Destination Wedding

when you come in from the outside
with the smell of chimneys in your hair
the coolness of your bottom
across my inner thigh,
makes me think the gods

really are

with me

I Found a Love - The Falcons

Do You Realize?

Underbunny

The Last Man on Earth

Work is slow. I have endless hours to surf the net, and find myself looking at Flickr, Friendster, and MySpace accounts in an endless stream of personality delivered on a six degrees of separation basis. From profile to profile I am allowed access into the lives o f the general public from my dimly lit office that I share with Remington, who maintains the facade that we're busy for me. There is only so much you can learn by looking at someone's profile online, it's a controlled presentation, but the details are still there. Their likes, dislikes, who they hang out with, who they love, and where they work. And you can get specific, limiting your searches to the unifier of the masses, popular culture.

While searching Flickr for people who like Margaret Atwood, I came across the profile of a woman in Seattle that is an undertaker. Her job is to administer the techniques that keep the deceased looking alive and peaceful long enough to allow for the ceremonies that we associate with death. The images on her profile were calming in contrast to another profile that I ran into earlier in the week while doing an advanced search of single women that lived within 5 miles of my postal code, and listened to Glass Candy. One of the results had a MySpace avatar image that looked like an abstract painting as a thumbnail, but when enlarged, and after some examination, revealed itself to be the bloated, bleeding face of a dead woman. The only way I could tell this was that there were other photos in her profile that showed the body wearing white panties. The images were horrific, how could something as lovely as a woman look like this? They looked like alien autopsy images stolen from area51. The face was barely recognizable as such, the head was the shape and size of a basketball, and the skin was waterlogged and disgustingly translucent. No longer human, the body was now a living reef for the process of decomposition. A host to another type of life.

The undertaker, known on Flickr as Underbunny, had photographs that were different, but equally unsettling. Injected with loss and humanity, but juxtaposed with the clinical reality of her task at hand, which was to perform a medley of age old procedures to keep a body recognizable long enough so that a loved one could say goodbye. The pictures had more of an effect on me emotionally than the gruesome waterlogged cadaver pictures posted by the adolescent woman on MySpace. The Underbunny made me think too much about what inevitably is on the way.

When I was married I used to fear the day that I would have to say goodbye to my wife, how foolish I was to think it would come late in life. The downfall of loving someone supposedly forever, is that one will eventually outlast the other. To risk such loss so late in life was something I found terrifying. More often than not, the one left behind succumbs to death within months from sheer lonliness and loss. I guess I should be happy that my wife left me when she did. I suffered her absence when I was young. I suspect that when we die we'll scarecly know each other, and it seems more bearable this way. Still, I remember a moment when we were together, she was standing in front of me and I had a weird premonition of what she would look like as an older woman. She looked lovely, and I felt content. I imagined our daughter as a grown woman coming to visit us living in some kind of rural bliss, which seems insane when I think back about it now.

Surfing all that profile porn took me to five o'clock quickly, but left me with a melancholic reminder that we will all die one day, and we will be alone. The rain fell hard on the roof of the bus on the way home, and I realized that I am more prepared for death than I am for life. If financial planning is any indication of longevity, all signs point to me living everyday as my last. I have no savings. Retirement is an abstract concept. Everyday I age a little more. Eventually my body will fail and I will no longer be able to work. I've spent too much time on the east side lately, where the elderly that have no one wind up, mixed together with the young addicts that look as old as they do. On and off the bus they go, confused, underfed, aimlessly riding the roughest routes with no apparent destination. I was sitting at the front of the #20 earlier this week listening to my iPod and could hear a woman yelling over top of the music to an older fellow sitting across from the driver with his shirt undone all the way to his belly, "If you're going to Carrall you have to get off and get a bus back that way!" Over and over she repeated this in a loud helpful tone. The old man sat there, disinterested in help, lost in his confusion, content to ride the entire route for the fare he likely didn't even pay for over and over again.

