Knitting Ferocious Spiders

If I Have Run Out Of Weapons

2006-04-04T17:40:00.000-05:00

to shake at the page,
the blank world,

it is not because I am empty. My
hands are always full of something,
but when the hammers and
pins are lost

numb fingers can still be very clever.

I have been at the buckles today,
the straight jackets done up, white
like empty worlds; and I have been
knitting ferocious spiders
to spin their webs across the ceiling.

I have tickled the belly of the
three headed dog, and now
I'm working at picking out
this knot:

a tangle of failures
as smooth as oiled secrets,
as tight as a garotte around the
throat of an angel, balanced on
the head of a pin;

there are other dangers
just as sudden
that can spring from my
curious fingers;

and while I am working at undoing this
potential for savage reunion with the world,
which is as empty as it was in the beginning,

puzzle this:

my dreams were never violent,
but they promised
that all things will come.

Thank You For Paying Attention

2006-04-03T17:50:00.000-05:00

Knitting Ferocious Spiders has wound a nice ball.

It's been a diary of confusion and mistakes, assertions and affirmations, but now, it's time to tie it up, and leave it as it is.

There's a certain symmetry to a year. This was never the intention: I was set to fire it off under this format for quite some time, but it's been a little more than 12 months of massive change: a lot of learning, and tangles tugged out as best I could muster. I have a better idea now of what I want, and of how I see my life progressing, in the near future. Even more, I've learned about the world of blog, and what kind of a form I would like to pursue in its arena.

This direction has become a little too undirected.

The Spider, however, will keep spinning.

Check back for the new link. My next attempt at a quotidian project should be a little more so than this one, I should think.

A Lesson Every Day

2006-04-02T06:33:00.000-05:00

For the past several weeks at the present restaurant job in Auckland (present only because I hope that in the near future it will be the stuff of anecdotes and legend) I have been making a grievous error. I have been making Lemon-Lime and Bitters the wrong way.

Apparently, in New Zealand, as well as in other British and colonial locals, Lemonade is more what I might call "Sprite", or (if under duress) "7-Up"; so the "Lemon" in "Lemon-Lime and Bitters" stands for aforesaid fizzy drink, not lemon cordial, as I have been using, and soda water is evidently not an acceptable surrogate bubble-maker.

I learned this after the woman who pointed out my error almost twisted the ears off my head for the inaccuracy.

God I've missed waiting on tables.

How Expected

2006-03-28T21:22:00.000-05:00

Nothing has really topped Morrissey's How Soon Is Now as the epic anthem of solitude in a crowd; and my iPod conspiratorially conjured it as I lie here in the early afternoon, the Sunday following, just as I'm in the midst of that song's sentiment. A little melancholyncholy, perhaps feeling the first strains of homesickness.

I'm not willing to accept those heart strings being played. Let's blame the booze.

Booze, darling?

My first boyfriend, Adam, the first man, the first naked stretch of learning (not on a curve, but flat out), came to visit me during the summer I was on the farm. I was out of the city because I couldn't afford to stay while school wasn't in session, and he had gone back to his family in Montreal. Out of the blue, he announced over the phone that he was coming. His visit was disastrous. Over those few days I think we both started to realize that we had bitten off more than we could chew, respectively; but I was elated when he drove up the lane in the minivan. (Yes, I did say minivan.) When he stepped out, we kissed... and the first thing that he said to me was, "I think nostalgia is a subtle form of depression."

Which was the best explanation I could have had for his visit, but it was also probably the most useful thing I took away from the six months that we tried to make a go of being together. It remains one of the most insightful things anyone has ever said to me.

And when I think of him I prefer to think of that bequest, rather than the fact that the lad refused to let me ravish him in the daylight. Or nightlight. No light at all, in fact.

He's the one I determined was sleeping with his therapist. Yep. First boyfriend. Yay me.

The nostalgia thing, though, resurfaces intermittently, like fish winnowing the water. I'm not one particularly given to regret, my decisions are (on the whole) made peace with when I make them, and I try (TRY) to let go of those things I cannot change, the ones I have no power over, like the past. (At least not yet. I'm still working on the time machine; and Corba has a theory about bending the speed of light with crystal. Fingers crossed everyone.) But these slow aches wind their current still. As far as I can determine, it's the price of memory; but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Music is probably second only to smell as the manifester of the big ones, the sizmic heaves that purge molten jets, and I haven't had enough time to connect any new strains to this volcanic soil, where I (according to my own expecations) am supposed to flourish.

Every song I know has a habitat in rivers back home. Listening to the iPod is dipping into dysthymia.

Shortly after we arrived in New Zealand we attended the Hero Party; Auckland's answer to Pride. Big venue. Lots of gay. Mustardseed and I went, and danced as we're good at: flirty; coyly; slutty. I can say this defintively: being sandwiched between two panted boners in throbbing base does nothing to ease the sense of aloneness that clublife is so good at highlighting. In lazer light.

I didn't want a romp. I wanted a friend.

I got a phone number instead. Lust is a perennial accessory, and it goes in every direction: chaste and shameless, all at the same time. It, at least, is immediate, has little to do with a relationship to the past when it's a new infatuation. A rise in blood pressure of this nature is suitably crushed on the future; on possiblity and roads untaken.

I'm not there yet. I'm squarely between then and when. Now is taking up all my resources.

I've put away the clock.

Faster Than the Speed of Light?

2006-03-28T21:00:00.000-05:00

Contrary to even my own observations, I have been writing blog entries, or at least parts of entries. I just haven't been posting them. I don't know why, exactly. As much as I absolutely adore my laptop, I'm still getting the wonderful machine in order, and only recently installed Microsoft Office, which allows me to explore text in the sublime environment of Word, the frankly intuitive word processor, rather than the mucilaginous purgatory of AppleWorks, what I have been wrestling with up until now. God, I hated that program; and because of that, I had been writing all of my entries directly into the blogger platform, sometimes with dire consequences.

Let's have a moment of silence for all of those sentences lost before they could be read.

Getting my house in order here has been piecemeal, but we're getting to it eventually, my motivations and me. Out of good faith towards the spirit of my intentions, and some sort of temporal integrity, I was going to post the backlog under their proper dates, but then I thought: Time is an illusion anyway. I've traveled to the future; this is the future past.

Too Tired To Stand

2006-03-28T20:40:00.000-05:00

At the supermarket, coming home from work (you can buy wine at the grocery. I love the civilized world.) after a ten hour shift, the girl stopped me.

“I need to see ID.”
I looked at her.
“I can’t sell it to you otherwise.”
“I’m 28. Born 1977.”
The glare I got back was not encouraging.
“You look younger than 25.”
“I’ll be 29 next month.”
Nothing.
Luckily, I did, in fact, have my wallet on me.
“I have a photo Health Card.”
“I can’t accept this.”
“An old driver’s licence?”
Scrutinized.
“This one time,” she finally announced.
After a moment, my chicken and sauvignon blanc going into krinkly plastic bags, it came to me: the retort.
“I’m you’re senior.”

The man behind me laughed.

That Block

2006-03-22T07:14:00.000-05:00

Seems like every blogger I read or know has stalled. Including myself.

I'm pulling it together. Promise.

Cleaning House

2006-03-10T07:37:00.000-05:00

In a vain effort to make up for the characters I have lost between locations and digital outputs, here; relatively unedited, from 11th of Feb, 2006:

Stop talking, I've run out of aspirin. says: Ha! Found an insecure wireless network. Hong Kong rocks!
violet headache says: ah. cool.

Stop talking, I've run out of aspirin says: had the loudest American family of five sitting behind me on the plane. three children. didn't stop noising all 18 hours.

violet headache: what have you seen?

Stop talking, I've run out of aspirin says: it's morning in the city, I'm just waiting at the starbucks for my room to be ready. was lucky to find an free internet signal.

violet headache says: (10:35:06 PM)
cool

violet headache says: (10:35:24 PM)
what's around you?

Stop talking, I've run out of aspirin. says: (10:35:41 PM)
the fashion district. It's going to be hard not to shop.

violet headache says: (10:35:51 PM)
yep

Stop talking, I've run out of aspirin. says: (10:36:03 PM)
Every fucking label in sight. Vivienne Westwood is across the hall.

[changed to:]

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:39:11 PM)
This city is really fucking TALL.

violet headache says: (10:39:24 PM)
yeah

violet headache says: (10:39:34 PM)
you haven't been to NY have you?

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:41:13 PM)
Not yet -- I know that it's taller, but this' a neat effect.

violet headache says: (10:41:22 PM)
maybe not

violet headache says: (10:41:41 PM)
the city would seem xtra tall i guess

violet headache says: (10:41:52 PM)
tallest you've seen?

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:41:59 PM)
Montreal.

violet headache says: (10:42:05 PM)
ah

violet headache says: (10:42:12 PM)
it's big though isn't it?

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:42:56 PM)
Hong Kong? Yes. The bus onto the island took an hour, everything is built up quite a bit.

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:43:33 PM)
the airport is beautiful.

violet headache says: (10:43:42 PM)
yeah?

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:43:55 PM)
and it smells all different outside.

violet headache says: (10:44:17 PM)
like Chinatown?

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:44:46 PM)
no. different plants. different smog.

violet headache says: (10:44:52 PM)
right

violet headache says: (10:45:13 PM)
light is different too

violet headache says: (10:45:18 PM)
colour new

violet headache says: (10:45:23 PM)
i like that most

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:45:33 PM)
starbucks looks exactly the same though.

violet headache says: (10:45:36 PM)
especially in the plant life

violet headache says: (10:45:39 PM)
lol

violet headache says: (10:48:36 PM)
what are you gonna do today then?

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:49:19 PM)
Wait for Mustardseed and Chikimonkey to show up. I'm just gonna wander until they get here. Get my bearings.

violet headache says: (10:49:32 PM)
ok

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:50:50 PM)
any suggestions?

violet headache says: (10:52:13 PM)
i don't know about anything in hong kong

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:53:44 PM)
you mean to tell me that none of your sexual escapades have taught you anything about this city?

violet headache says: (10:54:51 PM)
no

violet headache says: (10:55:03 PM)
my cock was in their mouth when they tirade

violet headache says: (10:55:41 PM)
speaking of which

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:55:41 PM)
lol

violet headache says: (10:56:05 PM)
i somehow ended up getting a blowjob in the --- washroom last night

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:56:12 PM)
no!

violet headache says: (10:56:51 PM)
i was bad

violet headache says: (10:56:55 PM)
got a bit drunk

violet headache says: (10:57:12 PM)
my friend steve started hitting on me hard

violet headache says: (10:57:17 PM)
he has a bf

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:57:43 PM)
you're a bad, bad man

violet headache says: (10:57:49 PM)
his bf was kissing p.P. though so i don't know what it's all about

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:57:57 PM)
ewwww.

violet headache says: (10:58:02 PM)
yeah

violet headache says: (10:58:22 PM)
not sure whats up with their relationship

violet headache says: (10:58:23 PM)
???

FOREIGN. says: (10:59:13 PM)
OMG. everywhere I look there are killer clothes.

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (10:59:20 PM)
this is not good.

violet headache says: (11:00:30 PM)
haha

violet headache says: (11:00:38 PM)
told you

violet headache says: (11:00:39 PM)
lol

I'm all, like, FOREIGN now. says: (11:00:49 PM)
anyways, gotta go. good luck in the work department... and in the blow job department as well.

violet headache says: (11:01:05 PM)
i'm gonna ignore it and hope it goes away

Night Images

2006-03-07T02:33:00.000-05:00

Mustardseed and I went for a walk in Hong Kong, late at night, and I discovered what my new phone was capable of:

Under New Management

2006-03-05T17:58:00.000-05:00

"What about serial rapists? What should be done about them?"
"Oh! I've got that one all tied up."
"What's the solution?"
"We're talking serial rapists, right?"
"Right."
"Surgically remove their opposable thumbs."
"..."
"It would work. You could even let them roam free afterwards."
"That's brilliant. Horrifying, but brilliant."
"And picture them trying to open a door with a knob."

The Green Ocean Explorer

2006-02-20T21:50:00.000-05:00

From China to New Zealand, above the sea. Above, even, the clouds.

Aircrafts aren't so special anymore. Even when they serve you decent food. The magic is gone; now so pedestrian.

How many tons does this thing weigh?

Flight is magical enough, I'd say; it occupies so many of my dreams.

This is what we might call kamakzi blogging: renting time from the Auckland Central Library on a sunny day, a sunny summers day, on a mission. Let's hope I crash into the right target.

Here. 6 days and counting. Moved hostels, walked the grassy crater of a sleeping volcano, bought "jandels", tried to rest, found an apartment. It's the latter that's making it sink in. The outlay of funds for a habitat, the outlay of funds which precludes my ability to get home on my own. I live here now, and it's now that I need a job.

So I've done my resume up. Which was harder than it sounds when you have to rent your computer time, and more so when you realize that their standard office paper issue is slightly longer than we use at home. Not quite legal, not quite letter; formatting's a bitch; but there I am: Spider's Qualifications.

What exactly are you good at?

Well....

It's been a back and forth between the four corners of emotional extreme, flight control can't quite get through all the static: panic, delight, despair and unbridled desire, each lying outside the calm. But soon I'll have a place to hang my hat. With a view, thank god.

Last night I watched Sideways with Mustardseed in an open air theatre. You can see stars, even amdist the urban sprawl, and the air is clean enough to see out across the water. This is what the Kiwis call the "Big Smoke". It ain't so.

There was a complimentary wine booth provided, a vinters range from Hunter Valley.

"What do you like, my dear?"
"Everything. I'm a sommelier."
"Oh! Then what do you want to star with?"
"The Pinot."
"Ah, in keeping with the theme."

Today, I've taken refuge here in the library because books help me feel grounded, and the stacks have always been my refuge. The smell of paper is something permanent to me... funny that, what can so easily go up in flame.

I re-read Marguerite Duras' The Lover, which is something that is best done in the summer, somewhere cool, on the edge of the heat. Near the end it makes me teary.

Here:

And another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean, night had begun as before and in the lounge on the main deck there was a sudden burst of music, a Chopin waltz which she knew secretly, personally, because for months she had tried to learn it, though she never managed to play it properly, never, and that was why her mother agreed to let her give up the piano. Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat, of that she was sure, and she'd been there when it happened, the burst of Chopin under a sky lit up with brilliancies. There wasn't a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn't sure she hadn't loved him with a love she hadn't seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.

I've seen live music at the Zoo, so far. I've been dancing, here and in the city of light, Hong Kong. I've gotten a couple of history lessons, and I am continuously, constantly in danger of being run over by cars; mind you, I'm still up high, looking for a target, circling my map of New Zealand, in back and forth between those four corners....

I'm off to buy some toggs.

Two Airports, One Dream Later

2006-02-09T23:10:00.000-05:00

There is a point, almost a location in and of itself, that is between two places. Transitional and uncommitted. Where you feel vulnerable to disaster, and not yet fully dedicated to a direction. Something's going to go wrong. I'm going to be pulled back. Made to stay.

But there is nothing to stay in. The apartment has already moved on without you. A stranger is living in it. Your possessions exist zipped up; on wheels. You have no space, no home.

I was in that point for at least three days, if not a week. It is an awful one to be in, and all I could do was fret, about nothing. Nothing; nothing. All decisions had been made, all bills paid, all money made. Just wait. Wait, they say. The powers that be. The angels of time. They would point at that clock. You're counting down.

Down. Down.

I finally flew from that point yesterday. Into the future, on Cathay Pacific Airlines. Through 20 hours of darkness, we fled the dawn above the clouds. Now I'm in Hong Kong, and the day has caught up with me. I'm wearing my sunglasses, and feel better than I have in months. Nothing left to fear from the past.

I fucking made it.

1 Day, 7 hours, 39 Minutes

2006-02-07T14:49:00.000-05:00

And 30 seconds.

I'm numb with excitement.

Oh, and fear. Did I mention fear?

Look! It's My Back Door

2006-02-05T20:08:00.000-05:00

Not an escape hatch.

And there is also this,

which I feel is somehow apropos.

Goodnight street. Goodnight murals. Goodnight overpriced corner shop. Goodnight hair salon. Goodnight apartment. Goodnight door. Goodnight room.

Goodnight moon.

One Night, Stars

2006-02-02T23:42:00.000-05:00

In 2003, when the power grid was burned out, this city became somewhere else. With the light pollution stopped, the summer sky was as alive as it can be, and the skyscrapers were silhouetted against the blinking sea.

This is a mural in what is now my old neighborhood.

I stood on the viaduct bridge over the Don Valley Parkway, and watched motorcycles race the motorway in the dark, far below.

It was the most magical Toronto has ever been for me.

That Transport Is Honking At Us

2006-01-31T17:24:00.000-05:00

My father arrived the morning of the 22nd promptly. Early, actually. He's always early.

I had been at Brown Owl's the night before for a fantastic dinner, a long overdue visit, and the breaking out of the single malt. Which, in retrospect, was what made that Sunday morning not necessarily painful, but, ahem, still rather drunk; and smelling of spirits. To high heaven.

It's 9am.

"Hi, Dad."

But I was functional; and surprisingly organized. We got all my belongings loaded, stacked and snug in the back of the trailer: the bed, the books, the shelves, the sofa and the table; all in about half an hour. Tarped it. Tied it. Off we went.

