wildcat

Work's a plateau today, only infrequent ripples running along the surface, often generating interference patterns. Thoughts? Not collecting here, somewhere else away from my head.

Planned finger-talking for the evening so I can input the story's opening into my machine at home, I have a rough idea what the ending's going to be and I'm thinking I might give myself one week starting today to build the first draft. Might stretch that to a week and a half, taking into consideration various meatspace obligations and situations. It doesn't have a title yet. I don't know. There are aliens in it.

Also going to dump music onto Mother Box and update the flash-drive with the writings.

[EDIT - DEAR GOD, We have a copy of Julie Taymor's Oedipus Rex production on DVD at work, I've got a hold on it, I'm suppressing the urge to drool over the case...]

Banged out another page of the gnostic science fiction story, which remains untitled, over a hot chocolate in that coffee shop on the bad side of the street, before hopping on a bus to come to work. I have a better idea of what's going on, but it's a very uneven first draft because I have to figure out the mechanics of things. The diction's a little all-over-the-place but that might end up being a necessary effect of the characters.

Rudy Rucker's Mathematicians in Love is pretty good so far, although I'm still not sure how I feel about Bela, the main character, being a sexy, surfing mathematician - feels too much like Rucker's pulling him off as a Mary Sue character but that could be my natural hesitation toward beautiful characters, preferring the ugly or slightly peculiar. As Rucker's employing first person narration, we don't get any description of Bela, or even his name, until he looks in a mirror and the whole thing feels completely unnatural and awkwardly written, especially given how sexy Bela seems to think he is. I do like the punk rock Queer Eye monster fashions the characters drape themselves in as they wander through their parallel reality Berkeley, and the language pops. Good use of contemporary technologies as science-fiction appendages. The narrative is still revving up so Rucker's got time to pull me more fully into the story.

1. Often, writing seems to involve a lot of cross-eyed staring, while you try to remember that this is the first draft and that it doesn't have to be the most amazing thing ever. Some days, like today, I think it's much more complicated to be a mediocre writer because we've got grit our teeth and deal with it when the sentences come out a little flat.

2. I'm not sure about this one character, still. I know what she looks like but I'm not sure what her motivation is. Don't you hate that? It's like the title issue, still untitled - nothing to structure the story around. Beyond a texture. I haven't properly articulate the texture, either.

3. My descriptions of the city are, frankly, terrible. Not enough interesting or unique details. I think I'm going to start infusing it with Victoria descriptions; I had that thought while I walked to the grocery store down a street with cherry blossoms running the length of it.

4. The main character, meanwhile, has to live in seething conflict and is barely shaped at this point. He's this blob, this shadow, which has benefits and drawbacks.

5. Hard when you can't find proper writing music. Magnetic Fields isn't doing it for me tonight.

1. Even when the shit's everywhere, there are moments - she hasn't got a name, but this one character's dialogue clicks for me. I want her to be a space angel, a messiah for messiahs.

The woman, motherly, sighing, half-smiling but mostly frustrated, ran her thumb over the smooth glass and smirked at him as the gun's opened mouth did. "We come from a world of beautiful rocket scientists, Doctor. I'm afraid you've been lost amid Earth's strange wars and disintegrating bodies." She stroked the gun and held it up until it caught the gullies of putrid light and shone like vibrant crystals. "This is not a gun."

2. The movements and blocking is difficult to grasp right now, with this story. This will probably be the very first issue to be dealt with when the second draft is cracked.

3. Other issue is the characters, how they relate. They're cyphers in service to the story.

1. Erasure's cover of "Take a Chance on Me" is notable mostly for its video, which is close to a shot-for-shot reproduction of the ABBA video, only with Erasure's singers in drag; it's funny and fun and plays into perceptions held about ABBA. Their cover of "Video Killed the Radio Star," by contrast, is a textbook example of sound being used to generate story. It's not about reproduction; it's about layering. It's the Oral History of Machines, it's a bunch of robot students standing very still in very clear rows in a Museum of Robotic History while their top-heavy robot guide instructs them in the evolution of technologies. I'm not sure why they'd be communicating in English rather than binary code, but I suppose even the robots must be allowed their little affectations.

2. Following Joy's suggestion, the space angel character is going to be called Rahab or some derivative, although there's something about the original being a biblical prostitute-spy that makes me want to hang back on that name and use it for a story with Teiresias Jones and Johnny Damocles. Which is a good argument for using Esther instead, but her story doesn't quite mesh with the infiltration aspects of the story so well.

