wildcat

The wind was hot, animal hot, and rolled over things like spongy clay. Too slow to stand up-right, or for sound to travel far. Too thick to breathe; lying there in the sand like an old studebaker left too long without gas in the tank, the wind greased over top of you. Feet half-buried, dirt in your shoes and socks - itching, but too far away from your hands to scratch. Everything so far away - your feet another continent under the sheet of wind. Were you even a body anymore? Or had the landscape eaten you and grown Indian paint brushes in your place, flecks of grass, an empty pile of clothes half-disappeared into earth--

The video is so close, so intimately close-- Steff's vacation meant that when she came in today for editing? She could look at it with the fresh eyes Myla and I lost about a week ago. Really. Feeling more confident about it, even though there are a few patches that need to be evened out. Most of all, we just need some music for one scene.

Otherwise, it's been a heavy week, getting loose ends put to rest. Other than the video, I have one assignment left, the journals for Art & Technology - which I can do in a day or two, just spend an hour on them and print. So close to graduating that the Fear comes everyday for at least half an hour, but there's that other feeling mixed in, a sliver, something with flavour. Razoring closer and closer to finishing something. Wow.

Otherwise, puttering around with Michael and the gang. Watched Hellboy with Michael last night, again, enjoyed it. Looking to kiss the back of his neck later tonight.

...by Lamplight finished in a jaunty fell swoop this afternoon, after I showed up half an hour late because of daylight savings, and various equipment failures. The disc is in my satchel now, my bag of tricks; I can deliver it to Brian in a day or two, depending. It's been a stressful week, and I'm glad the thing, the infernal beast, is finished - I'm even, dare I say it, proud.

Now I'm just watching Firefly and geeking out over the mixture of cowboys and outer space. I'm fairly impressed by the cinematography, the editing, and the writing. It's twiddling certain parts of my brain and now all I want to do is write some potboiler stories in various genres for the summer.

It's a very simple scene, and yet everything I write ends up as bird cage liner. Really. It's just shit. I've started from scratch about seventeen times - I counted - and now I've hit that wall. No more brilliance. This pisses me off; it's there, it's three-dimensional and vibrant in my head, full palette of colours, but there's just something missing. Prose does not issue forth from my fingertips. The scene fails to operate. There's a broken thing in my head, half-configured, and I am at a loss to retool it and build it out of the everythings therein. Something something about momentum.

There is a pile of books beside my desk; this is not the typical pile of books I haven't read, but the pile of books I'm planning on selling to Russell's, for some extra cash. I might spend some on a haircut at Jimmy's, but we'll see. I have to figure out when I have time to cart all of them downtown.

Apparently I anger easily in the presence of Jacques Derrida. Watched the first hour of a documentary on the "father of deconstructionism," called deRRIDA, and came face to face with one of those intellectual barriers standing in my head. Really. I agreed with about half of everything he said, but the other half either made no sense or simply frustrated me - the man seemed to rage against Plato in a lot of ways, even as he was a Platonic Thinker. The point being, I still have this big huge locked door between me and knowledge. There's so much in the world that I have to learn still. It's very frustrating. As for the documentary, I'll watch the rest of it later tonight. I find the long tracking shots of Derrida walking with a pipe to his mouth a little too mythologizing, I'm more of a shit-and-champagne man myself, but the woman reading selections of his work is hypnotic and quite often he breaks out of the traditional documentary interview to use the form to illustrate deconstructionism. Which I still think I don't get. Christian explained it, but it feels too much like a snake eating its own tail--

In the middle of Stranger: Dark Tales of Eerie Encounters, an anthology of short fiction edited by Michelle Slung. The premise of the collection is stories about weird encounters between strangers, passing - as it were - in the night. John Peyton Cooke's "After You've Gone" is brilliant in a hardboiled way and I really enjoyed Alex Hamilton's odd fairy tale "The Baby-Sitters," which makes do with some weird cliches and works around them. There's a Lovecraft story and one by Bradbury, I'm looking forward to those, and a smattering of various writers. Good, solid read; I'm highly inspired right now.

Gyozas for dinner, with a dessert of strawberries. Going to spend the evening writing and possibly getting that response journal finished up so I can hand it in on Thursday and be finished. Poetry workshop for the last time tomorrow, we have to make sure everyone neccesary is available for summer workshopping and drinks.

On occasion, it surprises me that I leave Margaret Atwood short story collections just lying around, as one might casually leave pornography or paystubs.

