wildcat

1. I hate scheduling screw-ups, especially when they aren't my fault. Especially, in fact, when I've gone out of my way to make sure everyone knows what's going on. Sigh. That said, I also hate scheduling screw-ups that are my fault, and I've had one of each today. Sunday comes at the beginning of the week.

2. I just babbled on the phone with Joy for approaching half-an-hour, wherein we discussed the nature of Good & Evil and why Lucy is the best thing about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Well, Lucy and Edmund.

3. I've really overused the word "redeemed" today.

4. One of the women at work loaded me up with knives, as she and her husband are replacing their set. I plan to go into the circus as a sword-swallower and knife-thrower.

5. And lo, there shall come, a workman-- Hawksley Workman's playing at the Alix Goolden Hall on April 19th, demanding my attention. I saw the poster up on a telephone pole as I walked downtown today. A sign, I say, a sign. Matthew shall be jealous. Need to get tickets for that and see if I can acquire anyone else who wants to go.

6. I bought a new track jacket. It is in fact the Platonic Track Jacket: bright green. I have longed for this jacket in various forms for eons. As well, a thin grey zip-up hoodie, suitable for flouncing around in.

O, the Incapacities of Communication! I sat in Fantastico for forty minutes, drinking more of the bland hot chocolate and eating the generic peanut butter cookie with the bit of dipped chocolate on one side, reading Hellboy comics and scribbling out paragraphs about imprisoned girls and swamp grass. Steph was off looking at apartments and Joy kept calling me from a payphone during the five minutes I wasn't paying attention to my phone. Afterward, Steph called and we made a date to meet in front of the Belfry Theatre this evening, to go from there. Nothing too expensive. Nothing too meaningless.

And now I'm reading Ivan E. Coyote's Loose End and thinking about some work on that story. I need to find some reference photographs of Neal Cassady to get the look right, then I have to decide if I want a full throttle sex scene, something more after-the-fact, or a mixture of the two. I loathe writing sex scenes, but at least this one would be opposite-gendered and I'd be able to keep track of the pronouns. It may need to go in simply because this is a horror story, and sex has a certain visceral squishiness which would be effective.

I realized at around noon today that I'm feeling so cracked out because this was Day 10 of work, and now I have a day off to feel like a human being again. The zombification can be reversed.

Okay, question time: "rational discourse," is it meant to be discourse without emotion, and logical? I tend to think of it as an attempt to correctly balance logic and emotion, taking advantages and strength from both to make your argument. Is that an incorrect definition, and is it appropriate to deride someone who expresses emotional points of view as being "hysterical?" People can argue reason as masculine and emotion as feminine until the world ends but I have trouble seeing it like that.

And does arguing over theory (i.e. identity politics) take into account enough of real physical experience, or does theory fail ultimately to map onto that experience? We are sapient enough to generate all these ideas of the world which don't physically exist, they function within informational space and then they don't quite jive with the day-to-day living as a person of a given gender or ethnic background (for example). Do other people find that as frustrating as I do? At what point is one thinking too much and living too little?

Yes, I understand the irony of that last question.

I actually got to spend some time with the boyfriend. Will wonders never cease?

Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire was a fairly sharp little film, witnessed at Cincenta the other night, even if it did cut whole swathes out of the book. If they'd included everything, well, seven hour movie. I could really do with less of the "Ron and Harry hate each other, no, love each other, no, wait..." It was fun and reasonably well done.

Æon Flux, on the other hand, intrigues me more. I fell in love rather stupidly, foolishly, with this film. Plot-wise, it's a terrible retread of all those movies where clones seem to retain memories of previous clones/humans. But, on the other hand: Æon makes a choice that obliterates the karmic cycle of rebirth and lets everybody enter into the unknown, into Nirvana. She's also Eve, breaking the wall down and letting everybody return to the scary old Garden of Eden but retaining knowledge. The plot is useless, but it's only there is an afterthought to explore in live action all of the cartoon's wildest elements - Scafandra's feet, replaced with a second set of hands. A secret lair accessible only when you put on a kinky harness that shifts your atoms out of phase with everything else. It brings us messages delivered through homeopathy, and drug-addled telepathy.