On the 401, a corner of the tarp in the trailer started to flap up in the wind.

"Oh, look. I wonder if that's going to be a--"

My father went dead silent, and quickly pulled over to the shoulder of the highway.

The wind had got under the covering, and then presumably under the dining room table, which then took it like a sail, and launched it up and out, directly into four lanes of 120km an hour traffic; and brought the couch with it.

Of all the disasters that could have occurred (say, like, the hardwood table coming through a front windshield, like a blade, and killing someone), none did, but it was certianly an experience, walking up the shoulder of one of Canada's largest freeways on a Sunday morning, only to dodge oncoming traffic and pull two large pieces of furniture from its middle lanes. I'm not sure what it says (if anything) about my decision to leave my current life and start a different one; or, if I have learned some sort of lesson concerning material possessions, perhaps the importance of rechecking your bungee cords; but I am quite sure that I have used up a good portion of my allotted luck for the next long while.

Lets hope my plane doesn't crash into the Pacific.

8 days and counting.

Give Me A List

2006-01-28T12:38:00.000-05:00

As I wound down my career as a registered burlesque entertainer, I gave pause to consider what I learned from my time in that dim corridor.

1. The combination of prodigious amounts of steroids and equally prodigious amounts of cocaine, do not a charming fellow make. Intimidating, but not charming.

2. Socks are expendable.

3. Whatever is said while you are undressed, turgid and frottaged against a stranger, is generally more amusing if you imagine it being said by a character in a sitcom. Your choice.

4. No matter what you look like, someone thinks you're the hottest thing they've ever seen. Patron and performer included.

5. Flirtation can be a weapon.

6. Laughter can be permission.

7. Silence is deadly.

8. Money is the dirtiest word of all. Nudity, and lewdity, are permissive; it's monetary greed that's the most offensive, especially if it invades a fantasy. Stripping is fantasy, and when there is disquiet, when there is a PROBLEM, the imaginary quality dissolves, and the modis operandi of all parties involved becomes apparent. "You don't really like me," is countered with, "you pay me to like you", and no one is happy. A happy business relationship is when both parties are satisfied with their participation, and satisfied with the illusion. Discord tears the veil. Avoid it at all costs. Except the bottom line. They still owe you $20 a song.

9. People are lonely and anxious in the dark. Metaphorically and actually. Someone brave enough to give them an out is different, especially if that person knows what s/he's doing.

10. Nudity and affection should not be a commodity. For the number of people that are caustic, there are hundreds who are simply starved. We are all human, and there is no reason to debase others.

Yes, Somethings Broke

2006-01-28T12:28:00.000-05:00

It's started.

Last night at the club, there were not one, but two men sporting cowboy hats indoors. I didn't try and count the number of snappy, snapping cowboy shirts.

You have to wonder if there is an inherent flaw in the gay male brain, one that thinks the physical appropriation of an element of style actually translates us into the object of our desire; or better, into the object of everyone else's.

Urbanites who have never seen a cow should not, NOT, try to look like they just got off the ranch. Especially fellows who are liable to flee at the site of manure.

From Beggerstown and the Night Roads

2006-01-27T13:21:00.000-05:00

So, lost, angry, and scared, Quorum came down to Parvenu, for the first time since he had lost Celeste. He looked around, and made his inquiries. He took a back room off from the baroque labyrinth of parlours and corridors. He lay down....

Many, many nights later, it was ‘lu himself who battered his way through the heavy curtains of the Salon’s smoke filled rooms to sit down beside him. He waited patiently for Quorum’s sight to come into focus, and coolly regarded the youth’s confusion with heavy-lidded eyes before reaching out to put the pipe aside.

“Do not,” he spoke precisely, “confuse curiosity with concern... but these past few days you have not been so much chasing, as fleeing. You’ve not been one of my solitary guests before now. Something has changed.”

Quorum struggled with the receding fugue, grappled with the tangle of emotion that was knotting itself back into his chest. A ragged sigh shuddered him. “I want out. I don’t want to be stuck in this hellhole anymore.”

“That’s not very kind.”

“This city. This fucking place. I have to get away.” He struggled to rise.

“Ah.” ‘lu sighed, and placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder, settled him back down. “We all think that from time to time. It’s a hopeless notion. We get tired. We rest. Then we get on with it.”

“I can’t get on with it,” he said thickly, anger encroaching. “I’ve got nothing to do. My own crew doesn’t want me. The Group doesn’t need me. I’m fucked.”

“You’re exaggerating. You still have the Group’s sanctity. It hasn’t been lifted. You’re just on leave. You know what would happen if it was gone.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Stand up when you get your balance back. Breathe some clean air, it will help.”

“Not gonna,” Quorum pulled the pipe back with his hand. “Just gonna let it go.”

‘lu stood up, smoothed his robe. “I’m going to talk to some of the fellows who have been visiting you. They’re not to come back here. I think it’s time for you to move on. I have enough cowards and lost souls taking up space as it is. Any more might ruin the atmosphere I’m trying to protect.”

“Fucking buzzkill. Now what?”

“Get up. Shake yourself out of it. Go back. Find a balance between what you can and can’t change.”

“This city’s fucking evil.”

“No.” ‘lu turned back. “It’s not that complicated, Andre; really. Listen; this, at least, is free: the city is just a hopeless addict. You must realise it by now. He takes, and takes and takes until he can’t conceivably take anymore, but there’s always another scrap; one more piece to go up in smoke. Now, he’s addicted to you. He’s not going to stop. He has never stopped. It’s not in his nature to be reformed. He’s young. He’s so young that he hasn’t been taught a lesson. Not yet. He hasn’t even had to hide his bad behaviour. Not really, anyway. He’s not like those old ones off in Europe, and definitely not like that Grande Dame New York. She has a few things to teach upstart Beggerstown about excess, but he’s not inclined to listen. He’s not going to slow down. Fortunately, or unfortunately, you’ve made and impression. He’s decided he likes you, and now that you’re in his system, he’ll dig through the muck with his fingernails to find you. It’s a terrible habit. You’re certainly not good for him. None of us are.”

“I’m supposed to take comfort in that?”

“Sometimes, you just have to console yourself with the fact that it’s nice to be needed.”

7 Words

2006-01-26T16:47:00.000-05:00

Querken. Pribble. Viripotent. Rannygazoo. Vitrescent. Rutilant. Periplum.

If You Drill a Hole Directly Through

2006-01-26T06:07:00.000-05:00

the centre of the Earth, and you'll find me on the other side in 13 days!

As some of you know, and as some of you possibly don't, I will be leaving Canada shortly. Although I'd like to pretend that this is because the Conservatives look to be taking power, in reality it's because I'm afraid of our neighbours to the south. They're crazy.

So, I'm moving to New Zealand; and then, when they kick me out (deport me -- whatever) I'll be heading over to Australia, to see how long they can take me before foisting me back to North America.

It should be great fun. Now, in the interest of demonstrating that I love you all, and that you should all strive to keep in touch with me, and never, ever forget me, Mustardseed and I (who will be traveling together) are hosting a Drop-In Drinks Party at the beautiful (and tasteful) *** pub, at ***.

Under no circumstances are you to bring any small trinkets, nick-knacks, or power tools which will put me over my weight limit on the luggage-thingy, as all of the possessions I am not taking overseas are already packed, and now live with the bats up in the rafters of my father's farm.

However, small, unmarked bills are always appreciated.

Kisses!

[Spider]

***

It was fun.

From what I remember.

It's Relevent to Post

2006-01-20T20:05:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Ted Hughes (see below). And thanks to Alex Boyd for doing the legwork.

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are...Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the duplicity and relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment of time, and in that same moment make out of it all the vital signature of a human being - not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses - but a human being, we call it poetry.

2006-01-20T19:04:00.000-05:00

As I'm sure some of my stylistic choices make apparent, despite the fact that I try to ignore the fact, and noticing that I have posted a few verses, here and there: I am a poet.

A Touchy-Feely-Unpublished-Poet.

Actually, that's not true. I am published. That was just my Wu Tang Clan name. Spooky.

Besides the fact that the English speaking world seems rather intimidated and disdainful of the word in stanza, and convinced that you require a supernatural passion for the language, a prodigious understanding of culture and history, or a masters degree to enjoy or appreciate it, poetry really is supposed to be the language of the blood: the visceral, the intrinsic.

And your mind is allowed to wander into possibilities. That's what the form is actually for, the reader and the writer both.

In any case, I'm not going to use this space to lecture on the cultural relevance of poetry; but I am going to post one. Another piece of paper I've come across in the moving preparations.

I wrote it when my aunt died two years ago,

when the world shook.

As the Coffin of This Day Opens

My youngest aunt lies in fire.

Those were the most comfortable bones.
There was a skeleton most gifted
of love, and the support of its arms
such a gentle steel;

And what tenderness brought those embraces
in the summer; and what smiles; and what
a wicked laugh. The best clinches in the sun and the flies,
the best salve in the world from its scrapes and bruises,
as one who understood the nature of pain, better than me;

And the best goodbyes, as one
who knew the nature of loss
even before I knew how to give.

***

Though I am familiar with those many things
broken within and without,

the forces that compel all sense and judgment
unfairly, so remains

the reminder, as empty as a bauble on a string,
suspended:

so many things hang from a thread

whether it be the plump doll
or shambling marionette. A bad mystery,
the devolution of the body,

and driven by a wicked laugh.

*

But what soul makes peace with the cage of bone and body;
what spirit has ever been happy there for long?
Who has had the endurance to love so
drawn out, in spite of the eurekas of confusion, and the pain --
and how can you stay when the only good left is a
love too big for a person to be,
rocking alone inside a broken vessel?

***

When the ashes cool
I want a few things said to the wind,
as particles part
and return to the firmament,
the conflagration of stars
that are all our birth:

First, that the essence of liberty is not physical,
that there is more from the marrow;
we do not stay.

Second, that whatever brittle remnants burn within
the fired porcelain of this shell, this cracked
doll sill full of phosphorous: I only shine
from what light I've caught from looking on those
better and finer than myself,

and I how I have been comforted.

Characters Popping Out of the Walls

2006-01-20T17:56:00.000-05:00

I've been going through my papers. My mountains of papers. Trying to cull.

It's like digging. Archeology, like.

Look what I found. It's lyrics. From the Muppet Show.

It works best in vaudeville cockney.

Our House

Oh, a man came into our house, our house, our house,
A man came into our house to sell us some brooms.
So, we asked him to come in, and we hit him with a hammer
And we hid him in the closet in my father's room!

Chorus:
But you're always welcome at our house!
Anytime of the day,
Yes, you're always welcome at our house,
And we hope you will stay.

Oh, a lady came to our house, our house, our house,
The lady came to find out why I was not in school.
So, we asked her to come in, and we gave her some poisoned lemonade
And put her in the freezer where it's nice and cool.

(Chorus)

Then a kid came into our yard, our yard, our yard,
A kid came into our yard to get his ball.
So, we asked him to come in, and we took him in the basement
And we sealed him up inside the basement wall.

(Chorus)

So, when you come to our house, our house, our house,
When you come to our house, we will have some fun.
We will ask you to come in, and we'll take you in the kitchen
And we'll put you in the oven until you are done.

(Chorus)

And we know ...... you will stay.

Jim Henson was a genius. Shame about the Disney thing.

Walking in Circles

2006-01-19T19:48:00.000-05:00

"Say something funny."
"No."
"That's not funny."
"From here it's hilarious."
"Refusal is just annoying."
"Really? It makes me feel smug."
"You're a right twat sometimes."
"Don't make me start humming. It'll drive you mental."
"Too late. I'm contemplating putting you in a box and sending you to Africa."

See? I can't even talk to myself right now.

"Just Hire Someone."

2006-01-18T14:57:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned it before. I'm not systematic.

Though I sometimes like to pretend. What I am is at that stage of moving...

Yes, that stage of moving...

Where things are in slight disarray.

And when I say that, what I mean is that I think I've forgotten which way is north, weather gravity pulls or repels me from the earth, and if clothing really is nessessary in a different hemisphere.

I think I might just burn it. Burn it all.

If You See It, Tell Me Where It's Hiding

2006-01-16T13:15:00.000-05:00

What I'm actually suffering from right now is the plight of having a little too much to say: the mind struggling with all the little ignitions, sending my consciousness quaquaversal (you know how hard it is to find a use for that word?). I have little treatises forming on all sorts of wonderful topics, very few of which have anything to do with anything besides procrastination.

As "The Date" gets closer, I feel more and more harried (harangued, halted, hysterical), although I can really only get so much done in so much time, and I'm on schedule far as I can tell. I spent this morning walking around in circles, attempting to determine some sort of direction to focus my attempts at organization, and instead bottomed out and read a quarter of a novel.

The cats are now gone, and I'm suffering their phantom presence. Much like losing a limb, I'm still making room for them about my legs on the sofa, checking to bat them back when taking ham out of the fridge. Their absence has opened up that gulf that comes with moving. Empty shelves, lifeless floor.

The real problem though, is that the lead up to going away might do me in before I even set foot on the plane. My liver is threatening to pop out, grow legs, and scuttle off to refuge any moment now. Enough already!

Intellectually, I know that it's possible to socialize without drinking oneself down to a weak emblem of his regular, scintillating glory, but really, where’s the challenge in that?

A Rapture

2006-01-15T10:11:00.000-05:00

The following is a dream that I had in May, 2004. It came up again in a conversation, recently, and luckily I had it written down.

I love my brain.

The end of the world came: judgement; and those blessed with a heart lighter than a feather were given a golden key on a ribbon that spun in the air over their right shoulder, and propelled through reality to a shimmering beach bordered on either side by a iridescent, aquamarine sea, all in perpetual twilight.

The beach was a sinuous sand bar, reaching from horizon to horizon, and filled with people. Wandering there I found (these I remember for sure) Mustardseed, Satan’s Little Pixie and Kengee, but continued to look for others, sure that they might appear somewhere.

As more and more people arrived, we speculated on whether or not this was the afterlife. It was, after all, very nice, but undoubtedly would become quite boring.

All this under a constantly changing sky, stars moving like water currents.

Finally, a being appeared to speak to us, bright, glowing out above the water.

“You are the assembled, those who are to Ascend, projected from one reality unto another. You are all one in a million, those with the greater force of personality, greater dreams, understanding and empathy. Your opposites have been chosen in much the same way, but are headed to a different destination, and lined up on a very different shore. With your kind removed, humankind must again begin to grow. It will have the room it needs to become something else, through necessity, fear and inspiration. It is not the end of humankind, but it is time for all of you to cease being human.”

But where were we to go? Heaven, basically. Well, not exactly, but the being sort of showed us what it was:

A set of elaborate, interconnected planes of existence, each displaying different qualities, engendering concepts that could be considered positive. These would be our home, infinite playgrounds, where we could envision ourselves as any being we could concave, and become it, completely. The chosen reality would fill in the blanks, give us our basics, our history, our true understanding of our nature and our abilities. We could change our identities, but never start the same one over. In this way we could continue to change and develop and learn and react and interact as one being, adding layer upon layer of complexity; but still, not limited to it. We could be unmade, but never killed.

We were all to become, multi-dimentional, poly-persona, immortal beings.

This, I thought, is and afterlife of tremendous beauty.

Mustardseed laughs. “I’m going to live out eternity on a holodeck?”

But that was the end of us as we were. The beach folded in, twisted, pulled through and there it was, a conceptual wheel of world, realities beyond our reality.

You will be given an identity to start with, conveys the being, which, of course, is not a limitation.

So, I was transmuted into a construction of pristine urbanism, given to contemplation and aesthetics, history and preservation.

I was a female being, something equine, of blue and white crystal; my natural form some kind of unicorn-woman. My home was a labyrinthine museum that held all of the curiosities that I studied and adored. I knew my past, and my history, and I was looking forward to alien, elaborate desires and motivations. I knew what I could do.

You will know those other beings you have known when you find them, thinks the angelic entity to me. You will still love them. Love, above all else, is how this transcendence has become possible.

Further Complications

2006-01-06T19:54:00.000-05:00

And there were documents lost, and paperwork re-routed; and errands that needed to be performed again; and the liquor store had to be raided for boxes, boxes, and boxes. Life needed to be coaxed and cajoled into storage, while mounted upon the wall, a large clock had been fastened, always tick-tocking it's heavy gears closer to that line, past which it all changes: location, location, location, the ultimate differential. The hands of that time-piece will not be altered now, finality's course is staid, now watch the metaphysical teeth of its inner workings grind the future closer... there is still so much to do; but, by heaven, the time for filling out forms is past.

I'm not signing one more piece of paper.

More Than Half-Way Through the Decade

2006-01-04T14:43:00.000-05:00

Oh, and happy 2006, by the way.

It's going be a goody, I can tell. This one's even.

Fair Warning

2006-01-04T14:35:00.000-05:00

Get between me and my coffee, and we're going to have a problem.

The same thing goes if you happen to occulde that neutral zone that stands between me and the bar.

Trouble.

Just sayin'.

Fever Dreams

2005-12-31T12:44:00.000-05:00

Nothing like being kicked in the ass by a tenacious case of the flu, just a couple of days after Christmas. I've been shivering under blankets and whimpering for the last three days. What remains of the illness is still making me a little achy, but I am no longer delirious or suffering vertigo, so that's something.

