Dreampepper

Friday night the star-fall was beautiful. Some were so violently bright, it was like we should have been able to hear them shred through the atmosphere. On our backs in a row under the too-cliche starry night, we irreverently cracked jokes about proverbial movie endings, but still gasped every time the sky impossibly ripped open with light.

The language of morning, music, two silk black cats, a matching short kimono, claws hooked into the chain of a pocket watch like an eccentric playful ribbon. Knocking down the mess. Sorting papers, shifting things into drawers, off the floor. Work at three o'clock.

Mechanical heart removed after organ heals itself.

Free of the future, he lives on the same block as my boyfriend who killed himself the night we were going to be together. I can see his bedroom window from the back porch. It's unsettling. I'm almost breaking down, every word I'm holding on, trying to gain some equilibrium. My friend is telling stories that flow like an archaeological river. He's been doing it for hours. Acid trips in London, working with Peter O'Toole, where he was when the Berlin Wall fell down. They go well with the house, his implacable gestures. I try to memorize as much as I can, anchor myself, keep the car running. Catching myself in a simple mirror over his shoulder, the naked frame is a prison, I feel like a photograph hung on the wall.

Walking towards breakfast late in the afternoon, one block down, someone has gracefully drawn absolutely perfect hot-rod flames into the dust coating a black vintage pick-up truck. It looks like something my buried love would have done. In my mind, I rock back on my heels into his body and, with a silent smile, I gesture to my friend, stuck on his cell phone, who sees it and smiles back. Suddenly, everything will be alright.

Does anyone know of a professional alteration shop that won't break the bank?

I have a line on a fairly simple gown that I would like to be a bit more complex. Mostly the skirt ruched up with tulle put underneath as the green one is on this page, or with something on top, as the red one is, yes, flowery bits and all, if that's easier. It's about time I admitted myself a flowery bit of girlishness rather than have certain aspects of femininity drift blankly past me like a painted-eye shopping mall crowd after a fire.

the feeling of some love.

Last Sunday I went to Seattle, and after a pleasant ride down with Brian's friend, Jane, long silver hair, the pretty violet mannerisms of a relaxed bird, I found myself in the grand company of Eliza, who walks like she really means it and takes two hours to decide what to wear. It felt somehow like I was speaking with an echo of something I used to believe in. Three days of barely sleeping, being thrown into a car with a familiar stranger, a city I'm not familiar with. I felt like a game of jeweled cards was playing inside my head where I didn't know the rules. I appreciated her friends, they were relaxing, a black clothes contingent to take my hand and keep me standing through my weary run. more pictures soon.

the feeling of my workplace.

People have been repeatedly sending Robert Newman's History of Oil to me the last few days. I am remiss in not posting it immediately, I'm sorry. (I forget more people read here). It's a shining and clever monologue that discusses the critical political issues of war and energy use in an exceedingly accessible manner. He gracefully binds imperative information in laughter and ties it all up with a fun sense of charming levity, which may sounds silly, but it really needs to be seen to be properly understood. Watch it as soon as possible!

Quote of the Day: Andrew: "I think it says bad things about me when I try and go to the site http://super.cali.fragi.listic.expi.ali.do.cio.us/ and get disappointed that no one has made it yet."

I sat on top of a news-box downtown for half an hour with a book in my lap, trying to tune out the religious zealots handing out sheets of paper with the word Jesus at the top. Too exhausted to run for the bus, I was twenty minutes late. No one was there. No one came. I did not expect them to. Dinner had obviously been decided without me. No way to contact my friends, I decided to gather my chores in hand before I went back to the hospital. Official visiting hours are over, I thought, and I am having difficulty imagining myself mouth that I am Devon's wife.

The drugstore felt hollow, as if somehow I had fallen into a facsimile. I stood in the hair care aisle and let my eyes scan the products without me, looking for the word Organic. In my head, I would try to concentrate on the mundane task I was undertaking, but instead I would glimpse Devon in surgery, a garden of stars unconscious on a table, the illusion of a slight flash of the metal knife as it sliced into his skin. Eventually I chose two bottles of shampoo and turned to find soap. The cheap soaps are sometimes the best. Less scent means less chemicals. Small thoughts that have nothing to do with what went wrong or his face on the bed.

