wildcat

The weekend has ended, swallowed up by memory and gin hangovers. It was the much-anticipated Vancouver trip for Pride, and I was happy to experience it and even happier to get back to Victoria afterward. Drove over in the Van of Death with Michael (he was the pilot), Sher, Ashley, Jonas, Jo, and Dan. It was a cufuffle and the ride over on the ferry was rather lovely, discussed a wide range of things and didn't end up leaving the top outside deck until we had to go back down to the Van.

Vancouver itself was a whirlwind of decadence and fast times. Drunk on gin on the 14th floor of Harley House, we watched the fireworks and met up with Matthew, talked Esque and flailed wildly. Jo was wholly British and wholly Colonial.

Science World was great. It was, although there were too many little kids running around and tainting the air. We have a picture of Michael and I rendered in infrared.

Other bits and bobs: a long march through the streets for the Pride Parade, a stop over at Matthew's house, sushi at Tsunami with sashimi and miso. The ride back was pushing things but we eventually got home and drifted into bed in time for Family Guy and Futurama.

On an seven hour shift at work. My dinner: Camembert cheese, a loaf of sourdough bread, green grapes, and a "Tangerine Wavelength" Fruitopia. The leftovers will be left in the fridge over night for lunch during tomorrow's 10-6pm shift. All I seem to do is work.

Tonight will be the first night back in my own bed; Michelle's sister will be gone, Oliver the ugly white cat will be gone (he's about twice Sambuca's size and a third as old, with grotesque pink giant rat-eyes), and I will be able to slink into my bedroom and hide out for the night. And get up at six-thirty, of course, because everyone else needs to take showers in the morning too. I've enjoyed my nights at Michael's house will the stupid cat stayed over breaking things, but now I want a bit of fetus-style time and gestate and replenish.

Had a dentist's appointment this morning, had my teeth cleaned, my gums prodded (with discussion of painful oral surgery down the line), and then got shoved out the door with an appointment in three months. And more floss.

I think that the pilgrimage to Salt Spring Island to find the elusive Buddhist monastery must be a go, this semester. Probably whenever reading break is on.

My mouth is very sore.

But what about a piss-up of poets, an armada of umbrellas, a tempest of teapots, a halfway of unwed mothers, a scandal of stewardesses, a prominence of businessmen, a marathon of running shoes, a slough of landlords, a mincemeat of prostitues, an agency of secret policemen, a poisoning of novelists, an alabaster of government officials, a perennial of butterflies, a dolor of inexorable pencils, an album of photographers, a jangle of keys, a huzwang of frusits, or a kaleidoscope of opera glasses?

And yes, I know there's a book, and that these are probably "wrong," but I can't remember the title of the book and I couldn't find it on the shelf, and this is more fun anyway.

The vibe last night at Prism was couples. Yes, couple on couple action. Couples hitting on couples. It was what you might refer to as "bizarre," but you know - these young kids these days. Michael and I had two couples hitting on us. It was like being part of performance art. One of the couples was rather cute - yes, I'm referring to two people, although you wouldn't know it from the hands on each other's hips melting together thing. Fey brunette and his shave-headed boyfriend (who looked like a sexy Lex Luthor). They nuzzled noses. It was busy and chocolate martinis - and gin martinis - were consumed before we stumbled out without saying good bye to anyone to take a cab home and do fabulously fetishistic things to each other. Probably very loudly as well.

Actually, the rest of the day was pretty slamming. Couldn't get ahold of most people from brunch, which is fine because we went to the Banana Belt with Nathan and then the two of us took off to wander around downtown all day; stopped off at Lens and Shutter, went to Munro's Books where we spent money (I bought a copy of Philip K. Dick's Valis and a cheap little book of Rudyard Kipling's poems, including "Gunga Din"), then to the Papery (oh, the rantbooks). Paradiso provided us with gelato, and Superboy was working - although, he buzzed his hair and got rid of the spit curl, wasn't wearing his Superman ring, and seems to have decided that big-brimmed hats are some how a good idea.

Wandered down by the water, through the Junkie Park, discussing with Michael the nature of religion, numerology (the significance of twelves, and how it would actually make more sense to use base twelve than base ten), how we know very little about the Babylonians (although, he explained their method of counting to sixty on their hands and it's enthralling), et cetera. Mailed off my phone bill. Waltzed through A&B Sound. Discussed the idea of a photolog. Went and played five games of Pool at Peacocks, just the two of us, where I sucked and then I got better but ultimately didn't have the skills to save myself.