I have an epic strawberry in my mouth right now, I have a cataclysmic strawberry in my supple and stretched mouth. Chew. Juice. There is juice in my mouth, blood from strawberry. The little seed bits get caught.

I have completed my very last assignment as an undergraduate. All being well, in a few weeks I should have very clearly a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Things need to be graded. It is, as they say, out of my hands. I'm walking on a tightrope and I feel just fine.

I'm going to close down the web browser now and I'm going to open up Microsoft Word and I'm going to transcribe the opening to a new short story and then I'm going to write that story for all it's worth. I can feel the muse starting to operate--

It would appear that an integral part of my drafting process - my first draft process, in fact - is that one of my protagonists always seems to end up shot, mangled, or dead. I don't understand why I always maneuver stories toward the hard-boiled. This usually gets reworked and edited out with successive drafts, but it is an odd stylistic tic; anyway, Beryl's just been shot in the kneecap and we're going from there. I'm up to about page seven in a day and a morning; the plot seems to permeate the thing and I'm having difficulty with character development and internal monologue, but that's probably just something to worry about when I attack it for draft #2.

Visa to pay today. And I should eat something. And I'm going to swagger up to school shortly to really begin my day.

After my final academic workshop - the final poetry workshop, I ended up in Felicita's with the poets, some of the poets, drinking. You know, the usual: open mouth, insert booze, close mouth, act emotional. Forget yourself: give into the petty exertions. Started on a gin-tonic, then a double gin-tonic and then beer. Emily was the steadfast, iron voice of BOOZE, all capitals, and demanded that we continue drinking. After that, Emily and I stumbled to the #14 bus where we ate popcorn and raged as usual. I went over to Michael's, and we zoned.

Anyway, back inside my tiny box of zen and waiting, waiting, waiting for the film screening tonight. Should be peculiar. It's a spectacle, with Brian up front delivering sermons before a kaleidoscope of video presentations.

A working, thus far: the automatic muttering of street names, not unlike running a finger down the phone book's columns. I called Beauty on the hotline through sub-vocal articulation and the operation of walking sideways to the wind; my body was a razorblade to air currents. Mason, Chambers, Grant, no exit, Balmoral, Fernwood, Vining, "without art, the reality of the world would be unbearable", Kings, Bay, Haultain; Fernwood meets Cedar Hill and blend together perpendicular to Ryan and Hillside. Hamilton: the address number on the side of the complex is slightly eskew. By operating these names, one can ask the Sun God: sharpen the shadows! Beauty. The synthesis of beauty, sunlight, wind, cherry blossoms caught, an empty storefront of Fernwood with junk and broken furniture, no door, and workmen inside. All is. One. The elusive. Number. Six.

The result was: an envelope, brown and from the government, waiting for me on the bedroom floor. Inside? Tax return, decent amount, the gaping maw of Oblivion and Existential Angst is driven off for what amounts to a day or so. I don't feel so bad about spending four bucks on a comic book. I can pay my phone bill, as well.

Also: wrote three pages in Serious Coffee on Fort Street, read some comic books I had with me, drank a Snapple ice tea that cost me two bucks.

The filming screening was unhitched; there were, as usual, the high quality, middle quality, and low quality. I'm fairly confident that ...By Lamplight was high, but it's also my baby, even if a demented one. Well, there was a hitch, but it was more of a personal issue that's been mended. Someone deserves a present for the patience of a saint, and that's that. Michelle finally got see one of my movies and we were allowed to be snobbish at all the right intervals.

And then Michael, Christian, and I got drunk in a park behind Michael's house, with homeless people in the distance and about half a bottle of vodka, then ginger ale with vermouth. There was scuffling and eventual passing out.

I woke up - still moderately drunk after a heavy four hour nap - at seven a.m. with the intent on making it to my final Art & Technology class. And I made it! I handed my response journals in to Brian and we chatted and then as soon as he disappeared for the class evaluations, I took my leave. Back down to Michael's house to drag the boys out of bed and head to Floyd's. So hungover. Michael complained about wanting to spawn babies because there was this cute little year-old girl tottling around. Spawning. Spent a heavenly hour in the Starfish gallery watching glass get blown.

I want to have skin made of luminous, super-heated glass.

