wildcat

Hasn't come yet. I got up at seven-thirty on my one day off this week, and he hasn't gotten hear yet. I'm hungry but there's very little food in the house; I was planning on grocery shopping afterward. I'll see if I can scrape something together down there, maybe smear cream cheese onto a tin of tuna or make particularly bizarre pancakes. Maybe pancakes and cream cheese. Michael phoned, still a bit drunk from last night, and then he was going back to bed. I paid my phone bill and had to turn down a shift on Dec. 30th, because I'm already working that day.

McSweeney's today: "There, almost hidden among blades of grass, is a tiny pyramid. Oh no, you think, not more Egyptians!! But this is no Egyptian pyramid. It's terraced, and you know what that means. You've got yourself an Aztec infestation." (E. Silver)

I pass the time by watching Russian Spider-Boys performing bizarre acts of physical dexterity. The camera work is shoddy, but there are some pretty wild feats in there; I liked the Fred Astaire on the side of the bus bit, particularly. The musical choice is a bit suspect in places, as well. [Via]

1. My toes are very cold.

2. The plumber hasn't shown up, again. And I will somehow have to find time to sit around all fucking day again and wait for the fucking plumber to show up. Again.

3. My roommates, naturally, conveniently, haven't been around at all to maybe also wait for the plumber. Just me. By myself.

4. I fucked up the procedure for two refunds at work yesterday because I'd only done one before and I've just spent ten minutes on the phone with a supervisor having procedure explained to me, and trying to help them figure out what exactly went on so they can put in the proper paperwork. Someone will be going over prodecure again when I go into work tomorrow. Each one was just five bucks, but "just five bucks" doesn't work as an excuse, other than my stupidity. I know it's a learning process, but I feel like an idiot.

5. My nose won't stop running.

6. I feel tired and sick and want to hide under a blanket.

I might toss aside stories and hunker down with poetry for a while. I need a break and I need to flex my words in another direction. I looked longingly at a Ted Hughes book tonight, of all things, despite my distaste for the fucker. I cracked open Neruda when I got home with a dripping guacamole-encrusted sub sandwich at 10pm (olives, lettuce, tomato, the works); these are all signs. The signs all say: Go Forth, My Son, & Starve; Be a Poet. In other words, I'm going to be drunk for the next week and a half.

I'll probably submit "My Father is an Invisible Voter" to the Danforth Review once I get some more feedback from a few people and can make some final changes. I'm not entirely convinced of the ending, but if it gets rejected (when it gets rejected), I can always take another crack at it. The DR prefers and encourages experimental writing, and I hope my time structure fits under that heading. If I wasn't so chickenshit I'd send it in tonight, right now, and never look back.

For the record: everything was fine with the fuck-up at work. They solved the problem and when I went in today somebody went over the whole procedure with me and pointed out that it isn't something that occurs very often, so quite a few people have screwed it up in the past. I asked a couple questions, got some clarifications, and then went on desk. And had another one, right away. But I did everything correctly and I'm confident this time. "Doesn't occur very often," my sweet arse.

Plans this weekend - I work tomorrow until six and then something's bound to turn up. I might see what's happening with some people, maybe inquire after Tara and Samara, maybe think of something to cheer Joy up. I work on Sunday afternoon and hopefully Michael I are going to Stuart McLean's Vinyl Cafe Christmas performance in the evening; we discovered it was happening while we waited for our Chinese food last night (which was beauty, except that they forgot the prawns fried rice; Splendid Chinese Restaurant wasn't so Splendid), so I'm not sure how much tickets are or if they're even still possible. I'm optimistic, seeing as how I saw Atwood after expecting to be turned away into the cold. The Vinyl Cafe's about as Christmas as I'll get, otherwise it's all Solstice and miso soup.

I wish I could drag my typewriter to work with me tomorrow and sit at the desk, noisily typing away poems while irate Colwood people squeal about fines and THEIR RIGHTS AS CITIZENS, which are bug-fuck utterly wrong. I would hand-deliver typed notices of stupidity. Stupefaction.

On desk today, amid tedium and listless, sweaty customers propagating foul odours into my air, the air I breathe, I decided to write seven poems about the deadly sins. Trite, derivative, self-explanatory, but I'm going to do it. As is natural for a Scorpio, I will be writing about lust firstly.

Afterward, after work, I caught a bus with Jenny and got off at Hillside, stumbled homeward and phoned Samara. We made dinner: burritos. Ate them, watched a shit Jennifer Lopez movie, ate cookies, and then I took off for home. Still up, still awake, still vital: I'm going to swagger sexlessly around the bedroom, cleaning up, putting things away, clearing my mental space. And then I'm going to work on "My Father is an Invisible Voter." Or write poems. Or both. I'm going to listen to movies, and I'm going to debate the merits of a new cellphone because the phone I have is falling apart and unreliable and I have a toy bird that Michael gave me for my birthday - he gave it to me alone, while nobody was looking, in bed. It is metal and paper and beautiful. I shall, probably, write a poem about it.