The highlight was really dinner with Daniel at Hime, where we chatted the waitress up, had a platter of Nigiri sushi (the squid! the snapper! the scallops!) and then two plates of tempura. It was astonishingly good, with great conversation to go with the food. I went easy on the soy sauce so I could probably enjoy the flavours involved, and I got to have sweet potato tempura.

But even then, even at the the height of our elation, the shadow fell across us: it's been a very long time since we've had yam balls.

This one was one of those nasty little dreams that I get right before I wake up at around six in the morning sigh and try to force my eyes back shut: Hair growing out of my fingertips, black hair, but it's more like facial hair than scalp - it grows in as sharp stubble. I have to shave my fingertips, cutting into them with a razor blade. While I get the hair off - this growth, anyway - I'd cut up my fingers pretty badly. So, a dream about abnormal hair growth and self-mutilation.

It seems like everybody's sunk into a mid-August funk or something, a mild malaise has settled down over our sleepy heads and everything smells like gutter. Can it all be bad? Doubtful, but we all know I'm bad when it comes to looking on the bright side of things (ick - positivity).

Had dinner tonight with Michael, Jake, and Jake's friend Jonathan. Jon's working as a clerk at the library now, which is cool, he ended up working at my branch today and we sat around and chatted while I tried to make through my shift without vomiting from hunger (why was I so hungry?) or self-destructing under the strain of yet another neurotic episode. Anyway, the four of us went to the Shzechuan (ha? spelling?) restaurant over by Green Street - the one right across the street from the police station. The food was more than adequate, we got to have some really nice squid, and then we drove Jake home and came back to Michael's place to flounder in front of the television. Michael's off swimming right now at Oak Bay Rec, which uses chlorine and that's why I'm here (allergies).

Brandon's here soon, but so is my mum, so this weekend is going to be very busy and not feel like a real weekend at all, what with all the running around.

Anyway, to fight the malaise, I'm going to go do some research and try to write something worthwhile. That doesn't induce dry heaves. It'd be nice...

The heat's too much. I'm over halfway through VALIS. At work. Thinking about a plotline for my spy characters. Woke up beside a beautiful man this morning (I can hear you retching in the back corner), had lunch with him and Jo, sloughed my way through the streets downtown in search of treasures. Found some.

I think I've lost weight under the resentful Eye of Ra.

Had Spice Girls in my head all last night, which was a peculiar flashback experience. The dreams in the night, however, centred around Buddha doing dirty things, which I suspect has something to do with finishing Valis and this book on homosexuality in literature that came through check-in yesterday, with Japanese saucy woodcuts inside. I rather didn't expect to dream about Gautama doing that, but I wish my body was that flexible. Oh well, whenever I get back into the yoga.

On my way out the door to have breakfast with Samara and then hopefully find somewhere quiet to read for a few hours before I go to work. My mum's in town, but I won't see her until tomorrow night. She's brought a friend by the name of Don, and they want somewhere to go dancing. I was thinking perhaps the Upstairs Caberet, which I've never been to.

And on some hotter than hell days, all you want to do is leave your job behind and run, run, run across a big field somewhere for as long as you can, which wouldn't be that long because of the tremendous sweat factor, the mild asthma which has mostly died away, and the allergies that would probably react to the flowers and grass on that field. Then you'd haunch forward with your hands on your thighs to catch your breath, husky and broken, ready for a tall glass of gin and tonic with a slice of lime thrown in for good measure (carefully squeezed before dropped in), your eyes a bit red and itchy, but free, free, free from the hideous demands of your other life. And everyday would be a novel. And every morning would be a sex farce. And every dinner would be a sumptuous movie about a restaurant, where the family's repressed passions explode in an array of gorgeous foods that titillate the audience seperated from them by a thin screen of light.

Drinks with my mum tonight. She's been here since Wednesday, but this will be the first I see her.

