UPON MY BREATH

A firm conclusion.

2012-02-18T21:14:00.000-05:00

Banquet's new album IMPASSE is available for stream/download at http://banquet.bandcamp.com. It's free/PWYC; just click Buy Now and enter a zero if you'd like, or whatever other number if you wouldn't. None pressure.

No art to find the mind's.

2012-02-08T21:03:00.000-05:00

Near the bus stop I wait at, about a block or two away, is a tall apartment rise being built. I was thinking, watching the people drive their cars past, wondering about all things. And I heard a shout call through the air--"Where's your hard hat?" I looked up to that building and saw one man standing atop it and large against the sky. And I thought, maybe he is talking to me.

Is silence not quenching.

2012-02-06T14:08:00.000-05:00

Today, while out walking about the neighbourhood blocks, I approached a couple arguing loudly on the sidewalk ahead. I tried to step around them, but as I did the woman grabbed a package of cigarettes from the man and threw it at me. I caught it, but when I started to ask to give them back, she told me to shut up, and to tell her boyfriend to shut up too, why don't I. But I didn't do that, and instead I turned and kept walking. So, that has been my day.

You are still at Anthony's temptation.

2012-01-04T01:28:00.001-05:00

Outside for a moment so that we can take a break from dancing, really dancing, and in the cold and close quiet of the street we are approached by a few young men who have also just exited. They ask, Hey, do you guys have some dru? We do not know what that is, but it turns out that it is weed, and we do not have any. They say, that's okay, but man, I just want some, and how's your nights going? Ours are great. And then she asks of them, or of the one still talking to us how his New Year's Eve was, and did he get to kiss his truest love? No, no way. He said, I'm too young for that. And on the walk back to the car I thought how absolutely opposite, while thinking over the last ten years of my own life, or really, even the last fifteen or something like that, and how absurd to be sure of yourself that you are too young for love. He said he was too young, and that he is young, he wants to live life. I thought of myself, and then thought, does he not ever think that he is actually missing life, is that not what life is? That has been mine, surely, it has been life. But then as the car went I thought, well, you know, maybe. Yeah, maybe.

Standing there on a chair.

2011-12-19T23:04:00.001-05:00

The last time I was in a hospital was to kiss my brand new nephew, his soft hands curled while he started his world in a small maternity ward, lit with primary colours. The time before that was with Evan, where we spent the night in the waiting room. He lay on the floor, his body curled in a wish to fold in his pain. After about seven or eight hours, he was at last let into observance only a short while before the sun came up. I spent the night sitting still in a plastic chair until an unimaginably cheerful morning news program came on the television at four o'clock or so. I share a commonly held distaste for hospitals, with their wishful sterilization of the real parts of a person, the blood and abject leaks and breath. And there is always a clutter along every hallway, of carts and basins, and machines, poles of barely indentifiable occupations that sit beneath poor, pastel coloured landscape paintings. Somewhere in the anaesthetized bowels of a hospital, probably behind doors and doors, where paintings are no longer hung, lay my mother. I always think about what people must be thinking in hospitals. I wonder about the approach of despair that comes out of the pain of their bodies, of their awareness of something broken about themselves beneath their bandages or swimming within their mysterious flesh. I do not think that the stiff sanitary can keep away these thoughts when one closes their eyes.

Once again and innumerable times more.

2011-11-26T15:23:00.001-05:00

The other day I was outside on the library steps, sitting with a coffee and the cold, and a young woman sat down beside me. She had dark, good eyes. Her boot laces were coming undone, and she pulled them loose next to me. I have a demon inside me, she said, as she pulled the ropes open. We know what you mean, I said. But she didn't get the joke. And I saw her then, and said, what does it feel like? She pushed her hair from her face and said with all her breath that it feels like something is always pulling her laces apart. I watched. I can tell that you know, she said without looking up, tucking her jeans into her boots. We send ourselves. The waves of hair fell over her face again, and she looked to me. Her mouth parted, but without saying anything she got up and walked without turning back. And I watched my fingers reddening in the cold air.

Devorans tempora.

2011-11-20T22:25:00.001-05:00

A story of giants.

2011-11-20T12:53:00.001-05:00

Here, to smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together it's fantastic. Or to draw: you know, you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it's a good line. Or when your hands are cold, you rub them together.

I have been inundating myself with films, because of course. There has been your Twin Peaks, my Days of Heaven, Eyes Wide Shut, Synecdoche, New York, and on, like Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas. They make threads that weave between. Some short while ago I was watching a television programme, or perhaps a movie, though actually not at all--but I remember watching, in myself, a line of thought about voice and suffocation that ran through and beyond this programme on the screen. Some images of a contentment that glares, one that keeps a steady demand of the depth and frequency of conversation with another person--a demand whose results are the inverse of depth and frequency. Surprised by the violence of casualness. There, it is absolute. The way that a person waits until the very end of a phone call to give their least, their meager apology to the greatest trouble. And all the time conducting a beastly happiness, a slanderous facade that works to sing all the louder when it realizes that its feet stand in acid and rot. I do not know what that might feel like to understand it, I do not think I could know. I do not know what it is like to eschew the account of all that is present, and to demand ignorance. I have been watching these films that are somehow all strung together, and I realized this morning, while watching one of them, that it is in the way that these people walk through their scenes. Their walks are among what has been peeled off, but still prodding and clenching the spot that is left there, true steps in decisions of honesty. I was thinking also of the violence in certain paradoxes, ones that offer an opportunity for conversation when, long before, the offering has already been made impossible and refused to be mutually overcome. Yeah, I thought. Yes, I said. Tonight I will watch Bottle Rocket.

I used to make long speeches to you after you left. I used to talk to you all the time, even though I was alone. I walked around for months talking to you.

Nothing with any certainty.

2011-11-07T00:19:00.000-05:00

Things seen and heard this season:

-Two shoes on the sidewalk. Both the same kind of shoe, but both were left shoes, and both were the same size.

-An old man with a large pot belly, wearing only underpants, rollerblading past my house.

-"My leg's crooked, alright? My leg is uneven." From a woman walking around the corner, alone.

-"You don't want to be caught out in left-center field."

-Bus stop advertisement for real estate agent George Georgopoulous, email george@georgegeorge.com.

-On my first bus ride, a man who was denied a ride launching a ball of spit that hits the window beside my head.

-A recycling bin brimming with only discount brand lemon-lime plastic soda bottles.

-Another recycling bin with an enormous mirrorball balanced on top of it.

-A near victim to my own misplaced rage, a drunken undergraduate student who was pushed into me, recipient to my height and sharp words.

-Somewhere around fifty dogs chasing each other about a dog park on a late Sunday afternoon.

-Misty, a stranger, a drunken woman in a Team Canada warm-up suit, accosting me for my pants and then crawling under a table in an attempt to remove them.

-A million conversations about lost jobs and hard times.

-Late at night, a young man in his front kitchen window making a salad and a grilled cheese while I with my headphones stood and sang out quiet songs to wish a good meal.

