a Mona Lisa simile

like a broken arm and an apple tree...
like a bobby pin on the floor of Starbucks...
like an old dear in the Express checkout...
like Gandalf's hemline...
like a conversation about Stephen Harper with your mother...
like mustaches and 'irony'...
like your ex contacting you upon breaking up with her latest boyfriend...
like a meteorologist in a convertible...
like the last biscuit at a tea-party...
like flattery after an unintended slight...
like zombies, vampires, trucker-hats, wearing your pajamas in the mall, and the miasmatic word 'sustainable'...
like reviving your use of Facebook a few days before your birthday...
like finally receiving the email you sigh to...

sounds

communities used to convey information through the use of bells: marriage, commemoration, time, religious observance, victory, defeat. now this news is quietly embedded in our self-phones. and bells, when they bell, are a sort of vestigial emotion. a nostalgic tracing similar to Bjork when she gets to that part of the song where she plays with the limn of words' sound and meaning

i have a collection of 8 foot bamboo rods in my bedroom right now, they crackle softly like a bored Geiger counter. harvested from my yard, i wonder if i wouldn't love giving it all up and becoming a bamboo treehouse guy

toast is quite sonorous when the lights are out. spreading butter sounds somewhat like someone ox-plowing a parking lot

my alarm clock does not wake me up. but my sister's one, 35 feet away and through 3 doorways, does. by some feature of harmonics, it's soft enough to be piercingly loud. that and its bleeps are akin to a truck backing up

extractor fan drones; ear-bud hiss; people dragging their feet in libraries; the noise of another's single mistake that you somehow know is antecedent to their declaration that they're having a bad day; sailboat clanks as the water passes its waves through the boat and to your ears; the ticking of an unseen bicycle being walked past your window; the sound shadow an object creates as you pass, such as how bench curves the susurrus of a fountain; the ubiquitous use of power heels and jangled keys forecasting arrival of authority

the word 'ostentatious' is

Divestity First

Point form!! YAY!

- Sustainable porn?

- is one of the Kids in the Hall playing the role of Stephen Harper these days?

- Found shopping list at Safeway:
1. Chips
2. Pop
3. Ice-cream
That's it! Someone WROTE THAT DOWN TO REMEMBER. I hope they're not still wandering the aisles in anguish as I write this.

- Diversity Fest, 2009. Was as righteous as ever [aside from another sad loss] But I remember thinking one thing to always keep in mind: the nastiest object that one could possibly touch would be a hand-sanitizing bottle when it's empty. That's all for this point.

- Best movies I watched this year (2009-2010, in order of remembrance):
1. The Fall
2. Moon
3. Let The Right One In
4. District 9
5. Stalker (favourite?)
6. Mary and Max
7. Mongol
8. Primer (a sci-fi filmed for $7000?!?!)
9. Silent Running (made me feel sadder than I thought it could)
Could you recommend any? This list feels mildly insubstantial...

- You are my among my softest thoughts, being not privy to yours. Is that why we always end in obloquy?

- Also, THIS GUY!

no more negative thoughts

soundtrack: shackleton's breezeblockmix.mp3

homework's jeering at me and my room's a snowglobe of clothing in stasis. these are both pushing at me, and i realize i realize them. as walls and arches, i feel i occupy and build within such negative space of these outerworldly materials. not negative as in subtractive, or in some perceived absence of good, but as the space of semi-invisible constraint. as tasked materials within which i react. often, i dwell there precognitively: i shouldn't drink a beer now, i want to drink one later. i should reflect on the memorial service for my mother's neighbour. i am afraid to finish that music track, so i won't. i am afraid to write, so... i will...

What are the benefits and pitfalls of approaching sustainable building from a philosophical position?
i owe an essay to this question for an accreditation course i am pursuing. i wish i could decrypt the problem i have with it... it appears to have too many intrinsic assumptions: philosophy is an immovable, immutable 'monolith' with no endogenous complications? surely not... philosophy will aggravate ideas of sustainability until it has bled all intended meaning? no... a philosophical position is doxy, whereas the vacuity of the word 'sustainable' is necessarily adaptive? i'm not sure about any of this... honestly... benefiting who? in the purview of what timescale; the lifecycle of a building? is sustainable sustainable? building is generative whereas philosophy is masturbatory? perhaps at whomunculus, but really, philosophy has set itself up so that only parts of it can fail [this could be read: succeed in becoming 'factual', and thereby aphilosophical]... so this shivers out of shape again. instead, i hope to divert the river here:

take the human out of her own devices of measure, and place her in the universe. she becomes both the alien and the intimate. let us suggest that she could imagine her self being more-than-one within her lifetime. that is, she can readily say phrases such as: 'i like myself when i am around you' or 'sometimes i wish i were a tree'. it could follow that these possibilities allow for this differential of self down to a minute quantum of time (quick cloud gaze: do units of time become 'dryer' the smaller the get?) thereby, taken objectively, a person both is and is not who she is... it is only her claim -and constant repetition of such- that she is that might make her so. if we allow the shattering of that person even further (or, it could be said, simultaneously) into feelings, then perhaps feelings belong as organs. not separately, such as anger = pancreas and love = heart, as that shit's older than age itself, but as parts of a whole. the twist is, the whole is not here the individual anymore, but that which is conceived by the individual. our she might have an idea that is made up of many emotions, each one presenting themselves as they are benefited or pitfallen by interaction with the universe. any perception that she IS her emotions, would speak to her beholdening of herself as a contiguous in-dividual. instead, she could become the (now messier than my room) many-one that conducts emotional response over now very divisible ideas. again, the blurring of these ideas into a representation of her true self is a conceit of convenience and indiscriminate thought. i'd say developed, in part, by legality [as attempt at quantifying the human condition in lieu of acceptable qualification?] and deeply ingrained social mores. what's left becomes subject to questions like 'what becomes of personal agency and responsibility in the case of the many-one?' - but do we not already have this problem, i.e. pleas of temporary insanity (apparent interruptions of continued self) or corporate malfeasance (bad doings by the meso-many-one)?

so now, anger becomes again a failure of intended or anticipated happiness of an idea 'he's late to pick me up to go for ice-cream at Fisherman's Wharf'. and not 'i AM angry'. admittedly, there were many allowances made to come to this manifold sense of organic self, but it's largely because i did have that beer in the end.

and, by grand allusion, i'd like to propel this idea as an argumentative analogy to spite 'sustainability'. with out its supersaturated marketplace connotations, 'organic' means so much more... the paisley wallpaper of ecology remains (or is even strengthened), the systemic notions are made firm, the mortality reintroduced (as opposed to some hazy embedding of trans-generational communism/collective guilt) and space for change is again of central concern. considering our historical faults have become evident and that methods of underwriting true value (energy consumption married with nutritional systems) are now available, we have further to go than we've yet come, and sustainability is not enough as that would imply that we've already arrived. besides, 'sustainability' WILL lead to programs of overt eugenics.

of passersby who just don't

in montreal, i began to notice a girl who i could only describe as 'a spunky redhead' was popping up wherever i went. sitting at a cafe, she'd nip past. waiting for an elevator, who would exit it? catching the VIA train to Toronto. even on a ferry in BC. it became at least a bi-weekly game: 'oop, there she is, riding a unicycle, of course' [that never happened] she'd only grimace at me, spunkily. and i've no idea what expression i carried, but one of mild irritation perhaps?

well, this is beginning to happen in victoria, except this time it's with a hispanic-looking dude. i KNOW he's seeing me at least as frequently as i see him. he seems to be on every bus i get on... i suppose we do conduct some affairs in the same quadrant of town, but still, come on. next time i see him, perhaps an awkward moment hovering in the produce section, i'm gonna just tell him that he's got to alternate days with me, else take up a wordless high-five ritual so's to keep it real.

the Princess and the Blog

blogging for me is like doing mental calisthenics. always done alone and in the pink, it's a graceless, self-serving endeavor, like being busted with your mouth on the milk carton, dribbles beading down your bathrobe lapels. for others, it seems not so, and they pull off some remarkably thoughtful ruminations that find a resonant space balancing between the extremes of trivial and profound. perhaps its just their hidden machinations, my own so brazenly revealed (to myself), that make it so, but i'm always impressed. it's a baser program for me, i feel, as i do it to simply wake myself up. i'll readily discuss burrito recipe balancing or bull markets, post-structuralism or polyps... if only to feel that in that day, i had a thought that, if not original, was presented as such.

however.. as i left my own musings in the cold, more or less for about a year, i'd also fallen out of tasking myself to comment on the blogs of others. this is a critical function, like the return of blood to the pumping heart or the intake of fresh air. blogging without reading and contributing to others is being a PRINCESS, and something i really must prevent in myself. on one level, i'd readily admit that i don't want to comment just for the sake of it (as most comments seem to be self-referential/promotional) but shit, this form of individualism is alas an accepted medium for discourse (and tends to trump the input of the modest moiety). it takes a community to whisper up an individual but an individual to shout down a community (or something loose-witted like that). so i'm gonna try to get out of myself and visit the ol' blog-pond and bask a while on their lily pads. kiss kiss.