Stuart MacLean's out, the tickets cost too much. But we're not staying in: we're going to Pagliacci's to listen to Klezmer music if it's playing; otherwise to eat and drink a martini or two. I eat out more than is perhaps healthy, but we haven't done much that's properly out and about in some time. Invitations will be extended.

Received Monsieur Long's comments with regard to "My Father is an Invisible Voter," and I'm feeling positive. He had considerable to say with regard to the piece's tone and diction; I fall too easy into the turgid, and need to cut it back some. However, the problem lies in finding an even balance - between enough sparseness to let the story stand on its own, and enough of the turgid tone to flesh out the narrator as his own character, seperate from storyteller.

Tomorrow, my day off, I'll wake up at a reasonable hour and do some work on the story, going through the opening to balance it out some more and make it an easier door into the story - he has a point, the chaos of the story begins almost right away and I don't give the reader enough room to maneuver before the fiasco begins. I don't think I can remove the overwriting completely because it's part of the point - as Joy pointed out when she read it, the tone of the narrator exposes a distance from his father and his father's past concerns.

Matthew also made some point about my continuing theme of "Party as Shattered Narrative," which I quite like.

Sunday night was brilliant; Joy & Matt & Michael & I (which will be the title of my next film) had a double-date at Pagliacci's, where the Hermannators were on special for $4.75 - we started off with several baskets of the hot, peppered bread, followed by a plate of gravlox. Gravlox! With a dill-mustard dipping sauce, capers, red onions, and cherry tomatoes. Matt had this gorgonzola ravioli dish, Michael had this elaborate dish with pine nuts and beauty in it. Joy & I went with the demure half-order Sophia (Named for Loren, not Koppola) - egg noodles with shrimp, crab, and smoked salmon. Delight! A creamy checkerboard cake for dessert.

As we ate dessert, the Yiddish Columbia State Orchestra keyed up with some Klezmer music, a couple new songs, and the omnipresent accordian. Afterward the lead singer, Marianne, came up and clasped Michael to her ample bosoms - he was, as they say, an old school fan, and familiarity bred itself at some point. She wore a dashing purple gown which had undergone an unfortunate zipper malfunction at some point. She showed Michael her Mao Tse Tung cigarette lighter (flip it open and it sings The East is Red at you) while the rest of us waited on the street and took in the brilliance of the night air.

Followed by: brisk walk to Joy & Matt's, the production of certain muffins, the consumption of certain muffins, the creation of certain new email accounts, and then Michael took me back to his place. He forgot his scarf, poor thing, but I picked it up from their place when I went over for the writing night.

1. Groceries acquired! Breakfast was Salt & Vinegar potato chips and brie. Why? Why not. Dinner will be pasta with lemon-herb prawns and mushrooms.

2. Next operation: washing the shitty downstairs bathroom. I bought bleach. I've got bathroom cleanser. I've got a priest, a rabbi, and a bad punchline on hand to purify and sanctify the toilet. Do a banishing and a hard scrub. Wash the rug. Mutter backward incantations while I do so; just to be sure. I might just burn down the house and start all over again.

3. Afterward, I'm swaggering up Hillside to the liquor store to pull myself a bottle of wine, something cheap, and some orange juice besides to, as it were, mull some wine this evening, to celebrate the day off and the clean bathroom and the lights in my head. I will use one of those packets of mulling spices that Christian gave me. I'm going to probably crack open Pussy, King of the Pirates or I'll just lazily edit "My Father is an Invisible Voter."

1. Goldie Hawn does a decent impersonation of Groucho Marx.

2. Editing begins: I opened the file and read the first few sentences, disagreed with Matthew's estimation of them, agreed with his estimation of them, changed a few piddling words, stared at them again. It can go on like this, at times; editing is a neurotic, overly analytical, micro-managing affair. Details! There probably aren't enough of them, at present. There is an overgrowth of metaphor, to be pruned. I'm not quite sure I get my point across with "killing field dance floor," but it may need to be cut out. "Murder the little darlings," Faulkner said. Was it Faulkner? I tried to google for it, but the top result was a previous Wildcat entry, which tells you something about something. I'm not sure what, exactly.

3. I keep hitting the space bar at imprudent moments, and then having to delete the excess.

The writing has hit a wall, so I'm going to have a shower and then do some more; I find the procedure of running water over bare skin is terribly therapeutic and inspiring, if only because it gives me time to do nothing but think mad thoughts about sentences and character. At some point I gave myself a paper cut, but I can't remember when. Is it any wonder?

Otherwise, the usual sophisticated responses to questions asked, and the usual idiot scramblings interpreted as rarefied genius, worthy of dissection.