-My own questionable voyeurism.

-"You look rich--are you rich?" and, "You've got pet hair on your face."

I would sell my martyr.

2011-10-28T00:46:00.000-04:00

Stomping my worn boots into deep puddles on the way home, I kept Bazan up loud and hummed him into the night while my fingers gripped inside my coat pockets. This is a strange place, it is, and I don't just mean this new town I've had to be living in. I mean this darn world. The whole of it. A kind of world where in this town, with a good person I have known for just some short weeks, I would close my evening with my hands circling his back while he cried against me for the pain of something he had lost and was somehow perpetually losing to other turns that could boast no similar kind of infinity. I had said less words than slow and thoughtful murmurs while I listened to him convince himself of some shuttered composure and then let his feelings loosen and shudder all over again, and alongside this I was thinking that my feelings knew his feelings very well, though as a knowledge and empathy that is kept in a simmer deep down. I told him that it is okay to work towards being okay and to not feel okay whatsoever all at once. The conversation, helped by the length of the walk that takes me to my house from his, made me give over to thinking about the phrase I had been hearing from some other places as well, being told that despite a most important circumstance, that "otherwise I am happy." It is something I do not think I can accept when hearing it, because there is no such thing as a happiness otherwise, a happiness that is excepting one or a few objects. Happiness is always only full. And there is a kind of defiance in such a phrase, so that just saying it gives its hidden truth away, that it is not full. That perhaps it is working so hard to chip off a cornerstone of one's very existence in the world, to knock away some part of them that shapes how they know to breathe. One can of course feel pleasure, perhaps drawn from some other circumstance or gained within one's own self. But pleasure, even deep pleasure, is still far apart from happiness if it is existing despite something else. A person can not call themselves happy if the path they are taking towards that happiness very purposefully leaves someone else in a heap. In this way, then, happiness is a social task. There is no way to feel it if you are disallowing another to feel it. So the objects that compose or oppose one's happiness extend beyond one's own self--it also exists out of the happiness you give to, or keep others from having. So neither can happiness be derived from the hurt of another. Not when one is making that hurt become, keeping it in becoming, not no matter how many turns you take.

Mackerel or herring / Hurled into the sea

2011-10-24T20:36:00.000-04:00

Walking with this wide world, its raging spin, and the ways that others unimaginably spin and pinball forth and away along our sphere, can rack a person in their shoes. It can transform a person and their paradigm. The way that horizons are created and closed off can leave a person feeling embattled with futility. I have been writing a lot, and reading a bit. I thought it would be an exciting thing to study some languages and to learn some new words for thoughts. There are some that I have not been let to speak, though. But I remember a night some while ago, in a place that I used to live.

I was out on a night time walk, and found myself stepping through a block or two of sleeping street construction. Pylons were strewn everywhere, and the whole asphalt of the street had been ripped out and piled in rows along its sides. It felt like a parted sea of tarred black rock. I stood for a moment, grateful for the feel of dirt beneath my feet in the middle of a city. Then I thought, and I left myself there. I poured the ashes from my pipe, turning it upside down and tapping it lightly on the side. I moved forward, with slow steps down the middle of this sea floor, and as I walked, I drew from my pockets what I had in them, and let them drop. A receipt from some groceries, a bus transfer ticket. A dirty penny, and a clean nickel. Another receipt from the purchase of some delicious burgers. I pulled a thin layer of dirt over this trail to cover it, stamping them where they lay so that rivers of glimmering asphalt could soon spread over them. And as I started my walk over again I knew in my steps something certain, to know them as a place I will always be, and to leave a trail of signals, a line of buoys towards where I will always be.

The assembly of rhythms occupy the house.

2011-10-21T13:23:00.001-04:00

In the fury of a youthful mood, I shared a conversation about dreams of future. We all asked each other about what we wanted to do and to be, wondering within whether the form of our ideal paths could be made into something lived and substantial. Each thought hard, negotiating in their minds the fought pull between things dreamed and restrictively realistic. And at my turn, I gave my answer. I have given it several times before to friendly smirks and prods, resulting from the swift recitation I was able to give. So by this occasion I had learned to pretend at hesitation and spontaneity in my answer, feigning a surprise at the development of my own wishes. It eases the reception when the delight of my first answer is to have two dogs (maybe more), a cat, and a horse, to live near some woods and meadows where I can ride through mornings while my seat and my eyes still higher than the cool sun at dawn and dusk. Among these souls, I would want to be a writer, enough to subsist in such a place. And if not that, then I would love to be a professor, where I would then also be reading as much as I am writing, but can actively relate my own ideas to a whole community of others on a basis that would be so brilliantly regular. And then, if neither of those things, then I would seek to own a cafe, with a lending library and a little shelf of board games. A cafe that would host knitting circles and philosophy reading groups, and invite art exhibitions and musical performances. And among all of those things, my days and my writing will be composed with thoughts of love. Those are all things that I can do, I think, and all of which would make me happy enough. To live in such circumstances, and to be among such furry souls, is now my youthful path to seek. When I think of them, I feel pleased at the simplicity by which they are thought, for my negotiation between a dream and my own steps can include all those with ease. All except for one--though one that is now beyond me.

Like a hood upon my mind.

2011-10-11T12:21:00.000-04:00

I have a dog, and have had to save him on two occasions. Both of them were while he was swimming as a young boy. The first time, last summer, he came along with me and some friends to the Elora Quarry. It was a bright day of jumping cliffs and eating snacks and sandy feet. The Grand River flows along right beside the quarry, and while dogs were not allowed in the quarry water they could wade off the heat in their fur in the light brown of the river. The Grand looked lazy that day, and so we let Pascal hop out into the stream to nip at insects in the air and to catch sticks. But in the bright sun, flecks of light were tossed out across the surface. He swam out to them, further and further, and by the time he reached their place they would be gone, and new lights reflected on more distant ripples. Though the river looked calm, its current was strong and Pascal was pushed out with it, unable to swim upstream and back to us. He was drifting far up the river, toward a dam that was some ways downstream, helpless to fight the water. When we realized this, I dove after him with his leash roped around my shoulders and swam hard into the current and across the wide river to catch him. I was already tired when I reached him, and I clasped his leash onto his collar. In his panic, he thrashed against my chest, so that when I reached the opposite shore again my skin was a red-white patchwork. I had to tow him, but the current was much too strong. We climbed out onto the bank instead, and ran a long ways up the length of the bank so that on our second try across we would be more easily carried along with the current. When we stumbled out of the water, my chest burning inside and out, and Pascal's body shaking, we went home.

