What The Large Print Giveth

Authorship of Meat Exerpt: Chapter 3

2005-09-27T19:49:00.000-06:00

If I had put something into Claire last week that shouldn’t have been there, then on that same day I had taken something out of myself which I most certainly need. I open my eyes and I feel like I’ve left something somewhere. It might be a centre, something on which to lean, a sense of place or a little happiness - something close to love maybe. I’m not sure exactly what it is because it’s always been inside me, out of view, and when it left I wasn’t watching for it. Even if I had seen it, I don’t think I would have been able to notice it. All I know is that it’s gone now that I’ve woken up.

Plus I’ve been drinking pretty hard since last week when I left Claire to twitch away down the street, when I first wrote The Rohippies down and cut one loose. That was Friday and (I check my watch)… now it’s Friday again. I know that some things have transpired between then and now but all I can say for sure is that it’s Now again but some time later. And I’m certain that something which was once in me no longer is.

Truth be told, I feel a little bit like a Rohippie.

I get out of bed wearing only my boxers and a shiver moves down my spine into my hips. I move towards the desk.

When I sit down to write, my eyes still squinty with sleep, all I can focus on is how strangely absent of thought I am. I’m an animal, some sort of dog maybe, just looking around and breathing. I sit and stare at the screen of the computer for a bit, wondering what Mike would be doing right now. I figure he’s just sitting at his computer, staring at the keys, wondering what the first word he’d write today would be if –

Johnny comes into my room and is dressed, wild-eyed.

“Yo guys let’s start drinking!”

“Oh hell man, I can’t drink. My body hurts. I feel like a beast.”

“It’s homecoming, Fitz. This isn’t negotiable. Wake Iggy up.”

I hadn’t even noticed – Iggy is asleep on the couch wearing last night’s clothes. As soon as I see her curled up and full of dreams, covered in the slanty yellows of October morning, I realize that nothing’s missing from me at all. I had just forgotten that it was on the other side of the room, sleeping in the sun.

“I totally forgot she’d slept over. Sorry, I’m really out of it.”

“No worries. Get sorted out and wake her up.”

“I’m on it.”

Johnny leaves and I get up from my desk, knowing that I’m not going to be writing shit all for the next little while.

“Ig,” I say. “Iggy – it’s Fitzy. Wake up.”

“Uhhh…screw off…” She groans and stretches.

“Come on Ig. It’s Homecoming Friday. We need to get up and drink.”

“No more drinking.”

“Yes, yes, let’s go. We have to. It’s our last one.”

“Fine damn you.” She sits up and rubs her eyes, looks around. “Is there any coffee?”

“No, but we have 40’s.”

“Christ.”

“I know. I’m hurting too. I didn’t even remember that you’d slept over.”

She rubs her face. Her hair is a glorious mess; the sun picks up the purples painted in it. “I had weird dreams about you last night.”

“Oh yeah? What happened?”

“I don’t remember a hell of a lot of it. We were on an abandoned street and you were saying something like ‘Dig the million human footsteps that used to drum up and down this strip of concrete. Who ran from here and who ran to it? There’s joy and sadness here.’”

“Weird. What street was it?”

“Not sure. But it looked like it had been bombed.”

“Trippy.”

“And then you turned into a praying mantis and bit my head off.”

“Christ.”

“Strange times.” After she rubs her face again, she smiles, looks me up and down. “Don’t go getting all dressed up for me Fitzpatrick.”

“I just woke up. I forgot you’d slept over.”

“You’ve said that already. Deal with it and put some pants on.”

I throw on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt; both are cool with the October air which snuck in through the window while we slept.

Exerpt from The Rohippies

2005-07-21T15:13:00.000-06:00

And now that homecoming has come and past, I see more and more kids walking down these gorgeous street towards class with their heads down, eyes away from the sky, backpacks full of books, their backs bent and twisted with the weight of strangers’ opinions of the world (that’s all a book is), their spines almost cracked in two by the weight of mommy and daddy’s expectations, carrying the paper they’ll one day need to put the marks on paper, so that one day four years down the line they’ll get the paper they think will make them educated. Their entire body turned down towards the ground, closed, being broken, in the name of insight. I want to stand straight-backed, be the keeper of the only unbent spine, and I’ll become a piece of meat so strange and straight and weightless that books will be dedicated to understanding my mad tower of a life, and I’ll become a thousand times heavier, being transformed into millions of words that still will fail to capture all of me, every load-less inch of me, and I’ll crush the backs of those who confuse wisdom with wealth, understanding with insight, weight with weightiness, because they’ll look to books of me to know me, and they’ll heap them on their backs, but a book is nothing but a heavy bunch of paper, and paper was but a tiny part of life... you’d need a backpack the size of the entire universe to hold it all, every book of everything, if you want to tote your wisdom around on your back to show everyone how smart you are, how heavy with understanding you are. You’d be crushed by pride, bent in two away from the world you want so badly to understand, unable to look ahead again.

Mail me your secrets

2005-07-11T09:08:00.000-06:00

Check this out.

Postsecret

2005-06-30T12:14:00.000-06:00

Cool news:

The novel is now over 300 pgs. Here's a new exerpt from when Fitz and Mike now meet, for those keeping watch...

-Mike

And the wind blew up from concrete towards the air, not from it, not of it, and time moved like lava – ruining then hardening into rock – and the light was everywhere around us but somehow nowhere and we could each turn and run and scream but It would still be everywhere encasing us in stone, the shadows growing longer like at sunset the further we run and it happened just the way I just wrote it, just the way I lived it, it having already been written on a massive stone cast into an even more massive lake, and every time it makes more sense and less as well because some great galactic word came first, then speakers of words, who are charged to recite those words unknowingly, as if for the very first time, in different orders and tongues and there are no firsts or lasts, just words for the colourlessness of darkness, the speed of light, and life, and then some silence, and I have two right hands and they exchange a picture

Authorship of Meat: Exerpt

2005-06-20T01:48:00.000-06:00

HAPPINESS IS THE SEAM LEFT UNSTICHED

As they always did, as they never had the opportunity to do, they awoke at precisely the same moment. The actual time of their awakening was fluctuant and of no major significance; one day he needed to be up at six A.M. for an interview and she opened her eyes with his at 5:25. On another occasion, she had had a long night of studying, of worrying, and needed a couple of extra hours; he laid his dreams to bed, awoke in bed with her as she arose with him at 12:43, the sun streaming in through their bedroom window, into his eyes, into hers. Life, after all, was a single blinding spotlight, created for and operated by them and only them. The light streamed in as the luminescent world itself streamed in. They opened their eyes each morning as if their waking lives were a dream they shared, a dream only made real when they dreamt it together, a dream impossibly stitched seamlessly into reality, the seam between the two sheets impossibly woven taut by their opening eyes. A bed of dreams, of visions – a place to sleep, to dream, to live. A single pair of eyes, a single mind between them, opening, being flooded with light. The bed-sheet fitted above their collective window retracted all at once. Their dreaming lives the sheet under which they slept, made conversation, made love.

Mmmmm…. morning, she said, rolling over to face him. This was her favourite moment. Her favourite time of day, her favourite time of all time. His as well. Watching him open his eyes unto the dream they shared – the dream they dreamt up together and now lived together, incredibly enough. What time is it?

Time to wake up, apparently.

Did you dream of me?

Of course. And you?

Of course.

And of what did you dream?

I just told you: I dreamt of you.

No, I mean what was I doing in your dream, silly?

You were waking up and asking me of what I was dreaming.

And how did you answer?

I said I was dreaming of you.

And so it had been for as long as they could remember, so it would forever be even after their memories ebbed back into aged forgetfulness, so it would never be, of course. Each morning they had and would and would never be allowed to wake up in bed – simultaneously – and just be. Each morning she would and never would roll onto her side – her purple-black hair each time rearranging itself into new ink blots of meaningless and deeply meaningful strings of obsidian against her pillow (what do you see now, Love? and now? and now?) – and she inspected his face, as if for the millionth time. As if for the very first:

I see grey in your beard this morning.

No you don’t.

I know.

Then why would you say that?

Because it scares you.

Not if you’re the one who points it out.

I’m not; you haven’t a single grey hair.

You’re changing your story.

And now you have nothing to fear.

With her finger, she traced lines between the most infinitesimal of his face’s freckles. She could trace them without looking. She knew their locations by heart. Eventually, she did and didn’t come to name each of his freckles, and the constellations between them which only she could see and trace. A stargazer. She was always reminding him of their names: And here is the Great Hammock. And here is the Lonely Winged Archer. And right here is the One That Looks Like Me.

And does it look like you because it does or because it does to you?

What’s the difference?

In one case your eyes inform your mind and in the other your mind informs your eyes.

You speak of them as if they’re separate.

They awoke simultaneously each morning (she never let me wake up beside her) because it was as if the other could only be seen, could only exist fully in the eyes of the other. As if living was being seen. And only the other could see the other for all their ink-blot-obsidian-hair-freckle-constellation wonder. They lived exclusively in the space between the others’ eyes and head. If one was awake without the other, then neither had arisen yet that day.

I never asked you this, she said as she kissed his chest, but why didn’t you turn back over to me that night?

Which night?

You know the night, she said, making her way down his chest, down his stomach. Her knowing hands on his neck. Her morning breath like air to his lungs only.

I don’t know. I was embarrassed I think.

Embarrassed of what?

Of me. Of the way I had acted. Of the way things turned out.

But if you hadn’t have acted the way you did, would we be here?

Be where?

Be here, she said and kissed his stomach. And here and kissed the nevus on his solar plexus. And here and kissed his nipple, and lingered over it.

But you are here. And I never turned back to you.

I know.

And he took her hand in his. You are here, thank god, he said and kissed her neck, her jaw, the corner of her eyes, the corner of her lips, her lips themselves. You are here.

And just as they would and wouldn’t open their eyes at the same moment each morning, each morning they would and never would make love in their bed. Each morning as they were making love in their makeshift, whitewashed bedroom, she would say thank god you didn’t turn over to me and each morning he would respond by saying thank god you are here.

Dangles of her ebony hair on his faces:

Thank god you didn’t turn over to me.

One of his hands on the back of her neck, one on her cheek:

Thank god you are here.

Their love-making was a desperate entangling of their bodies. Just as their life had become a thing which was only seen completely, lived completely through two sets of eyes, they made love to relinquish the remaining gaps between their two beings. Her foot around his leg, his hands on her head and neck, her arms wrapped around his back. It was as if they were each pulling the other into themselves, until there finally was no distinction between them.

Until:

Thank god you didn’t turn over to me

Thank god you are here

Thank god you didn’t turn

Thank god you are

Thank god you

Thank……….thank……thank………

Each morning after they finished making love in their bed (they have never slept together), they spoke of their memories. She always laid her head on his chest and he always put a hand behind his head and stared up at the ceiling, pulling his fingers through her hair. He asked:

Would you have been able to ever love me, do you think?

Of course, silly.

Then why won’t you let me?

I do. I am.

No not in this. In real life.

Just because I could love you doesn’t mean that I should, she said and traced constellations on his stomach: and here is the Smaller Wooden Spoon; and here is the Mallard in Flight; and this one right here looks like an umbrella.

Why shouldn’t you love me?

There are so many reasons. Do we really need to talk about this?

I think it’s important.

You ruin everything in your life with your constant talking.

Hey!

I would have destroyed you, Mike.

I trust only you with my destruction.

I’d kill myself if I killed you.

And I would chose to never live if it meant that someone other than you must kill me, that you would escape death only to be killed by someone other than me.

Why do you love me? she asked and fingered tiny circles around his belly button.

I don’t love you. You won’t let me, remember?

Right, she said and looked down his torso into his face, the face only she knew fully. The face she’d never get to know.

If you let me love you –

Then you’d stop dreaming of me.

But I’d stop dreaming if I could have you. I’d have no need for dreams.

I would disappoint you.

You couldn’t possibly.

I would.

You don’t trust me, he said. I only dream because I can’t have you. Because you won’t let me. You won’t let me know what you look like leaving the shower soaking wet, hopping down the hallway to our bedroom on pointed toes, your towel falling down, your hands rushing to cover yourself, you rushing out of the shower on tiptoes, your towel falling, your hands, your exiting, the towel, the water, the time, the showertiptoestowelfallinghandsexiting the towel…. The time, your breasts finally falling, your dark hair finally lightening, your varicose veins like earthworms finally working towards the surface for a bit of rain water, your body aging for me only, your out-of shower- dance memorized by me only, only able to be re-enacted by me.

It wouldn’t be as pretty in real life. You make it all sound so pretty.

I want you to tell me you love me.

I do.

No, say my name, and tell me you love me.

I can’t.

Why?

Because you’re too sacred to me to be given a name, she said, perching herself up on her elbow, the sun nearly blinding as it came crashing through their window. Because you’re not a name and I’d never put you into one. Because you have none.

I want you to say: Mike, I love you.

But that’s not who you are or what I do.

I know. You’re the best thing that never happened to me.

I know. But listen –

Always, love. To you, always.

She crawled up to him, over him, driving her knees into his stomach, into his fleshy parts, smiling as she crawled towards his head. She finally came to rest lying down next to him again, in just the same way as they had and hadn’t awoken simultaneously that morning and every morning and none. She closed his eyes with her cartographer’s fingers. Now listen she whispered.

Ok, he whispered back, eyes closed.

When you wake up, remember only this:

you need to protect your face.

Maybe a movie starring Julia Roberts, bigger than life and pretty as an angel, is the only afterlife we get.

2005-06-04T08:58:00.000-06:00

Read an awesome exerpt from a new Chuck Palahniuk book RIGHT HERE!

Wicked.

-Mike

Biodiesel

2005-06-02T09:35:00.000-06:00

Yeah. Check out how to turn your goddamn peanut oil into biodiesel.

