Sex Coffee Poetry

Punditing

2008-09-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

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

Short story

2008-07-30T19:48:00.001-07:00

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.

---

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!

2008-06-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-14T23:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-14T10:34:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-04-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

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!"

PBR Punk

2008-04-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

"You try keepin' it real, but you should try keepin' it RIGHT."

I was at this shindig in somebody's new apartment yesterday. My case of PBR (I have a hard time saying that with a straight face, but it's a cheap and tasty beer regardless) was sitting on the floor somewhere next to me (there was no furniture in this new apartment). There was this fellow sitting next to me. He seemed pretty drunk, as he'd just gone on telling me I needed to grow my goatee back to its fullest because he, unfortunate guy, can't grow any facial hair (face smooth as unskinned chicken flesh). He'd also just run out of beer. I'm talking to someone to my left, when he reaches into my beer case.

Animal instinct kicks in. You know the way a cat or other predatory animal will suddenly jolt into stillness and mark its prey out of the corner of its eye? The offending hand retreats, empty.

He then asks, "Hey man, mind if I have a beer?"

"All you have to do is ask, friend." Smirk.

To derive from Cypress Hill: This is 2008! Y'all need to learn some beer etiquette!

Motherfucker you're in college! You want to punk beer? Get back to high school.

Get your mind right.

Get your mind right

2008-04-16T22:28:00.000-07:00

A year or 2 ago I used to be one of those assholes who'd say shit like "I hate money." I wound up saying this to a drunk Newfie on King St. one day, and he then challenged me to back up my words by giving him all of my money. I didn't, of course, and ever since then I've realized, No, I don't actually hate money. Not only is money not the real problem (currently reading Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord), but I don't hate it. I quite like having it, actually. Loving it is too far, but it's a nice thing to have. Wise man, that drunken Newfie.

The point? When you've decided to take a stance on something, think it through just one more time to see if you're willing to back them up. If you still think the same thing, go talk to a drunken Newfie. If you can't do what he suggests, it's time to get your mind right.

poetry

2008-04-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

Life in every city is basically the same, but every city's got it's own feel. I'm thinking like Harlem Nocturne, Duke Ellington, you know? And I've wanted to write something about Montreal for a long time, but every time I see something written about Montreal by somebody who's just moved here, like myself, I think it's weak, trite, and artificial. So I've been putting it off. But here goes, a poem about my Montreal, improvised, b/c I'm feeling improvised poetry right now.

Montreal is like Washington Square Park, only French, and there's less narcs,
Montreal is like Henry Miller's life, with coke,
Montreal is like LSD in a 1 and a half under the Jacques Cartier bridge,
Montreal is like getting in a cab playing Davis driving past Lafontaine at 4 in the morning,
like getting kicked out of a bar for getting it on on the dance floor,
like adding an extra swing to your swagger
like smoking your own hand-rolleds 'cause that's the thing to do,
like gentrifying a neighbourhood by lighting the sidewalk with red,
like going off on a rant when you're so high you can't remember how you started
like puddles on a sidewalk
like St Michael's dome in the orange St-Viateur night
like Paris with English and half the assholes,
like vomit on the metro and crusty brown ice in april
like drinking Fin du Monde instead of Olde E when you're 14
like living in another country without ever having to learn the language
like getting conned out of $10 by a Quebecker at the Toronto bus terminal who "needs it go pick up his bag from the police station" which, he swears, is stuffed full of cartons of your favourite brand of cigarettes!
like if the Pope ever got into urban planning
like believing in magic again and then figuring out the magician's tricks
like going to his shows and cheering him on anyway
like hopping a turnstile without the guy in the stand really caring
or like the hip of a UdeM girl in 90s neon pink pants on the blue line, and how you'd really like to run your hand down it.

---

I am going to continue with this poem, maybe once I'm done writing this paper.

so some drunk frat asshole tried to fight me on ste-catherine's

2008-03-21T23:12:00.001-07:00

Drunk Fat Boy: [to drunk frat fellows] "I've been looking for a fight all week."

Peaceful beatnik walks past.

DFB: [to peaceful beatnik] What the fuck, man? Wanna go?

PB: Fuck off.

Peaceful beatnik continues his way down Ste-Catherine street. DFB follows, arms held like a gorilla.

DFB: What's that? Motherfucker let's go. Why you walkin' away?

PB: 'cause I don't want to fight you.

DFB: What are you a pussy?

PB: You just walk around looking for a fight? Fuck off.

DFB: Pussy, let's go.

PB: [points to the police cruiser] You wanna fight in front of a cruiser?

DFB: What the fuck. You pussy.

PB: Look, you're a dumbass.

DFB: What? Fuck you.

DFB's Friend: PUSSY!

PB: Fuck you too.

DFB's intelligent Friend: Yo what're you doing?

DFB: PUSSY!

DFB realizes his friends no longer think fighting the first guy to come along is cool. DFB turns around yelling "FUCK YOU!"

Why you wanna fight? 'cause your mind's not right.
Learn to keep your thoughts tight
and lose your ways of spite,
you're the reason women fear the night
you'll never know the heights
where fly the kites
of those who accept life's light.

Get off my streets, get out of my city, get off my fuckin' planet.
I try to preach peace and you're just a piece of shit.
I mean it when I say I'm out with "Peace."

Radical Vulvas

2008-03-09T00:14:00.000-08:00

Tonight I went to this thing called the Radical Vulvas. The first few paragraphs of this Gazette article give the low-down, the rest is some background on historical feminism and where it stands today. Basically it was this art show (music, poetry, monologues, story-sharing)/discussion forum for, well I guess feminism, but it seemed to reach a bit beyond that (shout-out to Jonathon who doesn't read this blog but did a great piece about looking for his mother). I was a little bit ill-at-ease, b/c a) I'm usually just ill-at-ease with large unknown groups, and b) feminist art forum! Gender issues are unfamiliar grounds for me -- I don't know what to say, I don't know what to contribute.

Let me give you some background as well. My favourite book? Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller writes about scrounging for food and laying every gash he can find in Paris. Latest favourite movie? Breathless - J.P. Belmondo slaps Jean seberg's ass more times than I can count. He was a misogynist, but it was an innocent misogyny. It was natural behaviour, and the character was genuinely love-struck and died because he stuck around Paris too long trying to convince the girl to run away to Rome with him. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Teresa and Tomas -- Tomas is a chronic philanderer, but for him, "making love to a woman and sleeping together are two different things." He fucked around, but Teresa was the only woman he would ever sleep with, literally, sleeping in the same bed. These are all things I admire and sympathize with and are unquestionably formative on my conceptions. Not to mention, you're a philistine to call Miller, Godard, and Kundera dumb men.

So the Radical Vulvas was something very different from my usual cultural tastes.

One thing that struck me was that by the end of the night this thing called "safety" become the theme. People were making remarks about how safe they felt there, in the sweaty-hot crowded loft on the east side of the Plateau, and it struck me for the very first time that there are places where women don't feel as safe as I do. This had never occurred to me. I mean, there's the obvious -- I can walk through downtown Kitchener at night without a second thought, but most of the girls I went to high school with (it was a downtown high school) wouldn't even consider it w/out a guy or a large group. But that's a blatant physical danger. I don't quite know what was meant when "safety" came up at the Radical Vulvas. An emotional safety? Psychological safety?

Besides that, I left the Radical Vulvas thinking, and thinking big heavy thoughts that I can't figure out yet. It was a challenging night.

Someone told a story about harvesting wheat in the B.C. interior, there were about 3-4 men and a lot of women. They were doing it with shitty tools but the women started singing and enjoying themselves, when the men got impatient and went to get lawnmowers and weedcutters which were too loud for them to sing. When I heard this I just thought, "You're out to cut wheat! So go cut wheat! That's no time for singing!" But men are genetically designed to be efficient. Millions of years of hunting down things with spears, with the alternative of you and all your family starving to death, has lead to an efficient mindset.

I still don't know how I feel about the whole thing. I toyed with the idea of the masculine side of the story -- half-assed Freudian ideas about mothers, male dependency on female love which leads to anxiety (dependencies cause anxieties) which leads to a need to control, etc. etc.

Fuck it. Who knows? I'm going to bed.

what gets you up in the morning?

2008-03-02T17:19:00.000-08:00

Why do you get up in the morning? or afternoon, evening, or whenever it is you face the world? What's your motivation?

I want to know, because what you wake up for is what you're living for. The shit you fill your day with is just the shit you fill your day with, but what forces you to shake the sleep from your eyes?

For me, it's the day's first coffee and cigarette. Class determines what time I'm setting that alarm for or whether I'm setting it at all, but it's the promise of coffee and cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch anyone?) that lure me out of bed.

Sometimes what gets me out of bed is some poetry thing. But it's occasional. I wish it were more frequent.

There's a lot of good reasons to wake up. I've had a lot of good reasons to wake up. I've woken up to see what city I'm in now, I've woken up just to stare at "mon amour" (whoever that was at the time), I've woken up to go get high with my friends. That's a life worth living. Waking up to drink coffee isn't a particularly good one, and lately I've been in the dumps 'cause Tim Hortons and Big Tobacco are the highlights of my day.

@ least I'm not working at arby's

loonie for your thoughts

2008-02-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

Oh shit! I've scotched the dope! Never put your grass in the bedside table next to the radiator!

And now the moon's gone!

What's happening around here???

Narcissism -- bad?

2008-02-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

I definitely should not be writing a blog post, but here I am anyway, procrastinating from doing this research for a film paper. Not that it's an uninteresting topic: comparing Godard's and A bout de souffle and Bande a part, both two of my new favourite movies, but I'm laaaazy, lazzy, lazarus, late. And tired.

First I've got some pimping to do. Tomas McManus is up to some interesting stuff, which has lately given me some motivation to get my hustle on, so check out his MySpace. Also, my man Dan is getting himself into the rap game, so go check out some of ravenOVERwater's YouTube videos. And I've recently gotten myself in way over my head with the THROW Collective, and will be hitting the open mic preceding the next slam at Le Cagibi at 8 p.m. on February 16th (the day before my birthday!). Trust me, it'll be FLY. I'm terrified of just performing on the same night as some of the people who're going to be bringing it to the stage that night. Art's happening all around me!

I've got in my mind another rant for you folks. Having spent way too many nights up late reading Vice magazine online, I've been thinking about the ruling value of the era: narcissism. Hipsters, gangsters, geeks, neo-cons, suburbanites, urbanites, and all but like one hippy I've ever met -- the whole damn nation. Now I'm just speculating off my ass, but I think it's a value that comes from sources nefarious and benevolent. The biggest contributor is probably our culture's rampant commercialism, but I don't think we should overlook those show-and-tell kindergarten curriculum / countercultural beat-hippy-punk rock calls for individualism. It does very little to create genuine individualism so much as people who are obsessed with being individual themselves. There's also our centuries-old abandonment of spirituality, disintegration of traditional family structures, and total disillusionment with the state and consequently our disregard for civic or societal duty.

The only thing left in the world to care about is Number 1 -- ME!

And is this a bad thing?

As far as the deep integration of commercialism in that narcissism is concerned, yes, but I think only because commercialism is mass-production by nature. I think there is a lot to be said for fashion as a statement of individuality. Fashion is its own artform on various levels, primarily in terms of the designers making clothes, but on the consumer's side as well, putting together a style out of the materials designers provide is an artistic endeavor in its own right, kinda like magnetic poetry. It takes an eye for what looks aesthetically pleasing, and there's an intended effect which must be negotiated with the actual effects of what you put together. Also consider the fact of cultural products: the music you listen to, the books and poetry you read, the movies and TV shows you like, contribute to your personal make-up. A person is nothing but what s/he acquires in life, an emptiness filled with stuff. My point: materialism is not to be disregarded in the idea of individualism, though the present state of it is non-ideal.

Supreme mathematics say: number 7 is god, and you are your own god. Narcissistic enough? Doubtless, but this is a key both to a rejuvenated spirituality and self-actualization. You are your own god, which means you're the master and maker of your own universe, you're responsible for your fate. I'd argue narcissism is inextricable, on some level, from self-empowerment.

And our selfish motivations do not necessarily mean self-absorption -- this leads to stagnation and so decay. But the goal of acquisition of knowledge and experience is to learn about ourselves and develop ourselves, and the goal of self-actualization is imprinting yourself on the world. It's a give-take, but it's all about you.

a day in the life!

2008-01-09T21:20:00.000-08:00

Bought 8 Diagrams, new Wu-tang joint. Went to CASE poetry reading at Grumpy's. Read latest version of the Queen and the Kaiser for a free beer and mardi gras beads (I'll show you my literary tits if I'm drunk). Met some guy I'd met at a house party near Snowdon. Got him high? Blond bitter poet chick eying me down... several times? Listened to 8 Diagrams. Some of the songs' choruses subtract a lot from the songs, but the verses are fresh. Straight Wu one way or another.

New Years resolutions

2008-01-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

New Years resolutions:

- take things less seriously
- slam poetry
- get fresha

Saul Williams

2007-12-30T01:18:00.001-08:00

That last post kind of pigeon-holed Saul Williams, not something I'd want to do to anyone who hadn't heard of him.

Coded Language is the best English poem I've read / heard since Howl, and might even be better, infused as it is with the type of spirituality in poetry you get with Rumi. It's visionary. Listen to this until you get every word, and they come quick.

tonight, who knows what I'm writing about?

2007-12-30T00:14:00.001-08:00

The pursuit of efficiency will turn us all into insects.

First, we behave like them. Then, certain aspects of our bodies become useless as we cease to use them, specializing into a smaller number of tasks. We lose unnecessary parts and grow new parts that are more efficient. Eventually inefficiency isn't an option, because of physical limitation. Insects are just more highly evolved.

Incidentally, pheromones are just one of a bee's means of communication, using smell, we just use sight and sound more dominantly. The only real difference in communication between humans and insects, or any other creature for that matter, is we can talk to ourselves, and do it all the time. We are possessed, by something. A voice. Words.

Words came into possession when we became so vain we spoke to ourselves (thinking), and that was when humanity became separated from natural order.

I was going to write something about Saul Williams, and this video for Amethyst Rock. Saul Williams is a brilliant poet, and this poem is a powerful perspective on white American culture
from a poet of the black nationalist movement, a position that could be quickly be compared to Mayakovsky or fuck, yes, W.B. Yeats that ivory-towered-romantic, and I'd put Williams above what I've read of either of them. White America is the object of Williams' anger, which only makes him sharper. I'd like to point out the lines:

"our influence on them is the reflection they see when they look into their minstrel mirror and talk about their culture / their existence is that of a schizophrenic vulture"

I'm thinking he means white America defines itself not in terms of what is white America but was it NOT black America, a schizophrenic, that is, not whole, a split mind, no longer capable of defining itself but constantly set in opposition to the world around them. Never in harmony with it. Possibly a reason why America seems like such a hostile place. The strongest, most living culture white America has immediate interaction with is black American culture, and so, culturally, it seeks to define itself in terms of what it is not, and it is not black America. White flight?

Also, for about a century or more, and earnestly starting in the 40s, this idea of cool or hip (defined always in opposition to conventional white American culture) among white Americans has been closeness to black influence, being diluted (and maybe regenerated several times amongst certain sub-cultures) from hepcats to hipsters and Beats and the wake of subcultures you could track up to know, and I think rap and hip hop may have started the cycle jazz did a century ago.

Didn't this post start off as a rant about insect nightmares?

Christmas Eve downtown Kitchener

2007-12-28T23:09:00.000-08:00

I wonder if being schizophrenic would be as much of a problem if more people knew how to be compassionate to strangers.

On Christmas Eve I wound up helping out this (probably) schizophrenic woman. I was walking downtown, Kitchener, with Oleg, around 10 in the evening. As we neared the YWCA and the church attached to it on Frederick St., we noticed this woman walking in the middle of the road carrying her coat. She kept edging toward and away from the sidewalk. As we passed she hesitated and asked us, totally sketched out, "Do you hear dogs barking?" She is clearly hallucinating something fierce. We tell her no, ask if she needs any help. She refuses, doing her best to act "like normal people" as she walks away in the middle of the street, carrying her coat in the dead of winter. I piece it together pretty quickly she's either tripping on a psychedelic or schizophrenic, and I now figure the latter. We insist on helping her, and she asks our names.

"Jason."

"Oleg."

"Oleg? What nationality is that?"

"Russian."

"Russian? What does your dad do?"

"Um... ah... he works at Rogers."

"Took too long to answer."

At this point I realize she probably suspects Oleg's a Soviet agent (I recently read Kaddish), as this woman's middle aged (i.e. raised in the Cold War). So I intervene and say "He's just an awkward person. Come on to the sidewalk."

"Do you want to hurt me?"

"No, we just want to help you."

I should probably paint a picture of this woman. She looked to be in her mid-forties. She was not unattractive for a middle-aged woman. Definitely a face of lost beauty. She was not your typical K-town crazy -- at least, not a life eaten by crack. At one point in the conversation we came to have, she mentioned losing all her pretty dresses, and how good she used to look.

Eventually I got her to trust me. Gave her a cigarette, got her to come onto the sidewalk, and gradually she calms down and opens up to me. She tells us about herself. She feels she's different from everyone else, not superior, just sees things too differently for other people to understand. She explained that that day she just "wanted to let God lead me, and sit in my suffering, to learn." She talked about how she used to work for a vet, and her frustration with the people in the church we were standing outside, how they just did as they were told, and didn't think about their spirituality. A woman stepped out of a taxi near us and got out with her large, vulgar family. As she passed she said, "Hi Trish." and they went into the church. Trish kept mentioning how she wanted to go into the church.

We kept talking, mostly I just tried to understand her, which wasn't actually that hard. It was exactly like talking to someone who'd had an important mushroom trip that gave them all this perspective on the world, they were pretty stock but genuine revelations, and it frustrated her that other people couldn't understand this. She mentioned how some of the people in the church got really angry when she tried to talk to them about this. And how someone had stolen her Christmas bag. She talked about how corrupt this city was, and I agreed but said there were a few good people here. She agreed and mentioned some of her best friends, her ex-boyfriend, who'd been deeply spiritual.

I pieced together that Trish had once been very attractive and pretty successful, working for a vet and all, friends, boyfriend. Then I think the schizophrenia became serious. Somehow she lost it all. She explained how the last 5 nights she'd stayed with a different man each night, and hadn't got any sleep because each one had tried to rape her. They all sounded like the crackheads and rummies you see around Dandy's Restaurant.

After a few more cigarettes and about a half hour of talking she seemed totally normal, thanked us, and walked into the church.

2007 was a bizarre year

2007-12-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

I'm no philosopher. I'm tactless. I see something and then I think about it, but thinking is only applying a logic to a seen object. If anything thinking occludes the seeing.

And by seeing I mean a surah kicked straight into your head. It's a degree of clarity. Understanding. When I think, things become redundant and obscure, and it's all mind trash, because the most I can do is spew out half-chewed versions of someone else's logic. I myself am not particularly logical.

Instead I've got a head for visions and surahs, messages straight from the unconscious or injected straight from the outside world that triggers some unconscious appeal.

Personally I'm a fan of a few of these:

- kiss me quick / world is sick sick... (urinal graffiti)
- Time passes because the leaves rustle (a haiku-like observation product of meditating on a staircase)
- I am everyone and everyone is Satan [meaning that humanity is separated from divine grace (no-consciousness) by vanity, which is not a bad thing, it just happened]

I've also been warned by the spirit-goddess of salvia to be wary of dying in the cold on a psychedelic, and had innumerable things revealed such as "art should be spontaneous," the value of irresponsibility, and the all-important one, the one that happened December 28, 2006, the one that kick-started all this quacked voodoo crap, the simple understanding that the world is made out of beautiful stuff. But they're more personal.

These are the things that stick. They're indelible. They don't take thinking.

hyphy in the k-hole

2007-12-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

So, some night in your life, everyone just go round up about 10-15 friends and friends-of-friends, a few cars, a ton of joints, and go party in an abandoned parking lot, make the most of it. It's wicked. Listen to some Mac Dre if you need any inspiration. Pop a lot of e if you want to be authentic hyphy.

Hunter S. Thompson literary theory

2007-12-12T01:22:00.001-08:00

Hunter S. Thompson turned the practice of journalism into a complex post-modern art form, called Gonzo journalism. Rather than an enigmatic narrator reporting details and giving some degree of the connections it made between those details, Thompson told the story of him getting the story. It's really twice-detached journalism, art that shows the journalist getting the story, providing a source for the journalist's bias and mindframe. And he was not entirely accurate in reporting himself, he was an artist in the vein of Blaise Cendrars, to create the “truth” moreso than give the “facts,” by which I think Thompson meant an artistic truth, probably about breaking down the structure of journalism. If nothing else he awakens people to the fact that there is a story about the making of every news article, which affects how it's made, because it affects its author.

Now, whether he knew he was doing this or he was just drug-addled and doing it all spontaneously and letting this happen I won't ever know, I never knew him, only saw his IMAGE which was impossibly tied up with his art, which cast him as a drug-fiend of that excess.

He probably did enough drugs to make himself think like that.