The second was this past spring, at a dog park in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver. The park was a beach that lined the Pacific Ocean, and though the air was slowly beginning to warm, the water still had the frigidity of winter. We went there in the late morning, on a day that was cool and overcast. There was a good handful of other dogs there, and in Pascal's eagerness to play with them he would chase after the balls or sticks thrown for those others. In some kind of a flash, he dashed out into the ocean and started swimming. He was first swimming towards a thrown stick that was floating out, but an older and stronger dog was able to race him for it. While this dog turned back towards the shore to meet its owner and return the stick, Pascal kept on swimming. The pale glint of sun on the laps of the water urged him out much farther than he should go, far enough that when I called him he could no longer hear me. He was lost, with no sign of shore or direction, following the reflections as they disappeared before him. I threw off my coat and shirts, getting ready to follow him out. I almost forgot to take off my boots, but then kicked them away and slung his leash around my bare shoulders in the cold air. Pascal was being carried by the ebb, and the dog park was now some distance away. I dove into the water, and my chest immediately sucked into itself so that I could not breathe. I was surrounded by cold, choking on freezing salt water. But if I did not breathe, and if I did not swim, then I would be stuck out there myself, and would not have been saved. When cold and dark make circles of your vision, the only thing to do is to force yourself to breathe and to swim. When at last I got near to Pascal I called to him. Now he heard me, and weakly thrashed towards me. I leashed him, and I could see his fear, and now I wonder if he could see mine. The cold was tiring me, and I was afraid I would not be strong enough to make it back. When we reached the shallow, I cut my feet, still in their socks, and a thin strip down my left palm. My heavy pants were sopping down my body, down my waist and feet. In my fear, or perhaps as a way to try and keep cover over it, I felt some frustration towards Pascal. He was not a very strong swimmer, and I thought he might have been aware of that in himself. But I understand and wonder at his perseverance out there in the waters and the flickering lights. These occasions set off by glints and shimmers that are gone once you reach for them. Glimmers on the surface that fold away the very moment you gaze on their fortune.

Decayed teeth / Decayed ambitions

2011-09-18T22:31:00.001-04:00

After some phone calls you stay sitting where you are, recounting it as it seeps in and changes the character of your mood and outlook. I knew that, with the way this one ended, it certainly would, though this time I decided to walk with it. So for the second time in the afternoon, the boy and I packed up for a long trudge through the neighbourhood with some Bazan in my ears. A few blocks from where I keep my belongings I came across a woman who immediately expressed her excitement at the sidewalk construction being done along the street adjacent to where we stood. We were at the corner of an old church built with stones the size of chairs. She had her hair cut in a bob and wore glasses with dark red frames. She reminded me of an old boss I had, a slightly maniacal woman who lacked the characteristic to see with varying perspectives. This woman told me that this kind of work was just fantastic to be happening, and that usually you have to get into the faces of city politicians in order to get anything done, and that she was someone who regularly does just that. I congratulated her on the difficult work that kind of activity presents, and I told her and encouraged that it is important, that grassroots political movements are sometimes much more effective and immediate for a community in need of results. She said that she was a Big Sister as well, to four girls, and that one of the elder sisters had found an exciting direction for herself by also becoming an activist, and that it seemed she was even starting to dress like this woman here. As she was telling me that, a girl with hair dyed bright purple walked past us, and behind her the woman raised her eyebrows, looked at me, and pulled her chin back into her neck. A friend of hers, she said next, told her that she should start running for a position here, but that she did not want to do that kind of work. She told me that if you want to make politicians do their job you have to get in their face, and if her meaning was not made then she stepped forward while she was talking, telling how to get under peoples' skin while almost rubbing noses with me. Her teeth were like the colour of mustard, the real kind of mustard, and one of her front teeth had a dark crack that travelled diagonally across it. This woman told me that the city has a policy of filling holes within 48 hours of being reported, but that the time it took to fill the one that broke her back took five and a half years. "You have very nice eyes, and nice teeth," she said with some kind of knowledge. "That will get you very far." Maybe it did.

In at the mouth / In at the eye

2011-09-13T18:47:00.001-04:00

I can recall the uncanny number of times this summer that I have heard an old story about a shoot growing from a stump. I heard reflections on it read aloud after dinners, and I read it in several different books whose pages coloured with me in unfamiliar places under this summer's sun. I pluck leaves from trees and use them as bookmarks. I saw the story again while my nephew was baptized, told to little children while a preacher knelt by them in robes. In all of these accounts and in each of their contexts, the story talked of the shoot being a new plant. But this brand new shoot out of this stump should be seen as the very same. This new growth is the very same plant, its fervor and goodness climbing out of anything. There is a pause, but not an end.

A long while ago I was given a small cactus in a little brown plastic pot, wrapped in bright and red, metallic foil, and tucked in a paper bag. My gift giver overshadowed thoughtfulness with humility, but I accepted it with my whole heart. When I had the cactus at home, I sat it where I would always see it. It grew quite quickly, and I watched it stretch its stem up and out of the dirt around it, leaning bright green and a little crooked on my desk in the sun. But I did not know its proper care. I was excited at its quick growth, and in that excitement I gave it too much water. After some while it began to shrivel from top down, and its spines slowly flaked off. I learned about how to care for this, to cut off the top, and to add in some dry soil, possibly sand. I carefully cleaned off the little white tufts that grew along the ruts of its stem. I waited, and the cactus stood pale and hard. After a long passing, though, next to the scab that had puckered where I cut, the cactus continued growing. Its stem pushed up into a little bulb, with new spines flecked around it. I keep it where I see it. And it grows, and it grows.

But one night every thousand years.

2011-09-11T14:22:00.000-04:00

This morning started next to sleeping fur and half bottles, and under the sound of light rain and heavy feet of small children being yelled at by their mother. Their floor is a loud ceiling, so I turned up the rest of Badlands in bed. Now I sit in this back yard. I wonder who put this bench here, and who has sat on it before me. The sun is out now, and in the afternoon here you can feel the wet being lifted up out of the grass. With your eyes closed, you can tilt your head slowly back and then down, and watch the orange brown light change with the direction you face in the sun. I think, only to myself now, about how weird eyelids are. And I think about some weeks I held this spring, and of the long stretches of toil that bracket them. I think about the path of years that walked towards that time, watching hair grow long. All moments spiral off into infinity. I think of the marvellous weeks that will strike through every story I have yet to write. I think next that I should go pick up one of my leaky black pens, but I stay instead, to sip my coffee and watch this brilliant toddler carry and kick a fat green walnut.

Three parts / Seven parts

2011-09-10T16:22:00.000-04:00

The loveliness of weddings is in part due to the audience in attendance, who have woken up that morning to enhance their beauty with trim suits and dresses. There is a signalling selflessness in the way they gather for two people. Everyone sending all of their happiness in one direction. And it lasts for the whole of the afternoon, through the ceremony and into the rest of the meticulously planned afternoon, while light music and energetic hosts help the day along. But then after dinner the speeches come, just after dinner, when people begin to lean back in their chairs, worn out with their contentedness. They slip off their shoes under the table, and they loosen their ties and leave their jackets to hang on the backs of their chairs. It is like taking off an armour of selflessness, where then passed all around are remembrances of the reasons why each person loves the two getting married, why the wedding is the perfect thing to have happened, and on. And almost as if because of everyone's loosening outfits, the speeches slink inside their seams, and their reflections turn upon themselves. And while they listen, fingering the stems of their wine glasses, everyone is wondering to themselves about love, about their love that is kept boxed. A beauty turned to ache, and then sending its meaning into a night covered with a blanket of dance.

