wildcat

The big question this morning is where exactly to end Scene #4. I made a preliminary incision but I can always graft and rework later if it's not working. And now we swing into Scene #5, smouldering into the flashback sequence. As it stands, this story is a flawed beast and the other night I considered putting it out of its misery. More for my sake than its: the clawing sensation which is not unlike the Fear, but from the perspective of honesty rather than money. I'm having difficulty - have had difficulty - seeing the full arc of the characters. I know, vaguely, what the story is about; I have had an idea for while what exactly the story was about, but it lacks what you might consider a thrust and drive.

And, of coure, the other problem is one that my mother neatly articulated the other night on the phone, which is that I need my characters to be sympathetic, or understandable. The problem, in her estimation (and my father's, as well) of "The Inexplicable Face" from back in June, is that the characters aren't as completely fleshed out as they could be. I tend to like loosely sketched figures in my stories but there's always the question of whether or not that's a stylistic choice or plain, dull apathy. Laziness. That is, I think, why I suspect this particular story will be a novella rather than a short story - six characters all craving attention. Assuming that the piece isn't utterly boring from its lack of central conflict, and the quieter theme that popped up.

Anyway, I work at 2 this afternoon for four hours, and I need to go write some romantic backstory for two of the characters. Don't worry, if I ever get to the end and it looks like some of the characters might walk away happy, I send in an armed gunmen and shoot them all down.

1. One tall, gin rickey with a coaster underneath it, in a long glass thick at the bottom but smoothly blown for the occasion.

2. One delmonico, no ice.

3. One trigger: a word, a statement, something. I just spent ten minutes in the shower and thought up two more scenes for the story, but I still need to write up the romantic backstory so that I have it there to brew under the surface. The backstory is mostly imagined but stubbornly refuses to ejaculate out of the opening phrase for that particular scene. However, once I'm done this post I'm going to hit the word processor armed with a dozen or so books to find some snatch of dialogue or prose to pull the backstory up out of image and into language. Then I can hammer out those other scenes.

4. To collect my thoughts enough to send Christian an email, thanking him; he sent me two birthday presents that both arrived today. One was a book, Suzette Mayr's The Widows, about a trio of old woman going over Niagara Falls in a barrel; I saw Mayr speak at UVic once, applying for a tenured position that ultimately went to Lorna Jackson. She was a strong speaker and I'm sad I didn't have the opportunity to study with her. The other gift was a bar of German chocolate, which I admit I stuffed down my gullet after dinner. It was dark chocolate and velvet against my tongue. I probably should have waited for the week to open both on my birthday, but it's hard when you so rarely get happy mail instead of bills, bills, bills. The desire to open envelopes overwhelms.

5. For the Telus strike to end. My cell phone seems to be receiving hundreds of parallel universe text messages from this morning.

6. Some more music to rip onto my computer. I might investigate when I'm at work tomorrow, bring some home. The latest was a batch of Josephine Baker.

7. A tea party, to be held in a garden maze. With a round, wooden table with curving legs and an inoffensive light varnish. Dogwood chinaware. Two or three poets of various descriptions, possibly including my Polack friends, possibly including a pale pad of paper with three pens.

8. To wake up with Michael one morning without having to get up or rush off to work.

Benjamin Allan Rawluk.
Benjamin.
Ben.
Benjamin-Allan-Rawluk-Get-Up-Here-Right-Now.
Snickerdoodle.
Kidlet Woo.
Pickle Juice.
Benny.
Ben-Ben.
Jam-Jam.
Weenie-Man.
Micro Dude.
Antix.
Chaosmonkey.
Chaos.
Chao.
Noe Won.
The Son of Dracula (I was six).
Benny-Benny-Ben-Ben-Ben.
Quintuple-B.
Fucker.
The Little Red-Headed Homo.
Rainbow ("Rainbow! Come back, Rainbow! I want to play with you, Rainbow!").
Pure Love.
Kid Marvel.
Johnny Fuckface.
Faggot.
Wildcat.
Darling Wildcat.
Papers.
Wonder Boy.
Pooky.
Pookums.
Monkey.
Then (well, I always answer to that, anyway).
Dude.
(Oh) Meringue.
Slinky Boy (I don't want to talk about it).
Liquid Boy (same).
Silly.
The gay best friend.
Ben Allan.
Matt (Grade 4).
Franklin (Grade 5).
Johnny Damocles.
Jamina.
Narcis Pravda.
Azalea Blank.
The-Boy-Who-Calls-Me-Anais-Nin (sic).
Daniel Abbot.
Superman.
Sweetie.
Mama Gin's Favourite Son.

What are other people called? What do you all call yourselves? Lists, I demand lists, with copious notation!

I worked out in Colwood all day and then came home on the bus, catching all my connections in a timely fashion. The issue with my cellphone constantly spitting up a weird text message over and over got ironed out - after twenty minutes on hold - and Michelle came over. We went to Thrifty's and got supplies, made nachos. Drank raspberry juice and gabbled away for four or so hours, she just left a few minutes ago and I'm exhausted. It's the good, full, fulfilled exhaustion, though. I may spend a few minutes working on the story, transferring stuff out of my book onto the screen, and then I'll probably turn in.