The Gonzo articles expose the inherent flaw of contemporary journalism and its desire for objectivity: there's a story behind the reporting of every story. Who reports that? Thompson aestheticized it from his seat as an artist, who didn't need the same standards of “fact-finding” as the journalist.

Reporters just report things happening from a certain perspective. Journalists are paid to make connections for us.

Topi Antelopes

2007-11-29T19:43:00.000-08:00

Did your aunts, uncles, and grandparents ever make jokes about you being so cute you must have to beat girls away with a stick?

They didn't know about topi antelopes.

Poem: Letter to Kevin Baldridge

2007-11-26T20:59:00.000-08:00

Letter to Kevin Baldridge

If there are no chains

that does not mean there are no slaves.

Dell builds prisons

and prisons build Dells

and prisons must be filled

so the poor get shoved into projects

where there are no jobs,

there is no money,

only need.

A few steal

or push what no one will,

but someone wrote on a piece of paper,

“Theft is illegal, and so is selling crack.”

So armed toughs take away men and women

who tried not to starve

and then they get paid 20 cents an hour

to make computers.

New York City is collapsing, but

God lives above Cincinatti,

above rats and roaches

and injections and repossessions.

There is poverty in Cincinatti,

but there is also Kevin Baldridge,

who loves Godzilla, hates Cincinatti,

knew Grandmaster Flash back his Bronx days,

and dreams of dinosaur sandwiches

because he's hungry and his fridge is empty.

He hangs out at the Greyhound terminal,

drunk and bumming change to get home.

He scraps with tweakers,

befriends backpackers,

wants to move to Canada or California,

where a young white guy will, happily,

chat with a 40 year old black man like himself,

which he couldn't believe.

He told me what he thought about Hilary and Obama,

that he didn't care who won,

as long as one of them did.

Then he pointed up at the toxic-orange clouds

against a backdrop of 5 a.m. violet,

and said only God's hand could have made that.

I write him a letter:

Dear Kevin,

Don't bet on Hilary, Obama, or God.

They're skin husks.

America needs laughter, and sadness,

in all its bus terminal parking lots.

If anyone in America is alive, it's you.

So give muscle to the mannekins,

blood to the gasoline-veined.

Remove their exoskeletons and put their bones back inside.

Let their skulls show when they're dead and brainless,

not whiel they can still shout out in ecstasy,

which they can, even if they don't.

But watch out for the Ohio state prison guard.

He also knows the terminal at 5 a.m.,

and he's always had his eye on you.

He's a dog-catcher and a slave-master

and a Dell drone.

He knows not what he does,

and maybe it's best not to tell him.

Better to expose him,

and let him atrophy,

with no one willing to replace him.

Yours.

Midnight in Montreal

2007-11-20T22:18:00.000-08:00

Today has been a fantastic day.

I woke up 14:00 to get to my class at 14:35. I went to sleep at 7 because I spent a couple of hours talking to Mia, which reminded me that the air-headed bitch I dumped a month ago and who thinks I'm a jackass doesn't matter in the least, that in fact, many of the people I dislike don't matter in the least, because in my worldview, their opinions and their thoughts are irrelevant and worth nil, and that there are people in the world who DO matter, and who are worth something. And it's for them that the nils need not be worried about.

So then class happened. Afterward, I went to Grumpy's Bar, this basement joint on Bishop St. that does Open Mic, poetry, music, comedy every Tuesday, heard some mediocre to really good poetry, heard a poem about me that involved burning my beret on an effigy of myself written by a fellow aspiring writer who I respect, for the aforementioned air-head (I was flattered, it was a pretty good poem). Then, around 10, this girl got on stage, blonde, American Apparel, hadn't thought much of her at first except that she was really good looking, and delivered a MIND-ZAPPING "Yeah I just fucking did that shit and I KNOW it's awesome" 5 minute spoken word poem that ended that set.

I and the aforementioned aspiring poet then left, my mind still blown, because I had to work on an essay about Ezra Pound (which I still have to do). I get home, and realize I have to call my mother, and it's already 23:30. So as I'm walking to a payphone on Ste-Cat's, this French guy approaches me, asks me if I'll work for him for an hour tonight, $25. I tell him I'm busy, but then he explains he's a contractor, and I agree to work for him tomorrow, just for a few hours. He shows me the place he's working on, RIGHT across from my dorm, and the guy's pretty cool, this incredibly shady middle-aged lecherous chilled out Frenchman, so I agree to do an hour's work for him right there. He tells me he needs good, respectable-looking guys who won't steal his shit, who'll keep an eye on his other employees, and who will look good for his customers (he doesn't take customers who own houses under a half-million dollars).

So now I have a hang-out for poetry readings on Tuesday nights, right next to where I go to class and live, and a job that pays $15/hour during the day and $25/hour at night, cementing a basement.

America: You are not at war with Mexico

2007-11-09T00:28:00.000-08:00

Vet knifes down Mexican Flag.

I got this off the blog the Cleveland Brawler, which I won't link to because although the author is a good writer, he likes Palahniuk and he's a patriotic American. Patriotism is not an admirable value. People think it is because people say it is, and people say it is because they said it was so they could wage war against Napoleon.

America: YOU ARE NOT AT WAR WITH MEXICO.

People come to America for a better life (they should have gone elsewhere). They will not destroy your country. Your country is destroying you.

Chemistry and history

2007-11-04T23:37:00.000-08:00

"Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition." Milan Kundera.

There is no such thing as Yeats' gyres. There is no such thing as Eternal Return. This is because of entropy, a basic force in chemistry. When entropy is greater than enthalpy (energy invested into bonds between atoms to make molecules, i.e. heat) bonds break and molecules break down into atoms.

"For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the acolytes said, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' She replied, 'I want to die.'" - The Satyricon, also the epigraph to The Waste Land.

A new standard in avant-garde rap

2007-11-03T22:31:00.000-07:00

Situation, Buck 65, produced by Skratch Bastid.

BUY IT!!! DOWNLOAD IT!!! LISTEN!!!

It's entirely about the year 1957. Beatniks, bums, 50s cops, pornographers, and obscenity trials. What more can you ask for?

The name of the album comes from SI, Situationist International, a strange European revolutionary avant-garde art Marxist group that began in Italy in 1957 and was most active in the 60s, with its roots in Surrealism and Lettrism, and a hand in psychogeography.

Down in Petit Bourgogne

2007-10-29T12:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday night I took a stroll through LBG - Little Burgundy, that place everyone tells you to avoid in Montreal, where most of the crime is. LBG's a pretty small area downhill from the Ste-Cat's escarpment, from about St-Antoine down to the Lachine Canal, from Atwater east to around Guy or so. It's a working-class, mostly black community, and I've been told to avoid it.

Now, I went between 10-11 p.m. -- I suppose it's not the peak time for violent crime, and I could easily seeing LBG being a bit more intimidating between 3 and 4 a.m. (right after last call) -- but man, if your town's sketchy area isn't sketchy at LEAST by sundown, you've got shit pretty good. Most of the businesses, except for a couple of Deps, are closed up by 6, so there's not a whole lot going on. It wasn't totally deserted by 11, mostly just people making their ways home or headed up the hill to Ste-Cat's, people going about their business whatever-that-may-be. I didn't encounter a single panhandler or drug dealer, and most people just kept to themselves except for one guy on Guy and St-Antoine who asked for directions to a dep.

It's not the friendliest or liveliest district around, nor is it the ugliest. It consists of low-rise apartment buildings and a lot of older townhouses, a bit run-down. There was only one factory in the midst of it, and several parks - including one I really like during the daytime, on Vinet - which also has a VERY impressive Catholic church and another, lesser-so church, which I think is either Anglican or Presbyterian.

The only incident was once a 10-year old black child from a doorway screamed at us in French, and the only word we could make it was "Tabernac!" in a lengthy tirade.

Personally, I find Kitchener's "wrong side of the tracks," around Victoria, Ahrens, and Weber Streets, a lot more intimidating than Little Burgundy, and don't get me started on the time I stayed in the Tenderloin for a week (best summed by the construction worker at 2 a.m. who said to me, as we entered from Market Street, "Welcome to Hell.").

Verdict on Little Burgundy: wouldn't wander down there out of boredom, but I've seen worse in my little hometown of 200 000.

Next seedy district to explore: Griffintown, then Point St-Charles.

Coffee and Cold Pizza

2007-10-28T23:27:00.000-07:00

Did you notice the name change?

It's an experiment.

I'm now writing to you from the streets of Upper Burgundy (l'Haut Bourgogne).

Here's some lines:

New York City is collapsing

“Well, what do you think about Iran?”

a cab-driver asks while I keep my eyes on the fare.

I'm jostled by shouting in mid-town delis

and the people who exchange short words with money.

There are phone calls, faxes, e-mails,

but only for centipedes in blazers to strike contracts, settle mergers

and operate the cogs that churn out dollars

that in turn are spent against time

to prop up the skyline that's crashing

even as the dividend cockroaches copulate in their towertops.

And I see that the people are still neurotic,

pushing and dealing just to score for themselves – a meal, a bed, a lay

which they have to buy from a whore

because valentines will just litter the pavement.

There is only cholera in their shorn and bloody bodies.

There is nothing in New York except Wall Street

Times Square

and Rockefeller Center.

Word Virus

2007-10-26T15:09:00.001-07:00

Language is in a state of constant decay, (Take Latin, itself a degradation of earlier Indo-European languages, which had very few abstract nouns in its peak of use, but as time passed and it became a Christian language it got looser and cruder and more abstractions were added, and then German came into it and you're left with modern French, which is only mildly more expressive and accurate than modern English) because of the exponential increase of WORDS.

It's like when you 1st start a junk habit, you REALLY get a kick out of a shot, but then you get addicted and then you need more to get the same kick, which turns into an oilburner and each hit does less so you need MORE. The algebra of need.

Soon, as with our oxygen habit, we won't get any kick but we'll need words just to live. Talking will be like breathing. Glossolalia. None of these words will have any meaning, it will just be constant noise. Mute = dead.

I'm afraid of a cold-turkey withdrawal. Instead I'll take the paregoric.

-----------------------------

The Waste Land opens with a line from The Satyricon about Sibyl, a woman who asked Apollo for eternal life but not eternal youth, leaving her in a state of eternal decay. She shrank to a size where she could be put into a jar, and when asked what her one wish was, she said, "To die." But she couldn't, and this is the Waste Land. Eliot does not fear the destruction of our culture, because in death lies regeneration (The Fisher King). He fears eternal decay.

-------------------------------

"Cold silence has a tendency to atrophy any sense of compassion between supposed brothers, between supposed lovers."

Rants on modernism (oh god)

2007-10-22T19:47:00.001-07:00

I'd like to refute the claim that the Modernists failed to affect any change in the world -- certainly none of them succeeded in implementing the structures they desired, but as a group their actions did change, or at least correlate with those changes, the world significantly. WWII was the pivotal moment separating the twentieth century, with modernism before it and so-called post-modernism afterward. Modernism, I think, if not modernist art then modernist thought, was the build up to World War 2, especially if we look at the model Pound wanted.

Pound wanted an age of epics. He looked back on antiquity, he wanted "men of action" who would cause change in the world. Mussolini was his ideal man of action, a figure in real world politics who looked like a model for rejuvenating the world (from Pound's perspective). And he got the age of epics he wanted.

World War 2 was the Trojan Wars of the A.D. era. Look at it from a poetic perspective, beginning with a man trying to revive the Roman Empire, who was then usurped in significance by the Neroic leader of a more powerful nation, whose intent was to make his dominion a paradise for his pure, flawless race. In doing so he murdered millions and millions of people, as he took his nation to war against the most powerful forces in the world, aligned with Mussolini and the Emperor of Japan -- a figurehead of classical tradition and authority.

The Soviet Union, in a war deserving of its own Iliad, turned the tide of war in a Lord of the Rings-esque drama that pushed the front from the gates of Moscow to Berlin, America and Britain rained fire and brimstone on a city from the sky in an Apocalyptic display, while on the other side of the world America reversed the progress of the Japanese Empire, and at the very end committed the single most destructive human act - NOVA on a nation.

If that is not an epic, in the most infernal and horrifying way, I don't know what is.

What followed was the rise of the most successful control systems since the Mayans. There was a contest, really, to see who had the better control system, America of the Soviet Union, but it was a contest between a force that operated through control of the masses and a single new order in the world, versus a force that operated through control of each individual and profited from chaos in the world. America won because of its entropic nature.

The current dominant world system, the system of America, is corporatocracy, and operates by individual rather than mass control. It atomizes its (first-class) citizens into ivory towers, inspiring apathy and negating their ability to create change.

They are neutralizing potential agents of change.

There is only one system now, but out of the chaos America creates in the world new agents have emerged, like Putin, Khamenei, bin Laden, and Chavez, each with their various intents and systems. China is not a new force, but a New America, spreading the current system to the East and which will probably replace America itself without integrally changing the system.

Regardless which forces win history, the only real change can be achieved from the human level up. This was what the early post-modernists realized, and focused their efforts on change at the human level, where the modernists had erred by focusing on large systemic change. Post-modernism might have been effective in the Soviet Union, but in America its focus on the individual only played into its process of atomization and isolation. What was once the best weapon against America now props the system up. It happened in the 60s, I think, when the concept of self-liberation and self-amelioration were perverted into decadence, and now the post-modern message is narcissism.

----------------------------------

At face value, Henry Miller might seem like an example of that self-servingness, but he was a hedonist, not decadent, and he espoused the surrendering of control addiction and a taking up of responsibility for oneself. He's a rough prototype for the Burroughsian ideal.

Appreciation

2007-10-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

Next time you complain about pidgins, think about this guy and shut up.

The disturbing power of science

2007-10-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

So here I am, killin' time till turkey, when I encounter this news article on the BBC, and this one in relation. At first I was shocked and more than a bit concerned for what this means in terms of precedence, but like the ethicist in the first article I thought about it more and the practicalities, and I'm still not sure exactly my opinions.

On one hand, there is the possibility that unnecessary surgery on the mentally disabled is a dangerous progression of the world's thirst for convenience. It makes caring for the subject easier. That's the point, really. Which makes the quality of life of the caregivers better, or at least prevents it from deteriorating any further. The act would be atrocious if this were all, especially considering the option of just giving caregivers more resources (which they probably they need anyway). However, there is also the fact that this will improve, or at least maintain, the quality of life of both girls. It's a practical solution. It makes things better for everyone involved.

Nevertheless, I still can't get over the horrifying idea of altering a human's biology based on their minds functioning differently from the majority. I mean, this is a pretty mind-bending issue: what exactly does "mentally disabled" mean? Is it really a lack of ability, something genuinely wrong with the person, or is this just the cloudedness of words and thinking giving me a dangerous misconception?

Ashley X, the girl in the first article, has the mental capacity of a three-month old child and is reaching puperty. Her parents want to use science to totally alter her body -- keep her biology in a permanent state of child, rather than growing through adolescence and adulthood.

Ethical issues have never been a strong point of mine, I'm not sure why I brought one up. I think it's just because I find the issue to be VERY disturbing. The power of science is terrifying. Technology can stop natural biology. Human intervention can control an organic process, which is the way we were designed by molecular language and how that program is executed. It's like if a computer program learned how to alter itself.

-------------------

On another topic altogether, on the Greyhound into Kitchener for Thanksgiving, I figured out how Kitchener came to be such a weird place. And I mean downtown Kitchener -- most of Kitchener, the suburbs where all the people and businesses are, is bland and boring and no different from suburbia anywhere, but downtown has the actual character of the city. Downtown is a very bizarre place, and the reason is because of the total failure of City Hall's lackluster gentrification programs. Downtown has been left to society's dregs, students from 2 high schools, and the counterculture. Youth, freaks, and hempies.

I'm now of the opinion that gentrification is sinister. It's the suburbification of urban areas, trading soul for safety. It makes a city's character palatable for mass-consumption, which of course robs the city of its life, not to mention it causes the further suffering of already marginalized people.

Keep City Hall out of the city.

Sundays at the Parc du Mont-Royal

2007-09-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

Recently a compatriot of mine and I smoked, together, a gram of hashish in one night. For those of you who don't know exactly what this entails, it took about 2 and a half hours of leisurely smoking in total. It only reinforced my belief that hash is a very superior substance. I find in it a sensuality lacking in pot. I think it stems from how languid it makes you. It's a fantastic, clean languish that doesn't make you feel the least bit dirty like pot might, in addition to a heightening of the senses - especially in how colours, especially coming from lights, are fuller and in perception of sounds. It's sensate and sensual.

I've also now been to Montreal's tam tams, this huge drum circle in the Parc du Mont-Royal. I do not understand it or how it happens, but it's something that doesn't need to be understood, just felt. It's a total liberation. Anything goes in the park on Sundays when that drum circle is playing. There's a man who sells mushrooms in baked goods. Smoke a joint on the hill with everybody around. Come trippin' on something fierce and just dance in the pit with kindred spirits. Feel the vibe, give the vibe. It's this basic primal genuine human contact between hundreds of individuals meeting on a level of liberation.

It contains the spirit of something. It's a lot like that wave speech in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Studying cities

2007-09-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

Looking out my window for the first time in a few days I see the product of the constant jack-hammering that has tormented me for several days: the sidewalk across the street is gone.

I would like to take this time to recommend to you all the movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It's a fantastically weird example of early German Expressionism by director Robert Weine. It has the surrealist set designs I have seen and a very twisted story. The best way of explaining the effect is Dr. Caligari was a HUGE influence on Tim Burton, i.e. Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare Before Christmas. If you dig the aesthetics of that, you'll love Dr. Caligari. It's the source.

My film class and readings on mis-en-scene have got me really thinking in terms of visual art. I found myself staring out of a window in the Library Building today marveling at the sheer quantity of frames in my field of view. There were too many to count. I wish I'd had a camera. Then I began dissecting this image, looking at its colour and composition. It was a very complex image, but really nothing more than a standard urban scene. Most mind-blowing is the fact that it's an accidental combination of man-made structures. Sky occupied only two small quarters of the whole image, framed by rooftops and a green church steeple.

I've lately been thinking about the elements of an urban environment - primarily the effects of visual and physical composition on the human dynamic, vice versa, and each on its own. There are very prominent compositional parallels between Montreal, New York, and San Francisco.

Greenwich Village, NYC:

Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco:

Rue Ste-Catherine, Montreal

I hope this comparison with photos gives you some idea of what I mean. Really just take my word for it, the three cities are very similar in their visual composition and physical dynamics (density, transportation). Because I don't own a camera my resources are really limited in demonstration, but their urban residential districts are all dense, characterful, and have some very European influences in the architecture.

There's a historical comparison between NYC and Montreal from the 70s, so there must have been some similarity, and I can see it visually, but the New York I saw was neurotic, overwhelming, and stressed-out. But that was Mid-town. Greenwich Village, Washington Square were all so much more relaxed and eccentric, and that was where there were the most visual parallels between NYC, MTL, and SF. Mid-town New York is like a hateful, amphetamine-fuelled Toronto.

And as far as modern comparisons are concerned, SF and MTL are very alike in their human dynamics. Both are more sexual. You can tell just comparing their main streets: Ste-Catherine and Market Street. Strip clubs abound on both. However, the Village has nothing on the Castro.

Insofar as these three places I've seen on a limited scale, there seems to be a correlation between composition and human dynamic.

Kentucky Fried College Student

2007-09-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

Picture this: you work in some sort of office building, possibly a call center. You're working the evening shift, 5 p.m - 2 a.m. or something like that. You're on your dinner break, eating in the park just outside your building with half a dozen of your colleagues. Across this rather small park, just on Réné-Levésque, clearly visible, are two college students, one a blonde-haired girl and the other a guy in a beret. You hear some giggling, the girl whispers something in the guy's ear, and suddenly a thick, hookah-sized cloud of smoke billows out from the guy and wafts slowly toward your table.

For the next 15 minutes, the two of them lean back and stare up at an apartment building, either fascinated or terrified.

My Friday night from one of those office workers' perspectives.

It's incredible the strange things that happen to you when you're just exploring a city while you're so high your brain has abstracted itself. St-Catherine's is overwhelming. Finally we stumble into a falafel joint, and I order a trio (I love this new term for combo). It involves some fantastic shish-taouk (with beet, something I haven't encountered in Mid-east fast-food before), a coke, and potato wedges. The man serving me asks if I want garlic on my potato wedges, and stoned and open-minded I say yes. He says, "you won't like it," doubting my white-anglo taste buds. Let me tell you. If ever you get offered some weird garlic sauce on your potato wedges, TAKE that opportunity. That man is a culinary genius.

Munchies satisfied, we continue on our way down St-Catherine, only to find a used book store open till midnight, and it's only 9:30-10. We go in and awkwardly maneuver the cramped space with other customers, when after a bit of inspection I opt to buy a book of Lorca's plays. The bookstore clerk, a 50-something French illustrator, makes a comment about Dali, making a connection with Lorca, and there we are, blazed out of our heads, in an hour long discussion with this man about Dali and the psychology of artists and music in the 60s.

Wondering just what the hell has happened we make our stunned way back to the nunnery where we live (yes, it's a nunnery. The university bought a wing of this Catholic nunnery to turn it into a student residence). The only thing my frazzled brain can deal with by that point is sleep.

