Dreampepper

BABIES AS WEAPONS is the most twisted thing you will see today, even if you're a regular at ModBlog. It's the inelegant site of XenoSapien, a man in the States who believes he is "suffering from deep feminist-culture side-effects." I hope he never discovers gifs, as the flame motif is bad enough already. (Warning: for reasons unknown he plays inappropriate music very loudly). The front page has a pencil sketch named MyPain of a woman dressed as a stripper about to whip a prostrate man with a baby that's still attached to her by an umbilical cord that snakes from between her legs. For added wtf, the diapered baby seems to be angrily shouting into a microphone. The entire thing gives me the quesy feeling he watches Wicker Man and touches himself on Friday nights.

"NASA can no longer afford the future."

Plans for making a Jacob's Ladder from readily available parts.

Today has been full of unexpected phone calls, disco light moments, when the blare of music fades into almost silence at the exact moment you see her face. Theatre people, friends, night and day. Someone's finally read my pen written letters, public transit edited. A long distance shout from an ex-lover, three defeated countries away, sunburned voice peeling across the lines, unexpected and welcome and a little puzzling. I love him, but why now? Little mirrors refracting light, circling in the room. Another chrome ring, pick-up-the-phone - a potential investor, in town from Memphis, surprise, someone I've been considering handing the project off to once I get it up on its feet and properly connected to my city. (We all know I want to leave.) I'm cancelling my plans this evening so as to see him.

Just as a reminder: Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo opens tomorrow at The Western Front. Further details here. I'm going, are you? Especially quick comments have a chance at a comp.

On a bad day I'm a once favourite plaything that someone got dirty. Now they put me back in the box once they've seen what they've done. Good days aren't much better. Either way, he smiled when he was sleeping, and the music playing was in synch with the industrial trucks outside. I fell back unhappily dreaming to that moment, notes of piano and large crashing stares, the threatening movement of birds in the sky.

Thank you Ed for the benediction of tasty dead animals. I was scared to look in the fridge yesterday, for fear that you had brought me half a cow or something.

HOW TO DESTROY THE EARTH.

It was brought to my attention that I have spectacularly failed to mention that Stephen and I went to the Vancouver Folk Fest last Sunday. Every year for the past seven years, someone has lavishly offered me passes, back-stage, performer, and otherwise. This year it was DK and this year, finally, I not only remembered in time, I had a day free. We met him at the western gate, the one in the middle of the ethnic village of white plastic open tents selling bamboo/hemp/100% pure free-range cotton hippie fabrics, flashing peace-sign LED pins, the essential and required plethora of hand drums, and east indian/african clothing richer than oxygen with colour and glittering threads. The passes he gave us were top of the food chain. Floating through the crowd, we'd come too late for anything but main stage, so we left DK to continue to the other gate and forked off to find food. We had the option of eating backstage with the performers and volunteers, but felt too guilty. Almost everyone else with a CREW pass worked for it, even if only a little. (We missed the super secret little mecca the crew had assembled behind the Tool Tent, complete with an immaculately balanced fooz-ball table and twenty foot hammock, until everything had wrapped, the more fool we.)

The hot sun made shade prime real estate, so we found some and sat in it while the band that first inspired Bob Dylan took the stage and explained to us with instruments and voices stronger than bombs, in very precise detail, the definition of American folk music. Deciding that Mr. Dylan was made of sterner stuff than I, as the banjos on stage continued to proceed with an overwrought dignity, I got up and walked about, taking messy pictures of the crowd, and successfully tested the efficacy of my special guest pass by half-climbing the sound tower without being questioned. I ran into a few people I used to work with who's names I wouldn't be able to remember if you put a gun to my head, who asked me details on stripping down a side stage tent, until I decided it would be simplest to vanish back to where Stephen was dozing with my bag.

The steady swell of applause broke us and we fled backstage, cutting through to the food tents again. This time we ran into Johnny Fuck, Andrew, who was in charge of the Lantern Parade, Maureen, and the lovely Jess Hill. (If you've never been to one of her shows, know it's higher on my recommendations-of-things-to-do-in-Vancouver list). It was a little like Commercial Drive had moved over six neighborhoods and had comfortably settled in for the night to volunteer. Everywhere there were long ragged skirts, smiling kids with dreadlocks, and people wearing chunky stone jewelry. Middle-aged children still carrying the light for the next generation.

All Your Snakes Are Belong To Us!

