wildcat

The usual mid-eyelid-opening psychodrama this morning, to the tune of Schubert pumped out by the gigantic clock radio on my bookshelf, tuned to CBC Stereo. The numbers are so huge for when I go blind. Can you get a braille clock radio? I suppose you could get one that speaks the time, but that seems counter-productive to a calming existence.

The postcard story blog is up and running, tentatively, and there are already a couple of stories up. Postcard stories working laterally into the comments would be cool as well; I've always been a bit turned on, worked up, aroused, entranced, mesmerized, and seduced by the comments feature and its potential uses.

Lunch with Jo in about an hour, I'd better get a move on because I have to go blow money on a bus pass again. Then afterward I'll come home and - gasp - write. I'm going to sit down and avoid watching TV, avoid talking aimlessly to Michelle, avoid all the other shit; just write at my computer for at least an hour, get something to work out.

Michelle got the final diagnosis: four kidney stones and a benign cyst (there's a special word for it, fugoid or something) in her ovaries. Her body continues to amaze me in its complete lack of sensible functioning. Had a bit of a talk about it and I managed to get her to not drop down into the amazing pit of despair - at least for the moment. Her pagan circle's going to do a healing ritual this week, which might make her feel a bit better about everything.

Other things: Read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep yesterday and now I crave Dick (Phillip K). If only I'd actually gotten more than ten pages into Valis back in Prince George when Brown was leaving for Australia and demanded that I take it and read it.

Found a job I'm going to apply for. I'm going to go home now and fiddle with my resume, come up with a cover letter, and generally get my shit together. Wish me luck!

I hereby declare myself an Axis of Evil. I will consume all of my own failures and piss them out as sweet, sweet champagne - I will take that champagne and make vengeance smoothies in the blender, mixed with yogurt and my own black, viscous blood. I will not accept a chocolate smoothie if I've ordered a chocolate milkshake. I will roam the streets in a mania, foaming, spewing renegade poems and backward stories that end on a moment of supreme agony. I will wallow in unfufilled dreams, sexual desires, burning sensations. I will call myself Meringue and O, how my mascara will run. I will fail to live up to my own expectations. I will obsess, obsess, obsess over the minutiae of social paranoia, I will recharge myself with shock value, I will condescend as I please, I will laugh at my own pretensions! I will be undesirable.

Have to fiddle with the weblog configuration settings for the postcard stories blog to make it clearer what the rules are (they aren't what I thought they were) for everybody. Otherwise, I've spent the day writing silly netfiction like in the good old days when I had just started writing. Only I'm writing it well, I hope, as opposed to the original crap. Anyway.

Going to Salt Spring on the weekend for a night of random outhouse debauchery. I suspect evil will follow.

Michelle's at a ritual tonight at her friend Clarity's house; there's going to be a healing ritual involved for Michelle and another woman who has breast cancer. She apparently mentioned this to Kelly (Creepy scuzzy wizard-type clinging weirdo she briefly screwed a little whil ago) and he responded with, "Oh, you should try to send some of that healing energy at Willow for her plane ride here in two days." Willow being his new girlfriend (hastily acquired via the internet mere hours after Michelle ended things with him for all the creepy reasons) who having never met him is moving here after he spontaneously and without warning bought her a plane ticket. Michelle's response? "Um, hello, it's a healing ritual for people with actual problems and she's just going on a fricking plane ride, it's not like she's dodging bullets in Cambodia." Plus, you shouldn't cast a spell on someone without their permission for the obvious reason of the Wiccan Rede, et cetera, et cetera. Just one more reason I love Michelle - the line "It's not like she's dodging bullets in Cambodia."

Talked to the mother today on the phone for ten minutes, she complained about young people - it's report card season, and she becomes a complete bitch when she's writing them, this is just another part of the Circle of Life - and sounded a bit down. She'll feel better when they're over and done with. It doesn't help that tomorrow is class selection for next year and she gets to fight over which little monsters she has to teach next year.

All the writing I did today was crap! Onward and upward. I'm going to go write a postcard story or two and then have a shower.