My daughter, who had just finished spending a week with me left last night. The house is always eerily quiet when she leaves. I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no money to help time along. So I watched a Vincent Price movie in bed on my laptop. It was called The Last Man on Earth, and Vincent Price played the role of a doctor named Robert Morgan. In the movie the world has suffered an airborne pandemic, killing everyone except for Robert Morgan. Everyone that wasn't burned when they died, is now a zombie/vampire and after the last living human. Vincent Price's character fills his days with the mundane task of keeping the undead from getting into his small home. While the vampires sleep, and recoil from the sunlight of the day, he restocks his home with a fresh supply of garlic, mirrors, and wooden stakes, preparing for his nightly battle. When the sun falls his home is surrounded by death, he tunes out the sound of the haunting outside his home by blasting jazz on a record player while smoking, drinking, and watching movies of his family, along with found reels of humans at work and play. He voyeuristically experiences life from his small, dark fortress while death surrounds him constantly. He is alone, filling the hours of the night as best he can, day in and day out. Years go by as he waits for death, fighting it all the way, lamenting it, and remembering all too well what it was like when things weren't like that; when he was in love.

Love Happens

10 Girls that I have the most chance of falling in love with according to
Love Happens

LeRoy, Nymphalidae, Remington and I started drinking in the early afternoon hours of a Saturday. Turning a blind eye to the mayhem that some hockey game on the big screen was creating in the packed bar, I professed to LeRoy that the small circle of friends we have is unique and even envied by the people that are not a part of it. The love we have shared over the past 18 months is something so rare and special that we may never find such a thing in our lifetimes again. A friendship fueled by the camaraderie of a band, the sharing of an art studio and practice space in chinatown, a fear of being alone, and an urgency to discover real meaning in a world filled with faked emotion. A friendship in time with the frenetic pace and devotion that only youth can incubate. We are not young however, and I warned Leroy that such a thing cannot last forever as cheers were sent hurling over my head towards the screen that separated me from the rest of the patrons.

Before long I found myself alone with Nymphalidae. We had dinner together in that place with the steamed up windows and then we went back to her place so she could get ready to accompany me to a party for the publisher of the magazine I work for. We shared a cigarette in the entrance of her room. The small dish on her dresser filled with ashes as she undressed in front of me and began to inquire about what she should wear. I felt closer to her at this moment than ever before, and lamented the way that I had treated her in the past. I had her try on just about everything in her closet so I could see her pink fishnets and black panties revealed ever so briefly one more time. When her closet was empty, I persuaded her into a gingham skirt with a black poppy, and we were on our way. The party was crowded with writers and musicians, and as we sat off to the side of the long table filled with empty jugs of beer and shot glasses, I wondered about the impression that I was giving my colleagues by showing up with a different woman every time we've gotten together to drink advertising money owed to us by the bars and restaurants that place ads in the magazine.

Earlier in the week I was invited over to Viridian's place, poured a cocktail and treated to a lap dance. She was so good at it, that I started questioning her past as she straddled me on the couch, which made the whole thing seem quite surreal and business like as she reminded me not to touch her. She left her home at 13, and lived on the road for 2 years, hitchhiking back and forth from mexico to saskatoon with another girl that eventually became her lover. I thought there had to be some stripping in Viridian's history as she twirled about on the painted black hardwood floor in a pair of burlesque panties. She looked so happy, smiling and laughing as she went through her routine to a Neil Diamond song. All I could do was stare in awe at what I was seeing.

A week today our band practices for the first time since last year. We will play music, laugh, and hit the town together, knowing that one day the magic will end. We will think back from the obscurity of the future, and reminisce about this time that we call the present. The moment where the smell of Nymphalidae's perfume covers my face, and the sound of Viridian laughing fills the void of the quiet loneliness as I lie here in bed writing the stories that will be with me forever.

Westward Vignette

Sponsorships - Les Georges Leningrad

Hard Time - Daniel Johnston

LeRoy and I walked home last night after watching our friends play songs in a restaurant bar on the east side of town. The beer was too expensive, and we spent far too much money. In the early hours of a fresh day we found ourselves smoking our last cigarettes in the street. Ducking under awnings to stay dry we stopped in every slice pizza joint that was open along the 12 block stretch back to the train station. I took the train, LeRoy took the bus, and before long I was alone in car 0089, free from the rain that hasn't stopped in weeks. I looked at my reflection in the dark window of the car, with the lights of the city streaking across my face, "We have known each other for such a long time," I said to myself out loud. My hair was wet, dripping, and pasted onto my creased forehead, which seems to grow more furrowed every year. "Yes, we have," I said in response. Then the circular grill holes drilled into the wall of the car chimed in, interrupting the strange moment, announcing that I had arrived at the station closest to my home.

We Now Resume Our...

Rock Bottom Riser - smog

They tore down the hockey arena in my hometown the other day, I saw it on the news. People stood at the side of the road watching in silence as the large arm of a machine slowly and methodically dismantled the memories that the building had been holding all those years like an urn holds the intangible remains of the dead. Surrounded by a massive parking lot, the unused arena sat there, big and stupid, until people finally didn't even notice it anymore.