I had left my jacket in the car, thinking ahead but not all at once. It sounded like some kick-ass music was happening, grooves thicker than industry, as we walked out of the festival, across the bunny fields of Jericho, past the Drum circle, to the impromptu grass parking lot where we had abandoned the car. I was sorry to miss it, as it sounded like it just continued to get better as we came back, but I felt like I wanted to give the market a try, so we wasted half an hour poking at baskets full of five dollar five-wash shirts and tough twists of fiber-femo necklace, and by the time we were back on site, everyone was packing up in preparation for Jane Siberry's last dance.

Sunday was Jane Siberry's last concert as Jane Siberry, as she's now changed her name to Issa, which means Peace in some romantic sounding language I doubt she speaks. Don't get me wrong, the ethics she runs her website with are astounding and wonderful, (all of her songs are available as plain MP3s, which means they will play on your computer/iPod and are not loaded with DRM restrictions, and you pay whatever you like for them.), but over the years her music has been stretching thinner, until she stood on stage and asked us why there were roosters in Vancouver as clips of them played overlaid on the sound of running water. Stephen and I sat at the very front, settled with our backs against the fence that keeps the audience from the stage, and I laughed when I realized just how many of the nervous looking volunteers they dragged on stage were familiar faces.

He left before the afterparty, which turned out to be magical. Walking in, the music hit DK and I like fire sucking oxygen from the air. Ganga Giri was on stage, playing like it was the last time they would ever get to funk out. It was pathogenic. All our free will vanished, replaced by the contagious urge to dance. Outside was just as good, an open space dotted with clusters of folk fest performers jamming together under scarlet tiki torches. In one corner, a man was quietly teaching people to throat sing, and in another there was a fiddle circle that went on for at least two hours. Absolutely fabulous. I told DK that on particularly frustrating nights at home, I think to myself "there is a party just like this, somewhere out in Vancouver tonight, and I don't know about it." He laughed, answered, "Isn't it great?" and we hugged, knowing it was true. There was nowhere more In than that place. It felt like home.

The preacher called me martyr as he finally found his name, (it's good to have a name, I cannot write without a name, oh my tarnished scientist, oh my bleeding star), because I give in to the emptiness biting at my heart, because I strive to believe it better to drink the dreadful rain than to be proud and drown in it. I walk out alone, looking at the smoke that passes for a sky in our city and wonder why I'm never good enough company to keep. I have no pure fey and giddy anticipation, it's threaded through with hard-earned dread. Crumbs from a table. Semantics twisting in. And I'm still terrified to talk to you, still too tired to cry. When everything changed, when the worst happened, it was the supports I never questioned that gave way, that turned from stone to sand beneath my feet. The cement is the same colour as the rain and as the water runs, I feel it must match my eyes. I lost the charm to fly, the meaning. Sometimes I only laugh to let a cold wind out. When I can't casually say your name without feeling like I'm lying, what can I help but dream you'll dream of me? My answering machine is silent, except when asking me what I want to do. Press two. Press three or four. I hesitate and hang up.

Original letters sent by Frank Zappa and the PMRC to various instances during and after the '85 PMRC hearings on music and censorship.

I dream you will come with me to the station when it comes time for me to leave. That you will reason with me the night before, try to hold me as if I would crack, like the light of a candle dimly holding the darkness back. In the morning, you'll kiss me goodbye and wave, knowing I'll come back for you. I dream I'm enough to fight for, an ideal with flesh surrounding, not a shell with soft hurt inside. That's I'm real instead of filler. That there is music to my madness, that it's not a lost cause again. Another reason to be myself, another reason to stand my ground against the cynic's world. I dream and think sadly that I'm too young to feel this bitter, but there is no one to cradle my hands and draw my poisons from me. Not in this city. Not in this place. My time here has already been drawn as dry as glass burned back to sand.

Every single Playboy centerfold ever published, (in order).

The weather the past few days has been beautiful, sun and wind. I have been keeping busy. Friday was beach visiting then Jacques birthday, Saturday was dinner out with Duello-folk, then the TV on the Radio concert, Sunday was Sunset Rubdown and Frog Eyes, Monday was Korean Movie Night, Tuesday will be the Secret Machines concert, Wednesday is dinner with Nicole and Matt, Thursday is dinner and archiving vintage family-photographique with Silva, and then, as true as the trees let me be, Friday-I-do-not-know. I work this weekend, Raphealla having something else she's doing, so I will only be available outside of shop hours. If you want to claim some of them, do so now or hold your peace. I have no internet at work, however, so you'll have to use the telephonic device made so popular by the previous century, TOLL FREE: 1-888-HYPATIA. Handy, no? Yes. Minus the lack of net at work, which leaves my employment stupefyingly dull.