Actually, the whole thing's a bit shit and I've downed an entire bottle of wine by myself with orange juice in there as well. And eaten a chocolate bar, which is burning up in my body and desperate to make itself known.

It's terribly cold outside but it's terribly hot in here, and I haven't turned on the heating once this year. Not once.

1. Michelle is now engaged: not a hoax, not an imaginary story - engaged. She and Mike will probably be getting married in a year or a little bit more than that - a healthy, long engagement - but they'll be tying the knot. I'll be in the wedding party, apparently. Also, because the bank has decided to fast track her into management, she'll be moving to Fort St. John for six months for training.

2. Mark, apparently, has told the landlords (before us) that he'll be moving out. Michelle mentioned this. Now, I've been thinking about moving for a few days, seriously, even though I haven't got a permanent position yet. However, when I heard this latest bit of news, my brain smashed in twain (Mark Twain, ha) and I've decided that I can not deal with another new roommate, that I can not deal with the current living situation for much longer.

3. I'm going to be moving out for the 1st of February, in order to give myself time to organize my possessions, unload things I don't need, want, or have space for. Sell books, quit drinking for a while, get serious about the writing in ways I haven't even imagined. I've been home for ten minutes and already have two piles of books to sell. I'll be doing that in fits and starts over the next few weeks. I'm going to pack things up. In the meantime, I'll think about how I want to word the email to the landlords, who have always been great.

4. Joy, Michael, Michelle and probably a few others will be helping me look for a place. It's mostly just because I've never actually had to do it - I always moved in with friends - and now I'm in a situation where I need to live on my own. Andrew's mother told him that she always suspected I'd end up in a garrote, and that would be fine; a little dinky-toy place would be fine with me, if I could live in it alone with relative inexpense.

5. I'm having an overloaded brain fart/failure/crash--

Well, I told the landlords about the plans, this morning. I wrote up a reasonably succinct email, but I tend to ramble. I think I got my point across. I told them I was going to discuss moving out with Michelle some more this weekend, and then I'd let them know a firm timeline by next week. I explained that it was more about my head space than anything else, and that I've been thinking about moving for a while. They've been very good landlords, very accomodating, which is a shame to give up - but I do need to have my own space, I've grown in a different direction from the roommate situation.

It was scary to tell them. It started off with me just wanting to let them know that the plumber didn't actually come, but that the toilets were functioning reasonably well, and then I figured I should just come out and say it, with a clear mandate of communication over all else. Also, it's a kick in the ass for me to stay focused on moving out. I'll languish, otherwise.

I'm probably going to start boxing up all the things I'm keeping, this week, to encourage this. I'm also going to get the gang to help me look for a place, because I've never had to do that - the lamentable first basement suite was selected by my parents of all people, and then I drifted into Green Street, and Michelle was looking for a roommate in this place, so I moved in.

I've never had to go about the process, but I'd rather have some help so I don't go insane or get screwed over. As Joy pointed out: I don't have pets, or kids, and I don't smoke. I'm a pretty quiet tenant as well. I'm an asset.

Going out for dinner with a small crew after work, too much happening at once. I feel as though I have several lives, all of which are overlapping at incongruous moments.

If I don't get called in on Monday, I'm going to box up all the books I'm keeping, and finalize the number of books I have to sell. I've gone through the upstairs books, but I still have to brave the downstairs collection. It's curious to see how many books I don't care about. I'll also box up my kitchen things, maybe come up with a list of all the utensils and items I need to acquire. I'm thinking I'll convert the money from selling books into buying kitchen gear.

It's fun and exciting to feel this practical and focused again! I don't think I was like this when I originally moved out, but I was a wee lad with very little in the way of brain matter.

Shopping was a bust this morning, but I have a bead on something for tomorrow, in between boxing and possibly getting called into work. Last night's dinner was amazing, as well as presents delivered from Japan which will go quite well with the new potential apartment. Otherwise, my brain is electric and it's going to be a busy day at work!

Packing begins: amidst other things, eating orange-chocolate, one of my bookcases already emptied. I have no packing tape; why do I have no packing tape? Tomorrow morning's mission is packing tape, and garbage bags. Tomorrow's mission is packing, I want at least another bookshelf emptied and a list of kitchen gear that I need. There are three boxes of varying sizes filled with books, and graphic novels besides. YES, this is how serious I am, I've packed away my graphic novels already.

Any missions tomorrow may have to be postponed if they decide to call me into work, because this is the one week I'm not booked solid and DAMNED if I don't need the money. DAMNED, I say.

It's interesting all the minute questions, concerns, and issues that WELL-SPRING from your throat, not unlike orchids: how does one safely transport a zen rock garden? Which cardboard boxes are mine? How did I survive this long without packing tape, duct tape, something? I must have duct tape somewhere. I remember having duct tape somewhere.

