Punditing

It's official, folks. Science says conservatives are physiologically inferior to liberals. They're just scaredy-cats. You might even say, pussies.

Short story

So I've a hit a road block with this short story. So I'm going to post what I have in hope that people reading it, and some feedback will jog the creativity.

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We were in front of Super Sexe, looking for people to beat up. I was wearing sunglasses. One of the punks broke the lens when he hit me.

I wasn't living for anything except myself. I was too beautiful to kill myself. All I needed was cocaine and my reflection, a punk to beat the shit out of at night, Nadia and J.P.

We were living on Cazelais, in an apartment without even a fucking fridge or a stove because our landlord was too Portuguese to buy one before he leased it to us. The place was slated for demolition in a year. I hate St. Henri. The deps close at eleven when you can't buy liquor any more, and everyone's either a dead-beat or works their whole life – or they think they're the type of person who shouldn't like living in the Plateau, which is bullshit when you own a flatcap and a vest.

In the winter the neighbourhood was such a drag we wouldn't ever leave. We'd spend days smoking opium, stroking each other like our genitals were fabricy flower petals. It took hours for Nadia to make me come and then I'd just dream of winged odalisques fanning me with the tropic heat out of their vaginas before I even touched her. And then she was just skin. She was her breasts and her candy-corn nipples, her little hill of a belly, her thighs and her feet, and sometimes I would stare at J.P. instead. He had one of those Adonis-chests, and I'd force him to make out with me if I got bored. They were both mine.

Sometimes Nadia and I would play games on the metro. During rush hour I'd get on at Peel, in the second-to-last-car, and she'd get on at McGill wearing a skirt without anything underneath, and she'd snake her way up to me through the people. We'd act like we didn't know each other, standing awkwardly close to each other with her cunt right next to my hand. She'd press up against it, accidentally a couple of times, and then she'd get into it, bumping and rubbing and so I'd slip my hand under skirt to get her hot. When the crowd changed at Berri-UQAM I'd re-adjust myself so my dick was against her, and still nobody noticed or they pretended not to. She'd unzip my fly and pull it out and it inside her, and then we really got going and people would get off to move to another car and we grinded all the way up the Green Line or until security came and kicked us out, and we'd both have to go finish the job ourselves in the closest bathroom. Or for a real rush we'd wait for the sweeper train. She'd dress up like a street urchin, wearing a biker's jacket she'd found in the dumpster that smelled like piss, step on the train without any shoes on and curl up in the corner and cry like she was only on the metro to get out of the cold. Then I'd come over, put my arm around her, take her jacket off and start stroking her face, thumbing away the tears and kissing her and she'd squirm and try to get away and start fighting me, and I'd pin her down and force her out of her clothes and hammer into her until she liked it. Then we might just lie there until we got to Angrignon.

We knew there was something wrong with us, that we were neurotic and diseased and rotting in boredom, that were sick with cancer and cocaine and crazy, and shit, we never checked, maybe one of us had AIDS.

But that was the point. We'd have gone batshit dull in a sterile life, so we railed and shot up until things got exciting, and then they got boring again because eventually you run out of new kicks to try until all that's left is strychnine. The zeitgeist is depleted. The only cause is style.

J.P. had just had a gig so he was buying me drinks at Sharx. I recognized one of the guys playing pool from T.V. -- we invited him over to do lines with us. J.P. is an agent for movie-actors, you know, and I'm a fashion editor for a hot shot magazine, you know, and this is your first time in Montreal, is it? Let's show him some real local colour, eh, J.P, let's take him across the street for a drink at Bar Diana, eh, J.P., don't feed liquor to the natives, by the way, Mr. Celebrity. He got used to the place. After a half-dozen shots he even danced with a forty-five year-old woman with no teeth, and a couple hours after last call – this man's a celebrity, you know, he's above last call, and he's got money, Mr. Barkeep – we stumbled down the hill to Little Burgundy, telling our celebrity how dangerous, and how black this part of town was, and all the murders and shootings we'd seen down here, and behind the huge factory at the bottom of Guy J.P. played the knife trick on him. That's where you take a knife and you thrust it at someone, but you drop the handle and grab the blade so only your hand hits them in the gut. But J.P. was so drunk he got it wrong. We ditched the knife down in the canal and hoofed it. The lousy part about Little Burgundy is it's always crawling with racist pigs who're just waiting for a race riot, and soon they'd find a dead T.V. star down there.

J.P. only ever let me kiss him if he was on LSD. Then he'd take his shirt off and I'd hover over him, his body was elegant, he was an Adonis, a Casanova, and I'd just caress him with a hard-on like the Carnaval shuttle launch, and blast Plutonium off into the solar system when I coaxed just one kiss out of him. Then he'd put his shirt back on and pretend it never happened.