When the morning stars sang together.

2011-08-31T13:25:00.004-04:00

In the quiet of the world, The Tree of Life begins with its two characteristics, nature and grace, leaning hard into each other. One walks slowly through, into, the mourning of death. The theatre is silent and waiting as it watches grace, the beginnings, and its eternal growth. Cells multiply and move. Everything grows into paths of difference, saving precious note of the sameness that shines into each--until a premature death. Then there are roars. Bursting earth with volcanic eruptions, the demands of nature. And the theatre sounds out with the snapping plastic pop of snacks being pulled open.

To be thoroughly conversant.

2011-08-21T16:24:00.015-04:00

A video tutorial series on how to stay standing.

Walk it out in search of shadow giants.

Take a swim with your dog. Wake up in the sun from that soaking dog as he protects you from bugs.

Watch your nephew see himself on the phone screen, and then give kisses.

This rusty car creaking along the highway.

2011-08-14T12:29:00.006-04:00

So the other night a motorcyclist draws up from behind. His single, steady light does so gradually while I'm driving in the car towards home after wandering lonely inside the drowning noise of rubber on highway, and of wind sneaking through shuttling crevices. The blank noise of a car late at night has been written about, and has been sung about. All kinds of lines that welcome the way it smothers the incessant haunting of one's inability for understanding, or worse actually, the unnegotiable despair of having understanding. These combined with something lit in hand and something liquid under the seat, it's a convention.

The trouble, the truth, is that when you drive long enough, the dull pulse of fear that lay in those thoughts becomes amplified. You flail about in wonder at how a thing--something shared and held, something communed--can be made to vaporize, and how it does in a joyful white flash so that what you still have within you is as if a careful delusion. After a while all that a person sees is the cycling of their mind around images on fire, about an impossible confusion. But then a motorcyclist drew up, and once it was close it turned off its headlight. Now all that could be seen of it was a floating nickel in my tail lights, too near my car as it sailed along behind me. When that happens the first fear, the one that loudens in every crawling day, is suddenly flattened by the anxiety of whether you should speed up or slow down, and how quickly you should make either of those transitions. But then a few minutes later, because somehow this is how it is, they weave into each other. And mortality and fear become the same thing, these two vehicles in the dark.

Each other's magnitude and bond.

2011-08-10T00:18:00.002-04:00

Out to meet you.

2011-08-06T22:31:00.005-04:00

This one, this is one of those days. One where the yellow of wheat fields being cut folds into the air with the smell of forests. A cicada somewhere nearby wiggles its weightless ribs together. And even though you feel the weighty heat of the sun brightening your hair, you catch the spare, strange drop of rain on your arm. Within it all, your walking feet landing upon the open world, you feel you just don't know at all. And you can't tell whether it's coming from all that out there, or from all this in here. And then you feel another drop fall onto your swinging arm.

The stairs of his concepts.

2011-07-30T16:34:00.010-04:00

They were the only two left on the bus. Everyone else had piled out as soon as the bus had pulled over at the small convenience store that leaned against the edge of the highway. A leftover smell of hot, uncomfortable passengers clouded the cabin where they no longer sat. He finished eating his melting chocolate bar and shuffled the narrow aisle to wash his hands at the back of the bus. She was sitting there, a large girl with headphones in her ears, stretched across that very last and longest row of seats. The door to the washroom was sticky and jammed at first, and he hit her with it when he finally pulled it open. He apologized to her. "It's okay," she said, but he was not sure that the girl had even heard what he said.

Inside the small, dim bus washroom, he washed his hands and looked at his face. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought about what other people must think about in the mirror. And if this is the same face that people saw when they looked at him. If they saw calm, or sadness, or interest, or wonder. Or if they saw something blank, or uninviting, or maybe abrasive. He wondered if, when people are looking in the mirror, they feel their heaving flow of moments. One telling him repeatedly how nice his teeth are. One teasing him about the holes in his socks and then offering him chocolates from a crammed pantry. If other people, when standing before themselves, might also feel their hearts constantly slowing out of a past that is so quickly shed--one that was magnified by the shared breaths of those who held it, but now deflates under only his own, and seems to have done so just moments after a departure. Just moments, maybe. Parts of one world made small, made forgotten by others'. Just moments, maybe, because those, their own, are replaced by others'. He wondered if people feel the weight of their future. If, with the unwavering and quiet observance of themselves that holds within it a curved, piercing expression, they feel their minds absolutely bursting from their skulls. If they feel anguish. A kind of agony that can not be chased. He looked at his teeth and his eyes, at the few summer freckles. He pushed hard for the sticky door to open, and it hit the girl again. He apologized, and they smiled at each other, and he went back to his seat. A few minutes later, the rest of the passengers migrated back up the bus steps in their wrinkled, stuffy clothes. As the bus pulled onto the highway, it filled with the smell of processed, powdered cheese and shrink-wrapped sandwiches.

The most insane dashboard I ever saw.

2011-07-21T11:18:00.002-04:00

Watching Pascal watching me watching It's Complicated

Many a trip continues.

2011-07-14T23:51:00.004-04:00

I am very pleased to encourage you to listen to the upcoming episode of the CFRU 93.3 program Pioneer Radio. The theme of the episode is Movement, and the generous hosts gave me the opportunity to read "Moving Still," a recent short story of mine, for the program. Pioneer Radio airs Mondays at 5 o'clock PM EST, and episodes are available for download at their website.

Stream CFRU radio here: http://www.cfru.ca.

Faster than sound.

2011-07-08T11:45:00.004-04:00

With just thirty-one seconds on the count, Atlantis, the last space shuttle on its last trip, was delayed. Somewhere in all the millions of parts something was not as perfect as its design. Some piece, shaped by thousands of minds out of decades of discontent. Murmurs passed through radios into the air. They saw that it was not the shuttle itself, but the cap at the top of the pad that was not yet fully withdrawn for launch. This hood that balanced as a vent over the giant external fuel tank, the central part of a shuttle. The delay was not for Atlantis itself but for the structure that was built to send it along. On an unseen man's mark, the count continued down. And then the ship burst off into the big blue, millions of pounds at a mile a second.

Rumble, young man.

2011-06-25T22:48:00.004-04:00

Walking around, I was thinking about this story I know. It is of this one, where a lone apple tree grew just off the edge of his property. The boy never knew it was an apple tree, though, not for a long time because it looked like any sort of small tree--until it suddenly grew a single piece of fruit late one summer. He saw it for its new seeds, and saw the future beauty of stretching, unordered fields. But with this first bearing, all he could think of was to give it to the girl. So he picked it, and she liked it very much, loved it in fact, particularly its fresh crunch because it had no bruises. She told him that she detested bruises. And she was apologetically dissatisfied about there being only one apple. Perhaps if they encouraged the tree, they thought, and talked to it, then it might bloom a few more blossoms. They stood together and he stared at the tree into the deep night, stared so hard that he did not realize the early morning sun arriving. He blinked into its brightening, and looked around to see that the girl had slipped off in the dark. He saw the path she made through the pressed, dewy grass. She had left.