Æon Flux is about sex. Sex, sex, SEX, darlings; everyone penetrated, everyone sensual, everyone penetrating. Everything is nubile with overwhelming sensuality, hips fluttering. Bullets are removed as one might finger a vagina, followed by a skin-graft dental dam. The design sense is ridiculous, pared down and hyper-magazine-spread. Nature has been beaten and abused and rises up, to penetrate the cloned human culture and remind them who they are. You know, sexfully. The Sex & Death is a bit obvious, out there, pushed toward the viewer too much -- it's equivalent to Narnia's full-force Christian allegory, and both have their problems but both have their strengths. The acting's decent given the dodgy scriptwork. Our Heroine wears impractical shows, but in the future city of Bregna no shoe is impractical; unrealistically high heels? Where else would you hide your secret chemistry set? Anyway, Charlize Theron has ultra-human super-ankles that can handle the strain while twisting in the air and murdering people with the soles of her feet. There are sexy neo-fascist soldiers, the eternal fight between Law and Chaos...boo-ya. Death is recycled. Turned away from Nature and trying to control it, we are laid low by Nature until we can truly reintegrate with it.

Æon is Our Lady of the Female Jerry Cornelius, Michael Moorcock's constantly resurrected bisexual secret agent assassin. She is bestowed with the directive of bringing light and anarchy back to the cold and sterile (but not unaroused) world of tomorrow.

1. "My Father is an Invisible Voter" was rejected by the Danforth Review. I got the email on Saturday but didn't really do anything about it or think about it, actually. I have to remember that I'm writing a short story collection, and have to keep going with these things. It was an email, of course, and at least they got their name right in the subject header.

2. I'm given to understand (ie, my dad said) that my mum has done something positive about her life and it makes me happy. I need to phone her. He wasn't sure if I was supposed to know, but that hasn't ever stopped either of them before...ha.

3. Joy cancelled writing night which was fine by me, I'm feeling awfully antisocial. I ate veggie burgers and watched a stupid Jennifer Lopez/Jane Fonda romantic comedy, Monster-in-Law, instead. The movie's actually decently funny at times, but it was mostly mindless and I let my head go.

4. I didn't accomplish anything last night, so I need to work on one of the three stories that need attention - "My Father is an Invisible Voter" (obviously), "Queen of Coins," and "Swamp Girl" (extremely working title). I don't like days where I don't write; it all feels self-defeating and usually I end up sputtering through work like a zombie as a result because my head's not entirely in the game.

Mission from the Universe; the emotional concerns of rain; laundry so fresh you could cleanse the Heavenly Bodies.

In other words: what a weird day. I woke up and went to the Sparkle-Bright Laundromat, cleaning my clothes for an hour with quarters swallowed up by the bastard dryer. Afterward, one of the other tenants caught up with me after his morning smoke - he actually tracked me down to the laundromat, having seen me go out - because he'd forgotten his keys inside and needed me to let him back into the building. Right. Chocolate pancakes for breakfast, a sad & frustrated Michael on the phone.

I clothed myself anew, and shaved, and brushed my teeth. My hair was deplorable. Went downtown and bought comic books and then staggered around in a very zealous rainstorm for an hour and a half, then went to Hime for lunch - it was dead because of the weather.

I bought a bag. Actually, after looking in approximately seven different stores, I found a bag in that Access upstairs Bay Centre baggage store for sixty bucks, not a bad price for something which is simultaneously a backpack, courier bag, and brief case.

And now to work. WORK! Like crystalline murder clockwork jazz...

