wildcat

Portishead keeps showing up in the shuffle and then I fall back into some momentary state of being nineteen. I wouldn't say I turn into an emo monster, but there's a definite emotional context going on.

Dinner last night was at Dan's place, we all had sandwiches on those crusty Portuguese buns (which led to bad jokes being made, certainly, but not by me for once). There was turkey for the full-scale meat-eaters and there was lox for me. Which was good, certainly, though rife -- I have a convoluted relationship with lox. I like the taste a lot but the texture is very difficult to achieve correctly, and it occasionally develops a certain entrail-like quality. This was decent, though. And Dan made this pear and peppers reduction to go on top, with nectarine in the salad. I just skipped having "salad" and shoved it all the bun, with brie and white cheddar and mustard and too many conjunctions.

Truly, I am the Victor Frankenstein of sandwiches. I should host a show on the Food Network and then I could attend celebrity functions, flirting endlessly with Nigella Lawson as we discuss the merits of poached peaches with mint julip sauce and I slap waiters for bringing over poorly mixed drinks that use Tanqueray rather than Bombay Sapphire. Can you imagine? Can you actually imagine? The title of my television show would probably be a painful pun but people would buy my cookbooks on account of them having sinful pictures inside, and then I'd end up on the same crash-course bender to stardom that claimed Jamie Oliver and people having Wednesday supper clubs might consult my recipes via the website. They'd have a lot of difficulty timing food preparation correctly.

I didn't write anything from about Saturday until Wednesday. I could have actually shat upon the page and felt more productive than I was. Mostly I moped around and was overly sensitive to things and failed. Failure. Big dumb. I watched Barbarella and marvelled at how weirdly, stupidly, B-movieishly good it is. I tracked down the trailer for the new bloody Wes Anderson movie, Darjeeling Limited, which opens at the end of the month and I'm already in the theatre, in my head, watching endless coming attractions and waiting for it to start. But otherwise, I was in a funk with the not-writing.

You remember the Fear. Shitty houseguest, likes to remind you of your failures.

And it was Wednesday morning and I couldn't have a shower because some guy was doing constructive things to the Margaret Atwood Boarding House's bathroom, which was unexpected and why on earth do you have someone come over to fix things in the bathroom during the morning? It was my day off so I mostly just sat around in my underwear and scrounged for food. I think there was tuna fish sandwiches -- see, see -- but I put too much cayenne pepper in and not enough mayonnaise. Eventually the guy in the bathroom took off, but left his tools, so I suppose he went off to grab a bit to eat. I showered furtively, shaved, and then managed to linger delicately around the apartment for even longer, until round about 1:30 when I decided it was all for nothing.

So I went to a coffee shop. I went to Dolce Vita and sat there for three hours, drinking freshly made iced tea and scribbling in the rantbook. With terrible posture, hunched forward. My wrists ached a bit. A gaggle of middle-aged people with questionable colour sense (Do I have to fucking dress you people myself?) sat around gibbering about giving conflict resolution seminars and how the idea of the "corporate retreat" was backwards, because that's what the army who isn't winning does, how they should be "corporate advances" (I know! It was about fifty times funnier when Georgia made roughly the same joke on Dead Like Me, what with Ellen J. Muth having a better sense of comic timing and the writers being able to string words together convincingly) -- and they said it straight-faced, totally serious, utterly drunk on their own linguistic castration. I soaked in that noise while I wrote.

Then I came home and spent two hours transcribing ten pages' worth of text onto the computer. It was the beginning of a new draft of "Hotel Detective," and I ripped off Carol Shields in terms of structure for the opening sequence of the story, but I was quite pleased with the product. Not perfect, but certainly reaching in that direction.

Then I went to dinner and managed to say things that were funny but modestly biting, as I do, because I honestly open up my mouth and sometimes fail to notice people have feelings. Because it's funny.

Then I took the Accomplice home and we passed out for too long.

Scribbled two more pages - opening to a fresh second scene. Don't know where it's going in terms of the rest of the story, it's a shift of the point-of-view, but the prose was loose and I'm going to bop over to the coffee shop again tomorrow morning before I'm expected to go to work (or not go to work, or go to work but walk out, or whatever they decide to do with the job action thing) and I'm going to scribble at least three more pages of the scene.

1. A woman teetered back and forth between waking and sleeping on the bus this evening, as it drove back into town. Then she got up and got off the bus. Another woman sat down in the same seat afterward, before the man sitting across the way with the skinny wrists and the baby carriage could warn her about the puddle of piss left by the first woman. There was much indignant caterwauling and back-and-forth over the incident, the bus driver stopping at an intersection and laying out newspaper over the pool.