This is not what I meant when I said I'd like some more quiet time at home by myself; but those Holiday Elves, always working with the tools they've got to give you what you want....

Bless their viral ways.

"What's this, Ebola?"
"No! Don't give 'im that, that's fatal. Besides, it's too rare 'round here to waste."
"Fair enough."
"I have some chicken pox!"
"We gave that to him back in '91, during the Christmas recital, don't you remember?"
"I'm not the one in charge of keeping notes."
"No, but seems to me you are in charge of --"
"Focus, fellows! Who else has some ideas?"
"Well, colds are overdone."
"And it's physically impossible for him to have contracted herpes recently."
"Oh. Guys! You know how he refuses to get the flu shot?"
"Perfect... go with god, young one."

That Human Element

2005-12-27T23:22:00.000-05:00

I like stripping.

I do.

It's just that there are certain factors which are impeding my ability to have a good time during my last month of peeling for the masses.

Problems which walk, and talk and have minds of their own.

Arg.

There's Nothing To Do Over The Holidays

2005-12-24T22:45:00.000-05:00

But read. Oh, and maybe write.

This dissemination of power, octopussing out from the cap of the Americas, that crown-dome of the US of A, is really blowing me down. Merry fucking Christmas. Besides the continuity of it all (none of it is new, but now just so blatant and shameless), and digressing from the arguments that it may be the beginning of the end, the decline of an empire, we still have to live with it, festering all the way through the operations of a global economy, and constantly meddling, muddling and pounding us like a pestle in mortar.

It's never about anything but control, and the will to dominate: imperialism cannot really disguise itself, but remains so laughable as it benefits such a small designation of any society, which remains in power as even the arms of its influence are just as bereaved and ravaged as its oppressed. Those lower classes kept poor, annexed, ghettoed, and then used as cannon fodder and filler. Michael Moore had something in that anti-Bush propaganda film: the policy makers do not pay the price. Where's the revolution? We've got the complaints down, certainly. We can belly-ache all the way through our lives, and continue to avoid any sort of responsibly for the complacency that allows all of the abominable waste and exploitation to persevere.

When I first came to the city, and especially after I started to work in the "high end" restaurants where the wealthy came to complain and criticize an experience, which should have been nourishing rather than aggravating, I was astonished by the real numbers of the wealthy. Coming from such small communities it was hard to picture that the upper class existed as a horde rather than a small group of wandering eccentrics; but then when I started working in catering, and began to enter into the homes of these people, hired to rearrange and embellish their already showpiece properties, I was even more overwhelmed and depressed by the realization of the scale of what we're talking about when we say "rich". Setting up a bar in a hallway, a colonnade of pillared marble, running between a sitting room and a kitchen, it starts to dawn on you, what the real gap is voiding the stretch between the haves and the have-nots. This kind of greed has been normalized: envied, sought and accepted.

We have to keep these things in perspective: it all happens so a class of first-world residents can maintain estates of opulence and gluttony. People are stacked in blocks of concrete towers and told to live productively; freedoms are constrained and limited to designate consciousness, fostering ignorance and apathy, promoting fear; wars are promoted and fought; oil fields are sought and ravaged; the green world turned ash grey and muddy brown; all so a meager percentage of the worlds population can have a toilet in a quiet room overlooking a lake. Four baths, six bedrooms, a ballroom and billiards in the basement. The puppet masters are maintained by the comfort mongers, the silly enthusiasts, the vain and tawdry aesthetes that preen their way above the unwashed.

Without taste, I might add. I know, I've served them.

These are the obscene, the affronts; the structure has to be redesigned; we're out of our depth. You have to consider that in terms of evolution (or progression, if your cap is in with the intelligent designers) we are a stone's throw of generations away from a time when we were hunter-gatherers. Money is a concept perhaps not understood in our blood, not carried physically; and money is a representation, not of worldly goods, but of virtual power, symbolizing only itself. It used to have a direct correlation: it used to be gold, and even that was better because it was almost understandable. What we understand is exchange, and as animals, no matter how capable of self-identification we might be, we are designed to respond to our environment, not base life and death decisions (even daily ones: how do we feed and get fed?) on the basis of a concept. I think that the structure of our existence has brought us to psychosis.

We've all gone crazy and are trying to keep it together.

So, we've made the globe into a warren of madhouses; and the ones leading us from one ruin to another are the ones who buy into it so unreservedly, and are doing their best to defend the ability to control that which has no actual equivalence without the exercision of will, by capitalizing on those poor in conceptual currency, and made comfortable with a good night's rest atop a down pillow, in a bedroom large enough to house an entire family. A house that sucks up enough of this earth's resources to maintain an entire community. Indefinitely, come wind or rain, terror or ruin.

Now that's physical representation.

A Veneer of Respectability

2005-12-24T09:58:00.000-05:00

If I ever start posting lascivious pictures of slutty boys (even if they're of me) or glossy shots of the idealized male form, I'd like someone to come find me, and kick a petrified banana into my eye sockets.

Please.

Don't Feed Dogs Dynamite

2005-12-20T17:32:00.000-05:00

This man makes me rather happy.

Find it on a Map

2005-12-19T17:58:00.000-05:00

I feel a little woozy after spending the better part of two hours at the travel agent with Mustardseed, booking our trip to New Zealand. Light headed after finalizing those life changing flights.

Thank god for Italy and those beautiful bottles of Ripasso. I can travel a less threatening way: just a little snort, darling; barely a bottle, please. Something to calm my nerves.

Better.

So much to wrap my head around. So much to plan. It's very exciting. A few days in Hong Kong for the Lantern Festival, then on to a new home. Committed. I'm committed now, with the physical modicum of money. So small and yet so large.

I leave Canada on the 8th of February, touch Anchorage, then down in that old bastion of the British Empire, stay a few days, and then on to Auckland. I have no idea when I will return. The next step is a flight to Australia, booked for the 20th of October, 2006.

This is not like Paris. I have some money. Not as much as I would like, but then, no one in this blasted society can say that they do. I'm committed. Unequivocally. The apartment has been rented for the 1st of February. I'm packing. I'm arranging.

I'm scared.

Thrillingly so, I suppose. I do feel alive; with it; in every moment and a part of all the decisions I'm making. The driver's seat is completely mine... but it's a big, wide, tiny world out there, and I've been existing in a microcosm for a very long time.

Toronto the Good. You've been my place for a decade. You may well be again, but I have to get out.

My father has promised to take my boys.

Red eye doesn't work on the cats, apparently.

I may miss them most of all. The daily aggravation and companionship of them both. Rue sits on my lap as I write this. He's my writing companion. Pangor is off dealing with the bathtub. He has an issue with the porcelain. Thwup, thwup, thwup. His claws can't get through.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter.

My obsession with Eliot continues.

It isn't just one of your holiday games.

Logos Rue and Pangor Bann.

You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter....

Maybe not a hatter. My mercury intake has been remarkably low, but still, mad.

The cats are the most descriptive examples of my fear. They stay, orphaned but adopted, while I go off exploring. I have a group of friends that will not be abandoned so much as left (self-sufficient all), and though they would never complain or ask me to stay, I have been working to the best of my ability to build not just good friendships this past 10 years, but intrinsic... and I have. It's the hardest thing to leave.

Bringing me back to the city today, my father began speaking to me in a way I am unaccustomed to:

"I was talking to my friend about your plans and he said he wished that he had done that kind of traveling when he was younger. You put stuff like this off, you know? You tell yourself that you can do it later, but (the point is) as long as your situation doesn't change... but change is the one thing you can count on. You should really tell yourself that the one thing you can expect is change, it's gonna happen sooner or later, and it's gonna happen in a way you don't expect. So you have to do it now. There's no guarantee of later."

I think my father is actually proud of me.

Alright, then. Ready.

How to Sing

2005-12-18T20:01:00.000-05:00

My father’s family goes quite mad for Christmas, though my father himself doesn’t. The best way to describe their home during the holidays is to say that the whole lit and tinselled season comes into the home, swells like a giant balloon, and explodes, covering every wall and surface. It gets into every corner, takes over every stair... in a homey, inclusive sort of way. There are two Christmas trees up, lights about all the windows. This year there are white rain deer aglow on the front lawn, a red nose blinking defiantly on the nose of Rudolf. Santa shines at the end of the drive. Bears in red hats, angels and children, manifestations of a pantheon of festive spirits (and presumably the Holy Ghost, haunting somewhere), fill the shelves, sit on the steps, blink out from snow heaped, wintery scenes on mantles. The dogs get snowflake kerchiefs. The nog flows easy.

There was a time when I thought this entire set-up some special kind of hell. Maybe a Buddhist vision: materialism gone critical: motorised ornaments whirling, robot Santa’s singing carols in the bathroom, gadgets and tinkling widgets going on; things everywhere tying you down.

This is not transcendence, and it is not about the renewal of human spirit. It’s just about stuff. I know I’m often saying “I like stuff,” but this is unreasonable; quite out of control.

I used to bitterly quip in my head, gripe that no vision of Christ had ever included him bushling candy crucifixes in one arm while doling his wish-lists out to the apostles.

“Don’t worry Judas, I know things are a little tight. Just get me a donkey and some cuttings from a rose bush, that’s all I really want for my birthday.”

I’ve gotten over that. It is my aunt’s favourite time of year, and she waits for it, batedly, during the rest of the calendar, poised to shop and decorate. She has been known to blow a small fortune in four weeks to mark the occasion. In recent years, I’ve learned to take the whole thing in the honest humour it is enjoyed in by my loved ones. I’m not out to ruin Christmas, after all. Not anymore.

In that spirit, I started inviting my friends to the annual sing-a-long that kicks off their celebrations. It really is the event. My dad’s family has been hosting it for thirty two years. It’s survived moves, illness, death. Fifty six people descended upon their newly renovated home this year, into the Christmas chapel. All of these characters are people present in my history. This side of the family represents the greatest of influence on me outside my parents and sister; my grandparents were omnipresent even at a distance, out to spoil and cherish Turtle and me. They were the gift givers and the indulgers, and seeming permanently interested in every twist and turn of our juvenile brains, great to spend time with. With my sister we would constantly regale and pester, “Listen, Grandma!” and “Why?”.

It has been observed that they have been far better grandparents than they ever were parents.

The sing-a-long is the best expression of my father’s family. They are at their best, not because they have to be, but because they are ecstatic to be. When I first invaded with a group of 13, all bearing gifts, smiles and laughter all, my aunt was taken aback. She had very little to say, but the vanguard of the event were there, and my Aunt Dot, my grandmother’s best friend for 72 years, came up and caught my face in her hands.

“I’m so happy someone is taking on the tradition.”

She had tears in her eyes; and so did I.

This year was a bit of a bust for my contribution. Myself, Satan's Little Pixie and Kengee arrived. Late. But I’ve established the commitment. I’ve been calling in my friends by the dozen for six years, and even with the disappointment in the faces of my great-aunt and her friends, I know that the mark is permanent. As black and sheepish as I am, I have been the first of the next generation to take it on, make it something intrinsic for a group outside and alien to my grandparents and their peers; and they asked, all of them, from Aunt Dot to Uncle Bob:

“Where are all the Toronto people that usually come?”

They couldn’t make it this year. All good reasons, all disappointing; but their absence was felt.

When my grandparents were in St. Jean Quebec, the last year they hosted the event before coming to Hamilton, it was one of the biggest snowstorms in municipal history. Snow fell to be measured in feet, not inches. They thought that no one would come, and people trekked to the house in snow shoes.

“I still remember them coming in the door. They looked like snowmen,” my grandmother told me.

Traditions are made from memory, nothing more. I came to this sing-a-long laden with apologies and regrets, that too is part of the history. We can all sing the banns later in life, should we make it that far.

....

And to keep the mission statement of this site intact, here are the cookies: jam wheels, nanimo bars, gingerbread, shortbread, chocolate balls, sugar; raspberry thumbs, butter tarts, lemon glazed, and Christmas snap. Cookies are nice.

Popcorn

2005-12-17T02:41:00.000-05:00

Aeon Flux only barely resembles the wonderful strangeness of the cartoon which spawned it, though it wasn't nearly as bad as critics promised. The art direction was phenomenal. And the gadgets were super-cool.

Now I want marbles that come when I whistle and blow things up.

For Christmas.

Q & A

2005-12-15T14:39:00.000-05:00

"You don't tell them your real name do you?"
"Of course not. I have a stage name."
"So what is it?"
"..."
"That's pretty cheesy."
"It's a cheesy industry. What's better though are the stories I make up when I'm talking to people."
"You just make shit up?"
"I need to pass the time somehow. It's personally entertaining."
"And the best thing that you told someone?"
"That I didn't really have a stable home growing up because we moved around a lot."
"That's true though."
"Yes, but it gets better. The guy asked me why we relocated so often."
"And?"
"Real estate fraud; Mom and Dad were a couple of crooks. You'd be surprised at how much money you can make scamming the poor, unsuspecting folks of sleepy, Northen Ontario towns. The downside being, just when you start to get settled -- bam! -- it's time to grift the rubes, and off you go. I didn't even know what my real last name until I was ten. I thought it was regular for everyone just to switch and get a new one every couple of years."
".... You can't be serious."
"I kept a straight face."
"And they were never caught?"
"Retired. Mom's a school teacher now. Dad's gone legit."
"He bought it?"
"A strip club is about fantasy. I think in most cases the willing suspension of disbelief is enacted by walking through the door."

I'll say this, I'm never bored.

Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

2005-12-13T13:05:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the release of the new movie by Ang Lee, the New Yorker has reposted the original short story.

Ah, cowboys falling in love. I read the story a couple of years ago, one summer afternoon by a lake, I think (as all good humanist short-stories should be read; or, if it is winter, by a fire with hot chocolate near by). I teared up then. When I read it over again last night, I teared up again.

At its essence is a straight forward enough tale, complicated by the very regular dilemmas that stand in the way of intimacy (mostly communication) but the most poignant element of the story is that of language, or the lack of facility with language. The young men are constantly obstructed by a paucity of words to describe what they feel for one another, not just to one another, but also themselves. It's the frustration of being a couple of uneducated, rural lads who have only ever been given the tools to work, and drink, and fight; and make those decisions which would emulate the day to day operating around them; not to imagine, or love. They were never given words to describe their feelings. So they sometimes get lost in the morass of their own undefined emotions, with no up from down, only physical intuition.

Right, said Jack, and they shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder; then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions. Within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off.

The problem in experiencing something you can't name is that later it's hard to know if you were feeling it at all.

It's a good subject matter for this kind of predicament: the development of a love which by its very nature refuses to be defined, and is difficult even to acknowledge. It's something which a lot of queer individuals, even those educated and gifted with linguistic facility, intuitively understand because of the process it takes for you to find your own compass to self explanation. It's hard to define yourself when you don't even know what it is you're defining.

I'm happy not to know Wyoming in the 1960's personally. It's close enough to the setting I grew up in, the backwater woods of Northern Ontario, the Ottawa Valley; there was enough confusionon and inability to define there, even in the 90's, and more than enough intolerance and bigotry to make it miserable. Stuck on a ranch past the tree line with nothing but a bottle of whiskey and a skittish horse back then probably would have killed me a hell of a lot faster than death comes up on Jack and Ennis in the story.

We do come a long way sometimes. Personally and collectively.

Ang Lee should do an admirable job of it. My god, he made The Hulk a disquieting, beautiful film; hard love in a hard place shouldn't be too much of stretch.

Now I just need someone to go and see it with; but, unfortunately, I'm not in love.

Faceplate Readjusted

2005-12-13T12:56:00.000-05:00

I cheated and used another prefab template from Blogger to tide me over on my journey to web-design-savvy. Who knows how long that could take, after all? Besides the formatting issues with the old one, those hovering dots (that had seemed so attractive when I set it up) were starting to annoy me. Clean black, that’s the way to go for now.

Funny how there are some aesthetic biases that just don’t let go, even after you leave the drama club behind.

What Dark Recesses

2005-12-11T16:04:00.000-05:00

For years after moving to the T-dot, having spelunked my way down into the dark, early morning recesses of the city's after hours recreations, I was confronted with the slithery, sideways advances of both men and women.

"Ooooh... such a little innocent. I want to corrupt you."

I don't know if it was true, even then, but what's amusing now is that, after all the prodigious drinking, a good stretch of stumbling about in an aromatic, herbal haze of blue smoke, and then an enthusiastic relationship with a raver's chemistry set, even now, standing around stripped down to my skivvies or less under red flashing lights, I am still fielding comments and advances based on the same theme.

This, better than anything, exemplifies the slightly fantastic nature of my work.

Also, that I continue to look younger than my age.

A Piece of Work

2005-12-10T16:23:00.000-05:00

A Short List of Things That Have Inspired Over This Past Year, including all that which has tickled, tackled or otherwise traumatized my poor little brain.

In no particular order.

Last Exile
Firefly
The Tulse Luper Suitcases
Battlestar Galactica
The Information
Blogs
Philip Glass
The Relationship between Drugs and Technology
Umberto Eco
All Those Friends
Serenity
Losing Friends
Ambitions
Catherine the Great
Experiencing the Symmetry of Coincidences
Break, Blow, Burn
Understanding that there is More to Absolutely Everything
Nabokov (again)
Carnivàle
Realizing that even the Best of Dreams can be Spoilt
Ladytron
Felix da Housecat
The Secret History of Square Pegs
Fury
Brian Greene
Niel Gaimen
Full Metal Alchemist
the Oxford
Interpol
Sunrise over Lake Ontario
Kissing One That You Love
Gifts Given Lost
Batman Begins
The Edge
Watching a Very Beautiful Boy Slay You with Bedroom Eyes While He Takes Off His Clothes

Iceburgs floating out to sea, every last one.

