wildcat

For dinner, we had Teppanaki at the Japanese Village with six friends after wandering the eerily quiet streets of downtown - I had a salmon teriyaki with a bowl of rice drenched in steak sauce, vegetables, prawns, and a bottle of sake on the side. Top knotch meal. After that we said goodbye to a couple people going to seperate parties, and then took our little posse with us to James Bay for a party, and drinks. After that was photography and ridiculous conversation. I was accused of suffering from inappropriate-dialogue performance anxiety, Michael got the win, then we took Vicki to the Bent Mast and everybody else with went home or to Swans.

The Mast? The Mast was odd. It wasn't quiet but it wasn't busy, and we were the youngest people there. There was champagne and cookies at Midnight, a moment of time which past with a sort of icy disregard for anybody's feelings. Shortly thereafter the two of us took a bus back to Michael's place, with some girl puking in the back of the bus, to tumble into bed and fall asleep.

My stomach was upset most of the night but I survived. Somewhere in the course of the night I dreamt that some girl and I were called on to negotiate some sort of labour disagreement between the King of the Fairies and the Tree People. There was a couple scenes of flying aboard a floating mattress and then we pulled at our skins until they came off and we were Tree People ourselves, bark and wood instead of flesh, and we were taken to the bargaining table in the deepest forest...

I don't know if I'm really going to bother with resolutions. Be better at communicating with my friends via post? Write more, oh, every day? Read more books? Get ready and organized for grad school? Those don't feel like resolutions so much as basic ingredients for my life.

But, you know: with friends, good food, inscrutable conversation, the Accomplice on hand to kiss at Midnight. Score.

I am often amazed at my own inability to perform basic feats of personal administration. Especially when reasonably important pieces of paper go missing, and the ensuing search reveals that other important items have disappeared altogether, probably lost at the beginning of last year when I moved. I probably shouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything. Ever.

However, instead of panicking, I'm going to calmly deal with the situation. I have, using slightly irrational detective skills, managed to track down information about how to replace said items - assuming I can get around the paradox of needing a piece of information on the item to replace the item (?) - and I'm going to try and accomplish that on Thursday.

Irritating when one remembers exactly what one did with a piece of paper some weeks ago but of course some weeks have passed and things get shuffled around and lost.

Finding appropriate soundtrack is always a coin-toss. Anyway, motherfuckers: David Bowie.

It is time, I think, to shave; someone asked me earlier if I was growing a beard, and now, I'm not. I just can't be bothered to scrape at my face with a edgy razor like some hardcore punk. Well.

Johnny Rotten has become a middle-aged man, and the Sex Pistol may have gone flaccid and run out of ammo. He watches Access Hollywood. Possibly, this is our ultimate fate, all of us: aging punk rock stars doing interviews with Sook-Yin Lee.

I found a present for Michael's birthday. Number one, anyway.

After rolling forth from the Bay of Oaks after work, I made haste to the downtown quarter and stared at books at the bookstore, awash in the possibly inappropriate zen I feel in such times (at one, perhaps, with the ISBN - I am a string of numbers, yes, scan me, scan me) until I found some items to spend my Monolithic Corporate Monster Gift Card on - Jeanette Winterson's Weight (the retelling of the Atlas myth) and this science fiction number by Justina Robson with a cyberpunk butterfly and a pull-quote from Zadie Smith ("Idiosyncratic and unpredictable. A novelist with real vision.") on the cover, called Living Next Door to the God of Love, with far-flung futurists living in borrowed superhero construct bodies and weird metasexuality. You know: the world inside my head. Why other people have to keep writing books stolen from my imagination I don't know but I wish they'd stop doing it or at least pay me royalties for cocksucking my brain.

Punks.

Met up with Dan and had dinner at the Siam after walking several blocks in several directions to find every other Thai restaurant in town has shut its doors for the day. No red snapper. No red snapper. The service was barely adequate. We talked about quantum computers and the sensory experience of dreams. After that we walked up the Dolce Vita because all the other cafes were also closed and drank our drinks while old ladies complained about new-fangled music that was irritating them (So why did she stay for over an hour?) and an obnoxious woman prattled on and on and on.