Much ado: Composed supper with Samara at her place a few hours ago. Burritos with too much in the way of beans (the musical fruit), and salad. A couple brownies for dessert. Glass of filtered water. Felt good. Positive. Watched a romantic comedy and giggled. Colin Firth. Cleansing; afterward, a walk home that included somebody across the street filming something. A big crazed scene. Possibly - maybe - a party film. The air was teeth into apple. Stars. Someone beautiful on the phone with me.

The last two days have been emotional, but highly positive for the most part.

Anyway: grad party tomorrow, and furthermore a coffee date with my friend Jake, newly home from Spain. Spain! Apparently, in Granada you can feed a group of eleven people for the equivalent of fifteen bucks. Including silverware? Possibly drinks before the party with some people, and there will be the traditionally cutting (with a machete) of the rug (a welcome mat).

The operational hazards of poetry. In the middle of revising "Clean Living, Clean Body, Clean Fingernails." I can't end every poem on a dash, at the moment of climax with no resolution; this can work in some cases but I need to work on ending my poems. Really. I have this habit of building so much force into each one until they drive forward, forward, forward with no possible stop in sight. Talked to Caroline on the phone and read some Ginsberg, I have a few ideas for how to do it. I also need to make sure that I cut down the number of repeated words - "nail(s)" comes up far too many times. Need to cut that down.

The Grad Party last night. Drinking Southern Comfort from a flask, dancing to a girl DJ, marvelling out how few people I know in my graduating class. I tried to keep track of my peoples but they vanished like that thought you just had but you can't quite get your tongue around to speak. And you know it was there, it is there, somewhere, but it's not quite close enough.

Miserable out, ruinous, and I have to walk up the hill and then down the hill into Fernwood. Stared into a book of Pablo Neruda's Odes this afternoon, in a book shop. I'm from a Northern climate, however, and miserable ragged bird-calls settle my bones and colonize the marrow. My heating bill is too high; I can survive wearing sweaters but I'm afraid other people can't.

Might toss the Bill Richardson novel about Alice B. Toklas into my bag. I wish I could read while I walked places, because my discman batteries seem to drain too fast and they're devoid of power right now. Devoid. Instead, I'll just do the usual routine of writing entire novels in the time it takes me to get down Cedar Hill, until it's Fernwood Avenue and then I'll be at the Belfry Theatre.

Hope everyone comes tonight. I know they won't, I know everybody's hung over or working on portfolios or not speaking to each other, but it's difficult not to give into the Bollywood Fantasy Sequence of a Golden Age, when Shining, Brilliant Ones merge and emerge into and from each other.

Thought about going out tonight naked, nude, unclothed. Instead, I did the laundry.

Instead of making love in the afternoon with Cecelia, I went to the graduate reading at the Belfry Theatre tonight with full expectations of Good Ol' Times with the poet kids, including drinks with them and Tim Lilburn afterward. Actually, I got there five minutes early, did a walk around the block, went in and stared around awkward-like for five until Sarah showed up by coincidence. Sat in a seat way off to the side and waved at Casey, and Ally. Most people I waited for showed up late or not at all. Typically, the poets stood around at the intermission and the reception afterward; everybody else mingled and schmoozed and did all of those things that we are Required by Law to do in the event of an Event, while we crossed our arms, made awkward conversation and failed to understand each other, or failed to hear each other. I compulsively ate mushrooms with dip. Afterward, Samara biked off on Crystal's bike, hoping she could remember the way home, and who swaggers on by - not so much half-cut as fully-loaded - but Emily. Poets are more functional it seems when outside and away from large crowds. Tim went home because he caught a cold during his reading at Princeton last week and I ended up at the George with Megan, Emily, Caroline and a few people. A single, short gin-tonic.

With regard to the actual reading itself? It was good, solid, and nobody went too long. Everybody was strong; there were only two readers that I didn't like, but it had nothing to do with (a) who the person was or (b) the person being an incompetent writer. Their styles just didn't do much of anything for me, even though they were clearly very good at what they do. Got a chance to see part of Greg Compton's play about drunken homosexuals on the Vancouver Skytrain. Pretty hilarious, although I think the actor involved brought quite a bit to the role. Sean Virgo MCed and was witty, adorable, et al. Good reading. The only reason I felt compelled to leave in the middle was that I had an attack of "clearly my writing isn't good enough" and the desire to go home right at that moment and get to work on it, because it wasn't going to improve by complaining about it.

I still - desperately - want to write that Nancy Boys crossover novel before I day. You know, one day when I have money to handle the inevitable lawsuits. Until then, feast your eyes on this: The Curse of Maiden's Hollow.