As It Is

2005-12-10T02:30:00.000-05:00

This blog needs a redesign.

I realize this as I access it from Cobra's computer, and it loads all funky; and stupid looking. It's time. (I look around.) It's time I learn HTML, grab the fucker by the horns, get a host, and launch myself into the universe of Movable Type.

What better project to combat holliday cheer?

No Ballot Required

2005-12-08T14:21:00.000-05:00

Although I keep politics out of this blog for good reason, in honor of the upcoming shotgun election, I thought I should announce my support for the only platform I feel has any value at all.

Finally, some mindless rhetoric I can be proud of.

Death and the Methods of Education

2005-12-07T19:49:00.000-05:00

Body Worlds 2 at the Onatrio Science Centre

This afternoon was spent regarding dead bodies.

While we can thank the Swedish for freeze-drying them, it is the Germans we can congratulate for learning how to turn them into plastic. These are the real undead, or at least, the un-decomposed, halted on their journeys back to the elements of their creation. We can now watch them, suspended, as edifying entertainment: foisting a javelin; illusionally vivisected and spread; sometimes, sliced laterally and fanned into a deck of cross sections; and all the while imitating, or somehow referencing, the life that was there at one time, if life were to continue without skin, or fat... or movement....

Besides the ethical and moral quandaries that were disturbingly absent from the exhibit, so was the element which science is, although not incapable of, so often guilty of voiding from experience: a sense of reverence. The spectacle was purely clinical, and addressed innovation much more readily than mystery; even though, what we were looking at is still very much a mystery: the body, halted and empty.

The room was adorned with quotes, great banners of thinkers and wordsmiths.

Oh, what a piece of work is man....

(Though one might consider that in that context, Hamlet's tone was quite acerbic.)

And Saint Thomas Aquinas, imagining a greater purpose than function in the human form, which is so elegant in symmetry. Does it not suggest a higher design? A hint of the divine? Perhaps, but the Greek philosopher was quite plain: death is beyond good and evil, as they are based on sensation, and sensation is rooted in the body. Beyond sensation there is cessation, and therefore nothing. So, there it is.

Not so much after all. No need to concern yourself. They are, in the end, just dead bodies.

It is possible that we pretend to be a civilization rooted in a reasonable god, one that has freed us from any superstitious notions about the used vessels of life, but we aren't; not yet.

I'm not sure that I can pretend to forget that. I'm not sure I can really believe in the tinkerers that would not only take apart and study, but display so brashly. Some taboos are developed to harness and protect the intangibles which are just as intrinsic to our lives as blood and breath. Maybe the dead are not entertaining, even if they are educational.

Maybe the disquiet I feel is the result of transgressing something that is part of that which vacates the body after it stops. Something more.

Or maybe they were just gross.

Simply Too Far Away

2005-12-05T14:47:00.000-05:00

I had this text message bonanza with my sister yesterday.

M. Spider: Knock knock.
Turtle: Who's there?
S: Bananas.
T: Bananas who?
S: I dunno. That's all I got, yo.
T: You SUPPOSE to say knock knock again and then repeat banana several times then say orange. Don't you know ANYTHING?
S: Orange ya glad I didn't say banana?
T: There you go. You're not hopeless after all. So not until feb? Forgot that Chinese New Year is later or need more money?
S: More money is defiantly in order. Life has been exceedingly strange lately...
T: Details! If not here then in an email.
S: An extensive email is defiantly due on both sides.
T: I have an excuse. I'm writing my final paper. But it's due this week and then i free!
S: You want that I should give you World of Warcraft for Chirstmas?
T: Oh, that could be very bad for my school work. I don't know!?
S: I thought I should check with you first. I really want to start playing myself... but it would be good to play with you.
T: Is it only online or can you play regular? Does it cost to play online?
S: It's only online, and it costs around 20 shiny quarters a month. A fully detailed secondary world. Fantasy goodness.
T: Is that american quarters?
S: Yes. A few more chincy Kiwi quarters than that, one imagines. But not many.
T: Problem being not sure what kind of connection i'll get over there. Broadband not as widespread as in Canada.
S: Herm. That's not encouraging... yest not impossible. You have broadband now?
T: No. I Wish. Dial up.
S: Ick. Noisy.
T: Sllllow
S: Must make poor Powerbook frustrated.
T: She copes well. Any other computer would be much worse.
S: My little guy's name is Gabriel. Who's yours?
T: No name is good enough for my baby. She exists in a place where physical names mean nothing, she just IS.
S: Gabriel has a sword of fire and stretches his wings in the digital ether. I love him so.
T: :-> got to go. Have to talk to my prof about stats. Have a lovely evening with macgabriel
S: Miss you.
T: Miss you too. Kisses and hugges

Which is when I realized that I really do miss her, at that moment quite terribly; and I started to contemplate the nature of feeling alone. That started me down a spiral isolated and fearful; and the pressure under the surface started forcing me closed: the further down I got, the harder it was to breathe. My pulse started to race. I tried to calm myself down. It got worse. I started to become very, very afraid. Sitting on the couch, my hands clamped to the cushions, I held on and worried that something might burst in my head, that I really had gone too far, and that if I wasn't dying then I might very well have cracked and completely lost my mind.

S: I just had my first panic attack. It was awful.

I have been keeping myself busy enough lately, and focused on my goals, that some of the greater dilemmas which have been more prominent this last year have been in remission. By keeping myself in the world I have been forgetting that one of my greatest fears is that I can't operate there; that I am not designed to make it work. Perhaps, in fact, I have no real place in it, I was some sort of cosmic error, and my problems with the ethical ajuncts of pursuing any sort of dream or supernal directive in a world so corrupt and inclined to depraved indifference, that those dilemmas are not ones that can be resolved, that they will never become any easier to overcome, not without betraying myself or those I care about.

S: There are creative and moral issues.

It did subside; but I was ruined for the rest of the night. I remained a tender, trembling heap, my little muscles in tremors.

S: My brain is trying to kill me.

When I come to think about it, it was not my first panic attack; but I have not had one for a long, long time. The last time was in the art gallery in Ottawa, on a cerulean day in a tall arcade of glass: so bright, so blue, and so full of people that I began to become frantic, beset on all sides by too much, voices and problems and mighty distortions wrippling.... I thought I may have lost my mind then as well.

Crack! Crackers.

The time before that was after a horrendous week at high school, which necessitated a different spiral, one that could have been labeled suicidal.

I don't want to be in this place, but I don't know how to get out of it either.

I may, after all, truly be a mad spider.

No Exit

2005-12-05T14:46:00.000-05:00

Sometimes we can't read the signs.

Charity

2005-12-03T16:29:00.000-05:00

Even after a great deal of practice, the open bar is still my enemy.

"Just one second."
"Aren't we on our way out?"
"I just need a martini for the walk to the door."
"Of course! What was I thinking?"

At least it was for a good cause.

Fighting for Survival

2005-12-02T21:29:00.000-05:00

There was a poem that struggled its way out into the world, then had a hard time of it; ultimatley, it didn't pull through. Not all of it, but part of it worked. Now it's just searching for that right way to be whole again.

From the Dissolution of Weapons

Well, how about that for a yard?
Like any staging ground too
big, too troublesome to be of any use,
you can’t really manage it,

no rubbish to see for the ruined.

Monstrosities lumbered the earth
through war to make it here. Machines
full of toothsome gears gnashed the air;
throats of ragged pipes swallowed
the sky, just to collapse from their last
bulimic expiration.

There’s enough material there
to rust a project right out
of its process, a bone
out of its socket.

Junk for miles
and overgrown

the past materials,
the functions of last days.

We’ve come this far though,
haven’t we? Out of the scrubland
with tools, slabs, iron; and
now wet sand towers crumbled
by this old sun; each horizon a
playground of failure.

Is this how we measure progress?
the evolution of debris….

Heard Plainly, Forcefully

2005-12-02T16:33:00.000-05:00

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.

It's never completely silent in here; there are always sounds that occupy the vast corridors. If it's not being broadcasted from a device outside, then the music starts internally. The orchestra of voices and instruments down in the bowels, the foundations from which all the structures build, has always been a busy entity, and it doesn't always take my direction. I suffer and enjoy what might be considered auditory hallucinations from time to time. I can hear the music plainly, keeping time independant, just behind everything else. Sometimes songs I didn't even know I knew, lyrics I thought forgotten singing back from the archives.

I don't know why she swallowed that fly.

And it is often undeniably silly. Usually, it comes out as a contrast, against whatever it is that I'm doing. Out to mangle my composure. There are parts of myself that find absolutley everything ridiculous.

Perhaps she'll die.

Yesterday it happened as I entertained a fellow who, amongst other things, was obvoiusly married, and timorously enjoying what was probably a simotaneously eroitc and nerve-wracking experience for him. What to do?

There was an old lady who swallowed a spider.

My leg braced on a wall; pressing; turgid, and moving to the beat of the club's slow fuck mood.

That riggled and jiggled and ticked inside her.

I just about lost my shit. Not only did I hear it clear as day through the techno beat, it was being sung by a woman in a thick cockney. I had an image of some wench up on a rough hewn table in a tavern, regaling. My face must have changed because the man looked suddenly even more uncomfortable. I didn't laugh, but that was the end of that.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don't know why she swallowed that fly.
Perhaps she'll die.

Music is my life-blood. Words being music too, the resonance of them, and letters themselves, attatching each other in aural notation. Sound ties my life together, and provides the superstructure of memory. I provide soundtracks to take myself from place to place throughout the day. When I was younger the Imperial March gave me the courage to walk into a hostile room.

So geeky. I know.

A great many of the friendships in my life have music in common. Not always the same tastes, but the importance. This feeling of essentail inevitability. We all get lost in the notes and the chords, and there we are, forcing each other to listen to our love affairs.

"You have to hear this. Loud."

She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That riggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed that fly,
Perhaps she'll die.

This is especailly true of Cobra and me. We built our friendship on music. We raved together. Worshiped. Danced to the trance gods. I was with her when we got the speakers of her wet dreams. We sat in front of them, full throttle for the better part of a day.

"This is just dumb."
"Again, again!"

Those speakers, coupled with her prodigous CD collection, necessitated the forms of our socialization. Cobra is a home body by nature, but has been forced to relent some of her stereo-nazi inclinations as she is frequently hosting the host of audiophiles that make up our circle of friends. We inaugurated the two-song rule. Everyone gets a turn, and it goes in a round. You get two songs. They can be any two songs. No one can object and you're not allowed to complain. However, payback can be a bitch.

"What's that? Dwight Yoakum? No, no, that's alright. Go ahead. I think I have some speed death-metal in the back."

We've been playing the two song game for several years now. It really doesn't get old.

I know an old lady who swallowed a cow.

In anticipation of leaving the country, I've been converting all my CDs into mp3s. I have no intention of travelling the world without my entrie music collection at my disposal. I'm more than half-way done. It's rather erie, putting a couple hundred disks onto three DVD-ROMs.

I don't know how she swallowed that cow.

When it comes down to it, all these technological short-cuts, toys and accoutrement are only aplifications of the essentail. Music carries in the anatomy of humankind. One of the two universals (the other being math, my un-favorite). We have the most basic elements at our disposal at all times. We keep a beat by living. Thump, thump.

Thump, thump.

I know an old lady who swallowed a horse.

I have a regular who comes to see me twice a month, very sweet and quite deaf. We do manage to keep a rythem there in the room; he can still feel the beat of the music through the wood, but deafness is one of those things I don't know that I could ever swallow. There was always that looming hypothetical, first put to me in Sunday School: if you had to lose one, your sight or your hearing, which would you choose? It was meant to bring us out of presumtion, make us appreciate, but it's the sort of question that can hit a highly imaginative child differently, terrifyingly. In the dark, or in silence? At the very least, at this point in my life, I have a resovior, a deep well at the centre of things, that can still broadcast to deaf ears even after they burst or seal shut. These sounds could still play, and vary; but the thought still chills me to the bone. A very isolated world, taken away from new epiphanies of ecstatic song. I don't know that I could reconsile myself with that thorough loneliness.

He's dead of course.

Each World Has Its Own

2005-11-25T16:38:00.000-05:00

When places come to be used up, and there are empty spaces between the houses; and lights cold escape to the vacancies, flying between gravities left behind,

I like looking out from balconies, high up.

Who Has A New Camera

2005-11-21T20:32:00.000-05:00

And is on the road?

Me. That's who.

Close to the Edge

2005-11-19T02:46:00.000-05:00

It was when I handed out the money to pay; I realized that the cabby was wearing latex gloves.

As in medical, germ-phobic, or serial killer kind of latex gloves.

That the kind of paranoia, or affectation, can mean any number of things; but, really, any of the options available still made it a perfect cap to the night.

As it was the first seasonal day of snow in Toronto, the club was, predictably, slow. Inching. Crawling. Friday nights are often very good for me. I get to drink, play, chat, dance, and make lots and lots of money.

This Friday was a terrible thing. There was bustle, but no bustling, if you get my meaning.

Canadians suffer on the first snowfall. They suffer the memory of all the snow they've had to endure, all their many years, up until that point. To see a snowflake is not to see a snowflake, but more to see every snowflake that has ever heaped your sidewalk, buried your driveway, or barricaded your road. That first snowflake is the symbol for all frozen condensation, and here it comes, that tyranny of water, and sun, and the void.

So they don't go out. They stay inside.

I understand. I would be with them. Cuddled with the new computer under the duvet, watching Buffy, and drinking tea.

But I hauled it in. Yay for me.

There were a lot of gawkers and wannabe fondlers, but a dearth of solvent patrons, and the night deejay on Friday is not, as a rule, my favorite disk jockey. I put in my time. I did, what you might call, the "groundwork" for private dances in the future. I smiled, and I sashayed, and I drank....

When you're your own boss, time management is a skill quickly mastered or submitted. Tick. Tick. Tick.

A regular who likes to be dominated covered my commission. Thank you, Jesus... or whichever reasonable, sin-savvy, queer positive, cheeky facsimile deity it was that answered my quiet plea. Actually having to pay for the privilege to be there is not the happiest way to leave.

I could have been home with Raspberry Thriller and Season Five.

The stage show is fairly important to the stripper's income. It's the billboard, the marquee -- we certainly have the lights -- and without it, we've lost our star power on the floor. Said Friday deejay and I are not particularly close. We don't have anything that would even resemble an understanding. We're cordial, and that's about all.

The fellow picking the music is also the one who co-ordinates the stage schedule. Friday, I am almost always one of the last on the docket for the main stage.

This is fine. I've come to understand and work with this. I budget my time accordingly.

What's irritating is when two of the more motivated dancers decide to do a duo show on the tiny (picture a surface area atop your refrigerator) stage, all slinkin' and touchin', just when I was up. At first I thought it was impulsive, and kind of cute... and then it went on... and on.

I was completely upstaged, on a night when there really wasn't that much attention to go around, and even less money.

I wasn't prepared for how mad I felt. I was angry. I don't get angry very often, when it happens I can feel the speed of the blood passing over my temples. Whoosh.

I was this close to taking my job seriously.

I'm better now, thanks.

What Works We Ply

2005-11-18T19:17:00.000-05:00

And what trades we make.

The club itself is rather small. An isle of what you might expect: coloured lights, mirrored walls, black black black; a stage with two shining poles smudged with the glow from the gels.

I do not get paid to dance on the stage. I pay to dance on the stage. The commission paid to the house ranges, depending on the day, and the theoretical popularity of the day; which I'm beginning to realize is an attempt to force order onto the unknowable, the barest form of chaos. I rent my place in the space. Ultimately, I'm self employed.

The money I make is made by taking gents upstairs to the "VIP Area", where the Private Dances ensue. What is involved in a private dance is the subject of much debate, wrangling, whining and pouting. At times, genuine temper-tantrums. At others, a swindle or a shaft.

They really do run the gambit.

What I have come to understand is that there is no handbook for what goes on in those little cubicles. (They're referred to as rooms, but they are no-nonsense, swing-door, particle board cubicles; painted grey.) Full nudity is assured, though, I'll often leave my socks on. (Good socks mind, those cute little white sports socks that end below the ankle. I'm not straight, for god's sake.) Beyond that, it becomes a little more obscure. Just as there are all kinds of customers, the dancers themselves are an eclectic bunch, and the comfort level of the performer determines what your going to be allowed to do in that tenuous private space.

Assholes and aggressive wing-nuts don't get much from me at all.

"You sit there," I'll point.
"What? I don't even get to--"
"You get to watch."

That is, if happen to get stuck up there with a surly creep in the first place. I'm now weeding them out with positive artistry.

But whoever it is, I always make them sit down. From there, there are definitely different degrees of stripper tricks the client gets to enjoy (my repertoire is expanding), but what gets pulled out of the kit and used depends on the kind of energy I get off of him. The polite and the gracious, the delighted and the humorous, they get the best of me. It can be very easy to have a good time.

It is equally as easy to lose that cheerful disposition.