The Widows by Suzette Mayr is really well done so far. I love how bile-filled and self-possessed the characters are, how they bleed into their histories only to argue over the details of the histories - someone is always there to point out that so-and-so wasn't born until five years later, or the like.

Tomorrow I work a four-hour shift in the evening, so I'm getting up early and cleaning my room, the bathroom, and buying this week's comics. I plan to spend at least an hour in the afternoon seriously working on a scene, maybe do some light revisions on "The Inexplicable Face," and then there's the issue of the Squaw Hall story, which still doesn't have a title and desperately needs one. I really don't want to have my father read it until it's ready, but I may need some input to fully flesh out the details.

The newly opened half-time position in Colwood, the one opened up because the previous half-timer got the full-time position there, closes on November Fourth, so I hope to hear sometime after that who they want to offer it to. I spoke to the branch head today about how she thought the interviews went and she reiterated how close it was, how strong the group as a whole was, and that she wanted no one new to apply for this position so that they could base it off our interviews last week. I won't be too sad if I don't get it, but I'm quite curious.

BUT! Regardless, I need to get some writing done before I crash out. I'm thinking at least two pages. Maybe up to an even fourteen total for the second draft.

I get a bunch of shifts scheduled while I was at work and then today I get a couple cancelled. For some reason I'm only working every other Sunday this month. Auxiliary clerks truly are shat upon.

Otherwise: chatted with Christian, ate a large dark chocolate bar, and bought a couple comic books. Bang. Found a cable bill underneath some junk mail, having wondered why it hadn't come yet. Damnable roommates. Ate, listened to the radio in the reading room, had pie, felt cold, did laundry.

Work this evening and then I'm going to sit downstairs with some comics and my rantbook to work on this story until midnight or so...

Margaret Cho talks about Gwen Stefani.

It's been a very weird day, one of those days where you realize half-way through the bad weather and the winter months creeping up on you actually has a chemical effect and that doesn't just happen to other people.

But. But. The rain smell. And the rumpled patches of blue sky in amidst the dark grey. There was, I say, five seconds of sunlight as I looked out my window this afternoon.

But rather than go on and on about the weather like it was going out of style, I made some headway with the story today and then I tried to do something which utterly disrupts the flow so we're just going to pretend that I didn't write it, cut out that whole half-scene and ignore the whole thing. It's embarassing.

I very much right now want to go back in time and join the KISS Army and run riot over Detroit and it sounds like I'm drugs right now, doesn't it? I'm not. Really, I'm not. But I have a roommate who's cellular ring-tone is the theme song to Doogie Howser, of all things, and I really want to get away right now.

I seem to be suffering from some kind of madness.

1. Checking my email this morning, a message from Krista, the shockingly amusing image of her playing Dance Dance Revolution.

2. I am very, very smart - I wrote the phone number down on the student loan forms.

3. I asked for the revision of the repayment and the fast-low-talking gentleman asked me how much I wanted to pay and I replied and then he said no. I'll be paying a compromise between the two, but it is still a bit more than I think I can afford right now. I feel very sad at the moment, but I'm going to have to do something. Suppose I won't be paying off that credit card any time soon.

4. I haven't been called into work yet. I'm sure they'll call me later, or tomorrow. Until then, I'm going to eat breakfast and write. And I need to make my bed. And perhaps another load of laundry, with bed things like sheets and such. And I should probably clean. Then the writing. Look, look, I must be in a productive mood! I'm procrastinating.

5. Listening to White Town's "I could never be your woman."

6. I hate when I lick my lips and all I taste is dried toothpaste residue undergoing radioactive decay. The diminishing potency of mint alpha particles.

1. The band that came up with the song "Sparkle and Shine" was Econoline Crush. I could not remember that this morning and I kept thinking it was treble charger. No.

2. Yesterday morning I woke up early, had a shower, and waited around to be called in to work. This didn't happen; instead, at roughly 10:20 in the morning Joy called from a payphone downtown to ask if I wanted to do breakfast at Floyd's Diner. I had just decided to do a bunch of autumn cleaning in my bedroom but I stopped that, put the sheets in the dryer, got dressed and went downtown. Arrived promptly and Joy already had a table; the food arrived both hot and in a timely fashion. After that we took off to the deli where Matt's working now, and I workshopped Joy's most recently rejected story for her.

3. And then there was the issue of the table. Joy bought a table for their new place from her work, so we bused out to Michael's place, picked up the van and drove down there to pick it up. Really. Our lives, tragically, are enfused with comic potential: the vaudeville consideration of two of the most impractical people trying to (a) deal with traffic, (b) get a kitchen table and four chairs into the back of a van, and (c) move it into their new place. Which is actually a pretty nice house split into three suites. Apparently there were a pair of sketched out crossdressers living underneath until recently. After some vague confusion we accomplished everything, although when we put the back seat back into the van afterward, there were people parked behind watching.

4. While with Joy, I got two phone calls for shifts this week.

5. After that I headed to Christie's Pub, had a cider and did some writing until Michael and Penny showed up, then we got drunk and had appetizers. Ashton showed up after work. Stumbled home with Michael afterward, had sex, curled up together and fell asleep.

