The Real Stuff

Sunlight - They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

The past is pathetic, and the future is uncertain. So this is where I idly sit; in the present, the here and now. Call it what you want, but it's a certain kind of purgatory. The days fall in, the nights fall out, and the only place I can move is up and down a list of wines that I've compiled through dinners with friends and lazy evenings in bed with lovers. The e-mails asking me where I have been are starting to fill my inbox, and the web traffic intensifies. Each day the pressure mounts to say and do something meaningful. The several hundred visits I am getting a day seem to have frozen me into a paranoid state of mass exposure. Who are these people? And what are they looking for? I don't think I can satisfy their appetites any longer.

Piling my way through packed bars with mardi gras beads around my neck and an orange colored band on my wrist, Carl takes us through an endless parade of clubs filled with cross-dressers wearing leather and chain mail armor. Dancing in the middle of a medley of feet that are pounding a hard wood floor, drunkenly slipping my hand down the pants of a young girl from Yellowknife in the back seat of a car while getting a ride home, kissing a woman that I used to work with at a used clothing store in the upper balcony of a hometown institution, singing karaoke in a private room downtown with a big button in the middle of the back wall that calls the waitress to bring drink after drink; there is your hero, screaming into the microphone like a possessed maniac, spitting all over the screen that provides the words to Iron Maiden's 666 The Number of the Beast.

This is a place. It used to be mine.

Irregular Spine

irregular spine
tongue twisted
i don't even know why

the curves on your back
remind me of
wyoming

in the summer time
your skin
will be darker than mine

irregular spine
i love you

I Love$ You

photo: Brandon Herman via Tiny Vices


"They've gotten control of the cabin, and they've killed a stewardess. People are panicking. They're throwing up. I think we're going down, but don't worry. It's going to be quick."
-- Peter Hanson, aboard United Airlines Flight 175, along with his wife, Susan, and their two-year-old daughter, called his parents on Sept. 11, 2001.

"I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much."
-- Mountain climber Rob Hall, trapped in a blizzard on Mount Everest in 1996, called his pregnant wife in New Zealand. His legs were frozen; he didn't have a tent or sleeping bag.

"Mom, there is a fire in the tunnel. I think I am going to suffocate and die here. Mom, I love you."
-- A woman trapped in a subway fire in Korea in 2003 called her mother.

"Please be happy. Please live your life. That's an order."
-- Brian Sweeney called his wife from a hijacked plane on Sept. 11, 2001, and left a message on her answering machine.

via Globe and Mail

It's holidays like Valentines Day that make having a friend who is the manager of a restaurant deemed one of the best in the country very convenient. It is however, not so handy having Valentines Day arrive a day before payday, like it always does, reminding the have nots of their plight in life, and that yes, even love can be bought if you've got some dosh to spare. Oh god, I know the argument that it doesn't require money to make a difference on Valentines Day, please spare me. I am in no mood for invention and spontaneity with 11 cents in the bank and a stomach that's been fed a steady diet of Campbell's tomato soup for the past two days, although I must admit that it does wonders for the waistline. I haven't got a bloody date anyway. So I finally threw in the towel this afternoon by phoning my friend and cancelling the private table in the basement that they let friends have on occasion for charming the pants off your date with an informal dinner, and dammit you can smoke down there too.

I can't get this article that I read in the Globe and Mail on the weekend out of my mind. It was a compilation of transcripts from phone calls that people made before they died. Who would you call? Who would be the last person you would want to talk to? I wondered about who I would call, then I realized that I don't have a cellphone. Fido wouldn't give me one without a 250$ deposit on account of my credit history. I'd have to die old school. Alone.

Funeral Face - Surburban Kids With Biblical Names

All

Blog this, blog that, everyone's got a blog. I'm in love, I'm broke, the show last night was awesome! Welcome to "me" magazine, where everyone's the editor. I can barely bring myself to continue on with this crap anymore. I appreciate the attention I am afforded here, but I can't tell you what I am feeling, or what I have been doing, because then you'll know what a bad boy I've been lately, and now many of you know who I am. Thanks. I'm stuck.

I can tell you though, that lately I have felt like I am stumbling in the middle of an empty northern back road, with my arms broken, and my wrists dragging through the oiled gravel. They do that to roads ya know? Pour oil on them; it cuts back on dust from the big rigs. There are no trucks in my thoughts though, only trees, and as I stumble forward through the tall fauna of the days, the mass of tree tops look like jaws of sharpened teeth bearing down on my sweaty, confused forehead. Out of the corner of my eye the horizon shakes with each step I take, becuase my knees are locked and unable to absorb the shock of my invalid movements in the glistening blue skies of the lengthening days. Summer is coming.

Now, shoo! Or I'll make you cry.

More Than This...

I've been listening to the workers upstairs yelling at each other in a language I don't understand for hours now, they've been pounding around and calling each other, "fucking asshole" while they renovate the apartment above me. The sky is royal blue and clear, it beckons me outside, I can see it from my bed where i've been assessing my life with a haze in my head from staying up past the point of no return the night before.