It is unavoidably intimate, the whole procedure: an exchange of personal boundaries, and unquestionably a business arrangement, a monetary exposition of fantasy and desire. It is indubitably the sex trade. I have the fortunate knack of being a very tactile person, once personal space has been breached. I find being affectionate easy, despite the fact that I am, on the whole, rather shy. I make quite a bit of money because of it.

The horny make up the loin's share of my clientele; but the lonely are only slightly behind.

The club is gay. Women are only allowed on Sundays which, as a rule, I don't work. They are more inclined to gawk, and are more intimidated by the solo experience. It's more like working for free.

Plus, the women don't give me a boner.

Which is how I make a great deal more money.

Life Partnerships

2005-11-17T14:12:00.000-05:00

I'm in love. If I could, I would marry him.

Wonderful News

2005-11-09T18:20:00.000-05:00

This should be arriving tomorrow. Which means that I will finally be able to post from my very own machine, access the internet, and generally restore my life to the digital age.

These past few months I have been making do with the internet connection across the street in the convenience store, or by stealing time on the roommate's computer.

I'm so excited I can hardly sleep.

I'm such a geek; but soon, I'll be a Mac geek.

Do you ever worry that the choices you make in life just pull you further and further into a stereotype?

Occurrences

2005-11-09T15:16:00.000-05:00

It's no wonder I'm not writing a novel right now.

I'm more or less living one.

When Pulling Up Your Pants

2005-11-04T15:54:00.000-05:00

"So... Spider is a very private person."
"I like my personal space."
"You know, if you let someone in, you might be pleasantly surprised."
"By what? The chainsaw or the modified tooth drill?"

What followed was particularly good; I am constantly taken aback by
people's ability to let the most cliched and over-used phrases spew
uncensored from their mouths, while still expecting to be taken
seriously. "What are you so afraid of?" he asks me.

"I don't know... maybe it's just that I've been hurt so badly by people
in the past. Sometimes they get too close; they can take advantage of
the trust you give them."

Watch the patient concern display over his features.

"Or maybe I don't just volunteer personal information to someone who
pays me to take my clothes off."

The other winning exchange this past week was this:

"Come here for a minute, I want to talk to you before you start."
I sit, clothed, in his lap.
"I tell all the new boys three things. Three pieces of advice."

Insert dramatic, pregnant pause.

"Save you money."
"Okay."
"Get an education."
"I'll do my best."
"And read."
"... what, you mean, like, books?"

And then, after the dance, the same fellow, who could generously be
described as jolly in that (forgive me for bringing him up twice in as many posts) Santa Claus sort-of way, if Santa were a greasy, dejected sort of middle aged bloke, comes out with something different.

"Would you come back to my hotel?"
"Not likely."
"Just for an hour."
"Nope."

...

"Just out of curiosity, how much would you pay for a visit like that?"
"A hundred, a hundred fifty."
I stared at him.
"There are boys all around the city that'll do it," he says defensively.
"That's nice. You owe me $80."

Which, I'd like to point out, is what it costs for me to dance 16 minutes.

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

Bring Them Something Great

2005-11-02T13:44:00.000-05:00

I have to say that my efforts to reproduce Jack Skellington in pumpkin form were a success. He was in his happy face, and lit up at the back of the bar so that he could preside over Halloween; all the ghouls leering from the shadows at the vulnerable young'uns.... Now he's overseeing all the activity in my kitchen. His toothy smile and wide eyes warm my heart.

I wish I could have him bronzed, before he turns to pulp.

When I was seventeen, my friend Amanda said to me, "It is quite possible that you are evil, Spider; but if you are, it's more of a cheerful, Disney kind of evil."

That still brings a tear to my eye. Especially while I'm incarcerating drippy virgins, capturing puppies to turn them into outer-ware, or preparing to eat Santa Claus.

That Little Poem

2005-10-28T12:56:00.000-05:00

Reminded me of this one:

tickle doll,
like voodoo,
only nicer.

which I used to deface something else, many years ago.

Trust me, it was very clever.

Defacing the Construction

2005-10-28T00:03:00.000-05:00

Coming home in a cab and passing the site of Toronto's new Opera House, I remembered a little piece of graffiti I've been meaning to scrawl in felt tip across a poster or two on the boards surrounding it... something that hit me square between the eyes one silver-lit Sunday morning on the streetcar:

Operatic scale,
every note
a bill!

Poisoned

2005-10-25T10:54:00.000-05:00

it's been fun

Spent my day off with the surrogate hetero boyfriend.

destroying our bodies

Drinking.

it's been great just being together

Dear god.

crash another car
smoke another cigarette

It's a miracle I'm still alive, though I may not remain that way; my body is threatening to stop at any given moment.

and make love to all our favorites on the radio

I've managed to pull it together enough buy a two liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and listen to "Lethal and Young" by Hawksley Workman three times (see the italics), but now I think it's time to pull the duvet to the sofa and watch Oliver Stone's Alexander....

cause we don't know how to make it go
we were only told how to burn it down
and then skip town

Which may not be very rewarding as our dear director has apparently removed a good portion of the homo content for his cut.

so don't look so damn tragic
you knew this had to happen

Which was the only reason I liked it in the first place.

so don't look so damn tragic in front of your poor mother

The lifelong love story thread was good... the edifice of imperial cross-continental crawl... not so much.

she brought you here and now you have to stay.. to stay

Balls.

so be thankful that you're in love
be thankful that you're in pieces
'cause, baby, it's a begger being bitten by this bug
after all you're all young

you're all lethal and young

There is Never an Easy Way

2005-10-22T17:14:00.000-05:00

Having come to some sort of synthesis between purpose and penache at the strip bar, 12 weeks into the adventure my income has finally stabilized; though I do admit, I am still subject to the whims of the market. Now, I get to start focusing on the nuances... there is such a thing as professional pride.

Though I am not entirely sure how much the average detail really makes to the fellows who routinely take up the seats in perverts row.

The problem plaguing me presently is one of hair, or rather, its removal. In the week before I went in for my first day, I made and appointment with gentleman who runs his own esthetician practice, primarily for that all-important stripper procedure: the bikini wax. I was not entirely impressed with the guy's efforts, and had to do a little touching up with creams and razors later, which seemed to defeat the purpose as well as put me out the better part of $100.

I have had it done before, you understand, primarily out of curiosity, and at the recommendation of a female friend, used the services of an Eastern European woman working out of Yorkville.

"Never trust a woman armed with hot wax who is not from a hairy race herself. A Swede? Forget it. You want a Scandinavian with hair black as pitch. They know."
"She does do boys, yes?"
"Oh... um. She must. Yes, I'm sure she does."

Quite nervous I arrived for the appointment, and in turn caught her completely off guard.

(In a thick Czech accent) "Oh! Well... I... I have never. Hmm. No, it's alright, my darling, we will learn together."

Which didn't fill me with confidence.

She was indeed, very Eastern European, petite, with a mass of dark, curly hair crowning her head, an olive complexion; and her table-side manner, I have to admit, was second to none:

"We are all the same, my darling. Pay it no mind. Only different parts. Deep down, we are identical -- breathe!"

"Very good work, darling. You are doing very well -- breathe!"

Let me assure you, it does hurt.

After it was all over she looked at me with a fairly satisfied appraisal. "It is just like women," she decreed, "only more fiddling. It takes a little longer. Next time will be much better."

The results in that case, after the pain and tenderness subsided, were quite satisfactory... it was great looking like a porn star, but I never went back, primarily because I stopped having sex for quite a while, there really wasn't much need to be so well, um, manicured in private. Now, I've developed a healthy dose of consumer anxiety, somehow imagining that she'll be offended that I never returned after we bonded through a shared experience.

Don't laugh, it could happen to you one day.

But I had better get over it. The recent hack's job lasted well over a month (I'm not very naturally hairy), and since then I've been maintaining with my clippers and razor, but we're at the point now where it's really time to go back to the wax or reconcile myself with the prospect of having to shave my nethers weekly, which makes my hand cramp up.

In a perfect world, there would be someone easily located that specializes in troweling hot wax onto men's bits. I'm sure such a person exists, but thus far Google and my co-workers have let me down.

Woe. Woe is me.

My Dear Best Beloveds....

2005-10-21T16:38:00.000-05:00

Satisfactorily, my blog seems to be garnering a little more attention of late. Especially when I update on a regular basis. Which is nice; I am a writer, I like people to read my stuff. Even nicer is the fact that judging by the numbers, my readers are not just people I know, nice to think I might be entertaining for my prose's own sake... but then it begs the question:

Who the hell are you people?

I would genuinely like to know, as there seem to be only a couple of you who feel compelled to comment, even though I have gone to the trouble to make it so you don't need to register or anything to put something down. The internet is supposed to be an interactive medium.

So, gentle readers, I would like extend an invitation: leave a little hello, or rant, or rave; something, anything that might mark you as having been here. Down at the bottom of each post there's a little orange-y comments link. Click on that. I would love to hear from you.

...

Also, email the link of this site to all of your friends. Yes, all of them. But not to your boss. I'm going to start posting stories from the strip club soon.

In the War Against My Body

2005-10-21T12:43:00.000-05:00

Is the poetry of poverty.

I hated physical fitness when I was young. My mother, a kinesiology major in University, feared for my health. Sedentary to the extreme, I think she had visions of me arthritic and jaundiced by the age of 25, as she watched my eyes twirl hypnotic spirals, fixed with an unblinking stare upon the television. My own imagination treated my physical form's evolution little better. I didn't have many high hopes for it. I was painfully thin, and by the age of 20 had picked up any number of bad habits that weren't going to do anything positive to my health.

We were all surprised when I managed to make a go of actually working out. Ironically, I think what made it possible was taking up raving. Despite the chemical enhancements, dancing six consecutive hours at a frantic pace got me into the best physical shape I had ever been in, and I found that I liked feeling more in control of my body, less at its whim and mercy.

Maybe there's something to this....

That was a while ago now. I actually like the whole process. I'm a far cry from the stick figure I was about five years ago. Learning how to eat was probably the hardest part (I had to say goodbye to the eight and a half years of vegetarianism; it wasn't viable), that is, after getting over the intimidation of spending time in a space that was so foreign to me. I know this isn't very original, but I had always associated weight rooms with medieval torture chambers.

It's been a strange process. I could now probably be considered a demi-gym rat. I'm not huge or anything, and I still get side-tracked too easily by drinking, then recovery, but a significant portion of my life's schedule is organized around going to the Y, planning my meals, yadda yadda yadda. It's kinda fun. I would never have seen this in myself eight years ago. I was rather expecting to be up to two packs a day and still smoking a quarter of pot a week.

The Achilles heel of the activity is that after your body changes, gains some visible muscle mass (which was easy for me to notice, I had been working from ground zero), and your self-image eventually falls in line, your self-esteem becomes dependent on it. You can't just stop going and expect to remain emotionally intact.

I took a break for the summer. Making time for the gym was just one more thing and I didn't feel I had the time or the energy to get proper work-outs done, not when I had to move, and play, and find new work, and get fired, and find new work; on and on and on; but bodies like to return to their resting state when not in use. Mine loses its appetite along with it's muscle mass. Strange that I had the gumption to take up stripping mid-way through my degradation. At work I was unanimously granted the title of "twink", which is something I haven't associated myself with in a while. I looked at myself in the mirror about a month ago and my jaw actually dropped.

No wonder I've been feeling like a bag of shit.

Well, we've got things back in order. Three and a half weeks later I've regained about half of what I lost (thanks heaven's for muscle memory!), and I'm feeling more myself again. Self confident and no longer sliding into an inactive slug-like stupor. I'm granting that, as addictions go, physical fitness is one of the least of evils. Oh, free weights, you hurt so good.

Another dose of irony, of course, cannot be left out. Now that I look healthy, filled in, semi-athletic, my mother has new concerns to replace those of me looking sickly and drawn. Last May, around Mother's day:

"You look so much bigger."
"Yep. I've been working pretty hard, and eating a lot better."
"... Tell me you're not on the steroids."
"Thanks, Mum. Thanks so much."

'Cause it's the rich ones who really make it,
It's the rich ones who have the guts to take it;
They feel fine, they feel fine, fine, fine...

Better Than Spinning a Plate on a Stick

2005-10-18T14:48:00.000-05:00

In a truly spectacular fait du compli I have managed to put off paying my cell phone bill long enough to be disconnected for the fourth time in 18 months. It's approaching the level of becoming a party trick.

You wouldn't think that I can do this so often, but I can!

When days can come to such treacle oozing slowness, it is astounding that I can so frequently lose track of such constant, repetitive tasks. I mean, it's not like there are months when I don't have to pay for phone service. I somehow manage.

It's a good thing I don't really call anyone anymore; or that anyone's trying to date me.

Following Up

2005-10-14T12:43:00.000-05:00

"So did you have fun?"
"Oh, yes."
"That was great on the dance floor."
"What's this?"
"There were these two really hot guys dancing with each other; [Spider] just smiled and got right in between the two of them."
"Good for you!"
"Thank you. Thank you."
"You disappeared later. What happened?"
"..."
"You didn't."
"Did."
"That's hot."

It's a pity we pansies don't high five each other more often.

Wishing Well

2005-10-13T17:55:00.000-05:00

I want to work with Joss Whedon so badly it hurts.

About two years ago, just after I had broken up with Autobahn, to date my most involved of relationships, I was visiting ChikiMonkey and he asked me if I'd like to do some bite-sized reviews of some PS2 games and a DVD boxed set for this.

I narrowed my eyes.

"Do I get to keep the games and the DVDs?"
"Yep."
"Gimme."

The boxed set was a pre-release of Whedon's Firefly series. I had just discovered Buffy in syndication that year. Late, I know, but it doesn't mean I love her any less. Or the show itself.

Something to know about me is that I am hopelessly, desperately, in love with the narrative. It's been this way since I can remember. The affair has been going on forever. When I was four I was scouring the corners of my imagination for stories. I cast my mother and made her act them out with me. Good storytelling makes me tremble. I've been known to lose my breath reading or watching movies. I tear up.

Whedon, as I am sure many of you know, is a phenom storyteller. As far as I'm concerned, he's redefined and mastered the form of the serial. I lurve him.

So, being delivered the ill-fated series (so tragically cancelled) he developed around a fusion of sci-fi and western, I was excited to see it, yet suspect of its premise. Would he, could he, do it again? I have been let down so thoroughly before. Lucas, you cad, you've shaken my faith.

It should be pointed out that having just broken up, broken heart, I was feeling a little fragile. And lonely. Alone.

And a Firefly lit up my little television screen. I went out to space; and trembled; and gasped; and cried.

It was some of the very best of the medium, and, having been terminated abruptly, unfinished. Which was frustrating. In the space of a week, those characters had become my friends. More than that, the quality of the show, from the top down, was obviously a labor of love. The product itself was such a thing to be proud of. I have watched and re-watched imagining what kind of a working environment must have produced something of this caliber. I had dreams of getting involved with its resurrection.

The feature movie sequel, Serenity, has just been released. It is credibly, incredibly good. Holy shit, it's probably one of the most elegant stories I have ever had the pleasure of enjoying. It kicks Star Wars ass. I've seen it twice.

Sometimes things can and do work out for the best.

And I hopelessly, desperately want to work with him. I want to help create something like that.

My New Favorite Number

2005-10-13T14:28:00.000-05:00

A side effect of my work, especially when coupled with prodigious amounts of alcohol, is the annihilation of reservation. I'm getting real good at talking to people, and beyond that, my skills as a flirt are no longer recognizable. I'm operating at a level of efficiency I find completely alien. It never used to be this easy. I used to be shy. Well, shy-ish. What happened to that?

Don't know exactly, but one thing's for certain: that ability to love, which I fear has been burned right out of my heart, is not necessary to raise the bar concerning sexual adventure. Love, shmuve. Let's be very, very bad instead.

Oh, yes. Lets.

The thing about going home with a couple, say a pair of tall, beautiful boys with cheeky slogans on their tee shirts, especially when they've been together for about a year, is that you get to be the guest of honor. Thrust snug in the middle, so to speak. I don't know that anyone could actually turn down the opportunity to be a birthday present. I know now that I certainly can't.

And who would want to? It's a worthwhile activity, charitable even: backs arched, fingers spread and clenched; busy, busy, busy. We spent a couple of hours, this way, that way; over, under, through.

Then a friendly kiss or three, out the door, and down the street a 24 hour deli, where I had a smoked meat sandwich as big as my head, and ate all the chips while text messaging Turtle in Australia.

Turtle: Ever spend an afternoon digging up skulls? I have.
Spider: The skulls are good, I'll admit. As for me, after six weeks of not going out, just went home with two boys and had crazy sex. That sort of thing doesn't happen often.
Turtle: Threesome, huh? Don't think I'd have the guts for that. Lots of fun I expect.
Spider: Twas tons of fun. I will probably be more freaked out about it tomorrow... right now am having 4am sandwich. Then bed. Blessed bed.
Turtle: Mmm, food. Enjoy both food and bed. And don't be too freaked out tomorrow. Love me.
Spider: I will never stop loving you, dear sister. Kisses.
Turtle: 8-)

Turns out, I'm not freaked at all. In fact, I have a new affection for the number three, triangles and trios all. Yes, indeed.