With its stairwells smashed open and exposed, with the letters falling off the front facade, I was transfixed by an image I found of it being destroyed on Flickr for a solid half hour today. The memories came quickly soon after. A first date with my then girlfriend, who would eventually be my wife. Her dad got us the tickets to an NHL game, they were good seats. We were young, too nerdy to be goths, but self conscious enough to put down everyone around us so that we could separate ourselves from the horrific fashion and provincial behavior of the other spectators. I remembered standing in the front aisle of the top balcony, looking over the stage where Rob Halford from Judas Priest was front and centre, wildly whipping his Harley Davidson motorcycle. I remember watching people smoke drugs for the first time, wondering what all the fuss was about when all they did was sit there and stare. It always seemed huge and spectacular, but really it was small, with red seats, and painted yellow concrete walls.

I didn't stop at the image of the arena though. I started cycling through the rest of the massive 1084 image database that it belonged to. Most of the images were taken by people that still live there, braving the elements, and celebrating the destruction of my hometown memories in the name of the progress they desperately want to achieve. And who could blame them, they're the ones that have to live there. I want it to act as a museum, so that even if a massive 12000 seat arena sits dormant for 15 years, it should stay put, preserved for my consumption. So that when I go home, once a year, my hometown will look the same way it did just before I left, but each year it looks different. The city I grew up in is becoming more of a memory than a real place, fading into the recesses of the mind of someone who is getting older. Memories are like buildings, the old are eventually replaced by the new.

Despite the obvious demise of the arena, there were still hundreds of images I recognized. The hotel that I lost my virginity to an older woman in. We had sex on the floor of the pool change room, my knees were rug burned from rubbing back and forth on the fake grass carpet. There was also the hotel that we used to have parties at all the time with stolen id so that we could trash the place, and a vision of my friend Peter barfing out the 18th floor window at a New Years party popped into my head. There was the chicken finger restaurant that used to be a house that I used to eat at with my friends in the afternoon, when we were hungover, when it was so bright, dry, and arctic outside. I saw a picture of the bridge that we used to write our names under, and an exterior shot of the bar where I smashed a beer bottle into the face of some guy who was trying to climb on top of the strippers on the stage. The music stopped, and the attention of the entire bar was on me and the six foot mammoth of a man standing before me, holding his hands to his face while blood poured out the cracks between his fingers. How odd the stripper looked standing there completely naked, brought violently out of the routine of entertainer, and into the role of spectator.

The pictures seemed endless, but the day was not. It had been raining non-stop though, so I put my black slicker on and stepped out into the darkened streets obscured by sheets of rain. I hid under the roof of the bus shelter and waited for the bus that would take me away from my dreamy melancholic state, into the city that lay just across the bridge, pulsing, seething, bursting at the edges with life, and the reality of the present.

I AM ALIVE

On Kawara

The year is as fresh as the dust beneath my bed, and as I lie here in the earliest days of 2006, I contemplate the year that has passed, and the future that beckons me from the warmth of the iBook that rests upon my stomach. For the past 2 years I have been living the life of a dandy. Skipping about town in pants with tapered ankles, sometimes a hat, always a rosy cheek, and baudelaire behind my perse lips as I sought experience amongst the crowds and the city that holds them. I had watched so many movies, had read so many books that left me with a feeling of envy despite the obvious manipulation of fact for entertainment value. I began to understand my life like a movie script, with a beginning, a middle, and an ending that left you wanting more. So I started writing down moments of the day or night, influenced by the matinee, the hit parade, and the classics at the library that I never took back. Often, in the beginning, it was a rather dull task, but as time progressed, so too did my experiences, until I found myself amazed at some of the situations that I was describing. True, names have always been transient amongst my prose, locations are swapped for others, and of course days of the week are interchanged, but there is no word of a lie here at Low's Stories Big and Tall. Everything you read here, has happened in some way or another.

It is a stretch that the public would want to read something as self centered as a fellow in the city describing his thoughts and feelings while in pursuit of what, he does not know. But despite its obvious narcissism, read it you did, and if you come here everyday, you are among an average of 70 people that take a moment out of their routine to read about Low and the characters that make up the story about a group of people trying to find their way through life in the city. I thank you for the time that you've spent here, and wish you a fucking awesome 2006.

Now, shall we carry on?