The MTL-ist

2007-09-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

I'm walking down Ste-Catherine on a Friday night, returning from Farzan's home, which again was empty, when three young thugs strut up behind me. I am clearly walking too slowly for their liking. Two move to the right, one to the left.

As they pass, one on the right picks up a tune, "I like the way you walk, I like the way you-"

"Move it, move it," responds his friend on the left.

They walk on ahead.

Pot hustlers all have the same way about them. I still have no idea what, "You want some pot?" is in French, despite how many times it's been said to me.

I'm learning how to tell the French from the English. With many people it's very obvious. A French girl does not look bothered when she walks down the street, even if she is in a hurry - she always maintains an air of leisure. An English girl looks pestered or stressed. The older French women have the pall of cigarettes on their face, but it doesn't mar them. It's how they mature. French men all look more haggard and rough but still attractive. Their sense of style is more brazen and cocksure. Their eyes are all a bit sunken - cigarettes and fucking all night? They also have this look of lechery to them. It's not perverse or creepy, but I can't help but think they are all cunt-struck.

Some man hustled me a book on Vedic Yoga for a dollar last night. Rue Ste-Catherine, a.k.a. Hustlers' Row.

Today I saw some fool American in a car shouting out at passersby, right on Ste-Catherine, "Do you speak English? Excuse me, do you speak English?" Everyone was ignoring him, so I stopped and all he did was ask me for change because he had no gas money. It was a nice car. And everybody downtown speaks English, unless you're asking them if they do.

Updates on MTL

2007-08-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, the cafeteria where I can use my meal plan thing has not yet been built. I guess this is the sort of quality organization you get with a brand new residence. However, it is a pretty sweet residence. My dorm is fantastically huge, and because it's on a corner has two windows, with sporadic free Internet

I'm familiarizing myself with Montreal. My horizons of exploration have now broadened to Atwater in the west, Rene-Levesque in the south, the mountain to the north, and St. Laurent-Prince Arthur to the east. I have yet to climb the mountain.

I like this town. It's busy, but chilled-out. It's like a French San Francisco, actually. The pace is really the best part. Only a few people hurry, everyone else takes their time. Even on St.-Catherine's, which is always crowded, I can walk at a meandering pace or stumble drunkenly around. Also, no one minds if you're smoking some hash underneath some the overhang of a hotel on Cotes-de-Neiges and St.-Mathieu at night, despite the buses and pedestrian traffic. I have met a fellow hash-head from Grimsby, ON.

We were discussing the term hash-head, and how it's so much better than pot-head. Hash-heads have more class to them. They are more exotic, more matured, beyond the level of neophyte in drug culture. Baudelaire was a hash-head. It's more poetic, it's harder, and it's more serious. Their narcotic of choice, hash, is so much more enjoyable as well. It's half as harsh on a body, doesn't give you cotton-mouth, and is all-around a more pleasant experience.

No more weed! Seulement l'hashish pour moi!

If you ever encounter it, read M'hashish by Paul Bowles. It's a collection of short stories involving keif (hash) smokers in Morocco told to Bowles by this story-teller. They're modern fables and all involve keif, ending with the story-tellers recounting of his experiences as a keif-dealer. The way you smoke keif is hash and tobacco, and he dealt it at cafes. His story involves his run-ins with the French police. Picked it up in City Lights Bookstore.

My next object is to climb the mountain. Or go to a hookah bar. But first I'm to see Milo at this bar with live music tonight. Why Milo is here, I don't know. I just ran into him and his mother on St.-Catherine's. It was a weird double-take.

Lost and confused

2007-08-28T15:55:00.000-07:00

I have not been able to find the dining hall.

Starvation is now a very real and imminent threat.

Montreal

2007-08-28T10:41:00.001-07:00

I have arrived in Montreal.

There is much French. My cab driver from the train station to my dorm spoke no English, and I only had a vague idea where I was going.

There is a 24 hour Second Cup with free wireless a block from my dorm. This will likely become my home away from home.

I will turn Mitran into a binge drinker within months, I am certain of it.

The weather is hot and sunny.

I really just had nothing worthwhile to write about.

The American zeitgeist

2007-08-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

Did you know that in America you can inherit debt? I did not, until I spent a month there searching for its zeitgeist. It's also a hugely debt-driven economy. Apparently there are parts of California where it would not be unheard of for someone making $30k a year to own a million dollar house and just be in debt for the rest of their lives, their children too, apparently. And college is so expensive even a judge has a tight purse putting her kids through.

I suppose this sheds some light on the US. When I was down there it seemed like a very intense place. It was kind of savage, really. I'd just be walking down the street, be it in NYC or Knoxville, and I could actually sense the sort of struggle going on there - an animalistic need to survive. It's a cut-throat place.

Not all the places I went had this sense. It all fades into the background once you're out of the cities and the landscape takes over. It's not even the U.S.A. any more at that point. Some of the well-off or touristy joints don't have that feel - Sarasota, Monterey, Carmel, Pittsburg (although even Pittsburg had this graffiti on a bridge: "Poverty is the biggest prison the gov't 'er built.")

I believe I found the American spirit. It's undeniably present in every Greyhound terminal in the country. It's an absolutely cut-throat, bestial desire to kill everything that gets in the way of your getting on that bus, restrained form rioting only by one security guard who got into the business because his penis is too small, and the whole operation is run by sardonic, indifferent black women while Mexicans load the baggage.

1 pm

2007-08-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

Bleary-eyed wake up. Fuck - too late but whatever, it can wait. Enough time to check, at least.

Still no e-mail?

Nope. Oh well. 1 o'clock breakfast again. Broken eggs and burnt toast.

My new laptop inspires updates

2007-08-22T00:07:00.000-07:00

I move to Montreal on Monday. Until then, I have a lot of time to kill on the Internet. I've been spending an inordinate amount of time being absolutely unproductive, so I've decided maybe I'll start blogging again. Maybe I'll go on rants and lengthy descriptions about the month I spent in America. Or not. Hopefully it'll be entertaining. Somehow I just feel this is vaguely more productive than wasting all of my time in chat rooms and trolling Facebook.

By the way, everyone in the world should read Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Just saying. It's absolutely fantastic. It changed my life. I will be reading it again soon. As well as Mexico City Blues, because it proves Jack Kerouac is under-appreciated as a poet. It's possibly the best book of poetry I have ever encountered in my life.

On the seashore at Monterey

2007-08-21T23:40:00.000-07:00

Trespassing over iceplant and seagull shit along the bay to sit on cold rocks staring at a horizon that turns out to be the other shore (not the waters to Japan as we find out when the fog lifts) and watching the Monterey lights turn on and airplanes vanish into the clouds. Too contemplative. Would make a nice picture, if I had a camera.

In Economics today, I wrote this:

2007-04-11T18:13:00.000-07:00

The economy is based on things happening. Activity is the key word. In the global economy, money is only shifted. There is no saving and all the losses equal teh profits. Net zero. Why, then, bother at all? Things happen. Activity. The flow of energy. Money represents activity. This does not differ from barter. It streamlines barter and allows us to complicate it.

It's not the money that's valuable. It's the activity (energy) behind it and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only shifted. It can be active or dormant.

A piece of art is the product of energy concentrated, designed, and constructed in a particular manner with a particular quality. It beomces and energy vortex. You must put energy in to get energy out. To put energy in, you analyze, interpret, appreciate.

The energy vortex of art is the sum of the mental and physical energy invested in its creation.

Why art? Why make it, why appreciate it? Because activity is better than a lack of activity. It's like economics. The flow of activity causes more activity to flow. Spending money causes more money to be spent. But when there is too much money, inflation happens. The money becomes less valuable, because the energy it represents is constant. This understanding extends to art.

The reason art seems better if it was made during a time of oppression or hardship etc., is because the art, like money, is worth more.

On a recession, there is less activity. The energy is not destroyed, but it becomes dormant.

During recovery, the energy is re-animated.

Activity causes more activity. Art inspires more art.

Why make art?

Why do you get up in the morning?

Anything worth doing is worth doing right

2007-04-09T20:10:00.000-07:00

"For believe me: the secret from harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously." - Friedrich Nietzche.

This was written in a birthday card I got over a year ago from Ena.

I just finished watching Sin City for the, I don't know, fourth time from start to finish? Damn good movie. Need to check out more of Robert Rodriguez - perhaps starting with Grindhouse.

The quote seems to fit what I'm trying to figure out, which boils down to, more or less, how should one live? Having accepted that there really isn't any meaning to life, thus ending the debate on "Why?" I've been left with "How?"

Recently I've come back to hedonism, and attempting, with some success and some failure, to live that. Still have a long way to go. Still struggling with other people's expectations. Still restrained by boundaries and insecurities and doubts.

Hmm.

Should take Nietzche's advice. The question is: what's holding me back? I think it's still other people's expectations. I'm incredibly susceptible to them. I always hate disappointing people.

This must change.

Currently Listening to: Absurd, by Fluke.

One drunken Friday night

2007-04-03T18:30:00.000-07:00

CAVEAT: The following short story is based loosely upon events that may or may not have been entirely hallucinatory. Any characters bearing any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental

~

"Hey! Fraser! You're not a cop-caller, are ya?"

Smash. All it took was the mere suggestion that Fraser might possess some small morality in his being to convince him to launch the empty champagne bottle into the parking lot. It shattered gloriously and on cue all thirteen of us booked it, as though wired to some fearful adolescent instinct. Break shit - loud noise - run from the cops. What cops? Where would they come from? Why would their sirens blare for one broken bottle? We didn't ask these questions. We only ran.

-

"The great thing about malt liquor is it makes you unafraid of the cops," said Mr. Palamar.

"The great thing about the green," I answered, "is it makes you terrified of absolutely everything."

We exchanged substances in the odd hope that despite falling further and further into a haze, a balance of cannabis and Old English would keep us rational in the face of the fuzz.

There is a certain aesthetic to a 40 oz. bottle of malt liquor. It is ideal for roaming the streets causing a drunken ruckus. We had four of them, plus a number of $6 champagne bottles.

Vannelli, standing on top of a steel staircase behind a warehouse, popped the cork on one and drained half of it. The reason for the champagne was simple. Our man, Mike Vannelli, had that day been elected student president at school, beating out all the usual suspects for the position. He'd run a campaign of grit and grime, using car paint posters and photo-copied pizza boxes. No one had expected this.

Suddenly a generator awoke. All of us high, the cop-reflex kicked in again and we all dashed off, except one. Jake - a real beatnik, quiet, implacable, and dressed like a surly woodsman - sat down underneath the blue light behind the warehouse, half a bottle of Old E in hand. I pulled back from the mad stampede and joined him. Unphased. Unshocked. The man was in his element.

A few moments earlier he'd been standing on a milk crate, silently observing the scene. Here we were shouting and smashing and weeping and flirting, and in the very midst of it this bespectacled bhikku drank his forty and smiled. What was it about this man?

We were soon joined by 3 others: Mr. Palamar, Egerdie, and Tomas. There we were, five rough-edged gents in a circle underneath the blue light, a moment of tranquility in the heart of our delinquent rampage, emanating from the source of Jake's blissful humming soul.

Then shit got weird.

-

"You a fuckin' hippy?" screamed Fraser. He'd cornered some unlucky, long-haired bastard. Few things are as terrifying as Fraser buzzing on pot and riled up by liquor. I'd once seen him try to kill a man. Had to subdued by three men lying on top of him while his would-be victim locked himself in the bathroom. That, and his hatred of hippies was surprassed only by his hatred of the police.

We tried to stop him, but Jason and Jeremy (two indistinguishable twins I'd taken to endearingly calling "the goons") the only two of us all capable of restraining the untamed Fraser, had no interest in saving a flower-child.

I had to look away. I lit up and rolled on, unwilling to witness this awful depravity. Fraser only stopped when the man's face was left on the bricks.

-

We'd seen the white van all night, but it was already too late when we realized it was the pigs.

"Night Watch!" shouted Officer Friendly.

We all froze - just a bumch of guilty teens.

"We got a call about noise. Could that of been you?"

"I don't know nothin'" said Mr. Palamar.

"I smell marijuana." Jesus Christ where did that mean motherfucker come from? Crept up right behind Vannelli and the goons, holding a flashlight heavy enough to beat a man to death.

Officer Friendly: "Were you smoking reefer, kids?"

"No, officer."

We could've reeked of the stuff, we'd smoked enough that night, but I knew whether they smelled it or not it was all they had to say to legally search us. Policia? The Charter of Rights and Freedoms begins by telling you that you have all the following rights, unless they say you don't.

I thought we'd smoked the last when I saw Vannelli drop a joint to the pavement. He was slick about it- dropped his lip balm at the same time and let it roll in the other direction. Too bad Officer Mean-Fucker's flashlight landed on the joint on its way to the innocent lip balm. He picked it up and showed it to his partner. Just then another cruiser rolled up. Why reinforcements?

"Who's is this?" demanded Officer Friendly.

Nobody spoke up.

"Come on, assholes, own up!"

"Not ours, officer!" this was Jeremy.

"Bullshit!" One blow from Officer Mean-Fucker took him out and then was laying into Fraser while the third seized Jason, the other twin, and threw his head against the cruiser. The rest of us stood back in fear with Officer Friendly grinning at every new blood spot on his hood. NOne of us had the balls or the brawn to take on a cope, and the three of us who did were presently discovering that police brutality is reality, as the graffiti artists say.

What happened next I'm not sure.

Mr. Palamar was standing above a bleeding Officer Friendly. Fraser and the goons had overpowered their oppressors.

When all was said and done, Vannelli picked up his lost joint, lit up, and bellowed against the night, the Man, and the death machine, "Kill cops!"

-

If it were possible to stab a uniform without stabbing the person inside, I'd thrill in the activity. The police force is a mysterious and frightening institution. Not evefn the most law-abiding citizen feels entirely comfortable in their presence. Is it the guns? The billy bats? Is it because they have the authority of our collective will to ticket, fine, search, arrest, or detain you? I think that is simply because the police are the natural enemies of freedom.

I believe and hope that most individuals serving the law are just good people who make mistakes, but the very nature of their institution is enema to liberty. This means that when a cop puts on his uniform, he becomes a breathing representation of oppression.

I can think of no solution to the predicament of law enforcement, other than the dangerous and atavist use of the neighbourhood watch. Nevertheless, it is impossible for me to separate in my mind the police force from the sadistic idealogues of Fascism, thus fuelling a hatred of police that is unreasonable, childish, and unquestionably right.

We were somewhere around Barso, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold

2007-03-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

Those who recognize that title will recognize it to be the opening line of "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, directed by Terry Gilliam.

A couple of weeks ago I went on a visionary journey, and listened to Tazerine (courtesy Music at Knife Point.)

For several days afterward I wandered through a questionless confusion with that song stuck in my head. I was frustrated. I didn't understand the world. I couldn't even ask questions about it. Think about slamming your head against a wall, but it's dark, so you can't see the wall, or which direction you need to go to get away from the wall.

Last night, around 8:30 p.m., you could see the dark side of the moon. The sun hadn't quite gone down yet. The sliver of a new moon, burning white, lit up the bottom rim of the moon, which was what drew my eye to it. The moon rose in the west, and for about an hour or so, the sky on that horizon was this turquoise to purple-blue, meaning it was brighter than the dark side of the moon. That meant you could see a black orb in the sky.

Have you ever thought about the chemical composition of yourself? A lot of carbon. You know what else has a lot of carbon in it? Soil. Dirt. Earth. Clay.

One of my favourite Jack Kerouac quotes is: "Are we fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing is nothing and so we were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life to see it proved?"

I like it not because of its Buddhism, but because of the Catholic influence on Kerouac's Buddhism. I like describing humans as fallen angels.

People are clay bodies with angels' souls.

I just like it. I don't mean anything religious by it. I'm really a humanist, and I think that's all I can say for my spirituality any more. It develops. Today, it's this: people are the most important things.

As far as Kerouac's quote, I believe that everything is everything and that there is no such thing as nothing. Repeat that: there is no such thing as nothing. Redundant? Yes. Problem is, it's a difficult thing to grasp.

I also think that being, or existence, is infinite. There are a few very basic scientific ideas that seem to back me up. First, consider that the universe if everything and that the universe is just one thing: the universe. 1. Nothing divides this oneness of the universe. And 1/0 = infinite. Then that law of something or other that says that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Realize that the entire universe is just energy, and it is without beginning or end. Infinite. And everything is within the universe: nothing is outside the universe. STOP! Read the above paragraph again. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS NOTHING. I don't care what the scientists say (wouldn't the world be better off if no one had ever listened to the scientists when they said that women and blacks had smaller brains?), bugger the Big Bang theory, the universe is infinite always has been always will be not growing not shrinking just is.

Science is another religion, it's just a bit more open to change.

"But what does that mean?"
- The Matrix

Well, it means that simply existing means that there is no end to existing. Not just life. Any sort of existing. Your thoughts are just electric impulses and chemical reactions (chemicals breaking down further into just energy). Given everything's just energy, there ain't no gettin' off this train. I've also started believing in re-incarnation, in a sense. Given the infiniteness of the universe, at least, and maybe some day even all of the energy that presently comprises your "consciousness" will likely once again re-assemble into another "consciousness."

Also, the only reason for existence is for existence - consider that there is no alternative. Nihilism really does explain it.

But the important thing is, I saw the reflection in my mirror without the glass, and it wasn't a reflection.

I've come to believe that the purpose of consciousness (which is nothing more than a particular, chance assembly of energy) is for energy to be aware of itself. To see itself. We're all just mirrors for the great cosmic it. Godhead. Energy. Quality.

All is vanity.

P.S. When I buy a laptop and the proper equipment, I'm going to start using this blog for poetry readings, putting up the audio files on Putfile. Poetry was meant to be read. All you poets who read this blog, go read George Orwell's essay: Poetry and the Microphone. Now, consider the Internet.

Rage Against the Human

2007-03-07T16:05:00.000-08:00

ROBOTS ARE COMING!!!

Next, they'll be programming Jehova into existence.

More!

2007-02-18T13:11:00.000-08:00

Dirge for the Planet (first draft)

Thump pow-wow thump pow-wow thump pow-wow
sing the Indians 'round the totem fire.

Those Indians dance the rain dance for the earth
for the flame-seared forest, for the mud-flat farms,
for the sun-defeated grasses and the salt-pit lakes,
for the fish that swim in dust
for the beasts that feed on fallen ash,
for the thirst of human nations.

I hear the screams of a million Hindus drowning,
I see a hundred thousand black and white bodies in sewage streams.
New Orleans is sunk and New York won't listen.
I mourn the loss of Newfoundland to come.

When it happens there won't be no fall,
just the back-alley abortion summer, then the mausoleum winter.
Spring won't come until there are no flowers
and the Indians and anarchists take back the earth.

~

Lines written in transit

This winter air tastes like vodka,
this washroom reeks of piss and puke,
this coffee's burnt and cost me $2.15-
I AM a caffeinated beverage
my skin is a styrofoam
non-biodegradable
cup with a malfunctioning lid.
I stole an anti-abortion ad on the bus
I lied
someone else did that and told me about it.
But why is it wrong to stare at a pretty face?
Don't look at me that way.
God's dead so his work is public domain.

Everything's an addiction, now.
There's nothing wrong with that.
They cost too much, they're killing me, they're hurting other people
but I don't want to be reformed,
I want to taste pre-pubescent Hispanic blood in every sip.

There's a Moldovan woman next to me,
and a pair of downtrodden jungle eyes
glare at me and my label
accusing me of gringo-imperialism
but look
I'm in this shit-box, too, pal,
I waited half an hour in the cold
watching while a multi-cultural rainbow of faces drove by.
Panther, blame your brother in the suit,
he's guiltier than me
but then again, my great-great grandfather might've owned his great-great grandfather
so maybe I shouldn't complain about the salt on my jeans.

Nobody remembers the stop.
It's late.
I can't see the man in the moon for the dragon.
This vodka tastes like winter air.

A poem not worth reading - first draft

2007-02-14T16:56:00.000-08:00

What happened to the poets?

That? That's not a poet.
That's a literary gypsy
a peddler of temporary sentiments
selling poems of brief reflection
on little useless things on dead birds and other unmemorable shit.

Poetry is not a commodity!
Poetry is not a commodity!
Poetry is NOT a COMMODITY!

These decadent assholes are trading my language
for their trendy lofts in their 30s and their lawns in their 40s
for a half-decent indecent wage
for Starbucks and faux-hip and their names in a magazine
and all they do is defecate on paper.

83 percent of poetry today ain't worth reading.
Why not 99 percent? 100 percent?
Why should you read this?
STOP!
Turn the page and never look back!
Why are you still reading?
This isn't worth you eyes!
This tangled, ratty, gnatty mess of words.

Literary Revolution

2007-02-13T19:07:00.000-08:00

I have been left with a quandary.

What is this quandary?

Q: Who is the most prominent writer in the world right now?

A: J.K. Rowling

My Reaction Upon Realizing This is True: AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

Followed by: Tears

It's true. It's deplorable. It's grotesque. At the moment I'm reading T.S. Eliot's poetry, Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, the poetry of Leonard Cohen, and I just finished a book by Milan Kundera.