Cleaner, more efficient, and also way tastier!

A Dangerous Observation From Ch. 11

2005-05-31T18:19:00.000-06:00

From the epilogue of An Authorship of Meat
Or chapter 10 of The Rohippies:

The happiness, now understood, is gone, do you not see?

The faces?

The beautiful fucking faces everywhere?

The happiness, which when pressed, when touched too directly, when understood too fully, like a snail retreats into a shell?

To be forever understood in all its complexity but never again touched in all its sliminess?

Audio Exerpt: An Authorship of Meat, Chapter 5

2005-05-29T16:09:00.000-06:00

Baby-making thoughts

2005-05-28T22:50:00.000-06:00

Incredible: a child is the incarnation of a thought, a desire – a living proof of giggling seduction, lust, adultery, rape, sublime romance. A thought made into carbon, proof of the climactic end of the love-making which now may have been forgotten. A thought so enormous and unifying that the universe can’t help but generate a gassy, nausseaus, self-conscious, talented, brutalizing fornicating, bastardizing, honeymooning, self-propogating brand-new life-making machine. Another one. Weak-kneed and itching to fuck.

Exerpt: Chapter 5

2005-05-26T12:26:00.000-06:00

We’re down at the lake now, looking out at the Great Lake which was so Great that it had as of yet resisted the temptation to freeze. That’s Great, man. The water kaleidoscopic from the city’s lights. Flesh of streetlight fish breaching the tiny waves, flapping for a second, then submerging. A holy ocean of them/ a school. The divine author of things must be something like water, I think: timeless, fluid, omnipresent, in every piece of everything, even when invisible. In us, the trees, the air, even when we are oblivious to its presence. Coursing through muscle, through music-making-mouths, through mind, involved in every movement of every moving thing. Creative, destructive, ebbing, flowing, calm, furious, oblivious. Equally tsunami and bubble bath. Having no components, no personality (and yet part of each personality), no prejudice, no expiry date: non-perishable. And therefore, worshiping a single notion of god would be as foolhardy as worshiping a single lake, a single triubutary; a gross lack of vision, an insulting celebration of a greatness which is madly underestimated. A lack of vision.

Enthalpy

2005-05-25T01:14:00.000-06:00

Having someone who loves you. It passes. Comes and goes. Is in and out again, before you realize it’s there and gone.

What does admiration take to flourish? I’d love nothing more right now than to have someone knock down my door, look me in the eye, and tell me that I’m kickass. That I’m the only sack of human meat that matters. The sky could petrify and fall and I’d still be the only matter to tend to. To them. Just look at me, they’d say. Just look at me and we’ll be fine.

Lately though, it’s all ebb. Everyone is leaving, moving back into the eternal ocean from which possibilities come crashing. Friends move on and out. Away. Forgetting this one. Everything is leaving. Noun verb adjective. Denoting loss. Moving out. Away from meaningfulness. A page can give no body heat. Enthalpy.

Solitary and literary.

No two things in the universe touch. Did you know that? It’s true.

Everything Is Illuminated

2005-05-24T18:28:00.000-06:00

This is the name of the best book written in the last decade. In my opinion, that's exactly what it is. Jonathan Safran Foer was 24 when he wrote it. Pick it up. It's one of the greatest novels you'll ever read.

Now as always, Hollywood is set to fuck it up by midguidedly mutating it into a movie.

It'll be out in August. Read the book before seeing the movie for sure.

Can anyone say Elija Wood? Boo...

Tie a Ribbon Round My Index Finger

2005-05-19T09:48:00.000-06:00

I can’t remember what

you used to look like

naked,

exiting the shower on tiptoes,

drenched,

dripping,

smiling,

in the kaleidoscopic dawn.

I’m orphaned from my memories,

Shipwrecked

On an island with no past.

Halceon head-fuzz and puffy eyes,

Alone and nausseaus, hung-over, 7am.

What did you look like in the morning,

Again?

There’s nothing to miss

If there’s nothing to be reminded of.

Rippers

2005-05-17T20:45:00.000-06:00

Summer restlessness.

Working at Value Village, subservient to balding lifers and former dancers at the local peelers. No shit. Manual labour for $7.75 an hour and an ex-girlfriend has already moved in with an investment banker she barely knows. Which is the right way? Even my arms ache tonight, trying to type after a 9 hour shift dominated by lifting and bending and pushing and pulling and garbage-bin-replacing and hanger-replenishing and baler-filling. This is your life now. Michael Lista: this is your life! Like a TV show from the 80’s syndicated through time into the unabashed present. This is your life. Wake up and feel the abhorrent inertia of your flailing. This is your life, man.

Pulling shifts at a Value Village run by ex-strippers.

Pushing and replenishing.

Finger-breaking, watching the clock.

At night, drinking Coronas and red wine thanks to the generosity of friends.

Silly music.

Cigarettes even.

And angry e-mails about Fed-Ex.

Chapter 6 Exerpt: An Authorship of Meat

2005-05-16T15:14:00.000-06:00

Instead, I watched Claire runway-walk down the street and I knew that she had made up her mind about me. As soon as she’d get home, she’d drop her things off at the door and slink into Marni’s room and ask her have you read that review of Fitzpatrick’s book? Apparently it totally sucks. AND! This is her favourite part I bet. I saw him today looking all bummed out, smoking a stupid joint with that druggy friend of his! Her little judging eyes. She’d call her parents and tell them. See?! See how much better I am than he is?! See how much better I’m doing than he is?! I can see it now all written over her back. All of this was just way over her head.

What people will fail to realize, I realize, is that it’s not about the drugs at all. The first bit of the book was all about drugs in some people’s eyes. Just drugs. The way I figured is it was sort of like Gonzo journalism. It was sort of like Thompson’s work. People picked up his books and they’d read a bit and then their suburban jaws would drop, man. I heard such good things, but just look at this fiend! they’d think. He’s out of control! they’d think. Obviously you can’t write a fucking decent book if you’re friggin wasted all the time. You can’t write when you’re wasted. The whole point was that it was about the opposite of drugs. It was about freedom from drugs. From all the bullshit drugs everyone else was hooked on. The Rohippie drugs, besides the coke. Most people couldn’t admit what they were addicted to: safety, love, responsibility, ambition, fear. They shunned the drug you smoke and were addicted to the drugs you’re forced to construct in your mind. It was about living as fully as you could. Minimizing your drug use. Being responsible in your drug use, in your choice of drug. There’s a relatively narrow window in your life where you can get away with horsing around and trying wild things. Living and loving and getting high and dreaming. Reaching for something huge. Something near the heart of things. After that the world gives up on you. When you don’t straighten out. Get a job. Start a family. Most people chickened out when they realized that window which opened onto some drugs and closed onto others was in front of them. The reached the swirly eye, by chance or inebriation or existential onslaught. They were forced somehow, in their own way, to look upon the swirly eye and choose. Is it going to be grass and dreams and art and some sort of strange new world order or is it going to be CEO@AFORTUNE500

with2.4kids

AND1.6CARS

And100%chanceofsuburbansun

AND0%CHANCEOFEXISTENTIALRAIN?

So they picked.

Then they spent the rest of their lives telling everyone how dangerous and tempting but ultimately unsatisfying that moment was.

Which was utter bullshit.

Feist

2005-05-15T23:37:00.000-06:00

I forgot how perfect Let It Die by Feist is.

It is the actual sound of being in Toronto in the fall, in love and young and amazed.

Buy it.

Makeover Makeover!

2005-05-12T09:27:00.000-06:00

New look, man. Like a goddamn Oprah episode.

I like the colours, damn you.

So now I'm working at Value Village for the summer. They hired me to be a "recycler." Is there a nobler-sounding summer job? I didn't fucking think so, kid.

Look out for more from an Authorship of Meat and just more in general.

Audio Exerpt: An Authorship of Meat

2005-05-11T10:39:00.000-06:00

May 9

2005-05-11T08:37:00.000-06:00

Summer in Kingston.

Dandelions up. Grown up through dicey grass. Butt and beer cap weeds.

In my mouth, the taste of beer and marijuana belies the slothfulness that pervades vacation. Tans and picnic afghans and up-beat bands set the season’s rhyme.

Pretty girls in shorts and skirts flip-flop down the shimmering concrete sidewalks. Miragey. A dump truck unloads diesel fumes and down the street a topless dude cuts his grass, adding smell to sound and sight.

Kids walking with a case of beer.

A pair of fucking birds arcs down across the sky, playing coy 100 feet up but horny as hell for sure. It’s spring, actually, but Canadians only distinguish between the most mercurial of seasons: winter and summer. So in my world, birds screw in summer too.

Always hoping today will be the day the summer kicks up into a frenzied party of well-being, I’m disappointed daily. I do nothing lately, it seems, but drive great friends to the city’s jump-off points – bus-terminal, train-station, airport. All destined for bigger things in grander cities. All of them with plans. Each one ready to go go go and get the fuck out of this godforsaken town. Asking me for drives.

Periwinkle

2005-05-10T07:44:00.000-06:00

Pastoral scenes peered through a pot periscope; jeans blue and high-cuffed; hiccoughing frogs chirping like horny violins at one of Stradivarius’ exclusive jams. Just-visible bugs lit up in orbit, water up at the beach’s high mark, mist freeze-framed and vaporous. Sunshine! The sky periwinkle through the rising fog. Some sort of primordial scene here up near highway sixty.

A sunrise on Yoda’s planet it seems.

My X-wing crashed and I’m learning how to fight.

We’re locked up in the Canadian northland this weekend, away from all things nuclear, polystyrene, presidential. Dogs and docks and the democratic process. Each swimming out into the unpolluted heart. Beating out strong, unsullied, victorious.

Saw a commercial last night before the drive up. Bush found how out how to edge out the energy crisis: reopen the coal mines. Increase production 100 fold. Dancing models in sexy overalls with coal picks in their hands, dancing. Dancing! Dancing and singing and looking sexy all covered in soot! – Energy Crisis? Not if we have anything to do with it… HIT IT!

Pastoral scenes and I’m just shakin’ my head.

2005-05-08T19:27:00.000-06:00

The book is finally done. Right now it's weighing in at about 110 but I think it'll be up to 150/160 in a couple of weeks. Draft one is being read by people who give a shit. Draft 2 two will be available soon. The funny thing about finishing a book (or completing anything of meaning, I guess) is the void after the blast. Emotional investment with no viable rate of return. Like raising a child who doesn't love you. Withdrawn in its adolesence. Listening to punk rock and hating its creators.

Funny.

Cover Designs by Kerri

2005-05-02T18:07:00.000-06:00

Colour Cover:
An Authorship of Meat

Exerpt

2005-05-01T10:28:00.000-06:00

Haven't been online for a while because my internet was fucked.
Here's an exerpt from the book-ish thing I'm working on right now. It's called "An Authorship of Meat: The Strange Case of Fitzpatrick Madrigali." This is from the end of the fifth chapter, about thirty pages in. Fitz and Iggy, coming down off shrooms, are hanging out by the lake. They had just been talking about how they thought the sensation of tripping on shrooms was actually the sound of god laughing at you for eating these organisms that grew out of horses' shit. It was a divine joke.

And we sat there, on the rock by the lake for quite a while. I had my arm around her and we were just killin ourselves. Shooting the shit. And goddamn, I’ve got to tell you that it took everything I had not to be dumb and lean in and kiss her. Or tell her I wanted to kiss her so bad. That I’d love her and treat her well. Already did love her I guess. Not because I was feeling all sexy and gross or whatever. To tell you the truth, I didn’t particularly love sex all that much. It wasn’t about that. It was because Iggy just got me. And I got her, man. And we were here in this wonderful place in time together which will never be the same. Already, I could feel the joy bleed away, hear God and Its Divine Cronies tapering off their laughter inside of us, going straight-faced and serious again. And this was the last moment of the trip. I could feel it about to fall off, bringing the overwhelming beauty and wonder over the precipice with it. More than anything, it was about Iggy and I being these two cherry blossoms plopped down side by side on the same branch, and now we were flailing in the wind together, and that’s what made us beautiful. The fact that at any second, we could detach and fall to the ground, dead. That’s what made us beautiful. We were beautiful in sense that we were in the mortal process of losing that which made us so. The fact that we’d explode with colour more and more and more, and do it side by side, as if competing against each other, until we were so beautiful that we were beautiful no more. Just when you thought the other couldn’t get more stunning, you’d look over and see them shuddering in the wind, brighter than ever with colour. Clinging wildly to the branch. Our beauty just a barometer for our mortality. But each glance brought with it joy and fear – a wonder from the intensifying of each other’s ever-burgeoning beauty and a sadness at the fact that this must be the last layer, the last great aesthetic push before the fall, deadly and crushingly gorgeous. And she was so beautiful and I just loved her so much, in all her cherry blossom beauty. Ephemeral. But anyways… it’s not meant to be. Don’t start yourself on that trip now. Don’t fuck this up Fitzpatrick. Been a good night, man. Just drop it.

Just before the sky started to lighten, Iggy said she was pooped and I walked her back home to her apartment. At her door, she turned around and said well, I hope you had fun. Now I think you should put on a pot of coffee at your place and watch the sunrise on your porch. You should grab a notebook too – write it all down the way it happened. Or the way it happened to you, I guess. Write about the most important part. So I gave her a kiss on the cheek and headed back out, the sun just about to crest over the Canadian horizon, just about to start the Day trip for everyone over here. Already, the ghetto was springing to life again. People walking down to the library in the milky pre-dawn hush. Kids in sweatpants turning the light on in their toasty rooms – the light which cracks the darkness, sends it into oblivion. The red-headed kid on his porch sipping coffee with no past. Laptop on lap. The keeper of my revelations, my secret joys.

I’m in front of my computer now.