I got several pages written and a couple pages further scribbled full of character development and backstory questions. The start of something that will one day - probably - end up as backstory or prologue. So many questions! Lines filled up with character names. Questions asked in capital letters.

I feel disturbingly productive. I worked hard all day, went to the market, came home and made myself a sinful risotto with salmon and shrimp while listening to Nina Simone. I watched a movie while I ate and now I'm going to clean the apartment, wash the dishes, and then slip into bed to read the Justina Robson book (it's good so far), wrap a birthday present for Michael, and work on the character bible or the opening sequences or whatever of this thing which currently lives inside my (nameless) notebook. And I'm not going to think about how I woke up with the Fear this morning, full-force, for the second day in a row.

Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves was all right, as short story collections go. I really loved "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," which definitely had the jazz (as Joy and I used to say) but the other stories - while many of them hit a lot of buttons for me and seemed like content that I should love - seemed to skate along the surface of something much bigger or deeper or darker or passionate but didn't quite crack the ice. Her narrative voice was all over the place, I didn't always believe the characters' offhand remarks, and Russell continuously mixes up incubi and succubi (incubi are male sex demons, succubi are female sex demons - Russell seemed to reverse them), which is possibly a minor point but it threw me off every time it came up and was occasionally important to the plot. "Ava" is definitely an engaging story with a likeable main character, and Russell's ideas and casual lines are absolutely beautiful but the book failed to come together for me. I can trace out the George Saunders influence and the McSweeneysness of the book but it didn't quite click, for me at least. I'd be certainly curious to read other things by her, though.

Nothing like another story rejection to cap off an odd week. Oh well. I'd better go do some writing.

Steel nozzles showered them from above with liquid costumes that stained and clung to their skin as they danced (always, always, always moving, not a moment's rest, lightning flicking off their elbows), that reacted to body temperature and posture to form strange patterns. Rumpled splashes became capes, belts, or sashes. All danced except the nudist, King Koan, lost in thought and universes and keeping perfectly still in a way none of the others could imitate, not a jot - he kept away from the showers of latex. Perfect bodies emerged naked, aroused, and fully-clothed at once.

Through the wet/dry crowd slid butlers, tuxedoed robot-mannequins with awkward joints delivering obscene precision -- no way those legs should be able to deliver trays of drinks without spilling. The squat XL-32 shook a martini to the delighted Privateer's specifications and then offered it to the drippingly-gloved hand. Panda-Woman and the Voice of Reason giggled to private jokes and swept forth from the showers to sip glasses of warmed goat's milk laced with nano-bibles. Epiphanies! Entropy-Man and his sidekick, Kid Heat-Death, met them on the balcony and the four slipped off the marble floor and into a seething envelope of anti-gravity. The Voice took Kid Heat-Death's hand and waltzed; Panda-Woman tangoed with Entropy-Man. The music was different for each, or possibly played only at different speeds; ultrasound guns fired different melodies into their heads.

Their forgotten drinks rolled about, exposed, on the floor for only a moment before the butlers rounded about and approached; each stray molecule collapsed into pure white light and dispersed. The butlers hummed together for a long stretch, electronic eyes trained upward toward the dancers until footsteps marked Pale Ranger and the Surrealist stepping up the steps in freshly dried uniforms...

(Cover All-Star Superman #6 by Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant)

Thursday was one of those days, well -- one of those mornings. What with the MSP payment fiasco and me being shunted to-and-fro down the pneumatic tubes of Computerized Telephone Systems, but it looked up when I went downtown and picked up the sixth issue of Quitely/Morrison's All-Star Superman. Things looked up after that, especially when I paired the comic with some sushi for lunch.

The comic opens with a mournful, hazy shot of the distant moon - a harvest moon, full and ripe-yellow. The successive panels shift the focus, bringing us to a field that the moon looks over, with a ramshackle scarecrow that looks about ready to fall over, then switches to silhouettes of a man, a boy, and a tractor. Pa Kent stands out in a field with young Clark looking up at the big Kansas sky with Clark back for a vacation from Metropolis University. Pa recounts Clark's mysterious arrival as a baby and embarasses his son up until Krypto shows up.