Earlier, I had to re-set my day's plans. Alicia was to come by for eleven and I had set my day by that. Things came up however, as they often do, and it was two o'clock before she could swing by for her errand, so things red-shifted over a bit. I had dinner with Andrew instead of Alastair, and instead of going to a fencing demo, when I got off the bus across from Duello, I followed random impulse and turned left into Gastown. There's a shop there I rather like, crammed with odd antiques and paper masks. In the basement there's a chinese chest full of hundreds of small drawers that can steal an hour if your life if you let it. This time, however, I knew exactly what I came for. At the foot of the stairs is a small display of golden music boxes, the sort you crank by hand to hear the music. They're louder when you place them on wood. I sorted through them as efficiently as possible to find the one that played the Beatles song, She Loves You.

Going back to Duello, I fell into step behind a man I didn't recognize. I heard him unlock the school doors above me and cursed a wee bit, knowing that meant that I'd missed everyone. I poked my head in anyway, curious to see if I was wrong. "Who're you looking for?" "I thought to catch Devon." "He's in the hospital today."

At that, I turned and ran, another impulse. Down the stairs, across the street, down the hill, straight to Waterfront train station, where Randy happened to be standing inside the hall. Seeing him, standing perfectly as if framed for me to find him, I recognized my impulses as the impelling force of cinematic timing and I laughed. I stopped running and walked up to him. He covered the mouth of his cell phone for a moment, "Hey Jhayne, I've got news for you." "Yes, but what hospital?" We stood chatting for close to ten minutes, glad to be in company, "I just talked to him, he's obviously not dying," then took the train together. As soon as the doors opened on Granville station, I began running again.

There was a group of boys on the escalators, seven deep on either stair, pretending they were surfing. Such was my blithesom running that I decided they were an obstacle I wouldn't wait for, rather I made thier day by jumping up onto the slippery thin metal divide between them and dangerously running up that instead. They cheered, but for safety's sake, I didn't look back down. Another two blocks and I was on the bus, feeling as if my legs were going to mutiny if I forced them one more step.

A sound like god, what happens when a man covered in microphones walks into a room full of speakers.

I have been measuring things more in my eyes than my hands this week, which leads to interesting bits of missing time that I worry for, as if they're my children and I've abandoned them for that crucial minute too long in the shopping mall where now the only way to get them back is in newspaper articles I clip out and tape to my fridge.

Last weekend, Burrow was in town. I know that for certain. The order of her arrival is written down, there were pictures taken. She stayed over Friday night with Sam, the evening of Meat Eatery. Sam and I had walked to BJ's after dinner, watched atrocious movies with Bob and his girl-darling from Parksville, then returned to curl up with Burrow asleep in my bed. We were quiet, but woke her unintentionally.

Saturday we crawled out of bed in time for the Fool's Parade. Sam went home to shackle himself to his desk and Burrow and I rolled like tired thunder downtown and met with Duncan, Jenn, Georg, and her pink-dyed ferret, Silky. The parade was rainy and under-attended, so after coming close to winning the Fool of the Year award with ferret breasts, we abandoned the street for Taf's. When work didn't have my paycheque ready, we turned around and walked to the Bay to visit with Eva at her clinical cosmetics booth. It was fascinating, in a quiet colourful way, but not enough to keep Burrow and I from going home to rest before Duncan pulled us out to the graceful Fool's Cabaret on Main st. Reine's mother was there, and Siobhan, a friend of friend's we went to dinner with after.

Monday is missing, a played out afterburn. I took some self-portraits, but I don't know if I slept there at home or not. There was one, two ideas. A number, undifferentiated. Something.

Tuesday is more concrete, not only written down, but recorded. Video, audio, photographs. Imogyne and I at Hawksley Workman with darling Sophie. The Cultch in all it's warmly worn desiccating glory, intimate, red curtained. I remembered all the shows I'd played there. Running through the back when I was a child, that one time making love inside the roof. Downstairs hot-boxing the worn office, how there was once a pane of glass violently shattered in the middle of an orchestral piece, how the beads of my necklace clattered as I bounced and clapped. The music was good too, his acoustic version of striptease sincerely captivating.

After, Devon came over and we stayed up until the last bus, listening to our bootlegs and drinking weary tea. Imogyne eventually went home, and Devon and I talked until far too late, making me late for work Wednesday. The day I went to Andrew's after work and Georg and I re-dyed my hair into the colour of sticky quill ink while watching Ghost in the Shell. She came back to my place after, and we let the ferret run free through my apartment as we talked about partners and lives lost, the soulmates of just then and not today and maybe yesterday we knew something and maybe tomorrow we'll have some hope. She wrote poetry and I woke up in the morning holding her hand.