6. Woke up this morning at 7:30, had a shower and waited around to see if I'd get called into work. I didn't, although I got a phone call about working on Wednesday morning. Then I watched Teen Titans and Justice League Unlimited, before we headed out to the Banana Belt Cafe to have breakfast with Daniel. So good! I had a nut burger with mozza and avocado, along with a chocolate milkshake.

7. Back home to work on cleaning. I vacuumed my room, pulling up the equivalent mass of a human being in randomly husked body matter. I'm about to go back to purging my comics and reorganizing in general some more. I keep thinking about moving my furniture, but there aren't a lot of options with this room structure.

8. And this evening: library party. Unsure how scandalous it will be this time, considering the last gong show with twisted ankles and damsels in distress.

Last night, dragged Michael along to a party at K's house, a potluck deal with unspeakable amounts of bean salad and vegan chili. We brought three kinds of cheese and french bread. It was a good time: people from work, a couple bottles of homemade wine, and the "Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers." We were home by 10:30 and watched Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which made me laugh too much and I don't care. After that we fell asleep.

Tuesday's coming up, my 25th birthday, so I'm scrambling up a list of people to phone and email about it. Probably be at Bravo's, assuming all works out. I should probably come up with an alternate plan, though.

Going to spend an hour or so working on the story. I'm going to transcribe passages scrawled on Friday at the pub. I'm still unsure of the overall thrusting plot or the underlying theme, although the concept of hair seems to be big and demanding more attention. I hate trying to find fresh music to throw on while I write, something suitable and dire-minded to fire off the correct sequences of synapses and blistering inspiration particles. We'll see.

I'm definitely going to fire up something genre after this ... whatever this is ... is finished and over with. Something fast paced with a lot of action.

The problem so far is that I like the characters, but as I've said before - this could dangerously, very easily, become a spectacular failure. I'm using italics, I'm using adverbs, I've got characters in a bathroom. It feels like a reversion of form, rather than some bold new experiment. But, occasionally, revisting one's roots can be a bold new experiment.

Tomorrow night I'm heading over to Joy and Matt's new place for the first writing night of the new season. Joy's finally over her fallow summer and ready to produce brilliant prose. Matt's been working the new job a lot so I've barely seen him, even less than I've seen Joy - it'll be good to touch base again. I look forward to writing on that new, brilliant wooden table Joy bought - there's something fascinating about that potential kitchen environment, with a table underneath. It would be the perfect setting for a typewriter.

I keep numbering things by accident. Do I need to number every paragraph I write? No. My rantbook fills in uneven stumbles with aborted story openings and pieces of this thing I write, this story, this dinner party thing. It wheels on, and I'll be working on it tonight while I'm at Joy's kitchen table. Before that, I need to apply foam to my face and scrape a blade across it, removing bits of my body growing out of my chin. Hair. Really. Things to focus on: the remaining characters hair decisions, another scene set in Greg's point of view, possibly some more backstory and maybe a fantasy sequence.

A story idea: all those hapless girlfriends from Silver Age comic books (Fifties to late Seventies). Lois Lane, Iris Allen (Flash's sweetie), Carol Ferris (Green Lantern's lover slash boss slash hateful opponent slash girlfriend-cum-demonic-male). A couple of others. Maybe Wonder Woman's on-again off-again Steve Trevor. They never got to do anything but get kidnapped or tricked into things for a very long time. Possibly with a little light bondage fetish. Or I could just settle down and write the True Story of Jimmy Olsen. Then get sued by Time-Warner.

I love the word "hapless."

It's sometime near eleven o'clock and finally, finally I'm writing something that's lasted more than three sentences. Finally. I'm going to bang out a few more words and then continue with pen and paper, in bed, cuddled up under blankets and pillows.

Yesterday was the birthday. Talked to people connected to me via blood or high school, roved through downtown Victoria after work, met up with Matt, and Michael, and Joy. Then we went out. Bravo has shut down, which is to say, it has stopped working - just public writs taped to the windows. Workers Compensation Board things. We went to Hugo's instead, which cost too much money and involved snotty waitresses who hurried us along because apparently we all look like whores. I got some really amazing presents from people.

Went to the Sticky Wicket and stumbled around with Joy while Michael and Matt beat random old men at pool. Never have I seen such a temper tantrum from a fifty year old. I did a shot of Jack Daniels and sour apple liquour, possibly mixed with some red kryptonite that caused me to become split in twain - good Superman and evil Clark Kent. The transformation only lasted twenty-four hours, but I could tell Michael was getting a bit irritable by the end of it. He handled the whole thing with grace and sophistication, stuffed me into a cab and took me home to bed with him. More than Lois Lane ever managed to do.

Came home later today and washed the martini glasses and bowls that Samara gave me, and drank a glass of the Amarula from Beth. Took too many showers. Spoke to Michael on the phone and became very sleepy.