So, before I forget, thoughts on Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep:

There's this really interesting inversion which didn't make it into Blade Runner - naturally, because there's just so much going on in the book that they had to be choosey - essentially, because of the polluted atmosphere from World War Terminus, a large number of animal species are extinct or extremely rare, and the big thing is having an animal to call your own. Now, naturally that's not too far-fetched, but it's shameful to have an electric animal, a machine copy of an animal, because while they can be produced to simulate life amazingly, it's not keeping up with the neighbours. It's enticing that the latest model or technology is looked down upon (Rick Deckard hates to admit to his neighbour that the sheep is electric) in favour of the "classic" model (i.e. life). The rarity of real animals makes it make sense, but on one level it's a delightful shift that I focused on a bit. And it also reflects the fear of the androids infiltrating society - they don't want to admit their synthetic because then people know they're inferior.

I think I like Pris better in the movie; in fact, I like all the female characters better in the movie. It's rather bizarre to feel that a misogynistic Nineteen-Eighties science fiction film did more for the female characters than the source material. Although, the book does present an interesting meditation on the "female androids as sex toy" idea that comes up often - Deckard feels awkward about attraction to "objects," the android women. And it inevitably happens with each female android. Rather than the usual removal of inhibitions, which occurs places like Fritz Lang's Metropolis (all those dirty Twenties Germans of the future, lusting after the Maria Robot's Erotic Dance), Do Androids has Deckard paralyzed by his inability to deal with desire for synthetic women; he knows they aren't human, but he desires them, so he feels guilty (instead of just using them as toys), and ultimately is used by one of them sexually. And strangely, he feels no guilt about the event afterward even though he has a wife and it was definitely consensual (if manipulated). He still thinks of them as androids rather than beings. Deckard is quite layered, especially when you consider the issue of "killing" / "retiring" androids, which also paralyzes him at times.

Something else that didn't really fit into the movie but fascinated me: the androids can only be identified by empathy tests which constantly have to be improved with each model. But someone also points out that those empathy tests can fail for another reason: schizophrenic humans who experience a "flattening of effect" (is this term still in use?) and don't have as much empathy as non-schizophrenics can also fail the test and be killed as androids. Interesting, especially because of Dick's battle with schizophrenia.

Plans to see Shrek 2 tonight with what amounts to a small country worth of other people. Looking forward to it.

I ended up having a really good time this weekend - went over to Michael's on Saturday after work and we just geeked around with our computers, updated my antivirus software, found new wallpaper, sent off a submission for the print edition of McSweeney's - no idea when I'll hear back about that, maybe not for five months. We made sticky rice, miso soup, and salmon teriyaki for dinner, baked a cake, and then passed out halfway through Futurama.

Yesterday, we went over to my place and had a couple people over for brunch - Natasha, Michael, Michelle, Gemma, Nathan, Carlie, and Trent were all there. I made everybody chocolate-chip-apple pancakes and Michael was making everybody Americanos with irish cream in them. I'm really enjoying brunch at people's houses rather than going out, and I want to continue this new trend. New breakfast foods need to be invented though.

After brunch everybody left and I went grocery shopping with Michelle, looked at boys, then came home to write for about five hours straight. My imagination is a harsh master, but one I love to serve. I also started to clean out my room a bit and throw out things that I don't need or care about anymore.

Writing night tomorrow. Excited as ever.

I'm sick apparently, ugh, I'm sick and I still have to drag myself to work. Which means I'm probably going to have kill a lot of the partying from this weekend and stay at home, stay in my house, stay under the covers or maybe in front of the television to watch things like Labyrinth. David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly. Need to do it. Need to not push myself too much right now, especially when my soul essence keeps trying to escape through my nose.

Picked up a book from the library yesterday - Darwin Alone in the Universe - which is filled with short stories. They seem like they will be - odd. Which, as we all know, is my favourite genre. Odd. Unreal. I really want to write a short story, which means I should dig up the ideas for that "Charlotte and the Wildcats" story and start that up. Doesn't have to be a long one, but it would nice to finish something rather than letting it dissolve into a cloud of nothing with a few good lines.

I forgot how dour the world gets when I'm sick. Preoccupied with my bodily fluids. I should take up augury and start seeking the future in them.

David Bowie will save me!

We wanted lobster, but the sale didn't start until the day after, so instead Michael and I bought crab. There was a big pot of water for boiling, Michael performed some Indian magic to "draw butter" (he made me put the pen and pad of paper away), we had asparagus and potatoes. It was all very good, but the experience was a bit disorienting; alive, then dead. We were capable of doing it ourselves, rather than faceless cows bred for tender loins and killed by faceless corporate slaves, so I don't feel bad about it and I continue to eat seafood. The only thing that really disturbed me was the calm cooking instructions we found on the Net that described how to kill a crab in various fashions. We elected to do the pot and nothing else to minimize things.