And I begin to write.

*****

Cherry blossoms falling

And everybody’s calling

Loved ones

To describe this season’s colours.

The Rohippies

2005-04-27T15:52:00.000-06:00

Suburban solace is found
In the familiar meter of the nice
Anglo-saxon surnames
To which mid-7-figure-valued
Houses
Bow in financial servitude.

I’m a member of the
Mississauga Elite,
One of the Inheritors,
One of the Senators’ Sons,
One of the multi-coloured-card carriers
(Green, Gold, Platinum)
Who cut through red tape
With their rainbow cornucopia of plastics.

But I am an eater of their meats,
Indebted to the fortunes
Which heredity has stitched
To the Kangaroo patch above
My left butt cheek,
The black-sheepy bad-talker is he, is me,
The child of nature
Who was born above paved-over
Huron burial grounds,
The social libertarian
Whose crib linens were woven
By the broken-backed,
The mangled,
The naked,
The ecclesiastically challenged.

Vivid dreams last night
(As I slept beneath satin sheets)
Of heroin junkies
So strung out that they resembled Us
The Lost Ones,
The MTV breast-fed,
The Fortune 500 kiddos’ kiddies,
The pupil-dilated belly-filled whiners
Driven to their cog-therapy appointments
In mommy’s new jag,
The booze-swiggers,
The swingers,
The Xanaxers,
The fiscal conservative
Date-raping
Baby-boomers’ kids:The Rohippies.

On Criticism

2005-04-12T16:53:00.000-06:00

One of my essays for class - a call for the demise of reviewing shit.
Enjoy. Or hate it. Whatever.

Susan Sontag, in her article Against Interpretation whimsically notes: “None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did” (Sontag 4). The artistic beast must have been a wondrous creature in the days before mass criticism – a great, hulking hippopotamus emerging from the bog of the human mind. Of late, however, the hammerhead stork of criticism has descended onto Art’s great back, forever sullying its silhouette.

Histrionics and metaphors aside, art is in trouble.

Indisputably, art in its purest, most distilled form is a vehicle of experience. Whether it be musical, theatrical, or visual, a piece of art – by some elusive act of subatomic alchemy – has the power to change a human mind, a human life. That is to say, after viewing the work, the observer is forever changed (for good or for bad) simply by having witnessed the ululations of another human – the artist. A conversation begins.

This conversation, however, is being interrupted by a third party. In fact, the very nature of our interaction with pieces of art has changed because of criticism. In an attempt to evaluate, interpret, and understand art, the observer has been forced to subconsciously distance himself from the experience that art was meant to imbue. With the advent of mass-produced criticism (i.e. the variety found on television and in newspapers), we, the viewing public, have our subjective experience of the art we are witnessing unfairly and insidiously skewed by the reviews and critiques that we read about them. And we are poorer for it.

II: The Dawn of Criticism

The first critic, of course, was the nameless man or woman who stood before the first piece of art ever produced – perhaps a primitive pot or cave painting – and being moved by a surge of wonder, said in his or her now-extinct language, “wow.” There is no doubt that criticism is inescapable; we are all critics when bearing witness to a piece of art. The observer is constantly evaluating the nature of the piece, its quality, its relevance. But in the past two hundred years or so, the criticism inherent in the observation of art has changed. It has shifted from being a subjective commentary on a work to a supposedly infallible and objective quantification of something wholly unquantifiable. Fuelled by our ever-burgeoning technology, this new criticism is now able to be mass-produced, accessible to anyone who can read or hear or see, transformed into something seemingly infallible when juxtaposed in a newspaper to things as constant as the exact moment of sunrise.

The western world’s first critic worth noting is Plato. His dramatic criticism and his exploration of the nature of tragedy and comedy in theatre became the seminal critical body of work on drama. In fact, his work was so influential that it remained at the epoch of dramatic theory for thousands of years. Plato’s “criticism” however was more of a retelling of what he as an audience member had seen in the Athenian theatres; it was not a theory of what theatre should be but rather what it was. Furthermore, Plato was not interested in measuring the quality of work, or steering audiences into seeing a certain piece or not seeing it; he simply documented what theatre was, what it had been, and therefore what it is.

III: The New Criticism

For the purposes of this essay, then, the aforementioned genre of criticism shall be called critical analysis, a process which is entirely central and essential to both art and the advancement of the human psyche. Many influential artists have practiced this type of retrospective, evaluative criticism in an attempt to understand trends in art. In modern times, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson, and many others have written extensively on the works of their peers and on their own works in order to understand, catalogue, and evaluate the art being produced.

The more insidious (and unfortunately more prevalent) manifestation of criticism, however, is a much different beast. Where critical analysis tends to comment on pieces of art which have already been exhibited, in a retrospective evaluation of where a given work fits in the pantheon of human art, reviewing attempts to qualify (and most often quantify) the worthiness of a piece. It attempts to objectively measure the quality of a piece of work. It tries to cut potential audiences off at the pass, telling them of what’s ahead.

This type of criticism – reviewing – is the despicable destination of the evolution of criticism, and it is a symptom of a much deeper malady. This trend in critical thought (a trend which is exemplified by the quantification of the art being reviewed in the form of a ‘thumbs up’ scale or a ‘number of stars’ scale) is a base, useless, and implicitly dangerous practise. Although it may seem innocuous, the act of pre-emptively reviewing art is robbing audiences of the unapologetic joy that primordial humans must have known when viewing masterpieces. Furthermore, it is indicative of a much larger, much more pervasive devaluation of the artistic spirit, a devaluation which results in the whittling down of an artist’s creation to a meagre “thumbs up/thumbs down” appraisal.

Art is in trouble. We are in trouble.

IV: The Heisenberg-Ouzounian Principle

The first and perhaps most pertinent reason to steer away from reviews of pieces of art is that the principle victim of a review is the reader/audience member. Oddly enough, Quantum Mechanics can help explain why reviewing is a type of self-fulfilling enterprise in which its audience suffers.

Firstly, there is no sense in speaking of an objective reality out there. Quantum Mechanics postulates quite clearly that since only sentient beings can report on the world to others, and since every sensory being is forever bound by the experience of being an observer who is informed by his or her senses, and since we can only remember what we are shown by our senses, then out there is just a concept derived from the archiving of all the subjective accounts of experiencing the universe. This is one of the reasons why a seemingly objective appraisal of the quality of a piece of art is absurd; there is no objective quality, only a subjective appreciation of that which will be quantifiably different in every observer.

Secondly, if there is no out there worth speaking about, then that means that humans are very much interpreters of reality – reality-making machines. For example, a rock moving quickly through space and brushing up against a human face only has as much meaning as we as humans place onto it; the event itself isn’t particularly meaningful. However, for the human experiencing it, his or her entire outlook on the universe will change instantly – a change which is realized in the mind. That person experiences a state of being known as pain, or disfigurement, or shame, or fear, or depression. Therefore, our reality is a perpetually swirling interaction between the billions of pieces of information entering our senses every instant and our minds which filter that information, look for patterns, and eventually derive an experience. Right now, for example, you (the Reader) are looking at a piece of paper with black squiggles marked on it. Because you have learned English (learned how to interpret theses symbols) and have a wealth of information related to art and criticism and even physics, you can derive a meaning from a piece of paper floating about in front of your eyes, somewhere in the middle of universe.

Therefore, if you were to read a review by Richard Ouzounian of the musical Wicked, even before seeing play your brain would create a network of neurons and peptides which will manifest a very basic conception of the play Wicked, which for better or for worse, will be informed by Richard Ouzounian’s wholly subjective experience of that play. When you see the show, then, your subjective experience of the show will not be a pure interacting between the play and your mind; rather, it will be forever coloured, subconsciously even, by Richard Ouzounian’s article about it. Since your brain has already absorbed that review, your experience of that piece of art will be inextricably bound by your conception of it and all the concepts which inform that conception, which were informed (at least partly) by the review you read.
The purity of your interaction with that piece of art is forever tainted.

V: Physics Aside, Let’s Talk Fallibility

Besides the very noble metaphysical reasoning for abolishing reviews, let us now look to modern reviewers’ track records. There would most certainly be a value to reviews if they made us aware of masterpieces that the average, uniformed person may not otherwise know about. If these writers were highly trained specialists, with a keen eye for quality art, and if they were truly and consistently making the public aware of the importance of truly astounding works of art, then reviews would be valid, essential even. If they were enriching the lives of their fellow humans, then these brief deconstructions of pieces of art would be wholly necessary, all quantum mechanical implications aside.

That, however, has not been the case.

In fact, the exact opposite has been true. Samuel Beckett, for example, is perhaps the ultimate dramatic genius of the 20^th century stage. His masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, however, was described by the prominent French theatre critic Vivian Mercier thusly: “Nothing happens. Twice” (www.wikipedia.com). In fact, many critics followed suit and the first showing of Waiting for Godot was generally agreed to be a failure. Even earlier, in 1896, Chekhov’s The Seagull “which is now universally regarded as a masterpiece” was notoriously panned by Russian reviewers, and subsequently, by the public as well (Walker 173). Van Gogh, one of the single most talented and beloved artists in all of human history, was perpetually snubbed by the art world because of critical failure. These gross transgressions are all the result of poor reviews, and so the question is this: how relevant are these reviews if those writing them can be so completely wrong, so totally incorrect, when it comes to reviewing universal masterpieces?

VI: The Final Move towards Universal Subjectivity

Let us then embrace the universally subjective nature of art. This trend towards a propagation of and reliance upon supposedly objective reviews is stifling the experience of interacting with a piece of art – which after all is the purpose of art. The very nature of a modern review is a conundrum: even those who understand that a review is a subjective retelling of one person’s account of a work of art can be fooled by its apparent objectivity (being printed in The Toronto Star or broadcast on CBC). And even those who are not fooled by this guise of infallibility are still subconsciously infected by the subjective notions of another observer’s experience with that piece of art.

What is fuelling this compulsive need for us to categorize, to measure, to scale, to weigh the weight of art? Is this trend financially induced? In a world where theatre (and all art, in fact) is increasingly expensive, is there a need for us to database the bang-for-your-buck value of a given piece of art? Is this even possible, given the subjective nature of experience? Is reviewing a natural extension of the social Darwinism that pervades western capitalistic states? Is there a perverted joy, a form of shadenfreuden, that gives readers a sense of rubber-necking pleasure when reading a scathing review?

Let us, instead, simply try. Let us try to ignore these fallacious barometers, these jaded sentiments. Perhaps Sontag is right – what if there is an immeasurable joy to experiencing art purely – a great, full-body exaltation that surges from our every cell when interacting with an original work of art with no preconceptions? Perhaps there is a truly mythic beauty to going to a theatre or a concert or a museum with no evaluation of our destination’s quality already in our minds. Perhaps the mystery of the universe is in its universal and inescapable subjectivity, a subjectivity which has been the subject of art all along, even as we were trying to compartmentalize it into an unrealistic objective oneness.

Be Quiet You Jerks!

2005-04-11T21:48:00.000-06:00

I read once

Something that John Cage wrote,

Mad non-musical genius,

Tearing sound to shreds

With emptiness.

He said something about silence,

How try as you may

You’ll never be silent.

And the clamour of his pen

As he wrote that

And the wheezing madness of his

Hurried inhalations

And the smarty-pants huff

As he finished his sentiment

And the printer

And the typewriter

And the phone and the farts

And the mega-phone blare of it all

The thousand decibel scream

Of smiling.

Noisy little assholes.

Love Note/ Amity

2005-04-11T21:22:00.000-06:00

I have a beautiful friend who leaves love notes for all the boys in her life she calls friends. She’s always sneaking around houses looking for salutations, valedictions, places to leave little notes of reminder like: “You’re a bitch. – The Pope.”

One day I’ll build a monument and dedicate it to my friends, I think. Something with a Sherman tank. And a 1920’s barber shop quartet soundtrack blaring out from the cannon’s gaping stock hole well into the wee hours of the god-forsaken morning.

- the little ways that people move into each others’ heads. There’s a day when you can’t imagine the portrait of your life without them, each of their drunken quirks or notoriously automated stock responses a tiny fleck of paint upon your psyche, indistinguishable from the hundred million other brush strokes that make you painted whole.

Love notes and talk of Amity on a Monday evening.

the Great Lake

2005-04-10T09:25:00.000-06:00

I realized that the universe had made up its mind on a Saturday morning. First thought that popped into my head. A feeling, really - sort of like the psychic equivalent to putting your ear down to the Great Train Tracks and really getting a sense of the rumbling destiny you can’t really see or hear or touch yet. But it’s out there, coming. It was quite clear that Saturday morning in April that my Karmic Elastic has stretched itself out to where it would stretch forward no further. The impending backlash. The universe was putting its foot down on this one.

But that’s Saturday.

Friday:

Sitting out on the lawn until late in the afternoon, drinking whisky with Curtis in the spring sun, swinging low towards the trees, a bit of a buzz on us now, smiling, waving, hey-hey-ing friends and familiar pretty faces. Last day of classes too. 20-somethings hacky-sacking, long-boarding, beer-drinking. Awash with the glow of intoxicants. All of us, every one of us feeling like we’d done something great, just by being there, in that University ghetto, riffing on the Great Vibe of Spring 2005.

And the thought of being in universe’s cross hairs overcomes me as I walk down towards the lake, sunglasses on. So just hold on a goddamn minute I whisper under my breath. Don’t let the hammer fall quite yet upon me. Just give me a chance to make some sort of contrition. I’m sorry. I know I’ve been an asshole.

And not a second too soon:

Lake.

(…………………………………………………………………………………..)

18* C.

Sunny as all hell.

An invocation:

Exist park. Exist grass.

Exist lake. Exist beach.

Exist breeze. Exist tree.

Exist bird. Exist chirp.

