wildcat

About to go try to figure out which office is this Anne woman's - the woman in charge of the PADRE reports, which will tell me how many credits I need next year in order to graduate. As such, I'm in the fine arts lab studiously avoiding the activity.

Last night we went to Perikles, this Greek restaurant on Yates. We were the only people there. Had Baklava. For some reason the TV was tuned to this program - muted, in Greek - with newscasters running pens along newspapers to indicate text, presumably reading it to the people watching. What? What? And the weirdest thing was, they were switching off between two newscasters.

I don't know how to deal with that.

Going to see the Hellboy movie tomorrow night with the boyfriend, so here are some Hellboy downloads, including some Hellboy eComics to check out. "The Varcolac" is highly recommended.

I only really need to take four courses to graduate. I think I'll be taking three and three next year, give me a bit more time to work and I don't need to worry about getting stressed by four courses. The first time since first year.

Discovered the plot line behind the scent-memory story, it features a character called the Unscented Man. It's still relatively in fragments, but things are starting to work together and blossom into random insanity-flowers.

I want chocolate cake and cookies and and and and and and and and...

And I want you take your paws off of me, you damned dirty ape.

No, Michael, you keep your hands on me. On me. No tickling.

Damn, filthy monkey. Oh, how you squeal. Like the damned.

Like. The. Damned.

The appropriate way to worship is actually to go to brunch.

Went and saw Hellboy last night. As comic book movies go, the first hour - maybe first hour and a half - were pretty good, in terms of capturing an atmosphere and throwing some interesting character interactions. After that, it went quickly downhill and I wondered why I even bothered. David Hyde Pierce was excellent as the fish-man, Abe Sapien, but he's always been a favourite of mine and then they injured him before the big cataclysmic adventure could happen. Jolly good about the talking corpses, though.

Otherwise I've been puttering today. It's weird how randomly you think about one thing you have to do for the house and suddenly you spend your entire day puttering around and getting things ready.

Brunch looms. I do believe a feel a chill in my loins.

There was a Salesman at Sleep Country Canada, I believe his name was Chris. And lo, he was a strange man, some would even call him crazy (often, with a funny accent), and possibly still drunk from the hockey game last night. This Bed Salesman would offer everyone a chance to lie on three different beds with three different levels of firmness and ask them to choose which one they preferred. I kid you not! He was a modern day Goldilocks, with a goatee. And a blue button down shirt tucked into beigepants (The horror! The horror that is beige!). And today, this strange man did sell the Michael (yes, definitive article, in these uncertain times) a bed, a queen size (and yes, we already did that joke) mattress. The Michael was flanked on one side by the Mad Poet (hullo) and the Mad Theatre Major of Unspecified Intent (History? Acting? General? Madness!). While the Michael wrote his cheque, the Mad Poet and the Mad Theatre Major rolled around on random king sized mattressed which were far too soft and "icky" (Theatre Major's words). And then we left, having each shaken the strange man's equally strange hand (so moisturized!).

And then we got ice cream.

And it was good.

For the most part.

The pistachio would have been better without the almonds, which distracted from the overall "taste sensation."

In other, unrelated news, I despise the Charlton Heston film, The Ten Commandments, utterly, and it is on television. It is boring but Yul Brenner (Ramses) is mysterious and oddly sexy. I don't understand.

Last night was a bit bizarre, hanging out at Joy and Matt's house for the regular writing session. Most of the usual suspects, plus Maggie and some friend of Colin's, who came off a bit badly. For some reason, he didn't get along with everybody and seemed to be in an intense "proving himself" mode which made little or no sense. "Hi, I don't care about you, little man." It was a bit surreal to watch, but that's often the way life is. It is, I have to say, rather amusing to watch a guy and girl circle each other for alpha bitch status. We did some writing exercizes and now I have some prose-poem and postcard story entries to post in a second or so.