3. I'm on about page seven of the first draft, although I need to delete the last half-paragraph from last night and rework it and take in a better direction. Occasionally you end up in these narrative dead-ends and have to cleave them right away and force the juices to squish in another direction. The (first?) climax has happened but where do I go from here? I suspect, once I've fleshed things out into a more coherent second draft the story will finish itself off more naturally.

4. There's still the question of the title.

5. After an exhausting day at work -- not bad, necessarily, but merely taxing from the constant movement and energy and noise -- I went for a drink with a friend from work and we had a rather good time discussing dream interpretation, PhD theses, comic books, and living situations. She had a beer but, being the delicate wisp of a flower that I am, I had a raspberry martini. It felt idly decadent in the low lights, surrounded by servers in black. Refreshing.

There's something weird about that intersection at Johnson and Douglas. I sat in the ghetto coffee shop and stared out the corner window at the intersection and the light was funny, early morning strange, and for all the sketch there's this electric buzz about. I don't think I've ever hidden the fact that Johnson is my favourite street in the city - all the comic shops are on it, bunch of second-hand book shops and vegan Chinese food and other curiousities, and the street itself plummets down onto a big bridge on one end and rises up - snake-like - to merge with Pandora and become something else. Even when there's gobbed up spit on the pavement and cigarette butts and broken glass, or that weird bus stop in front of the comic shops that doesn't seem like it should be a bus stop, all those weird alley ways and artificial alley ways with stores down them. Buzz.

I'm jazzed up with ideas for the story and its ongoing rewriting, editing, revising, restructuring. Basically I wrote a thing not unlike a seed and now it's about making the thing germinate. Rahab remains my favourite character and with her there I can start to flesh out the others.

Vague rumblings of travel plans, down the road. India, Japan - to see the wayward children. Or to be wayward children, whichever. Nothing firm, beyond that trip over to Vancouver in a few weeks to take in the art gallery and remind ourselves that yes, there's a planet outside the island.

Superman's oddly neurotic considering he can hijack entire planets and push them out of orbit, isn't he?

I've got to be up early in the morning to function as a responsible automaton of society, so it's off to the mattress to scribble notes for the story. I've had about a paragraph sitting upstairs in my head all day and I need to actually put it down somewhere.

The hum of machines (computers, lighting fixtures, air conditioning) throbs on around me like a second wall. I spent half an hour in the ghetto coffee shop this morning working out the names for alien languages (I'm much too much in love with "Astro-Etruscan," I think) and writing the opening for Rahab's thread of the story. I've got a list of characters, short, with which to spend my time. A couple names have to be hammered a bit more to bring them to fruition. I'm working out the story's metaphysics. Sunday, I think, will be a good day to sit down at the Machine and make a real, solid thrust into the story's structure.

I'm tempted to buy various coloured pens to make a diagram of the story. That seemed to help in Short Fiction Techniques class, way back.

Last night was the bickersome Bent Mast. Tonight is probably Koto with Vicki and the Accomplice, which means a negitoro don. Fatty tuna makes me happy.

No, I'm not naming a character "Fatty Tuna."

No.

Well. Maybe.

Brunch was a little disappointing today. We went to the Heron Rock Cafe, which was touted as a mainstay of James Bay and top knotch -- only it was a bit underwhelming, all around. I had this veggie burger with carmelized onions and a side salad, but the veggie patty disintegrated too easily and the onions were oddly bland; the salad, by contrast, was quite good. A light vinegerette, apples, and various grains. It was missing something, a "kick" of some kind. Christian was saying they're better known for their three-course dinners and that gives me hope, because their brunch just didn't do it for me. Victoria has a healthy brunching community but I've found in my travels that it's very hard to find good, unique brunch offerings -- everybody carries the same West Coast Brunch Foods and only a few places have stand-out signature dishes like Avalon's hollandaise sauce.

Feeling unsatisfied with my meal, I wanted to go for ice cream but pretty much everybody poo-poo'd the very notion, so I've been at home fiddling about with my music. I'm going to go to the market and get things for dinner, including lime sherbert and some bread; I'm going to make myself escargots and garlic bread tonight, I think.

