Author: foxtongue

it’s all recently relative

we need to throw the right books,
(like right hooks)

by Joey Comeau

Let’s start ourselves a terrorist cell
and every time we feel like our life might be hell
instead of throwing our coins into that Self-Help well
we will write another beautiful book that won’t sell.

I’m writing a book about leaving home,
leaving bodies in ditches
I’m writing a book about making mistakes and
eating jelly sandwiches
books about apple trees
who fall in love with pretty girls
who fall in love with other trees
that have more squirrels

I’m writing a book of love poems based on my studies
half about lovers with disabilities – half about buddies
thematically I ‘spose you’ll find it a little muddy
two parts limping Audrey Hepburn – one part Al Bundy.

books about forgetting childhood
books about getting older
books about finding someone warm
because the nights are colder

Yesterday Alastair and I took on Disneyland. We drove into a compound, a small city all it’s own, blazoned with brand-name and two curved ears. The parking garages were immense maze-like things, plastered with moderne with trashcans proclaiming WASTE PLEASE on a seventies rainbow background. Everywhere there were speakers with pre-recorded helpful people, “please keeps your head, hands, arms, legs and feet inside the vehicle until it has come to a complete stop.” and again in spanish. The live miked drivers sounded incomprehensible and crackly in comparison, a darling thing when you remember that the park is ringed with private soldiers with AK47s.

In an effort to stop any rumors that Hallibrton will be the only company helping out in the rebuilding of Fallujah, the Bush administration has announced that Disney will be involved in that reconstruction as well… “We are very proud to be part of the re-construction effort in Fallujah,” stated Michael Eisner. “We will do everything we can to make Falljuah a ‘happy place’ again. We are looking into having Mickey Mouse visit not only the troops, once the fighting is over, but also visit the Iraqi homes as ell…” “We hate America but we love Mickey mouse,” stated an insurgent in Fallujah. “My kids like that new movie from Disney, what is the name of it? You know, Finding Osama? I just kid you. Finding Nemo. They love it.“

I’m trapped inside today, held inside by violent rain, serious rain, rain that would not smile at you on the bus on your way to work. Rain with a mission, rain that gusts with intent for drowning. I, being intelligent, failed to bring a coat.

and I still don’t know who sent me this song

I’ve got Low playing on repeat, as loud as the laptop can sing to me. The rain outside is pounding in heavy sheets of water, occasionally relenting, but not enough to let me out so I’m making cookies. Dancing in black jeans and a pink lace bra, I’m sifting the dry together to top of my voice holiday music, this is so out of place for me that I might like it today. I want to thank whomever it was what sent me this song, it’s been brightening my time stuck inside to a bell peal glow. The train rhythm especially makes me bounce, and the sweetly sung lyrics remind me of back when the holidays meant something, back before my dad lost sanity.

We lived on Grandview Highway one year, over by Boundry. A white stucco house with bright red steps, a plum tree in the back and a two story garage. It’s not there anymore, though the house down the street where the witch lived is still there and the house with the adopted kids. There was a silver flake tank underneath my window which had the most wonderful boom to it, my feet could never move silently on it, (boom-thud-boom), just tall enough to climb. I would sneak out at night and was always amazed when no-one heard me coming home. We had snow that year, heaps, enough that people still talk about it. I think I was six. It was the edge of my fathers insanity, the spring upcoming was the beginning of hell, a foster-home waited, but at the time, we didn’t know that. It was piles of shining white to build tunnels through, to ride my sled down at the park next to the highway. It was the year the elf came to the door.

I was supposed to be in bed, my parents were in the livingroom, maybe with a glass of wine. I was lying in my doorway, wrapped in my blanket, ready to dart into my room the moment they stepped toward the hallway. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them. I was going to fall asleep there, listening to the low murmur of my family, when there was someone outside. A knock on the heavy door and my father opened it. I crept farther out into the hall to see. A man was there in green, with pointy shoes and a fluffy santa hat. It was a bit unbelievable, I was raised to be a rather adult child, and that’s when I fell asleep. I hid in my bed from my parents, who peered in to peek at me, and didn’t open my eyes until morning. Outside he had a pick-up truck full of toys and holiday goodies. If I think about this too much, I’m going to cry. It was my first real christmas, maybe my only one. We had the tree put up and presents underneath. I woke up to paper wrapped boxes and candy canes. I wonder where the pictures are.

I think now that my teacher must have signed us up for a charity. She as a wonderful woman, and I think about her sometimes. She had brown hair and the kindest smile, the only nice adult at school. I consider stopping by Renfrew Elementary and seeing if I could track her down. I don’t even remember her name.

here, have the song

and who gave me the upgrade?

