I solemnly swear not to stalk those who do not deserve it.
I do not promise in the slightest that these will reach anyone before New Years.
Author: foxtongue
today I hit the post office
Would anyone be kind enough to explain to me how to imbed a counter into my LiveJournal? I know that it’s possible to customize it in such a way with a pro account, but I haven’t the education to figure it out myself.
When I posted this, Michel sent me this. If I had a credit card, my holiday shopping would be complete.
happy holidays with a lego gitmo from brixton
Today is my last day for properly getting anything done before I leave the country.
the finest art
Happy birthdays to James and Bill! My sincerest well wishes to both of you, the years would have been less splendid without you.
I’ve been up a long time, the sun has risen and the moon had sunk since waking, a bright morning breaking when I arrived home to my box today. Now the sun is setting at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, it’s dark.
There was a party at Marcella’s, a holiday thing, thirty people compressed into a small apartment out at Gamer Hall. I would have forgotten but for blonde Bill coming over. He visited while I was working, a welcome light-voiced distraction from the plugging monotony of the children. It’s interesting to see people who have been lost and out of touch for so long, the mannerisms are all slightly different, yet the relationship remains tacitly assumed. I feel sometimes like I’m braving an ancient fire escape bolted to a building that I built too long ago to trust. The secrets must have shifted, our identities blurring into someone new, but the same. I like that we’re older now.
I’d forgotten how comfortable with touch that particular crowd of people is, how assuring and self-assuring the body comfort is with some of them. Hands reach out to trail across your arm as you walk past the couch, you’re caught into hugs as you squeeze through the kitchen. It’s aristocratic inescapable, the affection. The familiarity is soothing. It’s been such a long time since I’ve felt I could curl up safely with everyone in the room who knows my name that it was blissful to the point of falling asleep. A noisy room crowded and I drifted off, cozy in the blended cacophony.
Bill eventually joined me on the couch, quietly letting me fit myself into his shoulder to rest until it was midnight. When the clock struck over, we sang Happy Birthday, filling the apartment with happy drunken voices. I meant to leave then, I was going to go home and sleep, my only reason for staying fulfilled, but after talking with Kim, Angus, and Antonio, I found myself sitting on Travis out on the balcony, shoes off again and my coat inside, my opposition pointless, as it was empty. “She thinks she’s an imposition” is right, but for once I didn’t mind my neck being nibbled on. Letting someone enjoy, that I am myself again enough to be there was blessing. That, and I admit I respect skill. I respect skill like I can’t breathe with it, there’s not a mark on me today. Words floating from graceful hands, little stories and observations, some people are story-tellers and I love to listen. A silence broke that had waited four years, here in my arms. A long skirt and eyes that are laughing in love with you.
it’s not all that bad
I need some anti-fascist films, I need to de-tox my mind. French films or explosions, art house entropy, a breath of dark edged humour. Work is a meandering river of pointless conversation and young child disasters that have never occurred to me. “My bf broke ^ wit me!! NE hot boys here who want a sexy 12 year old? I want a rope, not a thick one, but one for bondage. I want to tie these children to chairs and stuff their mouths with candied rags. Then I want to put them in a room with a screen. Let them be aware that there are others there. Then let them be AWARE. Use drugs if you need, but let it be learning. Let them out after an hour, let them free.
Sex and drugs aren’t getting us anywhere today, instead it’s sex and words. Trapped, my love, in these digital wires. I’ll tie your wrists, bind them with letters made of the most passionate steel. It’s a blood-sport. I want you to shiver from heat. I want ice to spark in your eyes. I’m going to get it. I’m going to take it. You’ll die when you finally see me dancing.
(forgive us,o life! the sin of death
Sorry – I don’t care who you are – you are not complete without having heard this song.
Download it now and don’t kill me.
I bought the boy a camera, after all. A bit of a sacrifice, that.
