whomunculus

Island of the Dead - Arnold Boecklin

2012-01-29T19:32:00.000-05:00

stonyteller

2012-01-21T13:12:00.004-05:00

'To write is to pull stones from a river' - a smooth weight to rub against your palm, but still, too polished to be placed in the story for which it was intended ===

sometimes I wonder at unintentional plagiarism, as copywrongs should at least reference the source... so i go-ogle [back when first using the new company, i though it was pronounced this way..!?] the phrase, and find a writer's blog

quite sweet really, but to see it rest there... why not go guerrilla? scribe the stone, and let it loose in a spot where it would be appreciated? glyphiti? petripoems? geodes!

2012-01-20T18:43:00.001-05:00

Dumpstrep

2012-01-19T00:14:00.004-05:00

What happens if you take dietary supplements that suggest you do so on a full stomach, on a stomach full of dietary supplements that suggest you do so on a full stomach?!

We're about to find out. Perhaps it'll grant me the energy necessary to enjoy Skrillex, a fartist with the power of turning all milk and cream and frappe you've ingested into bowel-cheese: Dumpstrep. He's like the conductor for a choir of tractors. Or an interpretive fiscal policy report for the US economy. If it weren't for the youth-market mills of the disaffected suburbs, he wouldn't have to produce vicarious screams.

Anyone else seen Girl With The Dragon Tattoo?

Wait, why I am being so cruel? Especially when complete and utter disregard is so much more effective. I know why: cause I'm getting SICK.

I'll make up for it now by injecting music that CURES instead:

slipstack : snowstalgia

2012-01-18T17:08:00.003-05:00

IN the phantasmagoria that is Victoria, a rare element has graced us: SNOW. IT turns us further inwards, for which people here will never make apology. WE are the seashell mysteriously found in every other domestic bathroom.

OUR hedge cat, Hucklebetty, is stress-eating. AND he's right to do so: light's become dark and he's just a giant polar-bear's nose. A lonely, staff-less note on the music sheet.

THE diligent, the SCRAPISTS, are all outside, huffing and swearing as they defile her. I've some ruminating to be sating the demands of a project, but first the this (FROM WIKIPEDIA - yes, there's ways to still use the thing this day of SOPA-be-gone):

'The name Ranunculus is Late Latin for "little frog," from rana "frog" and a diminutive ending.'

One God Universe

2012-01-18T02:07:00.000-05:00

funder and laughtning

2012-01-08T23:15:00.003-05:00

Maybe it was about the 3rd or 4th round of the game of spitting over a wire just off my deck that I realized exactly how bored I am. Like a 12 year old boy malingering outside a slushie-mart, target-spitting for pleasure. And I recalled just how much fun I used to have with this blog, or how the blog used to enhance the fun I had in life. And then I shrugged and spat clean over the wire.

But it's true. Somewhere back in the misted past, I resorted to a sort of crypto-nonsense, binding words up within the absurdity I hold so dear until they could no longer lubricate the story. Like the sewn pockets of a new suit, or braile on a parking meter, or your ultrarich landlords who flagrantly dress down only when they visit you
'Nice wellies. Is your stubble mascara'd on? Pizza's held facing the other way up, you know. Otherwise I totally relate to you.'
(I hate the word landlord, I really do. What other title invokes such presumption? 'I'm the bus-baron, and don't you forget it.'
'I'm not a valet, I'm the car-tsar. The auto-crat. The fourwheeled Fuhrer. The...

And I didn't bother finishing... so what.. it's boring

where? anandroid

2011-12-31T15:46:00.004-05:00

there're methods to e-mediation - short snappy lines; photo-punctures; lurid unclickable ad-zones in the margins - and all fit into the con-template of blog/web expectation: the tacit rules of content-layout that permits navigation to the most casual of visitors. but if you've ever tried flipping through the garble that is an architecture firm's website or artist's portfolio - them other buckers of convention - you'll see that those most likely to want content made deliverable by anticipatory design, are those most obfuscating and indulgent. and i'd be proud to count the who? alongside this inaccessibility. posthumunculously, of course, as this place isn't.

i've not had a cellphone for 2 years, and it's bliss. people tell me how much i miss, and i tell them the very same. this anachronism likely has much to do with my inability to substantiate their expectations, twisting up rootedly into elusiveness: i can quarantine my time. those without the phartsmone are the lost demographic. the gap in the map. the ignorant willful innocents. well, at least, we teluselves that.

with universal serial buses (yeah, you use their transit thousands of times a day) plugging us all in, commuting our service, we're now all subjectoplasm. internolinked. by circumventing the computer - some would claim smartphones have even eclipsed it - to flit through evolving reefs of info-ecology, these devices have become appendages, swinging around in bardo. purpose trivial. and part of me needs one, just so i can stay currency. but most of me is telling me that it's a sickness. i do not want my brain to do that, but i want it to be able to.

Pinch & Shackleton : Cracks In the Pleasuredome

2011-11-08T16:21:00.000-05:00

Post:Hello

2011-11-06T15:59:00.001-05:00

recording from the brain from yaron steinberg on Vimeo.

elegant proof

2010-11-05T15:31:00.002-04:00

"Gregory Bateson has clearly shown that what he calls the 'ecology of ideas' cannot be contained within the domain of the psychology of the individual, but organizes itself into systems or 'minds', the boundaries of which no longer coincide with the participant individuals."

Felix Guattari [trans. Pintar & Sutton], the three ecologies (London: Continuum, 2000) p54

fingers

2010-10-26T04:23:00.003-04:00

i don't think about my body much in its own right. the sensory harp that is my nervous system usually bypasses itself to privilege my brain, which will then inspect respective reports. i'm sure you can already see why this might be a prosaic recipe for stupid... cerebral distortion rears rampant, and discordance reigns. dancing unmakes this order in me, or beauty, or passion, or meditation... but, back to her, beauty really does it best: in music in facial constellations in literature in architecture in justice in empathy in nature... these make real, and decommission a tyranny that ofttimes feels most desperate. guillotine.

nevermind.

fingers get allocated strange habitual tasks. i use a different finger for each lightswitch (within reason. i never borrow.) and say its dark, or i'm altered or moody, and i miss my jab.. there's a wrongness there, like my body forgot, not me. extreme moods call for the weight of a second finger behind the one of contact (ebullient? try jazz-snapping. pissed? try judo.) there is never as much authority behind the switch which has an auxiliary. obviously, going off is more final than going on, but there's still a confidence pushed into the finger. sometimes one pushes that finger-thought further, into a whipped towel or thrown object. to affect a light.

i believe the above was mostly speaking to the forefinger. do you use odd fingers for specific tasks? i lift my pinky to thank drivers for stopping when i walk. that may've come to be because i was once concerned that a wave could be seen as imperious. actually, it can't really be confused for much other than what must be acknowledgment "thanks for letting me cross, want this in your ear?" the ring finger on my left hand (is that redundant? where do rings go again? evidently i pour custard on marriage. but i wish i trusted it) checks my fly as habitually as i pat my pockets for keys and bankcard. to assure itself, the zipper toggle is run beneath the fingernail. there are regrettably too many reasons why this digital affirmation came to be.
nervously, i will lightly circle the dome of one fingertip on the dome of a thumbtip, even more lightly than 'lightly' might convey, until the feeling of rolling a pea emerges. this simple discovery, made at the age of 7 or so and continued to this day, might have shaped me more than i know. the translocation of sense, producing a phantom object? only ever had this with my fingers. couldn't imagine how it would be with any other area to be honest "i have a tangerine in my armpit"?
the nerve buds at the fingertips are very densely packed. how concomitant with the use of, say, an iPhone is that idea? what evolutionary use would this extreme sensitivity have aside from the obvious interrelation with technology? ever read this article? it's worth it.
and fuck off.

I don't care, but you do, so I should and that means I do

2010-10-23T06:05:00.003-04:00

Supposedly hard to describe, toujours dans la moment, but that was exactly good. Gaslamp Killer was a Jim Henson puppet gone ronin, respectfully. 12th Planet was a dubstep dervish, precise and yet delirious. Daedelus, whom I dimwittedly engaged with the axiomatic 'Montreal loves you.. that is, those parts of Montreal I could vouch for loves you. They're not quite all there, cause I'm here, but they love you!' to much fist-throbbed chest motion, is a composer.

It was all so achonological then, that it decries sense to try depict now, but... there was a moment when, purchasing a shooter, a lass dropped what may've innocently been a billfold. I stepped in and said, scuse me lady, but you dropped something. She looked down and said what? Gentle as I want to be, the room ever having corners with shadows with shapes in them, I say that. She looks at me like I am holding a grilled cheese in one hand and someone's scalp in the other, and teeters. Her friend pops up as I am in the midst of kicking the sanitary pad into the shadows - as a geniality mind you, not a spontaneously-educe-feminine-hygiene-products-from-your-friends service I've got going on the side - and withers my attempts to be conspiratorial. Fine. Time passes, much lots happens. And we're in a crowd. Lady-you-dropped-something rushes past again, somewhere in the midst of her early 20s entourage, and I wouldn't have noticed her except that she caught my arm in her open purse. Seriously. What would you have said? A lot came to mind. Belatedly.

Not much transpired from that, as even within an elapsed 50 seconds it seemed such a waste of moments otherwise human. Being with friends, and meeting theirs', and partaking of a disjointed engagement around the music.. ultimately that's what was. Though there's something in me that ever wants to share it... to hold it for someone in particular, or be there with them to spin it further. It feels like 'missing', but I'm not sure if this is so. I miss so many people, I know it can't be so. Perhaps the future?

Developing Notions

2010-10-15T18:43:00.002-04:00

Plenty Offish is a bizarre bazaar of a free 'dating' website. It gives me pathos like mashed potatoes. You simply develop a name and profile (mine's Developing Notions and I like sustainable sandwiches and speaking pretentiously) and then take a tour of those of other people. You can write to them and chat, and, if anything kicks off, go for a date.

All that is in principle though. What really happens is that you embark on a demented cross between a safari and a dungeon. Earnest people peering through their picture portals, so lonely you can almost hear them tapping the other side of your monitor.. their cells made out of gliberties and 'about mes' and platitudes and attitudes. Or single moms stealing your hubcaps and menacing you if you venture from the car. I don't really want to get involved, but maybe just give everyone a hug.

I actually thought I'd have more to say about this, but I find I'm just annoying myself.
[edit: single mom just msg'd me, she'd like to play chess some time? is this a trick?]

2010-10-07T12:55:00.000-04:00

Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo from Jeb Corliss on Vimeo.

public pools, or, why self-diagnosed hypochondria isn't

2010-10-06T19:44:00.015-04:00

i have a pet project of taking photos that attempt to discredit our silent predilection toward gravity (NB: this project does not actually involve pets.) in consideration of this, i'm now going to try to conflate that idea toward the hope of undermining the preceding posts, which may come off as grave. i will not fuse words for purposes of intelleggtable wankery; will not talk about the Egg, or any part thereof (eg[g]. is the albumen more or less repellent than the germinal disc? how about in the conteggst of public pools?); will only offer ruminations of impending mortal doom specific to the person under discussion; will not mention the juvenile belief of saving the orange Smarties for last in the imagining that one could wish them to actually taste orangey etc.

i went to a public pool on Monday. turns out that the notion of 'public' is subjeggt to deggree. Mondays are eggstremestly public. and that's not especially good for someone with the lamentable problem of distortative logolatry. unbidden comes glyphic degeneration of the word 'public'... pubic is one. lice, another (it's there, believe me.) and then there's poo and whatever ool might turn out to be. however, because i was chatting with my upstairs flatmate the whole while, none of this was thought about until the changing rooms, which are apparently designed to ensure that every single article of clothing you bring will touch the floor. toughest though is changing amongst children again without actually being one yourself. not that i conduct my waking moments with the mantra 'do not eggspose yourself to children today', but, for a generic-looking, scruffy white guy with salient markers of maturity-under-duress, there is the problem of observed societal-refleggtion whereby i often find myself confronted. i am eggstremely sensitive to this (my biggest driving dilemma is having to slow down to 30kph when passing a schoolyard... crawl past, and i'm flaggable; speed up, and i'm flagged as looking like i'm trying to ovoid looking flaggable.) there is no graceful eggsit from this crushing eggsplication...

so yeah, in the pool. trying not to notice other publics repressing their compulsion to itch, i hop straight on in, rinse the goggles and submerge. bliss! favourite ending to a sentence, anywhere in the world, is submerged (ed: voluntarily and in water.) swam a width this way: first half, aglide! first half of the second half, goggles fogging, thoughts of 'oh no, what if i'm thought of as even more pervy?' and 'what was that semi-mucilaginous entity i just passed?' and then 'perhaps i could've phrased that last thought more accurately, considering its antecedent', oxygen? second half of second half, dancing gummy bears, replete with names, bios and musical influences........dots........ and at the other side!! the rest of the pool appears to have continued beautifully in my continual absence of 23 seconds. colour slowly returns.

chat with my friend some more. aww, she's great. lets me blather on about 'let the right one in' while she does floaty-legg eggsercises back to where we started. chinese dude sweeps upper thigh whilst in backstroke, top to bottom. and back again (lower thigh, up.) mild panic, visual confirmation of untampered towel; soothed. we go to and fro some more, go down the slide letting the lifeguard believe her own ironic smile, and then head to the steam room.