When he reaches the swings, he merely stands, remembering a girl. She had flaxen hair then, an old word, but accurate. It was midnight when he met her. He was eleven, brave with scraped knees and beginning to believe he was tall. His family had just moved from another city, halfway across the world to this strange neighborhood with foreign flowers lining the walks. His father had built the set from a box brought home from Canadian Tire, the place where they were to get him a bicycle, dad said. It was a hot day, with lemonade and the famous toolkit creating the swing-set like magic from scattered bolts and bars. He had gone to bed sweaty and happy in new Star Wars pyjamas, imagining the kids he would meet.

A sound woke him, it was dark, a blue dark, heavy lit by the moon though the unfamiliar window. The sound came again, blurring oddly from his dreams of being an astronaut into reality. He sat up, kicking his covers off to crouch on his bed under the window. He put his fingers on the sill and peered out between his dirty hands to the yard below. She was there, riding the wind like the purest form of american ghost. A ribbon in her golden hair, amphetamine white kneesocks under a chequered dress, she flew, legs swinging bent then straight to the stars. It was long minutes before he could move again, before he could breath.

He’s out front that house right now, if he looked up he would see the window he watched her from. He hurts inside, thinking how he watched her until she saw him, how she climbed the trestle under his window to whisper to him, “Never tell”, before running away into the perfumed night. His mother is upstairs now, dying. Her skin has grown thin and sickness eats at her from inside. He didn’t have the heart to tell her it was christmas.

who sent me this song?

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(Get your friends too. I say obey.)

Somehow he skipped the holidays this year. No sleigh-rides up the mountain, no reindeer, no red suits or plum pudding, just silence. He’s sitting out front the house, dark shaggy hair with a green t-shirt and stained blue jeans, one hand idly picking at the blue paint peeling off the wooden steps. The rest of the building is white, an old two-bedroom house put up sometime in the seventies in that brief period when striped awnings were chic. To the side is an old swingset, rusty and disused. He looks at it, remembering how the metal would scream when children tried to pump their legs to the sky. That was years ago. It was a horrible sound, like rabbits crying. He stands, scanning the empty street. There’s no-one to see him pick his way through the uncut grass to the angular bars, the neighborhood seeming to collectively decide that this is the hour for turkey dinner in front of the T.V. He feels taken out of time as he walks in silence. He can hear the grass fold like paper under his feet and on the wind is a snatch of bluegrass from one street over, something he knows but cannot place.

thank you for the

My fingers have been twitching, an odd scattershot itch. I think it’s that I’ve been wanting to write. Clatter on a keyboard and let the words spill forth, it’s like the future has been building up, the descriptions piling to topple down with a tin pan clatter. I want to mention the deep appreciation I have for the fellow who painted the bukkake moneyshot graffiti on the face of the too skinny haute couture model on the Venebles Street billboard. I want to share the unbearable wingspan of the local pelicans that stunningly remind me dinosaurs existed, were real, every time they fly. There’s just been no place for writing the past few days, no time set aside for this blessed interaction of flesh and type-writer. I feel tension draining from me as I sit here, curled up in bright green with the laptop on the top of my bended knees, as if poison is being drained. It’s a new feeling, a laid out refusal to accept that I need to do this battling with apparent need. It’s always been a filler-space activity, not anything to seek out. What is the pedigree of such a thing? I’ve been stepped up from hobbiest to hack or from a frying pan into a sinking ship. I’m losing my label coherency, the slick metallic honey taste of certain words are slipping from me. I like it though I don’t know what to do with it.

Lately there’s been a lot I don’t know what to do with and I like that too. I was whored in front of me at the two parties I went to this week, before leaving. People have been arriving, situations springing full grown from the head of Zeus to challenge me and clash shields with the everyday obscurity of my everyday life. If I make it seem dramatic, it may be that it is, but only in that people fill their lives with warm theater, with kisses and muttered imprecations, with saying in the dark, “I need you”, “you make me curious”, “I thought, once, that you had died”. There’s no telling the weary from the wise on a cynical day, but that’s fine with me. Crashing desolation matched with wet comfortable silences make me happy. Signals we can’t duplicate outside out moments with that invisible non-existent fourth wall are inevitable and precious. It’s nice to have an audience with you, so you can talk about it later, though those moments stolen private are the best. I’m getting used to having a secret, but it makes me feel a little blind.

I was discussing such things with the boy yesterday as we drove back from the silliest ice-skating I’ve ever taken part in, a tiny outdoor round and round in Pershing Square, a rather seedy area of downtown Los Angeles, set to a tinny mix of Isaac Hayes and swinging hits from the fifties. The ice was so cut as to be snow, textured like skating on a river thick with leaves and ruts. In my search for the proper terms and responses, I brought up the possibilities inherent in my parallel monogamies and we promptly got lost, he pulling off the organic running freeway miles past our turn. Nails down a chalkboard conversation, the roads conspiring to lead us to nowhere, streets named after companies, Fed-Ex Lane and Tesla Road, not conveying a congenial discussion. Apparently there’s lines been drawn that I was never aware of. They still haven’t been made clear to me, but I have some hopes for further communication. All is not lost, though to some it might seem as such at first glance. We drove a ways, growing more lost with every turn, following detours where the signs petered out just as we hit focal points with our voices. Common sense has nothing to do with jealousy. There are good reasons I worry about my boy. I felt that hate-flare once a long time ago, but once was not enough to understand it. I don’t mind to share, I need to learn what the sit-com relationship desires.