Borrowed Exile from Guyville from work because I haven't listened to Liz Phair in a while. I'd forgotten what a dirty, sexy woman she is. I can still recite "Flower" by heart, which is a sort of disturbing picture of what exactly I was like at nineteen ("...I'll fuck you til your dick is blue"). She will never, ever be featured on The National Playlist, I don't think. Unless it's one of her later, smoother tracks like "Polyester Bride."

I also picked up a bunch of books, including The Quantum and the Lotus, which discusses connections and parallels in Buddhism and quantum physics, and Emma Bull's War of the Oaks, which is a bit like Charles De Lint only in a different way.

The great leveller called Anyway: last night was an unexpected gong show. Since the Friday debacle I've felt wholly and utterly unconnected to the universe; I haven't been able to drift in the mental ocean of the city or anything like that. Been all headblind. BUT, after work I headed over to Joy & Matt's and everybody was getting rowdy, Joy & I put on the Streets and rocked out in the kitchen (again, who would have suspected we could identify so specifically with a stoned white rapper kid from England). For some reason we watched Family Guy and then there was the house party with the World's Fattest Racehorse pounding out the music.

Walk home was cracked out, the early hours a scene, and then this morning I was still disconnected from the phone tree as it were and I nipped off home from Michael's place, to get changed and ready for work.

And now I must be off. Tomorrow I shall reassert my place in the universe.

I am naked. And I'm not talking symbolically. I love living on my own.

I'm going to cook myself some pasta and pop in a film for the night. Some Irish thing.

Shit, the Streets have come on. I must rock out for a moment.

I fell in and out of consciousness again at around seven this morning, slept for two hours, then my mother reminded me that it was time to get up. Only my mother is probably at school right now, teaching her class. In another city. Halfway across the province. I don't have prophetic dreams or any shit like that but - man! They're always so relevant. So I pulled myself out of bed.

Today's going to be a long one, well into the evening - I work until nine - but at least I got my hair cut yesterday, I feel a bit more meshed, and I have my head on (mostly) straight. Made a couple frustrating mistakes yesterday at work and denounced my own self-worth. I need to stop doing that. But: my conscience is feeling particularly external, I'm receiving a full spectrum of information from the universe again, so give me a few days and I'll be at full strength again. Especially with the short hair, oddly enough.

There are some occasions when Leonard Cohen disturbs me "in a fundamental way," and makes the idea of democracy coming to the U.S.A. sound like a David Lynch movie come to fuck America in the ass. I might spend a few days writing poetry again, haven't done that in a while. I'm never happier than when I'm scribbling words and making decisions about punctuation and line break which are weighted with the fate of worlds. Cohen does this to me. Parker does this to me. Ginsberg does this to me. Paz does this to me. Neruda does this to me.

Incidentally: "...it's here the lonely say/ the heart has got to open/ in a fundamental way..." conjures this vast image of a human heart blossoming like an asshole (fundament) and knowing Cohen, this intention must be in there somewhere.

We haven't had a renegade poetry night in a while. You know, get all hopped up on crazy ideas and scream poems at each other, poems about lust and disgust and rust. Poems of judgment and excrement and light.

Accidentally went to Sidney yesterday, with Michael, and bought books. Accidentally. Among them: The Complete Poems of Betrolt Brecht, a paperback sci-fi anthology including Harlan Ellison's short story "Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktock Man." Which is one of the best titles in the English language. Also a book of Ellison's short stories & essays, a Kingsley Amis short story collection, and some presents.

"And you have such lovely red hair," said the middle-aged bookseller man at the "Haunted Bookshop." "You should really grow it out, it would be just lovely. My brother had red hair like that, long and lovely and with a full beard..."

Days like that.

A few days ago, I was tricked into buying a couple books at Munro's. Yes: I've been buying books again, a terrifying prospect that allows for the warm, filling breath of your first cigarette in the morning. Not that I've ever smoked to know, but I'm told, as it were.