28 seconds into over-crowded steam room, and with surprisingly little prompting required, my friend mentions her potential three-way tryst with randoms. i joke she met them at 7/11. moderate time elapses before she laughs. room's ceramic silence deepens, other than -admittedly already developed- laboured breathing. i quail and ask her how etsy.com works. she tells me. we go to the sauna.

bum-prints everywhere. sit on the half of one which doesn't contain the toenail. eggschange views on the differing merits of sauna vs. steam room with my friend. my claim is that i like knowing where my sweat is, hers is feeling her respiratory system. trio of blokes having a similar comparative chat, except over eggonomical sources for 'chainmail'. friend and i eggshaust the topic of swiss chard. we go back to the pool.

pool is fantastic! we loaf around again, obtain some large oblong float-pads under the lifeguard's proviso that we only stand up on them in the deep end. we immediately go stand up on them in the deep end as if we came up with the idea ourselves. tiring, we make to go into the jacuzzi. i am hampered by seeing my friend Arturo stretching off a workout on a raised alcove. i do this:

Arturo doesn't hear. i degglare that i'll get him later. we get into the jacuzzi. 8 months preggnant lady (that's an interpretation, not a hope) on the left. righteous dude with righteous babe opposite. pimply people to their left. lose my goggles. friend finds them. much merry rejoicing is had by all, except for alpha pimples who wants to punch me. look a bit harder at those sharing the tepid water with us: conjunctivitis on righteous dude? his girlfriend (behavioural observation) has similar ailment.. they high? wistful pangs emerge, but suppressed with assurances that phenomenon is definite proof of conjunctivitis. notice red lines describe peoples' high-water mark. suggest we leave. friend justifiably freaks over bubble-scum on her back. we take a shower and giggle a bit. back to the steam room.

then, sauna... triumvirate of historical reenactors replaced by homeowners sizing up 20 year mortgages. friend leaves. spritely old lady does the splits beside me on the top riser. i leave.

towel grabbed, i enter the locker room. shower, check on the socks i left airing up top the lockers, phew... fuck! children! thank heavens for punctuation marks! change as modestly as humanly possible, making sure every article first sweeps across puddles of discoloured liquid(s?) eggreggating in physically improbable areas. leave.

and am left -skin feeling a few sizes smaller- ovoiding eye-contact with angry-looking parental people outside whilst waiting for my friend. why do i have to endure this prejudice!? should i rise now, denouncing and condemning this indiscriminate bigotry towards disheveled misfits with red eyes hanging around community fitness centres? what form would this indignation take? a minor remark about how best to obviate grammatical ineggsactitude within the usage of 'slow children crossing' signs? or, go strong and find some way to prove that, irrespective of gender or mediated alarmism, it is hard doing kindness these days? doubtlessly, the counterclaim would be: what's hard? and, did you know that 'kind' means 'child' in German? and, if you burn, you're innocent. then my friend came out, and i felt the borrowed calm of looking like we were together; a prejudice finally eggsalting my favour.

at only $2 for a couple of hours, i'll definitely be going next week. gonna grow a beard first though so's to make my face, if not less suspicious, then at least more alterable. will also pass eyedrops round the jacuzzi, but will reserve the right to do the application myself on those wearing down the question. this way everyone will be more able to [e]n[g]a[g]e with the raw-egg-in-a-jacuzzi test.

ps. did you know, that -potamia (sing. -potamus) means 'rivers' or 'of the river'? think hippos or mesopotamia!

distancing as means of possession / Marco Polo awareness

2010-10-05T15:16:00.005-04:00

perceptive possession begs space. a retreat to secure. extirpative immersion at odds with fathom-soundings. the call and response of conversation, especially with oneself. morelike twoself. a yes:yes that shimmers forth a mirror studio within which to think and meet another truly. do not get con-fused, leave that for the skin. you know that retraction of space that another can 'inflict' on you, they literalize you, becoming themself some spontaneous arbiter of reality? some people are very good at this sort of violence, but don't worry, it only postpones their realization. literalism is a sort of thievery, a social trick, try not to encourage it. you are a broadbeam of pure thought, so think of time as its syntax and respect your spectator.

Each Hit and I

2010-10-04T16:52:00.004-04:00

Something beautiful should be written, but I am a bit too angry to be the one to write it. Mine is the anger of a fantasist, and it's not very healthy. Here instead is a saying that I can only hope is truly attributable to the supposed source:

"One winter’s evening whilst gathered round a blazing camp fire, an old Sioux Indian chief told his grandson about the inner struggle that goes on inside people.

“You see” said the old man, “this inner struggle is like two wolves fighting each other. One is evil, full of anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, deceit, false pride, superiority, and ego”.

“The other one,” he continued, poking the fire with a stick so that the fire crackled, sending the flames clawing at the night sky, “is good, full of joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith”.

For a few minutes his grandson pondered his grandfather’s words and then asked, “So which wolf wins, grandfather?”

“Well”, said the wise old chief, his lined face breaking into a wry smile, “The one you feed!”"

Egregiously borrowed in entirety from Don't Feed The [Wrong] Wolf (www.dontfeedthewolf.com)

how soon is now?

2010-05-31T17:27:00.004-04:00

Riddles often don't beg solutions, but choice. And so the riddles remain, their understanding somewhat improved. Most deceptive are those riddles intimate with their solution; their alloy betraying all hopes of choice. How many ways to choose are aborted by such prejudice? By solution?

Consciousness is most effective when gauging differential. This is stimulating, and the conscious mind will crave it. Much harm has been done by the sheer ability for the consciousness to create it for itself.

What is confusion? To crack it as one would some lexical geode, it appears to be a contradictory state wherein competing thoughts are co-mingled beyond individual discernment. What then rises to decipher it?

This imminence of present-mindedness is a messy, messy business. How 'thick' is the now? Thick enough for the mental space required for efforts of projection into the past or future. But it must fluctuate also, determined by those minds consensual of the shared moment. Also, I still do not trust the idea of 'being in the now'... what does that mean? Opening the senses? Reading the symbols? Destroying the past/future (both of which a could be said to take the form of remembrance)? Taken too literally, we might spite our gifts of intelligence.

Tractable familiarity saddens me, which might be why I get upset when people forget that they've already told me something. It makes me feel interchangeable with anyone else. This interchangeability is likely all too true, hence my sadness. When someone's warmth ebbs and flows, I am distressed, perhaps because at that point I am more them than they are me.

2010-05-20T21:09:00.000-04:00

2010-05-18T22:27:00.000-04:00

things rich people say

2010-04-28T18:57:00.004-04:00

"oh, that's just so the otters won't get in"

"Maude, I can see a piece of chewing gum in the privet"

"it's not squabbling, it's foreplay... for our respective extramarital affairs"

"I don't have a hammer. will a power-washer do?"

"Free Tibet? you're Free Tibet.. on whether or not it'll ever gain its independence"

"one of my sons is a broker, the other a hippie. but i forget which is the blighted freeloader"

"she's in Bermuda, but we play correspondence tennis"

"we save the tonic water for when we have guests"

"i only laugh upwards in class"

paper scraps found while tossing my room for Tax

2010-04-24T16:11:00.004-04:00

-landscapes of stories folding always back on themselves; pushing mountains out of them by sheer heft of societal force -> putting roads and rest-stops, stores and haylofts. And kitchens, always kitchens.

-egg punctured by the tines of a fork -> clouds like a jangle of brass keys

-inversion of the city's wealth strata

-of Victoria's nightlife:
"phalanxes of flaxen lactators
identitties, casualties of whore?
there's safety in numbness
village of the dumbed
remancipate yourself dears
pluck the sucker from you"

-?:
"symbionts and symbols
symphonies of cymbals
how's it hard
forests of fingers
contorting, distorting, retorted

and there's pride, it's filling
but not enough
to fill the trough"

-sudoku on the toilet; a process of elimination?

-anything that changes your behaviour must be real

-"ruffled willow Ryn,
wind whisperer, eolian empress
rustled billows press the push of swish and swoosh
her wisp, a kiss to cup the air
her shift, a crisp kristling crown of hair

lithe limbs arouse a mind amaze
enlaced grace assists the heart's arrest
and curtseyed skirts curtain your search
to curve your course to convalesce

fronds framing her slendor, besplendrin' the attender
with manifold dance of light,
levity lands, licked liminal,
by many lanced delights
fanning favour for fancy's full flight

with dipped hips Ryn sweeps and weeps for the river
sighs breathe through her, the breaths move her
a silhouette in shiver,
a candlebraic calm veils soft muted charm
hers is dryadic embrace
tending sanctuary beneath
her lullaby sways.."

similimilimiles!

2010-04-14T16:54:00.003-04:00

- like a prostitute describing herself as 'outdoorsy'
- like birdsong from a thicket
- like confusing Plenty of Fish for People of Walmart
- like being corrected for a purposeful hyperbole (A- "that bobcat driver is skilled enough to change a diaper" B-"i don't think that's really true")
- like literally shaking the last drop out of the carafe
- like being the very last person that anyone will sit next to on the bus. yet again
- like the magic cyclone a project needs to be finished
- like an atheists ability to still reference the world using religious language
- like the apparent nonsense of echinacea being applied BEFORE one gets sick
- like a clown afraid of children
- like a surname corresponding to the profession (Madoff the shyster, Maycock the optician, Pollen the horticulturalist, Straddlin the guitarist...)

2010-04-07T18:26:00.002-04:00

so yesterday i smashed the tea set at my pity-party. needed that. today, i woke up with the idea of augmenting what to me is central to the anthropological problem: scale.

but maybe i'll do that later instead.

2010-04-07T03:02:00.002-04:00

going to just hover my fingers above the keyboard and see what blurts out.

winds blew April into us and a synapse somewhere burped me a message so simple i'd of course overlooked it. hide in plain sight. blossoms evolved to release and capture pollen in those March winds, to be watered by those April showers. i am one of the many of this town that venture into gusty nights. it is a favourite escape. see the world pulled by an edge of force (i repeat myself, surely, but the force enacted on an object in the wind is more of a suck than a blow. think of the 'lift' of an aircraft's wings as it creates its own wind here.) perhaps the stormchasers who roam out to intercept the sensory concert these nights generate are there for the pollination of blown ideas. to receive the ideal mistrals of others, and perhaps let go of a few of their own.

i am confused by myself. there's some sort of problem of the heart that occurs everytime i try to play the sheet music i burnt so many candles to scribe. this is a stupid metaphor, but also apt: i can think it, just not do it. i'm not sure what is at fault here. a fear, a very basic fear, one i learned before i learned that i learned. i'm not sure what is holding me in this spot... i am afraid of finishing anything, and it's affecting my entire life. over. and over. i defer, i procrastinate, i moan, i mither... and i feel sadness, as i know i could be wonderful at life. that's all i can say, as i don't want to participate in its reification any further.

a Mona Lisa simile

2010-03-25T13:59:00.002-04:00

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

2010-03-23T15:18:00.002-04:00

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

2010-03-19T14:21:00.000-04:00

the word 'ostentatious' is

Divestity First

2010-03-19T02:24:00.005-04:00

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

2010-03-13T17:37:00.003-05:00

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

2010-03-12T13:47:00.004-05:00

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

2010-03-11T13:24:00.003-05:00

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.

2010-03-08T16:05:00.002-05:00

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

2010-03-06T18:11:00.002-05:00

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

2010-03-05T19:14:00.002-05:00

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.

2010-01-18T02:36:00.000-05:00

a stomach lined with the wax of a thousand paper cups

2010-01-12T09:46:00.003-05:00

a mind a pail of clattering crabs. i wake up early, catching the future napping, knowing that noone dreamed of me last night, not even myself. that's ok, as somewhere in time there's a petroglyph of me. relive a relief! haven't quite got madness right yet. multiplicities keep collapsing and rendering themselves as one (how can you rip yourself whole?) it's pages like this, lost eddies and whorls of word-spittle, that are becoming the nascent-Being's dreams. not that It'll ever be satisfied with as insubstantial a moniker as 'Singularity'. but for now, i am still my own corpuscle. my monads my gonads. and today i place myself back onto the hungry caterpillar's saddle, armed yet with a lance made of incredulity and a shield of comedy-tempered ostentation. it'll be easier now that i know to let the decisions do the deciding, the revisions do the deriding and that it's ok to wear a scarf even when you're not cold. because you might be.

zoos

2009-12-31T20:52:00.002-05:00

no more zoos. just as well really, we've done some seriously sloppy work this last decade. an olimpdick effort. [un]just[ly] sequestered our human further from our animal. earphone cords looping from our ears round to our own asses. ipood: i'm listening to what i consume and it sounds like indigestion. aural coprology.
i'm to blame. you're to blame. for the good as well as the bad. take responsibility for the good! but still left feeling like a soggy shoelace in someone else's boot. slops sploshed from the vat we've used to churn the sun, into gods and saviour-science. i was in a bookstore yesterday and everyone was wearing black and suddenly there was nothing left to read. wanted to grab the nearest and yell 'hey you sepulchral fucker! tell me what you know!' but i suppose the nearest was me, and he's already admitted, under duress, that he's too busy shoveling information into his baby-bird personality to know anything much about the world.
and all this is not true. which is a relief. the kind of relief i bought earphones to hear.... thank you for listening, now go and let the animals out.