And I'm looking forward to having lobster again; it's been a few years, and they taste lovely when spiced with lemon and butter.

The beginnings of a story in my head, which been around in various forms for a few months, and now needs to be written. I don't know. It's very surreal, as usual, but I think it might get even more surreal as the writing progresses.

Thinking about rearranging furniture to counter some kind of desperate tedium that crept up on me at midnight last night.

So, after I identified to Michael that what I was feeling was ennui, which is half existential dread and half boredom, and it was peculiarly French and peculiarly prevalent amongst twentysomething artists with too much time on their hands, we brainstormed things to help me deal. I want to do more things, like going to the beach on Saturday (which will require the likes of Joy, Matt, Michelle, Jonas, Paton, et cetera - only beautiful people allowed on our island, and I want to build a mandala and a sand castle), and I actually want to write successfully for a while. I have this new story in my head, which has been in my head for a while. I also want to write poems again - I haven't been, and I'm happy to report I just had an idea for a poem, vague as it is now, and I'm going to write that down before I get to work on the story.

I have to print out copies of stories to take to Colette at work to read. She did, after all, give me the idea for the nex story and it's from her dreams.

I feel better now. We watched The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and I was blown away by it. It had all these levels to it, like the serene tragedy of Mary's discovering of her own mindwipe - played very well by Kirsten Dunst. Elijah Wood as a creepy pantie-stealing slacker. I liked the fact that the entire thing is about memory and specifically memory of relationships, but it doesn't sugar-coat Joel and Clementine's relationship as this perfect bubble of happiness; they aren't soulmates in the conventional sense, they aren't living in some big budget magical relationship. We're shown the relationship from multiple angles, from all the points of happiness, content, dissatisfaction, hatred - and the opportunity to remove all of that from your brain. The visuals and transitions from memory to memory were beautifully done and with enough humour to fight against sentimentality. One belief is that we choose to reincarnate and in a way this movie works as a metaphor for that - Joel goes through the Bardo experience of seeing his life and all his mistakes while waiting for reincarnation, and starts to wonder if he's made a mistake. Wiping away Clementine eradicates good memories as well as bad, the pain of the relationship is just as much a thing he needs as the good times are. But in being reincarnated, we often end up around the same souls from previous lives, and old spirit-habits repeat. No memory of the bad shit but a faint deja vu drives people back together to reiterate the patterns. And when made aware of that bad shit, being made aware of the previous existence - do you halt the pattern? Does it matter, in the end, how it ends? You still need to try again - with or without knowledge - to do it better if you can.

Otherwise, you'd just end up allergic to the world and confined to the house you call self, like Julianne Moore in Safe.

Anyway; brilliant use of the handicam mode rather than tripods to give everything the shakey look of a bad dream. Kirsten Dunst stoned off her tree and dancing in her underwear with Mark Ruffalo. Kate Winslet building a beautiful character. "Oola" from Wonder Boys, who was also in Todd Solondz's Happiness - one of the most terrifyingly sad movies I've ever seen. Those transitions. The visual effects of melted faces and shape-shifting between six-year-old Joel and adult-Jim-Carrey Joel. The grainy and washed out colour scheme. The scene in the Japanese restaurant where Joel realizes they've joined the "Dining Dead" of bored couples who stare off into space while they eat.

M.A.C. Farrant's Darwin alone in the universe: short-short stories by this woman who doesn't give her full name, which bugs me because I hate just having initials. Brilliant book in a lot of weird ways, and it includes the story "Drought in the Cashflow River," which should pretty much being required reading for people attempting relationships with writers. "Towering Son" did a lot for me, seemed like one of those weird things that I would write, and the whole book has beautiful fonts, paper, packaging which I like to concern myself with. I like imagining my first book. She leaves a lot of white space between scenes. She's also Canadian.

Spent five hours on Willows Beach yesterday, my skin so burnt that my skin matches my hair. I may need to bleach my hair to even things out. We had fish and chips, we made sand castles (well, in my case, I made the old mad witch-woman's hut out of sand, with the adjoining well of despair and lunatic asylum), we wandered down the beach to get ice cream which failed because the ice cream shoppe was closed. We ate strawberries. Steff talked about her mysterious past working for NATO (She says she was a staffmember, but we all know the truth - Steff was a black ops agent!), and we discussed horrible teen movies and how there must be a Heathers for every generation.