I'm getting a cast-off double futon soon. Don't know what to do with the single, so like everything that the housemates don't know what to do with right away, it's gone downstairs to sit in the dining room and not be used. I vacuummed the floor where the single used to be - ugh - and I rearranged all the pictures on my walls. Moved the Alice in Wonderland picture, the photograph my father took, and put up the photograph of the Venetian canals. Nice and smooth.

Anyway, I'm going to go scrap bits of hair off my face and try to look like I'm studying for a bit. Scandal.

Gas pours from the dead fridge and Stanley thinks, I've never liked the smell of freon. He picks out a carton of creamsicle ice cream and fingers some of it into his mouth; this is the first time that the kitchen has ever been completely silent. When he's finished, Stanley starts to remove perishable items from the fridge: cheese, sirloin steaks, a cucumber, a bottle of Alberta vodka, mayonnaise, and that jar from the very back, filled with pickled pinkie fingers.

(C) Ben Rawluk 2004 all rights reserved

Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions: "It is true that we have really in Flatland a Third unrecognized Dimension called `height,' just as it is also true that you have really in Spaceland a Fourth unrecognized Dimension, called by no name at present, but which I will call `extra-height'. But we can no more take cognizance of our `height' then you can of your `extra-height'."

I've been meaning to read this for years and now I found it in hypertext. You know, for when I'm avoiding doing research or something.

After discovering -- too late, I'd already taken the bus out to Royal Oak -- that I didn't have work today because I'd forgotten it was a stat (brilliant), I coasted down to Fernwood to hang out with Matt and Joy on the patio. I drank wine -- white wine, you'd think my mother had taught me better than that -- and the three of us pontificated about all manner of things, spontaneously reciting passages from Joy's 6-volume copy of the Diaries of Anais Nin. I remember Joy and Lise saying they wanted to be Kerouac when they were 15; when I was 15, I wanted to be Nin. Don't ask. Virtually any passage -- selected at random -- was sensual and poetic with scads of adjectives. Verbose. Wispy. Slightly neurotic. Anais Nin was not the kind of woman to burn the candle at both ends, but burn an entire candle shop, probably while she was fucking the owner in the back room.

Joy wanted us to start writing diaries and, as Nin did, we'd recite them to each other. Then I pointed out that, you know, we have blogs.

Afterward we had a dinner of boiled potatoes, steamed mushrooms & brocolli, with garlic-fried tofu and mushroom sauce. We rented Woody Allen's Alice, which I'd never seen, which featured Mia Farrow being Mia Farrow and a mysterious acupuncturist by the name of Doctor Yang (gong!). It was ridiculous, and invisibility potions somehow worked into classic upper class New York neurosis with the ghosts of dead lovers and a brief interlude where Mia Farrow's muse arrived - looking suspiciously like a female Woody Allen.

We were right: Woody Allen and Margaret Atwood are corrupted sides of the same coin.

And now I've stumbled home to an empty house and tax rebates!

An Alphabet Synthesis Machine. I think this is really very cool. Check it out. Synthetic nonsense alien alphabets. Construct imaginary civilizations in your head.

I should pull that imaginary city, Aalaramudra, out of my archives and build it a basic language font.

A website, still under construction, devoted to Jack Cole, the man who invented Plastic Man. Some lovely samples of his early Playboy gags, which are so ridiculously retro...

Yesterday was actually pretty good, I have to say, once work was over and I was out in the world again. Went to the beach with a bunch of people and there was a trip to Dairy Queen for a blizzard (Chocolate chip cookie dough) before returning to the sands. I have a slight burn on the back of my neck but it'll eventually alter to a mild tan. There was a lot of fun, and eventually Michael and I drifted off to his house for a nap.

Dinner was at Brandon's apartment, salmon steaks with rice, asparagus, and spinach. Really good. Brandon's a very good cook and an even better chef. There was even a butter knife, although nobody really used it.