Maybe because it was Monday, I jettisoned off the reality-stream into one of those tiresome existential crises this morning. Seems to be clearing up with the application of some reality cheques, made out to me by the Rest of the Universe. They're probably not hiring a clerical until at least June, maybe as late as August, because of the new computer system. Fine. I tried to buy a pair of corduroys because - let's face it - I have almost no non-denim pants right now. Went to the Patch thinking I could get some used, cheap ones - but no dice, the floor plan makes no sense, the employees are all Hipper-than-Thou, and the rack of pants I wanted at were behind a cordon during their latest re-construction work. I seriously don't understand that store.

Okay, as of this morning, one week without drinking. It's been a repeating theme over the past little while for the good reason of End of Degree, but that can't be the excuse forever.

The Fear was on me the second my eyes opened this morning, so I immediately began to negotiate myself down from the ledge. Plan to take a resume in to Bolen Books, which - you know - I've been trying to get a job at for years, off and on. Apparently you need a degree to work at a bookstore. The procedure called "job-hunting" is one think I hate more than anything, so the Fear is currently at war with apathy and the desire to starve myself out of agonized disdain. I may also ask my parents for some money, which I really hate doing; I can not continue to survive on twelve hours a week, and the library is really not being helpful right now.

And now I'm going to ignore the tremble of a sore throat by pouring vitamin C down it, then I'm going to eat reheated pasta and sauce for breakfast. With garlic in it.

Quarter to five and I've finished something for once. Just five pages, random silly fictional shit, sent off to somebody to give it a read through. Negligible, but it's something and I feel SANE for completing it. To reward myself, after this Semi-Louise song finishes playing, I'm going to disconnect myself from this Monster Machine and walk around. Maybe swagger for a bit. Maybe scream.

Stolen from Joy.

Dictator
Stalin. You know, the "Man of Steel."

Country
I wish I had the balls to someplace like India, but I'll go with France. You know, the pacifistic tendencies and the overly romanticized views on seduction. Plus, Michael enjoys the, ah, french tongue.

Candy
Sour worms, because I'm never without my sugar-coated phalluses.

Beverage
The. Gin.

"Celebrity"
Lauren Ambrose all the way. Or Jeanette Winterson. Or myself, only famous.

Fish
Salmon, because of my ridiculous sense of direction.

With regards to the Bride & Prejudice plan, the film's already out of the Odeon and while it's supposed to end up at Cincenta shortly, we couldn't go to it last night. Instead - on a lark - we went to Woody Allen's new offering, Melinda and Melinda. A very solid movie, considering the uneven films that Allen's been making lately. It focuses on four people, a woman and three men, out to dinner in New York (because this is the only place on the planet), discussing life; is it essentially tragic or essentially comic?

One of the characters offers up a story - the specifics of which we never see - and the two playwrights at the table take the story and weave radical interpretations of it from the frameworks of tragedy and comedy. I thought the film worked really well for having a specific structure it followed. The ending felt a bit telegraphed - you know almost from the first scene what the ultimate point will be, so why do they need to clarify it for us right before the end credits? But the acting was top-notch and Allen had the opportunity to write two differently styled movies - one, a "spiralling down" melodrama about a woman on the verge of complete destruction and the other, a slapstick romantic comedy. Generally the tragedy was more hilarious than anything but delivered in an entirely deadpan manner, and the comedy was wildly ridiculous.

Radha Mitchell is the central character - the Melinda of both worlds - and I think she's given a real opportunity to demonstrate her acting chops; she can be the troubled but ultimately endearing romantic comedy Melinda, and she can be the overly dramatic Melinda of the tragedy. She worked best in the tragedy simply because she could deliver the elevated language and purple prose of the dialogue completely deadpan. Will Ferrell normally annoys me but he was quite solid in this, as the romantic comedy's equivalent of the Woody Allen character (Woody stayed out of the picture, as it were) with an mostly understated version of himself. There was some opportunity for meta-filmic stuff (Ferrell's character is an actor who constantly plays whatever character "with a limp" much like Woody Allen plays every character as Woody Allen) but it didn't too overboard with it.

Planned to write for three hours this afternoon. Naturally, I've launched a major expedition to clean my bedroom as a result. Really. I'm mostly finished except that I have to wipe down surfaces and finish the last minute things. Found some old pictures, looked at CDs, decided which books to sell and which books to donate to the library. It's remarkable how much I can accumulate; apparently the "non-materialist" aspect of Buddhism is still falling on deaf ears. Oh well, that's my lesson for this year - decide what I really need. What I actually need. All that.