Someone has rewritten the words to Gibert and Sullivan's "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" as "I am the very model of a Singularitarian," with lyrics celebrating the drive to transcend the flesh.

I am the very model of a Singularitarian
I'm combination Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian,
Aggressively I'm changing all my body's biochemistry
Because my body's heritage is obsolete genetically,
Replacing all the cells each month it's here just temporarily
The pattern of my brain and body's where there's continuity,
I'll try to improve these patterns with optimal biology,
("But how will I do that? I need to be smarter. Ah, yes...")
I'll expand my mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology.

There's an MP3 link too.

Today was spent re-arranging the shop I work in, hauling large heavy awkward pieces of pale laminated wood around into hopefully better positions. We need a curtain now. A curtain, a ladder, some screws, and some paint. It's nice to have carte blanche. I've been told that I'm to treat the store as my own, all my decisions will be supported. It's interesting, like an experiment in culpability. How responsible am I? How capable?

"I've listened to your music, seen the way you dress. I trust you."

I've had relationships based on less.

Remember the water? It sprayed like insane rain, kamikaze airborne water trying to reclaim the shore from the sky and bring it back into the ocean. I was so glad you ran through it after me, it felt like a victory. Breakfast, then sitting on damp moss, so British Columbia, so everything about this place that's sometimes nice. Secrets, so many secrets. I miss you. You're around and then not, all at once. I remember kissing you, lying with my body pressed against yours on a volcanic outcropping of rock, all soft cliffs and too much ocean view. All those trees. I saw you watching me trip down the path like a child, I watched you smile. How much that meant to me, I'm not sure I can say. It had been so long since I'd felt like anyone wanted me, like I could make someone happy. Therapy for both of us, I suppose. A furtive thing we could call our own. An epoch passed as we climbed the earth.

Evenings like this I wish you were here, free to sleep in my bed, be warm for me in the chill.

My lovers last year, all of them left silver hair on my clothes. Spiderwebs that tied joy down, transmuting me into an alchemist of golden moments, but my last year was longer ago than that. I think of new years in terms of fall. Leaves and seasons changing, halting, freezing. Anything after Hallowe'en is this year, anything before is last. It might be in November this year, my annual transfer from them into now. We met in August, we began in August. The year before last, something new, a man, a burning furnace hanging in the ether, changing my perception of time. Everything counted from the day I took a worried picture that my friend has hung on his wall in Montreal.

This year it might be somewhere in November where it shifts. Before there was my first love returned to me, too poetically pleasing to last or be real. My theater painter, my silly Gavool fool. "Have you met my underage girlfriend?" A genius clown that handed me so gracefully to California (Uber Alles). Flash: tied with ribbons, merry christmas, the light from the window before we moved the bed, a thin string glittering from one thing to another, my decision. LAX = empty regret. Last winter spent in Orange County, adrift in rain and lost without direction. My lovers, before they didn't trust me, they didn't tell me until it's too late.

Next year. New Year, December. My hanged moon, strung up on charming wire, so full before it waned so suddenly. He fell from the sky and destroyed all the tides. I fell down and drowned and my morning star, my most precious thing, my evening dream who surrounded me with words, abandoned me after burning me with a small handful of flame. Hours counted like suicidal moths. Hating how easy I must be. Fifteen people dying in six months. All the ways to count a year. Two jobs gone, three, a night of fire where I finally died. There was no vessel to carry me. When the apple fell, there was no one to capture it, no hand to interrupt its crash to the ground. Everything all at once, so dreadful.

I'm older now, I can feel it for the first time in my life. I see lines inside my face, miniature scars, a map of where I used to live. Pictures from last year, they look too happy to be me, too young and yet, here I am, feeling alright with life again. It took me eight months. It took me a year, a failed one night stand, and a married conductor. It took music and getting away from here, a refreshing life out of the small town. It took the sky and blood and tears and feeling too alone. It was Ryan, it was walking into the water on the night of fireworks and resisting the urge to let my head go under. It was so many things, saving a life on New years, never seeing that girl again. Slapping Matthew, dancing alone, dancing with Kyle. It was myself, finally, and the memories of starry skies that brought me back to me.

Though mostly it was the conductor.
        the good ones are just like that
"No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day.
But, I beseech your grace, pardon me: I was born to speak all mirth and no matter."