Afterward we went to Kyle's, next door, to hang out and have a general get-together with people. For the most part it was a lot of fun - we skipped through the music numbers in Newsies and then watched Chicago. Some people had drinks, Brandon suckled an entire bottle of wine, and Kyle's cat Jezebel ran riot through the house; she was an insane little creature, jumping off things and falling on her face, batting objects around and darting out into the hallway. I felt a bit annoyed, though, because there was the one new straight boy there and people kept making straight jokes which were a bit offensive in this vague way. It bothered me because here was this new person who was being exposed to a lot of defensive gay boys and the whole thing seemed counterproductive to actually encouraging potential allies and it just pissed me off that it's got to be some Us versus Them thing all the time. I don't know, the rest of the night was a lot of fun and I really enjoy hanging out with Kyle, he's hilarious, but my thinking afterward was that we walk around wanting them to be considerate of our feelings but we aren't considerate of theirs? I don't know. I'm probably being too sensitive, but what if it had been Matty-B or Jake or some straight guy that I'm close to and care about? I've spent enough time being the gay boy amongst straight groups to remember how weird it can be.

Matty-B pointed out today that you can really only watch Spaceballs for about half an hour before you start to question life. Watched most of Young Frankenstein with various usual suspects - Michael, Joy, Matty-B, Colin, Jake - and made eighteen rolls of sushi. I should wait to eat the leftovers tomorrow for breakfast, but I have this odd compulsion to pull them out of the fridge now and consume them.

We also watched the Addams Family. I don't care what anybody says, Morticia and Gomez Addams are the most romantic couple in all of cinema. "But the wheel of pain...the red-hot pokers..." / "Later, Darling..."

I always forget how nocturnal I get in the summertime. All the laws of physics say I should be in bed, but-

With regard to Matrix Revolutions: I wanted the machines to kill them all because they had more personality than any of the "humans." They all sounded them same with their bleeding monotone muttering apocalyptic voices which of course were recorded to be quieter than all the zinging special effects. Which means we had to keep increasing the volume to hear what the hell they were saying and then decrease it when the squids start attacking and we needed to stop bleeding out of our ears. And for some reason there's only one female captain even though half the women in Zion look like they could kick somebody's brains out. It seemed ridiculous that Aron from Titus was in it.

But man, that one moment when they pierce the cloud cover and Trinity sees the sun-

Going to post some postcards in a minute.

And then there were ten; Alex lined them up on the dashboard, ten My Little Pony dolls in various shades of pink and purple. Sunlight through the windshield wouldn't melt them fast enough, and she'd never liked the Chevette anyway. Two words: car bomb. Ten minutes to strap it in with a radio detonator. Standing at the other end of the parking lot as the bell rang 3 p.m., students everywhere, Alex hit the button and up the Chevette went. Orange candy floss explosions. "Goodbye Rainbow Blossom," she said. "Goodbye Periwinkle Stardust."

(c) Ben Rawluk 2004 All Rights Reserved

Scandalize a prawn with your tongue then pull it off the skewer and into your mouth. Eat. Do this because it makes her uncomfortable and because you hate watching other people eat. The first time you ever ate a prawn was at her house, off imitation Japanese plates; all the cutlery was dirty, not unlike this restaurant which smells of candied yams and brie. Complain loudly that you're out of water and that the least she could do is show you a good time, a final kiss-off before she shoves you out the door of some moving vehicle. You'll never get to floss your teeth beside each other again.

(c) Ben Rawluk 2004 All Rights Reserved

It's just after ten and the words are "Disco House," I'm pumping Dimitri from Paris while I channel all the shit in my head onto a shivering computer screen. Specificially, I'm writing a lovely story about Johnny Damocles and Teiresias Jones, ultra-glamourous secret agents. Why are my characters so damned sexy?

I need unscrupulously tragic British fashion magazines now.