I was on my way back to Cazelais from the hospital. I had on an eye-patch – I was a fucking cyclops. I wasn't even the weirdest looking guy on the Metro but I still felt every time someone glanced my way and thought, “what the fuck happened to that guy?”

EUREKA!

I've figured it out.

The universe is probably real, and not an illusion. Why? Ambient noise. Or ambient vision, ambient people, just a constant flow of shit in your perception that you don't clue into because to clue into it all would overwhelm your head.

Would all that exist if it was all just in your head?

Goodbye reality, hello salvia divinorum

Whether it was the quality salvia Jamie got from Different Strokes, or the psyched-out vibes coming out of my Haight-Ashbury pipe, saliva divinorum worked for me this time. And holy shit did it work.

It was totally unexpected. Nothing could have prepared me for the trip, but I was expecting things would start looking kinda fragmentary and glow a bit, or I'd be scared that this is how I was going to die (past effects of salvia). Maybe it's success on Jamie should have convinced me otherwise.

He bought the ticket first. After setting down the pipe, he said "I'm definitely tripping on something." Then he sat silent for a moment.

"Jamie, is it working?"

No response.

He looks at me very seriously. He gets up. He takes a few steps forward. He looks at me very seriously. He checks the time on his cellphone. 10 seconds later he does it again. He fumblingly gets his wallet back into his pocket. He takes a few steps. Sits back down on the picnic table. He stands up again. I light a cigarette and stop asking him questions. He says something before I finish and can kind of talk to me, but apparently he didn't really remember it.

"Enjoy the ride?"

"I don't really know."

We discuss whether I should hit it now or not. He's still pretty twisted, but very eager for me to join him hallucinating. I decide it might be dangerous, but before his mind's straight again I figure it can't be that dangerous, prep a bowl and hit it.

I burn my finger. I set the pipe down although a good deal of salvia is still burning. The world is shimmering. Then... I don't really remember. I can't remember if I fell straight into the first of hallucination or if there was a moment of total oblivion in between. I guess I wouldn't remember a moment of total oblivion anyway, that's the point. Then I recoil from it. My consciousness is screaming, flailing to get back, and it starts literally tracing my identity. JASON JASON JASON JASON JASON, and my mind is actually tracing my body, starting at the head, jaggedly outlining me and at each jag another mental shape of myself blasts up. My consciousness has been ejected from my life and is now tracing my identity as it physically outlines my body, and this is it, this is the end, not dying, far far stranger than any idea of dying but now some sort of hell I'm reeling from where my identity is recalled. I hit my neck -- and there's Jamie. He says something sinister. I'm expecting to get to the my shoulder. Everybody else in my life is going to show up as points on the outline of my body. Waterloo Park is where my life came to an end and now I'm going to move through it in reverse, re-tracing my past.

When that didn't happen I still wasn't entirely sure the ordeal was over. Such bizarre circumstances -- Jamie had called me to do salvia after work, just the 2 of us. We go to the park and he walks me to the end. Jamie, a friend I don't know too well, don't talk to that much, suddenly he's the agent of this cosmic trick.

But no. No. He's just Jamie. I'm... in this park. Drug. RIGHT! Salvia! I'll straighten out in a few minutes. The world is still shimmering. The shadows are actual empty abysses. There's a streetlight behind a tree creating orange and black patterns on the grass. Hours later I realized it was that pattern my eyes saw when my consciousness was tracing the physical outline of my head, and it was my head turning to see Jamie that convinced me I'd reached my neck.

Whoa. I can talk now. Things are re-assembling. I remember what my name is. I remember how I got here, my job. Jamie says he's going to walk over there to check out the trees.

"Wait!"

"What?"

"One second." I'm not ready to be alone yet.

I sit down and space out. I can see the brightly lit towers of uptown Waterloo, with a low-lying moon right above them, and the lake in the park in between. It's very beautiful.

I turn around. Jamie's gone. FUCK! He wasn't real.

"Jamie!!!"

"What?"

"Where did you go?"

"To check out these trees, I told you."

"Oh. Shit."

He comes back. We smoke a cigarette. Chill out a bit. I'm still not entirely aware of space-time. The universe is great. A few people and places flash through my head -- I have these. They exist. It's wonderful. And I can do anything. There's no reason or limitation, the world is mine to do anything in. I can scorch the universe with my presence.

2 year anniversary

Wow. So I just noticed that as of 5 days ago, Sex Coffee Poetry has been around for 2 years. May 10, 2006. Holy shit.