In other words, I just finished a book by the man who SHOULD be the most prominent writer of the time, am reading the poetry of one of the best living poets, the poetry of one of the best dead poets, and a book by a beatnik (and the sheer awesomeness of beatniks is unquestionable). Oh, and a few nights ago I read, "The Earth's Name is Juan" by Pablo Neruda. Amongst all this, I am faced with a reality: J.K. Rowling is the most prominent writer of the time.

I want to discount her, because she writes fantasy, not literature. I want to. But lately I've been realizing divisions and categories aren't actually real. Science is the study of the way the world works, and it's only out of convenience that we divide it into chemistry, physics, and biology - they all depend upon on each other. A continent is a continent, and the earth doesn't care about the borders we draw on our maps. The writing produced in our time is the writing produced in our time, regardless what section of Chapters we find it in. Hundred years from now, J.K. Rowling will be known as the leading literary figure of this decade.

Fuck.

Man is at his best in revolution. Writing is at its best in revolution. The works that are remembered most are torpedos. None of these are my words, but I'm using them. Paradise Lost, Howl, the Republic, Candide, The Wasteland, The Earth's Name is Juan -- even Oscar Wilde suffered persecution for his works, and he was a faggot dandy. Shakespeare? Well, I guess he torpedoed English's status as a second class language. He set the standard. The writers who are remembered are the writers who brought change to something - be it society, like Voltaire, or to poetry, like Ezra Pound, or to hip hop, like the Wu-Tang Clan.

Revolution is dead in North America today, and I ask you: where are the poets? Most of them are in music these days, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, the less musically inclined have vanished. Replaced by one J.K. Rowling, by Dan Brown, by the Trashniks.

My quandary tonight is: what will I torpedo? What will I revolt against to make my writing great?

Everything's been said. Everything's been done. So what's left to say and do?

Literary movements need aggression. They must be in conflict. They also must bring progress. The real world is no different from a story - no one gives a damn about how George woke up, brushed his teeth and went to work every day for five years, but give George a junk habit and an abusive girlfriend and you've got yourself a fucking edgy bestseller. No one gives a damn about a hundred years of peace - the textbooks focus on one year of war.

10:27, I look at my options.

Ecstatic, mystic poetry, i.e. Rumi. I'm into the mystical shit, I feel I understand things most don't. However, others wiser and better than I have said it all before. Like Rumi.

Then I must be in conflict. With what? Revolution is dead. The combination of democracy, affluent society, and information overload have left apathy and contentness. I've recently heard some pretty convincing arguments about the positive aspects of the Information Age, but I still feel that the Internet and T.V. offer nothing libraries don't in regards to knowledge, and instead have succeeded in inundanting us and thus rendering the knowledge useless.

People wonder what will follow post-modernism, given how goddamn open, liberal, and experimental it is. Can anything follow post-modernism?

Po-mo came about, I think, largely thanks to cinema. The paradigm shift of my generation is the Internet. The Internet seems to have redefined reality.

Most people seem to draw a distinction between the Internet and the "real world." But, I ask, given how much of our lives are spent on the Internet, is it not part of the real world? It certainly isn't a global hallucination. While you might not actually be swinging a fucking sword by playing World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft sure as hell is an aspect of the real world these days. Hell, you can even have sex on the Internet.

I have an idea. It may or may not be the target of my literary torpedoes in life, but if nothing else I've got a new philosophy. Let's attack the old, conservative, now-irrelevant concept of reality.

I'll leave the blood spillin' in the street - Jedi Mind Tricks

2007-02-12T17:06:00.000-08:00

So, it's been a little while. Given my recent lack of blogging, I've decided that for the near future, I'm going to bring Sex Coffee Poetry back to its roots. I originally wanted to exhibit some of my writing with this blog, but eventually it just became my commentaries and rants. Since I haven't had much of those lately, for the next while I think I might just go back to showcasing some stuff. So here's a short story I'm rather proud of. Leave your comments, please.

The Last Place on Earth

“Years ago, my old man said to me, ‘Where you goin’, son?” and I told him the comic book store, ‘cause the latest Batman had just come in and my pal George already had it. He said to me, ‘No, son, where you goin’ with your life?’ and I told him Tangiers. ‘Why Tangiers, son?’ asked my pa. ‘That’s where Burroughs went, pa,’ I told him, and he said to me, ‘Who the hell is Burroughs, boy?’”

The beatnik spoke to a crowd through his mic in a jazzy little coffee house off Regina Street. A blond man in shades behind him was playing a saxophone, treating it like a woman you forget about in the morning, tonguing and grinding blindly and hard because you know it’s just this one night before she becomes a face or a regret or a nobody.

“Now, folks, I’ve been to Tangiers, and it’s an O.K. kind of place, but I still ain’t found where I’m looking for. For now, I’ll pretend it’s here, and share some of these lines I scribbled down a couple of minutes ago.”

“Where you headed? Where you been?
I’m headed in front of me, and I’ve been where’s behind,
I’ve been all over,
I’ve been to Tangiers,
I’ve chilled with the sheikhs of Damascus
and smoked with the Sufis of Iran,
I’ve pow-wowed with the Iroquois mystic,
danced the rain dance,
but all I did was make it cloudy,
that man made it rain.
So it rained and it rained
like we’d pissed the Sumerian gods,
so we all jumped on a boat and sailed back to here.
We came in on the storm
but my mystic-man, he hoofed it back to the woods-
let me tell you about those woods,
those woods, we never should’ve left those woods.”

Claps and snaps and cheers. The beatnik stepped out of the coffee house, the blond sax-player behind him. Now the sax was locked away in a big black case, the leaden weight of a wife.
The beatnik lit a cigarette and took a couple of drags.

“How’d it go, Izzy?”

“Went great, if you ask me.”

“I did ask you.”

“Went great.”

They walked under a night made sodium by an overcast sky and a sick-pink haze in a Van Gogh painting.

“Hey, where’s the moon?” asked the beatnik.

“Ain’t no moon, man.”

“Is it a new moon?”

“New moon was five days ago.”

“So where’s the moon.”

“God only knows, brother.”

The 3 a.m. mist turned to 4 a.m. drizzle. The beatnik tossed his cigarette butt away, watched it smoke a little as it rolled over asphalt and down a storm drain.

There was a scripture-revelation on a wall.

The
future is like
Lego
Clean
Plastic
Stainless

The beatnik thought about the man who made that poem, vandalizing the side of a decayed building with an 8 word prophecy. Was he a sketch or a poet? Was he part of the urban Walpurgis Night or was he a spray-painting saint?

The two men meandered in the rain. They passed pimps and tramps selling bodies and fetish, pushers and dealers hawking visions and dream sessions, freaks in fishnets and shackled in chains, and crazies who mumbled wise things to their whiskey. They passed ship-wrecked lives. They passed worthless men and 10-dollar women, seedy devils and elegant demons, mutilated faces and mutilating hands.

“Watch where you look, boy.”

“Jus’ another drink an’ ‘m done, one more roun’, one more roun’.”

“Spare some change?”

“You gotta light?”

“Hey, handsome.”

Mephistopheles twirled his cane under a streetlight.

“Care for a cigarette?”

“Sure.”

The Devil lit the beatnik’s cig.

“Say, you look a gentleman, friend, and I only offer this to gentlemen, you know. How about the deal of a lifetime?”

“I’m skeptical, doc.”

“Oh, it’s nothing big, just tit for tat, fair trade. Anything you want for your soul.”

“I don’t dig.”

“It’s nothing big, nothing big. Faust did it, Shakespeare too. Look how well Dan Brown is doing.”

The beatnik and the sax-player rolled on. They passed under the baphomet smoke stack of an empty factory, a 19th century relic of industry. The rusting iron tower belched the breath of Moloch into the night. They approached a steam-less train dead on voiceless railroad tracks.

“Where are we?”

Izzy pointed up. The beatnik saw a building. United Taxi Co. Next to it was a sign: ‘The Last Place on Earth.’

The beatnik looked over and the sax-player had two wings, two angel wings. He held his ethereal sax like a darling Argentine girl about to dance the tango, and its big black case on the cement was her dress tossed to the bedroom floor three hours later.

“Where you goin’, Israfel?”

“I got a trumpet to blow in Jerusalem.”

The beatnik crossed the train tracks. He turned around.

“See you soon.”

Paraphrasing

2007-01-29T14:42:00.000-08:00

"This born-again Christian was telling me about how he believed that God created the world in seven days 4000 years ago. But then I asked him how long God's days were, given that 'time' and 'days' are human conceptions meant to schedule our lives. Each one of God's days could be 75 million years long, and on Sunday man could be evolving. It could still be Sunday."

"Shit. Monday's REALLY going to suck."

I've noticed a lot of the pictures I put up stop working after a couple of days

2007-01-25T18:47:00.000-08:00

Caveat: This blog post may or may not possess one cohesive point. It will certainly be an extolling of various philosophies of mine, half-finished, in-progress, etc. etc. This is for my benefit and your entertainment, because I find that I cement things in explanation.

Lately I have been entertaining the idea of optimism. Optimism first came about as the theodicy of Gottfried Leibniz, famous for the quote, "This is the best of all possible worlds." Now, Leibniz was trying to explain the existence of evil in a world where God is all-powerful and good, and he explained that the world required evil for good to exist, and that by "This is the best of all possible worlds," he meant that there could exist no lesser amount of evil. That's a heap full of horse shit, something I know and everybody else knows thanks to Voltaire.

However, there is still something in Optimism and the quote, "This is the best of all possible worlds." I would describe myself as an Optimist, something caused by my new reverence of beauty as a divinity. I like the phrase, "This is the best of all possible worlds." Part of me wants to believe that is true. But another part of me fears that this leads to fatalism and apathy - two things I dislike. That's the problem with the world "possible." You can always have a better POSSIBLE world. POSSIBILITIES are infinite -

this I believe is innately true. My conception of the universe these days falls in nicely with chaos theory, or more properly pattern theory. That is, the universe is infinite chaos in which all probabilities exist, forming into infinite patterns. The universe is in fact an infinite amount of universes, and each universe is infinite, much like how there are limitless numbers, and also limitless numbers between the very whole and definite 1 and 2. I can't conceive this, nor can you, but that's OK, because human consciousness is the most feeble thing in existence, and the most powerful thing in our universe.

What I mean by that is, we create reality with our consciousness, and this makes each of us God, and thus it is the omnipotent Creator of reality. However, it is feeble and nearly impotent, because it struggles to understand the vast world it observes. Example provided by Ze Frank, we almost effortlessly toss a crumpled ball of paper into a wastebin, but understanding the physics of that simple action is a challenge. Even worse, the consciousness tries to concoct Reasons, asking the question Why, when nature only provides What. There is no Why in nature. The closest thing to Why in nature is a series of seemingly related Whats, but there is no ULTIMATE source. Reality depends upon itself, like a circle. Why is irrelevant. Reality is absurd in that it lacks reason. Fiction, by comparison, is reasonable, because it's created by consciousness, a thing ruled by reason -

I was talking about Optimism. There are infinitely possible worlds, but right now, there is only this world. The statement, "This is the best of all possible worlds," should really be, "This is the only world." Does that make me pragmatic?

Pragmatism - a philosophy of dealing with things practically.

No. I'm not pragmatic. I am absolutely IMpractical. I dislike my job, but I realize that it is necessary to work to maintain my habits and pleasures and lifestyle (3 coffees a day, eat out for lunch consistently, etc. etc. etc.). That's a pragmatic realization. But that realization does not make me happy - it makes me content.

I define Optimism as finding delight in the world where others would feel apathy or despair. Delight, of course, is the sensation the creates happiness.

I'm afraid that I find it easier to be Optimistic about abstractions. For example, where some people look at the world, at nuclear weapons, at rampant poverty, at diseases, at what can best be described as the unholy fucking mess of existence, and think "OMIGOD IT'S ALL COMING TO END!" and they despair, I take an inexplicable DELIGHT in the fantasy that I'll be here for the end of the world. If not the end, certainly the degradation of the world.

But then I also find myself enjoying decaying buildings and desolate ubran landscapes that others would find repulsive. I also find myself capable of finding delight in situations others would not. I can show up to work and find things to enjoy - such as flirting with colleagues or simply turning off and letting my instincts take over as I make sandwiches, passing the time in the simplicity of mental idleness without the problem of boredom. I take pleasure in confronting and surpassing each little challenge - mostly: get this done, get that done, and such it all gets done.

I also find myself able to enjoy the company of most people. Which leads me to the latest of discussions I had with someone - about relationships with a person AFTER a romantic relationship. When you have rejected an ex-lover (which is to say, you no longer have the HOPE of building a further relationship with them), you lose the pretenses you once possessed with that person. Because you lack the motivation to IMPRESS or BE ACCPTED BY that person (the motivations that drive ALL socialization), you are exposed to the aspects that the person hides because they find them undesirable and counter to the purpose of impressing and being accepting. You then find that the person increasingly irritates you.

I suggested that this applies, to some degree, to cast-off friends as well. It does. This information makes me question the purpose of socialization. If the entire socialization process is deceit and delusion (lying about who are and accepting the lies about who someone else), what's the point?

We are social beings. Socialization is probably why consciousness exists. My instinct is to ask why. I accept the idea I extolled above: Why is irrelevant. This is how we are. I embrace the philosophy of Optimism: Take pleasure in this absurd object that is socialization.

I already do. Despite claiming that a lot of people piss me off, this is not true, at least, not in comparison. I think I will stop making that claim, because I can usually find delight in someone's company. But not everyone's. We are all prone to rejecting people as possible relationships instantly. We go into it lacking the desire to imperss or be accepted by them, so hostility, enmity, or animosity, either unilateral or bilateral, ensues.

Last night I had this thought: If I want angels to exist, I can make angels exist. The universe, after all, is a post-modern universe. Today, my friend said this to me, "If I want to be an angel, I can be an angel." The universe, after all, is a post-modern universe, and everything is true.

Coincidence?

Yes. The world is, after all, a chaos of infinite probabilities that forms patterns.

(Logic is kind of like happy endings. A happy ending is merely a matter of stopping the story at the right place. Finding logic that is NOT circular logic is merely a matter of stopping the question "Why" at the right place. Go too far, and the story always ends in death.)

P.S. I now understand why in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, the character Delight makes the tragic turn into Delirium.

P.P.S. I was told today that philosophy ultimately teaches us that we know nothing. I accepted this as truth, but then set out to realize it myself, because learning is about getting there on your own. I have decided that the statement, "We know nothing" is not as accurate as the statement, "There's no such thing as knowledge."

Hey Mr. Chips

2007-01-22T17:12:00.000-08:00

First off, here's today's badass picture:

Today I posed the question, if each hour were a person, what would they be like? I will now answer that question.

1 a.m. - a computer nerd, Asian ethnicity optional, think WoW

2 a.m. - the cute girl who likes calling you and talking for hours into the night

3 a.m. - a writer and poet who wanders around the city philosophizing, hatching new religions in a seedy Tim Hortons

4 a.m. - the crazy pervert who talks to himself

5 a.m. - an enthusiast who gets up early to go for a jog regardless the weather, and is capable of pissing others off with their bubbly energy

6 a.m. - a blue collar warehouse worker who lives for his beer and probably wears a Kenora dinner jacket

7 a.m. - the ever-tired, moody high school student

8 a.m. - he who is reluctant to face the world, but eventually, with the help of Juan Valdez and excess java, rises to do so

9 a.m. - the average suburban office employee who starts his or her day around this time, after a lengthy commute to the office

10 a.m. - an old lady who works in an antiques store, very sweet, maybe has grand kids, maybe doesn't, and always goes to church

11 a.m. - a quiet, intelligent young woman with a rather eccentric-yet-tasteful fashion sense, who cares about the environment, drinks fair trade coffee, and is probably a vegetarian and enjoys hummus

12 p.m. - a fat guy, real lazy, who's always stuffing his fucking face with Doritos, who you always hear breathing nasally if he's too close, and his puffy fucking cheeks are always blush red because he's got so much arterial clogging the blood can't pump itself out of that fat fucking fat mug of his. He's also just a big fucking douche.

1 p.m. - unemployed

2 p.m. - the office boss, who always speaks in clichés and tries too hard to be friends with the employees

3 p.m. - a kid between the ages of 8 and 12, very excitable

4 p.m. - the one who's always booking holidays off work, getting out of the office early, and just generally avoids work

5 p.m. - a housewife and stay-at-home mother, still married, the typical 50s mother-figure

6 p.m. - a middle-aged single mother whose kids are still at home, she always starts dinner the minute she's in the door

7 p.m - a socialite who's always got someone to meet, butterflying from one group to another, rushing off from one lunch date to another coffee and then off to the cocktail party, either a really classy woman or a well-dressed young man who wears charm like cologne

8 p.m. - not a very interesting person, generally they just watch a lot of T.V., and they're always the first jackass in a conversation to regale people with what they saw watching Jackass 2

9 p.m. - for some reason, I get the feeling that 9 p.m. is a stripper

10 p.m. - a low-life drunk who regularly wakes up in the tank, or the gutter

11 p.m. - the picture of a college frat-boy

Midnight - a really stereotypical goth kid who digs hackneyed vamp flicks and Edgar Allen Poe

Speaking of time, it's five minutes to midnight ladies and gents! I find it disturbing that since 1947, the farthest from midnight we've been is 17 minutes.

Hamlet &c

2007-01-15T12:26:00.000-08:00

Hamlet, I have learned, can make for a great psychological mind-fuck play. It's a damn, damn shame that Hamlet claims he is just pretending to be insane, as Kuruvilla, my English teacher, is quick to point out. Genuine insanity is a whole lot more fun.

The Eastwood performance of Hamlet at Kitchener City Hall is worth the time -- and it's free! (donations are encouraged). There were a lot of things I disliked about it, things the director decided to do, like pre-recorded solioquoys, and the kid playing Polonius was a wreck, but there were some damn good performances by the other actors.

The big experiment the director did, which I quite enjoyed, which really MADE the play for me, was having Hamlet played by two actors - male and female twins. While the guy played the more brooding Hamlet, the girl had a handle on the crazy. The performance definitely took Hamlet's insanity as genuine, and the division of the character does wonders in emphasizing this. In the opening scene, you really get the sense that Hamlet's brain has been cleft in two.

Applause goes out to both Hamlets, King Claudius, Ophelia (upon going insane - before then, her line delivery is weak), and Horatio. Fine actors.

On the topic of drama, the reason I haven't made any blog posts this week is I decided on Monday that I was going to write a short, one act play every day, for a week. So most of my creative energy went into that. I accomplished my goal on Sunday night. Maybe I'll post up some of the better ones, maybe not. It became quite the interesting activity, actually. I'd spend the day hunting out inspiration for the evening's writing session, and I inevitably found something good to work with.

The first two nights I trolled the Internet for inspiration, taking ideas inspired by news article and Wiki articles of some interest and combing them into strange scenes. Wednesday's dealt with romance and psychedelia. On Thursday my play had its roots in a card game and some soul-selling at a coffee shop. That one is possibly my favourite. I forget where the inspiration came for Friday's, possibly a song, but it was a romance. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday's plays are all contenders for my favourite in their quality, if not their ideas. Saturday's was inspired by the face of a performer at the Registry Theatre - he was funny and good-natured on stage, but his face was the face of an axe-murderer psycho, an idea that was cemented in my mind when the hair turned out to be a wig, and he turned out to be bald. Sunday's play possibly has the most potential for a longer, serious play, a Hamlet spin-off in the nature of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, it's a couple of scenes in which Osric seeks out treachery.

(Act 5, Scene 2 of Hamlet, just as the Queen dies, Hamlet cries "Treachery! Seek it out!" Followed by the stage direction: EXIT Osric.) Taking some creative liberty and having Osric fail to reappear in the death scene with Fortinbras et. al., it's quite the fun idea.

So that's what I've been doing this week.

Going Going Gonzo

2007-01-07T20:42:00.000-08:00

This is the newspaper article that Kempel wouldn't allow to print for the last issue of Seriously... Cameron's Student Newspaper.

---

Clickity-clack clickity-clack goes the keyboard. I’m writing an article on school censorship for a Writer’s Craft project when I realize this story’s a bore. I need something juicy, something exciting, something entertaining. Something that isn’t dry fact-spinning or redundant ranting.

It hits me – the War on Cambridge. There’s a story. Start of September some cracked blogger who goes to Cameron declared War on Cambridge and since then there’s this small but growing Coalition Against Cambridge on the Internet. They’ve got a banner and everything. Blogs are joining, there’s a Facebook group called the Coalition Against Cambridge, all these people are in this propaganda campaign and saying they’re at war with some dusty industrial city.

Who’s the cuckoo who declared war on Cambridge? It was me. The blog was mine, Sex Coffee Poetry (sexcoffeepoetry.blogspot.com). But the aftermath isn’t mine. Sure I reference it every now and then, but why are there 20 members of the Coalition Against Cambridge? Why did a girl in Owen Sound make the banner? Why do so many people hate Cambridge?

I took to the halls for an answer.