But when he looked up into the morning he saw a tree standing heavy with bright fruit. He gathered a bushel of them, all of them he could find, for her. They were her apples. He followed her path, through forests and then fields and then mountains, and he brought them to her. He reached her at last, maybe because he should have or maybe because she let him. But somehow, by the time he brought them to her they were no good. Not only had they been jostled as he travelled, but one old rotter that had been forgotten to be chucked out was stinking in the bottom of her basket. He didn't see it when he packed, and didn't think it existed among so many new ones. It did, and she found it, and then found all the others rotten and bruised as well. He tried to show her two apples that were still good to share, but she wanted neither and turned. Detracted and embarrassed, he left too, was made to leave before he could show her that not every apple was ruined. All of them in the bushel were tumbled and scattered across the hard ground--but alone now and standing in the sun, he reached inside his collar. He had still kept one safe in his coat, for just in case.

But a chipped fragment.

2011-06-09T16:00:00.005-04:00

"Your name is Rocky?" I said. He said, "That's what I said, yes." I smirked a bit, I think--probably something that appeared too shocking--and said, "That's funny. You know, I just met a raccoon yesterday." He didn't blink once, and asked, "What does that matter to me? What's funny about it?" Nevermind, I thought. I had no proper approach. I met this fellow the next day here, because it is the nature of the world to bring its own striking brand of twisted humour to one's feet, but only just as one begins to become confident of a kind of security. "So, do you need me to put you on the side of the road then?" This time he did blink. "Now, why would I need you to do that? Does it look like I want you to put me on the side of the road?" "Well, I just thought it might be a better way to deal with cars or trucks." His toes were long, sharp nails, like his beak. Every part of him looked harder with each moment. Even his tail looked sharp now. "I suppose it looks more like you could use a lift, since you're not even directed towards either ditch. Where are you headed?" But it was too late, and he didn't seem to be paying attention to me anymore.

Consonance / Vigilius.

2011-06-02T15:09:00.003-04:00

"Barnaby?" I repeated after him. "That doesn't really sound like much of a name for a raccoon." He didn't look it, at least. This one was out on the road, on his own under the sun. He stared high up at me and murmured.

I thought about this video I had seen, of some man on a motorcycle stopping to carry a two-toed sloth that was crossing, and crossing, the road somewhere in Costa Rica. He took hold of its shoulders and when the sloth was lifted from the ground, all of its four legs stuck out straight and stiff until it was set back down again, safe on the other side.

This one came towards me now when I approached, surprising me. I had to scoop it up under its warm belly. But its fur was not soft as it looked, and its sharp toes tried to push off my light grasp. At first I put it back on the side of the road it seemed to have come from, but in the tall, thick grass of the ditch that must have offered no orientation. So I placed it further out, at the edge of the forest for distinction.

Once I returned home I told my father about it, and he recommended I had not touched it. They are night time animals, and to see them out in the open like that during the day could very well mean it has rabies. Looking down at the remote control I held in my hand, my mother furrowed and said, "I sure hope you washed your hands."

Birds is falling.

2011-06-02T09:24:00.002-04:00

I was telling the ones in my kitchen about the sign. In the heat of August (though perhaps in June while standing on a dock, or perhaps in a December long before while throwing snowballs at a stranger's--who was to become a future Regis--window) something that had bounced within me all along began to stumble forth from me but was still frothing at corners like a flow getting caught in a stream--now it stands tall and light, beaming a gold tint upon everything that is. "The glory," like what Steinbeck writes about. As soon as it became able to speak it was silenced, however, until I determined that it couldn't, that it should not.

Anyway, that isn't even what I was talking about in the kitchen. I was talking about that new determination and I was telling about the sign. It came to me while I was out on a walk with our boy late at night. I was thinking aloud to the trees and to the stars and their sky. They have become the runners-up in conversation since I still walk here, because I like to think of their shared importance, and of the idea that, when you think about it, they are all sharing with you and I our same whistling air.

I was thinking through this light, wondering to the snow on the toes of my boots whether I ought now to shield it. I looked up and asked the trees, too, who had been solemnly listening with that stillness they carry.

Two people were talking together about the dances they have shared. He said that he missed it, he missed dancing with her, perhaps veiling the deeper, more obvious thought that dancing with her held a highest inclusion among his happiest patches of moments. Yet, "I love dancing with you," he said. Those blurry, whirring moments of scuffing feet and squeezing hands, and how could you do anything else but smile at how sparkling it all is. That is how he always thought of them, as moments that he had always wanted to start and never wanted to end, and he felt a fuse cut short by the way that she recalled all of those dances, pointing to him with biting expression, "I always had to drag and force you to start because you never wanted to."

How reasonable would he have sounded though, I could not help but think, if he had mentioned that the greatness of those moments, sharing a dance, bore little comparison to the small beginnings in hesitancy that were due only to a few foreign voices shouting through his head. But those opening seconds of nervousness, of crossing fingers to catch a rhythm, had been there, even if only for seconds, and so by existing would be available to carry a greater emphasis than the loud and glimmering dance.

Past memories can be manipulated to suit. What I was telling in my kitchen, though, was that I had lost my keys. There were inches of new snow stretching across that long park, and every criss and cross my steps took felt like it was impossible. I could make no new landmarks for places I had not looked. But after long hours of looking, when I had decided to give up and walk back home I followed a thought that struck me and checked my car door. It was unlocked, and my keys were sitting on the passenger seat.

Then the very next night my car had been broken into, the small change and adapters and gadgets gone, but only then my keys were no longer on the passenger seat.

Wish key.

2011-05-30T13:58:00.003-04:00

People go about it in different ways, it appears. Some of them drink their whiskey. Some people, they try to cut their hair, their nails, eyebrows, their eyelashes. They lay under the eyes of birds and bugs in the hot sun to burn out old cells. They cut their dog's nails, then their own toenails, and accidentally cut their finger on some thin paper. But when they get up again to look in the mirror, it is still there. It will still be there.

Miles to go.

2011-05-27T23:08:00.003-04:00

I, in a fog, hear myself thinking about two things in the car this night: chocolate milk, and riding a steed at seven oncomers, pell-mell, pinching sweaty reins between my teeth. The whole of wide Ontario feels small, a midnight fog here making its own low ceiling and narrow walls. Two constant red lights above the road are glinting twins ahead of me, saying that they will never be reached. Now, while I look to the part of the world where vision and fog accost, I think to myself, What a jumble all of this is, isn't it? A ruckus, a fray. All of it, everything, all of us, it's just--and I want nothing but to sleep.

Timshel.

2011-05-13T18:58:00.004-04:00

He lifted the breadbox and took out a tiny volume bound in leather, and the gold tooling was almost completely worn away—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in English translation.