2009-11-18T00:22:00.001-05:00

"if i would, i could"

there's no truth fairy

2009-11-05T22:28:00.004-05:00

perseveres
perverse and sere
see here
you wee knights
of weeknights
all blood, bile and quicksilver
and bellies full of eyes
awful jaw-fulls of ornate lies
sucked on and plucked from
and worried out by your lover's tongue
placed beneath your pillowed font
whence from your pilloried dreams once sprung

2009-10-09T23:45:00.003-04:00

always liked the hidden orthography of 'heart' and 'hearth'.. 'th'[e] dental fricative draws it on. the 'h' makes a beggar of the heart, but warms it also. gives it heat.

sub/merge

2009-04-14T14:08:00.002-04:00

striking in its grandeur, the West Coast resonates in and around me as holding its mysteries in its heights. the persistent reminders of altitude flattens the mid-lands, portraying promises as being 'over there'. this vertical hazes on nearly every horizon, creating a ciel-ing of great magnitude. the past and the future is up, and i often feel that i live in tomorrow's ruins (upon which i might survive to look down upon, hidden by roiling currents and revisionary stories of a pre-delugional world.)

this is much unlike my memories of the european mystery, which is locked down by water and sediment and buildings. it is hidden, and there is a prominent sense of 'down' - something beneath every surface, as if, like water, history abhors the steeps and instead collects beneath the feet. the stories are below, and in need of excavation. here, above, and in need of expedition.

in this vein, one might be able to extend the analogy to perception of memory. here it feels that memory for me is futural. as if i am nostalgic for something that has not yet happened, it could be the wide sky, the occasional murky weather, the high gusting winds, the mountain-locked microclimates... the history is thrown forward temporally. one just does not cast their mind to what lies beneath the ocean.. not truly, not in the way one would in the Mediterranean or English Channel. not in that inherited identity. identity here is created, not sought.

i now work at a bakery in dockside green. and as the construction guys and gals clamber all over their scaffolding (sometimes with a pilfered pastry in their bellies, the punks), it seems as if they are not so much building a new building, but preparing inevitable rubble. and due to the large amount of marketing and spin put onto this complex (immediated narrative) it is building its story right into it as it goes up. however, 'in these uncertain economic times' several phases of the complex have been stalled to wait for consumer confidence (aka best chances of return). so what this means is that the foundations that had been blasted prior to construction (so that residents would not have to suffer hip-rattling booms once moved in) will now be left fallow until the money returns. so it's now a ruin before even being built. i am very excited for this, as this will reveal this building community's true intentions: how will a self-proclaimed 'environmentally conscientious' for-profit PRESTIGE DEVELOPMENT/VERTICAL GATED-COMMUNITY respond to an unplanned open space on their lot? a market? a venue space? a temporary garden? racket sports? a reservoir? tent space for the city's homeless?

we'll see, we'll see.. either way, i'm going to step up and confront any corruption of ideal within the project (i suspect this corruption will occur, if not had from the original inception)

october

2009-02-08T16:01:00.003-05:00

Stopping up short, I sat down on a wicket above the visual traipsery. Stretched below it all its blistering vertigo was the sea and creatures like me picking around its wavering borders. The sun was poised to strike the mountains, and Echospace's 'Empyrean' was thrushing my ears through headphones on-loan. The music pooled itself into milk, and ceased. I took off the phones and sat longer, waiting for the melting hues.
Behind me, a sister and her friend pushed a stroller, from which a wee imp-girl's face jutted with intent concentration. The motion of this trio brought my attention into their breathy conversation.
"...no, I'm serious. So VERY serious," the imp-girl laughed.
"Oh really?" Said the friend, "How serious are you?"
The imp-girl scrunched up her face even more, looked at her hand, then thrusting three fingers forward to her interlocutor enthusiastically stated the degree plainly and with confidence:
"400!"

verticklarity

2009-01-26T14:48:00.005-05:00

building big.. i'm not sure it's worth it. proponents claim that densification is the major objective of bigness, but some of the most densely populated areas of the globe barely have one storey, and if it weren't for the dire poverty and health risks of living there, it might be said that their existence and spread is proof enough that they work. no, i'd propose that the purposes of the big build are of very few things, far less noble: investment return, commercial floor space (rent money), prestige and arrogance. who really owns these buildings? silverstein owned the WTC complex to lease, which would've cost some hundreds of millions -if not billions- of dollars to clear of asbestos (recall the post-collapse respiratory problems locals suffered?), instead he received some 4.5 billion in the insurance bid (to which, due to poor phrasing, he was able to negotiate as if there were 2 terrorist attacks.. i forget the name for it, but there's a phrase for where a private institution lumps the health costs on the general populace.. good thing it wasn't intentional, or else it would seem as if the company benefited) that's an unimaginably large payout on what was technically 5 years away from becoming a nightmare of a white-elephant. but, i digress.

who owns the buildings? credit card companies!? yes, they do. they've got/had the best credit rating around for a while (self-regulation has its rewards, eh?). the nature of credit is that it necessarily swallows asset, and the only TRUE form of asset yet quantifiable is land (though potable water will become so in the next decade).. which the individual can't really own, as why then are they compelled to pay yearly land tariffs, especially if the government isn't distributing it as they see fit. no, most people 'own' through credit, so, to be frank, they are serfs working the land. but, i digress.

credit card/investment buildings have styled their buildings as 'sky-scrapers'. and they seem so intent on raising the sky's limits that yesteryear's sky-scraper is now this year's thigh-draper. they're towers of purposeful religious semblance: since their inception, you'll notice that no cathedrals are yet being built (barring gaudi's, but perhaps there are others). and for what the church lent in absolution, the credit companies can now lend in relativity. the spacious resonance of the cathedral dome has been replaced by hard, phallic, inscrutable presence. and further, the reflectivity of their surfaces are not just for the sake of pretty. they are one-way mirrors, and we're the captives. simply stated: you can't watch the watchtower. the panoptic prison has been developed on the metropolitan scale, and our depressions, our minuscule, compounded worries have been greatly amplified by this further estrangement from the hegemony. this effect, i'd readily argue, has been committed with the utmost of calculation. the reflective planes act as both as paring sheaths and urban[e] limit. you can't SEE the opulence anymore, just feel it, yet not know from whence that feeling originates. but, i digress.

i saw a film on manhattan island a few days ago. it said, that until the advent of the elevator, the most exclusive, prestigious commercial spaces were located on the lower floors. quite a concept in this present era. as the street level has degenerated, until now it is scorned and vilified, even by those who claim to act on its behalf. all streets are now alleyways, where the garbage, in various packages, is pushed, conning us into wanting it, needing it, feeling something about it. in the case of dumpsters, the effect is one of revulsion. in the gaud and bric-a-brac we're meant to buy, desire. but all the lightin and flashy signs, all that fantasy does not disguise the fact that the street has lost its political power: it has been relegated back to an alleyway of the body-politic, where people wander quietly in scream, marginalized on the one level at which they are ENTITLED to feel most powerful. but, i digress.

above all this, shining high, as if we all agree, are these looming symbols of power. but in a few quick months, as snickersnack as a vorpal blade, a few of these reflective windows have been broken and an awful stench has wafted out from what lies within: as symbols, they are not now crumbling as consumer/borrowing confidence has waned, but they've perverted, and twisted themselves to their true form: we are being watched, bullied and manipulated. and all it takes is an elevator to keep you away from stopping it.

to dream

2009-01-15T22:59:00.001-05:00

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

2009-01-07T17:14:00.003-05:00

just twitching and twisting out the glamour vein... a cracked stain, like a tree-window's scattered strain... can one replace pleasure with the sheer absence of polished pain? what remains? depravity? a torn remembrane? light-drunk lives bored sane? what, when equanimity has orange pith neath its nails, and a chin sticky with juice, and has glutted itself equal, what can it protect anymore? what can it censure? who can it blame? it stays the same, until someone calls it so... its self-congratulations would drown its articulated spires of citydreams, dragging over itself a deluge of murky hypocrisy, grit and sand and silt and knick-knacks underneath and through the curlicued currents. you'd be there too, submerged, shapes of the known blurring and obscured by the spuming amorphia of dislocation. when all is stable, all becomes unknown. and our silent motives, the ones taught to us in the sun-drenched mires of childhood. the prejudices we osmotically somaticize, as easily as rising, as deriving, as deriding, as red riding. and so what's to want, knowing we are tethered by discrimination into mists of perpetuity?
we're a broke-down gasp, a crippled pleasure pier, licked by the froth as we cantilever ourselves further over the abysses... one a tall child of god, his cherubic hair tickling her nostrils. envying those myths as one envies the inevitable supplantation of us at the hands of our progeny. so, in the meantime, let our tongues dance, let us not plan, but engender casus bella. it is time for an ethos of beauty, as grounded in ecological reclamation, as grounded in partnership and not mastery, as grounded in you and me. now. embrace the dream immediate.

2008-12-22T05:02:00.003-05:00

you were there with me, all along, in the little emotion, not the big
i don't know how you contact me, but you appear
we're not-at-my-house and i'm concerned about the backyard
there is no lawn, just rust, but the small-life is growing as if by thought
and you ask me what colour it should be
and i say that i don't really care about grass, it's just for want of anything else that it should be. for lack.
a light green seems to make sense, not the dark verdant want i'd wish for.
you sense my distress and take me to a cork-board to show me a collection of red insects pinned to it by their latin names.
they are long antennaed and articulated, quite ugly-beautiful
you tell me that you birthed them. that they were of your boyfriends'. that you were ashamed but elated. i hugged you and said that i knew where to dance.
you said YES! and left. but i lingered to speak to my friend who turned up to tell me of a prank he'd played on a mutual friend. it wasn't a clever prank, it preyed on his alcoholism. but he did show me the telephone poles that he'd reassembled. bolting the pieces together. i was impressed, but i could see you in the distance. walking in a purple cardigan. and i missed you.
so i collected my urn, and sat astride it, as it could levitate. and it pulled me to you until again we were alongside.
but you were hurt by my absence, and laughed with others, and for the first time since i'd known you i felt jealous. and felt it tear us a little, my toes an inch from the ground, the urn never waning in it's power to fly.
when we arrived, all was well again, as if we'd remembered to forget. and while we danced, we spoke of your insects. i suggested that the next time they happened they would be butterflies and that you make a play out of the process and call it 'metamorphoses'.
you said i was dreaming. and i woke up utterly in love with you. and came downstairs to see if you had written. you had not, so i thought this important to write instead.

the one in which i use stereotypes to affectionately mock British Columbia

2008-12-07T16:13:00.008-05:00

In July, I moved from Montreal to live in Victoria for a while. While that while has whiled from indeterminacy to determinacy, I find that my initial impressions of the people here have retreated from stark cardboard caricatures into full-fleshed, thoughtful and intentional human-beings. So in coming to meet these people (a relatively slow process) they've revealed, in discreet but poignant increments, the sense and sensibilities behind their social behaviour. So I'm going to undo all the empathy and compassion that's malignantly metastasized throughout my perception of these warm, sea-side folk with some good old fashioned lampooning...

2 months ago, in the Dupermarket...

A That's my favourite label..."
B What?"
A Soysters.. the product you're reading there... Maude's Homemade Soysters..."
B ...I wasn't reading it..."
A Your lips were moving... hmmm, denial... you've been in Victoria 3 months?"
B Yes, how'd you..."
A So, what do you think of Victoria?"
B Well the people are very..."
A ...friendly."
B Yeah.. But I find it hard to..."
A ...make friends."
B Yeah.... And there's lots of girls. Like, everywhere. Just yesterday, I found one in my hamburger."
A I had noticed that you were a guy."
B ...um.. I AM a guy, present tense I think, though I must admit that a fine mist of confusion appears to be..."
A Yeah, the blonde girl at the deli counter said there was one in here today..."
B Oh. I'm uncomfortable, can we talk about something else?"
A Sure! Victoria...?"
B Oh yeah, well, the only whales I've seen so far..."
A Are the tourists! Can I touch your genitalia?"
B Ye.. wait, what? Pardon, I mean..."
A I said I'd like to own a Westfalia."
B Oh? Why's that?"
A So I can extract your seed."
B I... er... I'm mostly done shopping now, and should go pay. Nice chatting with you."
A Creep!"
CHECKOUT GIRL Ooooh! Soysters!"

Last week, on a date...