This is a young Clark Kent and yes, Michael, there was a Krypto: Kal-El's white puppy of indistinct breed, rocketed to Earth to arrive after the kid. A dog in a red cape with all the powers of Superman. Pa watches his boy and the dog leap up into the sky to sail off at impossible speeds and grunts, laughs, walks back up to his wife. Bathed in tractor headlights (shining directly over their shoulders at the "camera" as the credits roll) the two ponder their son's growing powers until a shadow falls across Pa's shoulder and Martha peers over at the shadow's owner.

A tall man in a button-down buttoned up to the neck, short blue-black hair like their very own son's. "Evening, folks. I hear you're on the lookout for some good men, Mister Kent. For the harvest." Followed by the story's title: Funeral in Smallville. This whole page - the Kents, the stranger, the blistering headlights - sum up to a Ray Bradbury moment, and you know something terrible's going to happen. I immediately thought young Lex Luthor, which was dead wrong, but there you go.

In the distant present, fresh from his interview with death row inmate Lex Luthor, Clark Kent is collected by a gathering of his own descendents to help them stop a monster that barrelling backward through time and eats people's lifetimes -- a beast tracked down to Smallville back when Superman was just a young man. Plot's incidental in this one, the time-travel is a weird and twisting rope that you never quite get ahold of, but that's not the point: this is the day that Pa Kent dies, while the young Superman is off saving the day. Clark Kent is given the opportunity to go back in time and does so, taking time to see his father for precious moments before his father dies. It's Orpheus and Euridice turned on its head; our Super-Orpheus can't allow his presence to be known and must come disguised, with no delusions of saving Pa's life. He just wants to free himself of an old regret - a regret, oddly, that helped make him Superman properly. As the future Supermen state, if Pa hadn't died he might not have stayed in Metropolis and gone on to father their line.

Even with the time-travel madness and the flashy Supermen of the Future -- including Kal Kent from the year 853,500 with his slinky-and-shiny sexy supersuit -- the story is a quiet meditation on the regrets of middle-age. We're given a scene with Clark's childhood friends Lana Lang and Pete Ross, the supporting cast of the Superboy comics ("The Adventures of Superman as a boy!") where they both clearly know who Clark is but continue to play the old games despite how they really feel. I was impressed more by this version of the Silver Age Lana Lang in two pages than I ever was of her previously - she was always a stand-in for Lois in the original comics, a rival for her on occasion, and it was only more recently in the mainstream comics that they've done anything particularly interesting with her, as Clark's best friend with subtext. "Why do you both act like I don't know who he is?" She asks that when Clark excuses him because of some "stomach problems" (to rush off and stop something monstrous) and all Pete can say is, "Don't make me talk about this, Lana." They've had to play this game for so long and she's tired. She's seen through all the deceptions and just wants to be honest but Clark? At this point in his life, Clark's too anxious to come out of that closet and admit he was Superboy and is Superman. Or, in that time frame, on his way to calling himself Superman.

Good comic, ripe with pathos and weird action as strange Superman from Brave New Worlds fight a ravenous monster all mouths and hands and eyes and MY GOD I can't imagine looking at that directly if it was a real thing, and the plot manages to have the whizz-bang while not actually being the whizz-bang.

I was one of the last people on the bus this morning before the bus driver closed the doors on the rest of the crowd. It doesn't matter that the last snowstorm was only a month ago - if that. Victoria collapses into chaos when the flakes hit. Buses going into ditches. Crammed into a very tiny space with someone standing on my foot until we hit downtown, then I squirrelled past people and changed shape to stuff myself between awkward bodies to get off the bus and out onto the street, the icy street.

The interview for the permanent position at the downtown branch was strange and short. I'm left with no idea whether I answered everything well or if I faltered somewhere and bunged it all up. Couldn't tell you. They've retooled some of the questions and a couple of them threw me entirely off. The suit doesn't quite fit me as well as it could, either, so I was uncomfortable. And my mouth did that dry thing that always happens when I speak in public, as if saliva is a foreign and entirely impossible substance which can not exist within the confines of my body. Afterward I strung my way back into the streets and ran into Gloriee. She's working four jobs right now.