So I've hit the opposite end, the maximum allowed before a fall, the roller coaster (our age-old metaphor, like an old friend, a trusted companion) has started to descend. Emotions, as the kids say, are running low. Money, money, money, it's always about money, and the fact that you'd think at this point in my life I'd know how to handle things, but of course, it's my registered character flaw. But of course, I'm awake and up at 7:42 am on a Friday morning before I go to work and I haven't yet eaten or shaved or done much of anything beside shower and kiss somebody (which is like galloping backwards up a few metres on the old roller coaster), so there's much time to get myself out of this mind frame so I can start, I don't know, planning on how to deal with things. Admittedly, the amount of money that needs to go toward a monthly bus pass is a priority, but I'm going to have to give in and ask for help with that. I'll find out what this "monthly pro-pass" that works through your employer is, and how much of a difference in cash it would make, and if I'm eligible.

This is going to be fine, I keep telling myself. I just hate to wake up inside the abyss. Again.

In preparations to get back into Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night, a traveller, to try and get that energy going again. Performing minor acts of googlemancy to try and divine weird, cryptic statements. Edith Manning apparently lived in Calgary sometime in the early Twentieth Century. I don't know. I haven't been reading the Calvino book because workshopping got in the way, and writing, and breathing, and dreaming, and all the hundreds of infinitesemal things that don't really connect to anything but add up to being too busy to actually pick up a decent book and read it. Despite the fact that I fully admit that I enjoy reading with my pants around the ankles on the toilet (nothing smutty, I'm not that kind of Wildcat), perhaps even going to the bathroom has been getting in the way. But. Calvino. I can do it. I know I can. So why haven't I been? The internet's been sucking brain power, but now I'm putting my foot down and actually making a step in the right direction. I'm going to write everyday from now on again, of course, as well. All the tiny little acts of "bettering oneself."

Where was I? Oh. Yes. I suspect I'll probably pick up Invisible Cities again and read that again, because I loved that Calvino book to death.

What?

Oh, yes. I'm going to go work on the second installment of the Johnny Damocles & Teiresias Jones adventures, which is tentatively entitled God is the Queens, and somehow involves a certain pair of drag-drenched beauties from Esque. Matthew's apparently been having maddening issues with the accursed copyright issue and his upcoming film, The Great Retro Chic Revival, so I'm inputting a bit of sympathetic magic for no reason than to make things smooth for him. Nothing is real, everything is permitted. Anyway, the story's getting ridiculous in my head, which is an excellent state of being, not unlike being random.

I didn't end up buying ice cream. Bummer.

And now I go in search of Disco. Because to write those sexy spies, I need to be hideously glam. I should track down a copy of Velvet Goldmine.

Recent events: exploding toilets in an empty house at 1 a.m., missed parties, dreams about Allen Ginsberg as a ten-year-old boy, Michelle returning from New York. The song "Sex Bomb" (by Tom Jones) roaming my head, replaced this morning by "Putting on the Ritz." Honey, honey.

Andrew is visiting from Vancouver and still obsessing over the latest break-up. We ate New York cheesecake direct from New York (well, with a stop over in Toronto) last night, Michelle brought it back for us. We have to get Andrew his birthday present in the next day or so, and he brought mine (yes, from November): a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides's book Middlesex, which I've been desperate for since it came out in hardcover. I have a nice trade paperback edition, which is how I like it. But first I have to read the Calvino book.

Thinking about the Johnny & Teiresias story, and more specifically, how the Golden Boys night club looks. Probably like every daydreamt uber-nightclub I've ever imagined. Go-go cages and raised platforms. Ridiculous lighting. A raised DJ platform. Glass-floored VIP lounges that overlook the crawling masses.

Should probably go pick my music for the day.

I'd forgotten that Calvino's such a ridiculously good writer. It's an example of a male writing second person point of view, and really well. The story is metamorphic. In a related note, I spent money for no apparent reason on Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions, which is gorgeous. I still like to spend time being a poet, too.