I realize that it all starts with the dancing. Out to make mischief on the dance floor. The years of raving, and before that skanking about to alternative music at Tullulah's Cabaret; a persona came to life in those steps, a rather naughty rake, and he's been given new energy now that he has a stage to operate on. He's a little shameless, getting better at what he does,

and likes being a birthday present.

More trouble is sure to ensue.

It's Not A Mess In Here

2005-10-13T13:49:00.000-05:00

It is becoming evident to me that many bloggers, if one were to generalize, are what you might call organized folk. Many of those who make a go of this particular shot at the communication medium are list makers and arrangers, people who make things line up "just so". Everything in its place, all places labeled.

I am not one of those people. Obsessive codification and systematic arranging makes me sleepy. I do, however, generally know where almost everything is, in a vague sort of subconscious way. Except my keys. I never know where my keys are. When I need something, like a specific book, or some knick-knack for this or that project (I have projects... they take time and unspecified amounts of concentration; this is why I don't call people back; I am not just sitting at home watching telly) I feel like I'm dowsing for water, stumbling about with some forked sprig -- ah, ha! the thesaurus! Somehow I knew it was in that end table.

I wonder if my brain works something like Google's algorithms....

In any case, it's got me thinking about classifications and systems of organizing information, file folders and dewy decimals and such, and wondering if the advent of new systems of scanning and retrieving pertinent information, like the search engine, won't eventually modify the way that people consider putting things in order. Header, label, sub-label may eventually become a thing of the past. If you just need to ask for the piece of information you're looking for to have it delivered to you, might not this kind of thinking spill over into the more physical world as well? Will the way that people understand systemization actually change?

Could the age of organized chaos be upon us?

Has my day finally come?

Taken Back

2005-10-12T13:03:00.000-05:00

I love enough, I suppose.

There are many people in the world I tack with that affection, etherise to the board of my life with sharp distinction... but I don't know that I have it to be in love anymore. Maybe I don't even crush anymore. Maybe I'm just worn too thin, worn down so close to being worn out... right out of emotional existence.

This merry-go-round has a life of its own. Its horses are galloping circles in my half-life brain, and I think it has something to do with the fact that it's been two years since I broke with Autobahn, and set off to ride my own amusements, suffer my own vertigo; grip myself when I plummet.

Super 8 and a Something

2005-09-30T17:38:00.000-05:00

This man was making me dizzy at Woody's last night.

I'm aware of who he is. And so is he. Everything he's done, written especially, has made that abundantly clear. His material for his entire artistic career, far as I can tell, has been himself, his life, and his obsessions.

This is not a criticism. I mean, I write this site.

My issue is separate. His interest was too blatant to be shy. You can't go whipping around the bar: around: around, at such a frantic pace, staring, and wait for the object of your affection to do all the work for you. Even if all that walking made you tired.

I'm familiar with his work. For a long time I didn't care for it. Now, I find it funny.

And I wasn't interested anyway.

With a Little Ice-Pick

2005-09-30T16:45:00.000-05:00

About two months ago, when I was two months in, two months through this stretch of inactivity, woeful neglect, I vowed that it was over. I had reigned it in, I thought to myself, called the dogs of sloth to heel.

That was, perhaps, optimistic.

I think I've been mildly depressed these past few months without registering it. Or, if not depressed, tired.

I realized this when Paris died.

With Paris cancelled, my bone weary, leaden posit of self into the divan of the sofa -- the lump of my rump -- spoke to me of something more than simple disappointment. There was more going on. Oh, yes. And whatever it was, it had been going on for a while.

I've had trouble sleeping, then rising; it's been a travesty to make plans; a disaster (waiting to happen) to construct goals.

I've been waiting, and half-expecting, for it all to bottom out. It, of course, being all my hopes and my plans.

For no good reason, I might add. At least, I've been feeling like there wasn't. There was.

My life has been in upheaval. From standstill to disaster. From boring to almost terminally interesting.

I think I needed a rest. So, besides working, I've been doing sweet fuck all for the majority of the summer. Chipping away at that glacier of time; time itself moving at a glacier's pace.

We are still the power brokers. We are still the merchants of the hours.

And no one can make decisions except that one and only. The chooser. The choice.

This has been the theme of this entire blog. It's the theme of the age: no action exists without making it.

I could not make it to Paris because I didn't have enough money to go. It's a simple but arresting fact. Work has been slow this past while. The boys tell me that it has been unusually so; we're having a bad run. At least it's not just me. I mean, with that trial of the personal psych-up, and the frightened, inside jelly-making stage of actually doing it, you'd hope that you weren't just bad at it. That would be a kick in the nuts.

But the fact remains, the print on my ticket got hit with an eraser. The free trip got totaled. It was a dangerous thing to happen. No matter how unavoidable, it made my life feel more like a prison, immutable, and each atom that much harder to move.

Oh, there's that gulf of depression....

Wait.

There is a more intrinsic layer of detail. Clustered together inside those little bricks: electrons, protons and neutrons; and inside those, strings; the little serpents. Some of them wriggling freely towards a definition, other ones eating their own tails, enclosed in a system, but all of them moving. All of them vibrating their place in space and time.

It's working out.

Worth A Thousand

2005-09-14T15:31:00.000-05:00

I found a roll of film in the bottom of a bag. I didn't know from whence this film had come, but it was 35mm 100, so I assumed that I had shot it using an SLR some time ago. I haven't owned an SLR in over six years. So I sent it off to be developed to see what kind of mystery photos I would get back.

I picked them up today. Apparently, you really don't have to refrigerate film to keep it from degrading.

11 years ago I left home to escape the farm, and a very real threat to my personal safety. The first stop on my path from the Ottawa Valley to (eventually) here, was Bracebridge, ostensibly to finish high school. What it really was, was out. I left home and family. I started what I could really consider to be my life.

The pictures are from there. From that time.

I feel like I've been beaten unconscious with a feather. Not only that, there are some lovely shots.

I would post them here if I had the means.

Besides a really dorky picture of myself at 17 (which is something I didn't think existed, on anybody's film), there are images of a few people who managed to make me feel loved and included faster than I had ever experienced before. As well, pictures of the two people I most loved and admired at that point in my life. Amanda and Dan.

We had attended high school in the sticks together. Had found one another and held tight for survival. Rode those emotional gambits and defeats white knuckled all the way to the end of the year, and when that year was up, they discovered that they were in love. With each other. Desperately.

I have a picture of them in love. At the very beginning.

It's beautiful.

It Happens Once A Year

2005-09-14T15:26:00.000-05:00

With this having taken over the city presently, a little bit of mayhem has been working its way through the city streets and my place of employ. Curiously absent from my immediate vicinity are any real celebrities to speak of... or speak to... or trip on their way down a flight of stairs.

I've never been star-struck, but I think that I could enjoy seeing a star strike off some surface or object in a painful, yet funny, way. Just like in the movies, only real. Mind you, nothing that would do any permanent damage; I'm not a monster, after all.

"Be careful what you say," A.I. might remind me, "our celebrity overlords are always listening."

Our masters who rule from the Hollywood hills.

Bah.

However, the Festival has managed to deliver me a very entertaining sexual escapade, and were I the networking kind I'm sure I would be up to my elbows in business cards by now.

I have noticed that all about the city, unrolled like lapping tongues to streams of traffic, the red walkways and avenues of carpet. What's evident is that the quality of said promenades is not the issue on everyone's mind: matted or mangy, tattered or heavily traversed, it doesn't matter as long as it's red;

as long as it shows you where to go.

Your Attention Please

2005-09-13T13:15:00.000-05:00

There are some things which need to be addressed.

First off, work (no matter what the venue, type or style) is still work. No matter what associations you might have with a paticular industry, the fact remains that if you intend to make a living, a certian amount of professionalism will most likely benifit you. Ergo, everyone is not on drugs; so please stop looking me in the eye, welling up with concern, and telling me that you're worried about my safety and my health.

I'm fine.

Thank you.

...

Second is the not having internet access at home thing. Whoa, boy; sucking beyond measure, let me tell you. Last week I spent a good hour slaving over what was shaping up to be a fairly witty, tongue in cheek sort of post about a recent adventure, when the computer at the internet cafe suddenly logged me out by its own volition... and sent my post into the ether. Every pixel sucked dry. No ones to punctuate the zeros.

I was not happy.

So apologies all round for not posting in over a while.

...

Third is the shout out to all you charming people who have started to actually comment on this blog.

I love you all.

The Remainder

2005-08-26T13:23:00.000-05:00

It is true that individuals spend an inordinate amount of time spouting off about the people they don't like; at least, in this culture, at this time.

Amongst my friends, this activity is sometimes out of hand. Beyond the disparaging comments leveled at individuals, which (admittedly) there has been an attempt to curb and discourage lately, to varying degrees of success, there are also the wide-ranging generalizations brought to bear against social groups and minorities. This, perhaps, sounds worse than it is. As we make up a fairly multicultural, mixed-gender, inter-generational, poly-sexual-oriented clique, most of the bases are covered: the "post-modern, self-referential, ironic social commentary" (as it has been coined) has been a hallmark of the last few years, but it's run its course, and we're attempting to put that puppy to bed, as it just doesn't seem to be as funny anymore.

As easy as it has been for me to sit around the patio table with a nice, cool beverage and espouse that "I hate gay people", or Satan's Little Pixie shouting out that "Asians suck", both of us only half-joking -- making it funny because it's true AND because we are what we slag -- what we really mean is something different.

Perspective, after all, is everything.

Most of the human race is not to my taste, nor to that of my companions. We are unwilling participants in this mixed bag of humanity, though smart enough to realize that there's not a damn thing we can do about it, except try and live as responsibly as we can. Most of us have grown into maturity as minorities within minorities; we have been mavericks and outcasts and punching bags, and somehow, out of all the mess, the disillusionment and alienation, we have managed over the past few years, to hammer together a cohesive, supportive and loving circle of friends. People that sometimes sparkle, and other times dazzle. Who fall and pick themselves up. Who give credit where credit is due.

This is not to say that we are not also deeply flawed. We are, as I said, human.

We are also spoiled; and we lose perspective. We forget that 99% of the race really does suck. The same mistakes are made on massive scales over and over: apathy ruling common sense; laziness trumping fraternity and empathy; selfishness hoarding wealth and privilege and progress; and fear crouched in its gnarled pinions, overshadowing it all, with wings ready to beat everything down with a black wind.

So yes, gay people do suck (and yes, I'm familiar with the joke). An oppressed minority fighting to establish its own equality does not grant its members moral or ethical superiority, it just gives them a cause; and causes are notoriously blinding. Equity is definitely a noble thing to strive for, if you can sustain those ideals past the point that you get what you want from the deal. Gay marriage is now legal in Canada, across the board. Wonderful. To get here, to this point, it has been a long hard travail. People have fought. People have died. Now, people have forgotten.

A younger generation of white, middle-class twenty something homosexuals have taken for granted that they live with the mere residue of the vicissitude that the generation just preceding them had to endure, to say nothing of our great gay grandparents who threw down the gauntlet when they had everything to lose. They do not bother even educating themselves about the past trials and tribulations of our predecessors, our benefactors, but rather club, and date, and screw, and buy, and preen in a privileged, isolated demi-class that has been built around an ideal of sexual desire. What has been won is the right to be just as self-absorbed, materialistic and classist as if we had been born straight, white and middle classed.

What a brave fucking new world.

And in the same way, the discrimination and abuse foisted upon those peoples who have immigrated here in no way absolves them of the very human frailties which plague our species. Persecution does not ennoble its victim, at its base. How one deals with that persecution can. Suffering at the pleasure or sport of another is simply that: suffering; and it degrades both of the parties involved; but there is a knee jerk reaction that attempts to sanctify the quality of the oppressed to give greater credence to the cruelty of the act.

certainly, there are good people who are monstrously abused. There are also bad people who are monstrously abused, along with the apathetic, the strange and the boring.

All the colours of the rainbow.

The Irish, during the 1800's, were a downtrodden, abused and abhorred race under the British Empire. They suffered and they died for the pleasure of the ruling classes.

And then they came to America. And in a couple of generations they turned the tables.

It's our turn now.

The cycle of life. The reason why 99% of people suck. Majority really does rule, and it's because we let it. It's because, of that catalogue of sins, sloth is probably the most debilitating to any real change, its the one that lets real nobility waste to death in the corner. It's the lack of perspective.

Which is everything, and what I need to check in myself from time to time.

I am very lucky. Somehow I've found a good portion of that 1% available to me, nailed them down and made them say "I love you", just so I can say it back. Surrounded by people who are trying to learn, as best they can, to be good and responsible and real. We have been outcasts for all of the right reasons, questioning the status quo and calling people on their shit, and now that we have found each other, it's sometimes hard to forget that we no longer really qualify for the misfit category, because in a very real way, we now belong to something that is greater than ourselves, a community that we have helped create. In our own way, we're become the cool kids at the back of the bus.

So, when I say that I hate gay people, it does not really mean that I hate 99% of all people... what it means is that I am so terribly discouraged by the majority of the race, so constantly disappointed; that it breaks my heart to see us continue on without learning, and without any real change.

But I see the beginnings of a variation, and the proof of hope, every time I go out for a drink with one of my friends.

Without Key or Lid

2005-08-18T11:03:00.000-05:00

In keeping with this summer's theme of bicycle related mishaps, last week I was riding home from work when I was egged.

Egged for fuck's sake.

There I was, just mosying along around midnight, minding my own little world from the safety of the bike lane, and out rushes past this black car, pulling up along side me just long enough for:

whack, whack, WHACK!

Three impacts along my side; then the gutteral staccatto of young male laughter before they gunned their way off down Harbord.

I've decided I don't like being egged. You'd think, after all the abuse I suffered growing up, that it would have occured to at least one of the malignent geniuses torturing me as a child to give it a try, but no, this was a first. I do have to hand it to the Drive By Eggers, they were a good aim, hitting a moving target from a moving vehicle. Practiced, one might say.

Thanks to physics (ah, handy physics), my shock did not result in my catapalting into the sidewalk and breaking my arm. Centrifical force kept me upright and wobbling. Stunned but on the move.

I've come a long way. Now, at least, the abuse I suffer in life is random.

V. Have You Ever Seen A Naked Spider?

2005-08-14T13:58:00.000-05:00

It took a bottle of white wine to get in the door. Well, it took drinking a bottle of white wine to get myself past the threshold; performance anxiety was at an all-time high.

Even then, adrenaline was keeping me from feeling terribly drunk. Actually, I didn't feel drunk at all; but I wasn't terrified.

I have been on stage before: plays, musicals back in school, and I've performed a couple of instruments in front of a crowd, but it's been a while. I have suffered from stage fright as long as I can remember, but I have the knack of finding clarity in the centre of panic. Once my foot sets foot on the platform and I'm out in the open, it's the eye of the storm, and my peripheral emotions switch off. I focus.

At least, I have in the past. As I said, it'd been a while. I feared that the coping mechanism may have atrophied through lack of use. Use it or lose it.

But I love to dance, and even though I am by no means trained, I am practiced. I have danced nights away and mornings to bed. I have danced long, and I have danced hard.

Not this hard, mind. Not this alone.

Fuck this. I can either do it or I can't....

I hate not being able to do something.

So, I did it.

On the one hand, I'm quite shy. I don't like putting myself out there right away; I have been burned too frequently to be truly comfortable taking social risks. New people are a hurdle; new situations, a fit of anxiety waiting to happen....

On the other, there is a cheerful, bombastic exhibitionist somewhere inside me that just needs to be comfortable in his environment to feel free to come out and play. I just need to give him license.

I had the physical license already: it's laminated and has my photo on it. All I needed was to take the last step. I said to myself:

"I've done worse for free."

Which is true. Now, I have a new profession. A crazy, absurd profession.

My inner exhibitionist is having a ball.

...

Life is an adventure. I've done my job, my duty to myself; and it's definitely not boring.

IV. How He Repairs

2005-08-10T23:04:00.000-05:00

The actual phone message was angry. So angry in fact that for a moment hearing it, I thought I may have actually stolen something while under the effects of a voodoo induced trance. Something like an entire liquor order. Or a manager's car.

"I won't be needing you at the waterfront anymore; or any of the other restaurants; ever. We're done."

A good, punctate receiver click never really gets old, does it?

I had been eating sushi on a Friday afternoon, en route back to the new apartment. I'd splurged, thinking that it would be a nice thing to treat myself to, as motivation to make it through the upcoming scheduled 4 days of solid horror. The lacquered boat had just arrived: cool, colourful tiles of fresh fish glistened. As I listened to the message my stomach knotted. Goodbye, little fish.

The other details of the message were at best, vague. Besides the actual firing, there was no content.

"I have some very loyal people who have worked for me a long time and, well, Things travel."

What those Things were still hasn't been established. By voicemail. Bah!

My darling Comrade told me later, cheerfully, "All the best people I know have gotten fired! What did you get fired for?"
"I'm guessing, but probably for an attitude problem."
"Hurray! An attitude problem! Cheers, darling!"

When you say to the universe that you need a change, it really doesn't let you down.

I have been unceremoniously terminated about four times in my life. Sometimes fairly, others not so. This one stuck in my craw, but really, it was a shitty job to begin with; what I didn't want to brook was the interference with my timeline, my plans with Mustardseed.

High blood pressure runs in my family. I was beginning to see little spots.

I will not be undone by petty tyrants.