After the puerile tantric bedroom cleaning, we started dissecting the kitchenware into halves for Michelle & Mike to take with them (and for Christian & I to keep here). Then Christian showed up with his friend Denise, who might be interested in moving in after they move out. She seems like a good egg.

Now, I'm revising poems. I have decided to go all the way back to 2nd year and revise everything I can! I've already done my very first 2nd year poem. You'll note I consider my first year poems to be a lost cause.

Rudely awakened at 8:00am after six hours of sleep so that Mike could use my cell phone to call in sick to work. They've had their service transferred over to the new place. Today's mission: pick up Michael's van for them to borrow, and transfer the Internet service over to us from Michelle.

I showered, unable to fall back asleep because of the drilling and construction across the street. Emptied the dishwasher. Wrote for an hour. Cleaned out my kitchen food cupboard and trashed everything that was old, stale, or refused - about five bags of half-eaten, stale corn chips. It's ridiculous. But I found a satchel of peanuts, banana chips, and almonds. Assorted medications, including a mostly full bottle of Buckley's cough syrup. Four packs of pasta. With the kitchen emptying, I can now fit my beautiful Japanese dishes - Michael gave them to me for Christmas one year - in with the actual kitchenware, rather than hoarding them in with my food. Tossed two cans of Pork and Beans - really - into Christian's cupboard; mine had become a reliquary for artifacts dating back to Pre-Vegetarian times. Two cans of tuna fish. A full tin - mysteriously - of hot chocolate. Wiped it all down and actually organized it into sections, with the top-most shelf my baking things.

Clean room, emptying house, clean cupboard. Nice and smooth.

Weirdest thing I've seen all day: The Writer at Work.* The Dorothy Parker one is my favourite - it's a toss-up between that and the Emily Dickinson as to which is more like me. I can't tell if they're particularly laugh-out-loud funny or just moderately amusing, but I like the style of the drawing and the panel layout stuctures. If I could still draw, I might be inclined to start doing a comic strip again.

Productivity soars! Well, actually it doesn't, haven't written a word since that hour this morning. Now for an additional two hours! I'm concerned with the number of exclamation points I'm using. I have another poem to revise - the "Scene from a Magic Realist's Failing Marriage."

* Link courtesy of Dorothy at Cat and Girl.

Signed away my unnatural powers over traffic lights to the universe today in return for an extra shift at the library tomorrow morning.

After work I ended up at Joy & Matt's house to watch Intolerable Cruelty with them. Made a sandwich of pickled herring, green peppers, tomatoes, and mayonnaise. With potato salad. Grapefruit juice besides. The film was - decent. It will never be my favourite of the Coen Brothers' oeuvre, but it had some really stong script work in places (weak script in others) and the interplay between Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Clooney was solid. A bit unremarkable otherwise; some of the plot-twists got me only because I became convinced at one point that the extended sequence which horrified me was actually a dream sequence or some kind of drug trip, but then it kept going and I had to deal with the fact that characters spontaneously became completely stupid. The film's strength was from the moment Zeta-Jones showed up on screen up until right after Clooney's character beats her in court. The script there is the strongest, the characters are allowed to be both dynamic and consistent, and at this point the obnoxious poodle hadn't shown up.

Discussed the parallels between the Old Testament's story about Sodom and Gamorrah the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Lot's wife looks back and is turned into salt, while Orpheus look back and Eurydice's return is cancelled, and she returns to the underworld. Something there about doubting higher powers. Also, of course, Pandora as the root of all evil, and Eve as the root of all evil. Except that while Eve caused the greater harm (you'll remember that Pandora keeps Hope inside her box), Pandora was created and sent specifically with the intention of corrupting mankind. Eve was young and child-like; she was bound to make mistakes. Pandora is presented more as a curse on capital "m" Man.

In the middle of cleaning the kitchen, because they've moved out and Christian's in Vancouver. House to myself, and now "moving out" for Michelle and Mike is winding down, I can start getting the house to look half-way decent. Started with the kitchen. Stuck in the kitchen; stuck with the microwave door open, attacking the baked on chemical grotesquerie left-over from an accident Michelle had with a bag of popcorn. Why shouldn't couldn't be bothered to clean it up at the time is beyond me, but the nastiness must go! I thought I was doing fine until I looked up at the ceiling of the microwave and saw Hell. Won't even mention what was behind the microwave.