I tend to injure myself. There was the incident with me tripping while crossing the street, running to catch the bus - I skinned my knee and cut up the back of my hand. The knee's better and the hand is almost completely repaired. Then I stopped on the sidewalk today to try and get a look at the bus coming up, see if it was the one I needed to take. It was: so I turned around and started to run. Only I was standing next to a metal street sign pole and WHAM, metal right up against the side of my head. My glasses flew off, but were okay. I managed to get to the bus stop and sheepishly got on the bus.

My head's a little woozy and I have four hours ahead of me. I think I'll be fine, but I'm getting a little tired of the Three Stooges routine that my life seems to descend to when nobody's around but scads of strangers who no doubt like to look at me and laugh. With pointing.

My head hurts.

Sorry to go goth for a moment, but the Wuthering Heights just kicked it up a notch and all I see is moors, MOORS, MOORS. And I'm not talking about Aaron the Moor. I'm talking damp, dirty, I'm talking about the sea exchanging places with the sky...and I've been in a snit. SHOCKING, I know, but it never ceases to amaze me what kind of an utter asshole I can be, especially to the people I love. Well, whatever. I have to pull on my party skin tonight and scrabble between corpses at Joy & Matt's for their housewarming.

I'm supposed to be off at five, but somebody called in sick and there are no other auxilaries available, so I'm taking a two hour lunch instead and working until six. Woo. I've also got a sore throat, which is worrying.

The housewarming party didn't happen, or it did happen but in another universe. We got there at half-past eight, a half-hour late, and waited around, banged on the door for ten minutes but nobody answered. Went home instead, curled up, fell asleep and woke up this morning to trundle to work. Lame.

KEVIN WAS SUPPOSED to get the money for Sean's pictures - that was the deal. But, typical, Kevin fucked it up; the cash in French francs, and Sean a desperate American jerkoff with no great love for the frogs. They didn't have a deal, which meant that he wouldn't get his hands on those pictures, those negatives, that evidence - no way to burn them. Sean with his Walmart polyester ties and cherry red sports jacket, ready to go to Kevin's with with proof - indelible, glossy, 9x11 proof - that Kevin was a no-good, two-bit pussy-licker every other weekend at the old Burlesque House on Main. Acts of acrobatic cunnlingus, strapped to harnesses over the stage, pulling Miss Mary Jane Capote's skirt up in mid-air to perform an oral examination for the audience to glisten over. How could Kevin explain that Jenny? She'd never take it well, not when she still studied her Catechism on Sundays while the kids played on the patio. No way about it: Kevin was going to have kill Sean and make it look like auto-erotic asphyxiation.

(c) 2005 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved.

1. After a relatively carefree day at work, I went over to Samara's house and had dinner with her, Crystal, Dave, and Dana. It was good; we (read "Samara and Crystal") made spaghetti with cheese sauce, roasted red peppers & zucchini, a salad, and garlic bread. The whole affair was rather good, and two new plans arrive on the horizon: a ear-candling/chocolate fondue party, and a drinks evening at my place, to make use of all these glorious martini glasses. Michael was supposed to come, but he's apparently buried under an unexpected amount of homework.

2. I really should never leave my house, because I came home and now the upstairs toilet has had a fit because of my roommate, and I used it and it's flooded as usual. I'm mopping up the mess, but we seem to have run out of bleach. I'm going to have to pick some up in the morning, and I'm going to clean that motherfucking bathroom. And I'm going to email the landlords and ask them if they'd eat the expense of having a plumber come in and figure out what these bastards' problem is, that they're always having plumbing freak-outs. PS, I feel like moving out today.

3. I am a leaf on the wind.

4. Alice Hoffman's collection of interlinking short stories, Blackbird House is really beautiful so far. It inspires me, I'm going to work on some writing once I've finished dealing with this toilet. And that all gives me an idea for the story I've been working on for over a month now, the one I haven't touched in a week. I'm going to do that.

5. My mother was discussing coming down for Christmas, before my phone went dead. The only problems, as she brought up: I wouldn't be able to have dinner with Michael and his family on Christmas Day, which would suck and she doesn't want me to have to miss that. My granny is incompetent and this point and Mum would have to do all the cooking, unless my aunt was doing it in which case the whole passive-aggressive cycle would start a-going. My mum would have to sleep in a chair, because she now needs a special posture-pedic bed that she has in PG. I'm saying it resoundingly looks like a bad idea because of all that, but I would like to see my mum.

1. On the toilet front, the landlords are going to call in a plumber to fix them in the next few days. They were shocked that we hadn't mentioned anything; the toilets have been eccentric since before I moved in, but more recently they've graduated to paranoid schizophrenic. Which means that somebody has to be home to let the plumber in, whenever that happens. I'm hoping Friday's the day, because tomorrow is my only day off and I'd like to get a few things done, but needs win out over desires. Either way, I've managed to work some of the toilet nonsense into the story I'm working on - I quite like what's happening, actually, it's successfully fleshed out the characters a little bit.