Exist tide. Exist:

plunking sounds of skipping rocks and hair-like horizon line. Exist setting sun, cooling air, eaten picnic treats. Exist all things gorgeous and fleeting. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole, I know. But I don’t mean to do harm.

A song in my head:

Cherry blossoms falling
And everybody’s calling
Loved ones
To describe this season’s colours.

A two-toned collision of right and left. Two different poems at once:

Just a day in April /They’re all rock-skippin

But all the people /Potato-chip-dippin

Dig the sunshine /And b-b-q-in

After cold-ass winters /Because the sun’s back

In the ghost capital /And the sky won’t

Of the 53^rd state. /Be black

For at least another hour or so /For at least another hour or so.

Let’s pretend that /Let’s pretend that

I’m part of the Whole /I’m part of the whole -

Another apparition that’s /A rock still skippin out

Giving a twisted salute /Onto the drum-skin tautness

In the spring sunshine /Of this great lake.

By the lake /I’m potato-chip-dippin, by the lake

Looking for solace. /Looking for solace.

The mini Winni

2005-04-09T10:44:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Amphetamine Blues for this one.

This man takes selling motor homes very seriously, and I think we can learn from him.
Ladies and gents, the Winnibego Man.

Imploring

2005-04-08T19:55:00.000-06:00

Two-steppin, side-steppin’

Country-themed party rockin’

Faces droopy, silly-smiley

Reducing the world to the size of a pint

And everything makes sense

In the sense that our senses only hint

At what we’re even doin’

- all droopy, snoopy,

Music FULL FUCKING VOLUME

And I am young and I am free

And wearing this ridiculous cowboy hat

And faces are mutated into smiles of disbelief

And music

FULL FUCKING VOLUME

And heads a-bobbing

(and my head a-lookin’ around)

Gorgeous people are everywhere

Waiting in line for kegs of warmish beer

And music

FULL FUCKING VOLUME

Imploring me to not Look Back In Anger

So I look ahead with hope and BAM!

We’re two-stepping, side-steppin’

Going to see live music after this country party

Above a cheesy Kingston peeler bar.

Breathe

2005-04-05T00:38:00.000-06:00

Intense feelings of robbery. Pocket pickers all around wearing brown paper bags over their heads (Freedom! written upon them in sloppy indelible ink) and screaming hysterics about responsibility. Uncanny, their insistence upon the preservation of the past, of the already done (and already done poorly and persistently). Two queens kids – cocky and drunk – bobbin their heads to music made for black kids. Nice. Coronas and butts up to their mouths, candy for the lips ready to topple Republican bullshit sepulchres made of gold. Try me on, man. Try us on.

Intense feelings of robbery. Problem is – They’ve got all the cash. These Wall/Bay street apprentices taking up all the space in my field of vision. Robbery. Intense robbery. So how do we work this? It’s got to be more than our usual cocky swagger, black leather jackets, and limbo-low sunglasses, eyes peering over top, ready to take down the next fuck to step up and talk shop. It’s gotta be bigger, deeper, something not yet in their puny, number-pushing head. Let’s do this. Take back a couple more and figure this shit out, I say.

So now I’m rollin down Rodeo with a shot-gun

Cause people ain’t seen a brown-skinned man

Since their grandparents bought one

Can’t waste the day when the night brings a hearse

So make a move and plead the Fifth

Cause you can’t plead the First.

But now: breeeeeathhhhhhhhheeee……………

Late Monday night:

Riding a swing for the first time in my new body – the post-adolescent, sullied 20-something body not used to swinging. Friends giggling on the three swings next to me – LOOK AT THE STARS! says one – and now we’re all swinging higher, higher, eyes fixed on the stars as we scream and curse into the 2 am spring evening. Wondering what’s happened…

Breathe, man.

Sunday

2005-04-04T00:31:00.000-06:00

Sunday:

Mediocre theatre (not Kendra’s though)
Joints with Matski
Old music in old orders
This goddamn coffee-cup-ridden desk/empty bed combo
The drifting/the obedience to wind/the feeling of sailing

Down at the lake, the rain’s melted all the ice in the bay. I have a faint recollection of someone mentioning a couple walking out on the ice, making a squinty eyed observation: one last walk on the lake out there, eh? I wonder if heading over to Wolf Island will ever be the same as it was that day in January with K, the ice breaker shuddering over icebergs – goddamn luxury line sinkers at that. But now it’s a huge yawny April afternoon, Kingston smelling like warm cow manure, and now the razor’s out of the wind; now the icebergs are all washed up.

Wave/particle thoughts again. The swirling wave of possibilities around us at all times – cows with wings for all we know. And so I’ve shot the particles out of sight/ fired them into rooms out of earshot. The particle people/ the people that dot the valent highway around us day to day/ rumbling in and out of sight. I’ve sent them away. And now they’re all out of reach, out of touch, out swirling way out (………….out) in the milky ether of possibilities. One with a halo and one riding a unicorn. One dancing with the Pope and another curing cancer/ happy/ naked in bed/ on Mars.

Sunday:

Lecture Musical

2005-04-03T12:02:00.000-06:00

....or just turn your lecture into a musical. Sweet.

Night Trippin

2005-04-02T12:43:00.000-06:00

The Present Logic

2005-04-02T12:06:00.000-06:00

Whatever it was, it was headed straight for us like a freight train. Rumbling along the tracks in our heads. All clanging and chugging and little rumbles. Getting unbearably here.

And now it’s the park. The universe an incredible humming violet which strings every little piece together in coloured oneness. The colour like an infinite number of semicolons; this is related to this, you see; and therefore the connections between things are infinite; nothing a tangent. And the train is stomping now. Right on us.

Jesus. The blinding goddamn beauty of this place. God damn. This is everyday life, man. Jesus Christ. We should bottle this. Christ almighty, it’s huge and the present logic is now this: it’s here for us, man. It’s here for us.

And later still – here we are. By the lake. Huge icebergs moving like wrist watch complications. And that violet again. And this surge of jumpy-arms-flailingness and

POW!

Here we are yet again. And again. And again. And look up, and yup, here we are again. And now we’re back at my place for coffee and winding down and some poor bastard is reeling, crying, shouting obscenities and these fuckin republicans and; but; and;;;;;;;;;;;; but no one fucking cares;;;;;;; images of the Viet-fucking-namies is all that stopped it;.............; NO BUT IMAGINE IF IT WAS YOU!; your family gave a fuck two years ago and now fucking look at them:::::::::...(i don't want to talk about this)..::::::::! Poor bastard.

Because there is a definite madness to it. A rough stringing along of moment here and there and yes thoughts do hurl themselves into bizarre and seemingly irrelevant sequences but this poor bastard has let the thing come right up on top of him and now he’s kicking and screaming on the tracks as 27 miles of maddening train roars above him.

- the universe shining in all its blinding fullness through the crack of fear in this poor bastard’s skull. His brain irrevocably sunburnt.

Smiling

And here we are.

Satisfaction

2005-04-01T20:48:00.000-06:00

I don’t need your promises

I need your peace of mind

I don’t need your promises

I need to stay behind.

I don’t need your royal decrees

I don’t need the time

I don’t need your royal decrees

I know that you ain’t mine.

By 2 AM I’d lost the count

On time and on the score.

By 2 AM I’d lost the count

On what you wanted me here for.

And oh! She don’t need your plans

Picnics baskets smellin’ of booze

God damn she don’t need no plans

Cause to her the future isn’t news.

By 2 AM I’d lost the count

On time and on the score

By 2 AM I’d lost the count

On what you wanted me here for.

Samson

2005-03-31T17:32:00.000-06:00

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first
Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth
I have to go, I have to go
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson went back to bed
Not much hair left on his head
He ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed
And history books forgot about us and the bible didnt mention us
The bible didnt mention us, not even once

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first , i loved you first
Beneath the stars came falling on our heads
But there just soft light
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
He told me i was beautiful and came into my bed
Oh i cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors and the yellow light
He told me that i'd done alright
and kissed me till the morning light the morning light
and he kissed me till the morning light

you are my sweetest downfall
i loved you first

- Regina Spektor

Queen's Pub: March 21st 2005

2005-03-31T00:31:00.000-06:00

“Checks and balances” this incongruous fuck says. He’s the ubiquitous president of some campus club. Students for the Proliferation of Independent Music in Under Privileged Households in the Greater Kingston Area: SFTPOIMIUPHITGK for short, or something to that effect. More or less, some bullshit pile from which nice kids can distil the taste of blood. You should see them, the crooked bastards, hunkered down in a campus pub at noon, chairs in a circle, everyone looking bored, slumped over, chin in palm, while this long-haired jackass talks about the cessation of child care benefit plan X. Honestly. Funny part is I’m not sure whether or not these 20-somethings get off on this shit. Everyone using fancier words as the beer keeps flowing down the circle, everyone wearing tounge-in-cheeky cute faux-retro T-Shirts: Come Visit Sunny Taqritt! (picture of sand dunes), LOCAL 1119, Smith Falls Dodge Chrysler Memorial Classic ’89. Each of them with an acronym for everything.

Jitter-bog Jivin

2005-03-30T01:46:00.000-06:00

Singin her to sleep
After a night on the town
No one's home
But in my head
We're in Paris in the
fourties
Jitter-bug jivin
Livin like kings
In the bog of my
Brain's prehistoric chemistry,

Grottos

2005-03-29T19:15:00.000-06:00

On a blanket in the sun

Sky pink like a dog’s belly

Grass kneeling in the light.

On a blanket in the sun

We talk physics and skirts

The quantum mechanics of skin.

On a blanket in the sun

We wear sunglasses

And wave to neighbours.

It’s April in the creaky ghetto

Paradise with porches

And my belly full of wine

Budding trees and hippy grottos

Brain candy for a trip like mine.

On a blanket in the sun

Oneness bends to greet us

Each of us a little God: creating.

On a blanket in the sun

Kids with longboards

Laptops, lapdogs: gadgets.

It’s April in the creaky ghetto

Paradise with porches

And my belly full of wine

Budding trees and hippy grottos

Brain candy for a trip like mine.

2005-03-29T12:05:00.000-06:00

Junky

2005-03-28T21:34:00.000-06:00

Drug me love me

Peptide wash me

Fill my head with

Chemicals

Neuro-neutrino-nano

Hard-ons

Head rushes

Healing thoughts

That swish around like waves

Of glee up and down my squishy neck

Surging on and on and on and over all

The goo that makes

Speak

See

Breath

Believe.

Electron theory romance

Valent Valentines

Heisenberg uncertainty

Like a nuclear shrug.

You and me, you see

Are Happiness junkies

Looking for our fixes in kisses.

Cool books and guitar riffs

Slap the eyes and ears and make

Us quiver,

Peptides up up up up up

Up us.

Uppers are Bar-B-Q’in sunsets

Pretty girls

And summer;

A junky shootin’ life like heroin.

Needle eyes.

Every little sound and sight and movement

A gross full-bodied

Pushing of the plunger.

Ah.

2005-03-28T21:17:00.000-06:00

Bat Country

2005-03-23T22:09:00.000-06:00

And so now we’re pushing deeper, deeper, deeper…

I was walking home one night (tonight, truth be told), my side feeling like someone had sucker kicked my ribs in my sleep, high as a kite and drunk off two beers from the campus pub. I had been reading a lot of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Wolfe, and especially Thompson in the months after my break up with the beautiful Serb. As a result, I pushed myself deeper into the counter-culture that sprang out of the post-war America and flourished into the late 60’s until Woodstock – the 100,000 amp eulogy to the dead Hippy Spirit. In any case, walking home that night, the full scope of all the bullshit acid-tripping, weed-smoking, bullhorn-blowing, wild drunken hysteria of the hippy spirit came into my mind as I looked up at the stars, walking smiling. I often talk aloud in public and as this wave of serotonin-induced serenity, this surging in-the-moment-ness washed over me, I began speaking what sounded like extemporaneous passages of Hunter S. Thompson. Bizarre really; full of the knee-breaking, bone-splint, heart-devouring cannibalism that so exemplified the dead Raul Duke.

And so now we’re pushing deeper, deeper, deeper…

- passing well-dressed couples on the street laughing about bullshit music or television or class or that girl who served them coffee. Watching their faces writhe secretly from utter boredom. There must be more than this silly talking. Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re pushing deeper, deeper, deeper still.

And all of a sudden my right knee began to hurt, to ache achingly. Wow! How. Bizarre. Is. This.? Reading an article on Dr. Gonzo today, I discovered that in his final months he suffered through tremendous knee maladies. How. Bizarre.

But never mind all this gonzo mayhem. The bottom line is that now I had been born again, after years of psychic enslavement and now I was nearing some sort of artistic aesthetic in the work I was doing now, in the very way I walked chin out, sunglasses on, butt of smirked lips, down the street at night – the point being that now things were different. After that walk, things had somehow changed. The hippy spirit was everywhere that night (tonight, of course). Kids playing cards at picnic tables on their lawns, music blaring through an open window, wine and joints and cigarettes at their lips, smiles. People were looking energized, motivated, ready to push things deeper man fucking deeper, you know man? Yes. Tonight I was Hunter and all of you were the merry pranksters or the hell’s angels or Alan Ginsberg’s chimes or whatever – you were pushing deeper.

And so now we’re pushing deeper, deeper, deeper…

Night Driving - Meter's Off

2005-03-22T12:21:00.000-06:00

The spinning madness of a Sunday night
Lost purses and pretty girls asking “what are the odds?”
Kids with longboards and tangerine street lights.
Two birds fly by, a winged nod to Spring-time Gods.

Screaming treble on the car ride home,
Palms pounding knees, the steering wheel.
The windows open, sunroof back, the dome
Of night revealed - everything Beatles-surreal.