In the middle of Dashiel Hammett's The Red Harvest. Very direct, masculine, and slightly gay in its descriptive passages. Enjoying it; the novel is intensely readable. Four more to read after this one, including The Maltese Falcon. His prose is so clear without being showy - the square-jawed pulp vibe. I have a plan for my 102-page novel, the one I'm writing probably next month for a week; it's going to be a Hammett-esque detective thriller staring Teiresias Jones and Johnny Damocles. Already have the basic description of Teiresias's look in my head, although I can't really do anything about it until I finish the first draft of this science fiction piece I'm writing.

Brunch this morning with Michael and Daniel at the Banana Belt Café in James Bay - had a really good omelette with smoked salmon and mushrooms inside. A cup of fruit and a croissant. As usual, I had a chocolate milkshake and Michael shamelessly stole some from me. We commisserated over our lives, Daniel talked about maybe taking off from Victoria to somewhere fresher. Considered applying for a federal government job.

Spent the afternoon cleaning the upstairs bathroom - I'm leaving most of the cleaning for when Christian gets back from Vancouver, but the bathroom was just too grotesque and I needed to do something about it. I took out all but one of the plants and left the rest in Michelle's room, because I wasn't sure what we were going to be doing - whether or not they were picking them up or leaving them.

Afterward, went to Samara, Crystal & Tara's house and ate dinner with them. We made this wicked home-style poutine with potatoes and herbs; salad; and Samara let us have the last of her chocolate zucchini cake for dessert. Really solid; their friend Dave came over - he's moving in when Tara moves out in a few weeks. Had a lot of fun.

Came home and Michelle and Mike had been by to pick up a couple more things - they took their shower stuff, which I left in a bag in Michelle's room because I was cleaning; I'm worried that came across as a bit of a diss. They also emptied out the fridge and left everything else. I'm still waiting to see if I actually get my key to Michael's van back from them. The move's been pretty friendly so far but I'm concerned it could get edgy at any moment for no good reason.

Ah! This afternoon, an hour or so has been spent reorganizing the living room and reading room, discovering that the phonograph does indeed include a working radio which pulls in CBC like nothing else. Really. Vacuumed under my bed and found about two bucks in change. Woke up this morning with garlic breath and a beautiful man wrapped around me. I'm going to make pasta and sauce in a few minutes to satiate this gnawing, unbearable hunger. It's a great day!

Although, apparently, I was not the only one to do so, today I sliced open my middle finger while preparing two veggie burgers for dinner. I should not be allowed near a bread knife. This is after I cut myself under the fingernail while trying to pry away baked-on grease from a fork. It's a wonder I can stand up right and breathe involuntarily.

Drinks with the Poets tonight: Swans (two glasses of cheap Sangria and a dry gin martini with two olives), Syn (one "S&M" martini, which included vodka, strawberry, and mango juices), and Prism (one short gin-tonic). Operational hazards. After that a brisk walk with Casey up Johnson until we caught a bus. Emily brought her man, Debbie showed up briefly to have some juice before getting a good night's rest so she could handle defending her honours thesis. Megan, Fred, and Samara were also on hand.

Tomorrow, my plan is to select and revise five poems for submission to PRISM International. I'm going to definitely submit "My Mother in Menopause" and "Indecent and Lucent," possibly also "Clean Living, Clean Body, Clean Fingernails" (pending final niggling with my word choice and line breaks), but there's still two more poems to select, a cover letter to write, and postage to acquire. Need to get an envelope and make sure I have the address.

I can't sneeze right now. I can't; it's sitting at the back of my skull like a gnome, burrowing away at my internal organs, but I can't get it out through my nostrils! A little home surgery might do the trick.

I bought a pair of beautiful bowls for six dollars today.

The submission is mostly prepared, although I have to write up the cover letter and then address the envelope, stick everything inside, and seal it up with the correct postage. I'm thinking two stamps should do the trick, it's only trying to get it to Vancouver or something. I wonder what colour paper PRISM uses for it's rejection slips.

The cookies turned out surprisingly well.

Reorganization of the house continues apace. Really. It's fantastic; I can sit downstairs and listen to the CBC on my phonograph with a couple funnybooks in my lap and my rantbook, for writing out genius mastermind plots! I'm feeling rather meshed the last couple of days, which usually means something bad's about to happen. But, as Caroline says, I shouldn't "be so fatalistic."