2. Watched 2010: The Year We Made Contact tonight, the sequel to Kubrick's 2001. While the latter film has passed my eyes so many times that I can get an A on a paper about it without actually watching any of it over again (I have done so at least twice, as I recall), but I'd only seen 2010 once, and I was quite young at the time - I remember watching it with my parents, but other than an early sequence with Roy Schneider at a range of giant satellite dishes, it was pretty much a blank screen for me. Watching it a second time, I can't say that I was impressed, per se, but it was a lot better than I expected. It ran with a lot of the original film's ideas, and created this odd ghost story in space, with some moments of actual panic and anxiety - I like the way the film portrayed unprotected movement in space. The Dave Bowman stuff was interesting, but probably introduced too late in the film; the ending was trite but managed to suggest something. Helen Mirren as a Russian cosmonaut was kind of fun, but it felt like they started to develop her character too late. A lot of anxiety hinges on HAL 9000 and what we know of him from the first film. The music is late Eighties synth-pop mood music, but if I can forgive it and even groove to it with Blade Runner, I can probably deal with it here. John Lithgow surprised me. It wasn't the most amazing thing, but it was competent for its time, and the use of political background and text/subtext was mostly well done. I like that there was no romantic subplot even though there were plenty of opportunities for it.

3. I think, after I finish this current story, I'm going to write a story about Marilyn Monroe. Or I'm going to write a story about a Marilyn Monroe knockoff, a character derived from her, but inverting her. I still like the idea of redoing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a story about two white trash girls going across the desert on a Greyhound, but we'll see. To be more in line with my views on the movie, it'd have to be two drag queens, but then you start to wonder what new ground it's breaking in comparison to Priscilla Queen of the Desert, or even my short story, "Drag Race on Mercury." Which remains one of my favourites stories that I've written. In the end I'll probably skip the idea and go with a completely different element of the Monroe ouevre. But not Some Like it Hot, because that's back into the same territory.

4. I babble too much about inconsequential things. I seem to be getting over this mini-cold, which is good. I'll pop some tylenol and drift into this thing called SLEEP. It'll probably just turn out that I've been colonized by thousands of sentient bacterial, forming a corporeal empire down my esophagus and into my nasal cavity--

It's after midnight and I should probably go to bed. But.

Tomorrow evening I must be le beau garçon, I must be dapper, which is to say - well put together. I must pirouette, I must sip wine with elegance and decorum, I must practice the exquisite art of the concubine. As in: conversation about pleasant nothings, brief dissertations on the taste of the cheese provided, I must varnish myself like an old cabinet made new, keep all the unpleasant elements from sticking out from underneath the collar of my (metaphorically) starched shirt. I must escort.

1. I received the letter in a constructed envelope (lined paper taped into the shape of an envelope, with the correct address and the last name "Millionaire" in the return address, movie quotes everywhere), informing me that a party happening in the past was not and will not and did not happen. There was also intermittant stabbing sarcasm vis-a-vis the performance of Telus, and the handwriting changed once between letter-writers. The letter has travelled between two or three parallel universes, ones in which sometimes the party happened and sometimes it didn't.

2. They have a phone number now, and I have called them. Left a message on the utilitarian voice mail.

3. Friday night, I attended a launch party and drank wine, ate cheese, consumed too many pieces of cauliflower and dip. The zucchini was corrugated; why would you corrugate a zucchini? It is not used for the purposes of packing things, certainly not expensive chinaware. It is to be eaten. Slipped between the lips and chewed. Afterward, eleven of us went out for dinner at La Petite Saigon, and then back to someone's house for drinks. I walked away having consumed three glasses of boxed red wine (fresh from the plastic bladder, of course), one Manhattan, one Hermann's, and two gin-tonics with about half-half mixture. I spent half an hour discussing the contribution of Jane Russell to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the failure of Dylan Thomas. Additionally, the blacks-only bars in South Africa, the nature of war, the hypothetical understanding of other people's horrors. Innuendos were thrown about and eventually we made it into a cab.

4. At work yesterday (Saturday), an email was written by one of the supervisors to the personnel department, commending my work ethic. This will be going into my permanent record.

5. The Triplets of Belleville is masterful; we watched half the movie before the computer encountered and error and shut it off. The characters of Belleville are fleshy; they and their world are undulating masses of flesh, bound by geometry. New York is a flesh city, bulbous and expressive. Their bodies are instruments, even the deathly thin ones. They reverberate. After the error, we watched the second half of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and passed out - too hungover from the night before, even at that late hour.

6. Sunday brunch, chocolate milkshake, my back sore and ungainly.

Occasionally, during the winter months, it is highly important to drink a mug of peppermint tea with the teabag still contained therein - tea stronger than Superman, stronger than steel. Man.

I have given up, I have given in, I have opened my arms and dropped the stacks and stacks of false starts, all the starts I have started since my ragged feet began to stumble through the dinner party story. I have gotten rid of all the procrastination story projects and focused my attention back on the party, on the characters, on the scene. I'm attuning my head to Simone again and I'll finish up that scene. It's approached the part of the night when my writing clicks on for real. I'm eating incomplete things and drinking tea and watching Bottle Rocket while I work. I work. I work. I work. I seem to be stumbling over this, over words, over my head.

Actually, I keep thinking about quitting, but then Allen Ginsberg smacks my head and says Shut your angel mouth, and get back to work, bitch and down I go again.