This place was supposed to be soundproof. That's all I wanted when I was looking for a new apartment, was to be left alone in silence, or to the sound of the sub I stuffed under my couch. Especially after I listened to my neighbors destroy their apartment followed by a knife fight in the bedroom above me at the last 3 story walk-up I will ever live in; which eventually forced me into a situation where I had to testify in court about what I had heard. So, I am traumatized by the sounds neighbors make. I never want to hear people walking around, or taking a piss, or listening to their shitty music ever again. The reason I was under the impression that the place I am living in now is soundproof was because there was a bloody grow-op in the loft above me, so I've been living beneath a garden for almost two years now, and plants are very quiet; excellent neighbors in fact. Furthering the myth no one could hear me are the massive timbers running the length of my ceiling. They're a wonder to look at, cut down at a time when trees that big were plentiful, majestic giants reduced to the endless tast of supporting a floor. They must be worth a fortune now, and they give such an aura of solidness I was certain my decadence and debauchery was going completely unnoticed all this time. Well the past week has revealed that this is not the case, the grow op was raided and it has been nonstop racket up there for weeks now. Which has caused me to relive certain instances that make me feel terribly sorry for the poor woman who lives downstairs with the nice shoes, the bright frocks, a little dog of some sort, and a meek demeanor. Mostly it was just insane fucking that she would have been privy to; along with hi-balls falling out of hands, smashing bricks of party ice on the ground to break it into cubes, dancing with hard heeled shoes on Saturday nights, jumping around with my guitar and pretending I was Jon Bon Jovi on Sunday mornings, and blasting music at 4am at least three nights a week. Maybe I should apologize, tell her I had no idea this building was so, revealing. I feel completely embarrassed, but those were the dark days.

So now I am lying here looking for a place to move. I should be sleeping, but I can't. I got home at 5am after having dinner with the band I play in. We had finished playing a show, then went for pizza so we could laugh about the crowd which was an odd mix of used clothing purchasers and slutty drunk college kids who were having a frat party. The women, well, no, wait they were girls. The girls all had dresses on, and the guys ties. They danced, had sex in the washroom, in the back of the bar, made their mates cry, and then they went home satisfied customers. It was one of the strangest shows we've ever played, but it was a total blast and there we sat, eating the money we made and playing true or false. Where basically you could just announce anything by saying "true or false" before you said it. Between bites of one of the seven appetizers we ordered LeRoy could barely get through his confession, "True or False. I once formed a band in grade 3 with twin brothers who had just moved from India and couldn't speak a word of english, or play instruments. We were called the Jazzy Three, and they were scared of me," which sent everyone at the table into that early morning giddy laughter that borders on crying.

We must have been loud and annoying to the waitress, but at least she doesn't live with us. I'm always moving, I hate moving. What's the point in owning anything if you have to carry it everywhere all the time? I want to sell all my shit, get out of here, live in a tent and watch sunsets, but I'll just get some sleep instead.

Chapter CCXVI

Wherein is continued the tale of insurmountable troubles that forced our penniless hero, Low Big and Tall into a bedridden exile of three days in which many scenarios of failure and drug induced bouts of paranoia presented themselves. There he stayed until his purse was once again, momentarily filled, so that he could continue on with his adventures, to the dismay of others.

Having expended my last dollar, and being with light provisions, there was little else to do but take refuge in bed. This was on Friday. So except for a 4 hour stint with endless drinks supplied by Tony and Nymphalidae in a large open club with very high ceilings, I spent over 72 hours in bed. With little food, save for a 1.3 litre fountain pop, a 240gm bag of Old Dutch chips, a 2 litre bottle of 7-Up, and approximately 1 quarter ounce of green and fragrant marijuana, I was helpless against the neuroses of my masochistic history.

The hours began to shorten, time had little power in that place, where days could easily turn into weeks. Surrounded by dark velvet curtains in the corner of my studio apartment, I lay in bed with my shoes on, tracking more and more dirt into my bed with each trip to the toilet. My hair was a mess, potato chip crumbs coated my tight black shirt, books and newspapers were strewn about the bed in left and right flanks adjacent to my body. There I lay, smoking, comfortable, but resigned and powerless against gut wrenching self doubt, mixed with paranoid realizations that I was annoying everyone that I am in contact with, until I finally decided that I have zero creative influence to achieve anything except helping other people realize their greatness. Between bouts of fisting my forehead and yelling "Fuck! Fuck! .....FUCK!" over and over, I surfed the net, and read. I read about Flaubert climbing the great pyramid of Kheops, of Don Quixote attacking a group of sheep herders, who eventually beat him senseless. I thought of Veridian, I thought of Nymphalidae. I fantasized about Zena.

Eventually I had to leave the safety of my dirty little lair to grab a bus east to where I was going to run through a practice with the band I play in. I felt instantly better as I stepped into the reality of the night, with the wind whipping into my hooded jacket, and the rain misting my face. I walked into a dirty east side bar where a few scattered folks sat silently with glasses of cheap draught playing bingo. The monotonous tone of the caller on the mic, announcing the numbers in a drawl that reflected the general demeanor of the people in attendance was almost hypnotic, "B.......17...................B..........17." I bought 9 tins of Kokannee and got the hell out of there. All the energy I stored over my hiatus from the real world manifested itself into pure rock-out madness. It was infectious and the whole band wound up cutting lose as if we were playing to a crowd of a thousand, rather than just ourselves. After practice I grabbed a cab back downtown to see Jeff Tweedy play some acoustic songs. I walked into the venue pretty hopped up, a bit tight, but quite exhausted. I pushed through a wall of annoyed spectators until I arrived at the edge of the stage. Shortly thereafter, Tweedy's voice was crackling in a high register, with the words, "I am so... I am so... out of tune" at which point I had wished that everyone in the room would have dropped to their knees so that I could see my ex-wife who was one among the many in the crowd. It would have allowed us a moment to ourselves, where no one else belonged. I said goodnight to my party, got a gin and tonic, and watched the huge venue empty out while I waited by the stage right door to be let into the meet and greet room with a friend who writes the music column for a west side weekly. All the free booze was gone by the time we got in, and Jeff was just leaving, at which point there was little reason to stick around; except for the fact that I found my companion wildly attractive. When we finally arrived out on the street, I began to hand out cigarettes freely to anyone that would take them, and then I smoked all the way home, an assassin on the avenue.