So today it is christmas, the shops are shut and the traffic slowed to a treacle crawl. Another thing where I don’t know what it means. We went up on the mountain and looked down over the miniature city that is Laguna Beach. I can’t claim it was very interesting but for the scrub and teen-carved sandstone. I like evidence of humanity, names and sitting-inna-tree love vendettas left for the elements to erode into history. I’ve been cold today, maybe a little ill with the on-set of the full moon without iron in my diet. This is California, I expected a bit more of the health food fad, but as such, I’ve been missing out as well as on the pretty sunsets. Soon I’m going to assume they don’t exist in the wintertime and scuff my feet in the sand less expectantly. The birds here will make up for it, huge things and tiny. I saw a sandpiper for the first time this week, it’s little legs flashing into a blur beneath its body as it ran away from the waves. An adorable thing, nature playing with design. It’s a bit of an odd release, to understand that I know the names of these things, these odd creatures of face and form I’ve never seen before in person.

it’s shaped like a kitty so negative points for having whiskers embriodered on my bottom

“I’ll take you anywhere” she sang, quietly dancing. The room was dripping blind with sunlight on the blank white walls and she felt like a stolen housewife, supplanted but still the same flowering plant. A new town with all the same faceless people. Outside a UPS truck jolted into a startled reverse, the driver having caught a glimpse of the cat shaped see-thru patch on her underwear as he was pulling out of the driveway across the street. She didn’t notice, too busy moving with her anxious body. Her time of month is creeping up and making her pay attention to the flesh changes what accompany it. She gets heavier for three days and she wonders at the physics of it while re-setting the straps on her bra.

The weather here is clear, crisp with an underly of heat. The angles and the shapes of the neighboring buildings all look the same, rows of balconies all facing the ocean. There’s some workmen on one farther up the steep hill, looking like warm blooded insects to my new eyes. We’re at the bottom of the ridiculous slope, directly behind a motel, two houses up from a highway. I’m here alone but for my internet, my blessed textual home, I love it. Every day I realize who peoples my world are the best I’ve ever had with me. I send my love across the globe, interpersonal treatise of friendship. I get dreams back, little pieces of brilliance to look at. Beautiful Jessica is sending cookies from New York and Warren’s tossed up something for Christmas.

Later she looks out the bay windows at the dirty pumpkin sunset. Everyone tells her the sunsets are spectacular, but she hasn’t seen one yet that’s really meant anything. They look messy, as if the window of the sky has been covered more with grime the farther south one travels. Hours pass and she thinks about why she came back here. She thinks like Susan Vega lyrics, short descriptive sentences that reference the world to music. She got on a plane, she walked down a tiled hallway, she pulled tight her gloves as she pushed through the doorway, she saw him and smiled.

I can see palm trees in every direction

The party was a serious success. Approximately thirty people filtered through the apartment over Tuesday night, the last people arriving at half after midnight. We played the Game of 1000 Blank White Cards and made vicious eggnog. The present table was amusingly covered in odd things; a totem-pole with Mobil figures tied to it, a giant box marked Aardvark. Andrew walked away with the giant whiskey bottle full of jelly-beans that Ray brought, Lief received the paper making kit my mother brought and I got the bag from Nicole & Aiden what had the two pairs of elbow length gloves. Victoria and Dan were the first to arrive and the first to leave, then came Bob, Beth, Brian, James, Ray, Andrew, Aiden, Nicole, Dominique, Rowan, Ethan, Ian, Alli, Nate, Alex, Aaron, Derek, Antonio, Sophie, Kate, Lief, Jenn, Steve, Kalev, his pretty wife, M., with two of her cousins, my mother Vicki, my brother Robin, and two Matthew G’s, Goodbar & Glick, all in no particular order. Will wandered in with two of his friends, but they didn’t know what they were getting into and dragged him out soon after. I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed someone there, it was long list and a lot of people in my livingroom.