Meanwhile, I'm going to bed. Meanwhile, I'm stoned. Meanwhile, I'm home from Joy & Matt's, where we wrote for a while, Matt made cookies, we played Jeopardy, wrote some more, listened to the BBC... Meanwhile, Joy read the story about my dad, which has been titled: "My Father is an Invisible Voter." There is another, less successful title, but we need to be honest. Meanwhile, I need to go to the bathroom. Meanwhile, I have to fiddle with the story about my father and expand on sections, smooth out the language -- tomorrow, I hope. Meanwhile, I have ideas for the dinner party story, which will be a much longer piece I think. Meanwhile, the sentences I write while writing my stories under the influence acquire a breakneck speed and will require future editorial analysis. Meanwhile, anal. MEANWHILE, my phone's having a fucking crisis again so I have to phone the phone company (whew) again, and get them to do something about it. Meanwhile, I'm not scheduled to work tomorrow but must indeed get up and wait by the phone which is of course having that crisis. Meanwhile, I need to do laundry. Meanwhile, I'm halfway done Alice Hoffman's The River King, a murder mystery of all things which is divine. Meanwhile, we're going to be doing a zine called "Mad Typewriter Gang." Meanwhile, Matt and Joy both came up with killer suggestions, but the only idea I've managed so far is a clever concept for the biographical notes. Meanwhile, all my ideas will essentially form their own black hole and be deemed inadmissable. Meanwhile, Matt has become peculiarly concerned with orange juice. Meanwhile, I'm constantly meanwhiling. Meanwhile, the air was filled with moist mist that clashed with the late night street lights that flashed on and off and blistered the swollen air every time. Meanwhile, Joy liked the story and provided some really good insights. Meanwhile, she's writing a story of her own with a really good title and "really good" is a cop out statement. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. MEANWHILE.

It's been an oddly fulfilling day. The casserole this morning didn't turn out right - something about the tomatoes and the cheese sauce didn't mix correctly, but the whole thing didn't taste too bad and I didn't die of starvation and I left the house forty minutes before work and got there on time. Tracey left me an envelope with the lemon tiramisu recipe contained therein, so I can relay that to Michael or something. Maybe actually bake something myself; I'm not sure at what point I stopped doing that. I didn't get anything done on the story, but the cooking this morning felt creative and after work I was sociable, for once, and had dinner with Tara and Samara on a whim. Lotus Pond; mmn. Vegetarian Buddha-Belly food.

I think I'm going to have a late night shower now and then I'm going to fall asleep under a lot of covers and dream incomplete things, jumbled images, jigsaw puzzles cast into the air and left to mingle on the ground, underfoot.

Tomorrow, I'm going to make Michael watch To Sir With Love.

1. What do you do for fun?

Maybe you haven't heard, darling, but there's a depression on, a recession. A confession: I sit down and I write things out, I kibitz and debate with Joy, I bicker endlessly with Michael, I read things. I over-indulge on comic books and pretend to be clever and watch movies - some ridiculous, some beautiful. I like to fatten myself up on sushi with the latest issue of whatever. I lust, judge, and annihilate as I see fit. Hilarious.

2. Is there a person from your past you would like to talk to again, even if it would be a potentially painful conversation?

Of course. There have been quite a few friends by the wayside, and certain ex-boyfriends I could do to make peace with.

3. What is your favorite comfort food?

Sushi. Macaroni and cheese. Chocolate. Possibly all at once; possible the Gin.

4. What is your preferred form of self-expression? (Do you dance; or express yourself through music, conversation, etc.)

Have you heard me try to have a conversation? Probably not because I mumble, but the words "gibbering idiot" come to mind. I express myself most succinctly in the words I spell out with piss on snow, in the winter time. Outside, full and ripe with beer.

5. You just received $5000; what do you spend it on?

Student loan. And maybe a new camera for Michael, some shoes. I still need shoes badly.

Needless to say, less than a sentence into my edits on "My Father is an Invisible Voter," my mother called. She actually has the remarkable ability to interrupt me whenever I'm trying to get down to the serious business of writing. Then I got distracted by other things, some online things, giggling on the phone with Tara.

But now I'm back to it: the story. It's nice to breathe something other than the air of the dinner party story. Joy made a good suggestion about the first sentence issue and I like that better than what I had before, but I've had to smooth it out a bit to make sure all the important information is imparted without, I think, sounding awkward. Some of the prose flails into the turgid, and while part of that is important to establish the narrative persona, I need to even it out in places so that it doesn't distract.

And I'm liking this little grouping of sentence fragments:

Things will go wrong. Beer everywhere. The concrete, the wood. The air, all thick like spittle at the corner of a mouth. The smoke, the ash, the curling armpit stench there to choke him. Everything has grown: the way legs seethe inside denim, the gobs spat from the lead singer's misguided lips. Men dwarf the six-foot walls.

There's a political undercurrent going on as well that I'm trying to tease out. While I worked on one of the paragraphs a couple minutes ago, a couple sentences popped up and wrote themselves in and it surprised me - but it worked with the flow, and gives me a better idea of the narrator's context or some other such bullshit. Actually, to be honest I haven't quite figured out the issue of all that, but I'm a couple steps closer. I wish I could just flick the lightswitch already. Illuminate the answer.