Thursday I had a date with Sam, a real live date, not one of those on-line long-distance approximations my life seems to enjoy lauding me with. Cleaned up versions of us met at Tinseltown for the Brick preview and had dinner at Wild Ginger before walking out to False Creek to hang out on a water fountain and eat caramel ice-cream. We sat under the moon passing the tub back and forth like a cheap cigarette and talked about some of the same things that Georg did. We're all divorced, the lot of us. It's like a curse or a disease catching in all the social circles. It seems like every split has had very little to do with love and everything to do with a basic need to keep evolving, to keep trying to touch forever.

Friday Michael stole me out from under dinner with Andrew, Navi, Ryan, and Eva, and accompanied Robin and I to Thank You For Smoking instead. It was gleeful, with some damned nice moments, (there was a montage of Bad People that slaughtered us like baby seals), and led well into creeping alone up the stairs into Duello for the end of Fight Practice, a small red flower as my sword. I sat on the couch with Lee, letting him show me knife tricks, as people cleaned up and we sat for coffee until it was too late to think of going anywhere else but home. Friday nights, however, traditionally lead into mornings without work, so we survived.

We survived well, in fact, not doing a damned thing until somewhere after two in the afternoon, until the body-call to breakfast was too deafening to ignore.

Good morning to the new lunar year. On the Chinese calendar it's my year, the year of the Dog.

The roof of my mouth feels lightly of electricity. Yesterday was falling backward, a door opening accidently, opening onto a room full of people I never see and don't think about often enough. I have a new ring, a silver thing like the branch of a mother of pearl tree. I have eyes too open to see sleep properly. The parade through China Town was extremely beautiful. Ray and I bought explosive paper twists, you throw them to the ground and they spark and bang. I fell in love all over again every time I dropped one to the pavement. I took a slew of incredibly colourful pictures, but I will upload them later, when I am not rushing against the time I need to be at work.


She retrieved a clove cigarette from her purse and put it to her lips. I hurriedly offered her a light with my lighter.

"I want to sleep with you," she said.

So we slept together.

-Haruki Murakami

"This General Motors Futurliner was one of only 12 such vehicles ever built. They were introduced in 1940 as part of GM's "Parade of Progress," spun out of the 1933-34 World's Fair, themed "A Century Of Progress." There are nine known Futurliners that have survived. Three are in operating condition, including this 1950 model which sold at an auction last week for US$4,320,000."

Vintage UK electronics ads.

The day before yesterday, I felt like terrible company. Saturday night I simply crashed. Blearily I answered the phone a couple times, tried to wake up enough to get myself together enough to go to dinner with my friend, failed, and finally closed my eyes. There was a knock on the door a little past midnight, Andrew and Ian to pick up some electronics pieces, and a bit later, Matthew to tuck me in, but no one stayed and I fell back into uncomplicated darkness, tangling my ferret in my hair and forgetting to dream.

Any time it snows, parts of my brain shunt into being six years old. This can be rather embarrassing, like when you're about to turn on someone and be upset for them unclipping your bra when you told them not to but your eyes have caught sight of magical fluffy little frozen clumps of white falling from the sky, so instead your lips blossom into a smile and the smallest little happy voice spills forth with, "Ooooooh..." and you forget to dish out what's coming to them until it's way too late and rather pointless anyway.

Blixa Bargeld, lead singer of the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, does commercials for Hornbach, a home improvement superstore. Here they are: Mosquito killer, Paving stones, a Power Drill, and Paint.

Brian collected me from work Saturday like an exhausted figurine. After dinner, I crumpled in the car on the way to a birthday party, a tired pile of black fishnets, velvet, and feathers, the air escaping my deflation taking the shape of an hour's worth of clarifying how sick I am of me and mine meaning more to me than I do to them. He's very good for me to talk with, he's too soothing to get bitter at. Always he drowns me in affection. After the first unsteady hour, where my independence wants to lash out and kill him, I begin to relax. The next little while, all my carefully locked away pains want to leak out, but that too goes away. They grow tired of fighting with me and go back to hide again where I've put them to stay. It's a trick I've learned to have. Hurray for trained repression. One day I should count how many people there are who are allowed to embrace me, allowed to find out what I'm really saying inside my head. I suspect the figure could be counted on one hand.

TUESDAY, (not tonight, my mistake, verysorry hope this catches you in time, etc), at 9:30, there's will be a group of us at Tinseltown go seeing what they've done to Aeon Flux. You should take part, yes yes. Strengthen our community through entanglement of social possibility

Thank you to the lovely people who came over last night after Graham and I cleaned up. Andrew, Nick, Ian and Ethan - your dishes are a sweet testament to your arrival. I'm sorry I fell asleep during disc three of Aeon Flux. It's been so long seeing some of them that I'm not even sure which episodes I missed. I don't even know what time I fell asleep, the only time I looked at the clock was at six:thirty when I noticed it was light out and the ferret needed into the hall.