A No way! I like coffee!"
B And dogs?"
A YES! LOOOOVE dogs."
B Cor blimey, I even HAVE a dog... Hmmm. Could we try a quick compatibility exercise?"
A Sure..."
B Ok.. Complete the following sentence: '...'"
A Broccoli!!"
B Wow... we are so alike! I would so give you a high-five..."
A ...if we weren't both recovering from a volleyball injury! This really is astonishing! So, what do you think of Victoria?"
B Love it! Though I'm still kind of caught on some of the lingo here..."
A Oh? Like what..."
B 'Postman'... is that like a male cyborg?"
A 'Cyborg', is that like a type of Polish Kale?"
B 'Kale'... is that like a type of dragon?"
A Dragons! I love dragons!"
B Me too! Let's talk about them..."
Time lapse...
B Wow, look at the time, it's 9.30!! In the PM!! So late! And I just realized that the time spent drinking these 2 coffees encapsulates the longest relationship I've had in 11 months."
A Yes. We should do this again soon! How does January sound to you?"
B Um, well, I.. I'd like to do something a bit sooner. Something social perhaps? Maybe with some friends?"
A Oh, we WILL be doing that, silly..."
B How do you mean?"
A We'll be hanging out in the meantime..."
B I still don't really quite follow..."
A In 'society', you know? Everybody hanging out with everybody!"
B Hmmm.. when you put it like that you sound like an idiot."
A You're funny! Wow, now it's almost 10! Want to do some cocaine?"
B Huh... but I thought you were a vegan?"
A I can't believe you just used that term! It's prerogative towards vegetables!"
B Pejorative? Towards... Wait. I'm confused again."
A I'd say, you're wearing slippers!"
B Yes, just like a typical BC person, right? Wear socks and slippers everywhere.. eat apples.. make obscure allusions to suffering from white-man's guilt..?"
A Er, it's socks and sandals, ok? Sandals."
B So, you're saying that we don't really have that much in common..."
A No, I was just going along with what YOU were saying."
B Wait. Have you been making fun of me THIS ENTIRE DATE?"
A What could you possibly mean by that?"
B You know, making shit up? Having me on...?"
A Of course not!"
B Then why are you...wait, you want some sperm? Is that it? I've got a ziploc here, I could..."
A Nope. No sperm... Thanks though."
B THEN WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"
A Well, I'm starting this petition against Reginald Howser, the local regional federal commissioner on How to Commission Federal Regional Local Issues More Locally -here's a leaflet printed on reconstituted potato- and I was wondering if you'd sign this...
B Listen, I've got to go now as I might get up tomorrow, but maybe we'll do this again in June, like you said...
A January. Yeah, ok. I could meet your dog!
B But I thought you were lying about liking dogs.
A Oh yeah. Well, see you!

2008-12-04T16:58:00.002-05:00

- Modern Language Association of America unveiling new line of punctuation marks to help bolster recent decline in emoticon usage.

- Edible Soap finds fiercest competitor in McCain's new Deep 'n' Soapy dessert.

- Area New Zealander finally relents, sighing: 'Yes, I am Australian'.

- Dalai Lama files multibillion dollar lawsuit against N.A. kindergartens for retroactive royalties on hit song If You're Happy And You Know It..

- Ecologists find new species of newt living on Victoria Beckham's pout.

- David Bowie to make guest appearance on NASA Central Command radio-link.

- KFC launches new Buckets Made Out Of Chicken dinner option.

- Obama declares Domestic Policy of leading US through desert for 40 years in search for land of milk, honey.

- Somali Pirate stocks at all time high on NASDAQ.

- Psych Prof. Gary Weinhoff unveils latest wife at UCLA Psychology Department Christmas Party.

organization

2008-11-20T17:39:00.002-05:00

"Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same -- their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference." Lewes, 1875

Emergence... after picking away the rancid meat left putrefying in the jaws of summer, I've come to a state of dynamic equilibrium. Amidst life's noise, interwoven patterns have once again begun to come forth. Not to say that the noise has ceased, I would never want that, more so that ciphers now jut through the tangle of murky background. Pivot-points of life have reassembled themselves, reorganized themselves into forms indivisible, and they provide life to my presence on the mesoplane. It feels good. It feels fun. It feels empowering. It isn't without work, and does not arise out of independent action, but as a concert of many forces and consciousnesses acting for and through me.

Thank you world, I endeavor to repay you daily.

Day 1

2008-11-07T19:14:00.005-05:00

Mine entrance? Witch's shack? Waste of time?

The Storm Project

2008-11-05T20:47:00.004-05:00

I've started a photo essay over at of murk and sky. It's over there for a few reasons, but chiefly because WP's photo management is superior to this spotty outfit.

I won't say any more about it, it's a bit of a surprise, but if you guess (not too hard really), then I'll explain my intentions.

forged textures

2008-10-25T23:17:00.008-04:00

Today I burned the last vapours of a hangover on a photo escapade along the coastline. While I'd wanted to capture the root system of a huge gnarly old stump, some other geezer with a serious-looking tripod and lens selection was all over the thing, and I wasn't feeling especially social, so I gave myself another exercise. It involves an idea prompted by a sci-fi book I read about how people might live low-tech inside a massive interstellar sphere (here called a Fullerene orb, I suppose after Buckminster Fuller?). They have no natural gravity, so the rich among them create their own with centrifugal forces, whereas the poor grow fragile and spindly. The author plays with the concept pretty successfully, and my thought was that gravity is a discreet value that determines EVERYTHING we do, so much so, that we tend design our environment with it as a given. But what if we can trick ourselves to give the impression that it can be tampered with? Would our estimations of beauty change? Would we rightly know what we're even looking at anymore? So I thought I'd torture the camera to produce some textured pictures that play with our vernacular and reflexive reliance of gravity. Both as a determining force on our actions and also as a means of orienting ourselves. The outcome was pretty interesting. Many pictures almost produce vertigo, and the hidden patterns we might otherwise miss seem to leap right out. It's almost that as soon as the mind realizes it can't quick grasp the aspect, the imagination quickly creates a new possibility. Also, while taking the pictures, I found that in order to reject the referent force of gravity, I had to focus more on axes and weighted symmetry.
The first picture is from a set I took of the moon last week when I played with exposure, and then the rest are from today's late-afternoon/sunset. Hope they're interesting and not proof positive that I finally drank myself into idiocy last night.

waves chewing on the moonlight

2008-10-15T00:34:00.004-04:00

real

2008-10-12T07:34:00.005-04:00

please click this for a description of both what and how and who... someawe!!!

strokes of genius

2008-10-10T17:45:00.000-04:00

A Missive Long Overdue

2008-10-03T15:54:00.010-04:00

I've written many posts lately and then let them age unposted in my draft folder. This one has been something I've thought about for ages, talked about for around a year or two, and only recently thoroughly committed myself to. I DID post it last Friday, but then went out on the town with an old, old friend and ray-gunned my sobriety into a soft gooey puddle; came home and read it and felt it seemed a bit taut, or idyllic, or manic, or vague, or immodest, or overcooked, or something. But now that I've revisited, I think all that's ok if it helps me get going on it. It's definitely assisted in that it's helped my see what parameters there are (or aren't) in the region. After this, I'll be ready for phase 2:

A recent article about Watt, a Rotterdam night club that literally generates energy from the motions on the dancefloor - an innovation several friends and I had talked about for about half a decade (except our version would also map and project the tactility of the dancefloor to a mad visual display for the dancers to see their rhythmic steps and cross-floor movements) - lends me the fortitude to know that I'm on the right track. While I feel slightly indignant about concepts reaching reification without me, I know that's just the irrational itch of feeling removed from the process. Logically, a dancefloor like that isn't too much of a leap of imagination, whereas the strategies of implementation really and truly are. Bravo to you, dancefloor revolutionaries! And thank you.

For years now, I've been spiraling around a locus that I can only really call landscape architecture: a transitional zone where disparate, and perhaps even incompatible behaviours, ideas and attitudes overlap and conflict, but also irremediably and necessarily coexist. Nominally, I think of this zone as liminal space, perhaps an overexertion of liminal's true meaning, but, for my purposes, it works. This space is far stabler than say a TAZ, as it is found everywhere, both public and private, purposeful or inadvertent, new and old, organic and inorganic, authoritarian or anarchist. For example, go now to the sea or a river embankment, approach the lip of wave rubbing its gums against the rocks and dip your finger in where land meets water meets air meets sunlight. Now extend that analogy to that of the human experience as it breathes through the manifold complexities of itself: sitting on your stoop is a liminal act, as you interact with the street from the vantage of your homelife; taking cover from the rain in an alcove; waiting in line for a slice of pizza... the list is simply only exhausted by the imagination's conception of intermediacy. Places like dancefloors, pubs, traditional marketplaces are but ritualized variants of such spaces. In essence though, you could simply host a party or political rally or just invite a friend round and your private habitat would become such a transitional zone (though there are many such spaces and artifacts already in your home, even when alone: doorways, office, bathroom, bedroom, windows, computers, radios, TVs, and, I'd argue, books).

Since its advent, architecture has shown that it can determine behaviour. Not only that, but reinforce ethical values. Take Haussmann's oft-cited tribute to baroque power through his reinvention of Paris. Or read the first few lines of NGM's timely Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran. And then relegate all this environment-altering power to the codification of built forms around you. The function of these composite landscapes are to project ideas onto mind: ideology, politics, philosophy, consumption and breeding habits. Except, it is the point at which your mind starts interacting with, toward and across this landscape at which the liminal space is formed, and wherein new function is wrought by way of innovation. Our built environment IS dialect, a stored wealth of perceptibly privileged knowledge, edificial and so directly manifest that it has the power to influence your thinking without you even noticing. Take the banks and credit bureaus panoptical skyscrapers downtown. They can see you, they can see all, but you cannot see them. Take old colonial buildings in Mozambique, and their neo-classical facades hiding, or even brassing, their criminal history. Take the International Style pervading and subjugating traditional stores of culture and identity in Iraq, Vietnam, Lebanon etc. Take schools built as prisons, or malls, or sanitariums. Take condominiums erupting out of the ground near you, like beached cruise ships, choking vibrant street life and segregating the haves from the have-nots. Now while I'm not really a behaviourist, I do believe that the writing is not only on the wall, but also in it.

And that's about where I want to step in. Though I've researched and perused and sketched and thought so very much about this, often having a tough time articulating this obsession to those others more politically charged, I hereby deliver my utmost in resolve to find immersion in this landscape architecture. When delineated in the fashion above, this field opens onto an immeasurably broad and deep scope. I do not wish to define myself within this purview, mostly as I really have no idea how to. However, I can say this: I want to help build a world that engenders self-awareness, inspiration, free-thought, egalitarianism, psychological well-being and ecological immersion, wherein the processes are transparent, educational, playful and stimulating. It will acknowledge change as the constant, and find the emergent planes to speak of the opportunities found within it.
And I will accept no less.

ON A BAD WORD
For me, the word 'sustainable' is flawed, and actually points to a turpitude that appears to carve deep throughout the building industry (the world's single largest industry, as our recent financial market crises have brayed): 'sustainability' is an arrogant and dismissive interpretation of a systemic problem. To underline that point, I ask you, haven't we always considered ourselves to have built sustainably? What really determines a buildings sustainability? Embodied energy? Psychological impact? Ecological principles? Economics? While sustainability grazes these ideas, it acts more as an apologetic syllogism for core building practice than helping stimulate the radicalization of building, nay, living tenets. I believe that the word sounds static, boring, and dangerously self-righteous: buildings are declared sustainable by reaching set conditions, but then are free to disrupt the environment in other, discreet manners, ostensibly hidden behind the noble mantle of SUSTAINABILITY. Look at the site plans of Dockside Green, found here in Victoria. Looks lovely, a sweet little bioremediation brook babbling between passively heated condo buildings and waterfront townhouses. In life though, the building are cramped, policed by design, and have missed vital opportunities to fully integrate nature (eg. by gradating the shoreline gently down to the water instead of dumping a cache of large boulders, or allowing a meadow area for nesting birds etc.)
Sustainability is a banner though, I give it that, and as long as it supports the dynamic evolution of dialogue around its procedure, I guess it'll be ok in the long run. I am afterall going to see about getting my LEED qualification over the next year, so who knows, maybe I'll be its biggest advocate soon.

S'Mat out.
PS> One more thing, this was all a peripatetic preamble for my other designs of starting yet another blog, a bit like Of Murk and Sky, but more informed. As soon as I come up with a sweet enough name, it'll be on. Was gonna end this post with a HUGE list of remarkable sites I go to whenever I can, but that'll have to wait.

S'Mat really out.

you betcha

2008-10-03T11:51:00.004-04:00

All that Palin proved yesterday is that she had better committed her talking points to memory, giving her the latitude to be cute. I hate that word, but it's true. Cute: Hokie hometown USA vernacular; winking at the camera; apple-pie anecdotes... yuck.

There was no debate, though Biden (I still can't believe that there's a ticket bearing the names Obama-Biden... how much closer to 'Osama Bin Laden' can you get?) did try to start a skirmish or two. I wonder if he felt any inhibitory pressure from the spectral main-stream punditry poised to shoot charges of sexism at him had he cracked her veneer.

Which brings me to the part that sickens me the most: Palin being touted as a symbol for contemporary feminism. WTF?! I'm outraged by that charge. If anything, she reinforces all the traditional anachronisms and stereotypes that have ever stymied women's political emergence: she's evangelical; pro-life; sedentary, having received her passport just last year. She also endorses overtly patriarchal overtures of war (which is basically a means of holding 150,000 US children hostage for electoral purposes, among the myriad other profits looted), resource-dessication and a nonviable economic growth index. She's no champion for feminism, she's a cocktail waitress in a boy's club. Poor Hilary Clinton, as much as the dark side crackled around her, she had my respect. The Republicans swung the quick bait-and-switch on the US, expediting Palin's advancement through demographic, and photogenic, nepotism.

I'm sorry to say it, but McCain may as well have chosen a golden retriever for everyone to go 'aaawww' at, and then condemned those who decried the ridiculous choice as committing animal abuse. That's how insulting I think Palin is, both as a person and as a campaign idea.

Ron Paul for president!

2008-10-03T00:20:00.002-04:00

If you get internet for your phone, reckon you could use Skype?

2008-09-30T01:20:00.002-04:00

It was nice that the hostages in Sudan all got a bouquet of flowers at the end of the ordeal. But I did wonder at the process of their delivery:
"Gutentag, I am making to try ze sending of ze flowers to Sudetenla.. bah, I mean Sudan."
"By all means sir, we assure same day delivery. May I ask who the flowers are for?"
"Hostages."
"Ahh, well then can I suggest a sunny brace of Asteraceae? Nothing says 'Get released soon' quite like meadow daisies."
"Zat is good!"