Max the Man Palamar told me, “You know the San Andreas fault? They say one day it’s going to sink California. Well, every night, I pray California would turn into Cambridge.” Max looked like he worked at an Esso gas bar, probably because of his Esso gas bar jacket and that sketchy mug of his. Face of the nitty-gritty if I ever seen one.

Writing my Writer’s Craft assignment, I interviewed a revolutionary, Miguel Carpentios, one of the heads of the C.A.C., and after screaming “Viva la Revolucion!” he tried to recruit me. I’ve created nutsos.

But do the Cambridgeans even notice? Does any of this do a damn thing? Do they get better city planners? Do they find street signs you can read? Do they try to spruce things up a bit between the big box stores and the factories? They just laughed at me when I told them about it.

Well, Cambridge, you’ll get yours.

Cleaning out 2006

2007-01-03T12:02:00.000-08:00

Currently Listening to: CunninLynguists .:. Rain

Last night I took a walk with a friend, and I realized that exactly 13 full moons ago I took the same walk with someone else.

I don't know about your closets, but I feel mine is a little bit like my subconscious. On the top shelf are a bunch of books I don't have room for on the shelves in my room. Hanging from the bar are all my shirts, blazers, coats, and jackets. Then, there's several feet of shit on the floor, buried in itself. Like the subconscious, there are bits that I'm constantly going in for and using (my clothes), and there are memories that occasionally spring up (the books I've read but aren't good/important enough to make the space on the two shelves), and there are the heaps of stuff lost on the floor. Digging through all that stuff, culling it, breaking up heaps of cardboard and finding little things I'd totally forgotten about I made the analogy. I found this crappy poem I wrote in grade 8. Despite how bad it was, I still connected with it, and thought about how many times I had repeated the thoughts in that poem. Except the last line. That's the important change.

Sorry, this has devolved into impenetrable obscurity.

I was going to post a picture, but that function doesn't seem to be working at the moment.

3 days late I've come up with a New Years resolution. Cull 2006 like the shit in my closet, and throw everything out that I don't want, emptying things out for 2007.

The floor of my closet, at the moment, hosts two pairs of shoes and a blue string.

New Age ain't got nuthin' on me

2007-01-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

If you were wondering where I've been all week, I was busy laying seige on Cambridge. It's become a bloody war of attrition.

So, some of you who followed me here from the Xanga days (shudder) might remember my need to find some sort of spirituality, self-transcendence being the highest step on the pyramid of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Well, I've found one. I just had to develop it myself. Or rather, I had a hand in developing it, and a number of discussions and experiences solidified it in my life. For about a year I've stopped thinking about myself as an athiest, and I would now consider myself intensely spiritual.

On Thursday, December 28, I found and re-defined God. Incidentally, psychedelics are awesome.

I wandered through Victoria Park for 3 hours with tears streaming down my face in religious ecstasy, because I could see the incredible beauty of the world. It was beatific. It was the greatest moment of my life. I saw religious allegory in the simplest of human interactions. Everything was clear. Not only did it seem like I could physically see better than I really could, not to mention noticing all the intricate patterns the world has to offer, but I could think more clearly, too. I understood EVERYTHING. Even the simplest and least significant of revelations were all-important. I felt I had found God.

In the conversation I had afterward, I re-defined God to reconcile the beautiful experience I had just had with my disbelief in dieties.

At this point I feel it is important to mention the problems with the word "God" in English. The Christian God actually has a name. It's the tetragrammaton, the holiest name of god. In the old Testament it appears as YHWH, probably pronounced Yahweh. Anglicized, this comes out as Jehova. Jehova is a diety, and by that I mean he's just another Zeus. He is a god (notice the lack of capital and the article). He is just another idol with a cult.

In my mind, the concept of "God" is not a god. Because of the language I speak and the society I was brought up in, the best way of expressing the beatific experience I had was "finding God." However, afterward, we decided that in this use, God is synonymous with beauty. God is beauty.

You see, we had previously discussed how religion exists because of the human desire to be near beauty, to experience the beautiful. The dieties and gods, or "God" that they invent are supposed to epitomize that beauty, but all of the systems they create to reach this beauty break, and the diety is no longer beautiful. Organizations, dogma, structure, and authority ruin it.

God is beauty, but Jehova is guilt.

The Sufi mystics realized that God is beauty, rather than some omnipotent being. They talk about how God is in the look the Lover gives the Beloved. God is in looks - which, I think, means the connections we experience with things and people. Those connections become a lot more real when you're knee-deep in religious ecstasy. You feel them, they're substantial. You feel the gaze you give a tree as you stare at it in amazement. I never understood what Rumi meant by God being in that look until Thursday.

Sufis belong to Islam, but a Sufi and a Sunni mean two completely different things when they talk about God.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good morning

2006-12-25T17:31:00.000-08:00

It's always the a.m. somewhere in the world, my Norwegian e-friend tells me as he greats me "good morning" regardless what time it is.

I've been making observations about people, being at all these Christmas gatherings and such. My mother wanted to play hostess this Christmas Eve so the whole damn neighbourhood and then some.

I was disgusted by one woman. She had, that day, become engaged to some T.V. chef on the local Rogers channel who knows my mother's boyfriend. She strutted into the house like a diva, and with breasts the size of Gibraltar. The TV-chef friend had the build and the laugh of a pig.

To my relief, the standard old man with wise bits of advice for the young started talking to me. Now, I dismiss a lot of that advice, because it tends to come from bigotted and backwards folk, but every now and then there's a gent who's got something valuable to say. This man is a well-read fellow, I believe he's from Yugoslavia, and he fought in World War II. Mentioned a concentration camp, briefly. Mostly, he gave me advice about women, and told me a little story about his ex-fiancé. Then he loaned me The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade. Christmas reading!

I was going to make a point about something in this entry, I'm sure.

Distracting MSN conversations have derailed that.

Derailed was a pretty good movie.

I swear, that woman had breasts like fucking Gibraltar. It was both awkward and repulsing. There was literally an elephant in the room - no, a PAIR of elephants.

Experiment

2006-12-22T19:24:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, I'm going to follow the advice of my horoscope, to the letter. If it works, I will re-evaluate my spiritual philosophies and turn to some form of mysticism. If it fails, life will continue as usual.

Vincent Van Gogh ate this blog post

2006-12-20T20:13:00.000-08:00

Today is the darkest, second-longest night of the year. There's no moon, and it's the day before the shortest day of the year. I like the way that sounds, "the darkest, second-longest night of the year," because not only is it true, it's happening, but it sounds real. That's the way the world works. It's not clichéd because it only comes close to being clichéd, the world isn't perfect enough to actually pull it off.

I went out for coffee earlier tonight. It's cold, it's windy, and it's quiet because it's cold and windy, and the darkest, second-longest night of the year.

That's a picture of San Francisco at night, during the full moon. I like the photo.

I'm feeling very Zen-like right now. I was walking home and I looked up at the stars and had that very hackneyed experience everyone gets when they look up at thousands of tiny, white-blue suns burning away at inconceivable distances. I felt that feeling of total insignificance when confronted with such vast distances that made me aware of the planet I stood on and all 6 billion other bodies standing on this very same rock.

It was not frightening, it did not make me question my existence, or my life, or make me want to be a better person.

It was actually very relieving.

My life is mine and mine alone. When I die there will still be 6 billion other bodies walking around on this rock without me. An infinitesmal fraction will notice my disappearance. Looking at those stars gave me the feelings that the only thing that matters is what I think about what I do, my thoughts and my reality. I really got the sense that I am, in fact, the creator of my own universe.

I can fade in or out of anyone else's universe at whim, and it really does not matter how they perceive my conduct toward them. What matter is the experience I draw from knowing them and being with them.

I've come to the conclusion that our entire lives are experienced in memory, and not, as we believe, moment by moment in the present. The present doesn't actually exist, or rather, because it exists as a moment too small to measure, too small to even understand, the electric currents that are our thoughts don't travel fast enough for us to even recognize the present. I decided this when contemplating the nature of blacking out from alcohol. I distinctly recall a perceivable moment at which I blacked out, when became invisible to myself in that while I was still capable of speaking and moving (implying that I was still capable of thought), I was not actually aware. I have perfectly no memories of what happened, but I was thinking and active. I was living entirely in the present because I had and still have no recognition of it.

The present is imperceptible.

I Enjoy Musings

2006-12-19T20:56:00.000-08:00

Today, home from open mic night at the Boathouse, where I aided my musician friend in writing more verses to a song he likes to sing, I read and watched the musings of two internet personalities I enjoy.

Tatsuya Ishida:

"So I go to Little Tokyo in downtown and get me a $12 bag of green tea. First time ever I got the premium stash. The thing looks like a brick of weed and the cashier lady gave me this look like, "Ho HO, big spender! Woo woo." When I got home to try it out, I realized I had no strainer. I'd been slumming on Lipton style tea for so long I was ill equipped for the authentic shit. Green tea, as you all know, is hardcore ceremonial zen stuff for us Orientals. There's a whole ritual to it, gotta have the right mindset, the right posture, sound a gong, chant, shave your head, show humility and respect for the sacred herbal tea. So what do I do? I grab me one of them little plastic salsa containers from El Pollo Loco, punch some holes in it with a needle, and stick a fork through the side as a handle. I felt like MacGuyver. Surviving on my wits alone. But the holes were too small and too few so that when I poured the hot water it overflowed on me, spilling precious tea leaves into the cup. I was all, "Fuck! Shit! Goddamn holes!" So I go back to punching more holes, thinking, What the fuck am I doing? Why don't I just go buy a strainer? I just spent twelve damn dollars on tea, how expensive can a strainer be? But once I set my mind on something I just won't let go, so after several false starts, I perfect my makeshift homemade ghetto strainer, and have myself some piping hot gourmet ocha in what turned out to be an expletive-filled, profane, not at all sacred tea ceremony.

-T.

Also, the latest Ze Frank Show, tagged Baseline.

Today I received a St. Christopher. It's an image of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers, and mine happens to be on a coin. It's one of the best things I've ever received, and I'm not even a Christian.

Currently reading: Hamlet, by Shakespeare.

Currently listening to: The sound of my computer buzzing.

The second would not exist without the clock

2006-12-14T18:44:00.000-08:00

I suppose it's been awhile since I've given you a real blog entry, and while I should be finishing some Works Cited pages, I have decided this would be a better use of my time.

So, yesterday, I went on this wild, Quixotic adventure with two oldboys of Cameron: Max the Man Palamar and Doctor Egg. Our travels took us into the seedy part of town, the wrong side of the tracks, but we chose to make the most of it nonetheless, for we planned a picnic.

Along the railroad tracks, underneath a bridge, we made to make our picnic, you see. But of a sudden, a dreaded Grease Monkey assailed us, and we were forced to flee for our lives. We made for safety, but found ourselves on the way to the express way, and as they say in the Matrix, the express way means death. Before we were sucked into an Agent-trap we darted off into the woods and wound up in a field, stumbling upon a set of abandoned railroad tracks.

We went further into the woods along these tracks, and finally had our picnic.

But just like the Lord of the Rings, the story did not end there. Oh, no, there was still the tedious journey home. We struck out on a different route, for fear of Grease Monkeys and Agents. This one, however, took us to the Junkyard. That's not a picture of the junkyard, but I can't get the real picture off my phone. Our junkyard had steel walls and cranes and all these car shells. I was instantly put in mind of the dystopian scenes from Final Fantasy VII. No sooner had the thought occurred to me than a Low Grade Final Fantasy Boss broke down the wall and attacked us!

The world shimmered and spun and battle music pounded. It was myself, Max the Man Palamar, and Doctor Egg, lined up in FF7 formation against the Junkyard Baron, in a turn-based battle.

It was a tight match, but the victory music was heard, and the ridiculous finishing poses were made!

I hope you enjoyed the story. It was almost entirely true.

In English today I wrote this poem:

Chalk Art

A breath blew onto the black
the impression of a woman,
and the wind could blow it off.

~

More poetry!

Tired

Heaviness
drags me down
toward lseep
and
sadness-
farther
from
the
euphoria
of
lightness.

Winter's Mask

I look across the empty cafeteria
to see one girl,
alone and quiet,
with an open book.
Her muteness is the muteness of Rumi's reed flute;

the sadness is a petroglyph on her glass face
as my fingers trace her name
into the frost.

Urban Haiku

Electric buzzing
in the no-man's
parking lot.

A plastic bag
blown by
winter ghosts.

Sodium galaxies
glimmer
over sidewalks.

Electricity dreams
under
sodium skies.

The ghetto version of the haiku immediately above this one

e- dreams
under
Na skys.

Morning after observation

2006-12-10T09:54:00.000-08:00

Cannabis is better than alcohol, and here's why:

Right now, I feel great. I feel refreshed.

I should go watch The Weatherman.

Currently Reading: Moksha, by Aldous Huxley

Zoroastrianism: Continuing a Long Conversation with Azreal Darkskies

2006-12-08T20:55:00.000-08:00

Zoroastrianism is this bizarre combination of Judaism, Hinduism, and proto-existentialism.

They consider Being to be good and Nothingness to be evil, and in there's this battle between Being (the God Ahura Mazda, who created all things), and the forces of destruction. At one point, Ahura Mazda will prevail, at which point time will end.

It also concerns itself with the very existentialist idea of all individuals owning all their actions and deeds. Heaven and hell are vague, only alluded to in their scriptures, but they are alluded to.

It's really just a very confused religion that worships in front of fire.

Really, it's got a bit of everything, and I think, in relation to our discussion the basic concept is Being is Good and Nothing is Evil, which is the exact opposite of what other religions seems to be founded on. I think it may be out of the same primitivism that led Egyptian religion to create a mirror. Zoroastrians, however, having derived from proto-Indian religions that also spawned Hinduism, COULD conceive nothingness, but were terrified by it and thus considered it evil, while Being was good.

There is a judgment at death conducted by oneself, and you weigh your own good thoughts and actions against bad thoughts and actions, at which point the soul returns to this spirit that sent the soul into the physical world in the first place to play a role in the battle between Creation and Destruction. This provides the same misguided positive feeling of nothingness at ending life with all your baggage, the same as existentialism.

In other words, Zoroastrianism got EVERYTHING wrong. They could conceive everything, and went the wrong way in all its ideas.

It never got weird enough for me

2006-12-05T14:57:00.000-08:00

I am incensed. I am furious. I am fucking PISSED.

Why?

The profound lack of street urchins in this good-for-nothing town. You see, it's winter time again, and I've gotten in the habit of wearing black dress shoes. The problem is, the sidewalks all get salted, so I get these white salt stains all over my shoes. Why, when I get off the bus at the downtown terminal, are there not urchins queued up to polish my shoes? WHY!? What's wrong with this country that we don't even have proper urchins any more? I see plenty of these skeevy kids around the place, why aren't they busting out the shoe shine and rags to earn a decent buck? I blame welfare.

I'm a despicable man.

I have no freaking idea what Kandinsky meant when he pained On White II, I just think it looks funky, and I like it. However, a quite Wiki of this Kandinsky fellow reveals some pretty awesome ideas. He wrote about the artist as a "prophet," providing sublime food to the mind. There's this Triangle, and there are just a few artists leading people up the spiritual triangle, but in times of decadence their souls languish at the bottom as they seek out only material satisfactions.

These are times of decadence.

As such, the culture of these times are, uh, non-existent? Popular culture has always existed, I suppose, from the baudy Roman plays where actresses were made to strip if the audience hated the performance and screamed loud enough, to folk songs, to bizarre traditional dances. Rome wasn't all Aeneids, Rennaisance England wasn't all Paradise Losts, these nations all had their low-class cultures. But these things stemmed from traditions and customs and beliefs. Until now, pop culture has not been manufactured and sold to us. They were not valued monetarily. They were not designed for marketability. Shakespeare's plays were performed even in front of low-class audiences, they were a form of popular culture (I imagine it would be something equivalent to HBO - good, but still pop culture), and they were written to make money, but they made money through quality. When something was good, it made money. A quick trip to your local cinema will show this: profitibility does NOT mean quality. It means marketability.

Our decadence leaves up abandoning spiritual plights for material satisfaction, because in our wealth and luxury, we CAN pursue, to death, material satisfaction. During times of privation, spirituality may be our only pursuit beyond survival.

Timothy Leary spoke and wrote a lot about using chemicals as a means of triggering spiritual exploration. One doesn't achieve any spiritual transcendence just by doing drugs - but they are catalysts. It depends on one's subconscious. Set and setting. All that jazz. Then you do some peyote and you're off on your way to enlightenment, to finding out how to live, to synesthesia - which sounds like the most off-the-wall spiritual mindfuck ever.

There are all these things our minds are capable of, but only when induced to it. Things like synesthesia, the combination of two senses, such as perceiving letters and numbers with colours, saying words and experiencing a taste, or associating personalities with the names of days and numbers. The mind can do that, but for most of us, only with a chemical catalyst.

Where can you find peyote?

Whoa

2006-11-29T19:01:00.000-08:00

Magnolia is the most powerful fucking movie ever, and I will fight you if you disagree with me.

100 is just a round number.

Now, 101 is a palindrome, and palindromes are the only acceptable numbers.

Curiouser and curiouser

2006-11-26T16:39:00.000-08:00

Milan Kundera always puts me in a philosophical mood, and I've been reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Yesterday, a girl asked me what my "type" is. I answered, "a girl who fascinates me."

Then I realized in a contemplative moment in-between chapters of The Unbearable Lightness of Being that fascination is what draws me to people. And THAT is why I have trouble maintaining a social circle - most people aren't fascinating, and once I've realized that those people aren't fascinating, I don't care much for them.

The people I do maintain friendships with over time ARE fascinating. They have fascinating histories, they have unique qualities, they're sometimes enigmatic.

Everyone has struggles in life, but to take an idea out of the Immortality (Milan Kundera), there are many people and few struggles. There's a lot of cookie-cutter problems that all look the same - and while this doesn't demean the problems themselves, it's certainly not fascinating.

Which is not to say one is made fascinating based on one's struggles. But it plays a role.

It's a good thing the blog isn't an essay. When I sit down to type out my thoughts they tend to branch out as I attempt justifications and explanations, and I start to miss my original purpose. Essays are meant to be tight, succinct, and clear. I often find myself trying to express various ideas that aren't necessarily about the same thing, but they do touch on each other, if briefly. My branching thoughts make me lose ideas and find new ones and my original purpose gets devoured. I guess that's the point of a blog - raw and uncensored expression. My writing, essays and short stories and poems, they're curtailed and my ideas get withheld to maintain a quality in them.

Where was I?

It's peoples' stories that are fascinating. We like fiction and movies and things because we read about stories that are engaging and alien to ourselves. I like people because their stories are fascinating. I enjoy uncovering people's stories, and that's why a person's story needs to have depth and individuality.

A family's story can be intensely fascinating, because it is the culmination of multiple individual stories in this bigger and longer story. Think One Hundred Years of Solitude, my fellow IB-English-students or literati friends.

Some day, I will write an epic poem, akin to Ginsberg's Howl that will be composed of vignettes and visions of all the fascinating stories I have encountered, touched, and heard, the stories of friends and the yet-more fascinating stories of their families.

I'm working on a few lines already.

I always find it startling how many little tragedies and little stories my life has briefly touched on. People don't always like to mention them or talk about them, and sometimes it only comes up by chance, and for that they are supremely valuable. It's like thinking about the Internet from the perspective of a phenomenologist, thinking about all the tragedies and comedies with which I've come in contact.

~

There's a line in The Unbearable Lightness of Being about how every Frenchman is different, but actors all over the world, Paris, Prague, and the back of beyond, are the same. It then makes a similar comparison for surgeons, and this chapter is about the "Es Muss Sein," the "It must be," the meaning of their lives. Regardless of talent, each serious profession requires a consent to do something innate to the profession.

An actor, regardless of their talent, must consent to displaying themselves in front of an anonymous audience.

How fascinating.

"It looks like we were to talk like strangers"

2006-11-25T20:15:00.000-08:00

Trainspotting is a brilliant movie.

I can't get the song Born Slippy out of my head.

My weekends are breathlessly busy, my weeks are tiresomely boring. I have adapted by being social on week nights, the only problem is not everyone does the same.

I feel like taking a train to San Francisco. Why a train? It'd be more fun.

Sometimes I question what I'm doing with my life. I often just want hop on a train and leave, but I refrain from that because of something I call "reality," which isn't any more real than my life if I just left. The excuse is always, "I need to graduate high school." And indeed, I do, and I want to, but my fear is that I'm using this an excuse because I'm afraid to leave. Next it'll be, "I need to graduate university." I've already had to sacrifice the whole "travel to Europe" "travel to South America" dream. What if all these ideas about cutting loose just get tossed out from fear, using excuses of obligations and I wind up in the life I never wanted.

There is one safeguard against this. It is the TESL. Even if I never get the balls to up and leave, the TESL will allow me to up and leave with a paying job, thus both leaving and maintaining that soul-sucking security.

But that's not enough.

I need a bag, a notebook, a pen, and some benzedrine. Maybe a train ticket.

I am, here, faced with the old existentialist crisis. My life is whatever I shape it to be. Nothing is stopping me from leaving, and it's only externally imposed values that keep me in this nice little highway society has paved for me, where the first exit is death.