Bill, my ex, called and the game dissolved as I answered it, with no-one to keep on top of everyone. Matthew snuck into my room with me and was a delightful bastard into the phone, highly inappropriate, but he helped me pack, so I suppose we must forgive him. I admit that I hadn’t sorted a lick of clothing by the time people began arriving, my day taken with cleaning and finishing the final gifting touches. I was to do it Monday, but had fallen asleep at Brian’s. Not the most intelligent thing I’ve ever done, but it all worked out, so I’m happy. We were loud until the group split into two, with the gamer folk taking over James’ room to play a card game and the rest of us falling into various quiet discussions. Mass exodus was at midnight, but I was up until the next day with Dominique and Matthew. He caught a taxi around five, but she was the last to leave at approximately six:thirty wednesday morning. Ray arrived at eight and we were at the airport by nine. Useless, really, as they decided to not let me in. One collect call later, I was sitting outside with my book, a sad little mouse. The immigration man had yelled at me, calling me names, every word threatening me with a longer stay with some SWAT team men because I didn’t have a birth certificate, never mind that I didn’t have one last time I went down.

My mother came and picked me up, bringing me home for a ransack search, then downtown to finally get a new one. Ten minutes in an office and I had a new one printed out, the efficiency somehow creepy for a governmental office. We had time, so we stopped in the mall, getting her a pin for her hair before stalking into Taff’s for lunch. My second turn at the airport was easier, with kind officials who were on my side because they hated the man I’d dealt with earlier, who apparently every day is angry and uppity yet never does his paperwork. Everyone in line wanted to talk to me, everyone waiting had a look at the present I carried, a three-box tier of red velvet and crimson ribbon. The couple behind me was going to Disneyland with their grandkids and the people in front of me were going to Hawaii for their third honeymoon, insisting that when they were this time they were not going to turn on a T.V. set.

Now I’m in SoCal, arriving at night rather than in the blessed morning. It was amazing to actually see the city at night with my new eyes. Vancouver looks like a deep sea creature pulsing with luminescence, and L.A. looks like the nervous system to some great animal. I was the only person next to an empty seat on the plane, all the children aboard came to visit “the pretty lady with the purple hair, can I mommy?” The boy met me at the airport with a placard marked HOLMES and then he drove me home. This morning I find that I’m installed in a white-washed wooden beach-house apartment. It’s easy to imagine movie-perfect surfer boys living here, their girlfriends blonde and wandering around in towels and bikini tops. Not being one of those, I’m wrapped in a blanket, playing the game of ‘if I were a scotsboy, where would I hide the can-opener’. I want to move the computer outside to the deck, there’s a chair out there and it looks as if all I would be able to see is the aching cerulean ocean and the sky above it, but I can’t find any longer cords. It’s amazing, the horizon, a black-blue steady line stretching to the vanishing point in either direction. I wish I could record it properly, show it to everyone with the clean taste of the air and the siren sound of the emergency vehicles that have been screaming by all day. This doesn’t feel like December, this feels like spring.

fall in love with me again

Remind me to pay attention to my life some time. I’m wandering around feeling so strangely chaotic that it’s original and I like it. Days spent up with lovely people, light-haired wunderkins of various sorts, they make me feel better. I’m in trouble when I come back, I’ve got to write my own warrant, figure out the limits of behavior that I’ll deal with. There’s nothing says there’s rules but me. I’m thinking about druids, the magic of interaction and knowing what someone is thinking without having to ask. My always question, my always want to know.

I told someone once that “it feels like love when someone understands you, but it’s not.”

Why do people listen to me? I’m too young for this. Again. It’s my best way to be because it’s what I know how to do.

I don’t know who’s coming tonight. An eclectic group of people have slated their acceptance, but I can’t recall the list. I don’t know who’s going to show or the social stew for which I am destined. I should be cleaning but it occurred to me to write, so I’m writing. A slow waltz dance with typewriting fingers and the pain shoots up my arm again. It’s a hard thing, but needful. Priorities set, match, and love. Piano key quiver of the salutation letter.

I’m going to have the oddest set of obligations when I get back. There’s a relationship that needs a looking into, a years long flirtation that may have ripened into something to pluck. It’s an odd realization, but something that had to happen sometime. It’s my year for discovery and pleasant chance, might as well be now, might as well be before I leave for good. These are just practice runs, my first forays into having a tight-rope life. Somewhere to look down from, a number of days I can balance. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t play the game when it came to me. I can wait, but now I don’t want to sometimes. My patience, peculiar as it is, is shifting into something more esoteric. It feels like a run of notes, scaling past the prime number to somewhere unknown.

Dear me.. It’s solstice..

little did I know

I’ve had an interesting morning. There was a startled moment of snapping awake and being unaware as to what my situation was. There was someone behind me, their arm around me, that hadn’t woken me up, where am I? Without my eyes on, there’s little I can see, some dim lights, a computer chair, and ah-hah, right, christmas lights. I visited with Brian yesterday, that must be the person underneath all the blankets stealing half the bed. My next thought was that as it is their bed, I suppose they’re welcome to it.

We’ve been talking about economics as he wakes up, slowly sipping tea in a housecoat and discussing the vageries of cultural taxes.