I've been reading Amy Sedaris's I Like You: Entertaing Under the Influence, which I think Joy would like quite a lot. Some of the meaty pictures are a little distressing but they evoke that weird, psychdelic cookery feel of a Seventies cook-book. It goes through etiquette, throwing parties (How not to introduce someone: "This is Helen, she can't have children."), different menu selections, how to be an unexpected guest. It's got a section on cooking for one and talks about Sedaris's imaginary boyfriend Ricky.

Christian made some remarks about alien languages not being based on consonants and vowels which made me think. The story's going to be quite retro in its approach to science fiction, given the circumstances of the characters and the fact that in my head I'm writing a dime store pulp fiction. I've got about a page from the other day to transcribe so I can play with the ideas for a bit and then get to some heavy writing later this evening.

Trouble waking up: alarm goes off, get up, turn off alarm, fall back into bed. Get up after half an hour, check the clock, go back to bed. Unable to move, I'm forced to lucidly dream a phone ringing and that catapults me out of bed.

Before that, in the fugue, I dreamt I worked in a grocery store as a cashier, forced to scan an endless supply of barcoded groceries for old people with demands. This seems painfully symbolic and I wish my subconscious had something approaching tact, but no. No: my subconscious likes to smack me over the head with a Dictionary of Symbols whenever possible.

But, fuck that noise. It's sunny, I'm meeting the girls for lunch during my workday downtown, and then I'm coming home to do the dishes and write a story. Damn it.

Following pneumonia, one of the creators of some of my favourite comic books (Notably Deadman and the Doom Patrol) passed away today:

...Most of his new creations in the sixties came about because an editor said to him, "This comic is in sales trouble and needs a new feature." My Greatest Adventure was down in sales so Drake, working with artist Bruno Premiani and fellow writer Bob Haney, invented The Doom Patrol, a band of misfit heroes very similar to Marvel's X-Men, which went on sale at almost the exact same time...He was a loud voice in a writers' revolt during which several of the firm's longtime freelancers were demanding health insurance, reprint fees and better pay. Many of them were ousted, including Arnold, and he then worked for a time for Marvel before settling down at Gold Key Comics for many years. For them, he wrote many comics including The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and a particularly long and delightful stint on Little Lulu...Arnold wrote other things including plays, movies (Who Killed Teddy Bear? and The Flesh Eaters, among others) and novels. In the fifties, he authored a long comic book in book form called It Rhymes With Lust for a small publisher and later touted it, with some justification, as the first graphic novel. (Dark Horse will soon reissue it.) He also worked extensively with a group called the Veterans Bedside Network, writing materials to aid in the rehabilitation and nursing of men and women who'd served in the armed forces...
-- Mark Evanier

In a laundromatic haze, I found myself walking downtown while the sky spit rain upon me and the wind gushed. Blown off course but revelling in uneven spurts in the bliss of precipitation, I ended up picking up a graphic novel. 2020 Visions, a science-fiction affair written by Jamie Delano. Delano wrote the opening storylines for Vertigo's Hellblazer comic starring John Constantine back in the day, and its his work on the charater that was watered down adapted for movie Constantine.

The graphic novel is actually four interconnected novellas following a damaged bloodline in the year 2020; each novella is dystopian science fiction blended with a second genre (the first is a horror, the second a detective story, then a western, then a romance), and each one is drawn by a different artist. They were originally in colour when DC/Vertigo published them but the edition I got was a reprint produced by Speakeasy Comics; 2020 Visions is a creator-owned work and Delano was able to find a new publisher for the collection for whatever reason; it's done in black and white.

(Cover art by Frank Quitely)

All the stories have something, but I gravitated to the horror of the first story, "Lust for Life," where New York's become this divided city trapped in a war with infection. The rich, clean, white, and healthy have been segregated into a giant futuristic wet dream structure called the Archipelago; the disenfranchised, meanwhile, have been left outside of Paradise to rot and squabble with each other while trying to stay healthy. This is a future where outer space interests and adapting Earth viruses have led to a society gripped by disease paranoia, bizarre monster infections breaking out all over the place. Any evidence of infection? The citizen is quarantined chemically and thrown onto Ellis Island to await death. Promises of doctors on the Island? All a lie.

There's an intriguing edge to the story -- the Archipelago was built by a militant feminist government set up some time before the story opens, to protect their rich, white, female population for harm. I wouldn't call the story sexist or dubious, though; it's clear that the feminists are extremists and the society's problems stem from all kinds of militant extremism, fundamentalism -- mirroring the overbearing body paranoia. I definitely caught on it but it's structured to be more about power corrupting regardless and a matriarchy being just as bad as a patriarchy -- and they're fairly conservative feminists versus a more equality-driven feminism. In the afterword, Delano talks about an "equality of vilification," and asks for "indulgence" of what he feels was an exaggerated premise.