Instead of the usual Monday night writing thing, I went to Kill Bill Volume Two with Michael and Andrew. I'm a bit sad that I missed doing the postcard stories and all the gossip and the regularity of things, but Andrew's in town for a limited time - and we thought we should give Tarantino a second chance. A very good film, which to some small extent made me forgive him the first volume of bloody crap. You could have stuck in two scenes from the first movie (killing the first two Viper Assassins) and cut down the end of this film and it would have been fine, coherent, and good. Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver is such an evil bitch, loved her. I did have some series concerns about Uma Thurman's overall lack of body mass, though (The Adventures of Skeleton Girl!). And randomly Bill became too much of an Avatar for Tarantino (did we really need to hear him go on about Superman?). There was a lot of good cinematography and the violence was completely appropriate and not mind-numbingly long or bloody or dull.

The Pixies play tonight at the Curling Club; a curling club. I haven't been there since an ill-fated night at Green Street during a Bonspiel (one word or two?), with ridiculous things thrown, photographs taken, spasming laughter, and some drunk girl hitting on me (me -- didn't she get the memo? She had a boyfriend anyway). Joy dancing on a table in front of dirty old men (isn't that what we do everyday of our lives). The Pixies play there tonight. In mere hours. Weird. I doubt I'll be nearly hardcore enough for it, but have I ever been hardcore enough? The minivan episode doesn't count -- we were young, fucked up, and our shoes were on the ceiling.

The scene that really does it for me in Sofia Koppola's Virgin Suicides (besides the sneaking boys in the basement who don't hear Bonnie hanging from the ceiling yet) is the debutantes' "Asphyxiation" party, all those tuxedoed suburbanites in gas-masks, the pale green vapour in the air, the smell of suicide and sociopathy that permeates the entire scene. There are so many good shots in that film; Lux waking up alone in the football field, the entire screen tinted blue, like the residue of her ugly sex with Trip Fountaine. Cecelia, the youngest, the first to die, hovering like a poisoned spirit around everywhere, in brief snatches of time (and later, the imaginary Cecelia as a bride in Calcutta). Watching the movie geared me up for the second book by Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, in terms of the atmosphere I expect.

Read Shaun Tan's The Red Tree to Andrew last night. The image of a little girl with a dead fish god hovering over her, casting a shadow on top of her, sticks with me. I need to write.

I'm hot, alone, and debating clothes. Then I'm going to write.

A list of fun things to do on a Thursday afternoon in April:

1. Talk to friends you haven't really seen in a while, on the phone. Might do something with Chris and Kate later, Kate will call when she gets home from work, according to Chris she has a ridiculous sunburn from gardening.
2. Cookies. Yum.
3. Juice. Good.
4. Channel the spirit of Lucas from Empire Records. Riff on the universe's balancing act and random shufflings of the cards. Generally act like a Buddha.
5. Write stories. Big, goofy stories.
6. Run around in the sun! Find a swing.
7. Kiss somebody in a random fashion.

Crazed. The weekend started out on Friday night when, at around 9:00pm, Joy called and demanded that I come over and hang out with her, Matt, and the girls. If I didn't come, she claimed she wouldn't be my friend anymore (I pinned that balloon right quick). So I trundled down Fernwood Avenue intent on her house. That was ridiculous, but there was beer and Joy collapsing down into a womb of her own making. There was another party on Saturday night - also at their house - with sword fighting and kitchen floor games of "I Never" (it sucks to play it with some people who happen to know a variety of the nasty things I've done). Sunday was good, except I acquired a bad case of food poisoning and spent quite a while in the bathroom. And at the end of it I got to go over to Michael's house - he came back from a brief Vancouver sojourn - and we watched Family Guy and Futurama together before going to bed. It still amazes me that I get to wake up beside him (even if it was hideously early this morning and I had to leave like a thief to go to work).

A weird fairy tale started to unfold in my head at work actually, and I commenced writing it down on my break. There's going to be rather a lot of cannibalism in it. And whales. I also decided that I really, really want to go to India; Arlene at work talked about it with me extensively, the weird powers of the Ganges (it got rid of some of her foot blisters at random).