After that, Michael and I went to help Nathan move with Jo and Jonas. Got everything squirreled away pretty fast and then went for drinks at the Penny Farthing.

The story I'm working on is slow, but I have a good idea of where it's going, so that's all good. Thinking about resurrecting the reincarnation / talking fish story from before, since it was a good idea that needs more attention.

My stories are circulating around the library. It's important that people realize I only appear to be quiet when at work.

Appear.

Comic Book recommendation: Seaguy, written by Grant Morrison with art by Cameron Stewart. It's probably my favourite thing by Morrison so far, it just wallows in its own surreal properties and indeed has a talking fish named Chubby, who floats around and hates water. Strong, clean artwork with writing surprisingly uncluttered by Morrison's usual fare of intense political / magickal / psychosexual ideas (where every character is a mouthpiece; keep in mind that I do like his work a lot) - all the ideas are there in some respect, but they're implied by the text, the artwork, and the plot work rather than being referenced with every single piece of dialogue. He's working a lot with implication this time.

Similiarly connected, I can't wait for Wes Anderson's new film The Life Aquatic. Bill Murray as a deepsea documentary-maker. That's all I want to say, because I'm trying to avoid thinking about it lest the picture not live up to unreal expectations. I don't know why I'm obsessing over odd and esoteric undersea adventures. Maybe I need to watch old Superfriends cartoons and laugh at how horribly useless Aquaman manages to be in every episode.

Yesterday was good but a bit baffling. Woke up around eleven - for once Michael had to force me out of bed - and we had home made potato salad for lunch, with grapes. Ate outside in the back yard, chatted, listened to the birds (apparently one's nesting in Michael's roof-gutter), and waited for Nathan to show up with the Van of Death, then the three of us met up with Paton for drinks at Christie's Pub.

Then there were a few hours of drinking. We ended up at Paton's house with Kyle. I introduced a few people to Applejacks (Whiskey and Apple juice, or Jack Daniels depending on what's available), drinking games were played (with a few adjustments to the rules - the story card became the karaoke card). It was hot out, Juliet showed up, somehow it ended up at 8:30 and we waffled home to make pasta and watch Family Guy. Then we passed out fitfully to stumble to work this morning.

And now my hours at work changed! I'll be working four days a week instead of three, and more importantly, I'll have my Saturday mornings off! My god, I can watch cartoons. And have a real live weekend again. And at least until the end of the month, if not until the end of July, I'll have a seven hour shift on Thursdays rather than four. It's 1 to 9, which sucks, but it's money and I don't have to rush to get up in the morning.

Tomorrow night is the writing binge. I'm excited. I'm enticed. I'm ready and willing to do ridiculous things--

My greatest foes today include:

1) Soap Scum - more invulnerable than it should be.
2) Elections Canada - the electronic phone system is creepy with voice recognition software to make it seem more "personal." But really, it's powerless to do anything and you might as well just talk to a real person.
3) Michelle's hair - It's impossible to clean the bathroom when there's all this random long hair everywhere - everywhere - and it snakes out from behind things to try and kill you.

It's beautiful out and I've been a bit moody today. Cleaned the upstairs bathroom but we need some kind of special solvent to kill soap scum. I may have to investigate tomorrow, along with The Draino Issue. I wonder if the bathmat is finished in the washing machine. Had to go all the way downtown for literally five minutes worth of registering to vote in Victoria rather than Prince George, which annoys me mostly because they could have basically done it over the phone in the same amount of time. Hell, an internet equivalent would be good, but they don't seem to have that as far as I know. But I could totally be wrong and stupid. Wouldn't be the first time.

Trying to write silly netfiction to clear my head. Weird resurrecting old characters from four years ago.

Draino is fun to play with, kids, but remember not to drink it. If you drink it, you end up on Meet the Feebles. That's right, kids - Ben's own Private Hell. You'll end up as a heroin junky alligator (crocodile? lizard?) with flashbacks to the horrors of Viet Nam. A violent obsession with bodily functions, it's the decrepit husk of the Muppets. I hate it. The scarring has gone down a little bit, but I absolutely refuse to watch this thing ever again. It made me twitchy. An elephant and a chicken should not be able to reproduce.

