Gah! Filled with a sense of inferiority. It doesn't suit me. Not that I'm superior, of course - it's just that I'm arrogant, and sometimes that can feel like the same thing. Some prof told me years ago that success as a writer equals 10 per cent talent and 90 per cent discipline, and at the time I was alarmed and frightened - "What if I'm 100 per cent talent!" I wanted to shout out. "Shouldn't that count for something?!" Narf! But yeah - I have missed about 5 deadlines for various writing competitions/initiatives this semester, contests I like to think I would have had a decent shot at winning if only my work was there. WHICH IT WASN'T, because Ms. Waller is far too disorganized to do something like submit her work. I didn't used to be this way, I used to feverishly apply for everything that came my way, and there were results, results, I tell you! The need to rejuvinate on some sort of Tibetian mountain-top is obvious, and yet if I can't be a successful writer NOW, when I'm living in Fernwood with my piles of notebooks and messy kitchen and demanding cat and distracting - oh-so distracting and sexy - lover, then should I even bother?
Anyway, I'm doing a reading tomorrow, at Hugo's, which should help - at least I'll feel I'm doing something. Except ... Hugo's is a restaurant - last time I read at a restaurant was at the Sugar Refinery in Vancouver, and I read the "Orgasm Picnic" story, and people paused in revulsion, forks halfway up to their mouths, food cooling.
I was stood up THREE TIMES today, by two different people. How is one day even long enough to be stood up three times? Particularly when you're at work the whole time anyway? It doesn't make any sense.
Ben was supposed to collect me for my first break to watch me smoke a cigarette. He didn't show, and I stood by myself in the rain trying to read Bitch magazine without getting too many raindrops on it.
Then Matt was supposed to collect me for my third break, after he had eaten a slice of pizza. He didn't show, and I stood by myself in the rain, reading People magazine.
Later he showed up at work while I was trying to show a customer our selection of student protest postcards, apologized, and said he would meet me in half an hour for my next break. He didn't show, and I stood by myself in the rain, reading The New Yorker (okay, okay, it was Us Weekly).
Off to Felicita's after work for a solitary dinner of vegi burger and fries. Matt appeared on the patio as I was sipping Black Label beer and smoking a cigarette, in the rain. He was wildly drunk and had been given free beer. It was nice to see him, and we chattered away about my film paper, which is about melodrama in the 1940's, and the reinforcement of gender spheres.
I left to type the paper up, and now I'm at home, and no one is here! Technically I have not been stood up a fourth time, as Matt had only mentioned he'd be coming home as soon as he'd finished his glass of beer, but still. It's cold, and for some reason there was just a drag race down Camosun Street, which I saw through my living room window.
I'm listening to Elliot Smith, who is dead now. My dog died a few months ago, my roommate died a few years ago, and in the last year family members of many aquaintances have died. Does everyone die at the right time? I think so ... It's funny to think there's a date there, somewhere in the future - tomorrow? ten years? sixty? - when it will be me, and that it will be important and necessary that it happens on that date.
Dreams and death have taken on a new significance for me ... After Trev died I had a dream that he and Matt and I were sitting on this grassy area by the ocean talking and laughing, for one hour. We were only allowed one hour, and Matt and I were sad about this, and crying a little, but Trev never stopped laughing because he was having such a good time. It was later I realized that the grassy area by the ocean is a place I've been before - it's on the coast of Hornby Island, just below the cliffs where Trev died. The more I think about it, the less it feels like a dream.
A few days ago I had a dream that Keto, my old dog, and I were walking around in the woods on Silver Star Mountain. It wasn't the best dream, because I was so sad in it, knowing she was dead, but interestingly, Keto was having a fabulous time because we were walking in the woods together. It was that simple. I think that this, also, was not a dream, and I hope the next time I have one, I can appreciate it more as a gift.
I ask you - I ASK YOU! - is it right to skip your film class for a seminar on teaching English overseas, only to arrive in a tiny room with 7 tables set up, 6 of which are for study-abroad programs, and 1 of which is for teaching overseas, with an application deadline that passed last week?
What if all the bums in town were given one free hour of cocktails at the Empress bar, and no one was allowed to ridicule them?
What if everyone on the bus threw off their headphones and told everyone else what they were listening to?
What if life was like Muriel's Wedding?
What if Sambuca was a big black rap goddess and invited us to her parties, but only if we were dressed right?
What if poets wrote about funny things that happened to them at the bar, instead of the way sunlight looks on a torn spiderweb the dawn after lovemaking on ephemeral sand?
What if Trev could come back for just one hour, and we could drink White Russians in the sun and rollerblade around the neighbourhood stealing couches from copper parking lots?
What if gin cocktails grew on trees, the way lunch boxes grew on trees in The Wizard of Oz II?
What if nobody understood the meaning of "judgement," and took out their agression by shooting popcans placed on the top of cedar stumps?
What if Trudeau were President of the United States?
What if we had postage stamps that featured independent musicians and underground writers?
What if snow was cocaine?