This is for Ray:

"Doomed love! Pharmacology! Futility! Insane machines!
Unholy creatures! Dismemberment! Infection! Body modification!"
The Not-So-Secret History of 'Aeon Flux'



Today is my last day at work.

A pleased yet raffish smile deepened the perfectly etched lines around his face, around his closed eyelids. A sigh, and he looked up into my eyes. His own were very light, a sensuous honey infused with the essence of dead cities, empty of orthodox sins, and extremely open in a sense that has nothing to do with age, but with the eternal youth of ancient things. I thought of gods, the old greek imaginings that drove women to madness. I thought of braille and souls.

I could describe him more, but I don't know if you would recognize him walking down the street. He wears t-shirts and black pants just like everyone else. If he wore his hair unbound, then I might have a chance to let you stop, say hello, and examine him, see him for how beautiful he is under the poorly worn cover of being unexceptional. His hair is an inky explosion caught by a very clever illustrator, someone who fell in love with myths at an early age and let it reflect in every halo they ever drew. It's exceptional. When his hair is wet, it catches in my throat and fills my lungs with the need to say that I am drowning. Maybe if you saw him in rain, drops caught like cliché jewels in his lashes, there might be a flash of recognition, a glimpse of how divine.

I feel so antique, describing a lover in terms of looks, but I am always transposing feelings, depths of emotion or dialogue, and yet so few ever know who I'm revealing, even when it's myself. Earlier in the car, when I tugged on Andrew's hand and said, "Oh! I have news! Persepolis has fallen.", he understood what I meant, but Tyler did not. "We talk in shorthand.", Andrew explained, and it occurred to me that here I write in it. A code of association so baroque that only by reading for any length of time will meaning emerge from the tangle of references. Truthfully, I find myself most comfortable with people who can follow abstract trains of thought without effort, but I'm beginning to question if it's fair. I'm wondering how often my privacy is misread. (Graham got the impression somehow, in spite of my practically rabid monogamy in the face of people like Dominique and Christopher, that I was promiscuous.) At times, it's been psychotically useful, but part of why I continue to update almost daily is that I want to explain to my friends and family my keystone ties and transformations.

Matthew hated when I wrote about him but he would never tell me a decisive why. He would spin gluey reasons that would change, but always, (no matter how mutable), they were negative. I think, now, especially near the end, that he was trying to hide his whereabouts and actions from people who might possibly read this. After he came back, he attempted to expressly forbid me from mentioning that I stayed the night, and was upset when I ignored his injunction. (I still don't know who wasn't supposed to know this time. Last time it was Sarah. I know his wife used to drop by occasionally to catch up on things, her best friend tried to step in and defend him once from one of his first terrible injunctions against my decency before she understood what my complaint was, and there are other people. Friends, family maybe. I don't know, they just show up on my counter and leave rare anonymous comments from IP addresses located in Perth or Sydney.) My next closest relationship, they were always delighted when they could find reference to themselves in my entries. It filled their heart, they said. Made them feel exponentially appreciated, like every letter added to their worth. My friend Wilhelm, he complains that he never appears here, that I only write about people I can hyperlink to, but I know that I put his little misdemeanors of complexity here quite often, so how else can I reply except by becoming, if only briefly, a more concise exhibitor?

We used to talk until the sun came up, a confused tangle of how a head will fit into an arm, how the angle of a bent leg will comfortably into the slant of another leg of a different shape. His bed was small enough for both of us, and it was going to eventually be summer. Visits were too rare, for they were addictively pleasant, and I fell very into liking him. His casual strength of thought, his delightful leaps of imagination. Ostensibly, I was living in another part of town, staying on charity at a friends apartment, but as it gradually becoming more intensely uncomfortable to stay there, this small room full with its tiny bed became my home. I would always feel welcome, but an imposition. When I visited, I would stand silent in the street with my terrified heart, trying to collect courage with the pebbles I would find to throw at his window in lieu of a doorbell. Once Loki the cat found me and sat purring at my ankle, almost causing me to cry. I wanted to feel safe, and it was ten feet away, and I couldn't move. My housemate had pulled a dirty conversation on me earlier, full of tense demands, and I was so nervous of the world that just this little cat being kind to me was enough to unbalance me. When I crept in, quiet as to not wake the baby, I hoped he wouldn't see my hands shaking.