After work I headed to Hillside Mall, tragedy, but found six objects for gifting. One of them is admittedly for me, but it's beautiful and cheap. They were all cheap. Before work, I went and bought those 50's B-Movie greeting cards to fill in with postcard stories for people, I'm going to get started on those later this evening while I languish in bed. After I finished shopping I called Michael to taunt him, as usual, with I bought you presents, but I had to leave a voice mail.

No, I haven't packed my dictionary yet.

1. I'm leaving out my 20th Century Poetry & Poetics, for the sake of sanity.

2. Postcard stories! I have to write them. Endlessly.

3. February the 1st, which is also the boyfriend's birthday, is a Wednesday. Wednesday. Mid-week. I have no idea how I'm going to find people to help me move. I will have to make zombies, for fuck's sake. I will have to cook up some zombie-juice and force it on corpses, make them walk upright, make them move boxes. However, I have a month and a half to figure this out. Deep breaths, not histrionics. Little will be accomplished with knee-jerk reactions and rampant running 'round the room, wailing and gnashing teeth.

This morning was uneventful, but eventful: up at 7:30, downtown by 9:00. I got a hot dark chocolate and scooted around the downtown core until it was time to catch the bus into Esquimalt. There were the usual sketch-heads, fourteen-year-old girls scoring marijuana off of homeless old farts, twitchy middle-agers listening to Eminem. There was dead water pooling in the window sill on the bus, on the inside, so I scuttled over and watched it move back and forth with the gyrations of the bus.

Sunday night, at 9:00 pm: up to my knees in an ocean of books, someone rang the doorbell. I answered, thinking it was probably Danielle's boyfriend Dan (I know) and she can't hear the bell from her room. Instead, it was some little man demanding to know if we had a room for rent. I told him to phone the number attached to the apartment listing, he said there was no answer, tried to come in for a viewing. Eventually, answering some of his random questions, I managed to get him to go away and locked the door again. Called Michelle; he's apparently been phoning twenty times a day. She wasn't scheduling people to see the place yet because we hadn't evened out when people would be around to do it.

Last night was the Internet Shakespeare Editions potluck, with random party games and too much cake. I ate too much, drank too much red wine, and an Australian professor read out a postcard story I'd written before the party - it wasn't terribly good in my opinion, too purple. From Puck's perspective, written on a Forbidden Planet card (mixing A Midsummer Night's Dream with The Tempest, I know). The gift exchange, you see, had to be oblique references to Shakespeare. I'd wanted to bring a meat pie or two, to implicate Titus Andronicus, wherein two sons are made into meat pies and served to their own mother.

I spent most of the day meshed with the cosmos, disturbingly high in spirits and ingratiating with intent. I didn't have to try; it just happened. Worked for four hours down in Esquimalt, ate a cookie, and headed home with a DVD to throw on while I worked through the remaining books. I have seven boxes of books, one of them quite large - but filled as well with some comics. I've pulled out the comics I'm intent on for the next month or so, and I've got the piles of books to be sold. I'll take them downstairs so that Mark can pick them over, he's already taken my Collected Prose of Samuel Beckett and Mike McCormack's Crowe's Requiem. I ate ice cream while he cooked steak and we discussed moving out, job issues, and the bill situation. I should be getting some cash from him shortly, to be placed very safely into my bank account.

Joy and Matt don't seem to be around for the purposes of writing night, so I'm probably just going to go through some of my junk and toss it out, generally get myself organized, and perhaps scribble some words. I have an idea of a scene or two.

It's rather fun to go through all these old books and see what I can get rid of, what I don't use anymore, what's really important. All books are important to somebody, but I work at a library and I have to remember that the material world should only hold me back so much. There's quite a few I'm going to donate to the library, particularly some good graphic novels because the selection at the library isn't nearly as fabulous as it could be.

Wrote a paragraph, banged my head against the wall for a bit, wrote half a paragraph, took a shower, fantasized a full-life cinemascopic interpretation of a scene with my character, towelled off, closed the file for future reference, opened a new file, began to write, got a few paragraphs done, found myself debating how irritating the character is, realized that this character in particular is only "temporary," if you will, smiled, saved, took a break. Became momentarily obsessed with parallelism.

This is why I like comic books:

Because Clark Kent likes to get naked in random Metropolis alleyways, and Lois Lane gets to have a far superior Superman suit. The cover for the forthcoming All-Star Superman #3, cribbed off of Newsarama. Art by Frank Quitely (whose actual name is Vince something-or-other).

And now I'm going to get back to writing. I've gone full-blown with this one, there are robot duplicates and some witty banter will start shortly. Not a bathroom in sight, but there are gnomes.