Meltdown Preview

2005-03-15T15:34:00.000-06:00

Meltdown: Minos and Aximander

Major Barbara and the Bomb

2005-03-15T12:02:00.000-06:00

Proliferation
We’re riding high
60,000 feet
And a long night is nigh.
Money and guns
On suburban kitchen tables
We’re drunk with power
We’re drunk with fables.

Mommy Monday

2005-03-14T16:31:00.000-06:00

How long will these lushy days last?
Everything around here is beer-soaked,
A cloud of tobacco and marijuana
Hangs forever around us, our heads
High glacial mountaintops.

I woke up this morning in a sweat,
Lucid dreaming about the future,
The one where I’m alone in London,
My friends engaged and overseas,
(Hung-over and scared sober now.)

It’s Tuesday or so the calendar says,
But this is the Sunday of our recklessness,
Mommy Monday’s comin’ to straighten us up,
Exchanging backpacks for briefcases,
Middle-fingers for outstretched ring-fingers.

2005-03-13T23:06:00.000-06:00

Filters and a Meltdown
Snow at Midnight

Filters

2005-03-13T23:01:00.000-06:00

A cataclysm of stage lights

Fitted with filters

Painted from a palate

Of human-eye greens and golds and blues

Keep us helpless, all lit up and rubber-limbed.

Under focused eyes

30 feet above the planks,

We’re

Helpless, all lit up

- smiling like fools.

Wine and Einstein (Audio)

2005-03-06T23:07:00.000-06:00

Wine and Einstein

2005-03-06T22:19:00.000-06:00

So the other night Kerri and I were drinking wine and smoking joints and we started talking about – of all things – Einstein. He had an interesting idea. Well, he had many, I’m sure, but the one that has always stuck me in the gut, the one that makes me smile that crooked, drunken, nose-off-to-one-side-vein-bulger, is the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy. The idea is this: in the whole damn universe, there’s X amount of stuff, be it in material or energetic form at the time. So all of us, everything, the whole kit and caboodle, everything from supernovas to Floridian crocodiles, are part of one whole amount of X, a.k.a. all that is.

“For example” Kerri said. “So for example, look at that candle burning on your table. That candle is 8 inches tall, and about 2 inches in diameter. It weighs – what? – 2 lbs? So, as that candle burns, it disappears slowly, right? The wax, the wick, all of it goes poof! and one day, there will be no more candle. Some of it will be smoke and some of it will be ash and some of it will be dust, but most of it, most of those 2 lbs will become energy that will fuel the flame. So somewhere, that 2 lbs of energy exists, invisible, inaccessible, converted from candleness into flameness into....

“And somewhere else at that exact moment, an infant is conceived,” she added, pulling a hit from the joint which is now miraculously disappearing like the candle. “Creating consciousness out of old thunderstorms and flowers long since decomposed.”

And she hauled again from the joint and as she did, I could perceive the decay of the chocolate-flavoured tobacco wraps, of the carbon-based matter rolled inside them. Staring at the glowing tip of the thing, I could actually see the joint shrink into the energetic sub-dimension. And I could see the smoke puff out as Kerri pulled the joint from her mouth, and then get sucked back into her lungs, like a milky riptide. Somehow, I could even see the smoke in her lungs, being broken down and sent coursing through her veins, into her brain, where –miraculously!- it becomes thoughts about philosophy, about existence, turning itself into brain matter and body movements, the tip of the joint somehow making her head move back, making her smile –

“So think of this, then. Think of this,” she starts again, a cough in waiting. “Ok, so, then with this joint, then (Jesus Christ she’s reading my mind) it’s sort of the same thing, except you can experience the effect of the transformation. The energy is put into you – it turns from plant matter into chemical energy which makes you stoned, makes you think differently, sort of exist differently, right? But then you sober up as your body metabolizes the chemicals, and it’s transformed again, into energy, into feces. So, really, you’re made up of a bit of everything – you and I are part opium and h-bomb and Hitler and Shakespeare and Pluto.”

And I look around the room and suddenly the walls are a bit of everything – mom and a perfect beach and DDT and the strength of cancer–

“And when you die, they say that you loose about 20 grams of bodyweight.”

– and heartache and homesickness and spontaneous combustion –

“And all I want to know is, where the fuck do people think that weight goes? And what is that weight?”

– and Kerri and heartburn and Einstein himself (she’s channelling an atom of his understanding, maybe) –

“There’s just one pool of us. One enormous ocean full of one thing – being. It’s all the fucking same. And you sound like a waco when you think like that.” And she’s pissed off now, and she wants to change the subject, but you know what? She’s absolutely fucking right.

Standing

2005-03-05T01:11:00.000-06:00

The perpetual motion of
Hundred thousand dollar
Watches
Leap-year-counting
Forever-moving
Pieces of carved
Metal,
Reminding us
Forever (………………………………………………………………….!)
of our tardiness.

Black Mathemagicians
Pulling rabbits out of
Logarithms
In three part harmony
On a beach
In the middle of a grade-school riot.

Three part harmony
(you won’t stay over/ you won’t stay over)

Three part harmony
(matter and energy/one swirling mass)

Three part harmony
(in another life/ in another life)

Three part harmony
(I was thunder/ you were grass)

2005-02-28T22:56:00.000-06:00

My Heart Is On The Left
Snow at Midnight

Black Stars

2005-02-28T22:47:00.000-06:00

People miss the quiet profundity of midnight. My own personal summer on the balcony, somewhere in the Atlantic. Music blaring, faces opened up into earnest bold-faced smiles, veins gently bulging in the forehead, heads bobbing to the Arcade fire. White teeth foregrounds against tanned flesh backgrounds, perfectly exposed against the moon. Flash bulb and long exposure.

Imagine the faces of all the people who ever loved you rolled into one. At dinner, eating across from you, from each other, beaming, laughing over the tops of open wine bottles and cooked vegetables, savoury. In Rome. In July. Hot evening, eating outside. All in love with every inch of you and each other. Imagine.

Out across the Atlantic a cruise ship sails all dolled up due south into infinite darkness, enveloped by black above and below. White Christmas lights ablaze, astrung, astern, astarbord. Caribbean music blaring, inaudible, into the silent void. Over-priced drinks and balconies and Pilipino cabin stewards aplenty.

Arcade Fire. My heart is on the left, breathing through a blowhole, 20,000 leagues under the sea.

2005-02-11T00:54:00.000-06:00

A Day In The Life
Snow at Midnight

A Day In The Life

2005-02-11T00:50:00.000-06:00

I’m awoken at about 8:45 when the heat of the Roman morning finally rolls me over and up, out of bed. A quick shower of cool water, open windows. The hostel’s up already. Incredible, really. The hangovers are hot like the morning. Fuzzy. Sticky.

The Brits are already up (the Aussie pair as well?) and the living room is buzzing with bagels and espresso. Van Gogh green outside the huge open windows. It’s Tuesday but it may as well be Saturday; June in Rome is a constant weekend with even 50-something tourists playing in the streets like kids. Skipping even. A couple of deep, chesty chuckles ring up the stone staircase and an Italian baritone is bringing his joke to a European crescendo. So I towel off and grab my shit (wallet, water, notebook, pens, map, guidebook, bus pass) and I’m out onto the sidewalk, in the sunlight, beads of cold shower water warming up on me already. The smell of fresh bread and diesel.

Under a tree now in the forum, looking out onto the Coliseum. Colours muted by dark glasses and shade. Hundreds of African men hocking faux Gucci glasses and Prada purses. The thousands of dead Christians. Italians dressed up as Romans to nail tourists for pictures. In the forum, cats run wild and Irish tour guides lead American snap-shotty tourists around: “ahnd herrrre is the churrrrrch uf Saihnt Lorrrenzo.” A breeze picks up and high noon is tolerable for a second.

By late afternoon the sun is slung low, like a gun above the ancient skyline. Long Mediterranean shadows, dark like the hair of Roman women hang hair-down into the streets. The Campo di Fiori is a trendy local hang out I’m told – nothing more than a candle-lit square tucked deep into the road to the Vatican where locals wear red and drink wine. Writers sit at tables and tell stories to themselves of the dancers in the square in front of them, the cobblestone as impervious to the dancers as cold - Roman feet and evenings nimble, sweaty. A couple shouts in Italian next to me and everything is right. Just right.

Linen was a great choice. The air’s the perfect temperature for dancing through and the Brits and Aussies are up for drinking wine in the square by the hostel. On the bench. Cigarettes and sighs. There’s talk of Karaoke at a bar called Julius Caesar close by, without a hint of irony. Perfect.

You Suck

2005-02-08T21:42:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Ben.

You suck Ann Coulter. Staight up, you blow.

No shit.

Was Born with Roses in Her Eyes

2005-02-07T22:31:00.000-06:00

Looked through old love letters last night, to candlelight. Red wine-tummy flippin’ old memories. Flooding back to me: being 17 in England, in love and overseas. Café food in London, runnin’ back from Westminster Station in the rain, taking pictures with Max and Kate as we run, soaked and it’s pouring but it’s hot and I’m in England, baby; late nights in underground pubs and warm beer and cigars. And old age isn’t an Indian, Jack; it’s the last mid-50’s gent sitting in the bar, last one out. The one smiling in the booth next to pine walls and the smell of warm beer and cigarettes and the perfume of beautiful women is all over him, smiling. He’s smiling.

So I was reading the old poetry of the girl I used to love, thinking of England. Thinking, I had rituals that I can’t remember. My love for the lover who’s moved on and loved anew. The first girl I ever loved. In one letter she wrote:

God, I’m tired, and it’s past 1:30. The bridge lights are still burning and the moon’s risen a little higher. One thing I love about this place is that the stars are crazy! As I stepped outside, everything seemed to stop for just a moment. Everything relaxed.

And I try to remember what Past Michael thought reading that.
And what England in June smelled like after a storm.
And what it felt like to be able to run.
And what my clothes used to smell like, before smoke.
And the colour of my mind, its humidity at 17.
And Toronto in June, in school, at the precipice of infinity.

Home movies for the folks back home

2005-02-05T11:58:00.000-06:00

Fingers up in arms
About to strike like rain upon
Bob Dylan highways.

Boom! Up and out
Of the blocks,
Steroid jacked-up sprinter style.
- (boom.)!

So tonight was all about
"Classy Bullshit"
-classy bullshit-
Like, "hey"
"Hey, um, here's a little secret"
Like,
"hey"
"I'm a fucking smarty pants."

So, k doubts me.
Marty pants?
No no, my dear.
Smarty, as in the tasty candy
Andy Warhol gum drop sugar
Like intelligence.
With the "sometimes why." (y)

People Magazine

2005-01-30T09:05:00.000-06:00

Little hands and mouths open at me
Little dogs and cats and vermin swirling
Beneath the table.

Everybody knows.
Furry things with sunglasses on,
Squinting eyes copping a peak at me,
Under table,
As close as they’ll ever get.

And oh the little hangers on,
Panting beneath the table,
Bug-eyed, squinty-eyed,
Praying for me to have shaky hands today
So that I may mistakenly toss a tasty morsel
For them to fight over, fur furrowing,
Swirling, teethy, toothy, palmy
Beneath the table.

Down the street,
A supersonic tone beams across the land
And all the vermin under tables hear a pitch
That only vermin hear
And the furry under-table fuckers scream and howl
Because my hands have shaken.

- moving in.

I Me Mine

2005-01-28T13:23:00.000-06:00

All through the day I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
All through the night I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
Now they're frightened of leaving it
Everyone's weaving it,
Coming on strong all the time,
All through the day I me mine.

I-me-me mine, I-me-me mine, I-me-me mine, I-me-me mine.

All I can hear I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
Even those tears I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
No one's frightened of playing it
Everyone's saying it,
Flowing more freely than wine,
All through the day I me mine.

I-me-me mine, I-me-me mine, I-me-me mine, I-me-me mine.

- Harrison

2005-01-27T14:31:00.000-06:00

Okay, let me make this clear to anyone who is coming to this blog of mine for the wrong reasons: I am not going to deal with any more of this horseshit online. I will not respond to you. I will not post your comments. I’m not bothering with any of it. If you or your friends have something to say to me, please feel free to come to my house or stop me the next time you see me and we’ll sort it out. I’m not dealing with this fucked up pussy grade 8 shit anymore.

-Lista

P.S. If that e-mail can shut you up, you’re an even bigger pussy than I thought, buddy. And I learn a little more about you every few minutes.

Ted Bundy

2005-01-24T13:44:00.000-06:00

Guilt? Come on. Guilt is unhealthy.

I am free of these things. Guilt. Remorse. Fear. Hatred. Obsession. These things keep men from the life of invincibility. You – you people cheering day and night outside my cell window for my execution tomorrow – your minds are clouded. Hazy; wound up; charged. Even now, your cheers for my death are mitigated by your fear of me, by your hatred of me, by your insistence that you see me punished, tortured, killed; who then is truly imprisoned? Is it me? Or is it you? My walls are made of concrete and steel but yours are invisible walls made of much tougher masonry. Yours are walls of the mind.

Part of Chapter 1 (of Idemo Dajle)

2005-01-16T21:27:00.000-06:00

Friday Night Singer

2005-01-16T18:05:00.000-06:00

Girl from Flattstreet
Lips fire red pursed smirk opening windows
Groove down dirty dead on jazz jive
Voice like vinyl tweeter explosion.