Sorry, but my thoughts are too itinerant to cohere into a post worth some time. And thus worth yours. I'll try again soon.

...and Chodaboy

2008-09-22T20:30:00.003-04:00

Once there was the Unibomber. Then came the Shoebomber. But now we have the Obama. Dropping orgasms on mass congregations of people, getting them to ululate in symphonic joy. The Obama: his campaign commercial should just be a low-slung and gravelly "Oooo yeeeah". It's too bad that he only drops O bombs in the name of good, as he could probably stop McCain's heart with the simplest erotic blast. Though McCain likely only gets hot from Cindy flexing flayed bamboo canes threateningly and yelling Full Metal Jacket quotes at him while making bird spiders scuttle over his hog-tied form. What a creep...

So those that can should prevail against Baracknophobia and elect the Obama!

there's safety in numbness

2008-08-23T14:47:00.004-04:00

i think i'd fallen prey to parsimony there once again. forgotten that the good -of love, of skill, of friendship- is achieved only through practice. as enigmatic as it sounds, i just wanted to hurt less, to lay still until i could feel the power thrum through me. that old pit-trap. it's never worked before, what was there to make me think that perhaps it would this time? i was encouraging forgetfulness, i guess. how jejune.
strange, but it's because i love you too much, not too little, and recognizing that, i tried to play my instruments across myself and not others. i can't bear the fact that we all use each other so much. how can we disavow hierarchy when small-group politics are based on largess, and pointed significances of abundance, and condemnation of poverty in all its forms?
i swear. it's not because i've cared too little, i've tamped down on it because i care so much i feel unsafe to exhibit it. i swear some more.
that said, here's to writing! brut!
and sketching:

-disavowal: 'e, your mother was a diphthong!'

-speaking of mothers, my mum has a sudoku book in the bathroom. we complete each others' puzzles, sometimes writing expletives in the margin to comment on tactics. this is basically a conversation we have while exclusively on the toilet. i'm not sure how i feel about that, now that i think about it. she once asked how i played my sudoku and i said by process of elimination.

-i took up smoking again. i quit because i'd done some math and assessed what a waste of time it had been. the math came to something like 7.5 months or 225 odd days of having a cigarette in my hand/smoke in my lungs/being in a smokey room. this lump of time unbroken by sleep or breaks of any kind. health aside, this is a phenomenal portion of time that could've been directed at creating something truly wonderful. i took it back up after about a month because my anxiety attacks crippled me. and frankly, i didn't know how to direct the time to better uses (i was running 5km twice daily). the anxiety i was experiencing was tentatively nominated by a friend as agoraphobia, which literally means fear of markets. and taking market to mean a theatre of socio-political exchange, agoraphobia summed it up perfectly. the smoking has allowed it to subside somewhat.

-of smoking: i've been thinking of my uncle glynn somewhat recently. i'd meant to detail how smoking led directly to his passing, but still find the story overwhelming, and am afraid that my version would be from the vantage of a child, and thus apocryphal. i will try though, soon, and tell the story of how a single cigarette marked his death.

cadavre exquis

2008-07-29T13:55:00.004-04:00

back in March, I received a dazzling Fa-bo transmission from Alain entitled simply: "story take it where ever you want". enchanted by both his high-arched concepts and his rich, sensorially transpositive but devastating descriptions, i gave to agreement that this would be fun. turned out that the exercise became a new way to discourse about how we were navigating -and venerating- our most recent wounds. a romantic bleed if you will. for what it lacks in cohesion it gains in bombast. the correspondence lasted for about 9 alternating segments.

Red dust on blue winds and she sifts for golden sea shells upon a seemingly endless coast...where the waves in delicious foam don't move...a small wooden table where she paints impressionist canvases of the sea ... with a bowl of oranges and pomegranates and cinnamon scented turkish coffee to fortify her...the wind still speaks in a secret language and sings children lullabies and operas and declares immovable prophecy. The birds call to an invisible paradise and small temples litter the coast and sometimes a putrid half eaten fish carcass washes up and she kneels and worships it and then casts it back into the waters...when the electrical storms come, warm and moody , they cast their secret shadows upon the glittering indigo horizon she breathes in the ozone and cries for what she knows and then shouts and does cartwheels and remembers what the world was before it ended...

These were but a few of her daylight activities.
He called his surveillance system The Eyectopus, a clumsy nominative approximation of its dendritic sensory network. He could leave it unchaperoned, allowing him to work his target from another vantage, and then review the tapes later. It eased the boredom of his job, though experts in his trade, many of them his peers, went to extremes to explain the critical and functional role boredom played in their profession. Boredom was thoroughness, they maintained. But he cared not a fig, and spent many wild and loose-clocked hours in activities meant to attract her attention. 'Survey this!' he appeared to be saying to her. From the breakers where he played in the surf, he could see her shape on the reed-rustled dunes, a singular point around which the creased skies and verbigerative waves accreted. She became like a radio to him, left on in a room otherwise devoid of human presence. From a wind-withered ridge, she'd overlook the waters, standing braced as if hunting fowl, and he'd tread water for hours, buoyed only by his dogged instinct to find the trophy for which she seemed to so hungrily search.....

...though he was wide eyed with hunger and demonic with godly love, eyectopus was his child , the immaculate starfish , the glittering gem of his precious techno emotional crown ... like a prism of divine light it expanded into a rainbow...eden like... in that it reminded him that the paradise of art and love that he sought was forever gone, and the technological nation of Yacmar would rise and rise but the precious source of creation, the soma of modern life...real emotion... had been usurped by the cold calculating monolithic...mind... and he wept in crowds of robots automated and listless and lifeless who looked on mute and dumb as if a lost tribe upon a wasted burning napalmed shore of a former lush jungle fertile with secret emerald magick...the muse of light...the beacon of life, the frequency of intimacy, joy and humanity faded like a blue sun...in ivory golden tones ...and the moan of the celestial winds and black angels lent their wavering voice to his search for a god to resuscitate...

He recognized his sickness in her. Every nerve that connected them had been pinched tight by hypermediation. Trapped in the segues of their carapaces. Cinched tight by their exoskeletal yokes. She had become more than him, but by virtue of their solitary communion, less. Yacmar, the nation that had homogenized to the point at which entire cities yawned awake, and ripping themselves from the ground, stood up on giant feet and roved the Earth in plunder. On occasion, these massive automatons would lock in combat, but this warring was only a disguised act of merging. It was designed to extirpate, for what other objective could there be? Simply disguise the grim future of mind, that of deindivuation, by the destraction of intractable war. Blame your foes for spiting your individuality by being not you. And forget that the only difference between soldiers and terrorists were that the soldiers got paid. She, daughter of the empire, knew this all too well, and one day made her terrifying decision: She opened a hatch in one of the creature-citadel's abdomens, dropped through, and avoiding the offal that spewed from its base, picked her way through the digested lands in search of the Water Gypsies. He, commissioned for what was mistakenly construed as obeisance by a thin-lipped Yacmar agent, was tasked to find her. And bring her back.

'bring her back'

the intention was with surgical precision, digitally implanted in his computer enhanced emotional network...the god voice...the priest therapist... looked at him with reservation and wondered why he had been chosen for this perilous journey after all was he not a 'skipper', did he not dream unreal irrational logics...was he not better suited to be a code breaker... such a low frequency spirit that enjoyed coasting like an opium addict in netherlands of no importance,a vampiric krishna! A low learner who still worshipped the moon and earth and stars even though fifty class m planets had been discovered in one month of old earth time...

'there will be no holy grails'
'you will eat and shit and stare ahead transfixed'
'god has died...magic is science...is power'
'your queen has abandoned Yacmar...we knew this would happen,'
a solitary tear barely perceptible formed like a cosmic star at his tear duct.
'you are expendable...you chose to love in this world...we reserve that duty for the next...so you have been chosen...now you will show us your love'
little orbs of pink and green energy clung like weightless water to his eyes and heart region...
'you do not know how to surrender and for this we are grateful...bring Oshea to the edge of the luconian desert where all the rovers congregate and let her hear the voice of recreation...

he knew the voice would erase all her memories and make her a child again...so she could begin the reconditioning process...'may she remain damaged forever!' Are we not all wayward children.. are not angels bound to abandon us eventually...so we can each experiece the god moment...the weightlessness of being completely primordial and alone again?

he scattered his thought in symbols and let them reconvene in his heart, this was how he produced arbitrary visions ...and the stars moaned, and the sun smiled, and the deserts broke down and fish crept near the shores and leapt into heavenly light because they knew the inevitable truth that love itself was on the verge of expressing itself through
imperfection...

His expendability was that of a solitary indivisible in an infinite series of spines vomiting more spines. For all he was supposed to know he was just an operative. The meat casing for the delivery of an idea. Nothing special. Everything normal.

But he'd 'skipped' to get here, recanting time so that his present became the past, and his memories the unformed future. He'd spent a month in cerebral quarantine in an attempt to ready him for the skip. The isolation breaking his attachments to a phase of a world he'd never return to. Or so it was supposed, for the notion of time-travel altered all measurement of valency and left conventional ethics with the boatman who casually disposed of them in the river Lethe.

'Bring her back,' they'd said. 'Bring your mother back to Yacmar.'

'o mother'
'god preserve my soul for what i do'

The Luconian desert glittered in specks of crimson and gold as the sun set and the slivered silver faded crescent moon shone luminent over the long horizon.
The shrubs and fauna glowed a radioactive green like some mythic reptile
and he held her by the hand and all that could be heard were their shallow breaths as they ran...no historical exodus could match the breathless love of these two lovers united...was she a mother, a sister , a lover, or simply a god materialized from another dimension, it did not matter no barrier from the present life could take away the urge to run together, to escape into the dreamlike mist, to become absorbed in the golden fields of immaculate lotuses , but she was already reprogrammed he had failed , the Yacmar systemizers had found her three earth seconds before he could commune with the central all knowing eye...he had been recruited and all had progressed as planned ... but who was the hero, he who knew all and tried to change it or those who enforced the strictest rules of time to the atomic millisecond? Oshea had always been a renegade and double agent and deeply flawed in some mysterious divine manner , she was a fallen queen but all empires had to fall and this was the crown jewel of Yacmar that they needed their queen to bring their own knowing to an end, to silence their own evil and ingenuous plans to break the back of time, like a dying sinner they knew the light all too well when the dying breath beckoned them to the otherside they cried for renewed life through surrender...but Icmot was beyond the eternal dance of devil and god , of sun and moon, of life and death...time was a figment of some sentient race imaginations but beauty, love and unity stood above like an demonic god, or beautified lucifer who refused to follow the heavy conventions of the gods of the absolute, yes there was no hope the struggle was endless, the love of the conqueror must fade and the father will always reign supreme but for the moment when two twin souls pierce the veil of the forever with the unending laughter of having known and the clear song of victory of having overcome all others then...somehow something would transcend and so they ran like refugees into the still silence of the desert and with the magnificence of two suns they shone...immovable and infinitely devoted...

the hiss of sidewinding sands covered their tracks as they strode in the wind-shadow of the pack mule. the clank of the pots and the occasional sigh from the beast were the only perforations in the madness of quiet fury they willed themselves into. the sand was red with rust from the oxidized iron of weapon dust, and their landmarks were the harrowed buildings of a people lost, standing broken and lonely, like corpse fingers apportioning blame. they seldom spoke. she seemed to be a dream within a dream, her self-assurance and autonomy possible only through willed ignorance. he kept his attention drawn to practical gains: feeling the mule's muted ability to find water and cropped greenery; the collection of desert jetsam as fuel for their night fires. they saw noone on their haphazard path, though once heard the scream of engines in combat high above their ordeal. at night, he'd lie awake and attempt once more to please her with stories. of her future majesty, the mystery of the father she would choose for him, her breath of life that would be celebrated by the entire empire. and then, exhausted and embarrassed by her silence, they'd drift into the scrabbling sounds of the desert as the timid, big-eyed animals arose. neither of them could fathom the true danger of the ruins that provided their bivouac. that this mutated landscape might have horrors that muttered in the lost corridors beneath its sands was unguessable to either, until one particular night....

the sky was a breezy one hundred and ten degrees, an algorithm of skull and bone really, dry deserted heat, heat so hot that it made frying pans scream like tea kettles and lizards sing like chameleons on fire...a chamber chorus of high sharp symphonic alien like trance goblin rock played by trolls in lutes screaming 'stop the revolution' stopped in celestial perfection and a crimson gem was brought forward by two elvish creatures...there obviously was a little psychedelic property to this place...the stars spread out like dancing starfish in an aquarium of black n gold and sirens with pinkish hued skin chanted songs of blue... of water and sky and communication... and the trinity of two was accomplished in an instant...the love making broke out like a southern lynching everybody new it was coming but in hindsite no one could stop it...and never had the musty brown and auburn shadow streaked craggily ruins looking slightly orange at dawn been so pink with afterglow!The image of an empire hanging by a thread loomed over the passing days...they were merely termites, gnats, lice or even dare i say mosquitoes in this sodom and gomorrah which made the eastern wind that graced there cool dewy skin at dawn even more gracious and there escape even more blessed...their brown skins moaned with hot red pangs of heat burn but they would cut cactus and use the soft melon like interior to salve their wounds and even in this there was small glories ...
they found desert fruit...buried several feet beneath the surface of the parched earth and enjoyed it's tough leathery peel...with juice running down their faces like upon a child's cheeks they began to laugh and dream of the sea...'if only this sea of stars could rain every day' she said and he of course dreamt of wine which quickly deteriorated into pitchers of beer then of course water...clear cool and clean...the only liquid man has every needed truly began to impinge upon this romantic interlude...'what is an empire to a queen, when i am neither a worthy king nor prince...we may actually die of thirst' a buddhist sun set was taking place, one twangy flower red and green hung low and smiled like an emerald at the crow of silence that descended in the sardonic face of the sun...they ought to have known that beneath the surface there was not only water but they would soon discover the city of Oshante which translated from the desert rover language simply means 'floating water lotus'...