I spent most of the morning doing not much of anything; went down to Curious and picked up a comic book, came home, rustled around, and then went out again. I went out and I quested: for the gift, the perfect gift, the exquisite gift, the one I'd seen about two months ago and then promptly filed away in my brain, because, well, you know. So I went forth and quested and went to the shop, and all the furniture had moved around, some of it gone and replaced, and the item, the object of my quest, was gone. Yes? No, it had merely moved, the room shuffled like a deck of cards and there it was, other side and in amid some other things. I picked up, took it over to the woman who deduced that I'd seen this before, told me a ridiculous story involving the words "dirt market" and an impersonation. She wrapped it, which is probably for the best because we all know that I can't wrap for shit.

Items encountered on my quest, which were not picked up: One (1) yellow typewriter, left on top of a garbage can with some small damage, graffiti, and a cracked case. I nearly took it, but decided that I have a typewriter already and this one is clearly meant to be found by someone else. One (1) white hoola-hoop, sitting in a half-dug hole in a front yard. What am I going to do with a hoola-hoop? Damage my already tenuous sense of equilibrium and gravitation?

After questing, I headed downtown in the chilled air and bright sunlight, gripping my head on occasion because it was cold enough to shrink my skull. I went down to Chinatown and purchased two (2) blue plates and two (2) green bowls, as well as three (3) sets of chopsticks, to be added to the kitchen box. Then I had some bubble tea and walked up to catch the bus home.

Going over to see Samara tonight - drop off a bowl she used on my birthday, and some books, as well as her Solstice present. Then we'll head out to a coffee house - I'm thinking Moka House might be a nice change - and do some writing. I've got Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions with me, and my 20th Century Poetry and Poetics.

Tomorrow I'll sell some books in the morning.

Plans fell through for the evening, postponed until the morning for rousing breakfast. Rousing, I say. I'm going to drink a lot of Knudson Raspberry soda pop tonight and pass out in a fit of madness. Until then, I'm writing. Which at the moment is too much like taking a very difficult dump, but I've gotten all Freudian and anal-retentive, in the original psychic sense of the word. Don't worry, I can hear your groans. I'll probably trash what I'm working on in favour of poetry or something, I was wandering through the Poetics this evening and getting ideas the vague itchings of inspiration.

My belly is fat and full and I am about to lay on the fingers, which is to say, write some postcard stories. For Christmas, Solstice, all of that. The sky is oddly blue and tthe trees are oddly green, but it's that time of year again. I sat in Floyd's Diner with Samara and listened to awful Christmas carols over the speakers, raged against the dying of delight, ate too much and sat back to stew in my juices.

My toes are cold and there's a scar on the back of my hand from my own gross incompetence.

Maybe I'll write a poem today. Maybe.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Candled monsters; men, tall and pale and crowned
with candles, fire-pricks that blaze while they walk on by her
and while they lie beside her on the smoothed out canvas.
While they lie with her, parchment against parchment,
leaves piled on the lawn in September and lit on fire--
a tragedy, and illegal besides.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
A thinking woman can not remake these men as kings, or gods, or heroes--
she sees the flawed skin, imperfect arrangement of eyes, one testicle
smaller than the other, the hairs on their shoulder blades,
the impoverished necks hollowed out to store things when winter comes.
She knows that she lies with Grendel even there, on the bearskin,
she knows he plans to pick his teeth with her bones afterward.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
This, then, is her feast: to feed on monsters is abomination,
to feed on the spidery man with eight tongues, to feed on the robber bridegroom,
this is not allowed. She must wait for them to open her up
and smell her organs, this is natural law, this is how the story ends,
except. Except that there is no line in the story about the knife,
and there is no line drawn when both are monsters.

(opening line taken from Adrienne Rich's "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.")

© 2005 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved

Angelic choirs overwrite my higher brain functions now, at work, a half-hour early (so I could eat a Negitoro roll from the Sakura Market and check my email), but I'm alive and well and wearing a velour track-jacket over top of a Superman shirt. Odd wardrobe decisions for a Sunday.

Last night Samara had a party, we made truffles. We played "Cranium," people were shocked with the speed and veracity I employed in spelling "A-P-O-C-A-L-Y-P-S-E," or how easily I spelled "L-A-R-Y-N-X" backwards. Shock and awe.

Mum blows into town today, I'll see her tomorrow. I have to let me roommate into the house after work, he's lost his key, and then I'm going to remind him about the bill money he owes me.

I started to write a poem about death, but it was lame so I back-spaced over the whole thing and stared at the screen for a while. My mother's in town, so to speak; she's in Oak Bay, behind the Tweed Curtain, she's behind the tweed curtain. There's a lot of minutiae involved.

A lot of "minutiae" involved: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Anyway, I'm going downtown tomorrow morning and I'm going to stop off at Chapters to buy my mother her Christmas present (The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood), then I'm going to the barber shop. Some fat, old guy is going to be my Delilah, and I shall be Sampson. Only I get stronger the less hair is on my head, so I'll be fucking (adjective, not verb) Hercules by eleven o'clock. I'm mixing up my strongmen again. Perhaps I'll prance around work in a leopard print loincloth, deftly raising one-tonne weights and barbells onehandedly. I'll get a buzzcut and show up to work smartly dressed.