Loki is gone now, replaced by two cats. One black and one white. The baby is gone and my lover's switched rooms. His window is an undeniable bitch to hit with a pebble now. I tried the other night, failing, as it turned out, not because of my aim, but because we wasn't home yet, and I worried with every stone about hitting the neighbors house on the rebound. It didn't help that my hands were shaking again, my adrenaline screaming at me that I was being an idiot. Years pass and yet I stay the same. He claims it's brave of me. To do something I'm scared to do because I know it's the right action, but I'm not so sure. I'm expecting to have to apologise with impeccable courtesy for merely arriving while my heart is craving vindication, some forgiveness for the hour. If I'm scared, then I'm not being brave, am I? Being brave might be writing this down, not knowing what side of the disclosure line he stands on.




reminder: KEEP JHAYNE FROM JHAYLE -a party of proportion- #340 - 440 west hastings, Friday, November 25th, 9:00 - onward

So it's not tonsillitis after all. Apparently it's strep throat.

This week has been red lights and green. Wolf Parade was exquisite. A hipster sardine packed illicit space with ghetto lighting and terrifying wiring for the stage, I led Ryan and Andrew successfully to the very front. I leaned against the monitors and tried to dance crammed next to a short asian student of cultural ethnicity with my shirt off and tucked into my bag. I suspect her disapproving looks did wonders for my mood. The opening band was fun, stealing back everything from music that Weezer made suck, and when Wolf Parade came on, we offered them James' place in Montreal as a crash pad. (You should toss them an e-mail, lovely. See how serious they were, win some points with all those pretty girls with asymmetrical haircuts). Opening with Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts* set the tone well, though they could have been a bit louder with the vocals. You Are A Runner And I Am My Fathers Son is quite the experience live. The lead singer is a lean wrung out guy who froths at the mouth and screams with musical fury through a cigarette that he barely holds onto in a Keith Richard pout, and the keyboardist glares with such concentration it was surprising his intrument didn't melt. His grandfather was in the audience somewhere, though I would imagine he would have been hiding in the back next to the hole-in-the-wall bar. I was situated a foot in front of the man playing theramin and he was just as impressive, holding his little electric keyboard above him as if that would bring is closer to some holy god, his eyes rolling trance-like into back into his head. The room was dripping wet, sodden with brilliantly sweaty notes that just didn't translate well onto the album. (Though one must be mad to not to appreciate I'll Believe In Anything.) In summary, the heat was unbelievable and the music just as hot. The concert next month, with Wolf Parade opening for The Arcade Fire is my next most anticipated thing. Everyone capable should go. *both albums for download with this link

The Fetish Masque afterward wasn't half as fun, nor was the burlesque show. Andrew went home and Ryan and I stopped to dress properly for the occasion, gothing to the nines with feathers in my hair and running gold powder down my face. When we arrived, we let someone take us from the burlesque line-up to the fetish one around the side and downstairs, therefore missing the show entirely through a mismanage of poor timing. Aaron was there, and Brian and Kevin, but Herminia stole us away upstairs before I could properly find them. Tristan was upstairs, and a friend of ours was attempting to MC, poor thing, on no warning whatsoever. The show was apparently terribly last minute, so disorganized that it only took me a moment to infiltrate the blueroom and begin ordering people around. "Who's in the band, you're up next. This fruit is to go out to the table. You, cut it up with me?" Ten minutes later I was curling someone's hair in the backstage bathroom and trying to think of ways to get away while the organizer thanked me. I don't know how to curl hair. I escaped by carrying a plate of peanut butter chocolates out to the covered pool-table and re-collected Ryan. It was getting to be close to shut-down then, so after a bit of dallying, I smuggled us into the freezer and we stole out with some strawberries that no one was going to miss and a pineapple in my skirts. When we came back is when we found Kevin finally. His hair had gone from white to an attractive jewel-tone blue, and I'm remembering now as I write this that I really should drop him a ring. I hope e-mail will do, this not having a voice could make things difficult.

I went to bed with light in the sky. Then the phone rang. It's still early morning, but I answer the phone. The Crown has dropped all charges laid against me.

I'm free. No finger-printing, no crim charges. Dance Dance Immolation.

Also, I've a job interview this evening at Dream Designs, a delightful interior decorating shop that's only a few blocks from my house.

This just might be the best news since a possible breach of contract was the only thing what marked my birthday.

To celebrate, here's a piece that Nicholas wrote that is pure Jhayne-mockery: Strawberry Sickness.

Serves me right for letting these people into my house.

I'm leaving pictures until Andrew returns from the East Coast. This has been a run of bad timing Saturdays, everyone's been busy. It doesn't help either that I've been too preoccupied with the ridiculous packets of stress that have been landing on me to kick anyone's asses. Of late, there's only been varying degrees of more and more.

I still have to write my letter to Bill offering the baby cradle that's taken up residence in my home.