The sun is shining (and the weather is sweet), and I feel like we should all be British pop stars who sing pointless songs penned presumably by Simon Fuller, each of us fitting into a predetermined stereotype like "the bad boy," or "the messy one." And maybe some of us could get busted for smoking pot in London and then there would be a loss of advertizing capital before the eventual "Behind the Music" special. And people all over the world would put up posters of us, spread rumours about our sexualities (how weird it would be, to read m/m or f/f slash fiction about yourself), complain about the shallow lyrics, and critique our music video fashion choices (yes, you can do the sparkly silver top, but not with the Cleopatra wig). Later, we'd split up the band and twelve year old girls everywhere would throw themselves into the abyss--

Middlesex is really interesting. Whereas The Virgin Suicides was about teen suicide and repressed sexuality, this book is about the genetic consequences of incest. And silkworms. Apparently if you peel open a silkworm you'll find a tiny reproduction of the moth it will one day become. Makes my skin seizure.

I want to read Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. That will be the next book I buy, once I'm done the books on the pile. Not to be bought a minute before the last page of the last book.

Natasha and I recently discussed our misanthropic tendencies, and how they were based more of group dynamics and behaviour rather than on an individual, case-by-case basis. Ironically, the meal over which we discussed this (A smoked lox salmon crepe at that weird Mysterious Parisian Crepe place on Douglas Street) gave me a rather nasty case of food poisoning the next day, in the style of a drive-by-digestive-karmic-punishment. Anyway, my point is that the misanthropy flared up a few minutes ago when one of the DJs for the Pride Prom - the difficult to get ahold of, original DJ - called me to let me know that she had to back out for personal reasons. Which of course is a perfectly good reason to back out of something, but her "help" was to "Go down to Boomtown and get someone," as if DJs just hang out there in hopes of being discovered by some down-on-his-luck Non-Profit Organization Dance Organizer. What? It wouldn't really be that big of an issue if she'd been more helpful previous to this, but there you go.

Luckily, happily, Jason has been helping me with this little enterprise; he got me in touch with two really good DJs to fill the other two time slots and when I indicated that the original DJ had backed out, I got a little message on my voicemail saying that his boyfriend had expressed interest in spinning at the prom. Faith in mankind as a whole restored, at least for the next five minutes before I, you know, talk to someone or something. Tonight I'll roam the phone lines to get ahold of the people in question and try to get something organized; seeing as how we need to get this all done. Consequently, the DJs will be given something on par with a magnum of wine or something to thank them for their aid in this damned-dirty endeavour.

"Is it true that voluptuous crocodiles
live only in Australia?"
- P. Neruda, The Book of Questions

The Voluptuous Crocodile, with more scaled curves and full bosoms than any other reptile or amphibian, peruses the rivers and dry land of Australia, more voluptuous than even the brassiere snake of Southern Guatamala. Nippled and hunting, the crocodile seduces its prey with teeth like eyes and a habit of flipping its tail like a woman's dancing feet in Moracco. Beware the Voluptuous Crocodile, known to tempt men into a life of baffling sin, also known for the peculiar and lurid haunch of its legs through the underbrush...

(c) Ben Rawluk 2004 all rights reserved

Well, I'm not. I'm waiting for my laundry to finish drying and then I'm going to have a shower to get rid of all the detritus from my hair (freshly cut by a guy at Jimmy's, for ten bucks). After that I'm going to pack. In mere hours, myself and two of my cohorts will be in Vancouver for the premiere of Matthew's The Great Retro Chic Revival which will of course be scandalously good. That's tomorrow night, anyway, tonight we're supposed to meet up with him and several other young Knowables at some place called "Honey" (Honey, darling) for drinks.

Been looking forward to this for weeks, nay, months. First time I've been off the island since August, and a lot has happened in the intervening time. I have to pack some clothes and figure out what reading material to bring - I'm a little over halfway through Middlesex - and I plan to spend some of the travel time working on some fiction. I really need to get my butt in gear and start producing again, because it feels like I haven't been. That story idea I had last weekend is worth pursuing, I think, so it's probably going to be that.

And away we go!