Imagine them, coming in from the skies in the tens of thousands: Miss Shirley Bassey after Miss Shirley Bassey after Miss Shirley Bassey, gleaming steel-skinned and riding on head-mounted propellers and bombarding the city below with high frequency renditions of "History Repeating" until buildings shake and crumble, until streets crack and give way to vast fissures. Tens of thousands of Miss Shirley Bassey Robots landing in sheer black satin evening gowns, perfect for cocktail parties or smoky bars or unleashing wave after wave of electrosex onto a waiting, screaming, population. Crushing the audience beneath their boots.

I took a shower to clean up and warm up and speed up my brain. I drank a glass of water, wrote a couple poems, drank a glass of water, did the dishes, cleaned up the apartment some, took out the recycling, wrote two pages based off "walking the drunk down the street" as a weird drinking game between two friends, listened to the Frida soundtrack, pulled that Doctorow book up off the shelf because I haven't touched it for reading purposes since the night of the terrible food poisoning when I read it to myself at two in the morning while preparing to vomit. Going to scribble more poems, probably, or little stories while I read. The plans for the evening changed and I'm just enjoying the quiet. Quiet. Quiet. I need another glass of water.

Finished the Doctorow book this afternoon after a decent brunch and a trip to Russell's Books with Christian. Picked up a book of Robin Skelton ballads and two Ray Bradburys. I tried to read Natural History by Justina Robson but the whole affair didn't quite go off with the proper bang and I'm finding her prose too dense and cold in this particular book so I might start one of the Bradburys instead. S is for Space and Something Wicked This Way Comes. The whole thing is really rather familiar -- too many books. There's always too many books and they spawn other books, mutate and multiply. My library is alive, perhaps, and reaches out to swallow the world in its pulpy teeth.

Enough! I'm going to go consume sentences and spit out other sentences into the notebook with dim lights and the hum of the boarding house...

Work politics don't mean much of anything if you're not in it, trench-like, World War One pseudo-fiascos potboiling under the surface, but man! They're iridescently fascinating.

Not surprisingly, I didn't get that permanent position but I still have an interview to be scheduled soon for some temporary ones. Whatever comes, comes.

Walked around this morning with a first sentence like a loaded gun and then went downtown to meet up with Samara. We ended up having an extremely late lunch after she got done with the passport office and I had fired off the first sentence and half a paragraph besides; went to Ferris's Oyster Bar which was okay but not wonderful. Good company. We jabbered for while as our toes warmed up and then headed out into the cold, again, for a bus home.

One hundred and sixteen words sitting in my word processor and I keep staring at them and waiting for the next one to show up. Which is fine, I have some reading to do.

Three hundred and seventy-one words and I still feel like I'm staring. I keep saying to myself: first drafts are meant to be awkward. We're in an apartment but how that apartment fits into the world is uncertain, or which world, and msot of the bits of the apartment are blurred and descriptionless. At times uncertainy can be an immensely thrilling thing and other things you keep banging your knees into things while you stagger around and nobody's there to tell you where things are. Because they're not there, you're making it up.

Could just be that I'm having a bad day. Still, we stand in an apartment with one character and it's about time I bring in another one, somehow.

(Cover art by Duncan Fegredo)

On the grounds that I have a better idea of what's going on, I'm about to launch that story again. Let's see what happens.

[EDIT: 1302 words as of 10:59, one scene with too much dialogue and not enough physical description.]

[First sentence, for consideration:

"Shuttling along with the crass, impeccable body language of a silent film star, the brown-blotched salamander touched window pane for one tick of the big clock before fingers deathly in need of a manicure peeled it off."]

Got distracted in the shower with how big a computer would be or should be, for the story, and why. Bigger implicates a certain antiquarian approach that I'm trying to leave behind at the moment, smaller makes more sense but doesn't look quite right. I think I've found a happy medium, with a small computer connected via wireless to expansive interface tech (screens, keyboard, et cetera) because the character using the device needs it big.

I think I can quantify exactly why I've never actively written SF before, chief reason being that the prose becomes quite mechanical if you're trying to explain or express some strange technology that would be so integrated into the character's life they wouldn't really think about it. I've been looking around for good examples.

I'm writing about junk food. I think the story actually revolves the bizarre diet of the future.