Jeff has made us a holiday card from Japan. He’s been having a delightful christmas over there, his girlfriend is a sweetheart and he’s made friends among the other teachers. Now if only he would post pictures…
Another comic book moment for fred_smith and I to concoct story seeds from from my friends page. Then there’s old world brilliance and Bruce Sterling talking on technology. I love that he gives us the words. Creates the language we require to properly explain ourselves. We the Futurist. I’m not a mechanist, I’m a shaper. I want gen-mod offspring. Cat’s eyes and stronger bones, give her sleek fur, give him wings. A generation of sea green hair and shocking coloured skin. I can’t wait.
premeditated gets you life
For a time, I could close my eyes and see the future. Now I’m not so sure, though I still trust those moments implicitly. I’ve discovered tonight that I’m not the only one. The odds were against it, true. There are too many variables to ever be unique, but suddenly I’m justified. Pure of impracticalities and free to delight in it again. I shake in my heart of previous associations. The one I remember deepest is the most tragic. I was young, in the back of my mothers van. We were on our way to a camping trip, I’d forgotten my toothbrush, and Brenda was with us. I remember her hair, golden and brown and beautiful. It went past her shoulders then, she was the shining wind, my mothers best friends, the woman who mid-wifed my youngest brother in the driveway. Nothing stood between us, she was a granola angel, spun of Commercial Drive Bicycle people. I could flood the page with details, the chip of her tooth. Guy danced with her once in a purple shirt, the night he danced with me. I think they were in love, but briefly. She’s dead now, I miss her with blood-stained tears. She wasn’t murdered but close as. Hit by a semi-truck on her way home, struck after a day of delivering organic vegetables on her bicycle a block from her bed. There was no way of knowing when we said goodbye that it was the last time we’d see her.
I remember that too, but not as an Echo. She told me she was trying to have a baby.
The trip was years before. Not Denman Island, but the other place we would go to. We had to cross the border to get there and drive along the edges of mountains. The match-up to dream was a domestic thing. She was making us sandwiches, on her knees in the back of the van with us children, blue pants and a silver butterknife. “Come on”, she said, “Tell me what you’d like.” and I started to cry. It was perfect. The angle of her head, the freckles she’d gotten just that summer. Magic, wholeness. Quietly, and no-one saw. I remember the flash of light on the knife, the way she closed the red cap lid of the jar, spilling a drop of jam on the formica table. I’d dreamed this years ago, not expecting to be face-to-face with such a reality. I’d grown up, I didn’t believe in such things anymore. I was broken, I lost my heart to the burning sand of a foster-home encounter, but this moment was beautiful. It was match, set, and there. I still knew things. That boy hadn’t taken that away from me.
Soldiers walked across the mulching, the gardeners work unheeded. He had gone insane the previous year, the penguins finally taking out their mark with default weeds. They would blame it on Dorchester anyway, and march to war. Blue skies looked down on shoes pounding in time to the cobblestone beat, a young boy history flowing by, building the empire for daddy to fall back on. Wretched boys, pretending they liked to be soldiers. Wretched girls, opening their thighs for freedom. The needle in the haystack gave you a baby boy, it’s time like these you need to count your blessings. Grab the firefly chemical composition and drink it, the blood turning to bled. Never drink beforehand, they warned, you’ll only die of the heat.
The moon looked down laughing.
public notice, the use of we
Imperial Parking (Impark) is offering a one-day , 4 hour event during which anyone in the Vancouver area who has an unpaid Impark parking violation notice can have it waived by making a toy donation to The Salvation Army.
On Dec. 20, Imperial Parking will be accepting unused, unwrapped toys from Vancouver residents. In exchange, Impark will waive each donor’s unpaid parking violation notice. A single toy donated will waive a single unpaid violation notice. Those with multiple unpaid violations will have to bring an equal number of toys with respect to the number of Impark parking violation notices they would like waived.