Among the new government's reforms was a prohibition on pornography, which obviously just makes porn go underground. Consequently, the story centers on two aging, leftover pornographers who have been denied entry to the Archipelago. Alex Woychek lives alone in a loft, seventy years old and desperately collecting mid-Fifties pro-American propaganda porn, while his aged ex-girlfriend Zandra has tenuous connections to the Inside and has herself some luxury, despite being barred from Heaven. And Alex is there when a jumper smashed into the pavement and showers the crowd with infected blood and guts -- infected with a new strain of mutant virus. Alex escapes the containment crews and figures he's okay, only he's not. The story progresses through his illness, making contact with Zandra to get money for drugs, accidentally infecting her in the frenzied seizures of the illness (it's a fuck-fever, patients suffer a rising temperature and a sponatenous and desperate need to rut as it kills them).

Things happen. We're taken with them to Ellis Island. Alex oscillates between hero and monster; his love for Zandra and hers for him is both rejuvenating and damning, because they're too old and there's too much bad blood between them, because they've been infected. He's a Boy's Adventure hero in the wilderness, determined to make it into the Archipelago to get a cure, or destroy everyone. He becomes the leader of a zombie invasion, sufferers taking Manhattan and disintegrating into a frenzy of destruction while Alex tries to change his situation, or get revenge.

It's a story about the apocalypse as contagion, and the crisis is not averted. But it doesn't happen, either; the story is about an apocalypse that grinds on with no regard for human needs or fears or horrors, an apocalypse that stretches out and doesn't end things properly, drags them out, where there is no end in sight. The End is always just around the corner; tales are told of the government withholding some super-treatment with the intention of using it against the big, bad, super-bug that's been foretold, only they won't use it, because what if it's not the big one yet? What if it just gives the new bug something else to adapt to and conquer? Only it never seems to come, and Alex is neither redeemed nor damned, ultimately. He's a viral superman hobbling along, age wearing on him as the disease overtakes him (but, strangely, he is balanced by it).

I like the idea of an apocalypse that never finishes, or really starts, or has a peak to it; just an edges drudgery. It mirrors life, and our desperate need to feel special by saying that the world's ending, right now. It has that same feeling as The Passion of New Eve, relentless but sort of comical in its monstrosity.

Still processing the story, mid-reread.

Got to pack up all the shit I need for a night & day in Vancouver before I head to bed, on account of not being home between tomorrow morning and leaving for the city on Saturday evening. So: reading material, change of underwear, socks, phone charger, notebook & pens. All that. Dumping energy & songs onto the music machine to take with.

Big plans. Trip to the art gallery to wash myself in artist's sweat. There must be a ritual about that, somewhere, anointing yourself (head & shoulders). Haven't been since the Rodin exhibit with Christian, Michael, and Jeremy. Rodin's schlubby sculptures of Balzac. It's photography this time, comes highly recommended, and I'll try to touch base with Matthew assuming he gets the email all right.

Anyway: packing, then bed. Possibly in that order.

To begin, your full, unedited and unabridged name, please.
Benjamin Allan Rawluk. I often misspelled my middle name for many years, substituting an "e" for the second "a," suggesting that my keen intellect is often hampered by a questionable attention to detail.

On being introduced to your name, what was your reaction to it?
I will always be listed near the end of the alphabet, which flusters me as alphabetical filing is the standard and I write fiction more than non-fiction. At various points in my life I wanted to be named Matthew (Grade 4) and Franklin (Grade 5 - not Frank or Frankie. Franklin), but I've warmed considerably. The last name's spelling will always be a point of contention with other people.

Do you think God exists only in the mind?
Do you exist only in my mind?

And is therefore more real than the physical world?
"The material world is the part of Heaven that you can touch."

What is your chosen gender?
Bio-male, although I can't be certain what I was last time 'round. I've been both, I'd imagine. Several times.

If pressed, would you choose to wear boots or high heels on a first date?
I would not give into the Patriarchy of Sloping Feet. Boots. This has nothing to do with the fact that high heels would make me topple over, like certain Baltic economies.

Do you have a best friend?
Yes. She's very far away.