Let's think outside the box. I feel I have done all I can do in restaurants for the time being. My patience, especially now, is slim to nil. I cannot countenance the unreasonable power structures that are so prevalent in such an ego driven business anymore. I'm going to start snapping necks.

"Lots of places are hiring right now."

This process, pounding the concrete flags, filled me with dread. The whole project seemed a dead end.

I did talk to Said Tyrant the day after the fateful message.

"I'd like an explanation."
"An explanation?"
"Yes."
"Well, frankly Spider, I haven't been very impressed with your work. You just don't seem all there all the time. You've only been working for me for two months, you should be eager and willing; chipper."
"Some warning would have been appropriate."
"Warning? You should know how to do your job."

Ah. What became apparent was that the platitudes and the vagaries were not the main issue. I had been shit talked by the head bartender, the Surly Welshman. He had volunteered that I had been bad mouthing her, the management and the establishment itself. To customers.

I hadn't.

I did not volunteer that information to her, and she never asked for confirmation. It was immaterial, in any case.

"I like you as a person, Spider, but I think it's time you took a break from the industry."
Thanks to you, I don't think I have a choice.
"What do you think?" she then asked me.
"I'm not going to discuss this with you, Said Tyrant."

And then she offered to write me a letter of reference, which I found odd, and perhaps indicative that she may have realized that she acted out of turn.

"I won't be using you as a reference," I informed her.

And I won't.

The relationship between employer and empoyee is often executed as one of authority and subservience. It is not. It is a partnership. Respect needs to exist on both sides for it to work successfully, especially long term. This dynamic, however, is particularly hard to find in restaurants as owners often view employees as individuals out to rip them off. An attitude which frequently motivates them to do so. Yes, the cycle of life.

Maybe I do need a break.

Maybe it was time to do something radically different. Something entirely new. Something daring.

A plan was forming. Reparations underway.

So the surveying began. Floated the idea to Those Most Loved, Turtle and Cobra and Mustardseed, Kengee and Satan's Little Pixie. There seemed to be unanimous support. Well, all except for Ms. Montieth. He was rather tepid and skeptical.

It took a couple of weeks to get rolling, a document to procure, some processing time, a picture taken. Two weeks in July with nothing to do but ride around, and barbecue and beach, chat and drink. Glorious. I've not had a summer holiday in while.

I had the time to help Turtle get her stuff together, as she has undergone Big Change as well: off to Australia to begin a Masters degree in Environmental Conservation. She had been accepted just three weeks before having to be there. A whirlwind followed. It was nice to be able to spend some time with her before she left.

My mother and I deposited her at the airport looking somewhat dazed, but she's safely there. Studying kangaroos. Ha! Of course it would be kangaroos. I miss her already.

But, I had two weeks to catch my breath.

Two weeks to get up my nerve.

III. Wherein a Mad Spider is Angered

2005-08-10T13:56:00.000-05:00

When I left the charming, soft, delicious restaurant I went to work for a woman who owns a series of eaterys (of Italian variety) scattered about the city, as a bartender. I was installed into a rather sketchy corporate model, given my employee handbook, a new black apron (at my expense), and a very bare training on the wheres and wherenots of the bar where I would be working... where I wouldn't be working very long, I was assured. I had been hired not to work at this particular location, you see. No, not there, but rather at the new location currently under construction. To be throwing open its doors any day now.

Voila!

I did not fall off the turnip jalopy that recently. I have been working in restaurants for a long time. Nothing ever happens soon. If someone says "soon", what they mean is "I can't jinx whatever I want to happen by saying that it won't happen anytime later than yesterday". In reality, "soon" is often "inconceivably later than anyone would care to think". So, I settled in as an extended visitor behind an impractically designed bar, prepared to wait until, say, September for everyone to get their shit together, paint the walls, put in the windows, that sort of thing. I was going to stick it out.

I like to think of myself as a realist.

And summer flew in on the wings of a heat wave;
and working down on the waterfront was beatific for the scenery,
but horrible for the tourists;
and if I said that the bar was impractically designed, I mean in every facet. Kinked and crooked, that place was. Knotted and frustrated. Without air-conditioning, bereft of a clear chain of command or procedure. A little eddy of mayhem.

All this I was prepared for. Mentally steeled. What I wasn't quite ready for was the poverty aspect.

I did not make a great deal of money at charming, soft, delicious restaurant. I did make a living; a decent living. My waterfront bar didn't even come close to providing that. If I didn't ride my bike to work everyday, basic expenses probably could have sunk me. I was running in deficit, incurring debt.

It both frustrates and angers me that personal happiness, or at least contentment, is so tied to monetary solvency. I don't like feeling like I'm constantly trying to catch my breath. I hate that every time I did a cash out from my bar, after rapidly slinging drinks all day, a stone thwacked into the pit of my stomach.

Some people thrive on stress. They speed up, focus. These are the people who create dilemmas just to feel alive, and have something to solve. You can see the manic look in their eye, and listen to their to-do lists rhymed of at a frantic pace, and think: Wow. Even though that person says that they're coming apart at the seams, they've really got something. I mean, she's going to get all that shit done, get two hours of really bad sleep, get up and kick the world in the balls again. And she can probably bite pencils in half from all that clenching she's been doing over the past lifetime. That's a neat trick.

I am not that person.

New Zealand was starting to look extremely impractical. I'm not too good with math, but I can count. Six months was not going to be enough time, not there on the water, but the new location promised to be better, and things were coming along. They printed some invitations for the grande opening. The sign went up.

I carried an image of balance scales, suspended in my head. Point one. Tilt. Point two. Tilt.

Plane ticket to the Southern Hemisphere.

Oh, look: the scales just melted.

...

And then, I got fired. By voicemail. After working a 10 hour shift.

I could probably use that softened metal to fashion some kind of machete, and head out to be-head the executioner.

A Mad Spider was very, very angry.

I had just moved six days previous. My life was packed, my living space unfamiliar. Now, no job. Now, when I actually have a roommate.

This city really is going to be my prison.

I was challenging myself to come here, at 18, ten years ago. It was frightening, and big, and wonderfully alien. The small town boy dropped himself into the heart of his country's urban identity; the trap was sprung when it became evident that I fit here. It isolated my options for movement to somewhere else.

I can't go back to small town Ontario. I can't fight through it again.

I may not be able to leave....

Fuck that. Change is in the cards, and I've said it myself: I'd rather a nightmare than a bore.

II. A Spider and His Friend Find Something Tangled There

2005-08-08T13:29:00.000-05:00

Well. If we are so bound to change, time to ante up.

Mustardseed and I are going abroad.

It was that morning, that sunrise, that really solidified it. I have been plotting an extended trip to New Zealand for about a year now. I had given myself a time-frame to leave by early 2006, but it was a vague plan, without too many specifics nailed down; more like fish floating about in a tank. Then Mustardseed started to think about it as well.

By the lake, ensorceled by quite a different perspective, the world seemed very close. The Southern Hemisphere was only a short trip across the water. We have been caught in the sticky strands of Toronto, both of us, for quite a while now. We've started to feel a little wound up. Time to go away, so we can come back.

Changed.

Time to find somewhere else to spin my designs.

After all, 10 years is a long time to spend anywhere, and I have not been able to get out of this city, since I got myself into it, quite as often as I would like. Money and distance have always been an issue. And I don't drive. I can drive, just not legally.

For some reason, people won't lend me their cars. Jitters, I suspect.

So trips out have been a little limited in scope and execution. That is going to change. Imminently.

I refuse to wake up one morning in my early thirties and realize that I have not made it off the continent even once. I R.E.F.U.S.E..

In this light, I'm off to Paris in September. Well, into Paris, out from Amsterdam. I've got a week to kill in Europe. I adumbrate: I'm going to slay it good. It's a start.

And I'm starting to get very excited.

New Zealand is a different kettle of fish altogether. Im going there to work and holiday; going to go for a long while, to live and love and laugh ...

and fret, and frown, and fall ...

all that stuff we people do. With Mustardseed on board, motivation and plans have started to coalesce much more rapidly, and with better gumption than they had been under my care alone. I am now no longer afraid that the bottom is going to fall out of the boat.

We made a pact that morning to see it through: to be sitting on the bank of a different body of water on her birthday next year, hopefully spilling a different variety of tears into a foreign well... one that whirls in the opposite direction.

We're disengaging, getting free.

We got home that morning exhausted, but somehow a little nascent, scrubbed new. The world felt a little fresher. We slept well.

Then things started to go awry.

I. What Messages Travel the Web

2005-08-08T12:47:00.000-05:00

Back at the end of June, Mustardseed and I walked out to Cherry Beach from the Courthouse in downtown Toronto.

We had seen Pride weekend through; made it without passing out from heatstroke or heartache; celebrated three days with little break to distinguish night from morning. The heat was tremendous, the alcohol copious, and adventures were many and varied; ah, festival.

We walked the way out and down to the Beach because it's hard to know when it's really over, and after stimulating the body for so long (both honestly and artificially) it starts to take on its own momentum, and a sunrise is never a thing you can waste your time on.

It is time, all by itself, rising.

It was also the dawn of Mustardseed's birthday. Making it down to the sand, settling into a peeling, well used park-bench, we communed with the pixies (with a little help from they're magic powder), and watched the word turn form silver, to grey, to a perfect, crystalline aquamarine blue, dappled gold. We held up a tradition (after knowing each other for so many years, we've developed a few, halfhazardly): this one being the institution of the Birthday Breakdown.

For the second time in three years, I made Mustardseed cry on her birthday.

And the sky folded out, and folded back. I watched the swans (two, four, five... is one alone? is one bereft and undone like so many other un-pairs in the world? no, there on the horizon: six. Paired for life.). They themselves kept changing, transforming, at times glass figurines lighter than water, at others, twists of paper resting on a blue taracotta surface.

We came up with something. Well, two things.

The first was a question:

What the hell is the punchline?

Because all of it, the whole shebang, is quite obviously a joke.

The second was a realization, true for both of us:

I would rather my life be a nightmare than a bore.

Stagnation is that living death. It's been said before. It's taken books to be said before, but to have it come to you, with utmost clarity, knowing that it's true, and that you have made all your decisions up to this point, major and minor, willing to take the penalty, and rather that consequences supernova disastrously than fizzle and whimper into inaction, to make do with what it takes to keep it all in balance, suffer the suffering, but laugh and clap your hands freely when the lid blows off your world and everything opens up like a new book, fresh paper and words un-read or written, brimming with change and adventures yet to be lived... that was something.

We are of that ilk that are complicit participants in the ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.

We've realized that we are not willing to trade stability for the alternative; and for that reason will always be looking at the sea from a different shore than our families.

So it's time to do something about it.

We've started to plan.

I Swear to God

2005-07-29T01:37:00.000-05:00

I have so much to say. Veritable mountains of observations and anecdotes, only sealed off by time, and the bleep-bleep-bleeping of a proper internet connection.

I promise, I will be making up for the discrepancy.

Soon.

Blundered and Beset

2005-07-19T11:04:00.000-05:00

You would think that getting internet access would be easier in this day and age. Apparently, I need some new hardware (a wireless router for starters... a new computer would be better) to hook back into the interweb, as Evil Rogers will not lease a second modem to the same address anymore witout charging for another full-priced account.

Plus, I have all this extra time, and so much I could be blogging about.

Grrr.

Is it possible to kill a company?

Anyone?

Everything In It's Own Little Box

2005-07-13T16:11:00.000-05:00

So I did make it through those 10 days. Pulled them off; piouretted through the stage of days.

Put my whole life in boxes (which is not to say that it's been compartmentalized... it hasn't).

Put the boxes in a truck.

Moved.

(Thanks to Dan the Moving Man).

Now am smack dab in the middle of a heat wave on the third floor of an un-air conditioned apartment. The cats lie on their backs, legs spread out, and pant.

But there has defiantly been change. Oh, yes. Big Change. Which I'll divulge and expand once my internet connection has been established at home, and I don't have to sit in the wonderfully air conditioned library, constrained by limited time, to post.

...

I have been waiting for a time that can
never come without push
fucking shove. there is never enough
space between the cars; that moment
mid-air towards the surface of the lake
will never be the perfect arc -- skin
my never be ready. make the time,
leave the curb or the dock,
so the open air

stirs like a hurricane.

And Speaking of Mottos

2005-06-24T18:47:00.000-05:00

Or catch phrases, this summer's has yet to present itself.

In the six years that Cobra and I have known one another, each year fun in the sun (or Fun and the Sun) has delivered unto us a magical, wistful phrase that has managed to encapsulate the tone, breadth and tenor of that particular year's season.

One of the first was: "Yes, yes; it's all a rich tapestry."

Oh, and did we ever get mileage out of that puppy.

"I'm so glad you're here! I didn't think I was going to make it, and I so desperatley wanted to see you guys, but the--"
"Yes, yes; it's all a rich tapestry." [dismissive wave of hand omitted]
"Where's the bar?"

That was a good summer.

And then, a few years later, there was: "Suck it up, sweetie; take one for the team."

Which also served us very well; or, me very well, at least; the chaos, panic and disorder that we left in our wake may not have served others very well... um.... but, good fun was had by all. I'll maintain that 'till the day I die.

Last year it was simple. A.I. and I found it on a sunny hilltop at OM. We dropped the semicolons. "Soldier on!"

And we did.

Through music festivals and city streets and suds and drugs and fun fun fun.

And now we're about to do it again.

I'll make it known when the words arrive to shape the thought of the form.

Ah, words. Thoughts made manifest.

Ideally, everyone should be sick of hearing them by the end of September.

A Bare List of Necessity

2005-06-23T20:42:00.000-05:00

I have a habit of sitting at the flux point of several bouts of media. The television on (one of the five channels, but silent), music (essential), and the computer (laptop, donated by my father last Christmas); and then there's the window, the cats, the clunk-thunk of whatever is going on above or below me.

Presently, I reside on the second floor of a three floor, three apartment, house. It has been a joy. Mind you, private. My friends (the posse as well as the Troops, excepting only the scant few within spitting distance) will not come to the East End. My lovely, solitary, apartment, has remained that for 19 whole months. Interlopers are rare and few.

It's not as if I don't want visitors; it's mostly that none are available. The East End, for any who might me reading this outside the mega-city of Toronto: it is really, really far from the West End (where most of my friends reside)... not physically, but psychologically. You'd be amazed.

(This distance, ironically, has not stopped those same friends from insisting that come out at a moment's notice, to the other side... drunk or not, high or not, because "that's where It's happening". That cab fare I paid out of personal negligence is nothing compared to what I have spent over the past winter, relocating at the last minute.)

All this is about to change. I move come July. In with Ms. Montieth. I have no idea what to expect from this change. The decision to make it came out of a quandary both personal and public: first off, I need a change -- the old job is done, the cat is almost grown, and I miss being close to people I'm close to (although there will be casualties: my darling Comrade; as well as the surrogate-nonsexual-hetero-boyfriend); also, I need to save some money, if plans are going to come to fruition; and, at the end of it all, I am missing a sense of newness that I have become somewhat addicted to. Time to shake things up.

Shaken up is what I'm going to be if I pull this next 10 days off. I have to pack, organize movers, wrangle a couple of grace days from Landlord (heaven forefend he has found someone for the 1st) as Moving Day falls on Canada Day, which is a long weekend... which I have to work, and so can't realistically move before the 3rd; and before all that, it's Pride.... P.R.I.D.E. for fuck's sake!

I may be doomed. But I'm ready. The whole weekend off, funds low but functional, we're going to see if all those licentious, lascivious years of training can't get me by.

Cute and desirable outfits. Check.
Clean cute and desirable outfits. Check.
Vodka. Check.
New sheets. Check.
White wine. Check.
Cat food. Check.
Beer. Check.
Air in Bicycle Bria's tires. Check.
Magic Pixie Dust. Oh, yes.

I think we're good to go. It's time to turn off the images, the stereo; close the computer.

It's time to go out and play.

Make a story, make a living.

It's as good a motto for summer as any.

Kiss and Tell

2005-06-22T12:46:00.000-05:00

No matter what emotional complications have been rearing their thorny little heads about my attempts at promiscuity, the fact remains that making out remains one of my favorite activities, and is something I can do at the drop of a hat with a certain amount of panache. As well as a sense of the theatrical. Though I'm trying to be better about the latter.

I don't know if I'm succeeding....

Right now I would like to be making out with Cillian Murphy, but that's mostly because I just recently saw Batman Begins and now have a huge crush on him, not because he is in any way accessible right now. (Ah, would that he were...)

The movie, by the way, was fantastic. As a fan of the comic, and of Burton's imaginings, I went in hoping for something good, expecting something mediocre. Instead, WHOA! Full on thumbs up. I think, by far, the best written of all the examples, and what a brilliant, nuanced way to bring life back to the franchise. Well done.

But the issue at hand. Lip locks.

A few weeks ago I was climbing a staircase in a rather unreputable establishment, when the fellow in front of me looked back and said "I know you from Somewhere...". Now, as all the possible pick-up lines in the universe spin and eddy their way about the cosmos, sleet through the brains of sentient hustlers and desperate trollers, winsome starlets and anxious suitors, this is the the one that seems to come out of people's mouths directed at me most often. I don't know what it is, if I have that kind of face, or that I have such a terrible memory (thank you chemicals and poisons all) that I don't remember meeting these folks... which is possible... but I almost never get anything more imaginative. It also makes me suspicious when I hear anything to that effect. So I responded (rather coolly) "It's a possibility. I have been Somewhere before."