In the middle of "A Cure for Cancer," one of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels. They're a bit like reading one fifteen-year-old boy's "cool" masturbation sessions, but there are quite a few good moments, one-liners, and oddly surreal ideas for me to enjoy. Somebody said to read all the Cornelius books at once, so I'm going to start "The English Assassin" next and see how that goes. Cornelius is multi-talented and multi-sexual, with a mutable appearence; right now he's a caucasian with black skin and platinum hair. The multi-sexual aspect is in it to some degree, occasionally he sleeps with men, but the vast majority of it is randomly banging some woman he comes across, or is partnered with, or is up against in battle - what? The some of the languid, opulent descriptions are right up my alleyway, but at other times it's completely missed the point. I try to keep in mind it was written in 1970 and for the most part Moorcock was banging out books to pay the rent, but--

I think there may have been something I was supposed to do on my break (like bring world peace to all the nations), but I've forgotten what it was and go blogging down bits and pieces of my dismembered brain cells, who seem to have rallied together to go on strike. But I've written down some bits for my potential maybe novel (the one, at least, I'll attempt for my Novel Techniques class in September), and that's going very well.

I'm going to go type "Rogan Gosh" into the Google Images Search Engine.

This morning, once the heat exhaustion finally did me in despite the actual heat: one those hideous two-dimensional Spiderman cartoons from the Seventies, right down to the animation, with the plotline of one of those early Nineties "drug awareness" comics that they put out with Spiderman travelling around Canada and taking drug dealers down. It was an odd combination, but included the entire opening credits to the cartoon, with some odd additions of a storyline so far synopsis that mentioned a "drug an alcohol free graduate life."

Apparently, my dreams have become advertizing and include moralizing.

Shopping with my mother most of today, she should be picking me up soon to go downtown and maybe go watch some of the dragon boating. Meh. It'll be a long hot day and then tonight Michael gets to come with us to my aunt's house for dinner, you know, the entire family all together and such. I'm sure there will be trauma, but you know how melodramatic I can get. I think I'd prefer to work on my novel, actually.

I seem to be remembering my dreams more easily these days. Last night I was a young methamphetamine addict by the name of Swagger - no joke - who acquired his drugs from an old woman in a local pharmacy. Additionally, meth was referred to by the street name "Dante." My dreams are getting more and more narrative every night...

My mum visited this weekend, obviously, with much odd behaviour therein. Friday night was getting drunk with her, Michael, her friend Don, Jonas, Brandon, and Russell - first at Swan's, then at the Garrick's Head pub. Apparently my mother didn't know what cunnilingus was, and we had to explain it to her. Stumbled home with Michael at midnight. On Sunday, Michael met the extended family on my mum's side, which was ridiculous and embarrassing. To put it mildly, Michael said that he was amazed I turned out so well-adjusted.

They were attacking wasps with an electrified tennis racket bug-zapper, which made the insects explode on contact. My aunt ordered my cousin around as usual, like a slave. Granny was inexplicable. It went on and on, Michael was a perfect gentleman; then we proceeded to meet up with Brandon, Anna, James and Kelly at Swan's for Jazz, then went to prism for a surprisingly appealing drag show with a lot of cocktails imbibed along the way.

And now I'm back to work for the week. Not too bad. Going to get comics later today and treat myself to some Lotus Pond before the night's shift.

Waltzed around downtown this afternoon, stopping in various locations to absorb information and/or food. In the middle of reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns, a travelogue of the year he spent in Delhi with his wife Olivia. Lots of potent data concerning the racial and religious tensions within the city, and within India generally. Highly recommended, especially because I got it from Monroe's for about ten bucks.

As a side note so I don't forget, Varanasi in India used to be called Benares. I had a brain glitch and couldn't remember.

At work now, about to start, but also want to sit down and write at some point. I hope I'll have the energy to do just that when I get home tonight, rather than futz around, read comic books, listen to the same boring playlist on my computer (I need to build a new one) and fall asleep with yellow earplugs in and an open window. School looms and I need a project that invigorates me.

Work's hot and slow. Well, there's a lot to do, but who wants to do it when their souls are dripping out through their pores? On the other hand, Jason was right about me working at Commonwealth Place. I'm surrounded by two very appealing things - books and men in swimsuits. A parade of pleasing specimens has gone through here all afternoon, even if its too parching to move. A couple of interesting books have caught my attention as well; some unread Marquez novels and "The Age of Kali" by the aforementioned Dalrymple. A rather odd moment of synchronity in the early 915s (travel books, for the uninitiated) and he caught my attention again.