Do you look at all your friends and arrange them into a mental hierarchy?
No. Joy is my best friend, Michael is The Accomplice, then there's Christian. Actually, maybe I do have a hierarchy, but the vast majority are my friends, brilliant and shining each and every one of them.

How long would it take for you to realise that you are in love?
About three weeks, the last time it happened.

Could there ever be a sort of relationship that transcends love itself?
I have a sopping, questionable relationship with books, as it happens, but we're not at liberty to discuss that.

What is your favourite breed of dog?
Beagle.

Nutella:
I would not name my daughter Nutella, no.

Do you remember your first school friend?
His name was Mark, and his brother was named Adam and probably the subject of my very first, very nascent crush. I think. Mark and I used to play cars, and this was in William's Lake. There was a standing rule among all the boys that whoever's house we were at was the boss. This led to certain political crises.

Do you own a scarf of a colour other than black?
Samara crochetted me a lovely, rich green one. Very warm.

Do you like yourself? If not, do you like your house?
I'm extremely hard on myself, but I do like myself. My apartment, by contrast, is a lazy layabout although I love it very much.

Sometimes when I read, I read out loud. Do you?
Sometimes. Mostly when I read poetry, or a sentence whallops me on the forehead and says, "If only you could write this well."

Do you have some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder?
No.

Are mini-skirts the way to go?
Who like short-shorts?

Is red the new black?
Green.

Which animal would you rather be: a racoon or a panda?
Panda. More exotic.

Do you pity all the penguins who fall over when planes fly overhead?
Apparently penguins are quite the little drama queens.

Sugar or Salt?
Both.

Do you think that a monkey has more moral worth than a newly born baby?
Enh. Equal.

Is there a difference between men and women which is not just biological?
Biological and social programming.

'Velvet dresses are better than velvet coats'. Discuss.
Velvet smoking jackets, like Joy says.

Do you hate school?
In retrospect, no, but at the time it was rather distressing.I love writing workshops.

Does it sometimes annoy you that the Harry Potter films are so very bad?
A bit indifferent. They're pulp.

A weekend away! After many, many moons upon the island (and dust, creaking, crusting, upon my brow), we got a little over twenty-four hours on the mainland, driving off the ferry last night quite late in rain and darkness to zoom on through to Vancouver. We got there safe, as well, after negotiating the usual rigamorale (very nearly accidentally went to the United States, perish the thought, cross yourself, oh honey no / oh to have proper directions to deal with in the dark). It was Saturday night but let's just say our bones were ragged, incised, desperate to stretch out so we made way for the hotel and left it at that (well, well, with all the casual indiscretions that hotel rooms birth), with tragic body lotion and soap that smelled of amaretto.

Next time, we won't be fighting off colds, the pair of us. We'll actually go out somewhere.

On the ferry, I started reading Dracula. John Harker obsesses over Carpathian cuisine, especially paprika chicken - an unbearable thirst overwhelms him, not enough water, weird travelogue foreshadowing the Count's influence on his life.

Morning came, dreary grey light in between curtains (soft & downy white), checkout time, consultation with the spirits via text message and plans to meet Jeremy in Kits to brunch at some place called Sophie's, which was all right as brunch goes, but nothing much to write home about, to use a cliche. Stood in a long lineup for brunching goods that filled the belly but neither excited the senses nor delighted the brain.

Went to the Art Gallery! Stood in lines, checked bags. It was Kids Day, we need to make sure we don't go on Kids Day again. Photography as Performance, first floor - I got to see a Cindy Sherman photograph at the right size and accompanied by a shot done by a good friend of hers, whose name escapes me but, the second shot is an almost exact reproduction of Sherman's, as a weird cover version. There was a set of rooms full of photographs done specifically to emulate famous paintings, with varying degrees of success. A Last Supper rendition with Israeli soldiers (or possibly male models dressed as same), which I felt could have been improved by cropping everything above the table top so you're only left with all these legs & feet; the positioning seemed quite evovcative and more interesting than a straight-on copy. Some old Twenties prints of debutante and celebrity women dressed up as mythological women (Medusa, Niobe, and Europa).

Third floor was Fred Herzog's photography of Vancouver from between 1960 to the Nineties, and it was probably the best exhibit. The vast majority seemed to be Sixties-centric, and the smaller room with recent work seemed odd. Jeremy said he thought it seemed too nostalgic for the times shown in the earlier work. I thought it lacked energy. Some of the earlier photos were gorgeous, and I thought of Joy and Matt in certain cases (a woman in gloves trying on a feathered pillbox hat, old men walking along the street, et cetera) and my dad's photography in other cases (an old man and a kid looking up at plywood circus posters of coochie dancers in the show).

