Dreampepper

Half the time I try to post something, I recieve this message:

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Client error: Sorry, there was a problem with content of the entry

Anyone know what's going on?

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I don't know Stu Nathan and it's very likely that neither do you, (unless you are either Budgie Barnett who has just come out with a new book of quickfic that's quite lovely, yes you should buy it, where you ask, why right here or Alasdair Watson of They Fight Crime.) I don't know what he looks like, where he lives, or why he keeps a journal. If we were to meet by chance in the street, I would not recognize him. The only reason I know his name is Stu, even, is because it says so right there on his userinfo. He is a complete and utter stranger.

Why should you care? Because you should friend him. In among his regular blogging activities, he writes incredible character pieces about his fellow passengers on London transit, who he calls Tube People. Sometimes amusing, occasionally sobering, they are perpetually excellent and well worth your time.

A satisfying excerpt from a recent post:

"They clearly don't know each other, but they have two things in common — age and class. Bundled up against the cold in overcoats and scarves, the gentleman wears an old-fashioned check cap and the lady has a cosy headscarf. He holds her arm as they board the train in the windy West London no-mans-land on the way to Heathrow, but she's supporting him as much as she supports her.

'Oh, thank you,' she says, in the effortlessly penetrating cut-glass tones of the truly posh. 'Thank you so much, I was afraid I wasn't going to get up into the carriage.'

'That's quite alright,' he replies, in a voice you can imagine encouraging the troops at Arnhem. 'No bother at all.' But he's red in the face and puffing, and half-falls gratefully into his seat.

They aren't shouting, and they couldn't be described as loud. But their voices carry around the sparsely-populated carriage as they make the sort of small-talk you might hear at a tea-dance. Faultless manners and old-school decorum, and you can see that everyone else in the carriage is paying rapt attention. Newspapers stop rustling. Pages of novels are unturned. The volume on MP3 players is surreptitiuously lowered.

'You said you had children? A boy and a girl, wasn't it?' the lady asks, her head on one side, her face attentive.

'Oh, yes,' says the gentlemen. 'They're both fine and happy, grown up now of course. Jane's doing something in social work, living near Brighton; it's an area called Kemptown, if I'm remembering correctly.'

'And does she have a young man?'

'Weeeell...' he drawls, his eyes unfocusing slightly and a wrinkle deepening between his eyes. 'Actually, there seem to be two young men around; they have some sort of... arrangement I don't really understand. They don't seem to both live there all the time, but they're both... around. But everyone seems to be happy with it, and she has one son by each of them. And it's a terribly bohemian area.'

'Like a village?' she says.

'Oh, very like. It's not my place to question, I think?'

'And what about your son? What does he do?'

'Yes, he runs his own business. He was doing something in the City, but he decided to pack it in and do something he always wanted to do.'

'And what was that?'

'He opened a sandwich bar with his wife.'

'A sandwich bar? It's not one of those places where you can't sit down, is it? I can't abide those.'

'No, no, there are seats, of course there are. And you can get other things as well, hot soups and so on, and I believe there are salads as well.' This is said in the tones of a man who has heard of the concept of salad but will have no truck with the reality.

'And it's doing well?'

'Yes, very well, I understand.'

'Oh, good! That's marvellous. I do sometimes get peckish, you know, and a well-made sandwich is very welcome. What's the place called? Is it somewhere I could keep and eye out for?'

'Yes, it's called EAT, so he tells me.'

The man opposite has raised his newspaper to hide his face, and the pages start to rustle as his hands vibrate.

January - Seattle was the escape I needed. Not only does it have a refreshing amount of honest-to-mercy architectural and social diversity, it seems everyone I know there is brilliant, fun, and good-looking.*

February - He's young in that way that teenage girls find attractive, fizzing with ginger enthusiasm, wiry, laughing, his arms beaten with a couple of tattoos.

March - Ray and I are going sailing on a Viking War-ship tomorrow! Anyone want to come?

April - Once upon a time when time was shivering apart and memories seemed more real than reality, the girl who fell from the sky and the west coast hacker king came to an agreement.

May - A clean uniform of friendship, tattered in places, worn in the elbows and the shoulders, but strong all the same. I think of stone, how it erodes too slow to see, though it shapes itself to the wind almost perfectly.

June - Walking across the street in the rain, there's someone in front of me with a spiderman brand popsicle, the blue eyes two wan gum-balls that look like they were manufactured years before I was born.

July - I've been mistaken for a porn star.

August - Something's wrong with my internet at home. It's corpse blood sluggish, and flickering faster than an animated disco.

September - The weekend was spent moving David from his cave apartment of the mysterious smells to a pleasantly crooked #9932CC-darkorchid room in an old heritage style house on Arbutus street, right across the street from the Ridge Theater.

October - Something I can't seem to get over is how much mind-bogglingly delicious food there is in Montreal, for incredibly cheap.

November - We've decided to paint the guest room library the colours of a Hypselodoris nudibranch bullock, but darker and a bit richer, leaving us with aubergine, pumpkin, sunflower mustard, and crimson red.

