Dreampepper

Valentine's is creeping up, the candy coated holiday founded on Lupercalia, a Roman parade festival celebrating sex and werewolves. It basically involved sacrificing a goat, wrapping the wet and bloody skin around you, then energetically racing naked around the city and cackling madly while smacking women with whips for pregnancy luck.

Me, I just can't be bothered to put that much effort in. Someone hands me a goat at the crack of dawn, there's not going to be any leaping out of bed to kill it, no, nor running. At least, I wouldn't be the one running. This is dawn we're talking about. AKA bedtime. Also, seriously, what did that poor goat ever do?

So rather than running naked and bloody through the streets of Seattle, something I'm theoretically capable of if I weren't so damned lazy, sure, I've decided to celebrate this Valentine's by sending Tony treasures through the mail instead. How pale in comparison, I know, but wait! Don't judge yet! These treasures might not involve flaying animals or whipping nubile young women, but they're awesome.

The first present arrived last week, a new Crankbunny design made in collaboration with poster artist Brian Ewing called the Tell-Tale Heart Custom Valentine Card, a paper ribcage which opens up to reveal a personal secret message under a scarlet scratch away foil heart. My message read you have my heart. xox jh. It was a tricky choice, given that she has so many beautiful cards, but as I gave Secret Decoder and Dancing Robot cards last year, I wanted something new, something a little more to Tony's specific tastes, so I decided the macabre ribcage would appeal more to his recovering goth-osity than anything else in her shop, especially as it comes in a smart black envelope. Ha.

The next present arrived just yesterday, a valentine by Lea Redmond from The World's Smallest Postal Service! The letter is transcribed on a miniature desk in the tiniest of script, sealed with a miniscule wax seal with the sender's intial pressed into it, packaged up with a magnifying glass in a glassine envelope, and finished off with a large wax seal. The finished letter is just about the size of an American quarter, almost a little bit smaller. Tony was absolutely delighted to open the regular sized envelope and discover such a strange tiny gift inside.

The miniscule envelope, not having anything to do with actual mailing practices, can be marked as anything you like, so I wrote out the smoochiest addresses I could think of, mailing it from Jhayne Holmes, Lover's Court, Inamorata, L0V34, Valentia, and to Tony Jackson, #1 Beloved Blvd, suite: 2 serenade, Inamorato, H34R7, Valentia, something Tony got to read out to Michelle and her friend Kevin, who were over as he unwrapped it.

Inside, it read;

Now comes the long blue cold
by Mary Oliver, (with one word changed)

Now comes the long blue cold
and what shall I say but that some
bird in the tree of my heart
is singing.

That same heart that only yesterday
was a room shut tight, without dreams.

Isn’t it wonderful—the cold wind and
spring in the heart inexplicable.
Darling boy. Picklock.

-:-

Here's to closing in one one year together, to holding hands even when we're sleeping. Here's to finding love together and trust, truth, and beauty bombs. Here's to you, my exquisite love, my Tony, my only. Happy Valentine's. I love you, I love you, I love you.

Jhayne

A friend has just died from a congenital heart failure. He was going to be twenty seven in three weeks. There's been another school shooting, a new Valentines massacre, murder suicide, not even the first one of the year. I was fired from the Dance Center today, the job I've held the longest in my life, while the grandmother of one of my friends has just been put in the hospital, they don't think she'll survive the week. It all feels a lot like the good guys aren't winning the war, like the future doesn't want to be better.

And yet..


I dream I hold you tightly while we sleep, your limbs tied to mine with fingers, our hips a perfect hiccough, the contraction of a verb, ankles crossed as if even our feet hold hands against the melting darkness, the gathering tomorrow that poses, threatens, over the bed like a crashing wave paused. Like jazz, we make it up as we go along, kissing at the speed of disaster, pushing our moaning mistakes until they became what we meant to do in the first place, all style, wet substance, and tangled, dramatic coherence.

Watch this, please.

These are three of the more anonymous messages I recieved through Valintinr:

i wish you loved me as much as you love him

you want to flee into the ocean? curl up there, lungs filling up while you wait to be rescued but you didn't tell anyone where you were going. shine our light we do, all of us in the sky by the millions, each too-soft song of praise too small to measure alone. a chorus, then, tiny whispers in the deep. our frozen princess, bathed in love, rise when you will and walk. we long to shine on you and pave your path with petals. hear us and claim your throne.

The old mask was grown unfamiliar, but already the joins are harder to see. With teeth sharper than memory I have been chewing on the sweet sinews of your heart, keeping fragments safe, saving shrapnel.
and somewhere, amongst warm socks and soap, lie the eyes that saw and the lips that tasted.

I have been thinking of you.

I admit I post these with a slight hesitation, but I claim my grace from their beautiful and fragile anonymity. In this strange age, secrets are a new kind of social politics. Who to filter, who to write to, what you can say, what you can see - the lines between are easily blurred, writing without a name is a liberation. One step away, but not too far.