I leave for Montreal in a week and I'm still quietly lost as to what I should be packing. Warm things. Well, yes, I have about three of those. I have a scarf, a half-stolen plaid shirt that's missing some crucial buttons, and a fleecy skirt. Now what? I'm not even organized enough to get myself fed in the mornings before work. Ah misery me, I'm feeling rather alone.

Does anyone want a bus pass for two weeks? I certainly won't be using it from December 10th to 24th. These little bits of foil and paper are untransferable, I'd hate to see the service provided go to waste.

Also, someone get this "Will design thermonuclear devices for food" (in Russian) T-shirt, for Graham, k?
And The Great Equation for Nicholas. Thanks. You're awesome.

I should be walking, airing out the musty smell of second-hand cigarettes my coat collects in the back room at work, but I am nervous of what I will find once I get past my first destination. I have a secondary plan, there is apparently a corset stitcher happening tonight at Andrew's new apartment, but the primary is that for a reason. The scathing thing most close to the thin skin of my heart is the first thing I want to address. There is no turn back time, no peering ahead. I had a half argument about this earlier this week with a partially ex-lover. What's real is what needs to be dealt with, and what's now is all that we have to take chances with. What should be done should be done, regardless of imagined consequence. This is what I told him, irritation growing. I was falling in front of someone, hitting the ground hard with verbal feet that were suddenly fists curled in anticipation of the general unfairness of the world. Me, I surprised myself. I'm not used to admitting heat into myself. I usually keep everything I want very under control and very away from me. He said that I was intimidating. I would be surprised except that I'm beginning to get used to it.

What happens when you begin to reject neglect in the face of everything you want?

It's like waking up next to a lion. A lion who likes laughing.

The fog has been here a week now, so thick that it seems almost possible that if could just reach your hand a little farther, you could grasp handfuls of it to eat from the air. Breakfast was a small paper bag of profiteroles from the bakery next to the laundromat. Cold cream explosions draped in dark chocolate. Breakfast was walking through early morning fog, wondering at all the people who were already awake enough to be beginning their day, as if nine in the morning were entirely a normal hour. (Benn being one of them.). Now, yes, I know I used to be like that. I quite liked my nine to five. However, this does not erase the fact that my mind instinctually tells me that eight a.m. should be possibly banned by law. When the sky blushes, embarrassed to be rising so naked, then you should do it the courtesy of hiding your face in some coverlets. Otherwise, disservice and a pox on your house.

I love for the years he has on me, the time he wears so gracefully in his silver hair.

Manic depression scientifically linked to creativity.

Flickr claims they are only for photographs, bans pictures, illustrations. ...damned yahoo.

Sara came over after I and I and others went up the mountain, scared for her future. She's searching for a purpose, just like all the other humans. We're mammals with opposable thumbs who tell time with blood. In my more empty evenings, I would argue that meaning might be a bit beyond us. There's people like Katie, who blows stars into being, and I know she's as lost as the rest of us.

Vancouver Rhino Party seeking people with fictional languages.

This was in my in-box when I got home:

I walked out, into the cold fog, and looked back.
I always have to look back.
And there she was, the Sphinx standing in the firelight, standing in her cave.
For a moment she was there and then, like grains of sand in the wind, she blew away and I realized that not only had I failed to answer correctly, I had missed the riddle.

She had lain the opium of her body upon my lap, my eyes and arms drew her into my blood, making dreams of my senses and in the reverie of my answered prayers I forgot to hear hers.

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

I wish you were here in my empty bed so it would not be so hollow. It's been filled with clothing to mimic the twisting forms of company, but last I checked, sweaters don't talk. They don't try to keep me. I wrote once that my sheets felt like sand, that if I were to turn over in the middle of the night, absence would hit me like a blinding storm. They're doing it again, right now, with this soft music playing that reminds me so much of your hands tracing my cheekbones when my glasses are off.

because

You are small beautiful simple things, like a line perfectly written, the only one in the novel that you'll bother to remember later, but when you're away is all the time. It reminds me of the time I missed someone to death. When it happened, my pillows and blankets quivered, shuddered, and stopped breathing. My heart was dazed, dropped from a great height, and I have yet to recover its wings from the wretched broken mess of glass shattered connection.

because

The shape of you fills with mistakes when you are not around to fill in. The secondary characteristic of your absence is my dwelling on how much I can't deal with it. When I'm missing you, your smile bleeds out of my mind, to be replaced by how often I sleep alone and never with you. You right now are someone else. A heavenly creature I don't know, who sacrifices something that looks like my integrity to an altar I'm not allowed to approach or respect.

because

Then it slips out, my joan of arc moment, seeping through the cracks in all my routine and argument. It's the pattern. You cut here and put these seams together. You prick your finger on the pins that have somehow found themselves between your lips. My fear is a foot on the pedal, the sway and yank of social fabric. I'm uncertain. I can't wear this dress, it's heavy and the embroidery's just tacky. Not already, not so soon, but then your voice is crashing into me. I've been tackled by a thousand foot wave of feeling like myself again. You push me up to the firmament.