Lee wiped his steel-rimmed spectacles on a dish towel. He opened the book and leafed through. And he smiled to himself, consciously searching for reassurance. He read slowly, moving his lips over the words.

“Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

“Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.” Lee glanced down the page. “Thou wilt die soon and thou are not yet simple nor free from perturbations, nor without suspicion of being hurt by external things, nor kindly disposed towards all; nor dost thou yet place wisdom only in acting justly.”

Lee looked up from the page, and he answered the book as he would answer one of his ancient relatives. “That is true,” he said. “It’s very hard. I’m sorry. But don’t forget that you also say, ‘Always run the short way and the short way is the natural’—don’t forget that.” He let the pages slip past his fingers to the fly leaf where was written with a broad carpenter’s pencil, “Sam’l Hamilton.”

Suddenly Lee felt good. He wondered whether Sam’l Hamilton had ever missed his book or known who stole it. It had seemed to Lee the only clean pure way was to steal it. And he still felt good about it. His fingers caressed the smooth leather of the binding as he took it back and slipped it under the breadbox. He said to himself, “But of course he knew who took it. Who else would have stolen Marcus Aurelius?” He went into the sitting room and pulled a chair near to the sleeping Adam.

Fear is proof.

2011-03-08T21:06:00.003-05:00

Across the lane from the lawn bowling fields is a small building with pale siding, housing what I imagine to be lawn bowling balls kept within the world's most uncrackable safe. I pass this by every day on my walk to campus, but on this sunny day I rounded the far corner of the building to be stopped, face to face with seven or eight Canada geese who all too hurriedly flew off upon my intrusion. I turned to where they flew from and saw that on the side of the building was spraypainted, in two separate spots, "CARP" and "CK THE RICH." Suspicious.

Dry awakeness.

2011-02-20T19:38:00.007-05:00

Felt like it was arriving right just as I was leaving class, a flash freeze this past week that interrupted a few days of warmth. When it does, the wet from the couple days of thaw before gets caught, still hanging in the air as it frosts on us. Everyone walking with their shoulders bunched, hurrying home to whatever luck awaits them there.

People were walking quickly. They were bustling to resist the cold, with a slight lean and eyes leading along the ground about ten feet before them--all except for this one standing on the bridge. He stood straight, and he was round and motionless with hands tucked in khaki pants. He stood standing on the bridge ahead of me, not noticing the traffic or passersby, but looking onto the cold river below and at the sunset over the park trees, away in the distance and looking like the bright fade of watercolour. There is a long hill that runs downward on my walk back home, and the whole time I walked it I could see this person standing there, through the lengths of minutes, looking out to the frigid water.

He was watching the group of geese and ducks who had remained the whole winter and had formed some kind of a fraternity. All day they were sitting there, it seemed, every time I walked past them to campus or with our boy on a leash. As I got closer, the whole picture looked better--the unmoving smear of pink and purple against grey sky, hanging over the bridge and the icy river flow. I was just about caught up to the onlooker. But in a flash, the birds all decided to up and fly off down the river and into the sun. He watched this too, then slowly turned and walked away.

The consolation of life.

2011-02-15T02:58:00.001-05:00

What else, but that after deciding to eat one million cookies, I run short by about a million less a couple dozen.

I then thought that I might clean out my old email drafts, and wondered whether I should now send them all to their originally intended recipients. Maybe like a slightly discomforting, ghostly revisiting of circumstances long past. There were three and four year old letters of advice to friends who were deeply lost in their troubles. But maybe like finding an old letter or to-do list in something you haven't worn since a couple winters ago. There were all kinds, but what I liked most was a long, long exchange about a Doggie. A silly experience of a radio show turned somehow injurious for my good friend Greg. A reply to the request for a water bottle. A whole-soul, half-sentenced response to being told I was brave three years ago, incomplete because of the inevitable limitations that are given to all-of-the-heart expressions when they are verbalized.

Twenty-nine email drafts that have accumulated over the last five years or so, residing in their incompleteness as accidental reminders of complete, bursting moments, and how all continues here, in this day.

If lookin' likin' move.

2011-02-06T14:44:00.002-05:00

And the flowers are still standing.

2011-02-01T18:12:00.006-05:00

Listening to my head today, and these are the films that crossed my mind in correlation with the scapes of my walk home from campus:

American Psycho
Good Will Hunting
Ghostbusters
No Country For Old Men
The Notebook
Uncle Buck
Blue Streak
You've Got Mail
The Hours
The Family Stone

Like the wind and the weather.

2011-02-01T04:40:00.000-05:00

Some long while ago I was sitting on a bright front porch with someone I know, conversing and breathing in the sunlight. It was just past noon on a Saturday and Thanksgiving was coming up, so, as is the way things go, the conversation was guided toward tradition. I could not think of any family Thanksgiving traditions aside from the obligatory meals and wine. Nothing like afternoon sports games or gift exchanges, or any nights of song. We wondered together about starting some tradition, and how it could persist long enough to become one.

In the good, slow energy pent up in those mornings, the talk turned as it would, and when I leaned forward to stretch into its comfort I was reminded of the origins of bodily aches I no longer think of. Two of them: the first, a popping, snapping creak in my wrist and my shoulders. Years ago I worked at an auto parts plant, and the automatic lines were built for people much shorter than me. The second, a tightness that appears as it chooses throughout my back, gained from an accident in my car. It rolled down a ditch several times, and I was jostled along inside while it did, my shins crashing against the dashboard and my body swinging and straining into the seatbelt.

These things, lingering aches and pains, can be carried a long distance, long enough to know they are still carried even though it is forgotten what for--to cling to them so they remain long enough to integrate themselves into a habit of thought and motion, and to become a thing that you are so resolutely in disagreement with that it blots out all else, without being able to recall why. But I never think about these things. Once that sun got high enough, the warmth it lent was all else a person could need there. Porches are good for that.

The way by moonlight.

2011-01-27T10:54:00.006-05:00

Bowling has been around for, I don't know, maybe a hundred years or so. And I rarely bowl, I haven't in almost a whole year, but for weeks now I find myself waking out of the most vivid dreams of bowling--pink silk, those bright shoe laces and tough boots, bliss, and that bowling alley music. If I could at all, I would perhaps like to have conspired that the encyclopedic dream interpretation of bowling might have been too closely developed in accordance with derivations of psychoanalysis that linked all to eroticism, the psychology and the sport both sharing an historically mutual period. Yet, you know, sometimes psychoanalysis is uncannily bowling turkeys.

But dreams are the most important, I'm sure of that. The things that might happen to you in a dream reveal a certain truth about yourself and your heart that you might otherwise not easily see when awake. The ones that enter into your dream, and especially the things they say to you in the dream, are the most significant--because their presence and their very distinct words are in a great sense your very own thoughts and feelings as well. And so they are shaped upon a rationale that is stronger and deeper than a positivistic line of thinking that you might make drawn when you are awake. Because anyone can reason out anything, really. But that in both dreams and wakefulness, city buses always seem to first be driving through eternity before arriving for you at their stop.

That noodle thing.