They, very obviously, remind me of the letters I was recieving last spring. Mysterious things, slick with meaning, that I felt I should be able to swallow and, in consuming, unflinchingly grasp the author by the name. I still do not know who wrote them, but part of me hopes that they are the writer of one of the above quotations. There is still a familiarity, a cessation of breath that says to me that we were not strangers.

There were people who were worried for me, nervous of the idea of a "stalker", a man who knew not only my name, but where I lived and the blood of my mythology, as if I had been studied, tracked, and dangerously hunted. One person asked me to call the police if they ever turned threatening, but it was a sentiment I could understand but never respect. All of the sudden, a stranger is dangerous? Whatever happened to clever innocence? I was not long-suffering, it was a sharp loss when they ended. My mail-box, empty, felt like an accusation. I still feel the failing was mine for not identifying my admirer, for lacking the depth required to slueth my fascinating writer, my sweet daydream.

These notes, wrapped softly in the digital realm, are both easier and more difficult. I cannot hold them in my hand and try to analyze the writing script, instead I must rely on the idosyncrasies, the clues and choice of words exclusively.

The first, direct yet oblique, is a note that I might leave, and very much have in other times, but can't be from anyone who knows me well. A crucial understanding of my social situation is missing. The second, enchanting though it is, doesn't even give me that much information. All I know is they're a long time reader, someone in tune with what I appreciate. It's the third that's keeping me up tonight, certain there's enough information available for me to pluck the author from the crowd. My mind is trying to compile a list of people I have kissed and is finding it a short one. As three a.m. approaches, I've whittled it down to only four names.

I hope, whoever you are, you're happy. The soap is throwing me off.

It's the little things.



edit: Ryan? there's more (at the bottom).

Strangely, I found myself in a house last night that I used to be intimately familiar with. It's a small place just off Cambie, an odd little duplex left over from the sixties. Almost ten years ago, the tree out front had bicycles lashed to the length of it. It used to be a party house. If there was a crowd gathered out front, I would just walk in. Being there again was like looking through an incredibly distorted photograph. All the furniture was gone, replaced, different, but the underlying structure remained identical. I remember sweeping things off the tile counter that separates the kitchen and the dining room and using it as a small square bed. I curled with candles in my hands in the little window nook, my bare toes against the old thin glass, offering fire to the smokers congealing on the tiny porch next to it. Now Alec lives there, with his twin brother, gradually filling it with strange mechanical bits of home-made light-up furniture and rich vintage finds gleaned from local alleys.

I met him Friday, at Alicia's delightful Anti-Valentines party, and we spent from there until 7:40 this Sunday evening together. If he never talks to me again, I'll quite understand. However, I found him marvelous company. We stayed up late last night watching Six String Samurai and, honestly, anyone who doesn't question my sleeping with a knife is probably that much closer to being okay in my books. Thank you Alicia for the goodly gracious idea of inviting him. (Though you're only half right. He can out-geek me on technicals, but I out-geek him with culture).

Earlier than that, Friday, I was caught being ridiculous at my workplace by someone off the street I vaguely hope will either never see me again or spread the legend farther. See, the computer had been played with by the owner, James, the previous night and something he did had destroyed the sound card drivers. Silence drives me crazy. It was hours before he called me back and I received permission to do a RESTORE on the system. Hence, singing Gorillaz at the top of my lungs, trying to echo off the very back wall, and dancing on top of the counters in a lull between actual bouts of working. In my defense, it happened gradually. First I was simply singing, then louder, then dancing as I put shoes away and filled out little bits of paperwork. Finally I vaulted up and did the deed, shaking booty for the entire walking world to see. We have incredibly large front windows. People think I'm strange, but really, it's just that I forget what I'm doing.

The year 2005 may have been the warmest year in a century, according to NASA scientists studying temperature data from around the world.

I made a brilliant deal at the club tonight. Nicole and Matt brought me to Sanctuary and by chance we sat next to a friendly stranger. When I first began talking to him, I asked why he wasn't dancing. When he replied that he'd recently wrecked his ankle, I politely enquired how he'd hurt himself. He clipped a starling while sky-diving, he said. He'd been bringing his seven year old nephew up for a run and had turned on his back to show him what falling through a cloud looked like. Hitting a bird is a one in a thousand chance, he said, in an airplane. Million to one when you're free-falling.

I was impressed.

More so when I found out that he's illiterate. "How on earth did that happen to you?" I asked, taken entirely aback. He grew up in Northern Ireland. A bomb blast when he was twelve. "Oh right, you're the people who leave bullets in your post-office walls." A quarter of his bones are now made of steel, his right hand is warped, and his skull is almost entirely artificial. He still knows Gaelic, however, as that's what he'd been taught as a child. Home-schooling, apparently, though he's lost almost all his mandarin. (go figure?) So I struck a deal. First, before I entirely had a grasp of the bizarre situation, I offered to swap some English for some Gaelic. When he'd filled me in a little more, explaining that it hadn't been for lack of language programs with incredibly impressive pedigree, I offered something different. He chooses the book and I read to him in exchange for Gaelic lessons.

He stopped mid-thought, struck by that. "I just might, you know. That's a new one." I hope he takes it.

I've invited him to Korean Movie Night. I drew him a map.