Dreampepper

Burrow is staying with me this weekend. (She just got a new XKCD t-shirt and it being super squealy happy about it). 2 o'clock tomorrow we're going down to Suspended, Boca Del Lupo's WinterRuption show at Granville island with Nicole and Duncan.

At four, she'll be playing bike-polo at Grandview Park, and then we're going to SinCity in the evening with Wayne.

You are invited to any and all of these things. (Bike polo, obviously, requires a bicycle.)

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.

Bless the day that I walked away with a smile on my lips and tears that were glad to be. I ran for the bus wanting to call out his name as the cry that would stop all time. My eyes shone, said the man who sat next to me. How do you do that? I'm young, I replied, and went back to my book.

There's a mirror in front of where I sit to type on my computer and if I look up into it, I can see the white of my hair framing my face like the colour of ashes rubbed into the roots of my hair. Some days it's good to remember what I'm like from the outside.

Also, pirates.

Often, almost always, I'm living hand to mouth. I try to get used to being a little bit too hungry but instead I'm always hoping that my tongue will have the strength to claw me out of where I am to somewhere greater than myself. It can be so frustrating. I find, though, that there is a side-effect of running under the line for so long. Gradually, my requirements fall. It's almost that aphorism: the less I have, the more precious what is left becomes. As if bird crumbs have grown into mountains, complements arias, and even if they don't love you down to their bones, what they offer is more than enough simply because they're smiling to see you.

Scratchless CD blanks keep data from touching your desk.

I'm not scared anymore. That's terrible and yet I thank you. You were set up for those shots across the bow. All hope was swallowed in the cold of another morning, darkness and rain making for a miserable one foot in front of the other, and I had to let you know that it was okay. That no matter, I am too tired to need very much, too broken down to dust to invest my care too much. You've been that face that swims across my dreams close to morning for over a year. That I can kiss you now, that I have a chance, love, this makes for no illusions. This only keeps me warm.

Bike helmet covers shaped like brains, frogs, mohawks, etc.

Burrow is here, finally we get to connect. She's come up from Bellingham a few times and every instance, schedules have conflicted. It's a shame, as I most undoubtedly don't have enough professional clowns in my life. If the bicycle circus takes off, she'll be up once a week a least. She says she'll teach me to clown properly. Bwah-hah. (okay, no. She said heh heh heh, then HA HA HA. She's reading this as I type it). I'm starting to think about wearing make-up.

TONIGHT, (Tuesday), at 9:30, there's will be a group of us at Tinseltown go seeing what they've done to Aeon Flux.

edit: some of us are going for food at the wild ginger before the film. (Think 7:30). it's the william gibson restaurant tucked away in the tinseltown food-court that has the magical slow-motion exploding tea.