"The Heat"

2008-07-16T11:39:00.002-04:00

Anjulie is the daughter of one of my mum's close friends, and I think she lives in the Toronto area. While I've not heard any of her other songs, this one gives me shivers.

euphrenia - live here now

2008-07-15T14:13:00.007-04:00

So I am now in BC. I live here.
Somehow the public parts of me got tanned without going through the stage that usually makes me look like a blob of mayonnaise that was held down and pink-bellied. Somehow I am buffing up. Somehow my mind is enjoying itself. Somehow I can see past myself to the greater caravan. Somehow I ate sausages every day for 10 days. I just ate one, and it tasted like bad breath, so I'm done with them till Beerfest.
I went on a wine tour on Sunday. It was my birthday. On it, it occurred to me that:
1. 'debauch' finds itself from Bacchus. well, obviously, but it'd been a tacit connection for me until then.
2. white, heterosexual cliques are not much fun in confined spaces. when sober.
3. a lot of wine sucks, but the people who make it are rich so the tasters are nice about it all. it stays freer that way.
4. due to their environmental sensitivity, rose bushes are planted amongst the vines and used to detect potential plagues or diseases before they occur in the crop.
5. people hide their most egregious infidelities behind their most cherished and celebrated values. the universality of this both horrifies and fascinates me.
6. everyone else here finds the story of feet washing up on beaches interesting too. though i still think calling the foot-falling-off-and-floating-away process 'disarticulation' to be a bit abstruse. 'yet another case of anaquapodischism has been reported upon disarticulately.'

Yes, I'm still unemployed.

"It's the sick oyster which has the pearl"

2008-07-15T13:21:00.004-04:00

Previously, on whomunculus, S'Mat! mentioned that he'd peel back his onion and, through some sort of exegetic exercise, recall some of his more emotional memories in a series of blog posts.
Well, now he will not.
I spoke to him and advised him against privileging a liminal plane such as this with images of such tender import. Emoting is one of the few distinguished human arts, and should either be portrayed to friends, lovers and diaries or be written for the stage and then optioned into a Sir Ben Kingsley movie. You see, while shouting your more mulluscoid moments into the noisy, brassy internet has buckets of cathartic value, it readily becomes grandstanding. S'Mat! will speak into this medium one day, perhaps when it is palpably the greater neocortical reticulum, but meanwhile he will return to the first person for more post-narcissistic rambling.

when anorexia is autophagia

2008-06-19T14:30:00.005-04:00

Once, between breakfast shots of rakija -a very potent homemade Serbian plum brandy- my friend turned to me and remarked that I was anorexic. I tried to parry the diagnosis by mumbling something about finding his humour fatuous, but he pressed the point: "No Tom, I don't mean you have a body-image problem. I mean emotionally. You're emotionally anorexic." I don't really remember the rest of the conversation, I believe he moved onto Goethe's poetry, but his statement has haunted me for several years.

It hasn't been the only statement of that nature that I've received, but perhaps the most colourful. Others have made analogous analogies, and have given sweat, blood and tears on my behalf, but I've remained dumb. And numb. And indignant. Their techniques have varied from honey-coated lozenges of compassion, to blunt-force coercion, to baiting, to ultimatums, to attempts at conducive self-exposure. And I somehow rebuffed them all only to feel even more disconnected.

The shortest version as to why is that I hate myself. I like myself less than the people I like the least. I've hidden this from others for the several reasons. Those of not wanting to be subjugated by their judgment (related to pervasive feelings of inferiority, of fear of abandonment, of fear of loss of control and autonomy). Those of not wanting to influence others' already burgeoning emotional spectra. Those of attempting to hide my pessimism, my paranoia, my hurt. Those of simply not knowing what to do, what the source is, where this ceaseless bounty of pain comes from. Those of ignorance.

So instead it has constricted my movements ever tighter. Ruined or at least stymied the emotional growth of my relationships. Hindered my greater powers of memory, of accomplishment, of self-respect and empowerment. It's forced me to hide from people I adore; lash out like a petulant child when I've felt manipulated by others' emotions; and horde any positive thoughts for fear of letting them go. I've been cutting off bits of me and swallowing them for fear of poisoning others.

The one source I can find for all this is my first memory of experiencing how people validate their emotions: they were writ so large and full and real and overwhelming, that I couldn't bear to administer mine to them. If I felt so bad when it happened to them, how could I do the same to them? So I think I told myself a simple phrase: "I don't care". I couldn't be let down if I didn't care. I couldn't be hurt nor hurt others in turn. I tried to become emotionally moot. Instead I've practiced just as much violence. Just to myself.

I've been aware of this deleterious condition for about a decade. In conversations, I've tried to nullify this by practicing non-judgment for about just as long, indirectly judging them via my own emotional chokes. Though we live in a society that rewards positivity, it is as much a judgment as negativity, acting to subsume and punish and inhibit just as much as its antonym. In a way, I've viewed is with just as much suspicion (and, of course, with much envy). So I've argued against people, not for the sake of arguing, but for the sake of suspending judgment and advocating plurality. I've abhorred peoples' arbitrary codes of judgment - only because people hide their mistakes and sense of guilt behind them. It took me a while to apply this heuristic to myself: I've hidden my own hypocrisy behind my loftily stated mandate... all that time I have been judging myself so very harshly. Cruelly, in fact. Today, I try to begin again.

For the next 5 entries, I will endeavor to extrapolate further on my emotional states; memories; previous attempts at healing; my involvements with people I've loved and respected and failed; a soothing yoghurt salve with a diverse mixture of feeled berries. And I will hopefully have the courage to cite a few more recent conversations and personal involvements that have helped me come to realize this much-longed-after need to emerge.

Thank you for listening to me.

something sneaker afoot...

2008-06-17T09:56:00.004-04:00

I was going to write about who I think would win in a beach volleyball tournament between the Romo-Greek and Hindu gods. Or about how the new Death Starbucks' completion date is worryingly slated for 2012. But then I saw this news-piece on how disembodied feet have been washing up on BC shores. It's a case I've been watching since I first read about it here.
Please help generate some puns with me here people, cause I'm stumped!

As I lay flying

2008-06-16T12:24:00.005-04:00

6am Sunday, supine under my dual-action ceiling-fan light, it dawned on me that we were deep in conversation. Me and my static ceiling-fan, that is, you weren't around.
What made me dizzy wasn't that I was spinning while it was tranquil, or that it alternated between looking like a giant but genial albino mosquito, or a prototype sheep with rocket-trotters that had lodged its head in the plaster whilst showing off, or even an intergalactating heli-udder come to administer cosmic anti-bodies to brains paranoid of growing hair on the concave surfaces of their skulls,
but the ceiling fan's astonishing capacity for conversation (and, eerily enough, prolonged eye-contact) cut through all my delirious codswallop (such as my 'normalizing' joke about this all just being a trick of the light, to which it responded that the only lights turning tricks were red ones). It suggested that the pursuit of control actually inhibited self-determination, interrupted receptivity to detail, and mugged curiosity by luring it down the gloomy alleyways of preconception. I've long known my empiricist tendencies towards mapping my dendrites first through the material plane, deferring to the candor and impact of others, holding myself beholden. Exhausting these roots/routes/routs quickly, I then took to traipsing through the muck of self-deconstruction (which is pretty silly, because who yet has constructed a self?), and observationally-assisted entropy.
I've had blushes of intersubjective experience. They were events that occurred as bursts of moral and emotional elevation, culminating at an ephemeral arc at the thin-aired crown of the parabola, and then plummeting earthward again. These occasions instilled within me a profound sense of love, but never before toward a dormant but polymorphous air-circulator. At no point that morning did I find myself lonely, only quietly and blissfully alone. And so evidently connected with all the other unfinisheds that I've been afraid of receiving feeling from for so long. The rubble has been cleared, my political candidacy is restored and I can yet live!

If that didn't interest you, then these tidbits will:
- Click the 'video' icon to initiate the AMOEBA. A couple of minutes in, it gets really drippy.
AND

AND

consciousness as brain damage

2008-06-11T21:22:00.005-04:00

Constipotatos.
There, a landscape of riffled nerves.
Which is best: to accept the manifest as intended, and bear the weight of responsibility for your felt world? Or proclaim inadvertency, and become the opportunist you secretly suspect everyone else to be?
In trying to heal, I have hurt myself more. I forget that everyone talks about what they remember, and studies show that studies show that people prefer to remember lies.
Sometimes I wish I lied more, especially to myself. Err on the side of treason.
I know so many people who are mediocre only to themselves.
Did you know that an 'acre' is a unit of exertion? The 43,560 sq. feet (or 44,000 - 1%) is as much as one man and one ox can plough in one day. They say.
Did you know that famed futurist Buckminster Fuller was going to kill himself, but then decided to view his life as an experiment as to how much a human can accomplish in one lifetime?
Is it strange to be more afraid of life than death? I'm through absorbing the pain of others. Empathy is shit when it's only working in one direction. That's the willful depreciation of the self, direct and unmitigated.
Here's to physis. Here's to the lemon-oil spray that freshens the mind. Here's to recombinant happiness. Here's to the collapse of identity as the greatest perpetrator of all the world's ills. Here's to remembering, remembering that all is learning and learning is practice and practice is play.

Why I called but hung up when you answered.

2008-06-09T18:04:00.004-04:00

"So what's your tattoo of?" You lean over the table, your finger finding a sinuous path through the dinner's debris. Your elbow almost touches the baby-corn that I pushed off my plate over an hour ago. I'd left it there, hoping you might perceive it as erotic, or mildly provocative, or at least very casual of me. Back when freshly lubricated by black bean sauce, it had seemed a tad more tumescent. Now it just looks RE-vocative. Like a rolled up post-it note in a patch of dried beer. Or a giant Lego-man poo.

I gulp as the tip of your index finger grazed my bicep. I've been told that I gulp frequently. And loudly.
"I think I can just make out the edge of it..." you continue. "Is it a wisp of smoke emerging from a bullet hole? Or... hmmm... would one follow it to find Tacitus' refutation of Nero's incendiary solo?" Your finger jumps as you hiccup, catching the edge of my shirt. I gulp again.
"Um," I break eye contact. "Actually, I sneezed in the ashtray when you were in the bathroom. I must've scratched myself, my armpits have been so itchy all day. I think I'm allergic to my new antiperspirant. I hope I don't get hives, my aloe plant died last week. I'm not very good with objects. Physical objects. Er, ones that live."

Armpit hives? Somewhere I'm sure a Happy Elf falls off his Happy Branch. Dead. Or at least hemorrhaging quite badly from the ear.

"So it's kind of like dermography? I wonder what word is written?" I have no idea what dermography is, so I default-laugh and look frantically around for the manifest inspiration of a witty word.
"HA! I think it would say... fortune nookie. COOKIE! It would say fortune cookie."
You smile your crooked smile, a good, winning smile for the tail-end of a dangerous second date. Your arm is still stretched across the table, playing with my cuff.

"That's a far cuff for you!" I give you what I think to be the flirtatious frown of admonishment. Your smile falters slightly.
"What...?"
"Oh, no, I didn't mean. Er... you know, I am thinking of getting a tattoo though. Yeah. A big one of the life-cycle of the lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dentriticum. Breeds in the digestive tracts of grazing ungulates, the eggs of which are eaten from the dung by slugs, which then cough them up in these slime-plaques which are subsequently consumed by ants. The eggs pupate and form these cysts in the heads of the ants and then control their brains, making them climb grass-stalks so that they complete the loop by getting eaten again by cattle."
I pause.
"Now that I think about it, that might actually be the single most repulsive idea for a tattoo that I've ever heard. I think I'd rather get a portrait of Dick Cheney water sliding naked. Or one of that baby corn by your elbow there. With syphilis."
You retrieve your hand so quickly, you clink your bracelet against a bottle, thankfully disguising my latest gulp.
"Nakedly," you correct me. "I think I'm going to take my fortune cookie with me, if that's OK with you? And I'll call a cab. It's only a $30 ride from here........"

And it is THIS line of deleterious imaginative projection of how our second date will go which prevents me from mustering up the courage to ask you out again. I wish I could instead pretend that you are an arsonist or that I find your elbows too flabby.

Actually, we didn't even have a first date. I thought all this in between glances at you in the candy aisle at Blockbuster.
It's why I didn't smile back. Sorry.

Hickeys on the Moon

2008-05-21T16:24:00.003-04:00

3 totally unfounded theories:

1) Pedestrians that walk on the right side of the street perceive themselves to have enhanced right-of-way compared to those walking on the left side.

2) Increasing oil prices (and subsequent food prices) will cause overweight people to be perceived as sexy again (or would that be 'overweight people to be perceived as the body-type ideal'?)