Awake too long into last evening with thought-experiments regarding the woman on the radio, who gives tours of Einstein's house.

Hopefully they like my short story enough to email me about it, because I have a sneaking suspicion that I forgot to stamp the self-addressed envelope that went in with my submission for the Fiddlehead. I am powerless when confronted by my own brain; it confounds me every time. But both submissions are now in the box, the mailbox, and they are out of my hands.

Plans: get to work on "Time Zones," which has stalled again. Call some people, maybe arrange a get-together or something. Play outside. I need a bucket with which to make sand castles.

The soft, but utterly reprehensible nature of Sundays. I don't think I got much of anything done; I'm worried that the story I started on Thursday night has stalled, but the only thing I could do with it was to stare at the pages and produce nothing further. Nothing! I'm going to try again in the morning with a fresh perspective and some emotional balance. It's - well. I don't know. It's another story set in Lenore, which I haven't done in a year beyond several attempts that went nowhere. Look at it in the morning after a hot shower. Something like that. It doesn't have a working title yet, which is frustrating because it feels like it has no identity yet - this fetus - but there's an ending in sight and it flickers into the magic realism or the fantastic or whatever you want to call that thing that I do. Some of the internal logic feels flawed, which is really a curse only until I get the whole thing typed up and then I can begin revisions on it. My biggest frustration is the issue of relationships - I'm attempting to demonstrate the homosocial without dipping into the homoerotic. There's a peculiar intimacy I'm trying to pin down, and it flickers away before I can quite get my hands on it--

Found someone to rent the third room by the end of May. Solid as fuck; friend of Christian's, she seems quite nice and solid and dependable. Quiet, too, which I enjoy.

Watch this space.

Transition periods advance, and swallow our continents, vaster than any "sea of despair" melodrama we could construct. They yawn over us, spitting up petrified feelings and unresolved "issues" like a copy of some literary journal you submitted to but it never went anywhere. Everyone in transit: not quite settled, half-moved-out, sleepwalking and sleeptalking around awkward furniture with the Fear playing background noise out of nearby radios. Maybe you have to wait weeks, maybe you have to dawdle along over hilltops in search of something. The "wait" / "weight" homonym lingers like a bad poem amid the wreckage, built up into bad philosophy and dialogue which suits only the stilted whine of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow.

Walked around the inner harbour and then across the Johnson Street Bridge with Joy this evening after a modest sushi roll dinner and some miso soup. A juggling man in the harbour approached me with his pins, chucked them at me, kept going even as I gave a yelp and let them rebound helplessly off my arm. I can't juggle, and my hand-eye coordination is more suited to finding writing instruments. Fat, constipated tourists laughed at me as we passed by. When we tried to cross the bridge a second time, it was up like a woman's skirt: no passing here, not yet. Waited around until it went down and then we crossed and had no epiphany - it was one of those moments that begged for one of them - except Joy reciting some story she'd heard about someone we knew with urine on a bridge in the backseat of a car while someone's father was driving.

I can't remember where I left my parachute; does anybody remember what colour it was?

"The Inexplicable Face" continues apace, having finally found a working title to hang upon itself with the ending in clear visible space - even if it isn't the final ending, even if this is only the first draft. And it is exceedingly first draft; there's so many things that aren't woven through it properly, ideas that occur mid-scene and pop up but need to be expanded upon. The narrator is now the son of a pastor, and has a name. I don't quite know all about the Boys - capital "b" - yet. Leanne doesn't have a voice as it stands. But I have a title and an end, I have something like forward progression and some basic questions about structure (as it stands - linear, a to b to c) needing further exploration. What do I want the story's shape to be? Do I want drips backward in time? I have those already in sparse intervals; the story needs to expand backwards as well as forwards.

The Future lies somewhere in between Margaret Cho doing an impression of her mother, and Robert Smith singing a track with the Cure.

Bed now, dream sandwiches followed by a suddenly and overwhelming sensation known as "Being Awake" with more story work. The sensation of being completely engaged with a story I'm writing is foreign right now, but it reminds itself to me in increments; this sensation at the back of my skull suggests all the brush strokes of writing a story to me, so I need to explore further. What?

I'm tired, it's past two, and I'm ludicrous. Really.