December - Today we're hitting up, (or on, your pick), Lou O'Bedlam, Frederick's of Hollywood, Kevin again, (who will hopefully have recovered from his sudden death-flu), and somewhere delicious to eat, hopefully in Venice, with dear Crunchy of Mutaytor if we can line up with her lunchbreak.

A Guest post from Jhayne:

I apologize for leaving everyone with a bit of a cliff-hanger earlier this week. My journal has been innaccessible for the last few days and is likely to remain so until Livejournal screws its proverbial head on straight over the latest SixApart fiasco. (For those not in the know, this is what's been going on.). I am hoping that using a third party to post will break past the endless 404 display that has cropped up every time I attempt an update.

So! news!

Someone's willing to buy the theatre and lease it to us.

However, and this is a nasty however, we have to give him a proposal stating WHY we would be the best tenants in the known local universe. This is an investment, he requires a return. This proposal has to be delivered as soon as possible, because he leaves on a business trip in about a week. Of course, that's "about a week" as of Tuesday. Now it's Thursday night and I have just spent the last couple of days glued to my computer, ignoring so-called normal-human hours, typing my fingers to the bone and aggravating my carpel tunnel beyond rational belief, all so we would have a completely new HotW proposal done as quickly as possible.

You people had better thank me, even if this falls through. Thank me and Lee, the groshing accountant Warren's provided us out of the utter blue on no warning whatsoever who's willing to work through the night for free, and thank Merlyn, who came and made me dinner and cleaned my kitchen, all so I didn't have to pause what I was doing, and Alastair, who's been hacking at my horrible rough-rough drafts, and Carlos, who's been doing the same, but from Washington, and Silva, who's been helping me write all today, and Michael Green, for continuing to know more about theatre than I have ever wanted to know.

And with that, I have to somehow extricate myself form my computer and find something to eat, because I'm fairly certain it's in the manual somewhere that one should not go over twelve hours without a meal. This may even require I leave my apartment, but no worries. I'm brave when I'm starving. Signing out.

So once again, (as it tends to), my livejournal is running out of Paid Account. If you want to help out, as I certainly can't currently afford upkeep, then donate here to keep this journal alive.

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin are now available online for free.

Sometimes I feel like I'm crafting obituaries when I describe people here. "He was a kind man, Mr. Haversham, tall and slightly too commonplace. We loved his newspaper clipping accent, me and Dave, and now he's gone." That said, I think I'm going to give a shot to talking about Mark, (leaving out as much description as possible), as locals have been developing a curiosity.

We met in 1999, my mother was somehow part of an African music festival event that he was doing the sound for. We went home together after to an Art House on Fraser St. that he was watching for the out-of-town owners and, after we got rid of Lidd, we stayed up all night talking. (I would be shocked if Reine's mother was not friends with the artists who lived there, just to give you some idea of what the house was like). I'm not sure why we went back together after, except that maybe things just happen sometimes and occasionally personalities simply click. He says now that I was very shy then and it's sort of true. I didn't talk as much as he did, not knowing how to speak with people yet.

Threadless is having another $10 t-shirt sale. Go through my link to get bonus levels of awesome and help get something neat.

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago, after I've moved to Toronto and back, L.A. and back, Montreal and back. After I've singularly failed to escape from this place, actually, but have thoroughly lost touch with Mark anyway. I'm at a Timothy Wisdom party, having been invited by an acquaintance on the street, an anonymous e-mail, and Angus Ms. Spelt. Set between a funeral home and an industrial warehouse, I didn't know the hosts, but I knew the house. People spill out of it when there's parties, and everything on the main floor, excepting the kitchen, becomes dance floor.

On this dance floor, this most fabulous and exceedingly crowded place, I encounter a woman who stops me to say, "I have the other half of your sewing machine." It's an odd statement, but she's right, she does have my old sewing machine. I'm surprised. We used to trade one back and forth to summers ago. To her left is Mark. We haven't seen each other since before I moved to Toronto, but we recognize each other instantly. (Amazing if you factor in that he's not tall anymore because puberty wasn't finished with me last we saw one another and now I'm an entire four inches taller.) That quirk of timing goes "click" again, and now we're best of friends once more, spending time too late at night and sleeping over more often than is strictly necessary for a basic social life.

I think we have a date in December, but I'm not sure how things like that work. I'm going to have to ask.

If you people are finished gang-banging Warren in my comments, I would like to ask a favor of you.


I'm asking for a call-out.



Who you are, where you came from, why you're here and how you found me.

Go.

Copied from all kinds of people.

1. Copy and paste your friendslist behind a cut.
2. If you've friended multiple journals by the same person, delete all but the "main" one.
3. Bold the name of everyone you know or have met in "real life."
4. Italicize the name of everyone you've spoken to on the phone.*
5. Underline the name of everyone you've chatted with online. (I'm assuming LJ doesn't count, but anything else online does)
6. [Bracket] people you've known, online or off, for more than five years.
7. Turn family members red
8. Pass it on.

( FLIST )