Ah, the crushing depression of November. All the leaves are gone, it's dark out by 4:30, the freaks start to appear on the sidewalks by 7 at the latest. There are no barbecues, no cocktails on the patio, no raging against the sun, no eye candy shaking their thang along Government St. The season for dark lagers and heavy vegi burgers has begun.
It will be Christmas soon. I will likely be spending it in Comox with Matt and his family, which is lovely because his family rocks and there is a morose cat named Lucy who lives with them. There had been a plan for us to go to Vernon to spend some time with Ma and Pa, but Ma told me that as I was engaging in sinful perversion with Matt, we would only be permitted to stay at their house if we took seperate bedrooms and abstained from said perversion. Naturally I refused, as it feels like a moral compromise. The other day at Big Bad John's though, R said that if it was him, he would be willing to suspend the moral high ground on account of the holidays. Interesting viewpoint. Certainly not going to happen with me, but poll: is it reasonable for parents to ask such things of their children?
I bought a copy of the scandalous Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae" today. For some reason I thought it was going to be pop culture psychobabble, but soon learned it was literary criticism. Felt tremendously robbed.
I shall read it anyway.
The first 12 lines of the book each contain the word "nature."
Did she do this intentionally? Is it possible? Could her editor have missed it? It is Random House.
It's so exciting to have an entire day stretched out in front of me in which I have NO obligations! No work, no school, no social events, no last-minute homework. I actually got to sleep in.
Today I'm going to loaf about the downtown library researching Sapho, which is technically a form of homework as I have to give a presentation on her next week, but it's fun, interesting work that I would have done even if there was no presentation. Then I'm going to do lots of deeply satisfying Virgo things - organize and update my agenda book, make a financial chart to tape on the fridge, sift through the huge box that, for the last month, I have blindly filled with letters, assignments, papers, bits of ideas, receipts, etc, and put them in their proper places in my filing cabinet. Michael is hopefully coming over to take another stab at fixing my computer, and I'm going to make a complicated "thing" for dinner, not sure what. For some reason one of the things I resent most about being so busy is the lack of time to cook.
And tonight? No parties planned, but it would be nice to go out .... For something "different," though ... Perhaps call Colin and arrange a poker night? Call the Girl Squad and have a night at Big Bad John's? Maybe finally hook up with Morgan, who I haven't seen since MAY, which is just dumb, and get gloriously drunk in someone's living room watching stupid movies, preferably starring William Hurt. Hmm ... None of those are really "different," but they would be fun.
Last night I remembered a song I taught a bunch of 12-yr-olds at the summer camp where I was employed at age 17, which nearly got me fired. Here are the lyrics:
My name is Zach/
I'm a nacropheliac/
I do dead women/
And I pump em full of semen/
I get frustrated/
When they get cremated/
Cuz I'm so full of lust/
And you can't do dust!
Yowza. The stupidity of teenagers. Oh well; one of my co-workers gave one of aforementioned 12-yr-old campers a cigarette. So I definitely wasn't the worst one.
I listened to an absolutely terrifying lecture during my film class today. It was all about post-modernism, which sounds stuffy enough and besides I learned all about it in first year, but the class was introduced to the works of a French post-Marxist scholar named Baudrillard who defined the post-modern state as a world in which images were created with nothing to reference them - ie, before the objects of the images themselves - thus creating a bizarre world in which Disneyland is only a trick to make you believe the rest of the world is real, and there's nowhere to go but down because the images that reference no source start referencing each other, thus creating a world in which nothing has ever been real and which he calls "hyper-reality" and that somehow induces a state of manic consumerism in which people don't necessarily buy necessities but symbols. I was shaken by the time the (3-hour!) lecture was over. It's times like this I am so so grateful to have given up weed while I was still uneducated enough. Poor Matt! He has to listen to lectures about "The Life of Pi" while blissed out on a drug that caused me to mentally collapse at the age of 18, convinced the food courts were the outer dens of hell and that all of us lived in little boxes consisting of, say, your workplace, your house, your friends' houses, maybe the library, and the few bars you might frequent, and other than the boxes there was nothing else in the universe. At least Cafe de le Lune still existed then, and I could write in it, working on the theory that as it was a 24-hour coffeehouse I could buy a cup of raspberry-peach tea every hour-and-a-half and thus live there forever.
I'm in the basement computer lab, trying to work on my assignment poem. The assignment is that it must be written about an historical moment, and after grappling with the idea of the Russian Revolution, Yasser's death, the Nigerian genocide, the Taliban's occupation of Kabul, or really anything to do with Leon Trotsky (my favourite Communist), I've decided to write about that fateful day in 1965 when Twiggy hit the New York fashion scene with her photo spread in Vogue. Snacking was never the same.
Sunday was the best, the best! I awoke at noon, my knee bleeding, and remembered that I had been at a martini party the night before. Had worn the polyestor dress with the large orange flower print and danced danced danced, then fell several times on the way home, culminating with a terrific crash into the two baby carriages my landlords store in the shared entryway.
But .... Yes, Sunday. Wicked hangover, so I made African yam and peanut soup, which will cure anything. In between simmerings and stirrings and adding pinches of this and that and snacking on sesame rice cakes with cheddar cheese, I read Ian McEwan's Atonement. It's a British book, and has the standard British sentence strucure (ie, three times as long as they should be; lots of unnecessary adjectives), but for some reason I love it and am rather gripped by it.