Tonight I'm going home and working on a short story I started a while ago, based on a dream that one of the clerks had. It's been sitting in my rantbook waiting for me to lavish it with attention. It's written in the second person, which is a different toy for me to play with. I figure if I can finish the story - at around 4000 words - it'll be ready for my fiction workshop in September.

Debating ideas for a romantic date on Friday. Shooting up Heroin in a back alleyway on Wharf Street doesn't really have that - that je ne sais quoi, know what I mean? Even if we had tacos afterward. I suspect I'll have to come up with something plausible and appealing. Phwuh.

So Good! Just saw a trailer for Wes Anderson's latest, The Life Aquatic. I'm hoping for brilliance, but I've been disappointed before, so I'm going to avoid reading any critiques of it until I see the blasted thing, whenever that is.

I have to go run around, get money out, order some cheques (I do believe that I have one left), eat something (perhaps brains) and head off to work. Pick up something for my date tonight on the way.

Which means having a shower and putting some clothes on. Maybe a quick shave as well.

Watched Zelig and Husbands and Wives last night at Joy's house; four hours, more or less, of Woody Allen make me a bit twitchy, and his thought patterns are a little infectious. Yick. But I liked both movies quit a bit, even if some things could be cut out. I definitely prefer watching Diane Keaton to Mia Farrow, though; in the scenes with Allen, Farrow mirrors him completely and it's essentially like having Stereo Woody Allen having the same conversation over and over again. Zelig was more stylistically interesting, as mock-umentary using extensive 20s and 30s newsreels and such.

Also watched Bubba Ho-Tep which is just goofy pulp fun with a lot of great voice-overs by a man who thinks he's Elvis Presley. Or maybe he is Elvis Presley. Or maybe he's just Bruce Campbell playing a man who could be or just thinks he's Elvis Presley, in a movie with an evil mummy. Oddly enough, I think the dirty Egyptian graffiti in the bathroom stall is my favourite part.

Need to do some writing today, as my head feels a bit backed up (cut to profile diagram of Ben's head as convoluted early indoor plumbing), especially because I'm considering doing the three day novel. We'll see, though, school's the next week and I might be too broken and stark-raving insane afterward.

The anxiety of the day is that everyone else seems to have gotten their student loan papers on Friday and I haven't yet; I also don't have my application number handy to go check online.

A pack of elephants lived in the city fringed with veldt on all sides, an entire tribe of elephants, but each one was invisible. Amongst the rickshaws and the molting, sweating automobiles, the elephants could only be discerned by tension between objects and what seemed like empty spaces. A hint of bulk that brushes against your face, or the swish of a tail against your face. Each invisible elephant wore transparent jewelled headdresses, unseen silk brocades, and clear beads that jangled on those July days when wind poured through the city like sand. The air deepened with the clash of elephantine finery invisible but voluminous like thousands of wind chimes, or dinner bells, or soft sirens. Despite their mass, the elephants learned to step like flamingoes between mosques, broken buses, and irrate taximen. They lingered on hind legs between bazaar carts and speared mud-caked vegetables from market stands with their curled tusks. They sniffed out water barrels with their trunks. No elephant roared, because that would expose them; they quibbled with each other, from across the entire city at times, in a radar language known only to them and certainly never recorded. At night, once the elder elephants laid down to sleep and the city's peoples dropped into dreams, the youngest invisible elephants trundled out to the edge of the city to pluck fermenting amarula fruit from the trees. Drunk on it, they slumbered until morning sunlight mixed with the liquor inside their stomachs and each one became a voluptuous stone outcropping while the other invisible elephants would huff and scoff at the foolish young.

(c) 2004 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved

Cheques ordered, student loan papers taken in to the post office, and work in about three minutes. I'm going to Jimmy the Greek's barber shop after my shift to get that start of school haircut I crave, get rid of all the blond that I've grown a bit bored with. I wonder what I'd look like with a perm.

Meeting Joy at three for writing - writing! - and then I'm doing the movie thing tonight with my sweet baboo and Jojo. Napoleon Dynamite. Ah yeah.