Fourt floor was some terrible sketch work thing by "B.C. Binning," whoever that is. Well, not terrible. Not my thing.

Went to a couple comic shops with the boys, finding in among my purchases of old Legion comics, this:

(Cover image by Duncan Fegredo)

Tasty treat. One of the missing eleven issues of Peter Milligan's Shade the Changing Man. It's one of the last issues and certainly not one of the better individual chapters in the story but it has its moments and the idea is quite serene, alligator people, some meta-fiction (an old character, the writer Miles Laimling, is mentioned and pivotal to the plot - he writes under a pseudonym, Peter Milligan, last names being anagrams). I'm one step closer to having the entire story to read. A real treasure, certainly, having long ago plundered the absolute depths of Legends Comics's Shade collection.

There were puppies in a shop in Kits, and Michael was happy to look at them, if only through glass. There was also a candy shop with hundreds of Pez dispensers in the window.

So! Michael put up with me waltzing through comics and book shops - there's a sprawling one over by Davie Street, two floors with a ridiculous basement full to the brim with old comics and books (bin after bin of gentlemen's magazines, as well), I found a Harlan Ellison paperback of short stories there and snapped it up; it's called The Beast Who Shouted LOVE at the Heart of the World and adheres to the 1969 standards of paperback design work, the back covered in short story blurbs:

A terrifying paranoid delusion of a man whose vampirish friends feed on his slow charisma leak

A James Bond Santa Claus who shoots it out with Ronald Reagan in the men's room of a mental hospital

The dizzying notion of a Jesus who has a strange, obsessive relationship with Prometheus

Ferry food for dinner was. Food. It was food, nutrients were probably in there, but taste is a foreign concept, I'm telling you.

But coming back to Victoria is serene and refreshing. It feels good to ease into the soothing darkness and sit down in my apartment, back in my life again.

1. Shitty day. Moving right along.

2. Low self-esteem is like this oil stain that you can't seem to wash out but end up staring at over and over again. It's so simple to slip into it, say something nasty about yourself or think something nasty about yourself. It's never a matter of thinking "Stop." No, it's "Stop being a fuck-up," or stupid, or fat, or ugly, or whatever. And it's unimaginative! I might as well walk around with a cabbage taped to my head because at least Dadaism is art. Half of it's biological, anyway; insults and resentment are easy, visceral emotions - when you're hungry or need to piss or whatever it's easy to fall into them.

3. Felt better after work -- I made a trip to London Drugs and provided myself with earthy, solid objects like throat lozenges, ginseng pills, and batteries.

4. Funny thing. I took the Ellison book, which is quite good so far, and taped the front and back hinges to reinforce them before they started to fall apart more dramatically. I can now fix books.I can tape them up and glue them and hold them together.

5. Met Christian at Dolce Vita and we ate paninis, drank hot chocolate, and got down to work. We talked my shitty day out without overthinking it and then got down to things. I wrote three pages which held together nicely, although there were a few rough patches but by the end I was producing fluidly poetic lines and a nice paragraph or two. The point of view roved all over the place and it felt very much like it was a warm-up for something else but I felt accomplished by the end and furthermore enjoyed the experience, which is important. I really do love writing.

6. George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946.

7. Bee & Flower, Cyanotype. [Via]

I do not like looking like a neurotic spazz in front of people who will be interviewing me for permanent positions in a few weeks. Especially when I'm not actually being a spazz, only nobody seems to get the full nature of the situation.

I do not like being a neurotic spazz the rest of the time.

I do not like knowing that maggot play exists.

I do not like how emo my blog has gotten lately.

You know, instead of being an uptight neurotic cloned directly from skin cells left on a Woody Allen screenplay, I'm going to watch Jane Fonda strip out of a space-suit in the zero-gravity environment of an all-shag-carpet spaceship.