Michael tricked me into buying some books the other night when we went out with Daniel, when we went to the Sticky Wicket for mediocre dinner followed by an excellent dessert at Milestones. I bought a biography of my man Pablo Neruda, and I bought On Borges, a small memoir by Alberto Manguel about his time spent with Jorge Luis Borges, one of my private heroes and an important twentieth century writer. Manguel spent several years as an adolescent going over to Borges's apartment in Buenos Aires and reading to the blind old writer. It's a beautiful, slim volume which makes me burst with the desire to write with full bravado again, full ego, full wit -- it talks about Borges's exquisite memory and provocative ideas. It does not seek to justify the misogyny or the "senseless, commonplace racism that suddenly transformed the intelligent, keen reader into a momentary dolt," but approaches Borges with the care of someone deeply affected by him. It also introduced me to Silvina Ocampo, and I'm going to try and track down some of her disturbing stories.

Just returned from pool-playing with Michael and some of my library people, a good time was had. Michael stayed afterward to shoot some pool by himself, he's stressed out by work and school and family. I think I want to make a present for him. Maybe write a poem or something. Dirty limerick.

Tomorrow: I don't have a shift scheduled, so I have to -- ah, Allen Ginsberg has just come onto my headphones, "America when will you send your eggs to India..." -- I have to sit around and wait for a call. I'll work on the Moloch poems while I wait, maybe get them to the point where I'm ready to send the out somewhere, probably subTerrain magazine, for the rejection letter. I'll buy some milk and make a macaroni-and-cheese casserole with roasted garlic inside. Maybe we'll have writing night and I'll produce wondrous things. Mostly, I hope to success.

1. I cooked today. I made macaroni and cheese casserole with roasted garlic. I invested in some spices this morning and the taste is superb. Lemon pepper is peculiar. And now I must attend to the far more earthy pursuit of washing dishes, scrub-scrub-scrub.

2. Read about Toller Cranston's first sexual encounter, in The Book of Lists. Additionally, I did not know that Truman Capote once had a one-night stand with Errol Flynn of all people. "If it hadn't been Errol Flynn, I wouldn't have remembered." (Truman Capote) Incidentally: Marlene Dietrich and George S. Patton? What?

3. Moloch's being a bitch. I need to ruminate on glossy photographs of Paris Hilton for the wedding announcement section of the poem. O Moloch, dream corrupter, the unquenchable thirst of desert war. Moloch stop leaving your crap on my doorstep. Moloch, stop moving my graphic novels around.

4. I think, in the end, I prefer the Harlequin's brand of terrorism to V's. How much? I suppose I tire of the explosions, the killing, the violence in favour of the Harlequin dropping this on the city's sliding sidewalks:

"Jelly Beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin workers, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling underfoot and filling the sky on their way down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color [sic] and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!"
-- Harlan Ellison, "Repent Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman.

In particular, the phrase "coocoo newness" has the best rhythm I've heard all day. In particular, it's the audacity of boarding an airboat and riding it over the city, then dumping 150,000 dollars worth of jelly beans on everybody as a calculated act of ontological terrorism just out-fucking-weighs any exploding monument, assassinated president, and death threat in popular culture. And all of that just to throw off the ultimate city schedule by seven minutes. Seven free minutes. To illustrate the society he was against:

"(They knew it would have cost that much, because they had a team of Situation Analysts pulled off another assignment, and rushed to the slidewalk scene to sweep up and count the candies, and produce findings, which disrupted their schedules and threw their entire branch at least a day behind.)"
-- Ibid.

If his use of commas seems a bit erratic, read each section aloud and compare/contrast the pacing that results.

5. Incidentally: here's a link to the Searchable Calvin & Hobbes Database. Seriously. Just type in "rocket ship underpants" (by example), and see what happens.

1. Previous plans to go hence for King Kong have been postponed, on account of a shift popping up for me downtown this very evening, and Michael wading through the endless homework ocean, awash in numbers and cosines and tangents. Ha. Tangents. Possibly reschedule for Friday, although I seem to remember someone saying something about Friday in another context, which probably means I've forgotten something important again.