(Art by David Shannon)

Forget the grotesqueries of manga! What should we truly be terrified of? Ducks riding on bicycles. Ducks riding on bicycles while noticeably inebriated. Do you want to be coming down a street and see that depraved and manic gleam in some waterfowl's mad eyes, the rapid turn of spokes? Do you want to teach children that it's okay to turn ducks into monstrous, half-human obscenities who break laws? That duck, my friends, is completely hammered and operating a vehicle. That duck should not be riding a bike, that duck should be in the Betty Ford Clinic, drying out.

Joy would be proud of me. I'm listening to Le Tigre.

At around eight this morning I was stumbling around Downtown Victoria in a pinstriped suit with music firing into my ears from the iPod to encourage my brain to be alert and functional. With only half an hour of sleep last night and an ambiguously sore throat, I was - possibly - underprepared to sit down and be interviewed for two of the internal job postings today. I'd only had enough sleep to dump myself into a hazy chase dream with cyborgs and genetic analysis machines before the alarm went off. I ate a croissant and drank a hot chocolate, then loaded myself onto a bus out to Colwood. My only companions were a Doctorow book of short stories, some comics, and the Fear. The Fear sat there the entire time and pointed out I hadn't shaved, slept, or really eaten anything of consequence. The Fear sat there and reminded me that my suit's a little tight and I'm breaking out right now and I'm stupid, mind-bogglingly stupid. I read comics and listened to the New Pornographers. The Fear is best ignored in these situations.

I wasn't "tired" in that traditional, sleepy, misty-eyed and heavy-footed way. I came up with a story idea and was more like "wired," which leads to concerns over incomprehensible interview answers, surely, only I made it out there and had the interview and answered all the questions with confidence, fully, although I almost missed the point with one of them but recovered almost immediately. I have absolutely no idea if I spoke enough or how things are going to turn out, but there I was, heading back into town to buy comic books and sushi for lunch. I've got a very good shot, I think, but I'm at that point where the bullet's left the gun and it's all a matter of trajectories, and no unexpected obstacles moving in between it and the target. We're down to probabilities. There might be an element of sleep deprivation at play here, but I've been possessed of zen consciousness since I finished the interview. Although I keep losing vowels...

Should have done laundry afterward, but I think passing out in a laundromat wouldn't be a good idea and the whole concept of laundry? Feels completely beyond me. You'd think, with super-zen consciousness I'd be all about the laundry, the basic material aspects of living,

I'll be starting my temporary half-time position at the Esquimalt branch at the beginning of February. It's only a three month posting and I'm really still an auxiliary clerk without health benefits, but it's a step up and I'll have a regular twenty-one hours from that and seven hours a week at Oak Bay, meaning I'm set for twenty-eight hours every week without having to worry about it. This means, among other things, I'll have a predictable schedule for most of each week and can actually set aside time for grocery shopping and laundry. Plus, you know, not having the sweat buckets over each and every hour I can scrape together during the slow part of the year.

No, but seriously, I had every intention of writing tonight.

Honestly.

That's too many adverbs. I was going to write tonight.

Only I bought groceries, talked to Pops on the phone, emailed Joy, did the dishes, made soup and ate it while watching Veronica Mars, dumped more music onto the iPod, rearranged playlists, messaged Michael, read Barbelith for a while, which had an entire thread devoted to writing in haiku, overdosed on commas, did more dishes, and here I am, quarter to Midnight.

I was going to write.

But I didn't, and I'm sorry, and the Fear's tapping its foot outside my door but only in that "neighbourly" way like waking up because one's neighbour is up at five in the morning to head out as usual with his or her phone ringing off the hook.

So I'm going to get into bed and listen to music softly and write a couple sentences. Maybe a paragraph. Or two. Might stretch myself with three, big spender, you know.

Going to coffee shop it after work tomorrow afternoon and get some serious words constructed in something not unlike an english language sentence, or even multiples thereof. Might try the Moka House that just opened up in China Town. Well, maybe not, seeing as how my last couple Moka House experiences have been utter shit, I might just end up at my old stand-by Blenz with a hot chocolate and a clear view of people spitting on Douglas Street while the buses drive by. Couple seagulls fighting over shitty McDonalds remains. Good times, good times.