Well, that's over and done with. My mother should be on her way home to PG shortly. I walk away with a new pan and some shoes, a bit of a migraine, and a short haircut. My brain aches a little.

BUT, I have an idea for a short story, so I'm going to tackle that tonight when I get home from work, after I email Krista and possibly watch an episode of Dead Like Me, the new greatest show ever.

A flaw in the astonishing mechanism of my body. My feet, as previously recorded, are different sizes. One of them is in fact two sizes shorter but wider than the other. "No wonder you hate shoe-shopping," my mother said while we sat in the mall - the mall! - and I tried on shoes. I like the ones I ended up with, but it's going to take a while to break them in; they're still staunch, respectable, painful, and claustrophobic. Every new pair of shoes seems an insurmountable Everest. My foot is arched like an eyebrow. I got home at quarter past nine and freed my poor feet from those prisons. My toes breathe.

Meanwhile: do we ever grow up? Is there going to be some magical point wherein my mother comes to visit and I don't revert to a sullen teenager? On the other hand, I'm pretty quick to shut her down when she's being a bitch or unrealistic or impolite. I don't got no time for that shit, yo.

Actually, I'm more horrified by the fact that we're so alike. I ended up at work with a tension headache from all the adolescent angst building up in my skull, and it's hard to let go of some of the offhand maternal criticisms she rattled off probably without thinking about it.

Tomorrow, I'm donating a pile of books to the library, including some graphic novels, and I work until two. After that, I'm driving Michael's van back to his place - probably stopping at the comic shop on the way - and we're doing the writing thing in the evening, Joy & Matt's place. I have presents for them and a stiff and erect idea for a short story to perpetuate upon the world.

I looked through the apartment listings today. A couple stood out. I like that I've made another step in the forward-most direction.

The Christmas season has birthed strange days lately, everything wobbles too much and time has gone runny in places. Whatever that means; after what amounts to a wobbly day - good and bad, a bath with the boyfriend and the minced madness of downtown - I headed over for writing night at Joy & Matt's house. We wrote some sentence stories, Matt worked on a song, and Joy introduced me to Le Tigre. We exchanged presents; Matt gave a copy of Doo Rag's CD What we Do and Joy gave me The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, weirdly by Tim Burton. Sambuca jumped up onto my lap and stood there for a little while, as she does, and there was hot tea to soothe strange humors and imbalances.

Couple of Sentence-Stories:

Hungry Girl

Beryl knew immediately that the duck had spoiled; she tried to remember the number for poison control in between glazed bites.

Typography of the Liver

One Night after too much potato vodka, the mad typesetter cut the serifs from his fonts and lay down by the printing press, trying to remember the letter N.

I wrote a couple others, but they all faltered halfway through or simply rang too thin and empty. We ruminated on images of Marilyn Monroe and the Bulleteer:

(art by Yanick Paquette)

The nerves are still a bit jangled, but I'm keenly buzzing with the desire to write a short story, which can go nowhere good. I came home and tried to watch an independent Vancouver-type gay flick called Everyone featuring Matthew L.'s beloved Brendan Fletcher, but it was badly acted, shot, and overly dramatic, with a terrible script and a proclivity for the words "dead baby." Shut it off and threw on some music. Tomorrow is a light gathering, with wine. Because we're upper class whores.

Well. Well. Well: the party was a success, although I'm slightly nauseous from the wine and sugar and rich cheeses. This morning I have my ninth day of work - nine days did Odin hang by his heel - and I'm a little ill, but nothing insurmountable and nothing worth bitching about in endless cycles. Instead, I'm going to buck up and work, then go home and get organized. After that, I'll drive Michael's van over to his place with Christmas presents. Probably a night in, no booze. I want to be fresh to wake up tomorrow and relax.

Which pretty much sums up how my body feels right now. 25 minutes and I'm off of work and on my way home. 25 minutes and I'm tearing out into the street like a madman to catch the bus and grab a shower and scrape a razor over my cheeks. Because? Because I'm wretched, twisted, mangled beyond recognition. But I bought a couple cool comics on my lunch break and ate sushi with them, then began to suffer that burning ring of fire...

After fifty years of NORAD tracking and escorting Santa Claus (alias Father Christmas) on his Christmas Eve voyage around the world, F-16s reacted to a potential threat when Claus deviated from his projected flight plans while in New York airspace, heading for the Statue of Liberty. When NORAD technicians detected the deviation, the escorting planes were alerted and then broke off to fire on Claus's magical sleigh and nine astonishing reindeer. The resulting airborne inferno was brief and squelched ultimately by low temperatures, followed by a rapid descent. Normal rescue crews were blocked from the scene in favour of federal government response teams.

