Strangers are Truer than Fiction

I work at a call-center that processes operator-assisted calls. In a nutshell, I speak whatever people type to me and type whatever people speak to me. I am a voice and conduit, my head a resonance chamber loaned out for the conversations of others. The company's contract encapsulates the entire United States, so my ghost gets to travel, haunting various terminals, injecting.. I get insulted, praised, ignored, patronized, bullied, beguiled and humored in drawls, brogues, nasally honked whinnies, shuffling consonants and lassoed vowels.. I am a temporary organ donor and sanctioned eavesdropper, a windowlicker and string-wiggled appendage. A vociferous prosaia and choral echo to narcissisms' gall. And all this is housed behind a confidentially agreement I signed to protect the privacy and security of our guests/hosts. However, I can speak anecdotally... provided the IDENTITY of the client is not compromised... So here are some of the more unbelievable snippets I or others have had to say or type, that is, either experiences of mine or my co-workers... and to make it funner, I will fabricate a few examples, see if you can pick them out... Please keep in mind that I've only worked a week so far and that we are obligated to repeat everything verbatim...

- Our chihuahua puppies have had an allergic reaction to the vaccine... they are all swollen... my husband is rushing them to you...
- He just hasn't been the same since the place-crash...
- Sperm monkey!
- Do you ever jump off Jetskis for fun and just float there?
- Dude, you is buggin...
- Have a blessed day...
- I cussed a lot today. [Well, the lord forgives all, but you must repent.] - I'm kneeling right now...
- The car must have tilt steering so it doesn't rub against my belly...
- The operator says that there's the sound of a baby gurgling and laughing in the background... who's making all that noise back there? [Er, that's my father] - HAHAHAHA LOL!!
- I am a two-pump chump...
- All I is is sex to you...
- They charged 28,000 dollars on a gas-card... those identity-theft people ruined our life...
- Pig-humping sperm monkey!
- The reason it was funny was because his head was on fire... you get it, right?
- Hello, I am Mr. Stickrod...
- He is a tool! [A tool?] - A tool! [A tool... a... tool...] - A TOOL A TOOL A TOOL!!!
- Operator, can you leave a message like the axe commercial... you know, biaow chicka wa waaaah!?
- Lv this message: 'najp igoogigoo nyama-nyama-nyam-nyam tittitty booboobeboobubbba!!' Tnx.
- These operators are fucking idiots...

But how can you blame us?

Mind the Business

Its a few weeks until Facebook reminds me of my birthday and it correlates closely with a mean material aquisition streak that I've been enjoying lately... So I innocently post things I want to aquisite here in the near future (whistling adorable innocence)... this is the wishiest wish-list of all time...
houseplants (palms, creepers, fruit-bearers); vibraphone; windchimes; microphone; digital camera; aquarium; a frying pan; a plot of land; career; amplifier; a motorcycle; a haircut; a dog; long bedouin-esque tent material; rooftop access (and license/permit to rebuild); a cruising boat (a small wooden cruising ketch'd be awesome, yawls strike me as ugly); a beefier computer without screen issues (my screen is red right now); a nice scar so i can tattoo it (only way i think i'll get a tat); a toothbrushing tutor who teaches me how not to fleck the mirror; a longbow; climbing harness and shoes; scuba gear; a cerebral implant allowing me to actually learn other languages...
So I'd better start saving... I think I'll start with the houseplants, camera and aquarium... haircut'll have to wait...

The above picture is the cover of a comic I downloaded called Shaolin Cowboy... it's gruesome and hilarious, pointless and fantastically illustrated. I'd recommend it. (I've got a collection now... other recommendation include some of Oni press: Spooked, Borrowed Time, Wasteland... Two called Steampunk: Manitmatron & Steampunk: Drama Obscura... Alan Moore's From Hell... The Filth by Grant Morrison and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Tragicomic...)

The Mighty Post of Boredom

If I were a fictional prepubescant child with a name like Edgar or Reginald, I'd be bored enough right now to qualify for the locating of at least 3 fantastimagical kingdoms in various articles of furniture. "Wow, theres a transdimensional rift into a land of sentient and happy single-serve vanilla puddings hidden here in this recycling box!" (yes, recycling boxes do constitute furniture at my place).

Perhaps its not rightly boredom, but more an escapist reaction to my evil step parent, _______, which makes me be employed. I eat microwave dinners that leech plastic into my soul, swipe cards in doorways, crave stimulants (even Valium would be an upper), get grumpy at inanimate objects, start glowering at people and generating irrational and fairly arbitrary dislikes of various traits of coworkers:

[I dont like him he sounds like a speak 'n' spell][her elbows are ugly i bet theyre sticky i will give her a wide berth in the cafeteria][his eyes are shifty hes the type to fart in an elevator]...