2011-01-25T19:50:00.005-05:00

From the top corner of the movie theatre, the mixture of subtle irony and overt, secretly shared enjoyment of an unreasonably large cineplex is best held. There is no other way but with buckets of sodies and popcorn. Way in the back was perhaps the only place, though, because the theatre was filled. All that stadium seating, conditioned air and buttered popcorn, sold out to what in that dim light at least sounded to be about a million unseen middle-aged women. And us, too, everyone come to see that movie with Alec and ol' Steve in it, and Meryl doing her usual. I insist that movie is magic. It split the moments between an absolute happiness of circumstance, the clowning film, and an overwhelmed laugh at all those women down in the rows below, bursting their seams at Meryl's sexual misadventures. Everyone cackling in the dark.

When it alteration finds.

2011-01-20T12:33:00.000-05:00

[...] What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me
[...]

The sight of the stars.

2011-01-20T10:16:00.003-05:00

Must be a need in a person.

2011-01-15T20:20:00.009-05:00

Beneath those penants I was telling a story. I never knew where the penants had first come from, now hanging onto that part of the low basement ceiling. It is easy to imagine a golden 1950s varsity championship, with fans all frantically waving their cloth triangles.

But I was doing what I often did when talking and thinking at once, and looking up at the blemishes on the ceiling. There were stains from water pipes and curious gashes and marks from I always imagined what. Or that remnant glow-in-the-dark ink on the wall.

I was telling about a quiet place I had visited called the Sacra Santa. It was small, tucked adjacently to a much more attractable building across some square, and so it did not gain many visitors. It took me a long time to find it through the old winding streets. But I wanted to, and I must have passed along the cobbled stone several times before I found the way.

It was a chapel, and inside was only a long set of high steps, twenty-eight of them. And every step was made of marble several thousands of years ago in Jerusalem, though they were now wrapped beneath encasing steps of hard oak that was warped inwards from the pressure of those who have climbed them. Once inside, no words were allowed to be spoken. They say those steps were the ones that Christ climbed towards his judgement. The blood from his whipping was said to have dripped from him onto what must have been that characteristic of warm softness that rock takes on in sunlight. Wherever that blood had fallen, there were small holes carved out of the oak for one to see as they climbed

But to climb those steps now, one may only do so on their knees. There were a few others there, and I watched for some moments. The movement of each looked pained, and all took pauses to rest upon each broad step and summon what strength and prayers were left in making that climb. I did the same. I didn't know anything, did not understand the relevance of penance and judgement to prayerful reflection, but I could feel all the things that were within me. For every one of those twenty-eight steps, my knees burning, I gave the same prayers, each the same but growing more earnest the higher I climbed. I felt the silent pain in the few others around me be reflected in my own as my knees and my spine grew an increasing ache. To believe that an entire marble staircase had travelled from Jerusalem to Rome may be difficult or easy, depending upon how you consider the historical economics of Catholicism. But that does not matter when you reach the top of the steps. I think about spirituality and the steps of that chapel now, and how it was only most important that the prayers I felt at each instance along the way came to me on their own. Because they came on their own, they lit up my soul with a truth that led me back to tell this quiet story in that basement room.

So there were no glittering rooms beyond the top step. Other than pretty frescoes, once your wordless and aching body reaches the top, you exit the chapel with only that complete experience of self. And if I had reached with my hands and shared what those repeated prayers were then, while looking towards those penants and along the curve of light from the lamp, I would have said that I was glimpsing their complete reality. And if I were to tell of them now, they will have always stayed the same.

You say I'll get tongue cancer. You smoke too.

2011-01-09T13:28:00.005-05:00

I take my late night walks through the parks and woods that stretch along York Road from the covered bridge to the Lionsgate pool. Yesterday I had mine planned out to carry one of those Wellington Imperial Russian Stouts along with me, along with a cigar, to stand and sift through the snow while I watched our boy trot around, bounding somewhere and then back to me to check in.

There is usually no one about the area when it is dark. But while I walked and sipped from the can of beer, I noticed that the young man had disappeared. I turned to see him scampering with a little Italian mastiff, and tucked the open can into my coat pocket just as the owner appeared from out of the bushes, and I don't really know why she was in there. "Hi-i," she said, with that throaty, drawn out pronunciation that drifts up and then downwards again. "Now since our dogs are playing, we have to talk to each other," she said, apologetically. "I'm Jacie." I returned her greeting, and she said, "Now we have to talk about our dogs, since that's what people do." And we did, of course. It's what people do. Her dog is two years old.

I asked her if she lived in town and what she did. "I'm a brewmaster," she said, and in my thoughts some hasty reasoning pointed towards that slow slur in her speech. I told her that is an excellent title, and asked which company she worked for. "For Sleeman--well, I'm not one yet, but maybe in five years I will be. I'm working towards it." I was listening too closely now, but I remembered, too, my own tremendous discretion that I was the one who was trying hard to keep the open drink in my pocket from either spilling or being noticed. Except she threw her hands out next, saying, "It's all so secretive you know, the recipes and all that kind of stuff," and her hand knocked against the can to make that recognizable tinny ping and the liquid jostle. I coughed.

"Anyway, it's good. Yeah. I'm Jacie, by the way, we already introduced ourselves." She forgot and remembered this a few more times while we walked, back towards the covered bridge, and she talked about her dog. And as her direction split towards her car, she said, "You know, dog owners have to talk to each other, it's just the thing, even if they're not nice," and I said yes, that's a part of it all, though sometimes it's fine. "Anyway, I'm Jacie, but we said all that before. Have a good walk home to wherever you're going." I started home again and pulled the drink from my pocket.

Been hoping that you'd drop in.

2011-01-03T11:38:00.006-05:00

"To make a Christmas best," says my Great Uncle Herman, "it is up to you to decide. The entire purpose of the season is joy. It has nothing to do with gifts or food, but with giving thanks and praise to life and to those in your life. That's Christmas. To love."

I recall what was in this moment, how the one who I was thinking of in this conversation several years ago is still there now. And, you know, now there is nothing else but that.

Need no overcoat.

2010-12-24T11:52:00.004-05:00

This great bush in my back yard houses more than a dozen sparrows, and some cardinals, maybe seven but I hope eight so that each has a friend. I am provided a warm mulled wine for contemplation while I watch, its branches bundling about themselves in the cold, that kind of air you can only feel for some few minutes as the morning sky begins to brighten. A tender hug of frost. In the bush's late summer leaves, and now in its briar-like winter dress, the little things make the bush look to be constantly bustling in its same place. From inside my house I can hear their persistent chirping, even now, in the Christmas cold. Everyone home for the holidays.

Roll in from the whistling buoy.

2010-12-20T12:51:00.008-05:00

Only because Bazan says that he does, I listen to those three songs from Time (The Revelator) on repeat for a few hours. Tracks 5, 9, and 10, that last one fourteen minutes and forty seconds, my goodness. "Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand."