Where: The Salvation Army Belkin House
555 Homer Street (between Dunsmuir and Pender)
When: December 20, 2004 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.
the dream has ended : this is the morning
The fog is thick outside, heavier than the streetlamps. I wish I could take a picture off the balcony, but instead I’m sitting in my room eating poor-girl sandwiches of peanut-butter, honey, and cornflakes. It’s what I had in the kitchen. Tomorrow/later today I need to get groceries. The ferret needs to be packed up and moved, the bank must be visited to manage funds for the trip down. It’s going to be busy. I’m to visit Angus at the tattoo parlour, I have to stop by my lawyers office as well, sign the release forms that let me leave the country. Somewhere in there, I’d like to grab Dominique and try again this being girly thing, make out with the commercialism of Robson street for an hour and get lipstick all over its too trendy collar. I’d like to see what it’s shopping mall girlfriend might say to that. I’m listening to Sneaker pimps and thinking of Post-Modern Sleaze. There’s a certain something in the term that’s sweeter, more piercing, than I feel, that I’d like to try out. Maybe when I get my tongue cut I’ll make an attempt at renewal. Relearning language seems like a fantastic time to start. I hear of people deciding to change themselves, I remember people telling me to try and fit in, so it must be possible to choose such things. I know I’m set up for a certain measure of it. I decided once that I wasn’t going to be scared anymore of certain things, and then, just as suddenly, I wasn’t.
I want to be fumbling dancing
I wrote two hours and a crash swallowed it whole. My computer is ill, it comas randomly, running out of memory at the drop of a digital hat. I sit by its bedside table and grasp its mouse hand, fighting to keep it alive, wanting to save my precious information. The jazz corrosion can continue, the hiccups sound almost like part of the music, but the text, the darling text. I require it to live and am disappointed. I get as far as copy and do not make it to paste. The pointer jitters, frightened of the oncoming onslaught of frozen time. I imagine the words sitting helpless, paralyzed and looking out, knowing they will be lost once I finally press the button. Waiting for when I flick the switch on the machine and they die.
What happens to the deleted words? The keystrokes that have been backspaced and edited out of existence? I imagine them just out of reach, perhaps each letter queuing to be reborn in another word, another phrase.
This afternoon I mended ragged long velvet and sent off letters on-line, the needle in my lips while I typed. I expected it to be more difficult finding clothing to wear to both an office party and a fetish night. I had time still to spend getting ready, I had time for the rest I so needed. Sleep crashed, fell, upon me, with darkness and dreams I didn’t like. I woke from rest with the sound of a girl sobbing. She was young and inconsolable and I had missed meeting my friend and the beginning of the office party. Michelle was fine, hadn’t been left waiting in a lifeless lobby as I’d feared, but in fact decided rightly that as I was not there right away, then unconsciousness had caught up with me. One hour down, many more to go. I got ready, my secret santa present wrapped and socks found, six o’clock, but it never happened. Fear took me and stopped my hand at the front door lock.
Part of me had counted for that, it’s winter. If there is to be a worst time, this would be it. I hadn’t counted on my contingency plan failing. The person who was to call didn’t answer the phone. Mistakenly assuming they were on their way, I waited until it was too late to drop by the restaurant, too late to go to the show. I built this night to be my night out, a self gift of something I would enjoy before I left. A goodbye to this city with an evening to prove it’s not all that bad, commiseration for empty evenings structured in front of the computer. Rather, I’d been stood up and cancelled on by two others. It bothers me that my happiness seems so inextricably tangled with this. My earlier day was full of joy and I can’t seem to reach it now. When I remember today will I think of the bright giddy morning or the crushingly depressing evening? I think in my mind I will carefully separate the two with my subconscious. I slept between the emotions, so they will be different days. That was yesterday, this is today, the sun has naught to do with it, there is a stretch of desert between. I have never questioned why sand is always in old stories about sleep. I understand it. Grains of it pattering from one end of the timer to the other, sand left in your eyes by the spirit of dreams, it’s a nowhere land. I get it.