2. While I ate a sparse pairing of rolls -- the green dragon and a spider roll -- Christian continued to request an increasing array of Japanese delicacies; edaname beans, a spicy tuna roll, a negitoro roll, skewered chicken, sashimi. As we ate, we spoke of others' indiscretions with the hushed reverence of storytellers.

3. The coffee shop that we went to after dinner played only Jann Arden, at increasing volume. I certainly enjoy a bit of Jann Arden, but while I scribbled fresh paragraphs for Templechurch's encounter with Armand in the back gardens, her voice became too much, achieved a screwdriver effect, a bludgeon, a weapon of specific destruction.

1. Back cover blurb for Christian McPherson's Six Ways to Sunday:

"Dirty pool halls, greasy restaurants, suburban skateboarder showdowns, and dangerous drug dens-- some things in life just aren't very subtle. And neither are the short stories in Six Ways to Sunday. They brashly make out with subtlety's teenage crush, beat subtlety into the sidewalk, take a dump on its favourite patch of daisies, and unceremoniously bury it somewhere in the woods near Morgan Lake, Quebec."

One of the small mundane elements of writing-- when you're busy avoiding that second draft that needs to be continued-- is staring at other people's books, imagining your own future books, what they look like, the quality of the paper, font choice, what the back cover blurb is. Who provided the pull-quotes. In McPherson's case, there's a pull-quote from Mark Jarman (who once published a story Joy wrote). It's terribly distracting and it's about one step removed from tossing a white scarf around your neck and "writing" only in the sense of "going to cocktails and talking about being a Capital-W Writer," but it has certain insidious and joyful tendencies to it.

2. The menu for Monday evening supper is steamed salmon with asparagus. Although I'm currently spoiling my appetite with a small bag of gummi bears and I really should be doing the dishes so I can make dinner.

3. This past Friday, all the branches of the Greater Victoria Public Library system were shut down by the employees to have a one-day walk-out. Then most everybody in the system met at the Central branch's courtyard-- being careful to keep our picket signs folded shut when crossing in front of government office entrances-- to march down Douglas Street to have a big rally in Centennial Square outside of the Victoria City Hall. We were a fairly orderly throng, staying uniformly in one lane so as not to cut off traffic, stopping at red lights until the police waved us through. Speeches, shouting, music, et cetera. After that, everybody dispersed back to the branches to picket until the late, dark hours of the evening. No one knows at this time if/when we'll be going out again, or for how long. Between us, the Vancouver Public Library system being out on a full strike, and the Vancouver Island Regional Libary system about to enter into similar contract negotiations with the same basic issues, it's not looking good for libraries right now.

4. I am actually working on the story with much fervour, although it dies away for a few days now and then when I'm thinking about it too much. I'll be spending the evening transcribing pages from the notebook into the second draft I have running and then I'll try and crank out another couple of pages on my own steam.

1. Watched Bon Cop, Bad Cop on Friday and quite enjoyed it. It delicately balances the ridiculous, gorey, police procedural, and humanistic elements and is ultimately a madcap meditation on the linguistic dissonance between French and English. It revved up. Particularly, I liked how both of the main characters -- David and Martin -- come with small but strong family units rather than either one of them being relegated to the role of loner. Put it on the syllabus for your future film studies course, Examination of the Hollywood Buddy Cop Movie from Outside America along with Hot Fuzz. At times the editing was a little over-indulgent, and it's a very thoroughly Canadian movie (which is simultaneously positive and negative), but it's well worth sitting down with and really getting into.

2. Portrait of the Saturday Night as a Young Man: Tall sleeves of Hermann's Dark alongside burgers (salmon for me, with salad; beef with fries for Michael) or, in Daniel's case, bangers and mash at the Garrick's Head pub. Across the way, people line up in the chilling weather to head into Irish Times. Inside the Head, the music's a little loud, there's some small pack of purse girls & boys up in the little alcove that we usually prefer, but the food's good. Beer's good. Afterward, we stumble across to Re-Bar to have lemongrass tea and pie for dessert. The tea opens up my head a little bit, gives me some room to move around, then we head back across downtown to catch a Number Eleven bus.

3. The next action by the union will not be a library closure but rather a "peaceful presence" at the Saanich Municipal Hall meeting tomorrow night, after work. There's some sort of candle-lit vigil concept going on outside, and the notice could have been a little less short but for all the bad weather we're expecting, it might be worth it if a few hundred library workers manage to effect a "Death's Grim Watch" atmosphere. If only everyone was going to don dark makeup or found V for Vendetta masks (Imagine Michael doing his impression of Natalie Portman's terrible British accent, repeating "V?" over and over again).