The other issue is the Why - as Joy pointed out - why is this story being told? Why is the narrator telling this story? I know on my surface level, but I need to work it more deeply into the piece. It hinges around a particular line - a line I was worried about when I wrote it, because I didn't want it to be too over the top. I don't know.

Well, the panic attack this morning - MORNING - was a voice mail from BC Hydro telling me that we were having our power cut off because SHOCK, there was a failure to pay. Right. Right: because we haven't gotten our bill in a while. Fuckers. After the requisite flailing while Michael tried to make me smile or calm down or respond like a NORMAL PERSON CAPABLE OF RATIONAL THINKING, I phoned them up, got treated like a deadbeat, and got them to hold off on the power-cut until Monday, by which time I'd have them paid. Still a bit panicked, I got a ride home from Michael and just spent a rather confused half-hour setting up online payment, and produced to pay the missing money to the hydro company. Then I paid all my other bills in one heady, drunken swoop. I'm still edgy about it and will call Hydro on Monday to make sure the transaction went through correctly on their end, but that's that. I think I'm all done. I think, possibly, I can calm down now.

Of course, I have to wait for my phone to recharge so that I can call the plumber and set up a very specific time and place for someone to come over and fix the neurotic toilets, but I can do that in a little bit. Meanwhile, I'm going to go to Thrifty's and pick up some food and scream silently in my head for a good ten minutes.

I really admire people who could have managed to deal with all of that without having what amounts to a temper tantrum. No, no, no, I'm not allowed to progress past the emotional age of three. Really: I must be a confused and boiling child forever, long past death and taxes. I wish I understood money, but that sounds like effort and I fear it.

Yes, I'd like some cheese with my whine.

That peculiar, drowning sensation lasted right up until the transvestite at the bus stop. And then boom, rapid-fire my brain left the tunnel out into the clear indigo of space. All systems go. Work was a senseless distraction with a few offbeat moments and then the bus-ride home.

The River King by Alice Hoffman was a decent read; the murder itself was suitably grotesque, the narrative persona was a roving omniscient with a particularly gothic inclination. Now I'm reading of her books, Seventh Heaven, a far superior book - it reminds me of Atwood, again, but with less of the obvious feminist subtext (although it is there) and a looser style. It surprises me how many writers remind me of Atwood, only with more curve to their language. She's had a widespread effect. After this book, When Rabbit Howls, by the Troops for Truddi Chase - an autobiographical case study of disassociate identity disorder.

BUT, anyway, Leonard Cohen's playing and my breath is full of word-sex and my wrists are bent and I want to fire off some sentences into the storied void. I might fire up a scene or two of the dinner party story onto the blog for some commentary, later.

Fighting with a scene, trying to get the right foothold on Greg's point-of-view, and the extreme importance of hair therein. I feel that this scene will effectively bring some balance to the force, as it were: definition, direction. Something needs to have changed when the scene is finished, over and done. At the very least, it will give us some more backstory.

I like this passage, although it could probably use a bit of chopping up and editing. It could use circumcision. While I had meant Helen to be an Atwoodian (read: psycho-neurotic) composite of certain people, she is disturbingly like me. But all characters are ourselves, no?

Her jaw tensed; the anxiety boiled. The toilet had started to speak to her five minutes ago. Not with a mouth, not with a voice, but with shuffled transmissions, the marbled weeping of toilets as far back as the dawn of plumbing. Carl was dead, it said. Carl was flushed. Storm drain. Gutter corpse. Maybe it was her, maybe it was the smoked salmon, maybe it was the wine (but had she ever been a cheap drunk?), maybe after a year of her being Marc's roommate the toilet was done with her self-induced aneurysms atop it, the ball-cock ready to exert over her. Ready to plumb her depths. To speak. She sat, wrapped in woven panic and snatches of toilet paper clipped between her stubby photographer's knuckles.

Carl off in Mexico, some slut under his arm, buying a fresh family of orphans for fifty bucks. Broke, ditched, mugged, beaten with baseball bats and crowbars. Hospitalized with two cracked ribs and a detached retina. The depravities of the porcelain god: knocked out and pissed upon by homeless muggers in rank, wretched Lulu Lemon pants that fit too easily over burnt bone hips.

Anyway, back to work-back to work. It's eleven o'clock and I have to get much done before this night is out! I must compose like a deity. I must raise my hands and command the orchestra!

"It wouldn't be so difficult. Already I have this 2-year-old son with a mommy complex in a big way—he seems to derive all sorts of comfort and sustenance from my very presence—and I plan to fully exploit this. I have role models; I was always quite taken with the bit in the movie Auntie Mame where Rosalind Russell's tiny ward assembles a morning martini for a prim and proper banker."(Lisa Brown)

Breakfast this morning was turnip cakes and chow mein at the Lotus Pond, half-wrecked and impossible to function. Last night was the housewarming party, and I can feel every iota of it in my diseased insides. I couldn't stay and take care of Michael today, my hangover drove with me to work on the bus. My hangover pilots my body around through my day. I've only got another two hours and then I can go home - I'm thinking a very long, very hot shower the very second I get in the door. And then I'm going to stare at the ceiling and try not to think about all that wine...