After seven days straight working, I made it to the market to pick up things for dinner (brie, italian bread, boccocini, raspberries, two-bite brownies) in the bright sunlight while losing bits of my sanity along the way in small ruptures that bled out into the world. Holding it all together, it = me, with piano wire and leftover wrapping paper from Christmases past, I made it into the house and up the stairs and into my suite before the pieces really started falling off and hitting the floor, buttons spraying forth to plunk and scrabble across linoleum in behind the stove and under the table. Books! How I piled them. Groceries! How I stacked them next-to-neatly in the fridge with the dull and listless light bulb shimmering over them foggily much as I shimmered over them. All my pieces of technology are powerless and demand recharging, they gobble up as I will gobble (shortly), amid the wreckage of my apartment like laundry waiting to be bundled up and taken down to the Old Sparklebright in the morning for washing, the pots & pans & blender picked out Michael's grandmother's things - handed over to lighten the load as we moved her into an assisted living facility.

I could do with an assisted living facility, and think lingeringly upon the plan that Joy has, to retire early with imbalanced humours to lie in an old age home by the time she's forty, to be waited on and play canasta while I sit in an adjacent building and shuffle over to play shuffleboard and listen to gaggles of depressive writers coming in to shout our poems and stories at us the way we used to shout Ginsberg's.

Not enough quarters this morning at the laundromat, so the clothes are a little damp. The irony! Usually you need more coins in hand to get things properly, ah, MOIST.

Drying them in the open window, but it's chilly today and some painter's in the backyard, smoking, his deplorable chemicals rising up to flit into my nasal range and who knows what it's doing to the pants.

Watched the film adaptation of Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors last night -- the whole thing plunged at me from the screen like a horrible, mirror-world Royal Tennenbaums, which is both positive and negative. Jospeh Cross and Evan Rachel Wood were very good. Brian Cox was possibly a parody of himself. Joseph Fiennes was sort of unrecognizeable, but he's never been my favourite Fiennes. Gwyneth Paltrow? Check. Annette Benning was almost too good, I thought she walked the line a bit. Cinematography was decent, walked the line of the "faux indie" genre.

Watched I (Heart) Huckabees again, just half an hour again. Very good on the second viewing.

About to start Guy Maddin's Dracula, Pages from a Virgin's Diary.

Fuck you, Mister John Donne

Ocean sweat collects
in the crook
as he sleeps,
ass against ocean
floor, stretched out.
Cursed with geography
and stomach rumbling--
navel filling with
water, then draining
as he snores.
They will write
textbooks on measuring
his features, conduct
surveys of his
pores, plant flags.
They will lather
themselves into war
over his risen
knees, lose lives
at the battle
for his earlobe,
sign peace treaties,
then drown as
he turns over.

-- Ben Rawluk.

After walking up and down Admirals Road looking for some new restaurant with "beans" in the name - no avail - I ended up heading over to the grocery store for dinner on my dinner break, only some crazy old man with tufts of white-white hair in his ears came up to me and shouted THE PENTAGON IS LOADED! I didn't know you could get a government building drunk, and as far as geometric figures are concerned, I here Flatland wine is really, really weak. Which is about how my day has been, really; I was walking home this morning in desperate need of a bathroom and every single bird I saw was taking a shit while perched up on some street-light or flying overhead. Flaunting their avian disregard for social mores like indoor plumbing, damn them. I feel uncomfortable on days when the universe communicates with me via bathroom humour. News flash: the universe is a twelve-year-old boy in much the same way that Victoria's weather patterns are a petulent, moody teenager.

A five-year-old girl hit her mother at work today, and then told her mother that she'd hit her again if she didn't get what she wanted.

Meanwhile, my internal monologue has been sounding like Hunter S. Thompson all day and I'm surprised I haven't threatened anyone with an imaginary rifle or started on about the bats, the bats, THE BATS.

Today's coincidence: Three brightly coloured tour buses from different tour companies, in three different locations downtown -- each one emblazoned with a Union Jack on the front or sides like the misplaced dreams of British ex-patriates living in Oak Bay. Possibly last night they dreamt, inappropriately, of France instead. The air was crisp like chilled white wine and I walked around in between having a chocolate in the ghetto coffee shop and getting on my own bus, bound for Esquimalt.

Alice Hoffman's The Probable Future ticks away as I read it like finely crafted antique clockwork, all the teeth fitting nicely together. At times, the romantic subplots seem to click too easily together, too predictably, although it's a book about premonitions and the effect is almost appropriate. I'm nearing the end.

Last night, romance was in the air as we did our taxes. Also, watched The Devil Wears Prada which has depth in spite of itself and often unaware of itself, but perhaps that's Meryl Streep. Tonight we're going to the ballet to see Dracula performed live.