I think I am just really tired... Lucy left on Sunday to summer in Toronto with a job that was so perfect for her it seemed custom tailored to the cut of her psychic disposition, and she's overjoyed to be back in proximity of her sister and best friend Liz... really makes me miss Becky... makes me wonder what I'm doing here and makes me wonder what I'd do anywhere... sometimes I feel like I have the goods, a certain flair for things, enthused and buoyant... at other times I feel like all the angles of this city carve me down and gouge my senses... my truest are scattered across the globe, somehow with the money and inclination to travel, to live, to project...

Someone I met yesterday gave me good, if not stoned (?) advice: "don't work too hard, or else you'll die before you die" ... thats never really been a problem for me before, in all manners of speaking, the biggest problem for me is being able to project past the immediate point of contact. I believe that in "our" culture, there is some pressure now for guys to be dude-like, that is adaptable, and girls to be self-rather-than-other oriented, that is adapting... this is a gender schism, and while I basically agree with self-centering habits -and realize that we all opt and act at the leisure of our own decisions- our silent habits are approbated by those around us (those that influence us the most)... next thing you know, you are caught as the mooring rope between the dock-cleat of 'who I am' and the cruise-ship stanchion of 'who I want to be'.



Everybody is lonely... but how can this be? I type out background noises (I put them in brackets) at work. This apparently helps facilitate the conversation between the typing and speaking parties (I am a relay operator), but I'm seeing it more right now as capturing an obscured and near-poetic glimpse of habit... I write things like (sound of accordian in a hollow place)(door slamming)(windchimes)(a background conversation about mashed potatos)... It is one of the more beautiful aspects of the job, other than knowing that about 1/10th of what I do is actually helpful and chips away at peoples monolithic stores of grasping loneliness. So I am going to buy a little fish and put it in a creched tank and contemplate existences possibly lonelier than ours...

Green Space 1

This page needed some green, as I needed to practice some custodial and archival skills for a minor alley-way project I've endeavored to begin for years... here's one of the first installations...

rue Rivard x Roy/Marie-Anne

picker flicker

recent randoms:
- cucumber plants enjoy accelerated growth with the occasional sprinkling of 2-day old beer

- i have a compulsive and barely restrainable need to tell people about boogers, i actually noticed it when i caught myself REACHING UP TO A STORECLERK'S NOSTRIL, unconsciously it appeared i was compelled to remove it myself.. i should watch out for that (i was disciplined for such behaviour back in kindergarten)

- i changed my 'potential' dj name from Robotommy to Mangleloid... not that it really matters

- would anyone suggest a photo manipulation software suite?

- volunteering is one of the most direct actions in which you can positively involve yourself in yourself (and claim it as self-determination)...

- silk blouses billow the most when you ride a bike the wrong way into traffic

- absence and presence are ambivalent in each other's absence_presence

- some 'comics' suck, others will warp the way you look at reality... and the only way to know (other than by others' commendations) is to read them

- and, sadly, another to the blogbituary: methesequel.wordpress.com... dashes to dashes, dots to dots, RIP... miss you... T

dromedary caravan

upon occasionally realizing i have Writer's Choke (block's not enough'f a word, as there's a soggy bottom to the identity of any 'doer' vs. their formal intent) i wonder what it's got to do with me. all personal challenges aside, according to one of the principles of dialectic process, the unity of opposites, it would follow that The Choke is some sort of antinomy of behaviour...

to practice writing, perhaps i should practice reading, and by that i mean repattern how i engage with i) the written word and ii) the story/narrative of other mediums...

in my life of the past few years, i've noticed that i increasingly veer away from people who seem to have opted out of dialogue (or perhaps opted for prescriptive rhetoric). this is not to say that i am happier or that my approach is better or that i do not engage in rhetoric myself, but eventually, in conversation with such a prescriptivist, we'll drive each other batty... i'll feel solicited and they'll feel mocked... true story. and i think i might be a little lonelier for it. its given rise to a Zeno's paradox of intimacy... distance being relative, but exhaustion not...

the obvious problem, of course, is the fact that writing is a mode of inscribing the ribbon of time, of elegant decay, of quotational parasitism. the written word is governed by rhetoric, even though it's main efforts are to corrode it, or perhaps morph and leave it ampliate. it's a camel's conversation with the sand.

i believe i'll tie up these ungainly ruminations with a few quotes, for unity's sake (harhar)...

“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself." - Marcel Proust

"Laughter is the closest distance between two people." - Victor Borge

"Symbols are the seams of the redressed gestures of dreams." - Me

"Hypocrite reader - my fellow - my brother." - Charles Baudelaire

where were you when your friend told you that Professor Dumbledore bought the farm?

1. 'Right here, you inconsiderate dolt!'
2. 'Just before I ended the "friendship".'
3. 'I was that friend!'
4. 'At a dep, buying owl-treats.'
5. 'Practising magic incantations underneath my bed-covers.'
6. 'Googling Hermione's birth-date.'
7. 'Taking a wicked wizard shit.'
8. 'On a coach tour in Dallas.'
9. 'Playing Go Fish with Severus Snape.'
10. 'He's not dead - it's a ploy to throw off the Death-eaters, you Hufflepuff.'