The Bourne Supremacy wasn't terrible - it was a pulpy secret agent sequel, so the expectations were low - but they needed to replace the camera operator. Really. The cinematography itself was above average, there were some interesting shots and angles, but it was all done with a handheld camera that bobs and shakes constantly, and flickers between shots at high speed. The effect left me with a mild headache and an inability to stand up right away. That wasn't always bad, however - there was a beautiful underwater sequence which worked with the style. A later fight scene was ridiculous because of it, though. While the relationship from the first movie continued, it was rendered background pretty quickly - I'll leave out the spoilers - and the majority of the movie is happily without a romantic subplot in any form. Bourne doesn't get it on with Nicki, the Julia Stiles character. The action is solid, if a bit uneven in places, and it didn't make me want to retch. The plot could have used a bit more work, but altogether it wasn't bad. The other option for the night was to go see Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring - a Japanese film - that sounds gorgeous but nobody had the attention span to devote to it, so we went cheezy pulp instead.

Went to Hime Sushi with Michael and Jo before the movie, to listen to a half-hour long heated argument between some tourists and the owner. It was horribly uncomfortable, none of us knew what to do, and anxiety settled over the restaurant while we waited for our bento boxes. Finally, the couple left and the screaming stopped, and we got our food. Michael remarked that he was surprised it didn't get physical.

Andrew comes over from Vancouver in a few hours to spend a few days on the island. It'll be a nice relaxing visit after the whirlwind of the Pride weekend in Vancouver; we didn't get to hang out nearly enough and he was stressed out from moving. Probably going to go see Hero - the new Jet Li movie from the people who produced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Snacky!

Andrew's here, downstairs in fact, languidly attempting to get himself upright and perhaps on the way to the shower so that we might trundle off to Dairy Queen for one of their "cool treats" (never, ever their "hot eats") - that's right, log, a big log of ice cream and chocolate. I'm pulling for the raspberry flavour. At the same time as all of this, he's decided he's a southern belle from Georgia, beautiful people, he's named Bessie Mae (I came up with the name). So anyway, we're going to get this magical thing, this magical log thing, and then we're going to eat some and then I'm going to go to work for four hours - a mere four hour shift! - and meet downtown afterward with the unusual suspects (Michael, Michelle, Jojo) for Hero, this new-fangled Jet Li picture with the wire-walking and the siss-boom-baa. I'm encouraged about potentially attempting a hookah (or houkah).

I'm restarting the "Charlotte and the Wildcats" story, I'd like to have a draft written before I begin my three-day novel, which is not going to be the Johnny and Teiresias novel because I want to put that through the novel-writing class instead. The three-day novel is going to be some kind of a pulp-laden Kilgore Trout novel, not actually about Kilgore (who is, of course, wholly fictional) but just a ridiculous pulp story. The title "Kamikaze Women" lingers in my head from that Husbands and Wives Woody Allen fiasco, and I think that it might be the title of whatever drivel I write that long, long weekend. Thirty pages a day? I can manage that if I don't breathe or think about anything else. Meals by takeaway, of course.

For the record, the Oxford English Dictionary spells it "hookah," derived from the Urdu "hukkah" (meaning "casket"), but I suspect the myriad proto-spellings are just as good, because as Jo observed, it was originally in a completely foreign language to English.

Hero is amazing. The story's much less complicated than it seems, because it relies heavily on the "he said, she said" mentality of pitting different variations on an event up on the screen. You rebel against the new interpretation at first because you've just seen it - quite clearly, quite cinematically. Some beautiful sequences. It doesn't say anything peculiarly profound - "violence isn't just wrong, it's not enlightened enough" - but the beauty of the film more than makes up for that.

Bon Voyage - which is French - is similarly amazing. It was a weekend of subtitles and good movies. It's a very straightforward faux-forties Noir/Melodrama picture, hilarious in a lot of places but with absolutely beautiful work on cinematography, attention to detail, and acting. It features a genre story with all the usual hallmarks (the trashy actress bad girl, the pert and intellectual good girl who I'm surprised never had to "let her hair down," the doddering scientist, et cetera), and the lead actor was absolutely adorable, even stupid (he kept helping the bad girl who constantly manipulated him). It was murder, it was Nazis, it was the German occupation of France, it was everything. It had heavy water in it and everything.

But there's the other thing - the hookah - which we tried on Friday night in our backyard, with Michael, Jo, and Andrew. It was well worth it to attempt, strawberry and mint flavoured. I'd like to include a scene with one in a film, I was thinking perhaps for the music video we have to do for Video Production class in January; I'd like to get Semi-Louise passing around a hookah pipe.

Less than a week until the three day novel! I'm excited, I suspect it'll be a surrealist sci-fi Kilgore farce. With an ultra-mule.