Since it's an anniversary, how about a return to (intended, but never really actual) form. Here's a poem from my chap-book, The Queen and the Kaiser. (By the way, the actual poem the Queen and the Kaiser, for which the chapbook takes its name, is getting published by Soliloquies this fall).

LSD in the Village

“O squat piss-churner by the bridge were't not for your familiar Canuckian brand or your noen re-assurances of unAmerican culture you'd seem a Molochian bowel spewing poison into the mouths of mortal millions!”

I screamed at the Molson factory.

I filled Mike's apartment's dull sockets with Beat-Romantic Kitchener eyes

and saw mad prodigies of electrified paper lay down their abundant visions on the walls in pastel,

illuminations vomited from menace of melted liquid unbroken 14 hour consciousness.

“Why the fuck did you make me read this at a time like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Quote: 'LSD is a stupid drug. Terrible things happen when you lose control of yourself, like throwing yourself out of a window.'”

“Oh Bill Burroughs, you bastard. He's out to sabotage us.”

I didn't like that I believed that statement,

so I sat still smoking for 3 hours to take the edge off.

There were no revelations,

no spiritual ecstasies,

no Fear freak-outs.

The Molson factory was no Coit Tower,

Ile-Helene no Alcatraz,

Jacques Cartier no Golden Gate,

and I no Gregory Corso.

Super Delegates, Stupid People

Super-delegates.

Why does the U.S. have them?

Because some people still think Barack Obama is a Muslim.

When I first found out about the whole super-delegate thing, I was shocked, appalled that America's flouting of "democracy" could be so blatant (I mean, we all know the whole thing's a sham anyway, but I didn't know it was so obvious).

But there's a pretty good reason for them.

"Think of the stupidest person you know. Half of the world is half as smart as they are."

People are dumb. They really shouldn't be allowed to make their own decisions. Giving them political power is probably a bad idea. Appealing to the mainstream makes politics dumber.

In an ideal world, stupid people would be educated and enlightened, and democracy would flourish and civilization would prosper into a grandeur humanity had never before known.

Instead? Super-delegates. Or the parliament. But y'know, who cares?

Ciao, Montreal, nice to meet you.

I'm back in Kitchener. I'm still adapting to widespread ugliness, the absence of deps on every block, and now old friends. Need to get back into old rhythms, or new rhythms with old people. And I need to get back into the rhythm of this town, which is a lot slower, less colourful, and uncivil (the proof of Montreal's civility is the way people will line up on the sidewalk for the bus).

Victoria Street is the weirdest street, and walking down it last night pretty much clinched Society of the Spectacle for me. Guy Debord's all like: "The world isn't real any more! It's turned into a spectacle, or an image, that propagates itself and people spend their lives producing and contemplating the spectacle." Victoria street, from downtown to my house, is one long strip of fast food joints, auto shops, and non-classified drive-by commercial crap and all the signs involved. You don't walk down Victoria. There's a reason there's no sidewalk. You drive down it. Driving down it, the street isn't a real place, it's just passing through advertisement, and if you stop it's to buy something, and you buy it in a manufactured atmosphere, half-utilitarian half-physical-manifestation-of-a-T.V.-ad. The car isolates you from the physical space, and so on a long highly trafficked strip there are still things, places people go, people working and eating and buying, but it's all boiled down to base function.

I can't wait for gas to hit $3 a litre. COME ON DEATH OF SUBURBIA!!!

Don't get me wrong, the automobile is an incredible thing, but it separated time from space, which should be correlative things, time being movement through space, but thanks to humans creating speed with technical things, time became more relevant and space less relevant to human life.

Rigodon dance

I just bought Down with Rappers by Common Unity, which you should all go buy if you live in Montreal. It's on the shelf at HMV!

I tried to write a rap once, about Kitchener. It was a total flop. McGimpsey suggested I make it true to the setting. The perfect example of a successful rap song about Unimpressive City, Canada, is Rigodon dance, on Down with Rappers. It's 3 francophones from Quebec City rapping in English about being from Quebec City, and they presently live in Montreal. Here's some lyrics:

"I'm from Quebec City where the cold hits you like a lead pipe,
I hold my cigarette steady ready for the frost bite,
I got my tuque and pair of gloves,
???????? snare drums to tell you where we come from,
the morning's so rough I brace the ice on the concrete to try and warm up,
and mass amounts of slush get splashed on my back
I'll be back in a rush to get past this breeze that'll freeze my ass,
Waiting for June 24 when we smoke mad spliffs
and get high as a kite on Jean-Baptiste."

"Now stomp your feet and clap your hands, everybody get ready for the Rigodon dance,
everybody! everybody! everybody get ready for the Rigodon dance!"