Well, there are other exits, if you want to hop the concrete barrier. There are a few ways.

Maybe this is why I want to be a successful writer. If I'm good, I can have the freedom I want, not locked in by a home and career. I just need the guarantee that I'm good enough to survive writing for enough cash for a roof, food, clothes, and the occasional vice.

My thoughts exactly

2006-11-21T16:40:00.000-08:00

Casino Royale, the newest Bond movie, is a recommended view. I don't even watch Bond movies, or action movies, but you won't be wasting your money, which is saying a lot given the state of Hollywood these days.

There are a lot of movies I need to see.

List of movies I need to see:
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Memento
- Reservoir Dogs
- Little Miss Sunshine
- A Clockwork Orange (seen parts of it)
- and more that I can't remember quite right now

I have a question.

It is a very important question.

Why is the martini so suave?

It was once described as, "The only American invention as perfect as the sonnet." Damn.

RUSSIAN SPIES!

Last night I wandered the town with Oleg and Azreal Darkskies. We made accidental art. What is accidental art?

Photographers who catch accidental art say it's something that just happens without an artist. That's true, but there's more. An artist can take accidental art and turn it into a lot more. An artist sees something more than what's really there and then they craft it into art -- a Surrealist sketch, a religious poem. It's about turning something quite simple into something with meaning. It's creating art based on accidental inspiration.

Or at least, that's my accidental art.

Mye best poetry comes from experiences. My next-best poetry comes from accidental art, from chance ideas and poetry jams.

I cannot sit down and decide to write a poem. I can even write a pretty good poem if I just get an idea and write about it, but my best poetry is all narration of things that have happened to me. It comes from my experiences, not my thoughts. That's why I like Howl so much. It all comes from Ginsberg's experiences. It may not be clear what the reality is (in fact I hope it's not), but the truth is, my best poems are all artistic reflections of real events.

Except I never tell the truth.

Sometimes I give the emotions and feelings of the event to another character, and that can make the experience far more meaningful for others. By lying I can express to you what I may have felt.

That's what art is, or should be, a reflection of the artist. Presently, I'm in love with Expressionism and Surrealism.

On the Styx

Ferry me to Hell
my white demon slag,
you Queen of the Styx,
you devil-bitch.
Stop your shadows and wrinkles from grinning
at me,
I know my sin
and I know my port,
and why don't you speak?
It's maddening,
saddening,
gladdening that you're imprisoned here too,
you're Satan's whore,
the diseased one,
with flies in your cavern
and worms in your kiss
and dust in your love,
you're nothing but trash.

~

That's accidental art.

I decided that I want to die in the arms of my woman, and she's the one who killed me.

I don't know why, but it seems such a perfect death.

Currently Listening: Kno vs. Hov - the White Albulum

Really, how high was Salvador Dali?

2006-11-16T20:36:00.000-08:00

Today I had the privilege of seeing another rendition of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. I saw a previous performance of it in August put on by JM Drama -- this time it was UW Drama, and much of it was even better.

My initial impression was that wow, this was even better than JM Drama's, and they did a pretty damn good job. I still think that more or less, but there were some weak points. Mind you, maybe I'm just more sensitive to them because I've read the play and it's the second time I've seen it.

Lady Bracknell, played by a man (Greg Carere) was hilarious, but he stumbled a few times (recovered quickly). I started to get tired of his performance in Act III, but in Act I he was hilarious.

Their Algernon, played by Brad Cook, however, was what made the performance for me. Damn he's good. Screw up Algernon, and you should be hanged. I more or less want to base my life on Algernon (well, on some days). He's this hedonistic dandy who does whatever he pleases and doesn't give a damn the consequences. Not to mention he's so goddamn British.

This version's Ernest was good, and Gwendolen really mastered the sexual tension in her first appearance. Cecily, played by Jennifer Lorbetski, however, just couldn't compare to JM Drama's. Quite liked her, but not quite as much.

The muffin bit is, has been, and always will be my favourite part of that play. Oh, and Algernon's line, "The only proper way to treat a lady is to make lover to her if she's fair, and to another if she's plain."

Life is getting busy, busy in the best possible of ways. I'm becoming productive. I've become attached to the project of this hopeful movie-maker/actor, whose name I can't quite remember right now. All I know is he's a stage actor who wants to turn this skit he did into a full length movie. He's only got a beginning and an end and needs a script. I'm a good writer. I know how to make screenplays. There are a few others who've also joined, all from Creative Writing Club, but they'll likely just want to put vampires in it.

I'm profoundly anti-vampire.

Not true, I once wrote a screenplay about vampires. But then I wound up writing about existentialism. Ho-hum. Never read Sartre while writing a screenplay about vampires.

Also, the Pelvis of Radio (I keep meaning to add his site onto my Links list) and I have decided to turn PS Your Cat is Dead into a movie. I'm doing the screenplay, he's storyboarding, and Independent Film Club will help us film it once that's done. I already have all of two pages done. Ooooh.

Currently Reading: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera.

Tomorrow's horoscope is undefined

2006-11-13T14:27:00.000-08:00

Today I had one of those self-transcending experiences, the kind you find at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I ran into Julian walking to the bus terminal with a group of people whose company I enjoy. They all got on their buses and Julian and I went for coffee. Afterward, I still had a half hour till my bus came so I wandered over to Julian's place and with 15 minutes still to kill I made for the park alone. It was nice, misty, and very, very quiet. I just wrote a poem about it. I still need a title, so if anyone has any suggestions, don't hold back.

It's November.
I walk through the park
listening to muffled life,
watching brief vignettes:
a teenaged couple laughing and kissing and flirting on a bench,
a Viet girl in a bright yellow jacket playing with her puppy
through the grass - all smiles,
while several blocks away a white girl- 16, 17- leaps out of a van
into the YWCA
and a grizzled man (her father?) sits there
parked, thinking.

The lake is almost still,
there's a tranquil mist on everything
quiet footsteps,
life seems like a movie in one long Point of View shot
and everything's sublime.
I feel peaceful.

As the Viet girl runs past with her little dog
I smile
and the world is happy
in those moments in-between.

When I concoct bits of poems in my head before writing it down, not all the bits I come up with make it in. On the bus home I'd toyed with descriptions of the city, about how even the ugly things were beautiful, how the ugly things were especially beautiful for their rot and their decay and their reality. Didn't make into the poem -- but I'll save it for another day. That's why I write it down here.

Things are a-changin' round here.

Not so much with myself. However, the Pelvis of Radio, the man behind Vicariously Prejudiced in a Perfunctory Manner, and myself may be turning PS Your Cat is Dead into a movie (or attempting it). I'm treating it into a screenplay, he's doing the story board. This means I'm joining Independent Film Club. Exciting.

On a side note: Hide your copper! The gypsies are coming! Actually they're Romanians, but when you're pretending to be an ignorant white Canadian, all Romanians are gypsies!

Poppy seeds make opium

2006-11-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

Check out Music at Knife Point. I guest-blogged again, this time with some Feist. I love Feist. Her songs make me happy. Or sad. It's very simple, happy or sad, sometimes both.

Poppy seeds make opium.

Red poppies also symbolize respect for war dead. Let me reiterate that point - they are a symbol of one's respect. They are not, actually, one's respect. Wearing a poppy does not mean you have that respect for war dead. Not wearing a poppy does not mean you do not have respect for fallen soldiers. I didn't wear a poppy today, but only because I haven't got one on hand.

Hmm. I wrote my one act play for Writer's Craft (really only 7 pages thanks to the word limit), in stream-of-consciousness style. It's about a dream. I don't know how long it took to write but I did beginning to end without stopping once. I think I was listening to Amputechture.

How can I be so busy and yet so bored? Work, volunteering, school. I'm exhausted. It's been a long day. I have to open again tomorrow at work, be there by 8 a.m., work till 2, and I didn't even know I'd have this shift until I was in today and my manager said, "Jaaaason, how'd you like to open tomorrow?" How'd I get suckered into that? It's money. So why's my bank balance inching downward, not up? I'm not working for any reason, really. My South America trip probably isn't happening. I don't know what I'm going to do this summer. Wander.

When you work for something, it's tolerable, even if you hate it. You've got a goal. When you don't know why you're there, when you're doing it to pay for 3 cups of coffee a day and lunch, when your classes are useless and easy. I've grown listless.

This is usually when it's time to change. Change what?

Who knows.

"I am the who when you call 'who's there?'" - some song from the Nightmare Before Christmas.

Buenos Aires would be nice right now.

Lines from a poem I wrote on Halloween:

"1X 2X 3Xes in a row,
spin the last but it comes up an O.
Spectre laughs float up to the unhinged moon,
swinging on a rusted nail."

Dialogue written now, in the style of the French:

- I was waiting for the bus, looking up at at the sky, and the sun wasn't even setting yet, but the moon was up, gibbous and fat but not full.

- Sure, that happens all the time.

- I know, but this time it was different. I looked up and thought, the moon looks like a big rock in the sky.

- That's what the moon is: a big rock in the sky.

- Exactly! When does anyone ever say that? When does the moon ever even look like a big rock in the sky? The elaborate metaphors poets come up with to describe the moon more closely resemble the moon than a big rock in the sky, except this time. The best, the only description of the moon in that instant was a big rock in the sky.

2000 hits

2006-11-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

Some time yesterday, Sex Coffee Poetry got its 2000th hit.

This is also post 93, meaning only 7 more until 100 posts. I promise something special for post 100. I don't know what yet, I'll think of something.

I don't understand why the Japanese do some of the things they do. The brown thing on the right is Domo-kun. He's the mascot for NHK, a television station in Japan.

Thank you, Uncyclopedia, and your article on AAAAAAAAAAAAA. Fitting, given the results of the mid-term.

I was going to write about something in this entry. Really, I wasn't just going to post up nonsense and strange pictures. But somehow, any serious topic after that introduction would just fall flat.

Maybe I'll get mad about the latest issue of Seriously..., Cameron's student newspaper. I wrote an article about municipal elections. The headline on the article is "The Apothecary of Municipal Elections." This makes no sense. An apothecary is a fucking drug store. On first seeing it, I thought, "Hey, that should read apathy." I was mistaken. I have just dug the article up on my Desktop, and my original has the headline as:

"The Apothocracy of Municipal Elections."

It's a neologism, see?

Apathy (total uncaring or lack of interest) + ocracy (rule by) = apothocracy!

I can understand if the editor may believe her own intelligence to be beneath that of the spell check on Microsoft Word, but I'm still pissed off. OK, no, I can't understand it.

INVEST IN A DICTIONARY.

The DRUG STORE of Municipal Elections makes a total of 0 sense.

So for the next issue, I'll be writing a short fiction called, "The Drug Store of Municipal Elections," in which the main character walks into an actual drug store of municipal elections. Are newspapers allowed to satire their own gaffes?

Or maybe ad lib headlines.

Oh, and I almost forgot, all you Neil Gaiman fans should listen to the audio version of Murder Mysteries by Seeing Ear Theatre. It's done superbly.

Perspective is like paprika in all of life's spices

2006-11-04T12:47:00.000-08:00

"The studs of stiletto on a silent night
Stalin Smiles Hitler laughs Churchill claps Mao Tse Tsung on the back."

- Walk Away, Franz Ferdinand.

Listening to Franz Ferdinand in the morning will make you cheerful and upbeat all day long, because you'll have their songs stuck in your head. I dig it.

A Sarajevo Rose. Sarajevo roses mark where explosions killed people during the seige.

As some of you will know, I work at Arby's. Well, today I was in at 8 a.m till 2.30, running on three hours of sleep and I'd been drinking the night before. When I got off work I stopped at the Tim Hortons right across the street to feed my raging coffee-addiction, which is so powerful it frequently forces me to degrade myself enough to buy coffee from Tim Hortons. At the cashier was some trainee. He screwed up the order of the guy in front of me, dropped his change, then he put my coffee into the wrong sized cup and had to fix it, and eventually he just gave up and let someone else hand me my change. The guy was maybe a year or two younger than myself. I found this funny, because only 15 minutes previously, I was that guy -- I was having an off day, given I had 3 hours of sleep and although I wasn't hung over, I had been drinking the night before.

I have a new project. Another long shorty story / short novella, like Indulge. It's the product of the ideas you get in your head when you read Beautiful Losers at the same time as The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. Exciting times. And I still occasionally pick at my latest stage play, a historical play.

I like writing about Canada, or in Canada, or in Kitchener. Pulp writers will pick fantastical or exotic locations for their writing, but I'd pick the personal importance of your own city, your own country, your own surroundings over that any time.

Death of a President is a pretty boring movie. The concept is good, and the first half an hour makes me want to join a revolution just to fuck wit' da po-leece, but ultimately it's just dragging speculative fiction. However, that's not to be derisive. I don't like documentaries about presidential assassinations, and Death of a President succeeds in appearing authentic. The makers did a damn good job accomplishing what they wanted to accomplish, I just don't get excited about presidential assassinations documentaries.

"I look like I just jumped the Berlin Wall" - You could have it so much better

Ulalume

2006-10-31T20:45:00.000-08:00

The skies they were ashen and sober;

        The leaves they were crisped and sere-

     The leaves they were withering and sere;
 It was night in the lonesome October
     Of my most immemorial year;
 It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
     In the misty mid region of Weir-
 It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
     In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

 Here once, through an alley Titanic,
     Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul-
     Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
 There were days when my heart was volcanic
     As the scoriac rivers that roll-
     As the lavas that restlessly roll
 Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
     In the ultimate climes of the pole-
 That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
     In the realms of the boreal pole.

 Our talk had been serious and sober,
     But our thoughts they were palsied and sere-
     Our memories were treacherous and sere-
 For we knew not the month was October,
     And we marked not the night of the year-
     (Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
 We noted not the dim lake of Auber-
     (Though once we had journeyed down here),
 Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
     Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

 And now, as the night was senescent,
     And star-dials pointed to morn-
     As the star-dials hinted of morn-
 At the end of our path a liquescent
     And nebulous lustre was born,
 Out of which a miraculous crescent
     Arose with a duplicate horn-
 Astarte's bediamonded crescent
     Distinct with its duplicate horn.

 And I said- "She is warmer than Dian:
     She rolls through an ether of sighs-
     She revels in a region of sighs:
 She has seen that the tears are not dry on
     These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
 And has come past the stars of the Lion,
     To point us the path to the skies-
     To the Lethean peace of the skies-
 Come up, in despite of the Lion,
     To shine on us with her bright eyes-
 Come up through the lair of the Lion,
     With love in her luminous eyes."

 But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
     Said- "Sadly this star I mistrust-
     Her pallor I strangely mistrust:-
 Oh, hasten!- oh, let us not linger!
     Oh, fly!- let us fly!- for we must."
 In terror she spoke, letting sink her
     Wings until they trailed in the dust-
 In agony sobbed, letting sink her
     Plumes till they trailed in the dust-
     Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

 I replied- "This is nothing but dreaming:
     Let us on by this tremulous light!
     Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
 Its Sybilic splendor is beaming
     With Hope and in Beauty to-night:-
     See!- it flickers up the sky through the night!
 Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
     And be sure it will lead us aright-
 We safely may trust to a gleaming
     That cannot but guide us aright,
     Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."

 Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
     And tempted her out of her gloom-
     And conquered her scruples and gloom;
 And we passed to the end of the vista,
     But were stopped by the door of a tomb-
     By the door of a legended tomb;
 And I said- "What is written, sweet sister,
     On the door of this legended tomb?"
     She replied- "Ulalume- Ulalume-
     'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

 Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
     As the leaves that were crisped and sere-
     As the leaves that were withering and sere-
 And I cried- "It was surely October
     On this very night of last year
     That I journeyed- I journeyed down here-
     That I brought a dread burden down here-
     On this night of all nights in the year,
     Ah, what demon has tempted me here?
 Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber-
     This misty mid region of Weir-
 Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
     This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

- Edgar Allen Poe



Halloween is fun.

The best costume I saw was "teen angst."

I bought a Franz Ferdinand album.

I'm sure you were bursting to know that.

I also wrote a poem about Halloween.

Maybe I'll post it another day.

The only one left to talk to is a gay burglar tied up in your kitchen

2006-10-30T17:07:00.000-08:00

The last part of a bit on the paperback cover of P.S. Your Cat is Dead by James Kirkwood, which I'm presently in the middle of reading. It's quite funny. You should read it sometime.

This is the picture of the most infamous French arch-villain ever, Fantomas. Why have I found a picture of Fantomas? This chorus from "Kennedy Killed the Hat" by Buck 65:

"You know I'm bound by law,
and we're surrounded by
assassins, fantomas, mutantes and serpents,
werewolves and sex fiends,
New York New York City, Lafayette Street,
alright now bang bang London Paris
shoot the lights out."

I'm told it's about ecstasy. Maybe I can see it. It's an awesome song whatever it's about (and that's not to say that it being a song about ecstasy would all degrade it).

I'm thinking perhaps I'll have to use this Fantomas fellow once. I enjoy using characters from mythology, folklore, and general icons of fiction. Possibly my favourites are the Devil and Israfel (an angel).

On this topic, my faith in my own ability to write a short story has been rekindled. For the past few months I've almost entirely dropped the short story format in favour of stage plays, screenplays, and poetry. I'm presently working on a screenplay, I've got a full-length stage play on the back-burner, and I've been writing poetry every now and then. Only recently, however, did I return to writing short stories, having been discouraged by a history of failures in that medium. In the past week I've written 2 that I've considered worthy of revising and turning into polished works: The Dream, obviously a story about a dream, which follows a dream logic and has quite surreal settings, and a story yet to be named about a beatnik and Israfel walking through Kitchener-Waterloo (though I never explicitly say where they are). They briefly run into Mephistopheles, too.

Art by Nicoletta Ceccoli. I find it rather Dave McKean-esque, which is why I like it. I also thought it was fitting, given this is Devil's Night and Hallowe'en is tomorrow.

Devil's Night has interesting origins. It began in Detroit, and really, the only real Devil's Night is still in Detroit. It began in the 1930's with egging and general vandalism, the sort of stuff that goes on in the rest of the U.S. and Canada on October 30th now. In Detroit, however, in the 70s, this escalated into torching vacant houses. At its peak in 1984, 800 houses burned down in Detroit in the 3 days before Halloween. That's Devil's Night. Thanks to a movement of volunteers called Angel's Night, Detroit is down to about 20 arsons a year. Consider that the next time you wander through downtown Kitchener at night. Unsafe? Hardly.

Oh, and I think I'll spend my Hallowe'en reading Edgar Allen Poe. Maybe tomorrow I'll put up a poem by him - not The Raven, because while it would be perfect, everybody knows it. I'll find another, equally spooky poem.

Actually, while I'm at it. Things to Read on Hallowe'en:

- The Price, Neil Gaiman
- Black Cat, Edgar Allen Poe
- Walpurgis Night scene from Faust, Goethe
- The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allen Poe
- The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft

"...as blue as the night in Cuba"

2006-10-26T16:14:00.000-07:00

Irony: the waiting room at the doctor's office is a breeding ground for sickness.

My friend does not have a job, but he gets money. No one knows how he gets money. One day I asked if the government sends him cheques. He responded, "Yes." The reason he gave was, "I kill people for the government." We laugh. I didn't believe him. Yet he's very persistent with this response. I figure he's just joking. Then I recall that this is the man who adores The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesteron. In that book, the leader of the Anarchist Council of Europe decides that the best way to hide the fact that they're anarchists is to openly say they're anarchists. The logic is, everyone will assume they're just quacks pretending to be anarchists.

My friend kills people for the government.

A drag on a burning Fidel,
a whiff of wine-smoke,
a sip of that opium-tea,
a puff of all the herbs in man's domain,
a kiss from every virgin
and more from every whore,
is there any better night?

A cup of Turkish coffee,
a grind so fine it's black crack,
a coffee brewed with a knife and a mirror,
chocolate from the Ukraine,
and the pink grape-light in a glass,
is there any better life?

A blue night in Cuba,
a dead disco king,
the blood of a god in your goblet,
a fox's paw in your pocket,
winter on your fingertips
autumn in your hair,
and candles for stars,
is there any better place?

If there isn't
(and I know there isn't)
stay a little longer.

Painting by Norval Morrisseau. Odd? That's why it's here.

I need bongo drums, 'cause that's how they did it in the Beat gen.

"I was born black,
I lived black,
and I'm probably gonna die because I'm black,
because some cracker that KNOWS I'm black
better than YOU, nigga,
is probably gonna put a bullet in the back of my head.
*BONGO DRUM*"

- Revolution, dead prez

Today's recommendation for lunch is: the grilled chicken vermicelli at Pho Dau Bo. Company: one man with PKITS (penis tied in knots syndrome, the male answer to PMS), one Viet girl, and one mixed martial arts trainer.

Syphilis is an allegory for the corruption of the communist state

2006-10-24T19:18:00.000-07:00

I have contracted metaphorical herpes.

That is to say: bronchitis. Why is it metaphorical herpes? The means by which I caught this illness.

I can only thank Ahura Mazda (the name of God in Zoroastrianism) that it wasn't real herpes. I guess I should be grateful. He taught me a lesson in promiscuity. Promiscuous = sick.