3) Since the muscles controlling the tautness of the eardrums relax when presented with persistent loudness, the aural perils found at a raucous concert or such like event occur only when someone tries to speak to you, when you are most likely to willfully tense the eardrum in order to hear what they say. Peril!

I just stepped on my own jaw!

2008-05-14T15:52:00.001-04:00

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

2008-05-13T23:39:00.002-04:00

One day, I made a suit of armour out of salted dried cod and ate at the Olive Garden. I ate of their lunch menu. It was disappointing.

keep watching!

2008-05-11T20:30:00.000-04:00

Spurs or The Space Between Fingers

2008-05-09T09:29:00.006-04:00

I asked the lake about you.
The whole lake,
not just the piece
held
in the muted eyes of the stag;
That piece of whetted
guillotine sky
that cannot be withdrawn from the block.
Evidence of people
content in appearing content
wrinkle the hems of the sheet.
I want to crawl under it,
to fill it,
yet still ask for the door to be left
slightly ajar.
The worst offense
of the feud's forgotten origins,
is that we anthropomorphize
people
and bind ourselves to each other instead
with smoke lanyards,
and whistles,
and gifts with hooks in their bellies.
Suddenly I wish I'd bought some apples
from the basket-faced man
at that roadside stall.
He would have declared that
"apples are for walking"
but I would have stayed awhile
unfairly thinking
too much of him.
A friend once told me
that he was told
that something is only worth saying
if it adds to the silence.
And I was annoyed,
as if he had just laid claim
to my grandfather's patronage.
As if crumbs of time
didn't get caught in the headstone's lettering.
Turns out I just admired my friend's purpose.
But the lake.
It heals over my question,
the cambial silver
polished from beneath by old stories.
So I smile to the face I know
the least -
the leased?
And retreat to the boathouse
where I left the book
which taught me the word
anomie
even though I already knew the meaning.

Brad Neely

2008-04-30T23:09:00.001-04:00

a quick sketch

2008-04-29T10:53:00.005-04:00

The boy looked like a clump of semi-articulated rhubarb. Though not especially tall, his stringy frame lent him that illusion. His stiff limbs betrayed neither evidence of elbow nor knowledge of knee, and gave the impression that he was always hugging himself. To his mind though, he was hugging the world. Like rhubarb, he didn't seem worth chewing on directly, and his face was always scrunched up as if he was attempting to battle the astringent taste of himself.

Though he had one already, he had always wanted a brother. A real, tough, principled, confident brother. The brother he had was also that: older, imperious, impertinent and devil-may-care... but never what Roob imagined. His brother was a master of karate, a particular skill-set that Roob had felt quite directly involved in his brother aquiring and perhaps explaining why Roob reflexively kept his limbs where he could count them.

"You're still such a boy." His brother sat on the corner of his bed looking around at Roob's room in mock-horror. A pair of drum-sticks walrused out from beneath his toque.
"You should take up a martial-art. That way you could pick up chicks. And then use them as weapons!"
"Hrrr!" said the bassist hovering in the doorway, leaning in for a high-five.
Roob glanced at him from his desk.
"What does that even mean? Use as a weapon?"
"Oh man. Roob. You're killing me here. I meant it as a play on words, don't be so reactive. Martial-arts! You know. You flow over your environment, when you feel danger, everything in the environment becomes dangerous, and every object a weapon."
"Doesn't have to be a physical weapon neither. It can be like, psycho-logical," growled the bassist.
"Object?" Asked Roob, still turned towards his desk.
"Why are you such a Roob? We're all ready to be used. We're all objects awaiting weaponization. If you don't fill your environment with your mind, someone else will fill it with theirs. And then you're at their mercy."
"Hrrr. Mercy Beaucoup. That's our new band name, dude!"
"But don't environments overlap? Let's go back to the 'picking up chicks' bit." Roob was well-practised at ignoring bassists.
"Let's go back to you being a prick. It's no small wonder you're still stuck in Mom's basement, playing with your self, rubbing the rhubarb. Wow, if ever there was a metaphor..."
"Hrrr. Metaforeskin. Hrrr."
"I said 'pick up chicks' cause that's what people think alpha-men do. Finding a girl's just an expression of confidence, you know? The whole 'weapon' thing is a joke, like in The Yakuza, where the guy says to Tanaka: 'I see you've picked up the sword again.'"
"I don't want to just find a girl. I want full planetary fusion. The unity of mind. I want someone to devote myself to. To be my advocate. An equal partner." Roob had finally swivelled his chair around to face his brother.
"Oh no. No you really don't little dude. Trust me. You won't respect each other that way. That's a romantic disguise for leprosy. A freakin myth. Only the one in the weaker position looks for equality. Looking for that is playing catch-up all the time. And if you both feel weak, hell forbid!"
"I didn't say I was looking for it, I said I wanted it."
"Yeah, yeah. But you gotta find a way to exceed each other to be together. You're just defaulting on your own problems if you devote yourself to someone else. Take Lily and me right now. We're together because we have a common love: the band."
"Do you love her though?"
"Well yeah, but she's not my everything. And nor would I want to be hers. Give up her... whatsit... her volition? To me? Creepy."
"Hrrr. Let alone boring. Who wants to hang out with someone you have to make decisions for?"
Roob passed a stalky hand over his pale, pinched face and sighed.
"Aren't you guys supposed to be rehearsing right now?"
"Hrrr. Yeah, but we thought we'd fuck with your Morosey ass for a bit first." Yet another high-five was exchanged.
"Roob, little dude, you gotta stop trying to create your world from scratch. Love is bigger than you. Come upstairs to the garage. Grab a Bud. Drink in some Ohio air. Lily's sister's coming over in a bit. She's pretty pretty. Cutely cute. She'll look like a slice of pie balanced on a briefcase full of money compared to this monkey-boy outfit you got going here. Maybe you and she could help us come up with some lyrics for our new tune."
The brother plucked the drumsticks out of his hat, rattled a quick tattoo on Roob's chair, and left. The bassist stayed a moment, pulling on his goat, then also left. And Roob turned back to his desk. Rumed over his 'weaponized environment' for a moment before sharpening his pencil. Flipping over the sheet of paper, he started to write afresh.
I was in love with you, and you were there too...

LL Cool D

2008-04-28T11:00:00.003-04:00

My cat got in a back-alley fight. Lost most admirably and returned with a limp. The limp was from a bite, and the ensuing bacterial infection swelled his hind-leg to the size of a Bratwurst with a bacterial infection. I took him to the vet, where they lanced the wound and coddled Dougal better and held him for the rest of the week.
Man, did I ever miss that little guy: Abcess makes the heart grow fonder.
Now he's back, with one shaved normal-sized hind leg that looks like a weathered peg that may've drifted up onto some isolated beach. And was then firmly attached to a cat. Or the rolled-up tracksuit leg of an early 90's gangsta. Or a country parishioner on a bike. There's not much dignity to the look, but his mood is spry and cuddly and it looks like he'll be a porch-cat from hereonin.
And all I can say to the menace still lurking in the alley is, "Mama said knock you out".

mass perturbation

2008-04-23T10:26:00.006-04:00

"Jack off all trades, mastur... oh, fuckget it"

I am wondering what it is that brings me back to this site. I've definitely missed being a contributing member, missed the reading of others' blogs, missed the piercing clarity that typing a few words here and there brings to my day-to-day mental opacity. But mostly I've missed the puns. The blog has this marvelous way of feeling like you can refine your own little pocket of reality, and that all consent is tacitly granted by its accessability. You can create this -cosm of the absurd, populate it with the demented, and then somehow use that to counterpoint REAL life. A blog's like a jester to the king. Otherwise, what is it? A failed attempt at a 1:1 ratio of your feelings and all of its dust-motes? The throbbing forehead vein of vermicular emotion? One of the websites you return to in order to reinforce and revalidate what you already know? A performance-art of self-revelation? Very very, I'd say.

Montreal's got me down these 6 months passed. Like some sort of mental inversion, wherein I strengthen the same neural pathways just by walking the same streets. I've felt a victim of perfidy, of self-sabotage, of my own emotional reactivity (obscuring my lassitude and resignation). No specifity needed: I don't want to be trapped by myself any longer. I'm sure we all feel that way (hence the perception of perfidy). So I don't believe in comfortable change anymore (linked to and confused by the implicit human tendency toward self-destructive behaviour). Nor do I believe that we have to 'understand' everything anymore either, at least, not in order to make a decision.

I definitely want to stay firmly within the mists of mystery. Just a really really mysterious mystery. One that helps me forgo my cognitive prejudices and brings me back to the details.

Oh yeah, and boobcheese, prostatic analglyphs and bumbarnacles, just to meet the day's rude-word quota. Let's get real, we both come here for that.

End of an error?

2008-03-03T14:13:00.003-05:00

This rolling page, abused and misused in its prime, may be no more... my computer gave up the ghost this weekend, and now I'll probably resign myself to attaching etch-a-sketches to pigeons.
So, thanks for the laughs my friends, I'll visit when I can and update when I cannier.
*Whom's uncle out*

Thinking about drawing stick figure cartoons

2008-02-29T00:01:00.003-05:00

This is a collection of cartoon ideas about stick figures that I recently found in a scrappy old notebook. Its lo-fi objective was apparently not to even draw the cartoons, but to let the reader do that in her head. I did add a few just so I could rediscover what the hell I was trying to do.

- STICK FIGURES WITH SMALL STRIATIONS ACROSS THEM. "The cartoonist thought his stick figures had stretchmarks, but then realized it was just cathair."
- JUST A SINGLE VERTICAL LINE. CAPTION: "What stick figures look like to each other."
- BLANK PAGE. "In the early 80s, the stick-figures unwisely dabbled in atheism for a few days."
- A STICK CAT LOOKING AT THE READER SAYING: "What the fuck?"
- A COUPLE OF STICK FIGURES LOOKING BEWILDERED. "The stick figures couldn't tell if they were racist or not."
- A LARGE @. "Todd was part tumbleweed."
- TWO STICK FIGURES. "Mary-Kate and Ashley traded heads for a day."
- BLANK PAGE. "The day Teflon came to town."
- A 3x3 GRID WITH Xs AND Os. "Tic-Tac-Toe is a war crime."

Yeah. I've no idea either.

I have no idea what this is

2008-02-26T14:57:00.003-05:00

blinking out of my sunday window, i saw my middle-aged neighbour in her kitchen. she was wearing a big yellow bee costume. she looked busy.

today i reformatted and restored my ailing computer. i wiped it clean like they did McMurphy. i lost all my archives in the process. perhaps the Chief'll finish it off tonight.

valent tines

2008-02-14T20:10:00.004-05:00

<< collision >>
>> collusion <<
<< illusory >>
>> elision <<
<< elution >>
>> lesion <<
<< ablution >>
>> ablation <<

videmocrazism

2008-02-07T18:37:00.000-05:00

some interesting clips and media...

- Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected... saw this at Just For Laughs, then a friend reminded me of its existence last year.

- Billy's Balloon reminds me a little of my dad's globophobia, or, fear of balloons

- Monsatan and Faux News kissykissy

- I'm Alan Partridge... My favourite comedy series of all-time (season 1 is from '97; season 2 from 2002). I think it's genius.

- I was wondering what happened to the coverage on the Anthrax Attacks... something I read a few years ago now in palatable 'clip' form.

- And lastly, when one takes into consideration the use of oil to underwrite the value of currency, this article can explain much of the recent saber-rattling against Iran. Sure, there's many sparking loose wires in here, but what else, other than conjecture, do we really have to go on? This one also helps explain the money system.

Full Self-Esteem Ahead...

2008-02-05T16:40:00.001-05:00

Sat here turning phrases and opening lines about like a rusty, off-centre lathe for a good 20 minutes already. Pulse has synch'd with the despondent-looking cursor, which blinks at a pace approaching near-aerobic for me these cloistered days. But I've brooded my way to accepting that this entry will be an ungainly exercise, like a squid challenging a gazelle to a round of hopscotch, minus the funny sounds. It will be disjunctive (thus suitably representative) and moldy; weak on digestible content and doubtlessly several astronomical units away from the deportment necessary to convey my apologies to my friends and loved ones.

The good news though is that this is an elect state of mind for me as compared to the 3 odd months passed... you see, I'm almost re-heartened. Which is thumbs-up!

so... HELLO WORLD!!

I won't tell you where I've been. I'll allude: an amoebic disembodied tongue in a pickle-barrel. My phone has been nothing more than ballast on a foundering ship. It may've well been up my butt (which I guess'd bring new meaning to having a great ringtone).

You see, I am a depressive.
Not 'prone to the blues'. Not morose. Not histrionic. Not reactionary. But neuro-tragic. It turns the world literally inside-out. And all my choice is confounded by the 'reality'. It's a systemic corruption of consciousness. I'll list it...
- Words get slippery. I cherish vocabulary. It's the ecology of idea and the one reply we've generated to our impermanence. One slippery word starts the mudslide. One semantic gaffe... well... 'All for the want of one horseshoe nail, the kingdom was lost.'
- Free will becomes a hostage-taker. All pursuit of creating positive feedback loops only strengthens the sense of victimization. And I am vehemently opposed to victimization - it is habituated fear, and fear cordons and enslaves.
- Music sucks.
- Dependencies and addictions increase. Concern of this fact is in inverse correlation.
- The people who normally buoy you and keep you thinking and ultimately make you whole (you social animal you), become demons. You envy their apparent completion. You feel 'open' to scrutiny, and presuming you know how they feel about you, feel that its bad (in actuality you are feeling you feeling you, which upon further reflection is a gross violation of the other person's freedom = you unwittingly disallow their conscious presence). Your response is to avoid them.
- You become physically weak. Mayhaps from lack of healthy living in total, but it feels like a psychic ailment still.
- Lost time.
- Not even nothing matters. All is trivial.
- You flake-out a lot. Break vows, devotions, commitments.
- You feel that your simple presence on the planet, as a part of the whole, debases the 'good' of the rest. That you destroy it by being.
- Perhaps the worst bit, and linked closely to the free-will: you become you're own excuse and question your agency ('Am I 'creating' this? or am I a creation of this?')