Chapter 1: The Smell of Summer

2005-01-13T22:40:00.000-06:00

Before all other memories of my present life, before all other smells, I remember the smell of summer in full bloom coming through my window in my parent’s house, in the middle of the night. The house I grew up in. The summer I came back from my second year of University, my teeth white, my face thin. Back then, I was much different. I know that sounds sort of cliché, but it’s true. I was cleaner, I guess – not like I don’t wash now or anything like that. But I was cleaner of body, cleaner of mind, I guess – for example, I used to love to fantasize about the way my life would be. Like, the happiest day I can remember was in OAC, the night I found out I got into the school I wanted to go to. Pure potential, you know? Pure potential. Anyways, so I remember it being so hot and the darkness, the night was all over me. Just wearing boxers shorts and still sweating. And that smell. That smell. Like hot, hot flowers – like flowers boiling. And I remember lying in my bed and wondering about what adventures I was about to have the next day. Tomorrow was more than a day in my mind – it was a promise of continuity, of ingenuity – of things similar and continuous and wonderful. And back then, granted, I didn’t know that much and I was vain as fuck – also sort of self-conscious I guess, too – but anyways, I was beautiful for a second and I didn’t smoke yet or have pains in my side, or a gut, and I had more hair I guess. But anyways, that smell was the smell of romance. The smell of things to come. Like a perfume, like the future was out there walking around in tight jeans and pearls, all perfumed and romancing me. Back then, I didn’t have a computer to sit up all night typing to. I didn’t have a cell phone or a fancy stereo system or MSN messenger or delirium tremens or anything to keep me up or make me bizarre.

For a long while, I went to bed with a smile on my face – an actual smile. I used to be in love with the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, no shit. Before we stopped sleeping in the same bed together, she would always tell me in the morning that she’d stayed up for a half hour or so watching me fall asleep, watching the smile fade from my face immeasurably slowly.

“Like watching a blade of grass grow at midnight” she used to tell me.

In any case, that smell of summer was heartily indebted, I think, to the smell of cut grass. On the night I remember when I think of that smell, I was drunk with youth – erotic 20-something immortality. Every morning I’d spring out of bed and admire myself in the bathroom for a good 5/10 minutes before I’d hop into the shower. And out the door to work at the PR office where I was answering phones, I’d drive sunglasses on, windows down, shouting along with Dave Matthews or Radiohead or the Beatles down the highway. Music thick and arm-hair-raisey and the smell of diesel and cologne and summer would blow in and out of the windows, swirling between the driver’s and passenger’s seat, then genie-swirl out of the sunroof, invisible – poof!

And so those days were long and orgasmic – like every sense was the tip of your all-powerful dick and the world was a huge hand-job. For a while at least. Like, the sun was gorgeous. The night was gorgeous. Everything was a huge hit of sticky green, all the time. And things would happen together too. At night you’d fall asleep to that smell all over, sweaty and rose-pedaly, and in the morning, you’d wake up to the sound of birds and the smell of coffee. So it would be like a double-header, a veritable gang-bang, a sensory cluster fuck. And another time, for example, I was driving down Bloor at night, coming home from visiting my gorgeous brunette, windows down, sunroof open, a steaming, sweating 11:45, and as I stop at a light beside High Park, these two gorgeous women pull up in a convertible and tell me I’m hot. It’s stuff like that I’m talking about. That summer was something else, man.

And so the summer went on like this for some while. I would spend the days working the reception desk at a PR firm where I was supposed to answer phones and send client calls to our various PR professionals. Most of the time, I’d surf the internet, looking things up on online encyclopaedias (Anthropology!, Abbey Road!, Timothy Leary!). Other misuses of my employment included:

1. Photocopying 20-odd copies of my most recent full-length play – 93 pages of self-centred, centre-less horseshit.

2. Phoning my beautiful brunette girlfriend at her work

3. Exploring the artistic boundaries of Post-it Note art, being neither an artist, nor a fan of the 3M company

I’d spend hours dreaming about my parent’s cottage or fantasizing about my next secret cigarette break with my cool, secret cigarette-smoking friends or about being a famous playwright or actor who had the balls to tell my boss to screw off and that “all of you are a bunch of corporate whores!” But of course, I wasn’t so I’d plug away, wasting time wonderfully, smiling, taking photos of myself on my cell phone, photos of me giving the finger in creative ways to the Edelman PR sign positioned behind my head until 5:30 would come. Then I’d shut off the telephone board, log off my fantastically expensive Dell computer, and head downstairs and OUTSIDE! into the perfect late June sunlight, giving a respectful but friendly salute to the 50-something Czechoslovakian door man. Free.

The evenings would start as soon as I reached my car – my barely cool, barely unyuppy 1991 Mercedes Benz, whose one redemptive quality was the fact that it was fourteen fucking years old, guys. The Benz humming to life, I’d drive down King Street, making a quick left turn to dodge the taxis and streetcars that owned 5:35 PM in Toronto, then turn right onto Simcoe Street, whipping by old winos huddled around a church and Roy Thompson Hall, and turn right onto Front Street, racing lines of Canadian Idol fans towards the front doors of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre until boom! I was on the highway and sitting in a sea of rush hour commuters, heading west, all the while deliciously blinded by mid-summer quittin’ time limelight.

Most afternoons, I’d head straight to Vanya’s house. After some 45-odd minutes of stop-and-going, I’d arrive in Oakville, the June sky now hinting at light pinks and reds and far-off oranges. In the city, the Benz could pass for ironic-trendy, as in look at how I’m driving this formerly fancy but now beat down and out-dated German car. In Oakville, though, the Benz was something else entirely; here, it was look at that honkin’ relic, an obvious hand-me-down from a daddy who clearly isn’t well off enough to give his son a proper new car, but not quite poor enough to not give him a car at all. It was a complicated, but none-the-less a veritable look that the fine Land-Rover-driving mommies and teenaged-Beatle-driving done-up-blondies of Oakville could give from inside their far more contemporary vehicles. “Look at that guy,” you could almost lip-read them saying through the black opacity of their tinted windows. But I didn’t really give a fuck, sunglasses on, butt hanging off my lip, banging the steering wheel to whatever tune was coming through my tragically flawed speakers. I just didn’t care.

And as I neared Vanya’s house, my beautiful Serbian brunette’s house, things became almost magical. I think. Well, here is where things get sort of foggy – I want to give an accurate account of how this went, but I’m not sure if I’m romanticizing what really happened. In any case, I guess I can only tell it how I remember it, so for the sake of this whole thing, it was beautiful. Magical, even. I’d pull up to her house and some nights she wouldn’t be home yet. On the days when she pulled the 11-7 shift at Children’s Services, I’d drive around for an hour or so. Sometimes I’d go to the little lake-side city parking lot 50 metres from her driveway and I’d write. One night, I sat there for about 45 minutes, writing with the music on in my car, writing on little pieces of paper, no bigger than a five dollar bill, and I wrote sloppy spontaneous poetry on the papers and left them under the windshield wipers of some of the empty cars in the parking lot. Smiling as I walked back to my car, feeling like I’m made a little more Monetish, Van Goghish, walking in the pinks and reds of the June suburban sunset.

So whatever time Vanya would arrive, I’d be there. Most of the time, I’d jump out of the car as I saw her pulling up in her parents’ Volkswagen, sunglasses on, perfect face turning out a smile at the sight of the Benz – the only Oakvillite who would greet my car so enthusiastically. And we’d kiss on the driveway once she’d parked her car, her brown hair sticking to my bierd, her face smelling like a mix of the perfume she’d applied in the wee hours of the summer morning and the City of Toronto welfare office in which she worked. And once we’d kissed, she’d run into her house, given a new surge of adrenaline, running up the stairs to her front door, bursting through the door, screaming affectionately at her dog in her wild falsetto, shouting, “Majo, Tajo, I’m HOME!” And I’d follow in her blazing trail, walking in her wake up the stairs, the energy of her enthusiasm transmitted into every step I took towards the front door –

And then all over me was the smell. The same smell as in my house around midnight, this time mixed with long-since-smoked cigarettes and bar-b-q smoke pouring in the kitchen window from the porch outside. The smell of butts and burgers and long-winded June sunsets, like the smell of rain about to come. We’d sit with her parents who treated me like their kid, like their son-in-law-to-be, and I’d be ordered to the Bar-B-Q to flip burgers and roast Chevapi. Having orders barked at me in Serbian always made me smile that dumb, toothy, cheeky smile I always used to do. “Milos, ida idemo ou barrrr-b-q, molim te!” And I’d say something back, in my ever-improving Serbian: “Ia resume.” And when I’d finish grilling our meat, Vanya’s mom, Nada, would bring salad and grilled pita bread and cold beer out and we’d eat and laugh and we’d all try to speak in Serbian and then we’d all try to speak in English and either way, we’d end up bursting out laughing. Often, I’d find myself turning away as my laughter would taper off, turning away towards the horizon, towards the sunset, looking around and contemplating just how fucking big everything was – how huge the earth must be, holding all the cultures of the planet on its ever-spinning surface. All of humanity eating as the sun sets. All of humanity laughing, turning away like me. All of humanity looking into the sunset as their laughter tapered off.

As dinner would end, Vanya, Nada, and Vanya’s sister Joe (Jovana, actually) would clear the table as Bana, her father, would tell me stories of the old country, of his lush restaurateur former life, of the war, of life in the last few months before their emigration – a life forever punctuated by fits cold sweats and distant (sometimes not quite distant enough) gunshots. And I’d feel guilty, feel somewhat too old-worldly for not helping to clear the dishes and I’d give Vanya one of those I’m sorry baby, but I’m talking to your dad here and I don’t want to be rude looks, and she’d touch my arm and smile, picking up the plates and glasses. Being buzzed off beer, hearing Bana’s broken English in my ear off in the distance, looking out at the spot where the sun set not too long ago, wondering if there was a mirror at that point who would be looking back at me.

“ – and uh, but-a, aenways! Iss o-k now though, is it naht Miloshe?”

“Oh, it’s ok now, Bana. It’s ok.”

And so it went for a couple more months, each day increasingly shorter, each day increasingly more difficult to distinguish from the one previous to it, everything shortening and accelerating, like the sun swinging down under the horizon. By the end of the summer, we needed sweaters at night to sit out and eat dinner in the dark – by the end we began to eat inside again. By the end I began to sleep with the window closed and by the end we stopped bar-b-q-ing, and by the end all the smells of the summer were gone, replaced with the smell of food being cooked inside, the Canadian smell of food in the kitchen – the smell of fall. On one night which I still remember clearly, on what was perhaps the last summer dinner outside, we bar-b-q’d begrudgingly, set the table out of sheer instinct, spoke infrequently, our chattering teeth making conversation difficult, and I remember listening to Bana speaking about a new car he wanted to buy soon – mayabee in Sehptehmberrr – and turning my head to look out to where the sun used to set earlier in the summer, right there over my left shoulder, right between the trees, right into the lake. But there was nothing there – no hint of red, no impressionistic paint spillage happening at the edge of the world that night – nothing but pure black over Lake Ontario, over Hamilton.

And then it was December.

Icadorus Amnestasia

2005-01-11T21:28:00.000-06:00

So back before the world crashed down
Before super fauna and dinosaurs were smashed
Before industry rose and fell
Before the future of all things yet to be became the present, then past,
There was a bag of skin and bones
Named Icadorus Amnestasia.
Covered head to toe in mud and beer
And day-old cigarette stench.
Rambling in tongues made of “ska’s!” and “brah’s!” and “ftraaaa’s!”
And wine-sweet-booze-breathy and mouthy-red, merloty-red cusses,
He shouted for a while, then danced, then died,
And quite uneventfully at that.

On a snowy day, I hear,
With Carole King in his ears, I hear,
He heard the thing that made his heart sink low
And eyes-a-redden and fists-a-clenchin’
And everything went red and spun and fell,
On a snowy day, I hear, I hear.

When Icadorus Amnestasia woke up
The pedals of his love had shaken themselves from him
And he was naked in his emptiness
And serpentine in his drunkenness
In his bed, alone, hung over and infinite.
And he was perfect in his clandestine loneliness,
In his acne-scarred-gorgeousness,
In his drunken wino profundity.

God and Caps --> Audio

2005-01-04T23:46:00.000-06:00

Musin' on Bob Dylan

2005-01-04T01:48:00.000-06:00

Two young guys with black hair and crew cuts and straight-up-genuine toothy smiles trot up Spadina Avenue en route to an off-beat coffee shop. The January afternoon is totally devoid of winterness; the air is almost hot on us and as we head north towards Kensington Market, Chinatown buzzes with the sale of cabbages and glazed fowl and “Fresh shrimp! So Fresh! Fresh Shrimp!” So high in the city this afternoon, and the faces passing us are a homogenous Pollock painting of pearly-white glee, “Oh-Wow-I-Didn’t-See-It-Like-That” raised eyebrows, and stern, solo, sidewalk watching. This is our city and by God it’s alive and pulsing, full of gorgeous, muddy blood.

“You may still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not” sings Cat Stevens and as soggy-waisted, blog-comment-berrated as we may be, aren’t we lucky as fuck to be breathing, scott-free, not quite yet needing the iron lungs that await us? Aren’t we blessed? “God yes” the woman next to me shouts into her cell phone as she passes us. Everyone’s on the same page, unbeknownst to them.

Musin’ on Bob Dylan – how essentially clear-of-head he always was, how clairvoyant he could be, seeing into the giant (though latent) Human Soul, the one we all share and draw from, the one forever hovering over our ever-burgeoning cityscapes, invisible. How gorgeous and uncomplicated it all was. And he sang every revelatory word with that burger-and-fries realness that made his records nearly too much to bare. Chaff and grain coming over the speakers all at once – beauty and beast married with children.

My neurochemistry is milky and bouncy right now. “Let’s grab a coffee” Ashley says. Let’s. Survivor’s guilt is all over me as kids die of untreated paper-cut-sized gashes on their fingers and here I am, high in Toronto, paying $2.50 for a cup of coffee. How do we deal with this? A fine man named Scott reminded me of the unworthiness of my complaints, and all the power to you Scottyboy: you’re right. But I won’t apologize for my transient neurochemistry. Today though Scotty, everything is clicking like clockwork; you needn’t worry about this suburban boy wasting a precious bit of the World’s finite grief on himself today, in the ultimate act of selfishness (“he has fucking everything! Need he take my fortune and my sorrow?”) Today, Scotty, I’m all incisors and K-9’s, buddy: I’m unabashedly lovin’ it.