Highly recommended: Withnail & I, starring Richard E. Grant (Withnail) and Paul McGann (& I). Absurd British film from 1986. Two deplorable, out of work actors subsisting on the usual: drugs and booze. Barely. Grant in particular manages some full-body acting, wallowing in the infernal filth all around him. Inspired to write some more. More later.

The rest of the day is going to be spent finishing up the first draft of "The Inexplicable Face," followed by some notation and work on revisions for it. Two more scenes need to be finished and typed; after that I can start to the real work. There may need to be a scene in the church, but I'll probably wait for my second draft to explore the religious aspects of the narrator. I think my next story is going to have to be set primarily at night in a very claustrophobic city-scape with warm summer rain drenching the characters; Lenore stories always leave me lost in this desert wasteland with "egg-frying" heat, too much sand, and small town vibrations. I feel like compulsively applying moisturizer. After this, I'd like to jump into something different.

To expand upon Withnail & I: there isn't so much plot as episode, intervals of squalor and rancor. The sexual tension is intricate and simultaneously obvious to everyone and mostly ignored by the main characters; truth is dissected. Actually, it's mostly just fabulous for the sequences of divine fetid squalor; the film works best when its unsympathetic characters (the sexually-repressed, possibly closeted, whining Marwood; the deplorable, alcoholic, raving paranoid, compulsive-lying Withnail; the perversely eccentric vegetable fanatic queen Monty) bounce off of each other with no specific plot direction. Withnail proves to be so thoroughly vicious, conniving, and misbegotten that his constant feelings of self-entitlement simultaneously grate as well as amuse; he's lost without Marwood, even though he constantly abuses their friendship to get what he wants.

"The Inexplicable Face" is moulting: the first draft is complete, but rough, in the sense that it came back from Viet Nam a changed man. I've already begun revisions and plan on working up a second draft tonight once I've eaten dinner. The first scene has to be completely reworked and injected with energy; before it was a starting point, and now it needs to be changed. I also have to write that scene in the Church, work through some basic line edits, and play with the idea of narrative perspective; the first draft is first person with present tense, but I think I want to kick it back into past tense to smooth out some of the kinks in the voice. If that still doesn't work, I might make it all third person and rework it again - try that for the third or fourth draft.

Have to make some plot changes and expand on quite a few characters and situations - make those descriptions explode in the mouth. Pleased to see there are already several leitmotifs happening that I can play with a bit more, and the climax isn't nearly as out of left field as I thought it might be.

Picked up Richard Ford's A Multitude of Sins, which is a collection of short fiction, from the library today. Going through it at a pretty quick pace. I read a story of his about two years ago and really quite enjoyed it - "Calling" was the first story I encountered where the blushing bride phrase "Retrospective Narrator" was attached, and I really enjoy that device. I find I don't always agree with Ford's sentence structure - some of it is needlessly convoluted - and his characters always seem to be mid-Forties or early-Fifties men who work as writers, book editors, or lawyers; they are perpetually married, or divorced (and remembering their marriages). Or they've been involved in love affairs with married women that ended badly. However, Ford's choices in perspective, point of view, narrative distance (how close we are inside the character's head), and persona are always elegant and relentlessly beautiful. I started reading it today and immediately questioned what I was doing with "The Inexplicable Face" as far as the point of view.

At work, the Technical Services department has put out a vast list of missing items; books that have been misplaced, could be sitting lost in any branch or possibly none of them. Clerks run around for an hour or two everyday and scour the library for items on the list, but it's slow going and while a few turn up, many more do not. Maybe the books don't exist at all - maybe Technical Services just puts out a dummy list of items. Or maybe they existed once, and were unwritten.

Unwriters (I imagine) look like anybody else and have the correct number of toes under their shoes and socks. They stand too close to shelves while they read and unwrite books; their gaze destroys words, pages, covers, and book jackets - they leave nothing behind but a title, an author's name, and a catalogue number. They do not do it out of spite, nor because they hate words, but because Unwriters operate in a reality contradictory to ours, where time trickles down to a throbbing in the thumbs and ice cream is served hot and runny. They mutter to themselves in the backwards clicking language of spiders, and when finished unwriting, it appears to the naked eye that they've placed the book back on the shelf, in the wrong place - only you'll never quite find that book again. They are painfully sober, always, and the thought of alcohol makes them ill. Life is an endless joy for them, until they begin to unwrite - the procedure can drop them into a depression until they've finished the book. While a book is infinitely more susceptible to their eyes than human skin is, beware making eye contact; it will leave you with paper cuts.