Pretty bad stuff. It's only a fragment of 'me', but when it happens, it happens for a spell unbroken.
And yet, I emerge now from it... an astonishing thing to watch, as it's hard to know what to attribute it to. a squirting of brain? a flexed push of thought? an emotional levee? ... whatever, it feels good.

One caveat here:
Depression does not equal feeling 'unhappy' or 'sad' or 'angry'. Depression may CAUSE those feelings, but in and of itself it is NOT an emotion. It is a numbing of competency and sheer life-presence. If you, as a person, have a rough day and say: 'I was depressed today' then please, for the sake of veracity, know that that's what you mean.

In the meantime and the nicetime, I'll be talking to you...
My face is reforming and I'm lurching back into your life!

2007-12-02T18:43:00.000-05:00

I read somewhere that Will Smith had recently divorced and posted his profile on Millionairematch.com
That meant it was ok for me to sign up, so I did. If only to take a peak at "I, Will Smith". Perusing it while I ate take-out Phad Thai, I found it to have a delightful inital pr[e/o]mise: "#1 site for finding wealthy men and gorgeous girls, and women."
After squeezing the lime and sprinkling some peanuts on my noodles, I went and initiated a profile. Soon I was finding 39 year-old girls from LA, FL and Oakville, ON and guys from NY or TX or NY. But I soon discovered that if I truly wanted to email them I'd have to be a Gold member. All I wanted to do was see Will, so I typed in Will for a match. I got sirwilliam, willgivethisatry, willowyblonde, and WILLtoPOWER (who co-wrote the 1989 smash: Baby, I love your way). So I tried Smith and got Smithers123 or something.
And then I got bored of looking at 39 year-old social drinkers who are confident and compassionate and merely very good looking and looking for 22-22.5 year old spontaneous homebodies who love children (working for them), and stopped.

cone of sound and fury

2007-11-30T23:27:00.000-05:00

i am in a spot, once again, where i can understand things way beyond me and yet, Cassandrastyle, can't understand others or things present to me. let alone meet them. what to do?
ask you...
what do you do to pick yourself out of a depressive place? practices? consortiments? people? websites? please (a) suggest things, i.e. help and (b) buy Boxcutter's latest album (then think you've been ripped off, then get drunk and lonesome and listened to it full-volume and then told all your friends about it)...

i'll wake up embarrassed for this one...

2007-11-29T01:50:00.000-05:00

we are farmed to dis/arm.
becoming a kettle of lickspittle to better belittle the speakers less-special.
from original sin to societal din to redivisible individuals too remediated to rebegin.
we dress up to stay in.
or come out so stout in the self, that our society stays thin.
rubbing itself with deep-shelf unguents and linaments spun out from the latest in-thing spin.
ever mediated, ever expediated, ever inebriated, ever experiencing.
enjoyment sipped lustily through gripped teeth and belief stripped by flipped grief.
and where's the story read to me not through me?
if you're proudly rowdy, my larynx'll loudly reverse and upend, defaulting muscles to send your messages again to my brain... injecting insects and larvae and perfidious pain, through the one reign that remained and kept my self sane.
my voice, it belongs to you, but not how i meant it to.
bred to bleed and needing to seed, and in constant alarm are made to dis/arm and make stupidly stooped ids and entities and IDs. might as well wear shoes on your knees. or say sorry when you mean please. or say nothing when you mean sorry. or resent them for making you say nothing. and hate them for resenting them for saying nothing for saying sorry for saying please.

BLinks

2007-11-28T20:59:00.000-05:00

After some careful munching, I decided to ameliorate my other blog's name to of murk and sky. This was originally to be the name of a pirate radio story I was going to write a few years ago, but eventually put on the 'recyclable material' pile.

Also new or updated on the blogroll are the following links... Goodnight and Sweet Byzantine Dreams,Once upon a day..., and ...and hijinks ensued.

Enjoy...

Fried Rich...

2007-11-28T00:24:00.000-05:00

About all I'm good for tonight is the delivery of the devilry of my bathroom book du jour: Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil... here's Walter Kaufman's 1966 edition, not that I know of any others...

After such cheerful commencement, a serious word would like to be heard; it appeals to the most serious. Take care, philosophers and friends, of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! Even of defending yourselves! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of hostility, you have to pose as protectors of truth upon earth - as though the truth were such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of all people, you knights of the most sorrowful countenance,* dear loafers and cobweb-spinners of the spirit! After all, you know well enough that it cannot be of any consequence if you of all people are proved right; you know that no philosopher so far has been proved right, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little question mark that you place after your special words and favourite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn gestures and trumps before accusers and law courts. Rather, go away. Flee into concealment. And have your masks and subtlety, that you may be mistaken for what you are not, or feared a little. And don't forget the garden, the garden with the golden trelliswork. And have people around you who are as a garden - or as music on the waters in the evening, when the day is turning into memories. Choose the good solitude, the free, playful, light solitude that gives you, too, the right to remain good in some sense. How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, that cannot be waged openly by means of force! How personal does a long fear make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies! These outcasts of society, these long-pursued, wickedly persecuted ones - also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giodano Brunos - always come in the end, even under the most spiritual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, sophisticated vengeance-seekeres and poison-brewers (let someone lay bare the foundation of Spinoza's ethics ans theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that his philosophical sense of humour has left him. The martyrdom of the philosopher, this "sacrifice for the sake of truth," forces into the light whatever of the agitator anc actor lurks in him; and if one has so far contemplated him only with artistic curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his degeneration (degenerated into a "martyr," into a stage- and platform-bawler). Only, that it is necessary with such a desire to be clear what spectacle one will see in any case - merely a satyr play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the long, real tragedy is at an end, assuming that every philosophy was in its genesis a long tragedy.

*reference to Don Quixote...

Ch 25, p35-37, Nietzsche, F. (trans. W. Kaufmann).

Burning Down The House

2007-11-27T00:50:00.000-05:00

The Rules:

1. Put your iTunes/ music player on Shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER WHAT
(this is in capital letters, so it is very serious. No hiding your showtunes, folks!)

After you’ve answered all of the questions, tag 5 other people and then let them know they’ve been tagged to do the meme themselves!

IF SOMEONE SAYS “IS THIS OKAY” YOU SAY?
Bullyshit - Quasimoto
(this meme is spot-on so far!)

WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Underground Communication- Bassnectar
(cloak and dagger!)

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
The Aircrash Bureau - Gary Numan
(true! drama feels like it chooses me, but i guess choice is a choice)

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
I Want To Relax, Please! - Tei Towa
(hobble the damned hamster already!)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?
Laundry Baskets - Aqueduct
(the L key's nowhere near the W key. i'm in trouble...)

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
It's Her Factory - Gang of Four
(no comment)

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Song Against Sex - Neutral Milk Hotel
(someone stole my mojo baby...)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR PARENTS?
Beat the Odds - Dj Numark & Pomo
(hahaha... HA HA HA!)

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Panic - The Smiths
(-otine... if i don't get it!)

WHAT IS 2+2?
Juju Space Jazz - Brian Eno
(actually, no matter what the stumper, i'll reach that conclusion)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Fat Ass Joint - Amon Tobin
(the fucking Oracle of Delphi this is!)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Angel - Massive Attack
(this question, if that's what it is, demands a stupider answer than it got)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
You Were There With Me - Four Tet
(awwww. wait. who was? wait further. where were we?)

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
24 Hour Party People - Happy Mondays
(I grew up aaaages ago)

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Lycanthropy - Patrick Wolf
(ahahahahahahahahaha... ha)

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Down Down Down - The Presets
(that many downs... must be a syndrome)

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
True - Spandau Ballet

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Slipping Into Darkness - Dayton Sidewinders
(that's what i'll hear at least)

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Faded Coat of Blue - Jolie Holland
(old things? beggary? i do like blue, but what kind of hobby is 'liking blue'?)

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Fire Your Guns (Live) - AC/DC
(I guess so)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
WWIII - KMFDM

WHAT SHOULD YOU POST THIS AS?
Burning Down The House - Talking Heads
(well, works for Monday night procrastination at least)

And the 5 Taggees Are:
James, Eve, Amy, Lucy and I don't think anyone else reads this...

posterchild for democrazy

2007-11-26T21:56:00.000-05:00

i don't post much these days. and i'm not going to post about how i don't post post this 'post'.
i'd like instead to turn to freeverse to help thaw some anxiety here.

clackclack the crow goes
clack
grey cold gnawing on the house,
fielded nearby,
chewed stalks under thick clouds
pushed to a brittle surface
like the sad skin of a spurned lover
black feathers see such a compromise of air
and speak on the spoken
clackclack the gate shows
clack
a wind of dark trees
moans a door moans a window
as they approach
like the hearth of your parents,
it issues around the words
which are warmer when you are not there
clackclack the door goes
clack
the sound of a trick
you play on yourself
when you finally pull open

strangely, i feel more anxious than ever

squeal

2007-11-21T18:37:00.000-05:00

I fought the law and..............[soft sound of someone passing gas in the middle-distance].
Had the prelim today at the municipal court. Checked my name on the roll, the day's list of procedures, and it wasn't there. Went to the reception, she typed in the case number, nothing digital so she called up to the clerks office and fed them all the information that was on my summons. Nothing. She even said: They don't have anything filed. So she stamped the citation and said to watch the mail, they might designate a new day OR, if nothing happened, I could consider the procedures recinded (or some such buggery). So I did a few laps of the building and saw Sven, who had been identically charged. He had experienced the same 'whoopsie'. A 'whoopsie' that he'd rented a car and driven up to Montreal from Toronto for, inconveniencing both him and Liz, who'd come for support.
???
Relief is intermingled with indignation here.
Now also, because I'm neither guilty nor not-guilty, what happened that night between us four and the 2 divisions of cops all happened outside of the law. In other words, it never happened. I can't begin to describe how an event that now never happened has fucked with me for 2 months straight...
But do I dare ask for satisfaction? That's actually quite scary.

cell is other people

2007-11-15T15:16:00.000-05:00

do you remember when there was cellphone etiquette? when the one person you knew owned a phone would blush at a squawking 2-bit Old Macdonald ringtone, whisper apologies in every direction and hurry to the nearest permissible area as if suddenly suckerpunched by stage 2 of Montazuma's revenge? do you remember when people were exhorted to leave tables? go into other rooms? leave the house? remember when they were treated as pariahs and not as if they were the 110 decibel rallying point of convergent 'future technology'? remember when they were the only brain-tumor you had? remember when one person checking their phone led to people rolling their eyes as opposed to inducing them to check their own? when your Mum didn't have Giving the Dog a Bone as her personal ringtone for Gerry from her darts-league?
remember that? when you thought that you invented the 'they look like crazy people' joke? when PDAs held up the mini-putters behind without making you look like a total shithead?
...i just realized i could go on a long time about this one...

boasting on posting

2007-11-12T17:38:00.000-05:00

because i've had a rat-gnawed watermelon serving as an excuse for a head this last 10 days, it is with great aplomb that I provide my first post at Architext (that name just has to go... its a smelly name, as if the teeth of my thoughts thunken have a periodontal disease). It's a snobby, self-congratulatory story, but one that'll yield to softer pastures, I'm sure. I'll stay here, for what boredom now passes as here, and try for naught but exclusive whimsy.

2007-11-08T23:12:00.000-05:00

After deliberating through a mild spell of depressed sensibilities and general lassitude, I came up with the awkward www.liminalumen.wordpress.com... while I pondered crumbs I'd heard from elsewhere (Architorture, Anarchitecture) I settled on the facile 'Architext' as the interim title. Why would I stop here at this lacklustre inauguration? That's right! I haven't even posted on it yet. The first post'll concern the person who's work I stolenated as the banner picture. And also how 'sustainability' as a word is the new 'enemy combatant'. And also why I chose liminalumen as a domain name in the firstplace.

Left Angles

2007-11-04T14:10:00.000-05:00

But the straight line has become an absolute tyranny.
The straight line is something cowardly drawn with a rule, without thought or feeling; it is a line which does not exist in nature.
And that the line is the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization.
- Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Our buildings are machines built by machines and designed around their convenience. We have the choice now either to willingly climb into the machine, and integrate with it the rounded edges of our dreams, or to just let the machine be built around us. Our babble is realizing its parallel process, and media is the towering superstructure. What can we do? What can we do?

The liminal space is now private: your doorstep, your school, your communal area. You have been programmed to live in this liminal space: your car, your television, your credit card. Liminal space used to afford you expansion, was your theater of transcendence. Now you cannot let your children play in the streets. Someone will sell you your power, will you stand for that? But what can we do?

Engineer = ? = Angina

!!!Inside Outside!!!