New Year's E-mail to Ms. Kerri Carisse

2005-01-01T10:42:00.000-06:00

Ok, so here it is:

- was feeling down for a bit yesterday because I thought I was going to chill with Josh for new years and instead he ended up going to some buddy's cottage. Whatever, that's cool. I started however to feel sorry for myself because no one had called me or msn'd me or anything to see what I was doing for New Year's. But I said "Fuck it." I learned my lesson that I've neglected and alienated all my friends, that I've fallen off the platonic radar, etc... won't do it again. Fine. So I call up my republican cousins to see what's up - they're not doing anything - so I tell them that I'm bringing over a 24 and a 26-er of Unicum, the Hungarian National drink. And that we're going to drink it all.

So we all get fucked and high-tail it out to a bar. Dancing, revelling, having a great time, etc. New Years comes and we all scream and jump around like something fabulous just happened and I start trying to call people to wish Happy New Years, tell them I love them. Busy signals. Fine. Whatever. More dancing, more drinking, more phone-call-trying. I reach some people, leave messages for others - it's all very fine and dandy.

Then, I get the great idea to wish YOU a happy new year. So I call your house. At 2 am. Your sister (I think) picks up, sounding fairly awake.

"Hi is Kerry there please?"

"No she's not in."

"Ok! Sorry if I was interrupting you! Happy New Year!"

Smiling, thinking how nice I am to be spreading so much merriment -

- my phone rings.

"Hello?"

"Is this Mike?"

"Uh, yes it is."

"This is Kerri's dad."

"Oh... hello Mr. Carisse..."

"You just called my house."

"Um, yes... I uh... I did, yes."

"Let me tell you something. In this house, we generally go to sleep around 10 so we don't appreciate when people call at 2 am. Kerri's not here. And it's not appropriate for you to be calling so late. This is something you'll learn when you come up to visit."

"uhhh... oh my god! I'm so sorry Mr. Carisse! I just wanted to wish Kerri a Happy New Ye-"

- click.

So I'm pretty much mortified. He was clearly pissed off enough to wake up, get out of bed, *69 a perfect stranger, guess that it was me (because my phone is under my mother's name), and ream me out for waking him and his family up. I am MORTIFIED! Please tell your parents that I apologize sincerely and that I was swept up in a wave of oblivious joy and I just had to call my best friend to wish her the best for the coming year and to thank her for her edifying friendship. God, I'm such a fucking moron.

He clearly hates me already.

-Lista

Pissin' upwind

2004-12-31T18:12:00.000-06:00

The degradation of his face – or what appeared to him to be the degradation of his face – became apparent in the winter of his third year of University, three days before Christmas.

Fuck me.

Looking in the mirror, he finally decided that his fears were not unfounded. Looking in the mirror –

Fuck me.

– everything bloating and falling simultaneously on him, skin sinking and twisting, forging holes in itself, contorting itself. Moving closer to the mirror, he widened his eyes to discount the possibility of misperception, but the bug-eyes tell the truth.

Holy god.

– time and alcohol working like a Sharpie pen, disfiguring him superficially, the ink eventually running deep towards the bones shaping his face, diving like a Cold War submarine, subcutaneous now.

How did this happen?

You drank too much.

When did I become so –

You drank too much.

When did my face fatten like –

Passing out on the living room couch, forgetting to brush your teeth.

Thoughts like rumours in his head, whispered from all four corners, from under trench coats and ruffling scarves, tossed out subversively over glasses of Pino Grigio, audible to passers-by, reiterated, and then eventually self-propagating, like asexual amoeba. Mono-duologue of the vain, the beautifully insecure.

Baths and Wisdom Teeth

2004-12-28T23:49:00.000-06:00

Kaleidoscopic neon bottles calling from across the kitchen, from the wooden, lacquered mouth in which they rest, calling to my parched, perverted lips – the liquor calls from lips to lips. It’s contrition in a bottle, albeit a euphemistic repentance at best: I’ll drown my sins and sorrows. Looking across the room, I decide to stay sober. The start of something.

Sitting in the bath tonight for the first time in years, candles lit all fru-fru fancy fat-cat, wax dripping down as the water drips up, becoming air, everything moving along invisible vertical tracks, everything ready to fall or climb, and I realize how lonely the house you grew up in can be when you’re in your 20’s. Everything is shrunk down, made insignificant, defiled by the vicious habits we assume. Sigur Ros over the stereo I had my first kiss listening to, the montage of my over-rated memories cascading through me (set to music) opaque and gaggy, like water vapour slinking over to spoon the bathroom mirror, clinging to me blindly, passionately. Leaning my head back now, revelling in the god-damn heat of this fucking bathwater (!), candles push-pulling powder-nosed yellow light to and fro the sweaty walls, my knees and thighs rising up out of the water like twin islands from an Alan Ginsberg vision of some South Pacific archipelago, hairy and wasted – contemplating my diminutiveness, wondering what I need to do to leave this funk behind.

Taking dad home from the hospital today, walking him arm in arm towards the car (just don’t let him slip, you fuck up), wondering how he got so frail, him saying something almost silently (I’m fine…you don’t have to be sad, you know… didn’t hurt even…) and one day I’ll be right here again, stomach up in mutinous sailor knots, remembering tossing baseballs in the street-mommy-calling-us-to-dinner-him-calling-me-buddy-movies-spankings-sigur-ros-montages-in-my-head-youdon’thavetobesadyouknow in some doctor’s office I haven’t seen yet, wondering what’s his status, nurse? Mouth all gauzed up, bleeding out, brain all hopped up on Perkiset, Valum, bleeding out, talking gibberish poorly, given neither good form nor content in his faculty of speech: the shadows of my memories of him growing longer, out of proportion. Wisdom teeth surgery sets me off, up into my head, running furiously from things innocuous.

My friends say I remind them of someone who looks lost in Europe.

Ambiguous Onomatopoeia

2004-12-26T20:53:00.000-06:00

Looked in the mirror today. In my sobriety, I noticed just how bloated I have become. Wow. I smile for pictures and my second chin extends down below my first in a sort of revolting Kangaroo pouch-show-of-affection, or affectation. Agoraphobic nights alone with 1960s musicians over the shitty speakers of my laptop, and I imagine myself a year ago, in love, conversing with the wonderful parents of a girl I barely knew. “Hmmm” I think to myself, and as I do, I wonder how to express it verbally, on the computer screen. “Hmmmm.” Tonight, the taste of whiskey is all frisky tisk-tisky in my mouth, up in my nose. “Hmmmm.” Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind makes me wonder about things. I wonder if I’m an alcoholic. “Hmmmmm.” Memories flash back to me like old drug trips (Christopher last night talking about drugs, desparigingly)… I try to move on into the present but am addled by the past (Vanya, Miranda, and I wandering through the old mansion, looking for a place for Vanya to stay next year – this year).

I can’t forget the past. I wish I could. I wish I never was what I have been.

Hmmm.

I wish John Lennon wasn't dead.

Situation

2004-12-25T23:11:00.000-06:00

“Because the world is round, it turns me on.” Ok. Fine. Christmas day. 21 years later (21 hundred years later) I talk about moral relativism with my moral majority cousin; I listen to Golden Slumbers, intoxicated, awkward, unabashedly alone in my parents’ kitchen; I sniff the undersides of my pinky fingers in some strange olfactory shadenfreuden. I’m wondering all the time if it’s ok to say “I don’t give a fuck” when asked about religion.

A canker sore kills me every time I move my tongue. I imagine tongue cancer there, silent and deadly, like a fart in the car.

Merry Christmas, all you Christian conservative fucks, all you mouth-foaming, Japanese-game lusting doe-eyed 8 year-olds. All I want for christmas is for all the darkie, gay, female Muslims, to just disappear, daddy. I can only imagine the day when the Christmas lights will spread out over the globe, a Great wall of Christiandom, illuminating all the darker nooks. “You only give me your situation” in my head. Dad caught me, joint behind ear, readying to smoke and I said, "Wanna join?" Funny.

Incendiary

2004-12-24T02:34:00.000-06:00

Prodigal suns show tonight. Too drunk to write. I feel the weight of myself bear down upon me as I ready myself to smoke. What happened, I wonder.

The beat driving us, inciting us to dance. These days make us feel alive, incendiary. Niagara Falls with Elizabeth; Montreal with Vanya; Kingston with someone else. What happened to the geography of my life?

Goodnight.

A Fickle Honeymoon

2004-12-23T14:33:00.000-06:00

2:39 PM: an afternoon long and drawn out with cruel deliberation, the events of the day always self-referential, always reinforcing the fact that it’s only 2:30. “Christ.” The dog follows me around and sleeps eventually on the floor, glancing up occasionally to see if I’m still here. “Where the hell did you think I’d go?” I say. Outside snow and freezing rain and hail balls the size of Volkswagens and fucking locusts swooping around in a black, granulated cape keep the dog and me inside. The Canadian suburbs are always plagued by something or other: yuppy Gucci Fendi mommies tearing up and down the streets in honkey tonkey cell phoney talky Land Rovers; mad dad deep into new fad suits and leathers and Heathers and cars and strip bars and imagining sister-in-lawrs all decked down and ready to go; misunderstood little Terry and Jerry and Mary all fucked up on cokespeedweedcapssmack in their buddy’s buddy’s buddy’s basement, watching films about the American West coast, pissed off at everything. Thank god we all pulled together as a team, borrowing our brother’s American Dream, the party line a tight rope from which we’re all ready to jump.

Last night old books and guitar hooks and matronly cooks made everything feel like home, everything blue-skied-apron-60-minutes-on-Sunday-night-and-the-smell-of-church-being-7-again Zen. The smell of grandma’s cooking all over me for days: meat balls and pasta sauces and deep-fried-chicken-fried-steak-fried-chicken-chicken-fried-fried vegetables. Without much to say, I sit back and muse over the ant-hill madness of it all, the rushing, swirling pile of us all, the gorgeous compulsion of it all, and I, being a willing (albeit silent) third party to it all, smile and feel like the ant that grew up to be a entomologist.

I awoke from a dream just now, a day dream. I fell asleep with Sgt. Pepper in my ears and Jonathan Franzen in my eyes and soon I was skipping on the taut lake of consciousness, my mind bouncing and falling like a round stone thrown out against the world, not able to sink or fly. Opening my eyes, outside the world is BMW blue on white.

A Pretentious Noun-As-Title

2004-12-22T01:09:00.000-06:00

White wine tastes like freedom in the only bedroom in which I’ve ever slept. 21-odd years of history in this room and all I can do is get drunk and fall asleep before the weight of guilty freedom weighs down upon me, heavy and ambiguous.

“He blew his mind out in a car; he didn’t notice that the lights had changed” says John Lennon and I imagine my final struggle with death, pathetic and clumsy. No candlelight vigils for the amoral; those who tarnish their gifts get nothing nothing nothing when it comes to beatific eulogies. We get the sloppy funeral seconds.

So much to love. So many. So little. So little time, appreciation, wonder without the help of helpers (chemical of course). People with happy marriages, with babies, with plans for tomorrow. I get today and nothing else, my dear. I get today – all heady and underappreciated. I get snippits of happiness, fleeting and overpoetic. I see my famous playwright professor as I run to the john in the Tim Horton’s rest stop bathroom, pissing beside each other, talking about how I’ve improved my marks this term. I burn an ancient Valentine’s Day candle tonight for the first time, given to me by the love I’ve tossed aside. I’m given my parents’ love, my sisters’ admiration – things I measure and toss into the dirty laundry. I’m given so much and I’ve wasted so much. Fiona Apple now and I’m heavyweightless, teatheredunencumbered, imprissonedgrantedindefiniteparole . “Woosh woosh woooooosh” says the wind and I like its sound better than the accolades’.

My housemates say I’m going to be bald one day and maybe I will. My sister says I’m easy to fall in love with and maybe I am. My gut tells me I’m driving downtown tomorrow to buy the records of artists I’ve outlived already and maybe I will. Claire says I don’t live in the present and I tell her she’s full of shit and maybe we’re right.

2004-12-19T14:41:00.000-06:00

Coke Machines and Deities
Snow at Midnight

The Search For God and Caps

2004-12-19T14:37:00.000-06:00

A search for god last night as sounds and bricks and pavement moved in and out around us, revelatory. Body blown wide open, the continuity of things meandering about, scattered like chaff on the December wind. “The bats” we say and look into the trees as chirping plumbs hang from swinging branches, a heartbeat. Moving down towards the lake we fight the wind, ever keeping us from things too large for us, keeping up adrift, always moving, always in tiny, lit courtyards, always in the nooks of buildings. We pass the buildings we used to pass and in our passing, pass the time with talk of time’s passing – the old red coke machine, and all we say is “wow.” Further along I talk about how red things are and you talk about climbing through trees. I feel bad for this tree here, all dead and crumpled, its upright corpse a testament to perseverance and you say there’s nothing to be done so we leave, heads spinning still and motionless. You want to cut your hair. I want a camera.

Moving through the streets, we wonder why everything is empty, why the world is fast asleep already, why cars and couples are inside to miss all this. The fire of wonder, of innocence, of majesty beams down upon us, burns in us for once, makes us whole or holy or holey, as in porous, or something. Tiny things and huge ones are made possible, made lucid, made real, made beautiful in their simple complexity and in the distance, a church’s bell tower, all lit up calls, tractor-beams us in. And as we move in towards it, questions thundering through us, everything visible peeling away towards the horizon, we realize that God’s not home. We are unwelcome. “The door is locked to the likes of us,” she says and I call Him a pecker and we leave.