2. Apparently, an old friend of mine from PG, ten days older than me, is waiting to hear back from his third possible choice of school for his PhD. He'll be studying lattice theory at either Waterloo, Tennessee, or Hawaii.

3. I'm into the last section of Queen of Coins, the revision, so we'll see how it goes. Mostly, this is an exercize in cutting away the bullshit, refining, purifying. Out goes the Holy Grail routine, although I'm trying to keep the Joan of Arc stuff in because that actually works with the sequence. I need to put in more Earth and metal imagery, on account of coins corresponding to physical existence and day-to-day functions.

Angela Carter picked a fight with me in the fiction section at work, so I had to take home a copy of Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories to appease her. I'm enthralled by the title "The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter," which reminds me that originally the Luanne story was going to called "The Miller's Beautiful Daughter," only I don't think her father's a miller anymore. Either way, I'm going to consult her sexy, sweltering lines and try to live up to her talent with Luanne. Once I've finished this rewrite to "Queen of Coins."

Otherwise, I've brought home a bunch of music to rip. Right now, we're into the David Bowie, but I've still got Marlene Dietrich and Enya to go through. Yes, yes, Enya, I know, I know, but I need some brainless meditative music because Nina Simone makes me want to dance too much and Sarah Harmer does things to my head and Nine Inch Nails makes me want to fuck.

I think I'm going to go heat up some milk and make hot chocolate. Something to put me in the mood for bed.

& went out for dessert after work with the girls (sigh), inhaling some sort of cheese cake, strawberry crepes, and a white mousse cake-- the cake was beautiful. It was this dark chocolate brownie cake with a tower of white chocolate mousse held together by a dark chocolate wire mesh. This was at the Med Grill, and decently priced. We discussed the ravages of time, parental dispersal, and a condemned house on the block for rebuilding and restructuring practically from the ground up. A few strange details were provided which may be fodder for future stories. Particularly the goat. I'm still not sure I understand the goat.

Tonight's agenda (before I slid in between sheets): "Queen of Coins" line by line revision. We're talking molecule-by-molecule, word-by-word. Time to get out the tweezers and figure out what the fuck is wrong with the bastard thing. I need to get it ready for Joy to give it a read through next week and then possibly send it out shortly thereafter-- I need to get another submission out there before I disappear off the radar completely.

Tomorrow night, assuming I don't get called into work, there's some sort of information meeting at a church about this Spanish pilgrammage that Joy and I have talked about doing in the past. I'm not sure it's feasible at the moment, but that's why we're going-- research. Information. It might not be feasible now, but I do have to consider my future and I do need to remember that just because working is safe doesn't mean it's the only course of action.

I've been writing all day; six pages into the new story and now I'm on the very knife-edge of a not-entirely-consensual sex sequence and I just. You hit the wall of knowing exactly how much detail to go into, what vocabulary to use...I don't want a violent act, although this is a horror story. It's more got to be grotesque, because everything in the story is very grotesque, there has to be an unwashed, unsavoury characteristic and vengeance is a theme, a smouldering theme and, and, and...I'm in a very uncomfortable space with this story, which is a good thing, but, fuck, it really makes it difficult to get myself onto a firm footing and it's hard to slide into the fairy tale mode without it getting so dark...

Yes, Christian, I'm writing a gothic story.

Otherwise, I went out for lunch with Michael -- we went to Hime and it was busy and I had a bento box and there was ginger salad and it was good. I think the two of us are going to have a date tomorrow night of, ah, some description, because we've been a little shoddy with the quality time of late and been drowning in our own private worlds. I came home to work on this story some more and he went off to check on Penny during the ongoing election fiasco and such.

Yesterday's lunch hour consisted of picking up a spicy peanut box with prawns from the Noodle Box with Jenny; we ate in the Empress rose garden, watching them working away at the copper eaves. Afterward, to counteract the spice, we went to the gelatto place on Government Street and waltzed back to the library to dangle our spumoni and straciatella in the faces of co-workers. Saw Caroline, briefly, on the street; her bangs have grown out. Said hi, but had only five minutes to return to work. Fanny described the thing when we mentioned it to her, not as a lunch hour, but as a date. Pfwah.