After three hours clearing the wreckage from Liberty Island, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was taken into custody and transferred to the Guantanamo Bay holding facility for further questioning, with possible charges of Levitation during Intoxication being secondary to suspicions of terrorism. Claus followers have as yet refused to comment, and government officials will not specify where the big man himself is being held.

Sources close to President George W. Bush have intimated that 2006 will be highlighted by a new War on Christmas to replace the War on Terror. The War on Drugs has been postponed while the Drug Enforcement Administration evaluates methods of cracking down on Eggnog consumption. The War in Afghanistan has been disrupted in favour of a public media blitz to distract people from the issue of Christ's birthday being moved in order to coincide with the Winter Solstice, while the war on African-Americans has been replaced with a more timely war on Arctic-Elves and boy wizards. The police action in Korea, technically ongoing since the 1950s, is still an issue.

Boxing Day completed, ended, finished. Mission accomplished. Whatever: yesterday, Christmas Day, was Michael and his family. He cooked, I helped, we cleaned, I kissed the back of his neck when the homicidal impulses started up in his lower cortex. We got everybody packed up and away in time to vegetate in his room with Æon Flux (the MTV cartoons from way back, not the movie). Midway through the day we escaped for an hour to Joy & Matt's - fiddled about and destressed. Michael liked his gifts, I talked to both my parents for short snatches of time, and there he was at the end of the day.

Boxing Day was fun: started off in the kitchen with me making us breakfast, Bubble & Squeak (in this case mashed potatoes, stuffing, vegetables from my salmon last night, gravy, cheddar, and brie), then we futzed around for a bit until we headed over to Joy & Matt's again for a planned event: two Marilyn Monroe movies and way too much junk food. Steph came over for a bit and we all kibitzed and COLOURED in colouring books. We coloured for about an hour, although Michael stayed in the zone longer than the rest of us while Joy & I complained about our sore hands and aging hip-bones and those DAMNED YOUNG'UNS and GET OFF OUR LAWN. The gang like their colouring books.

Steph came in looking like a nouveu rocker chick with that frontward wave in her hair, but she had to leave after Gentleman Prefer Blondes on account of familial obligations. I keep telling her I didn't scream through thirty hours of labour giving birth to her not to be considered family, but she keeps going on about me not being her mother, men not being able to give birth, and the general implausibility. Usually I accuse her of being drunk when she says these things.

Too much junk food, but now I'm at my house in jammies and am free to make gas and sing along under my breath with wishy-washy music. Tomorrow, after an unheard of three days in a row, I'm going to work. And I'm going to enjoy it, possibly wearing the bright yellow Thai shirt Steph brought back for me, the one with the giant robot on it.

I feel much revived after a supper of avocado-and-edam sandwiches on sourdough buns. Much revived. I have three and a half hours before I get to leave to go home, and instead of getting anything of value done tonight, I'm probably going to end up hiding in bed with the sheets over my head and a book nestled in front of my face. Probably. Could just as easily "accidentally" end up wasting time on the computer, maybe fiddling with a story concept that reared its head earlier today, although I need to do some research into pregnancy, childbirth, and Pre-Rephaelite painting before the story can actually come fully into being. I've already scribbled out a paragraph and I'm hoping to scribble out some more later.

This is the part where I lie down on the beach and hunch forward, on my knees, puking things up. Believe me, as metaphors go this is the clean version, children, it's only coming out my mouth: pieces of clay. Depending on your creation myth we've been built up out of dirt, we're Earthenware, know what I mean? Baked in an oven, according to some. On the beach, spewing clay onto the sand, I could also bring into it the earwax, you know, this is a messy business. This is the bit where I'm just putting the basics onto the page, the raw shit and firmament, when it looks terrible and the voice is all over the place and the setting is not described with anything approaching satisfaction, when it's all about the ruddy image. And then tomorrow (or the next day) I will take what I've unloaded and I'll put it on the potter's wheel in a scandalous use of the mixed metaphor, and then I'm going to shape it. I'll do that thing with the foot pedal and the rotating of the wheel, push my fingers into it. But this is the stage we're at: on the beach, on the knees, clay pushing up and out of my mouth like one of those Play-Doh modelling stations with the press.

But, in a break from the self-mythologizing all the self-important faux literary mental masturbation, I'm going downstairs to pop in a load of laundry and then I'm going to get some smoked cheddar out of the fridge, for a late-night snack which will probably give me funny and obstinate dreams.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a new book out, Memories of My something something Whores. I can't remember the full title and I'm disinterested in googlemancy at the moment, but I haven't read it yet and I have it on hold at work. From what I can remember it sounds rather sad and eerie, as it should.

Parts 1, 2, and 3.