It began, the first desperate mutterings began, in the churches. People began to speak in tongues, as their Vishuddhas began to open: throbbing, erect throat chakras. They spoke in dirty tongues, in salty tongues, they sputtered out mantras of hard, of moist, of now. It began here, with the Earth hirself opening, ready, no stranger to sex. People stopped going to work, groped themselves and those around. The Songs of Solomon were shouted from rooftops, amid rainstorms, prostitutes made sacred vessels to Astarte's radiance. Farmers slept with farmhands, postmen rang twice through the heartland, televisions were left on while housewives screwed the next door neighbours and their children's teachers. The frenzy increased, spread like legs, office buildings became brothels with security guards jacking off to expensive video displays of the typing pool gone mad, absolutely batshit. Everyone in drag, everyone in leather, everyone in spandex and body paint - liquid latex dripping into your navel, candlewax up against your ear, the heat! Mahogeny tables at the United Nations swept free of documents and strategems, while world leaders fucked each other on them and mumbled horrible things to each other, all their dirty little secrets - where the missile silos were, how much cocaine they'd done for breakfast. Art and Philosophy gave way to true, beautiful masturbation - beret-fiascoed intellectuals met in coffeehouses with double dildos, kegel beads, puckered lips as they screwed in omnisexual orgies of light and colour. They watched each other come, offered constructive criticism, gave in and jumped in, jumped onto each other. Everything excited, Statues erected to Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs, or half-erected before workmen tore into each other, ravenous, pornographic stereotypes made flesh and blood and cum. Everyone objectified! The gaze, no longer lazy but laserly, cutting, electric. Taboo: every object fetishized, every item of castration or subjugation perverted and sexed. To kiss, tongue-bathed, an entire species driven to excess, their loins spurting, sperm and eggs achieving escape velocity, the entire planet an endlessly repeated cum shot, vast and grainy and vividly shot--

(c) 2005 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved

The flaw with Bride & Prejudice, the Bollywood rewrite of Austen's Pride and Prejudice is that it adheres to closely to the form and structure of its source material; they kept in step with the Austen, when there were a great many points when the material fell short and they could have worked with it a bit and altered it to fit the characters a bit more carefully. Character revelations were delivered at appropriate plot points in accordance with the original, even though it came off forced. That said, the film looks beautiful with a lot of real solid work done with colour. They worked with globalization and cultural appropriation concerns, made it feel political while at the same time light and frothy.

The music was a bit hit or miss; some of the earlier sequences worked really well, but at times their attempts to blend different kinds of musicals produced irritating Grease rip-offs. Other times, it shuffled uncomfortably into ultra-gloss boyband music video territory, although I liked how they used the musical sequences to balance out the unrealistic shifts of love/hate. There was a solid blending of Indian music and gospel at one point.

I walked away feeling satisfied but ultimately more for the editing, cinematography, and use of colour.

It's after Midnight and I'm about to strip off all my fiction-suits in favour of my dream-suit, but I've written three pages that don't make me want to vomit until my internal organs are all external organs, liquid ones to boot. All sixty miles. I'll keep the pages and work on them tomorrow, some of the prose is awkward and there's that thing where you feel the need to explain everything all at once. I need to even that out.

I need to find some time to scrub my room. Too many bits of crap floating around: old bills, pillows, belts, books (library & otherwise), comics. An empty glass stained with raspberry juice. The phone number for the plumber, scrawled on a bent bit of paper. The requisite pad of post-it notes, still sealed in plastic and little more than a drinks coaster at this point. I don't work on Thursday, so I might spend the morning cleaning up while the plumber's here, getting rid of all the paperwork I don't need but cling to for no good reason. Dusting. Maybe a little light laundry.

Tomorrow, I'm working out in Gordon Head, at one of the busy branches, and then I'm going out to help Daniel celebrate his last day on the job. I look forward to holding Michael's hand and a fine martini. Shaken, of course.

Instead, instead, instead of the very fine martini, I had a glass of Herman's Dark, with garlic-breaded prawns and a lemon halibut burger. Michael was taking Daniel downtown afterward, go to Garrick's Head and then drag queen bingo. Not me: money's tight, the angels sing, I wanted to finish reading Alice Hoffman's Seventh Heaven, sit on the toilet, maybe scribble some words.

There are people arguing outside; this isn't unusual. There are usually arguments, cats fighting, traffic running along the avenue - it's never really quiet.

The Hoffman book made me sad, because I'm nowhere near that good. She achieves a rotating empathy for her characters; all around them, inside them, beneath them. Above. The book is not about the death of the American Dream; it's about people waking up from it, in the uneasy transition from the Fifties to the Sixties, when you didn't say the word divorce in a certain kind of community, a certain neighbourhood setting. The blurb makes the character Nora sound full of intentions, full of a specific goal; this is all subterfuge, because she's just a woman who's had some bad times, and distantly remembers good times, and has kids. I think I like the book because it's not about making the right choice, but a choice; knowing for sure that what you're doing is what you want. It's about people waking up. Hoffman executes the novel with care, and I'm looking forward to the next one I'm going to read.