Trying to decide on my time table, but seats in classes I need are going fast. I have no hope of getting into the actual fiction workshop I need, so I'll be sitting on the wait list when my time comes - tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock. I've made a concise list of the classes I want, with X's beside the four that I definitely need. I can't stand the idea of putting off graduation based on one workshop - which I would have no chance of picking up in the summer. But I've picked out a Technical writing class for first semester to add to my resumé.

Work tonight. Must go make up some kind of dinner for myself before I have to head out.

I'm stuck in front of web registration trying to use voodoo to get into classes. I'm on the wait list for one class that I need - a fiction workshop with Sean Virgo - and I need to somehow magic my way into Lorna Crozier's prose-poem class; it requires permission and I need to go in and see her about it, obviously, because I'm the one that bugged her about it in the first place and really want to take it. As it stands, I need to get another workshop in there if I can't get into the fiction workshop, but it has to be upper-level; I'm going to see if I can get permission to get into a fourth year fiction workshop instead.

So, what I'm taking so far:

First semester - English 225 (technical writing), Writing 310 (Forms and Techniques in the Novel), and Writing 401 (Advanced Poetry workshop).
Second semester - Fine Arts 245 (Art and Technology), and Fine Arts 305 (Film and Video production).

I need that fiction workshop and that prose-poem class to fill out the second semester.

Apparently, M.A.C. Farrant is a sessional instructor at UVic. Blew my mind.

Drinks tonight threatens to get out of control. I don't know how I feel about that. I suspect we'll be causing a --- SCENE~!

At work now, feel terrible, wish I could leave and go do something else. I plan on gorging myself with Lotus Pond for dinner by myself tonight, before meeting up with people. I feel like drifting on the lonely highway--

Spent fifty cents on the Works of Kafka, including his short-short stories. Gleeful, the mood for the day. I intend to go read one now before I skate back to work, doing the evening shuttle.

No hotties around today. A lot of small, old women.

This cold has proven to be a shapeshifting minx, having developed a weird fever on Saturday night and now being in the form of a ball at the back of my throat, which is sore. I've been drinking tea at work and hoping to rid myself of this cursed, vile pox. On the other hand, one of the clerks at work has the exact same disease, including the random fever on Saturday night. Synchronous ill health.

Sunday - yesterday - was crazy with brunch at Banana Belt, then bad service at Milestones when we wanted Bellini's, walks around the break water and a bit of roaming to and fro.

Today I vote when I get off work - the decision isn't entirely easy. One of two choices available to me. After that, Andrew Brown is in town and we're having coffee before he goes back to Vancouver tonight and I rush off to have Vietnamese food with Michelle. I may have to have the hot pot again. Even though I'm craving Thai.

On your third day without sleep, you start to get a little bit delirious and do random things like get up at five in the morning because you're bored with waiting to fall asleep and the sun's out anyway.

I turned on Wonder Boys at six-thirty this morning and ruminated on some odd subtextual elements; Antonia Sloviak, for example. She's the transvestite that Crabtree picks up on the plane, and while oddly disoriented for most of her on-screen time, she functions as a shaman character and is the only one disconnected enough from the main action to help Grady (The Michael Douglas character) - she tells him to go home, because he "could use some rescuing" himself. If he'd followed her advice, the movie would have been very different.

I made pancakes at seven this morning and generally zoned out with the movie until Michelle left. I seem to have become immune to neo-citrin, benadryl, and other sleep-inducing agents.

Went to the writing thing for about two hours last night, suffered through a few exercizes with the gang while I coughed and dealt with the latest symptom - an earache. I probably should have stayed home in bed, but that wasn't going to happen because I had just started to feel a bit crazy. By today, I'm delirious and hoping that I can make it through work tonight without any major crises happening. Glad I take the bus and don't drive; I'm a mess.

Going to have a shower and then work on a short story. It's absolutely beautiful out and I might consider a trip to Hillside Mall later to pick up strange medicines. Certainly can't hurt to muddle through.

Reading Alex Shakar's City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses, a collection of short stories based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. There are several stories in the book based on myths I didn't know, and as I'm about to start the one based on Caenis and her transformation into Caeneus:

"She spoke the last words in a deeper tone, that might have been the sound of a man's voice. So it was: the god of the deep ocean had already accepted her wish, and had granted, over and above it, that as a man Caeneus would be protected from all wounds, and never fall to the sword."

If I had two frogs, one would be named Ovid, and the other Heqet, the Egyptian goddess of frogs.