I'm not sure how much I actually enjoyed Manufactured Landscapes, an NFB documentary on Edward Burtynsky's photography. I think I would have much preferred to go see an exhibition of his photographs rather than sit through a rambling lecture which ultimately restated the same couple points over and over again. The visuals were stunning, obviously, and I think I preferred the sequences in Shanghai with people's kitchens spilling out into the crowded alley-streets so that "inside" and "outside" almost seem like artificial constructions. I've always been a fan of claustrophobic urban imagery and horribly dystopian "the future is now" visuals. I think my literary struggles lately have been getting me down too much but I feel excited about exploring more urban geography in my writing, because geography and setting have always been something I focus on -- I'm often more concerned about writing about a certain environment, first, rather than coming up with a character right away. I've been writing very spacious desert sequences and wet, swampy stories and now I want some urban sprawl. Expect some weird science fiction to come squirting out soon.

That kind of got away from the documentary. Damn. Point is: good visuals, poor-quality soundwork and repetitive narration. It didn't help that the Cinecenta projector blurred the images ever so slightly.

1. Perhaps spurred on by the presence of David Lynch repeat offender Michael J. Anderson as the manager of the carnival, the fifth episode of Carnivale is like some bizarre inversion of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, where the carnie workers and sideshow freaks are the good guys we're rooting for and are frightened for as the carnival's audience in the damned town of Babylon trudge in to take in the sights and sounds. The silver miners of Babylon, the spectators, are the monster of the piece, a many-headed monster like the one-hundred-childrened Leviathan in Grant Morrison's revamp of Klarion, the Witch-Boy. The silver-miners are the threat, crowding in to destroy the cooch dancers when their lust is pushed too far. And certainly there's been references to Bradbury's novel in earlier episodes -- when the carnival reinvents itself, briefly, as a biblical endeavour, Felix pretends to be a reformed lightning-rod salesman, which evokes the novel's opening scene. And the novel has its creature of light and creature of dark, like the show does - the novel's boys, born one minute on either side of midnight on Halloween.

2. Klarion actually shows up, sumptuously painted, in this month's issue of Robin. I don't normally read the Boy Wonder's solo adventures but I'm a sucker for Frazer Irving's artwork and for Klarion, in his morally questionable adolescence and stark refusal to bend before his puritannical upbringing when he could be having fun. The adventure was, on the whole, a bit light but it manages to both evoke Klarion's childish wonder and his rather bleaker streak of opportunism.

3. Reading China Mieville's Looking for Jake, which is well done so far. Some of the stories are more workmanlike in their strengths but others, like the Borges-derived The Tain is both creepy and illuminating.

4. Met up with Christian at Dolce Vita and drank hot chocolate while writing for two and a half hours. I actually churned out quite a lot of prose, the start of a story, but I'm not sure if it'll remain trapped in the mire of the notebook or if I'll do something with it. Quite a lot of sentences that I liked, though, so I'll probably cannibalize it at the very least and use them in other things. Quite a good description of an orca, I think. Ruby Room showed up in the middle of it but I didn't quite have the opportunity to explore her character much. Maybe I'll send her off on her own adventure so that she has some, ah, room to breathe. Afterward Christian introduced me to the Bloc Party's music and I tracked a couple tracks down for the iPod.

Michael, Dan and Lisa picked me from work on Saturday night in the Van of Death, Michael's inherited conveyance between worlds. This was after a mocha cake earlier in the day and the lingering after-effects of a "strange smell" which had, the day before, caused the branch to remain closed until two in the afternoon while WorkSafe people determined its origins and tried to clean up. Burning plastic, maybe. Dead paint. Dead bodies. They picked me up and we lit out to Tillicum to eat at Sabri's Indian Buffet, only that was bursting at the seams, busy, so we walked over to the "Naanwich" secondary shop. Naanwich. I had potato-and-pea and we ended up waiting in a labourous bread-line for about half an hour before we finally got to leave.

Where were we going?