It makes me wonder, how does Jessica manage to get away with it?

Remember, boys and girls, don't kiss things you met that night.

The official story is I was abducted by aliens, and I'm sticking to it.

Oleg has made me think about something, due to his comment in my last entry. That is, our attitude toward animals, and how we treat them as our subjects on this planet, whereas, say, Native American tribes (used to, if not any more) appreciate the value of the animal life they were taking, expressing their gratitude toward some kind of spirit when they killed, and they only killed out of necessity. This great respect toward all types of life is an admirable quality, one that our society is sorely lacking thanks to the fact that we don't have to kill our own meat.

However, in this society so far beyond acquiring things that we need, must we take animal life only out of necessity? We use heaps of resources for art, so why not use animal lives for art? If bullfighting is an art, can't we express the same gratitude and appreciate the same value of the bull in its death for art as we would food? I think, given the mass-production of food but the singleness of a bullfight, it would be easier to appreciate and respect the bull killed by the matador than the cow killed for a Big Mac.

Oh, and it would appear that the Pelvis of Radio, Josh Matthews, has "syndicated, bitch"'ed me. I leave with you a link to Vicariously Prejudiced in a Perfunctory Manner, which shall at some point become a link on the side bar. Let it be known that I absolutely love chapters in which "In Which" are used in the title. Hence, let this be known as the paragraph In Which the Pelvis of Radio Gets Linked To.

Happy Eid ul-Fitr

2006-10-23T15:13:00.000-07:00

Today is Eid ul-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, so to my Muslim readers, enjoy the luxury of food during sunlight.

Despite my general distaste for organized religion, I respect Islam most of all the Abrahamic religions. No worse evils than those that have come out of Catholicism have come out of Islam, and they have avoided the major plague of Christianity: prophet shirts. Jesus shirts are everywhere! Mohammed, on the other hand, is a banned image. Although I wouldn't flinch at using an image of Mohammed for artistic purposes, such as the recently cancelled German opera that included the severed heads of Jesus, Buddha, Zeus, and Mohammed, I'm impressed by the devotion of Muslims to protest when a Danish newspaper puplishes a cartoon. If we gringos responded the same way to depictions of Jesus, we would not have that bane of fashion known as the Jesus shirt.

Islam also spouted one really awesome thing: sufi poetry. Rumi is brilliant.

The Matador is an awesome movie. Having recently bought a 1000 page book of Pablo Neruda's poetry, I've rekindled my fascination with Spanish culture. Bullfighting is really cool. There's an art to it. It's a performance, and I want to, at least once in my life, see a bullfight. It'll be easy if I manage to do my South America trip, which is still in limbo. Some people decry it as an abuse of animal rights. While I can get behind animal rights as much as anyone, I put on a much higher level the Right of Art. Bullfighting is an art and a performance. It's a tradition. Letting the Bull suffer is poor performance, killing it cleanly is celebrated.

Imagine, the matador is in in a ring wearing a traditional Andalusion suit, holding a red cape, staring into the eyes of a raging bull, watched by thousands of people. He's holding a sword. The bull charges, he side-stesp with the grace of the wind and whip the red cape around. He dangles the cape again and holds his sword ready. The bull charges and the matador kills it effortlessly.

The matador is the most confident man in the world.

"The shoe can't breathe and that's what causes the feet to stink." - Craftsmanship, Buck 65.

The price of strawberries don't fit into our economic system

2006-10-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

The title of this blog entry is a snippet of conversation I heard last night on my way to the Registry theatre to usher.

I have had a decadent weekend. It's been about fine things. Finnish vodka, Turkish coffee, Ukrainian chocolate, rose wine, and discussions of philosophy and poetry in the rain outside a Tim Hortons. Today I went to a pumpkin patch. Halloween is my favourite celebration.

Unfortunately, my weekend has also left me with a cold. Level 5 on the ICEC (Illness Communication Exaggeration Curve), but I think tomorrow I'll upgrade it to level 6 as a one-time excuse for poor performance. Check out Ze Frank if you don't know what about the ICEC. Sniffling, sneezing, and a cough. So long as I can still speak when it come time for the arts coffee house, I'll happy. Friday October 27th, 3:30 to 5:30, Cameron Heights drama room $1 admission. It'll be awesome. Sign up to perform if you've any sort of artistic bent at all. If not, just show up.

I am getting more ill as I sit and type this.

I'm in a happy spiritual place right now. I now believe that the universe is a post-modern novel. In a post-modern novel, meaning is personal. There is no "right" answer, because everything in a post-modern novel can be interpretted any way a person wants. There are symbols and characters and events and you can attribute whatever values or meanings you want to them. My friend described Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen as "putty." You can shape it to be whatever you want. That's the universe. You are the master of your own universe, and can attribute to anything your own meanings, values, or interpretations. If you believe in God, God exists. If you believe in elves, Odin, or Ahura Mazda, they exist. If you believe in nothing, if you believe the universe means nothing and that it's all just absurd, uncorrelated events and objects strung together, that's true, too.

The universe is malleable. You can make of it whatever you want. Like a post-modern novel, there will be parts of it that are simply incomprehensible, that no matter how hard you try to analyze, will always bemuse you.

I guess this falls under "Satanism," that you're your own God, as you essentially create your own universe and your own truths. However, in shaping your own universe, you can (and most people do), create an external divine intelligence. God is true because you've made him true, so that means you can't be your own god. A change of semantics will make this clearer.

You are your own reader.

You read the universe, and it, being a post-modern novel, becomes whatever you want it to become.

There are certain physical objects in the world that are irrefutable. The atom. The sub-atomic particles. Everything else is just interpretation. Emotions are just chemicals which are made out of atoms, people are just constructs of these atoms. We're made of the same stuff as concrete. Happiness, the chemical serotonin, is the same stuff as, I don't know, your jacket. Above the atom, everything is interpreted. I can see you as a build of atoms instead of as a person, I can see you as an angel instead of a person, I can see fire as the energy of Ahura Mazda instead of as a chemical reaction.

This is why image is so important. Image is what people interpret. People aren't privy to you inner thoughts, or your motivations, or your emotions. So people construct an interpretation of you based on your image. In their universe, the truth of what you are is an interpretation of your image.

The villain in sneakers is killing my business

2006-10-18T19:37:00.000-07:00

Today, I'm the guest blogger at Music at Knife Point.

Currently listening to Buck 65, a rapper from New Brunswick. In this album, he's got some country sounds to him -- but before you bristle in disgust at the word "country," it's not the bad, twangy country sound. No, this is the badass Western sound, the kind you would hear when an outlaw Clint Eastwood strolls into a dusty Mexican town at the beginning of a movie. In another album, after marrying Claire Berest, a woman from Paris, he raps in franglais - French and English. He also has a song about smoking opium in his houseboat on the river.

"I breathe out gently before my own death,
exhlaing hte mist of the three quarter tone breath
Like a pyramid of heartbeats everything forming
like teh Windless delicacy of the oil in Chinese paintings
I inhale the ashes of the past deaths
and dust from butterflies wings
and particles of rust."

- Riverbed 4

I was discussing with Azreal Darkskies' real world persona the awesome-ness of Quebec history. Canada has one of the driest, most boring histories of any country in the world if you remove Quebec. "So, we built this rail way, and some Asians died. Grain in Sasketchewan, we sent Ukrainians. Ask Britain for independence. A battle or two in each world war - we think they were important." Now, Quebec, on the other hand, has had the Quiet Revolution, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (the coolest battle ever fought in North America), a terrorist separatist group, and Canada's most charismatic leaders. Though they may be the flatulant Alabamans of the Francophonie, they're better than the rest of Canada.

I believe the source of Quebec's awesome history is its French colonization. As I've previously argued here, France had the most badass empire in the world, and as such, it's history is FAR more interesting than Britain's. It only makes sense that the descendants of French colonists would have a far more interesting history than that of the descendants of British colonists.

Last night, rather than do math homework, I decided to look into Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is an ancient Iranian religion, the dominant religion in Iran before its Muslim conquest. It was possibly the first monotheistic religion in the world, preceding even Judaism (which it heavily influenced, particularly in its angelology). The prophet was Zoroaster and their name of God is Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda is the only uncreated thing, and the Creator of all. It has subtle and complex theories about nothingess and unbeing, because those too are uncreated.

Some of the principles of Zoroastrianism include:

- None of life's duties should be avoided, and these include one's spiritual obligations, one's moral duties, and one's own pleasure
- all humans are entirely responsible for the consequences of their actions, regardless of circumstances (Sartrean philosophy in an ancient religion)
- Equalism; equality irrespective of race, religion, or gender
- Condemnation of oppression

On top of all these ideas, Zoroastrianisms consider fire to be the symbol of Ahura Mazda's energy. This means they treat fire in the same way as Christian's treat the cross - they worship in its presence. They have FIRE TEMPLES.

I might convert to Zoroastrianism.

And of course, this just wouldn't be complete without artwork by Dave McKean. That's the Sandman, as in the original comic book hero in the style of Batman or Superman or whatever. Except Dave McKean makes him look cooler than any comic illustrator ever could, and that's not even deprecating comic illustrators.

Riverbed 6 by Buck 65:

"A deaf violinist plays on the docks
He's missing a tooth and he stands on a box
His gestures are feverish
His cheeks wet with tears
He sleeps in his jacket, or so it appears
He plays from teh late afternoon through the evening
And bows with his hat in his hand before leaving
He plays for the angels themselves I'm convinced of it
Because no music at all comes from his instrument."

Chain-smoking angels
leave God's cigarette butts.
- J. F.

Bring me the head of the disco king

2006-10-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

Who is the Disco King, and why does David Bowie want his head? I think it was Neil Gaiman who asked that question, or something along that lines. I forget where or when, but having heard the song, that question is now haunting.

For some reason I imagine the Disco King is this surreal monarch in a hazy realm, sitting atop a glittering, disco-ball throne. David Bowie is Lucifer (in Sandman, Lucifer is sketched in the model of David Bowie), and the Disco King once made a Faust-style deal with him, but the Disco King cheated him. Now, David Bowie wants his soul.

"Dead or alive, feed me no lies
Bring me the disco king, bring me the disco king,
Bring me the head of the disco king."

Have I ever mentioned how awesome the Faint is?

" You know it's not only love, dear,
That can flip the switch up.
You know it probably should be,
Maybe god fucked it up.

Oh uh oh. Erection."

Onto a more intellectual topic:

Nigger-faggot.

What!?

Did I just say that?

How?

What a racist, homophobic mother-fucker I am.

WRONG! I don't believe in censorship, so I have decided to abandon self-censorship. No word, no term, no slur, no phrase will ever be censored out of my writing or my speech ever again because of its inappropriateness, politic incorrectness, or the "connotations" of it. Or at least, I'm going to try to remove self-censorship. Obviously it won't happen in an instant, but it's my new goal.

The English language, all its words, all its colloquialisms, and all its slurs should be my disposal. Nothing stops my tongue from shaping those words. Therefore, why shouldn't I use them? These words all have meanings. These words are part of the language, and language should not be restricted by anything. Euphemisms only create vagueness - and besides, they're self-defeating. We use euphemisms like "differently abled" to describe people with particular mental disabilities. How long do you think it will take before we need to think up something new because that euphemism takes a "stigma"? All the other euphemisms have. Mentally challenged, slow, retarded -- even retarded was an euphemism for "idiot" and "half-wit."

Why do we do this? All we're accomplishing is the further destruction of the English language. STOP THE EUPHEMISMS. But the politically correct will say, "But it's not nice. There's a stigma." Fuck your stigma. I'm not being mean, I'm being clear. George Orwell would agree with me.

But, why nigger-faggot, instead of "black homosexual"? Both of these are equally clear and concise, why is "nigger-faggot" necessary? It's not. However, I should still possess the inviolable right to say it, if I want. Freedom of speech, thought, and belief are the only important freedoms. By curbing the English language, by forbidding particular words or phrases, we mutiliate our own language. It's like taking a body and chopping off little fingers of it, and instead use different limbs for that purpose, but soon they become "offensive" too and we have amputate them. Prosthetics just don't work as well as the original organic bits. Before we know it, English will either be a bodiless head, or a cyborg, and it'll be our own fault.

Life is busy

2006-10-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

Producing a newspaper is hard, and I'm not even the editor.

Cameron's school newspaper, Seriously, is due to come out with its first edition this Friday, and when I finally hold a copy of that damn thing in my hands I will feel nothing but pure euphoria. But it will all be worth it. What we have is one damn quality newspaper, if you ask me, and we're almost a real newspaper. Our editor interviewed Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario, so we have a picture of that plastered on our front page.

Although most have contributed something to the newspaper, the three biggest contributors would have to be our editor, the real world manifestation of Azreal Darkskies (Music at Knife Point, Far From Relevant, check the sidebar), our layout guy Julian Haldenby, and myself. I've written a lot of damn articles - the most, I think, and then our editor. I have an entire page to myself, and that's only a portion of my articles.

The cover of The Legend of Johnny Cash. Good album. Knock country all you like, Johnny Cash is a BAMF (Bad Ass Mother Fucker).

I have a new appreciation for what our layout guy, Julian Haldenby, does. Layout is an infuriating and time-consuming process. Today I dodged fourth period to finish the newspaper.

I feel like a dogged, harried journalist in the midst of a war, trying to pump out a newspaper from a bomb shelter, getting past the censorship and distributing it to the people. The principal, Kempel, is the authoritarian regime, and we are the resistance.

"Mr. Edit is the name, and Word Genocide is the game" -- Myself, after editing 8 essays between English and Writer's Craft.

Thanks to reading Beautiful Losers, by Leonard Cohen, I have this new fascination with Aboriginal culture and history. They had a really good society, and although from a European perspective it was incredibly primitive, the people were probably infinitely happier than the King of England. They had very little in the way of instinct-repression. They were sexually liberated, they satisfied bestial desires for competition and violence through hunting, and they were incredibly spiritual. Screw the noble savage, the savage savage is the happiest man on Earth.

Poetry

2006-10-08T16:42:00.000-07:00

Opium Time

I'd sucked face with flames
when midnight fell three hours into the past
and on the wall 16 years later the Soviet Union's still there-
Off the edge of the Pacific is a white-black swirl,
Yin and Yang stare back at me
whirling without moving
circling themselves-
time is the music to their dance
each second a bass beat but the beat becomes rhythm
ticking faster, slower, syncopated,
the minutes spinning to the dance,
revolving sufis seeking love
and spouting uneven hours that pass like breaths or linger like days
in Plutonian orbit.

These seconds are the bastard spawn of dreams,
painted in Surreal form with opium-thoughts,
as blurred as the things in my eyes.

I.
With every crush I distract myself from you
but they all flatline in time.
No pulse- no heart- no romance,
it's desire's fault, not bad karma.

Every flirt is practice to make each word I speak
a key to unlock your laugh,
the laughter of an elf-song,
a honey shining off the moon.

I'm a bee.
My life is the pursuit of that laugh, that honey,
my only goal to harvest.

I want an orchard where each apple is your kiss,
or a field where all the grain's your touch,
or a stream where all the raindrops are your tears.

They call me Mr. Edit

2006-10-05T18:06:00.000-07:00

Check out Azreal Darkskies's new music blog, Music at Knife Point. I can't believe it's not butter!

Also, my friend Jesse has come to blogspot. Read Ramblings of a Swimmer.

The key to good health is clean bowels. Really, think about it. You can't be healthy when your insides are clogged with crap. You're poisoning yourself. I think I'm going to start fasting one day of the week, to cleanse the insides out. Start fresh. Wednesdays seem like a good day. It also has a spiritual purpose. Something you see in both Rumi and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (it's strange, but a lot of the stuff Rumi wrote about appear in post-modernism, too), the empty body is a recepticle to spirituality or God or inspiration or whatever. The empty body has room to receive things.

By the end of today, I will have edited 5 essays. I have one and a half to do after finishing this blog post.

I didn't really set out to blog about anything in particular tonight, but I felt like making one. I enjoy blogging. It is possibly my favourite hobby. I wouldn't call writing a hobby. You don't call studying for Biology a "hobby" if you want to be a Biologist. Blogging is a hobby, and I quite enjoy it. I like talking to you. "You." An audience. Site tracker tells me people actually read this. Quite a few people, actually. The blog is a medium, and I like to think of it as a medium of entertaintment. I'm an entertainer.

"A taunting of ravens to you," line from Vermicide by the Mars Volta. Sounds like a toast.

A couple of days ago I attempted to interpret some of the songs from Amputechture, the Mars Volta's latest album. After an hour I came up with one theory for one song: the second track, Tetragrammaton (go look it up), is narrated by Mary Magdalene.

Christianity has its own mythology. Much of it is discarded by realistic Christians, as it is not directly in any scripture, but rather it's legends and myths associated around the core beliefs of the religion. It's found mostly in angels, demons, and saints. The multifariousness of angels, demons, and saints in Catholicism gives it a pantheistic painting, and to me it shows that any religion will develop a mythology like those we associate with Greek or Celtic religions. Like any "pagan" mythology, it has a rich tradition of beautiful stories. The most commonly known, and most mainstream, is that of Satan, particularly the fall of Lucifer. My three favourite examples of literature making use of Christian mythology: Paradise Lost, by John Milton, the Faust story (used by both Marlowe and Goethe, I enjoyed both), and Salomé, another widely used story, but my favourite is Oscar Wilde's play. I would recommend all of them. Go read! Now!

Correction: 6 essays. I need to finish this blog entry and get on that, don't I?

The full moon is up. There is absolutely nothing more beautiful than a night sky with the moon in it. I always get an interesting mood when the full moon is up, and watching it half-way up the sky walking home from work today I felt electrified. It was a drive, a lust, a rage, an impulsiveness. I like using full moons as a time to make changes in my life. Going up my driveway to my door, I glanced back up at the moon and wondered if I was living my life by omens, using the full moon as something of a landmark. "Turn left at the big orb in the sky." I decided I might as well live my life by omens, because it's not like I'm living my life by anything else at the moment. The decisions are all mine, but the moon hasn't led me astray yet.

Notorious forty-two

2006-10-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

The Question to the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything: How many laws of cricket are there?

The Answer: 42

Victoria Park in Kitchener is the most war-torn part of the city. The upscale residential geese have gone to war with the downtown geese on the other side of the artificial lake, over the disputed territory of the island in the lake. Both sides believe that the island is their ancestral homeland. The UR geese and the DT geese have both subjugated the ducks, because geese are imperialist pricks. Meanwhile, the seagulls, in attempt to quell the violence, shit everywhere, accomplishing nothing. NATO air raids.

Both the UR and DT geese have laid seige to the Gazebo, the main settlement on the island. The persistent fighting on the island has displaced the real natives of the island: the squirrels. They now huddle in trees with their small stashes of acorns on the park periphery, frequently victimized by human cars, something like alien flying saucers in this strange allegory.

Presently, the Gazebo is surrounded by police tape. The seagulls, increasingly desperate to force a peace upon the two geese nations, must have killed a man to force human intervention by taping off the Gazebo. It is now interpark territory, though the rest of the island is still the cause of much bloodshed between the two geese nations.

When you fall asleep fully dressed and with the lights on, you don't wake up well-rested.

Imagology

2006-09-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

Ze Frank. It speaks for itself.

Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to the idea of "image," and particularly the "imagology" Milan Kundera writes about in Immortality.

Going to see the Battle of Waterloo, the big football game between WCI and Bluevale, on Thursday gave me more fuel for contemplation. The Battle is just a big party. People show up drunk, high, and under the influence of everything before hitting the parties at the end of the game to abuse even more substances. Looking around the crowd, seeing a lot of old friends from grade school, I realized something about the state of imagology in most high schools. "Image" in WCI has careened out of control. A society has formed where image dictates every aspect of life, and image is dictated by an inescapable group-think. People are not individuals there.

First, what makes an individual? Thoughts, emotions, and actions. Two of these are internal, and will exist no matter what. One is external, and is responsible for the image, the external manifestation of the individual. While everyone at WCI has their internal thoughts and emotions, their actions and behaviours are not individual, and in all likelihood many of them come into conflict with what's going on internally. People do not act as individuals. Instead, they act in an attempt to fulfill an image mandated to them by society - that is, the high school society they exist in. Because of the sheer amounts of people also trying to fit into that same or similar image, you get crowds of clones.

It was when I realized this that I truly appreciated the couple of friends I have at WCI who don't bother with that fucking thing called "image," or who I know beyond "image."

Much the same could be said about Cameron, even in the IB circles of society, though I don't believe things have deteriorated so far as WCI. However, the younger the IB students, the closer they seem to come to that awful status quo.

I've also noticed that there are people who are in complete control of their image. They fascinate me. Typically, either an image controls the person, or the person fails to control their image and portrays something else -- incredibly common is someone who does BOTH. These people who control their images are masters of imagology. They know how to manipulate imagology to whatever effect they want. They can do it to successfully fulfill a particular image they see for themselves, making themselves obscenely attractive to people (in all senses), making everyone want to be their friend or have sex with them. Some do it for the exact opposite reason: to repel people. When you know how to use imagology, you can cause whatever you want in people. Ad agencies know how to use imagology. The most successful politicians know how to use imagology.