That evening I watched "Saved" with Steph. Funny movie. Reminded me a lot of my teenage years in a "charismatic" Pentecostal church ...
What Kind of an Elistist Are You?
Book and Language Snob
You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. You are a fountain of endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and never fail to impress at a party. What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their grammar and insult their paperbacks.
A splendid week of coffee and writing at Second Story, drinking and hooting on the Felicita's patio, snuggling and watching movies in the living room, and an all-around appreciation of the incredible beauty that is Fernwood in the fall: orange leaves carpetting the sidewalks, cats hanging out on fences, crisp-ness, etc. Things feel good.
Matt and I are applying to the Jet Programme, a teach-English-in-Japan-racket that, if we are accepted, will commence in July 2005. The applications are due a week from today and I went on-line to print them out, only to find that they are TWENTY-SIX pages long and require letters of recommendation, official grade transcripts, proof of graduation, medical files, etc. GAH! It's possible to get it all done in time - I think - we'll see - anyway, if it doesn't work out we can just fly to Tokyo and look for jobs once we get there. But Jet pays $40,000CAD annually (that's 3,600,000 yen!), plus they hold your hand the whole way through as far as transportation, work visas, and securing of housing goes. Oh well. We'll get them filled out in time. And if not, maybe Ryan and Aya can hold our hands. :)
Books read lately:
"Life of Pi" by Yann Martel (Perhaps the best book I've read all year, though the ending continues to harass and torment me - I HATE open endings, mostly cuz they're so damn good)
"The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold (Don't let the cheezy cover fool you - it's dynamite, kind of like what Douglas Copeland's "Girlfriend in a Coma" could have been if he was a better writer)
"The Communist Manifesto" by Marx and Engels (Okay, I only got halfway through - damn it's dense reading - but rather fascinating in its own way)
"Fear of Flying" by Erica Jong (A brilliant example of the kind of "strident" woman and her adventures that the 1960's and 70's were so terrified of)
Films seen lately:
"The Tenant" dir. Roman Polanski (Not his best, but worth a look since Roman plays the title role and he does it with STYLE!)
"Reality Bites" (Totally disappointing! This is the first time I've seen it and everybody told me I would love it but I found it juvenile and, aside from the "My Sherona" dance scene, very predictable)
"Fallen Angels" (Meh. Another example of a Canadian movie that tries too hard. Which is really too bad - there were some excellent moments, but it ended at Niagra Falls, for fuck's sake!)
"Shrek 2" (Good clean fun. Antonia Bonderas splendid as Puss in Boots.)
I want Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Michael Moore to start a vicious, Rage Against the Machine-style band and rock the socks off the Establishment!
I have discovered the trick to playwriting! It is this: EVERYTHING depends on the type of beverage you drink while you write it. For example: my last play - the one that lacked even faint traces of dramatic tension - was written over the course of six bottles of Moosehead. Guh! Beer makes you sleepy; the play was sleepy. My new play, started today, has, if I say so myself, EXCELLENT pacing and moves through the lines at a roller-coaster clip - written over the course of FOUR CUPS OF COFFEE at Second Story! Aha! It's called "Ask Paris" and stars the Paris Hilton Guess? advertisements. Copyright infringement, anyone? Anyway, she's the high priestess/goddess of Bay Centre Mall, and the two characters are ex-empolyees who have chosen a life of homelessness over mall culture, but are doomed to live their life below king-sized ads of Paris on the outside wall. Now I just have to figure out what to drink while I write the final half. A violent ending? Whisky! A philosophical ending? Red wine! A domestically cozy ending? Herbal tea! A sexy ending? The gin! Ah, the gin!
Thusday: skipped yoga to rage about men and relationships with a few close friends at the Grad Lounge, followed by drunken shrieking on the bus about American politics. A heart-to-heart with Matt the next day, in which the raging about men and relationships was put on the back burner; a shocking overdose of movies, due mostly to Matt's and my early Christmas present to each other (a dvd player that actually WORKS!); dread building about my play, which is still in the greyish planning stages - could go three ways (university degree holding homeless people making the city their playground; a gay man and straight woman raging about men and relationships - ha; three roommates who are writers and don't speak to each other except to dredge up fodder for their own creative work). Votes? I kind of like the homeless one. Off to Second Story in a bit to get it started, then Angel Michael is coming over to bring my computer back to life (I command the evil spirits that have possessed this disk drive to COME OUT), then Ben's birthday party. Shall it be gin or an 8-pack of Pilsner? Does one even have to decide?
It's Election Day in the ol' US of A ... I'm not as tense as I was during the recent Canadian election, but there's still a weird electricty in the air. I'm confused about who I want to win - Kerry, obviously, but at the same time I find it frightening that he has built his platform on the idea that he can fight a war on terror better than Bush. What does this mean exactly? More soldiers, more dead civilians, more "terrorists" in more abusive prisons? Or an end to the occupation?
I wish Hillary had run.