Actually, the date was coming back to Michael's house after work and him having dinner ready for me. We watched the somewhat lamentable Sleepy Hollow on the Space Channel and then cuddled on the bed for some hours before we headed to the Tapas Bar for dessert with Dan and his new man. A fun, but brief excursion.

Pool with my work buddies is fun, with the usual mixture of shop talk, library gossip, and smirking banter.

The trickest shot was a three-in-one; my first shot of the third game. It was not a bang, then a bang, then a bang. It was a simultaneous sinking of three solid balls with little rhyme to it. For once, several probabilities lined up in my favour (in other words, luck), but it was my moment of glory before the Business As Usual resumed.

Now that I'm decompressed (staggering home from work, chinese takeaway, upset despair under my breath is sauce is thrown to the floor and assorted anguish), I have goals this evening: to chuck some paragraphs into the story about Luanne, and then to fire off poems in between reading from Angela Carter's Shaking a Leg, a collection of her non-fiction pieces. Well, reading that and reading Leonard Cohen poetry until I can barely stand up or mutter anything that isn't half-rhyming and half-electric.

A title for something: Argyle, or, an improbable trip to the dentist.

For lunch today I went to Hime Sushi and jawed with Gloriee while eating a seafood bowl, crab sunomono, and some miso soup. I sat and read Penelope Lively's The Five Thousand and One Nights, a collection of short stories which includes one about the previously unreported marital woes of Scherazade and the Sultan, which is ultimately a meditation on the exquisite diversity of fiction, and the knot-holes we get trapped in with it (low art versus high art, women's art versus men's art, literary versus genre). There is also another one entitled "The Butterfly and the Tin of Paint," which reminds me of some of Carol Shields's short stories; it extrapolates from chaos theory (specifically, the butterfly effect) but maintains, regarding the story itself, "One thing is certain: it is not science." Which is an oddly beautiful sentence.

Sentences! Do you understand? Sentences!

After the food, I stumbled out into the light and there was this city and I had to go somewhere because I was alone - alone! - for the first real time in days, and I had half an hour to kill before I had to be back at the library. So I bought a fresh rantbook because My Ankles Are Not Whores (yes, I name them) is almost filled, and then I accidentally bought two super-cheap, second-hand Angela Carter books - the non-fiction one, and also Heroes and Villains, which seems to be her take on pulp jungle heroes and heroines and such, with the following first line: "Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her."

Clearly, I'm not fit to be seen in polite, human society.

Fresh comic book day. All-Star Superman #3. Lois Lane is granted super-powers for the duration of her birthday, and Superman has to fight Mythology's Manliest Heroes, Samson and Atlas, for her affections. Samson: "I only have one weakness...scissors." #1 was about Prometheus taking fire from the gods, #2 was a mixture of The Shining, Bluebeard, and Eros & Psyche. #3 is somewhere between Phaethon taking up the chariot of the sun-god and the footraces held for Helen of Troy's hand in marriage.

Last night was Capote at the Roxy with Michael, Joy, and Matt. Decent flick, although I walked away more impressed by Catherine Keener's rendition of Harper Lee than I was by Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Truman Capote. Slightly perplexed by the way Capote's sexuality was both foregounded and backgrounded (sure, we get to see him in his full, lisping flamboyance, but any homosexual content was on the verge of being subtext), which Michael said was probably because they wanted to avoid it being a "gay movie." I suppose. Michael asked afterward if Capote was really that much of a "dink," and I responded that he was practically known for being a dink. I was impressed with the way they played Capote's feelings of detachment -- he was there for research, he was working -- off of his feelings of emotional engagement, and how he couldn't quite exist comfortably in either state, not able to quite verbalize how he feels about Perry and the killings while at the same time unable to keep the events strictly at arm's length.