Milan Kundera's Truth: Imagology is stronger than reality.

This brings me to the topic of aestheticism. Around the turn of the century (19th to 20th), there was an artistic movement called Aestheticism, the English version of the French Symbolist and Decadent movements. They came up with ideas like Art of Art's sake and all that, and also sprouted another idea. While this may or may not have been part of their ideas, Oscar Wilde definitely used it in his works: the idea of treating life as an art form. Live, feel, think, and love your image. Be your image.

There are only two ways to have authenticity.

1. Be your image.
2. Let your image be you.

I have decided, right now, that these two are the same thing.

This is a world ruled by imagology. Being yourself, absolutely, and letting your image be you, is the same thing as being your image. Image is inescapable. People who don't care about their appearances are projecting the image of people who don't care about apperances.

The key to success in life is controlling your image, not letting your image control you.

Whether or not these thoughts are coherent, relevant, or true, they must make me look like I'm pretty philosphical.

Listening to Amputechture - Mars Volta

2006-09-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

"They needed those locks of dirty red hair
necklace of follicles
with sabertooth monocles
they want a bouqeut of black rose gems
castrating kisses
stalagtite stems"

- Meccamputechture

Nothingness is beautiful. When I die, I hope I will fall into nothingness. People have a difficult time understanding nothingness. The best explanation is a dreamless sleep. You know when you doze off briefly on the bus, for maybe a second as your eyelids shut? You experience a moment of nothing. You wake up not a second later, but it feels like perhaps an eternity has gone by. You have had no thoughts. That's nothingness, and that's better than any heaven any religion or cult can invent. The world is not a bad place. People make it a bad place by doing things to themselves.

The problems of this life are not this world, it is the being. Heaven is no more realistic than modernist ideals of Utopia. If it is true that the eternal soul is transported to Heaven upon death, then one continues to be in Heaven, and the same problems that occur in this life will only repeat. Heaven will only be this life again. Nothingness is better than Heaven.

All this week I have not been home until late each day, until tonight. I realized, again, how irritating my family is. I was quite content living a week without having to see them.

Encore Records has albums of spoken word poetry. I found one album with Howl, by Allen Ginsberg on it. Howl is one of the 5 favourite poems. The beginning:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,"

I'm thinking of doing my English presentation on the existentialist themes of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. In particular, the moments of revelation in gritty, disgusting moments of life, such as when "the gang" skins the kitten. I'm thinking of connecting it to Beautiful Losers and Howl and such.

That picture is Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at Jack Kerouac's grave.

Song status: Asilos Magdalena. Spanish is a beautiful language (but French is better).

"Matilde, amor, deja tus labios entreabiertos
porque ese ultimo beso debe durar conmigo,
debe quedar inmovil para siempre en tu boca
para que asi tambien me acompane en mi muerte."

- Sonnet XCIII, Pablo Neruda

Milan Kundera said all black men look like kings (he was talking about the black men in France, those who are black as night and not far removed from the continent). If Satan were a person, he'd be a Mexican, and I make this assertion probably because of the American hangover of Mexican demonization. I naturally associate that country with drugs, crime, and chaos, but I still hold that certain Latin Americans bear an uncanny resemblence to something we might call Satan. And I do mean Satan. Lucifer's a David Bowie-look-a-like, and the Devil is a half-goat trickster god of Medieval European folklore.

The minstrel, the mariachi, the troubadour, the dervish, the folk singer, the beatnik. They all have the wander in common. Oh, how I want to wander. How I want to see Pablo Neruda's island, the Isla Negra, and pick up the tango in Buenos Aires, and be a flaneur in Paris, and learn Persian in Tehran, and teach Sri Lankans to speak English, and slum around in Montreal, and realize there are a lot of people in the world who might just be better than the ones around here. My fear is that I'm looking for El Dorado.

Unguided ranting

2006-09-25T19:18:00.000-07:00

Non-Sequitor Dreams

A star falls all the way from Heaven, takes a piss, and waits until the sun's risen to fly up again.

Knot-head punks with demon faces are anarchist philosophers meeting at the bus terminal.

Coffee beans and dead things.

The dream king stands atop an endless, spiral staircase.

Confronting the hag who lives on the edge of the tanglewood, haunting the Medieval faire over the hill.

These things leak into my head out of my pillow - the orange spots under the pillow case are dream stains.

--

"The police is the enemy.
Everywhere the white man goes he brings misery,
all throughout history - look it up." - Ghetto Youth, dead prez.

dead prez are black nationalists. They rap about revolution. However, some critics say they've started to appeal more to the their rap-gangster side than their revolutionary roots.

I am a Nationalist Socialist. No, don't freak out. Outside of the Western world, Nationalist Socialist means something different. I'm talking about an ideology truer to the term: nationalist in a patriotic and empire-building sense, and socialist in a Leftist, welfare-state sense. Not Nazism (which is what Nationalist Socialism is primarily associated with in Europe these days). My vision of Canada is an Imperial welfare state.

You may think that this is impossible for Canada to achieve. Sure we can be a welfare state with some radical changes, but how the hell is this wintry, pacificist pussy country going to become an empire?

Both are easily achieved, but not if democracy persists. Democracy is the root of indifference, the symbol of decadence, and the poison killing this country.

My vision of Canada is as far off as a dream. I call myself a nationalist, but it's not that there is anything at all to be proud, patriotic, or nationalist about in this country yet. If the status quo is maintained, immigration policies should be removed and the country open to the world. Why? There's no point in keeping the place closed. Canada has no reason to exist as a nation, and at present is merely a colony of the American empire.

Canada needs a complete cultural revolution before it can be an empire. Read Milan Kundera. Pop culture makes total war impossible.

The American empire is falling, and we need to detach ourselves as quickly as possible, or face ruin along with it. Let's take a leaf out of Russia's book. You see Gazprom? PM Harper points out how much better Canada is because we don't use our gas and oil resources as diplomatic leverage. Well, why the hell AREN'T we exploiting our most valuable resources for our own benefit? Free market? Globalization? Bullshit. We're getting ass-raped by the world, and all the money's going to a handful of oil companies.

Oil is the first step to empire. The second step is a military capable of defending this country when our benevolent protector / oblivious behemoth the United States either collapses or elects a Fascist who wants to make us the next Poland. The third step is using that military to secure absolutely and uncontestedly the Arctic. The fourth step is bringing Third World countries under our economic and political hegemony. The Carribean is a great place to start. They already want us in there. Let's accept the Turks and Caicos. They'll provide us a good first foot-hold.

--

Sandman: Dream Hunters is beautiful. Written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano. It's another one of Neil Gaiman's fairy tales, along the lines of Stardust, Coraline, and MirrorMask, but it's a Japense fairy tale, and involves fox-spirits. Foxes are my favourite things in fairy tales and folklore, and Gaiman's prose is worth more praise than I can give. Amano also does spectacular illustrations. If there were ever pictures worthy of Gaiman's smooth, illuminative prose, it's Amano's pictures.

Waterloo Royal Medieval Faire

2006-09-23T19:57:00.000-07:00

Today, while wandering aimlessly through Waterloo Park, I stumbled upon a peculiar sort of wall. It was an old stone wall, covered in vines and ivy, and it spanned a meadow between two groves of trees, their leaves burnished autumn reds and yellows. There was a narrow gap in this wall. Curious, I inspected this gap. Through the gap in the wall was an ordinary, if pretty meadow. Stepping through this gap in the wall, I entered into something that must have been a dream, but feels undoubtedly like a reality.

I crossed a stream on the other end of the meadow and followed a path through a forest of sere birch trees reminiscent of the wild regions of Weir in Poe's Eulalie. As I travelled I heard the persistent pounding a drum in the distance, and as I came closer and closer to the end of this wood I heard as well the chiming of a tamborine. The sounds of laughter and mirth soon came to my ears as well.

Cresting a hill, I left the forest behind and looked down upon a green meadow out of another time, for there were colourful tents throughout the vale, hundreds of pennants fluttering in the wind, elaborate standards marking paths, and hundreds of people dressed in festive tunics and gowns and cloaks. The drum beat and the tamborine chimes mingled with lyre songs and violin sounds, played by dozens of minstrels throughout the vale. Merchants under cloth tents hawked lunches, swords, armour, and all kinds of fantastic magical items. There were fortune tellers and a dancing gypsy weaving her body with a dragon-like beast. On the far end I saw two knights clash, lance against lance, and one was thrown from his mount while the other raised his fist in glorious triumph. I had walked into fair in the Middle Ages.

Realizing I must have been transported into this strange time when I walked through the gap in the wall, I decided to enjoy the festival while I had the opportunity. Not everyday you're transported to another time during a fair, after all. To fit in with the curious locals, I bought myself a cloak and a sword, and then a pretzel. I had no idea they'd had pretzels in Medieval England. They did. Cotton candy, too, but most of the goodly folk at the fair seemed to avoid that fairy food, and many cautioned me against eating pink and blue sugar fluff. Not natural, they claimed.

Even more to my amazement, I discovered that there were in fact things of myths and legends associated with the time. This was no ordinary Medieval faire. There were things from the realm of Faerie here.

Here and there amongst the simple peasant types and the burly, chain-mailed warriors and knights, walked fairies and elves, all of whom relatively the same size as us humans, if a little frailer and a few inches shorter as a rule.

It was then that I was absolutey ensorcelled. Enjoying a battle between two apt swordsmen and eating my pretzel, something caught my eye. Turning my attention to it I saw an absolutely ravishing girl dancing to the tamborine music, and on her back were two iridescent fairy wings. So stunned I instantly fell in love. Thus, I determined to approach her, but as I was about to speak to her, to utter to her some line that would astonish her the way the troubadours of Provence wooed noble ladies, I was apprehended by two men-in-arms!

They had noticed my blue jeans and collared shirt beneath my new cloak! They knew at once I was an intruder from some foreign land (rather, some foreign time), and although I had equipped myself with a fancy sword, they carried halberds, and people with halberds and people you don't want to screw around with. They escorted me back to the gap in the wall and shoved me back out into the modern days.

Sorely disappointed, I found the nearest Starbucks and bought a Grande Americano to console myself.

Some thoughts on France

2006-09-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

As some who know me well can tell you, I am a confessed and proud francophile.

Fran‧co‧phile [frang-kuh-fahyl] Pronunciation Key
–adjective

1.	friendly to or having a strong liking for France or the French.

–noun

2.	a person who is friendly to or has a strong admiration of France or the French.

There are very few francophiles in North America. This excluse group includes me, Jim Morrison of the Doors, and Robert de Niro. Most people prefer anglophilia (like Quentin Tarantino). Now, I'm quite happy to be lumped in a group with Robert de Niro. He was in Jackie Brown and is presently cast in a role in Stardust, the movie of a novel by Neil Gaiman.

Rather, in North America, there are mostly francophobes, or as I call them, French-haters. The ones who bandy about names like frog-eater (as though haut-cuisine were something to be ashamed of) promote Freedom Fries, and laugh at Jay Leno's frequent cracks at France in World War 2. There's a tremendous stigma against France around here, even in Canada, where we direct most our francophobia against Quebec. I can tell you, if I lived in Quebec, I'd be a self-righteous, fanatic sovereigntist. I ask myself, why all the French hate? People consider them pretentious, and they surrendered in WW2. That's about it.

Well, as far as surrendering in WW2 is concerned, France is unique in that its population grew faster in the SECOND half of the 20th century, whereas other countries grew in the first half, meaning they recovered military-able populations between WW1 and WW2 much faster. France was in no position to fight Nazi Germany, and ultimately the world is better off for the sparing of Paris from bombing. Besides, it's not like the French didn't fight. The Free French Forces fought all along, as did people within France during the occupation.

Another common remark about France is its historic position as a global power. The French colonial empire was the second largest empire. They're second best. I occasionally play online Risk, and one thing people despise is when you realize you can't win, but you can come in second, and thus, still win points to increase your standing. They call this "playing French." It really pisses people off. I do it a lot.

However, all this is ignoring one fact: the British Empire was a pansy empire. They gained their colonies through economic hegemony which led to later direct control. Sure, it was the biggest empire in land mass and population, but they didn't FIGHT for it. Now, the French, they fought, and fought, and fought - particularly the Second French colonial empire. In the map below, that's the hatched and dark blue parts of the map. Light blue is the first colonial empire that was largely lost to Britain.

The French fought real wars to win their colonies. It took years to subdue Algeria, and Indochina was a bitch to conquer. The French built an empire on blood and soldiers. They were badass. Also, unlike Britain, they didn't just let their colonies have independence. No. The French were too hardcore for that. Even in the aftermath of World War Two, they fought two bloody and lengthy struggles to maintain Algeria and Vietnam. They REFUSED to give up. Those subjugated people had to fucking STRUGGLE for their independence, unlike Canada or Australia. Don't get me started on India. I mean, Britain, c'mon, you got beat by Gandhi. He just stole salt and didn't eat. How can you compare that to Ho Chi Minh or an 8 year conflict in North Africa? Not to mention Haiti in the first colonial empire. Haiti was the first black republic in the world after winning independence in France in a slave revolt. Where do you think black nationalism would be today if it weren't for Haiti?

Another thing French-detracters will bring up is how former French colonies are some of the poorest countries in the world, unless, like Quebec or Louisiana, they later became parts of other empires (British and American, respectively). To me, that only shows how superior the French were at colonization in comparison to the British. The whole point of building global empires was exploitation. The British left some of the wealthiest countries in the world, like Canada, Australia, and even where it genuinely exploited natives, India and South Africa are now two of the strongest emerging economies.

Now, let's look at the French: Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Vietnam is poor and Communist. Laos is just poor. Algeria and Morocco aren't exactly a strong emerging economies. West and Equatorial Africa (Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Togo, Cameroon, Congo, Chad, etc. etc.) are some of the poorest countries on the planet.

What do we learn from this? The French knew how to EXPLOIT. If you're going to exploit native peoples, do a good job of it. Leave them poor for centuries to come.

Oh, and I totally forgot about Napoleon. Did the British ever conquer huge parts of Europe? No. They never got off their damn boats.

Ultimately, I conclude this: despite what all you French-haters say, France was one badass empire.

A defense of cheese

2006-09-16T22:29:00.000-07:00

Cheese contains two particular amines: histamine and tyramine. Histamine is released during the human orgasm. Tyramine can be found in the opium poppy seed.

Cheese is like sex and drugs at the same time.

Revolution and Romanticism

2006-09-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

We began timed writing in Writer's Craft today. The task: write non-stop for a certain amount of time. Today it was 3 minutes, because it was the first time. Here is the second half of it:

"My current favourite saying: Exclamation mark one or none. Been saying it a lot. It's fun. Try. Try damnit!!! Broke my own rule, but who's better to do that than myself. I for one think that breaking your own rules is the only way to live. That's aesthetic. That's making you a revolutionary against yourself."

Time up.

It got me thinking about revolutionaries and Romanticism. Revolutionaries are the epitomal Romantics. This makes sense. Romanticism, as an artistic movement, began as a reaction against the Enlightenment of Reason and Rationalism. It stressed emotions and the feelings of nature and the simple or pure. It was highly influenced by the French Revolution. It was created to go against something, and while being a Romantic no longer necessarily means you are a revolutionary, certainly being a revolutionary makes you a romantic.

Keep in mind, I'm using the term "romantic" loosely here. Romanticism has never been easily defined, and modern romanticism even less so. These days it's associated far more with romance, as well as general optimism, an appreciation for the natural and the "folk," and most importantly idealism.

The Revolutionary cuts such a romantic figure because he is always fighting against something, striving for something better, struggling for good, combating oppression. He is an idealist. He is ruled by emotions rather than realism and rationality. Reason might tell him that his revolution is futile, that if he ever succeeds in his fight now he will ultimately fail and become someone else's villain, and that all this is for nothing. His emotions, however, tell him that this is right and this is just and this is worth fighting, dying, and living for. He is optimistic that he will someday succeed, and that someday his revolution will make some mark of improvement. He has a love for the people or the country or the idea.

The tragedy is that whenever revolutionaries succeed, they cease to be revolutionaries and therefore cease to be romantics. The romantic hero becomes somebody else's villain. They are no longer fighting against anything, because they've won, and unfortunately, peace is not a particularly romantic thing. The struggle is the romantic part.

I think this is why Fidel Castro is possibly the only dictator (particularly the only Communist dictator) who with support in the Western world. There are, in some Leftist (and sometimes off-beat) circles in the West, it's not uncommon to hear people saying, "I love Castro," or "Castro is a great world leader." I happen to agree. People love him because he is still a Romantic. He has successfully cast him as the "perpetual revolutionary." He still appears in military fatigues. He has found a unique position in which he can both rule his country and still possess the image of the romantic, and this is due mostly to the United States. In the Soviet Union, Lenin and the revolution soon became Stalin and the gulag. In the United States, the American Revolution became the plutocracy. But Castro remains the revolutionary. Why? Capitalism, the Imperial aggressors, the United States, are close enough to swim to. Castro leads a nation that would be defenseless against American invasion, and even with the backing of the Soviet Union the Americans were still too close for comfort. The fall of the U.S.S.R. and the twilight of Communism only serve to make Castro even more admirable, for he is now the tragic romantic. He is seen as a dying breed of hero, defending a dying breed of revolution, and he is perpetually under threat, and perpetually fighting it.

Any other dictator, for dictator he is, and one who has violated human rights and one who controls the media and opposition (while I've lost faith in democracy, I can't give my total support to anyone who puts ANY limits on freedom of speech), would have gone the way dictators in this world do. They'd be demonized - often rightfully so. While not up there in crackpot dictator land with Saddam and Kim-Jong Il, he'd still be classed alongside Khamenei or the president of Belarus. But he's still the revolutionary, so he's still the romantic.

I don't know how my discussion of revolutionaries and romanticism became mostly a post about Castro. I hadn't intended that.

Back to Broadcasting

2006-09-12T18:28:00.000-07:00

... And we're back.

I feel I must explain my extended absence. You see, what happened was, a van guard of Cambridgean guerrillas laid seige to my house and were intercepting my blog entries. Thus, I could not post without revealing to the Cambridgeans I was in fact still alive. I escaped briefly to write my "message from the resistance." Shortly after that I used the fighting skills of one class of Krav Maga and a bad-ass sword to break the seige. And now we can return to regular broadcasting. Sex, Coffee, Poetry is back, and still better than television.

So, I had this huge list of things to blog about once my Internet returned. How many do I presently remember? That's right. None.

I could talk about how school's started again. But that would be dull and self-indulgent. Instead, I'll give you a brief summary, to both satisfy my need to do it, and your need to not have to suffer through it.

- I take Writer's Craft like one big joke, because all the stories I've heard of it from last year made me think that's what it was. I sit in the back row, and I'm loud and absurd. The teacher must think I'm a jack ass

- English: while I'm not a fan of Animal Farm, Orwell is actually a very good essayist. I'm a fan of the essays, not the novels

- Matter of Taste gave me a card that lets me get a free coffee after every 6 I buy. New favourite object

- My Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology teacher is a Creationist

- Joined the student newspaper (it has been named "Seriously")

Something else to get the ball rolling?

Awhile ago I made a post called "5 Favourite Poems." They have since changed. Here (not necessarily in exact order):

1. Sonnet XXVII, Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets)
2. Palme, Paul Valery (French version)
3. Howl, Allen Ginsberg (Beat poetry!)
4. Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Poem, Pablo Neruda
5. The Many Wines, Rumi

Notice Edgar A. Poe has fallen out favour with me. C'est dommage. Turns out he wasn't that good compared to those 4 (mmm Pablo Neruda).

Those are some buildings from the colourful La Boca district of Buenos Aires, a mostly Genoese-descended community that, in 1882, seceded from Argentina, and raised the Genoese flag that was personally torn down by the Argentine president of the time.

And Wikipedia has provided me with the best picture of Santiago, Chile, that I have ever been able to find. The more I think about it, the more excited I get about my trip to South America. Forget Europe, South America is where it's at. I mean, LOOK AT THAT!

Besides all the pretty things to look at and the incredibly rich history, there are also things going on there now that interest me. My hippy e-friend keeps going about the revolutionary energies.

I've decided that revolution is a completely romantic idea. Absolutely everything about revolution screams romanticism. Revolution is a Romantic ideal. And while I'm on the topic, South America also has literary movements and significance that draw me. Going to the Isle Negra, Pablo Neruda's home, will be like a pilgrimage to Mecca.

I hope this has satisfied your Sex, Coffee, Poetry needs for the time being. Here's an excerpt from a dialogue I wrote between a mariachi and a prostitute in Buenos Aires (I think I'm going to write a lot of dialogues and assemble them in a collection).

----------

Gringo-green eyes glared into a wanderer's soul. She was an Argentine beauty.

"Love does not pay bills."

"Why pay bills?"

The whore laughed and sat down on the bed again.

"Come with me," offered the mariachi, "My guitar plays for bread - that's all anyone needs. I'll take you to see the blue nights above Cuba."

"How are they different from the Argentine night?"

"They are much different. The stars are gleaming apples, the moon is a silver monarch, and the sea breeze fans a passion-fire in every lover's heart."