"Do you know [so and so]?"
"Can't say that I do."
"How about [unfamiliar]"
"Nope."
"Hmm. Do you hang out at [undesirable uber-gay venue]?"
"Not if I can help it."

I wasn't being very nice, I realize, but I wasn't in the mood.

"Wait! Do you know [very good friends of very good friends of mine]?"
"Oh. My. God."

It came back in a flash.

Said fellow, whom we will now refer to as the Initiate, was indeed someone I had run into before. At ChikiMonkey's birthday party about two years ago. Almost exactly two years ago, to make it a little weirder. On the night in question, I had just swallowed a pill that had defiantly not been proscribed by any doctor in North America, and was starting to feel quite happily altered, sitting on a bed in an upstairs room with a few other people. The Initiate was there. As was my beloved Kengee. Kengee and the Initiate were making out. Then, I started making out with Kengee, which seemed like a good idea at the time.

Making out with girls just counts as recreation anyway.

But then, Kengee's mischievous and somewhat opportunistic side started making plans of her own, and sort of suggested that the boys could make out too.

Again, feeling very pleasant thanks to party favours, I started to do so. The little voice in my head then started to narrate:

Wow. This is nice. He's a good kisser. He likes to touch your face. I like that. No, he's definitely skilled.... Much better than... my boyfriend. BOYFRIEND!

And the next thing I knew I was standing on the other side of room, speaking very quickly, apologizing and scampering, hurriedly, down the stairs.

"You were the first guy I ever kissed," the Initiate told me, there in the stairwell. A very different set of stairs from the ones I had hasted down two years previous. "You still have a boyfriend?"
"Oh, you remember that part, do you?"
"I think you said it about five times before you ran away."
"No, I don't have a boyfriend anymore. Not for a while, actually."
"You seemed a little rattled."
"Yes, well, that bad behavior kind of snuck up on me. It took me by surprise.... How about you? How you doin'?"

The Initiate, it turns out, has now been out for a full year. As we chatted for a little while after running into each other, he told his friends about five times himself that I was his "first".

"Oh my god, yes! We know. He was the first one."
"Well. It bears repeating."
"Does he know how many have come after?"
"Shut up."

Now, it's not like I made the Initiate gay, or even managed to sway his predilections by treating him to some mind-blowing, unrepeatable, torrid sexual romp; but really, a story like that is the next best thing.

I'm debating weather or not I should go out on a date with him.

Hunger Strikes

2005-06-22T02:23:00.000-05:00

Waiting for pizza at 3:20 in the morning.

What if it never comes?

There is no second chance. There are no other options, this time on a Tuesday... wait, Wednesday.

The woman at the pizzeria is getting a little fed up with me.

"Yes, yes. It's coming."

But it's been over an hour, and I'm sleepy.

Yet extremely hungry.

The world is absolutely fraught with dilemmas.

Also, strange things exist in the void.

A Narrow Escape

2005-06-19T11:25:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday, I almost had another biking accident, but this time with my ex-boyfriend.

Which would have been ridiculously bad.

Although also funny; only cosmically, not personally.

It unfolded rather simply. I had unlocked my bike, and was moving to cross the Danforth. As I stepped out from between two cars, inching my wheel forward, another cyclist whipped past, narrowly missing my front tire. At the last possible second, I realized who it was.

"Hi, Spider!" he said to me cheerfully, as he continued on by.

I can't say what the expression on my face must have been. I can hope that some sort of combination of roiling disgust, tinged with pity and apathy won the day -- but I think it may just have been confusion and relief. My mouth was sort of hanging open, and my brow a little furrowed, by the time I took stock of myself.

I do not talk to Autobahn anymore, for a variety of reasons; and I dislike running into him, for many of the same reasons. The chance that he could have run into me on the street, and sent us both sprawling, crashed, to the pavement; and the prospect of having to actually speak to him, ask questions like,

"Are you okay?"
and,
"Is anything broken?"

makes my skin crawl.

Conversely, the situation would also have given the words "drop dead" a huge amount of weight, but unfortunately, I don't imagine I would have been able to bring myself to say it.

Even though it would have been funny. Cosmically.

The Separation of Siamese Twins

2005-06-18T22:29:00.000-05:00

Colliding with David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers randomly on television (television, the recreational medium) is rather like catching your fingers into the top end of a meat grinder: the next thing you know you're right into it, and ground to a bloody pulp.

I am supposed to be at Turtle's best friend's wedding right now. I'm not; because I slept in, missed the bus I was supposed to take, in order to meet my up with my mother, get in her car, and drive to Muskoka. I had taken egress from the city and was halfway to Barrie in a cab (and halfway through a negotiated $110 cab ride), after pulling all of my shit together in less than 15 minutes, when my flustered and frustrated mother determined that it was cutting it too close, and that she wouldn't be able to wait for me in Barrie and still be able to make it to the ceremony. I promised to take a bus, meet her in Bracebridge after the wedding proper, get in the car, and still make it to the reception. I closed my cellphone, turned the cab driver around, and came back to the city.

Which still cost me $90.

And returned to the door of my apartment right in the middle of my landlord showing it to prospective tenants. Which sort of complicated things further.

When I finally gained access to my home, stomach in knots, it was already late again, and I was unsure of how to proceed. So paced a little, got angry with myself, struggled with a few stops and starts;

and collapsed.

I'm a little exhausted. I was not going to make it. That was apparent, but I didn't want to make the call. Literally or figuratively. The stress of fucking up so thoroughly takes a lot out of you, and it's hard to admit that you've really done as bad as you know (in your heart of beating hearts) that you have.

In retrospect, once I had started going North, I should have just kept going. The backtrack is what killed me. That and the lack of resources. I spent almost all of my money on the cab (as most of my recent paycheck went to the outfit I was going to wear). I had visions of me standing in Bracebridge with my bag, new shoes shining a brilliant white, waiting for indeterminate hours while things got sorted out, with no ability to help or effect change.

Any activity that requires relocation in Canada turns you into a freeloader if you don't have a car. Or a license to drive a car. Or a credit card to rent a car to drive. And feeling bad for imposing in the first place makes everything that much harder.

I really wanted to go to the wedding. Badly. I've been looking forward to it for months.

My mother is genuinely upset with me. For good reason. I imagine my sister is as well.

A few years ago I struggled with intention and action, and the mystery of discrepancy between the two; and the inability to diagnose what creates that discrepancy, even as you watch yourself fail to achieve your goals, or respond appropriately to situations and change. I came to the conclusion that intention and action are twins, conjoined, and that in the interest of some sort of cosmic balance that they can never be exactly the same. Some sort of contrast must be maintained to keep the worlds internal and external separate, the force of difference between the two drive you forward.

I lay down to an anguished, fitful nap after the final phone conversation with my mother. When I woke up, I sat down on the couch with a two liter bottle of Coca-Cola, intending to sugar and caffinate my disappointment with myself into submission. I turned on the television, to one of the five channels that are transmitted without cable, and was bathed in the eerie blue glow of Jeremy Irons, twined. Dead ringers. Dead Ringers.

Oh, dear. As if I wasn't in the best of places to start with.

Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors. I couldn't just not watch... as the negative space between what was intended and what became went very, very wrong; in a dark, lonely, desperate place.

When Eng woke up and saw that Chang was dead... Eng died of shock.

At times the deficiency in attempting to make real what is projected, what is drempt of and meant ("I did mean to"), is incredibly pronounced. At such times it becomes apparent that things have to change. Something is out of whack. Here's my red flag, waving, snapping in the wind.

Things need to get into synch.

Something radical is definitely required.

I don't think my life can survive a complete separation of action and intention.

They can't be allowed to be that far apart.

...

If one wanted to point out the irony of the situation: my mother is famous for this sort of debacle. She is constantly beset with complications and convoluted dilemmas which plague her ability to get from A to B in reasonable time. Today she was running on time.

I fear that as I get older that I am becoming more and more like her.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

I fear that being sorry doesn't really cut it.

Serial Update, Part III

2005-06-11T06:39:00.000-05:00

Last week, I got doored.

Which is the bike riding equivalent of an en route clotheslining. At the last minute, out whips the obstacle and, pow!

POW!~

Impact. Oh, my yes. And a skid. And a very, very lucky Spider clambering up from the pavement, with a skinned elbow and a left glute that is still not exactly back to normal. Although, to be fair, it's colour almost is.

The villain responsible was a rather stunned looking cabby. Who got yelled at something fierce by the onlooking resident street-watchers of Dundas West.

Poor Bria (which is bicycle's name); I don't know if she'll ever be the same. Her back wheel is potato-chipped. Her right pedal is bent askew. She complains constantly. She clinks and clanks. I worry about riding her long distances.

Thankfully, my trusty utility-belt includes an EpiPen with a single shot of "Understanding-That-Shit-Happens-At-The-Last-Of-Possible-Moments, " as well as a behavioral modifier chip which can be implanted directly into the brain lickety split, which prevents one from throwing one's beloved mode of transport through the windshield of aforementioned oblivious cabby's automobile.

I think I bought it from the Bay, if anyone wants to pick one up.

Serial Update, Part II

2005-06-10T08:53:00.000-05:00

Rather than have to explain who I'm talking about in these entry's, or worry that it won't be clear who it is I'm mentioning in the undoubtedly sordid upcoming adventures of the summer, I've started a Cast of Characters.

I have also fixed it so anyone can comment on this blog. So everyone, please feel free to leave as many remarks as you feel compelled to. Type away.

With the upcoming move, I know that I should be packing like a fiend right about now, but I've been working like and idiot for over a week, and shoving my belongings into cardboard receptacles seems about the least attractive activity in the world right now. Worse even than, say, drinking hot tar. Urg.

I think I'll read my new book instead, The Day of Creation, by J.G. Ballard. Either that or play Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal on the Playstation 2.

It's such a hard call.

Serial Update, Part I

2005-06-09T14:53:00.000-05:00

Employment found me.

Through a referential sort of "you should talk to" daisy chain, I am now working for a local corporate entity as a bartender down on the Toronto Waterfront. I was hired as a result of the following conversation:

"So, that Fat Fuck has taken over the restaurant?"
"Pretty much."
"Hunh. He's a terrible restauranteur.... I'll give you a job just out of spite."

I had no intention of quitting on the spot. Crazy or not, All-of-the-Above remains the frontman for a professional workplace I may have to reference in the future. Even though he did a number on us, even though he's an asshole, I have come to the conclusion that making needless enemies is not in my best interests.

I had a trial shift at the waterfront bar. It went fine. We established a tentative schedule for me over the following week.

I went back to the once charming, soft, delicious restaurant to get my tips from the previous Saturday, and arrange for a phase-out sort of termination. My tips, for a Saturday night (the money night, I might add), were $70.

"The house float was short. I'm sorry. That's he best I could do. I don't know what happened."

I looked at the money. Looked at him.

You're stealing from me?

"Um.... All-of-the-Above, this isn't the place for me anymore. I can't work for you."
"That's fine," he said, already rubbing me out on the schedule, "I kind of expected it."

Fine, then.

At the very least, it was done.

Serial Update, Preface

2005-06-09T14:47:00.000-05:00

As I haven't been posting regularly for a few weeks.... month... whatever, I have decided to do a series of print-bites to get everyone up to speed, thus alleviating any need I may have to explain my references in the future.

I'll just link them instead.

So clever am I.

And It Was Said

2005-06-09T10:29:00.000-05:00

According to Mustardseed, I was the "belle of the ball".

Oh, and I was. What followed (the last chance, the last choice of the evening) may have been erroneous... of all the suitors, spinning about, thrashing to the bass driven cacophony in that coloured light interior, I perhaps chose the one least appropriate... but in all fairness, I was drunk. Drunk on the drink; and a little bit on attention.

My resolution to be a whore has not been working out as well as I had initially hoped. What started off as a good idea has failed to materialize in a workable form. I don't think I'm built for it. Not really. I never have been. I've tried it before. Pre-serial monogamy (four years running) I had had aspirations to slut it up all over town, take my gay genes out for a spin (as it were); and that never happened either.

Oh, I've had my flings. I've tossed it, turned it, and thrown it over a pole, but never to the extent that I had envisioned. As a gay man, my list (The List) is remarkably short... though by straight standards, I'm definitely a slut. Several times over.

Mind you, I'm still not even close to the Urban Cowboy's score, which he has notched on his headboard,

worked in,

and he's as straight as an arrow. "Man-whore" we call him -- and he is. A couple of years ago his score (if we're speaking of numbers), just for the year, was over 100. I went out to a club with him one night, for some retro-skank-fest, sleazing it up in black T-shirts blazoned with metal bands and too-cool-to-live slogans, and he did (DID) three girls in the time between entering the door and exiting.

He had better in and out privileges than most people enjoy.

So I guess it comes down to the fact that I'm a poor excuse for a 'ho.... I'm not emotionally equipped for it. Really not.

I have built my personal life (post-high school, post-trauma) on intimate relationships, the same ones that give me so much trouble, but also the same ones that make everything so virbant and real. Contrary to popular belief, ever man (woman... womin) is an island; but it is because of that, yelling at each other across the water, describing our beaches and our jungles to one another, that we fall in love; that we can say things like:

"Fuck, man! I had just the same problem with the monkeys and the titanium bananas as you! Who would have thought that we could have drifted so close together? What are the chances?"

What are the chances indeed?

I get close to people. It's what I'm good at. I fall in love constantly. Plutonically. I have such crazy care and support around me that I often wonder who's life I'm living. All that I've done to deserve it is do my best to be as honest and fair and as un-crazy as I can... and I see the rewards for it every day.

I am not a Don Juan. I do not love as compulsively and passionately as that... and that is the problem with me attempting it: the willy-nilly bedding of strangers; the empty appropriation of another's body. Certain ways of making love are completely, utterly, selfish. Nothing makes me feel more alone than sticking parts of myself into the wet, squishy spaces of someone else, all the while having no idea where your headed. Traveling blind and having so little idea of what to appreciate.

Physical beauty itself is a bizarre enough concept. Culturally specific, non-translatable; aesthetics develop almost like an independent organism. The rhyme or reason to them are such:

appearances reference resonances that are cultural, and locally based. Today, in this first-world "global village" we see aesthetics being white-washed -- homogenized -- into a median standard of beauty that becomes rather boring (and at the same time masquerades as universal), but the planet remains a wholly diverse and multiplicitous patchwork of physical forms that observers find desirable because they mean something to the observer.

Fatness in Eastern Europe used to mean affluence. Affluence was desirable. It became desirable to have a fat wife; the connotation was showy. Fatness became beautiful....

Although loaded with associations, beauty is cultural, not universal; and it is empty.

All that Beauty believes in, is herself.

Attempting to make intimate connections with people with whom you have no personal resonance is empty as well. Sleeping with someone without anything to rely upon besides beauty just affirms your self as a selfish bastard, any pleasure or status you derive from it self-congratulatory.

I'm not made to be a man-whore.

I tried it again last night. It was made possible by being the "belle of the ball", as I previously mentioned. Dancing at 5ive with Mustardseed. We do know how to dance; and we know how to get into trouble. As my fine, fairy-friend got twirled by the gay boys on the dance floor, I was gyrating very naughtily with a few gents... and that went on for a while. The attention itself is attractive. I was beset with options. All of them were beautiful.

The choice, in the end, was immaterial.

And we did go home (to my home); and we did make out (to my music); and we did.

And now I am writing this blog.

And it was said, by John Berger, in his novel about the Don Juan, G.:

To morality there are no mysteries. That is why there are no moral facts, only moral judgments. Moral judgments require continuity and predisposes. A new, profoundly surprising fact cannot be accommodated by morality. It can be ignored or uppressed; but when once its existence has been recognized, its inexplicablility makes it impervious to any immediate moral judgment.

I have not made a judgment on last night's affairs, but I have made a new resolution:

predictable or not, events must transpire according to a certain standard. Not moral, but personal. Slut is not the goal. Maniacal travesty, either. Personal accountability is the target. Not wasting away because of lack is the destination.

I will have more to reference (the next time I take to bed) than beauty.

Often Up

2005-05-29T04:11:00.000-05:00

Before everyone else, because I am still up... because I'm incorrigible and have no off switch. Words are often my only companions. Polymorphic ones. Changing and being changed, while I fret out the keys playing on the board.

So much quieter than a piano.

Though I still wish I had access to music the way I had. Once upon a time, I was a flautist, and could play arias that longed and soared: "What beautiful tone," one judge said, "but you need to focus on theory."

My mechanics (as always) needed a little work. I've never liked to practice. I could fake the expression of music much better than my ability allowed me to. I exploited emotional resonance to peddle my notes. I spoke to the heart, not the head.

Though I haven't picked up the instrument in years, I think I am still using wind to make an impression. The intangible remains my greatest tool. Things are working out.

I am located in the centre of a viable nexus now because I can breathe out, and shake the air with my lips and tongue. Make sound. Vocalize. I have done my best to be as charming and quick and affable as I can in recent weeks. Decisive and resolute when the other systems fail. Organize to materialize.

And here I am, fretting and planning, when most every one else is asleep. Now that I am my own instrument, I think I've been roped into practicing by default. The end result is that I can talk to the head as well as the heart.

All these little compartments, up in Plato's realm of the Good, humming like a little chorus.