Tonight I thought I saw you standing on the corner of that memory, just enough out of vision that I could place you where I wanted to. It was a conversation about skin, about nerve endings. The technology that craves contact. Our first hint of compatible loneliness.

Lithium Picnic, my desktop.

Escape is four. Walls, edges, connect three and the angles are wrong. Four is compatible with fire. Two places to hold you, for you to hold me. Four. Boundaries make up all the most beautiful things hemming in this screen. // When they speak to you in whispers. It feels so right, but you're not in the story. Voice falls quiet from fear. // Hush now, cradles rock, it's picking a fight. I can't change this. The farther in I see, the less I understand about how I'm pulling. Noticing little things. This is a refuge. I'm not wrong, I'm on this list. I recognize the objects that feel the same from partner to partner. This is where we come to write, all of us, music or language or pieces of memory. Eighteen inches from the computer, everything we need. All our pills. All our letters encased in plastic chunks of communication. We're so human. It hurts me when I'm lucid. Damn lucky I'm not.


Tom Baker out-takes from recording a voiceover for a commercial. Many thank-you's Warren.

I don't know you, but we refuse to go placidly amid the noise, which is good. For once, the haste is ours. I warn you, however, this is familiar; how I bring joy. You've crawled into my life smiling with a whimper and the promise of bang, both unexpected, and I find myself bound to your responsibilities because I like you in spite of them. Unexpected is understatement. You steal what I steal and replace it with truth spoken quietly with affection. We avoid the loud and the aggressive, and violence escapes us, vexations to the spirit, except in our hands clutching at each others hair. That knowledge is comforting to me. If you don't look to force your religious opinions or your political surfeits upon others, than I will keep respect in my heart warm and welcoming and stand with you as far as possible without surrender. As long as those traps remain empty, it is not my business how you continue your life apart from me. As long as there is love there, I need not concern myself. If you choose to adopt a child and raise it, you have my utmost respect. My concerns will remain with myself and I will offer as placid a pool as possible and attempt to rinse myself of my frustrations. If you choose to raise that child into a specific lifestyle, that's fine, as long as religion is not an excuse for intolerance. You are already braver than I. (When half a million people led by their religious leaders gather in a 21st century city to protest a law that gives opportunity for two people who love each other to raise a child, it gives me pause as to whether this is a world that I would ever want to introduce a child to.)

I am usually complicit in the world, not comparing myself to others, for there are always be greater persons than myself in my estimation, and I make every effort to know as diverse a group of people as I possibly can. Diversity brings the new, insights and experiences that I would never have discovered had I remained wrapped in my own existence. But fundamentally, I don't know why you like me. My mien's been trampled, there are only a fistful of similarities left; we are on good terms with most people, we find good humour in the world, we listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. My skeleton is not made of such fine stuff as yours, it was spun messily and without comfort. I feel outdistanced.

My employment leaves much to be desired, but I do my best when I am present, however much I would wish to be elsewhere. When I leave, I wish to leave a positive impression and a place where I remain accepted. The world is a frequently hostile place, I want to have as little negative impact as possible. If I am to raise my voice, it should be to combat intolerance and promote distinctiveness. It is my own blindness to virtue that gives me discomfort where I'm positioned, not a lack in the striving industry of local friends. I want that as clear as the happiness in your eyes when you see me smiling back at you, granting without cynicism that you are not enough for me to stay as much as I am not enough for you to leave. In my adoration is hard knowledge sharpened on 'I should have known better' that states with great clarity that there can always be another human being to capture me, that there are enough souls alive to capture you as well, that we can't find ourselves alone unless we choose to be, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. I was not raised to be a child, though I had a right to be, instead I was raised to be strong in spirit. It may yet save me, but not from you. You are a piece of the universe unfolding the same way I am. It would be a gift to let go of everything I hold so tightly, but I don't know how.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.