wow

ok. im sure most of you music savvy folks already know about the incredible brilliance of of montreal; if you don't, you absolutely have to get your hands on their album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? . Incroyable!

good morning world

i was a bit late for work this morning because i was out drinking and dancing and being foolish until 3 a.m. i missed my bus and was waiting downtown, willing my hangover to lift and depart, when i saw a man in a bus shelter drink an entire bottle of mouthwash in one, desperate chug. i nearly cried.

its always fun to read your text message history the morning after a night of ridiculousness. my last text message to my friend Nate, which I must have sent in my sleep, said simply "Might nasdan." What do you think I was trying to say?

tonight's selection

Blow-Up directed by Michelangelo Antonion




this film was fantastic. i love short stories and films from the sixties. they often embrace the oddities in people that today is passed off as quirkiness. human beings are depicted as hungry, flawed, neurotic, passionate and beautiful. this was an award winning film when it came out in 1966. what mainstream film today would feature mimes as part of everyday life?

The scene in the club with The Yardbirds is damn cool. There is a Bob Dylan poster on the door, which, according to wikipedia, is a reference to the lament of the death of acoustic and rise of electric guitars. I love that Jeff Beck smashes his guitar and everyone goes crazy trying to get a piece of it, then David Hemmings' character leaves the guitar neck in the street and it becomes merely debris.

the party scene near the end is hilarious. everyone is smoking at least one joint and acting like they're doing heroin. hardcore.

Thomas: "I thought you were in Paris?"
Stoned Model: "I am in Paris."

the gold in their arms

this is a short passage from the story i am revising.

She wanted to swim under the rush of the waterfall and emerge on the other side. There, she imagined, was an indestructible water fortress. But she knew there was only a rock face and that she would be smashed by the force of the fall and dropped like a stone to the bottom.

She followed his feet to the shore and climbed up onto the cool mud. The banks of the ravine were smooth and tipped with brittle, yellow grass. The earth around was hard and strong and as she stood there she felt solid and graceful as the alders. The branches pointed up to the sun and some, broken, hung above the surface of the water, their straight white fingers just failing to reach their reflection. The opposite side of the bank held endless mysteries. He stood up and looked around at the expanse of water shaded by trees and the walls of rock that allowed their voices to travel but denied the invasion of others.

She felt everything all too much. If they stayed they would be transformed. To leave, she felt, was to make the ultimate sacrifice. Her feminine instinct, which raged sure as a river on its course, told her they could not stay. It was unforgivable. They were each separately, painfully aware of the wrongness that grew. Neither of them spoke while both minds raced in terror. She knew he could feel her shudder in every touch. His hard gaze thumped against the edges of her thought as on the stopped skin of a drum. It had in it a look of cruel, deliberate refusal.

He knew they would not stay, though he wanted it also. They were too pure for the world but would enter it nonetheless. He knew he must; his very maleness demanded it. He watched her, nymph like, her white limbs curled up by the water’s edge, as she stared at the surface. He suddenly resented the pleasure he took in her presence. She would resent him also. He somehow knew it was inevitable, for he was powerless to give her what she wanted or protect her from what would hurt her. This inevitability also, somehow, made him resent her. He wanted possibility, power. She created a sense of duty that could not be fulfilled.

Hatred’s first entrance; it rushes like the water over the lip of the fall, and pools like poison in the blood.

this is funny.

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?"



this is also kind of funny...

its a sign

Only minutes after I posted that, I received an e-mail from a friend in Halifax who I sent the story to about five months ago, and he had some really good feedback.

promises

The last week of sporadic sunshine has improved my mood immensely. The gray winter skies of november through february churned me into a hard lump of idle matter. I curtailed my inactivity by reading a lot. Now, after absorbing a stack of great literature, I feel a need to produce, so I am going to begin another short story. If I state this publicly, perhaps it will stir me to keep this promise to myself. To further encourage myself, I am going to revise (again) "the" short story, the one I have been sitting on for far too long, and send it out.

I will post a bit of a "teaser" from Gold in Their Arms when I am home from work... and, tara, I will send you the full story to read so that you can give me your honest opinion.

tapestry

I was listening to 'Tapestry' on CBC while drinking coffee in bed this morning. Buddhist Lama Surya Das was on and I liked what he said: "patience is a form of action." He was talking about virtue becoming action. As I rid my life of distractions, what is left at first looks like emptiness and inaction, but in the same way that an artist removes parts of a stone to unveil a sculpture, it only becomes more unified.

Occasional distractions become more like costumes for the sculpture, like a Rodin wearing a cowboy hat or a pirate patch.

Now Irish playwright Conor McPherson is on, talking about his play, "The Seafarer." This is perhaps the only time I will ever have an Irish playwright in my bed. He is reading an incredible description of hell as an icy frozen hole (as in Dante's Inferno) beneath a frozen ocean where you experience time as completely boundless. He believes that in hell everyone is totally alone; he says that in the conventional description of hell, "even if you're in hell, you are still sort of in a relationship; your torturer lavishes attention on you."

He wrote his first play when he was twenty-five. I keep track of these things now.

my apartment decor is becoming more and more odd. my stereo is in the fireplace, there are birds over the bathtub, and now i have a drawer hanging on the wall and a picture frame as a bedside table. i like claiming new uses for old objects.

i am going to volunteer with the spca as a small animal cuddler. seriously. i wish i could do it full time.

i watched the sun go down for two hours last night while lying on the beach in front of the cemetery. there was a wedding party drinking champagne and being photographed on the rocks to my left and a man fishing on the rocks to my right. it was all perfectly satisfying.

friday night was ridiculous. one minute i was in my pj's drinking peppermint tea, the next i was shooting whiskey at badd manor and tossing a just-emptied bottle of wine into the bushes on the way downtown. i stole a beer at big bad john's and gave it to my friend and she had to talk her way out of it when the guy came back (forty minutes later) looking for his beer. our friend got cut off so we moved along to the local twenty-something spot, where i proceeded to hit on a twenty-something guy in a kangol hat and thick rimmed glasses who makes salad for a living. not my best moment. the night ended with a walk home in the rain at three am and a cell phone conversation about chopping wood and the fleeting nature of happiness with a friend of a friend. just a low-key night in.

i have epiphanies when i look into my bathroom mirror. i had one while brushing my teeth yesterday morning that released me from long-harbored feelings of guilt and inadequacy. i love epiphanies. they eradicate blights from the psyche. maybe this explains why for the last year of my last relationship i had a hard time looking at my face in the mirror.

There is a go-go dancer at mod night who i can't help but watch every time i am on the dance floor. She is beautiful (like an egg or the moon or spring flowers) and she knows it, but she is also obviously insecure. There is something so touching about the way she accidentally flaunts her transparency (how absurd does that sound?). The other go-go girl is the better dancer according to some, but I am less drawn to her. I admire people who are able to properly occupy a persona, but something in me responds to vulnerability.

sprawling on a pin

I just made a pact with tara to start this blog. I am going to attempt to write about everyday life and try to carve out a space in which i can attempt to be less self-censoring and shake this desire to have an incredible amount of control over how i represent myself. I will try to write about the books I read, the people I meet, the strange things that happen, and the everyday battles. I will try to veer away from poetic musings and expose my experience with the stinking war of being human in this mad world. I will attempt to wrench myself away from imaginary space and expose (parts of) the hungry, dirty, sensual, dumb, and imperfect creature I am. It isn't going to be easy and it may not be very interesting,

"And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?"

t.s. eliot "the love song of J. alfred Prufrock"