expression on my face is one I haven’t seen since. I still think the neighbors didn’t see. Consequence of fortitude, the man with cello hair and I don’t have anything like that. We never had a marriage, only an impending debt that has yet to be paid. Instead I refer to him as on probation, as unfinished business, as lifting my eyebrows to say he’s yet to keep up with my spit when I want twenty white knuckles.

    For a little while, this place might have read like an S.O.S. call. Deaths piling up together, a one hundred foot calm declaration of pain, until everything from early May was a mass grave, covered over by news of the weird and breakthroughs in pretty science. Glitter thrown into the air, obscuring the disease, blowing away whenever the wind pursed chilly lips to smash me into another devastating reef. I would like to think it’s changing. That natural evolution is swinging me back onto my feet, pouring water into the desiccated personality I became over summer. That recent advances in emotional medicine are evident in the words I spill here and understood to be welcome scabs over the profoundly deep well of misery that laps and erodes at my foundations. I’m beginning to taste how I used to be. The line isn’t drawing as thin between me and living, my spirit is finding a way to return from the misery land of departed teeth.

    What am I going to do with you?

    I’m sitting in china flavoured ivory silk and wondering if any intentions have coalesced into something real or even vaguely legible. There are so many undercurrents to conversations, so many tones of voice possible with which to set a scene. I could stand in my doorway and merely shrug to express how necessary the awkwardness of roommates can be or you could call me at three in the morning and not know what to say, but not need to, because the gesture was enough to remind us both that we love each other. We could dance with the idea of innocuous topics while bringing to the table everything mother told us we shouldn’t take from strangers. We could even smile (or want to) at the mention of a number overheard in passing because six by six was a room once, but none of it helps when the air from the window is cold and I am curious with no immediate answers. No invisible cowgirls swinging their hips can save me, no assumptions of data paper are forthcoming with the tiny musical ting of inkwell spurs, only your voicing of desideratum, digital or otherwise.

    I cried at the party I went to, after the burlesque show. At exactly the wrong moment, that third-of-a-second where my throat was too tight to let anything out but misery, Michael asked how I was, and I dissolved. On the porch I held a twenty minute court, curled in my coat against the dawn and an outpouring of explanation, friends at my feet and holding my hand. Earlier was amusing, a boy in the kitchen drunkenly spinning fancies of admiration and delay while he worried about something entirely different that I pushed him toward, but when it came time to go, they found me as a black cloth lump between the stove and the corner kitchen cupboard. Occupational hazard, I warrant, when I’m not very good at being betrayed. I’m much better now. I began to fix most of everything the very next day, after Nine Inch Nails.

    (Which if you listen to anyone else, was a masterpiece of sound and light and motion, but to me was reminiscent of a high-school dance, with sledgehammer subtle visuals and terrible acoustics. With all the expectation built up, I was amused to find it was a surprise to see the people on stage only half an inch tall. They’re not twice the size of mere mortals! The rest of the concert was peppered with my mind being occupied on how effects are meant to erase that and create an actual feeling of bigger than life. “This is the audience, where all the lights shine out to blind you, and we are the band, who control this glorious blaze of flash and fury with a shake of our magical hands. We all know our roles, now we are bigger, and you are going to put your hands up in unison and punch the air so the people behind you get the right silhouette.” The most beautiful thing was the BIC constellations that flickered into being at every lull. A hundred hands bravely holding shards of fire above their heads to create a mythical web of stars in darkness.)

    oh how laughing hurts right now

    This is beyond brilliant. “The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals.”

    THE SHINING as “a saccharine comedy — about a writer struggling to find his muse and a boy lonely for a father. Gilding the lily, he even set it against “Solsbury Hill,” the way-too-overused Peter Gabriel song heard in comedies billed as life-changing experiences, like last year’s “In Good Company.””

    Related to this are WEST SIDE STORY as a Zombie Film and TITANIC as a horror film.