And nothing is solved.

City Scrapes

2004-12-18T18:01:00.000-06:00

“Praised be man; he is existing in milk” says Jack Kerouac. A block down, a block over and everything is new, rediscovered – the city isn’t a whole but rather a compilation of little places. Black cats here and honking cars and hooded, huddled, huffing, hurried silhouettes chase their shadow-casting bodies about, moving down the street in angles ever decreasing and increasing along the pavement. This new street corner: convenience store kit-kat sign lighting everything up, everything is neon-blue, everything is blue and red and 10 feet up, I smoke cigarettes out the window, naked in bed talking affectionately about affection (giving, taking, givingtaking) as smoke poof poof poofs out onto this new street corner, alone. I’m alone in my mind, and my mind-farts are misgivings of the way things will one day be, suffocating and grotesquely pleasurable. The night sky is motionless – the day readies its first step unacknowledged.

Christmas time alone, dead Beatles riffing, every sense working overtime (punch cards tattered and inked), every part of me pulling graveyard shifts begrudgingly, bewilderingly. Scrabble words and guitar feedback and a beer in my gut and I’m bought and sold and bought and sold again, forever changing hands, changing names, changing patters on the wall, changing patterns of sleep. Here come the bongos, here come the Beatles, here come the beatless, everything banging, blacking out, everything lacking, everything oversimplified.

“Corrina, Corrina,” Dylan sings about singing birds and as he does a bird lifts up into the winter sky, singing. Cliché I say and I’m wrong and right and everything is wrong and right for once – dichotomous for once. Just once for once, just twice for measure.

Bar Faces

2004-12-12T16:15:00.000-06:00

Up till four last night, slipping/sliding up and down the crystal, gleaming sidewalks from bar to bar to bar, always looking, searching in each for…The friends I used to know are growing fatter, growing thinner (“hey Tony, Timmy, Tommy – lookin’ good, gents”), each waist-based malady a post-it note reminder of how long it’s been since the 90’s, since our youth, each a millennium ago. Moving quickly now through the night, through the countryside of the life that should be mine, the train howling to the night sky, things whippy by, unrecognizable now.

At the bar our faces fall apart. With each successive round, everything droops on us – our eyelids draw down, earth-bound; with each sip, our mouths and lips concede another inch, and soon our jaws are agape, Neandrotholic, and our mouths, given an inch take a mile – mine’s running. Soon everywhere I look, everyone is bar-faced, everyone’s a slack-jawed jack-off with his cum face on, sweaty and detestable, gummy, toothy, tonguey - air tangy, tainted, and everything is moving to the pelvic-thrusting beat, every sense of mine reports pulsing. Lights low, fake smoke blowing over the humping lump on the dance floor, bodies desperate for humping, faces fucked up, searching, scanning for an open piece of flesh. I wonder how I got here. The room spins.

The snow came but did no good, wasted like diamonds on the jaded, me, a skeleton of who I was, a gilded corpse, a reverberating choral chord sung and left to echo off the church walls until its metamorphosis into silence is complete, until it’s nothing, until I’m gone. Outside it snows and inside the pieces of snowflake-happiness fall from the top down, the memories of joy, of better times, they flash before me as they fall – snowing inside, snowing outside. Everywhere the sky is falling.

Altitude 36,000 ft.

2004-12-08T17:45:00.000-06:00

More summer stuff. It's green outside; I can't help it.

How about Chevapi for dinner?

2004-12-08T14:37:00.000-06:00

Rain in Vienna

2004-12-08T13:36:00.000-06:00

The rain stopped at midnight. A friend asked me yesterday why I hate the rain in winter and the answer came to me all at once, without hesitation: the snow is faithful. It is the committed lover of atmospheric frat house – the monogamous spouse. After the initial pleasurable precipitation, the snow stays, it remains atop the earth for days, weeks, months, unmoved in its love for the frozen, balding grass; it’s the post-coital cuddling precipitation. Rain fucks you and leaves you. In the morning, the earth is left alone. I hate the rain in winter.

So I drifted back to summer thanks to December rain. In the summer, the earth is too young to know of the stalwart commitment of the snow. It’s not quite seasoned yet. So here is a summer evening, before the rain came:

May 19^th 2004

Vienna, Austria

Phone call back home and it’s all small talk, all plans, all judgements. Here it’s all about a belly full of food, a full bottle of wine, some strong boons, and the uncertainty that makes a day stand apart from the month in which it rests.

Funny how my May 19^th is a different thing than yours – mine full of promise, full of Nazi wealth carried over time’s boarders into modern Vienna, and yours is a spin around the earth’s axis (from light to dark to light to dark again). Mine is a window into the decadence of Austrian life and yours is 8 hours of stamp licking, of button pushing. An afternoon with Rembrandt here – an afternoon with Revenue Canada there. Acronymic TV/Radio station judgements there and here I get to smell fresh air, to know what western bullshit smells like.

Vanya speaking Serbian in the other room, digital che’s and ljiu’s throttling down electron-filled cables across an ocean at light speed and I have no idea what the sheets I’ll sleep in tomorrow night smell like yet. Forty-eight hours in a new city and you realize how little you learn in school. I’m wiser after two days of this than I am after two years of higher education. Here, I’m filled up with the strength to push up and out – to lock myself away in a European loft and never leave – to become a stranger to all of those who love me and close my eyes to all I’ve ever known forever. Only my Parisian barber and baker will know my secret.

Already, my hair is getting long again, getting curly, getting gross; this fine Florentine leather notebook is getting worn and tattered like my memories of Italy. A hotel room I’ve never seen before, a room I’ll never see again, and I’m listening to American music, breaking all the rules of grammar, not giving a fuck, being young, being free, being all messed up and all filled up at once, realizing the holes in my vocabulary, in my insight, being compulsive about documenting all of it. Do you get me yet? Do you get my immensity, my diminutiveness?

Beatles in my ears, knowing Vanya’s coming to wake me from this visceral, literary trance (hand moving at what feels like the speed of light), knowing this too will end, and just focusing on dead John Lennon sing:

Let it be. Let it be.

Let it be. Let it beeeee.

and I will and I do and I soar and I just let it be for the first time in my silly little life that no one will ever know or remember fully except for me. And outside, it starts to rain.

Ringing Beatles chords being whispered/screamed in my ears that miraculously work, drinking wine that miraculously makes me drunk, writing with enough force to wrinkle my forehead, to cramp my hand, to make my face go red. This is my life I guess (now, now, now, here, now) and it’ll never be the same and it doesn’t even feel real right now. And dead John Lennon sings:

Let it shine until tomorrow

and the chorus booms and I’m riding this giant wave that’s peaking, ready to crest. Eight cities in four weeks and music and poetry and another me for once, another possibility for Michaelism here, and all over me the air is heavy with rain, soft on my shoulders like silk upon dry skin, things a little too perfect, too spectacular to be real.

A song from Kingston playing in my ears (head?). Two versions of the same song – one electric, one acoustic, and I don’t know which one is sadder. I can remember what it’s like to wander those streets and already I hate being back – knowing how easy it is to go back in my head. Not there yet, but it’s already eating me from the inside out – my professors slowly breaking my spirit, my friends tuning out to the understated cry of someone out of place (“oh no – just a little down today, man”), my parents jamming their vicarious dreams against me, my crippled landlord telling me to turn my fucking music down and all I want to do is explode with noise and irresponsibility and drunken giggles. I want to sing poorly, act, dance, get drunk with people who glaze over and act profound, talk dreams earnestly, talk fears hyperbolically, and just feel for a camera-shudder-snap instant that I’m free, that I’m weightless.

Two more songs and then I’ll go to bed. I’ll go to bed in two, I swear. Just two more, no more, I swear. Coldplay saying something about “seeing you soon” and right there…. that’s where my chain’s slack ends. There’s the point where I feel how far I can go and where I can go no further. Went for one more boon, and realized I just finished my last one. And there’s my life: always comfortable in the fleeting present, never towards the impending future because in its cold palm is a handful of shit steaming just for me, its stench contained only when I’m standing in the down-winded now.

Outside, the rain stopped.

Promise of December, Rescinded

2004-12-07T13:09:00.001-06:00

Soon enough though, the solidarity is gone. At one moment the snow is cascading from the sky, covering things up, erasing things; in another atmospheric breath, the rain returns. And now it’s cold and unforgiving, an unwelcome reference to October, an acid-trip flashback, a burden lifted and replaced.

All around me people lose their grip on the sidewalk, lose their grip on trust, on the continuity between one step and another, on what’s deserved on a day like this, and they tumble down the streets, heads down and faces pursed. Looking out my window, I wonder when the promise of December was rescinded.

In another city, it’s snowing. Insomniacs are put to sleep there. Couples dance as the heavens fall and the snow is just so: victory for the fleshy mortals for just a second. Tonight in Kingston, the evolution of things has stopped, has faltered, has regressed, retreated, and everything is out of sorts outside and in our minds – pathetic fallacy for those who feel fictitious.

It’s dark at noon. Outside all heads are turned down in disbelief, the minds which they carry wondering why our governor’s pardon didn’t keep. “What did we do wrong?” The executioner - the relic of the fall - is back to reveal the blemishes hidden in our heads, the ones tucked between old locker combinations and the memory of the scent of her hair. We could go insane today and reveal it all - the water could wash it from its hiding place and the streets would be flooded with our misdemeanours. Turned to ice, the city would be crippled by the frozen confessions of our Id's - an enviropsychoanalytic disaster. "Damn the rain" we'd say as we slid down the sidewalks, our fears and quiet perversions staring up at us like frozen cigarette butts, for all to see and curse.

No snowmen for us today, I’m afraid. There’s nothing to be done with rain.

An Enviropsychoanalytic Disaster.

2004-12-06T15:54:00.000-06:00

I'm a stranger, waiting for the first snowfall of the year.
Snow at Midnight

At the Street Light

2004-12-06T15:52:00.000-06:00

Reality has a strange way of coming to be. I’m completely undeserving of my destiny – the ivory tower alcoholic decadence, the perfumed feces, the drunken screwed up face of it all. I deserve much less; I hate this and deserve much less and here’s reality I guess.

Six months ago I thought I’d be dead by now. Tonight, December 1^st, I’d be pieces of myself – half earth, half black flesh. But here I am. Had justice chased me down (had I not ducked behind the dumpster and hid from it) I would have been little more than gut-rot in my loved ones’ full bellies. And this notebook would have been my sloppy b-list opus – the belched alphabet of epitaphs.

I ruined it, though. I soiled it with this trivia. This was to be my final, gagging, spittle-ridden ululation but now I’ve worn out my mildly witty intellectual disdain. The drinks have hit my head and my words are growing tried and hollow, my midriff growing soggy – every piece of me fattening.

I’m MSN messenger now. I could have been the enigmatic martyr. Now I’m overexposed, like a photo of the sunset ruined by deliberation. We’re all clinging wildly to anything that won’t sink.

Peeking through my fancy stereo is my fancy music and all over me for the first time in (forever?) years is the worried tummy-flipping-nausea that makes me feel alive. “You better come, come come, come come to me” says Cat Power so I do.

I can’t believe August is nothing but 30 yesterdays now. Driving home from work, sure that piece of mail will arrive to sink me: Canadian Idol lines snaking wildly, screaming down front street, a bronzed Glenn Gould across the street – a constant reminder of all I’ll never be. Play. Play. Play! Where went yesterday? There. Gone. Here. There. Wait – there. Gone. Italy (Florentine window). Gone. Budapest (drunken dancing in the square). Gone. Corporate Edelman (good morning Edelman). Gone. Beb and I walking home from school. Gone. All gone, little Mikey. All gone. Josh. Gone. Joe. Gone. June. July. August. Gone. None. Just a bunch of yesterdays now.

I am iPod now. I am high on Long Island. I’m the culminated nothingness of a life of lies. I’m my spelling mistakes – the product of red Microsoft Word squiggle error lines. I’m no one in particular, a stranger waiting for the first snowfall of the year, a hooded MS Word red squiggle line waiting at midnight for the first snow flake to fall across the rusty orange of the street light. I’m drunk, alone, unpoetic and hyperbolic. Nameless, faceless in the world, hooded and egregious red.

Standing cold in my own mind tonight, the train of all my thoughts rumbling in the distance as they come and go and come and go again, looking skywards hoping that the snow will come to blanket all that's written on the pavement. I’m waiting for the first snow fall of the year. I’m the sleep I should be getting.

2004-12-06T15:49:00.000-06:00

Slow-motion simulation of the apocalypse
Snow at Midnight

It arrives

2004-12-06T15:10:00.000-06:00

And finally the snow arrives.

It came at midnight like the prayers of all the world’s insomniacs were answered at once, sent down in parachutes by the God that finally gave a fuck. Floating past street lights and made an unnatural yellow – street-walkers turn upwards in awe and we’re walking through a slow-motion simulation of the apocalypse – heavens being smashed like glass and falling down to earth through the darkness, into darkness, onto us. The unanimity of it, all of them, each flake just this size, all of them moving at just this speed, urged left and right by the wind just this far. You should have been here.

“There’s gold in them hills” Ron Sexsmith says and I guess I believe him. “So don’t lose heart” he says so maybe I won’t. Over top of all the weeping and moaning is the contrapuntal scream of joy (waaaaaahhhhh!), moving back and forth, up and down, in perfect syncopation, perfect synchronization, the light charging and the darkness retreating in equal, measured steps. And all over me in every direction is the snow. The snow. Thank God for you. I turn and look and turn and look again and all over everything is winter's promise to forgive and forget. Here comes salvation in jigsaw puzzle pieces, falling at the speed of insomnia.

So now I’ll sleep.