Team building exercises are an odd idea. I'd imagine their usefulness as having any lasting value being as limited as a People magazine editor's attention span. Take our high school exercises for example: get everybody across this imaginary alligator pit using not-enough planks and a skipping rope. The future applications this has can be projected to what exactly? Escaping from a Nintendo game? Smuggling somebody's relatives across the Rio Grande? If there's ever a point at which I can hold my hand up to the group I'm mysteriously traveling with and say 'don't worry guys, I got this, luckily we covered this one in gym class' I'll reappraise my relationship with my junk-mail folder. Honestly, if our teachers were truly serious, shouldn't they've gone a few steps further in the imaginary activity: 'A few of you have been spraying your precious bodily fluids down your thighs for the last 8 days due to dysentery. One of you is at the end of their second trimester with the Somalian pirate-king's baby. Those two are still chained together and you over there are still blinded from the gasoline siphoning mishap in the exercise we just completed. Now get across that alligator pit.'

Hey! How about some skills we could perhaps transpose onto the real-world? Oh, I don't know, something like 'how to do your taxes' or 'this is your charter of freedom and rights' or 'massage circles' or 'fixing small combustion engines' ...anything even remotely relatable. So what was the point then? For a teacher's lounge betting pool? 'Good job. Because you were death-rolled by the alligator, Mr. Jenkins now has to dress like Monica Lewinsky for a day [this was in the late 90s]. Therefore you have a Type A personality.' Or something more insidious, like getting us used to the absolute pointlessness and subjugation we'll have to endure through much of life? Breaking our spirits with an uncompletable exercise so as to prime us for later brainwashing and ideological impressibility (this has been shown literally ad nauseum through psy-op detention exercises).

I've totally forgotten the point I was trying to make. Nothing like the introduction of gOVERnMENTAL brainwashing to prime one for forgetfulness... Um. Oh yeah, the denouement: We all made it across without a single sacrifice (voluntary or non-) and then, as a reward, we were hosed down and prodded back to our gruel-troughs.

white

i am white. i don't mean that in an ethnic sense, or as a statement of pride, or even as an approximation of my capacity for rhythm. but as sheer fact: my whiteness is profound. i'm surprised i cast a shadow i'm so white. it's beyond ceramic. beyond mime. beyond The Bachelor's teeth. my white is weapon's grade white. i make Russians look Brazilian. i make tampons feel like harvest farm hands. brides feel like anti-smoking ads. i get crank calls from pieces of chalk and magician's bunnies, cave newts and Welsh people, i'm that white. i have to use aloe vera after a full moon. i cannot even look at my own feet during summer.

i say this as i took my shirt off yesterday, and a child pointed me out to her mother, and i heard an audible gasp. people gasp as if i'm some sort of perversion! which is a fair appraisal, it just skips a few salient intermediary points.

hypocropolis

so i published a post i did. it was inappropriate, so i just scrubbed it off. those types used to be my favourite, as they seemed to press against consensus and get something closer to a dialogue rolling (in my head). some people don't even know they have beliefs until they're challenged, which is Fox news' approach, i'm sure. i can't really pull that off anymore, as in my world we're fresh to an earnest era. baiting, trolling, cynicism, scrutinizing, contrarianism... these are skills of rarefied value in Victoria. and this is fine, as it makes this place pleasant (if not repressed and shrewd).. it's just that i had devoted many hours to becoming an obstreperous bucker of convention (i.e. a jerk), that now i get facial cramps when i have to say something nice.

but pissed off people DO things. i know many people who only work to make change when they're angry, often projecting things to get angry about, just so they can make motion. it's effective... but only to the extent of their own self-righteousness. they often forget that multiplicity is the cosmic condition, and that duality is an anthropic conceptual vice: there are more than two ways to live. indeed, any way that is not always under processional review is flawed, as all ways of living are yet still open. living systems can always be short-circuited... not always for the good, of course... but sometimes, by introducing another element, for the better.

i saw a hummingbird this morning, who had, through whatever process, learned to raid spiderwebs for insects. that struck me as a marvel, as the blighter zipped straight for the web expecting a meal. that is, knowing that the web was there, knowing that it could find food and knowing that it could retrieve it.

also, today i called a callous driver a cumshot. which is pretty good, as normally i fumble around for something offensive and end up yelling something like 'mean... yellow-haired... car-driving... groober!' feeling a little uncertain as to what a groober really is, and whether it would suffice as slander. my all-time yell: diesel dick. still proud of that one, but can never seem to remember it in time to use again.