For GM

The necktie cut into Nancy's throat as she sidled down the darkened corridor in the house by the ravine. The windows were boarded; the only light was slices of moon. Bess was ahead of her, Bess was Frank ahead of her, and while Nancy cursed herself for not checking the flashlight's batteries, she couldn't help but think about Frank Hardy, the way he looked under a night sky, the way he moved - had Bess moved like that before, or was she merely good at the charade? They had a case to solve, but Frank was awakening embers deep down inside Nancy, embers that Ned Nickerson had never quite stoked.

Bess, that was Bess ahead of her. Frank was somewhere else - with his brother, Joe. They were somewhere dressed up like the girls. And Ned was with them - with them and thinking that Joe Hardy was her. Nancy smirked - was Ned smart enough to put two and two together? Let's be honest, he was never the real detective, she was the one who wore the fedora in the relationship.

"Frank," Nancy breathed, hand to her scratching at her neck. Hadn't quite been able to simulate an Adam's Apple, but people couldn't always be counted upon to notice such things. The lights were low. The professor's missing coins - or was it lost books? Stolen encyclopedias of the ancient world? In the moonlight, the buzz of bees in her crotch, it was hard to recall the mystery that had dragged the two of them down into that house, where kidnappers and racketeers were probably waiting in closets to jump out and thump them soundly on the head. Knock them out, drag them away, tie them up - perhaps to deduce who they really were, perhaps... "Frank," she repeated.

"Nancy?" Bess turned to her friend after the second call, all her Bess-ness strapped away with a suit jacket thrown over shoulders which were perhaps a little narrow for Frank Hardy - but perhaps not. An illusion? A faint after-image of the Hardy Boys clinging to her? "It's good to play along with the game, but I'm still Bess. Are you all right? Have you caught a cold or something? We've got to solve this before they do or it's milkshakes at the soda shoppe for two months - on us! I can't afford that."

"My father would pay," breathed Nancy, drawing nearer to Frank. Bess. Nearer to Bess. "He's a famous attorney, he can afford these things." If her father could see her now! To see his little girl, his strapping lad, his new son reaching out to touch Frank Hardy's ruddy skin with this smile there, upon his lips, upon Nancy's full, exhausting lips. "Come here."

"But the case--"

"There's another mystery we have to solve first, Frank," said Nancy, and she pulled Bess to her. Pulled Frank to her.

TBC.

It is a peculiar point, in between moments (an echo, perhaps of the leap second coming up) - when I look around at all these recordings and want it to burn. I said as much to Joy over the phone earlier, after she read me a poem she wrote on her break today. I said as much while dumping my rantbooks into boxes. I have, not counting the one I'm working on right now: nineteen books, stretching from the present moment (on #20) backward to 1998. I started in my first year at UNBC, for fuck's sake. And I know there's one missing, one lost along the way. Burn it all? It's hard not to want to, not to feel a little restricted by the recordings, but that's part and parcel of the human experience so I'm not going to burn it all down, nor the house, nor all the houses I've ever lived in. Can you imagine? If I flew back to Prince George and got into a taxicab, took it to Foothills, down Faulkner Crescent (yes, I lived on a fucking literary street) and blew it up? Blew up the white stucco and the turquoise trim and memories, memories, memories? Hell, I could just burn everything I own and walk away with the moment's rantbook, a pen, and my Edgar Allan Poe action figure. Right? Right?

Except I'm not much for fire and tend to leave things behind, there's always a trail of bread crumbs behind me, there's always husks and masks and half-forgotten things.

I'm not sure where all these impulses are coming from. I got home from work with insects in my head, ants crawling around under my tongue and again, metaphor-metaphor-metaphor. Time to turn from packing things up, and time to focus on the writing. The Good Work. I wrote a second Nancy Boys piece last night that might end up here in a day or two, although it's a bit more graphic and I need to even out the prose some, maybe work on the pacing a little bit - a lot happens in a very short space.

Incidentally, there are times where our phone calls sound like really awful after school specials with encouraging narration. And she still does a better 300 pound Samoan imitation than I do.

Hard to remember which direction I'm going on. Hard to remember. Hard to remember forwards. I'm going to denounce this lame emo shit and hang in the willow trees.

(avec tangible respect toward C. Simic, L. Cohen, and M. Joyce)

Gasoline: you think it smells awful, but have you ever rubbed it
along your teeth with your tongue? Spit. Smile. Swallow.
Build up the bubble of ethanol and saliva and release.

Then you take a match. It's an overused metaphor,
but take a match. Flick it against something,
apply friction and there it goes.

It's strange, it's simple, it's a little played-out, but
it still works, this personal game of chance,
this sweet fucking kiss-off.

Drive on, driver, drive on while everything that is becomes was,
past tense, to be an irregular verb in every language
and certainly in this one.

(c) 2005 Ben Rawluk all rights reserved