Christian's students out at Pearson College have been preparing for weeks for a European National Day and he's been cracking the whip, teaching them how to waltz, et cetera. He's been exhausted and stretched thin as a result but we were going out there to see the show. We drove on, and on, and on - out through Colwood and Langford and Metchosin, with darkness thick round the van and dripping in and no music, on account of the radio being dead in the van for quite some time. Possibly there's a blown fuse involved, but the radio's dead and that means no Stuart McLean on Sunday mornings while we drive to brunch. But, regardless, the van is quiet but for the sound of the road and us lapsing in and out of conversation, Dan delivering Christian's directions to Michael by light-of-cell-phone. Imagine: the scene set like a knock off David Lynch movie but there is no soundtrack.

Calamity, right?

Eventually we reach Pearson and the van slides on up and over hills and down other hills and there, down there, deep in the heart of darkness (Marlon Brando being fanned from the depths of a darkened tent, gone quite mad), Visitor's Parking.

Fast forward. Christian meets up with us in the dark and drags us up the hill to the main building and we mount stairs threaded between young whippersnappers in formal wear, find ourselves some seats and wait for the show to start up.

The show.

Well, Michael's probably going to put up the pictures later. Christian and teenagers doing Russian dances in red boots, kinky boots, Nancy Sinatra Boots. There was a really solid Flamenco, although the sound equipment was a bit shit and I think the singers could have done better to have simply projected rather than constraining themselves with microphones, but music! What do I know about music?

And it ends and we go down - go down again! - into the depths of the Visitor Parking lot to, you know, get in the van and drive away to meet up with Christian at the Bent Mast to, you know, have a drink. Only the car won't start. It won't start and it won't start and even though I've been known to make computers explode with my touch, I tried it and it still didn't work and there was that thin edge of panic going on, what with none of us being knowledgeable or equipped to deal with car troubles. It wasn't the battery, but people kept asking if it was, only all the electrical systems were fine.

So we went back up the hill and found Christian and went back down the hill and tried again and then went up to the staff parking and geez, we were going up and down a lot, in the dark, passing by smoking students in light shawls (whippersnappers) and we got into Christian's car like sardines with a loud multicultural soundtrack off his iPod and drove on, leaving the van to its own devices in the dark and drenched with demons. Also, I left my Sprite inside, and who knows what the dark does to carbonation.

Stephen King should write a story about that.

Anyway, crammed and out of sorts we headed into town and across town and after a thousand years on wheels, we reached the Bent Mast in old James Bay and we drank beer and I ate perogies while engineers got wasted at the next table and then we headed home.

Christian took Michael out to Pearson today and they had to get the van towed. Could this be the end of the bastard vehicle? I don't want to think about it.

I think I want to go to the art gallery next weekend.

It's been an Airlock Monday.

A girl in sunglasses and a "kicky" outfit sucked on a cigar this morning at the bus stop, round about nine in the morning. Seems early to partake of a stogie, especially when one isn't a hardened drill sergeant played by Martin Sheen. The man in the seat in front of me on the bus, the one in the heavy green-and-black flannel, permeated the air with half-damp booze and a hint of rotting flesh, but maybe I'm getting that from the way baggage carousel running in circles under his eyes. The man's face was a northern town's airport. A buddy of his got on after a few stops and they chattered amicably until the buddy got off.

Work was mostly people coughing on me from across the desk without covering their mouths, and I'd dash into the back between to wash my hands with "spiced pear" hand soap, dreaming of full-body decontamination showers with that sanitizing foam and industrial cleaners. It's not like I don't have that sore throat that comes and goes without actually getting me sick; waking up with the sore throat is becoming a regular situation but at least the sore throat's a quieter squatter than the Fear. I ate a huge fruit salad for lunch, mostly because I was craving pineapple for whatever reason. Time to fly south, maybe. M gave me a ride home from work so I didn't have to slog it in the foreign smells and stewing juices and rampant infection. I made haphazard sushi rice and chirashi with avocado and various seafoods, sat and stared.

This should be out tomorrow:

(cover art by Brian Bolland)

Volume 5 of Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, wherein a hypothetical man runs for president having doused Venice in a backwash of psychedelic energy. Also, it has the following inside:

(Pencils by Mike Sekowsky, inks by Frank Giacoia and colours by Daniel Vozzo).

If all goes well, anyway, since it was supposed to come out the first week of January originally. But if it does come out I won't have time to pick it up until Thursday, but that's okay so long as it makes out into daylight and I can put my hands on that pack of flattened weird shit.