Throughout the fall months you talk to a few strangers every couple of weeks named Rob and Barry, and sometimes named Suzanne and Peter--whoever is home, really, during afternoon drop-ins--who for the last stretch have handed cups of sugar, have offered me a way to gain a long-churning simplicity I have yet to sing out, though it's what I've been building.

And, precipitously, I think of grandparents now. Fear can be everywhere, it can be provided for by all things, but not now when, as that one under his "Pigasus" symbol has said, the world is glassed over.

Always sleep with them out.

2010-12-07T23:06:00.004-05:00

Fog shows before your every breath, and you walk for blocks. Miles of air so cold you can't feel your hands or the bend of your cheeks. You can't know where your fingertips end and wind begins. That's your nerves in the air, a burning sufficience, where you walk with hands suspended to indefinition.

Wrapped in piano strings.

2010-12-01T22:05:00.002-05:00

Ed turned from his computer and told me that I could conquer mountains, that I could conquer the world. That ten years from now the likes of Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth will be asking for my audience. And if only he had someone telling him twenty, thirty years ago what he was telling me now...

He said that two years ago his wife divorced him, and he gave her everything. Fourteen million dollars worth, coming from six patents to his name and four PhDs, and he gave it all to her. He told me that he does not regret it a bit, and that he knew that I would do the same. He could see it in my eyes and could tell by my face. I did not respond, but I think I knew my answer. After they divorced, he started having strokes. Now he has cancer, he said, and next week at the doctor he will find out whether he lives or dies.

It is a flattening sense to feel the world change around you and tell you that you may no longer live as the person you had been. That you have to somehow relearn yourself to fit the contorted shape that those around you are giving. The way that you breathe your air is made obsolete, and every word you use it for is elegiac. I left thinking about that next mountain, and supposing it to be unclimbable. Caged as a man who is told that he now lives only in anecdotes and stories, because your whole being, your breathing body's thoughts, have a status that is not situated anywhere else now but within those tellings. A sudden past, since their location no longer exists for you to live in, and since the present one demands of you a new way to walk. What is a person's location, then, when they walk through days though they know nothing of the path of their upward steps.

For a few habit forming years.

2010-11-16T16:02:00.007-05:00

Something slurred, of course--through whisky with coffee and dashes of shoplifted maple syrup, cups enough to never see their bottoms. Something of the peculiarity of performing songs about dying and drinking for an optimistic fundraising event and at a faith community, and new songs that carry shapeshifted disguises, but really about the same things as always. Someone I have known had told me that I have predictable ways, as if saying every silent moment now in this room is known, and the fact that it is scrapes rust into the air with any movement. While watching my dog twitch in his sleep, my own knowing and never knowing what goes on over there, worlds away now. Now you can watch the room fill with my own dust.

Into each similar scene.

2010-11-12T11:07:00.003-05:00

Hints of an inverse constellation come about to surround, oppressive winking holes upon a thick whiteness, and tell you to take that flask for a walk into the deep night. Anywhere is surrounded by everywhere, so you sink on your back upon the pitch black of park grass. Fog mists the air above your brow and seeps into the creases of your knuckles. As you lie you feel your kneecaps pucker within your skin like the grass that you feel stiffen and frost around you. That sea and its noise surrounds to silence, but never quite for that long enough moment. But then you see the black skeletons of trees, their steady colour against the night's upward progress from lighted hues to blackened blue--skeletal stillness, and when that's all there is, that is all there is.

Once your leaves turn.

2010-11-10T14:04:00.006-05:00

Different weather falls down upon people on the single same day, and that's strange. Seasons change faster in some places than with others, and that's strange. That's strange. But what's strangest is that it's all the same; winter is comin'.

--

Reading Aristotle and the end(s) of human nature as social, yet private, beings. It is strange how home means to you when you leave it behind. It continues to exist, maybe glowing a little, in your memory. But when the home left behind no longer houses the ones that made it, it does not seem fit to be called a home any longer for those behind. I don't know if there is a word for that state when one still remains, a kind of complete inverse--nostalgia is always for something that can not be returned to, but what is that, then, for the one that is left, who has not left. Some kind of desert, quaking familiarity.

Anyone who does not / betrays them again.

2010-11-03T23:48:00.005-04:00

This is one of the most beautiful, inventive publications I have ever seen. It is filled with an agenda, short stories, to-do lists, party planners, and incredible art--and, holy moly, one of those stories is mine, by the way.

I love this book and want you to love it too. Buy it over here.

Inasmuch as which.

2010-10-12T10:34:00.005-04:00

A long story cut short leads me to being at a petting zoo recently, where were kept hostage some goats, alpacas, and silkie bantams. The birds were in enclosed, transparent tents to keep people out--somewhat like those flynets that people enclose themselves in to keep nonpeople out--and this pheasant kept squawking out. An old woman stepped up and asked of it, "Now, what are you talking about? What are you talking about?" She was wearing orthopedics and a cashmere sweater, with dangling earrings and brightly painted fingernails. A few children ran past her, wearing their toddering run which at any moment could become a stumble. They were given ice cream cones filled with pellets to feed the goats and the sheep, and chased them around trying to do so. "C'mere goat! C'mon," a soft, high-pitched coax that was not seen so convincing. I leaned against the fence and said to the donkey next to me, "People sure are funny, aren't they. Talking to animals as if they know and will respond in the same language, while knowing that they won't." He looked at me without saying anything, and rubbed the goop of his nose against my sleeve. "Well, I don't have any treats for you. I just meant that it's strange, is all."

Hares in the open.

2010-10-10T23:23:00.004-04:00

From every moment of exchange we leave each other with baskets of impression amidst our empty cases of expression. We have these weights hanging about us as we rub about one another.

After one of those moments, while walking my dog home on a late afternoon is a woman with random, useless objects like signs and old license plates for sale on her front yard. And she beckons and calls me to come over to purchase things, and asks me whereabouts I live. Oh, over on Oliver Street, I say, next to Alice Street, and yes, it is a very storied neighbourhood I have moved to, you're quite right. She asks me what I am studying at school and then returns my answer with that blank face: her features seeming to all gather towards the center, mouth closing and eyes changing to give that usual reaction that makes you realize your tedious description has gone farther than they wanted despite the fact that they asked. Then she asks me, with a bit of a titter, if I am gay--well, no, and what made you think so? What does a gay person look like, anyway? My shirt, with the top button undone. My glasses, which I have still been getting used to myself, and am now standing a few steps back in that process. I ready myself to step away and to bid her a pleasant evening, but she preemptively blurts out how frank she is, how she is just very frank, which had made her lonely in China and lonely here, too, when she moved from there years before now. And how this frankness was also given example by asking a lover if he was going to kill her while he was angrily driving out into the night's countryside long ago, after she learned firsthand that he was involved with another woman. Now she is very afraid and very hurt, for she is forbidden to even knock on his door.

Here I am thinking now of the ways that people attempt to drive straight through moments of discomfort which they have produced by papering over it with their own deep and personal objects for discussion. As if to stamp out that ruddy grey distaste that flickers and is brought out in the other person, to accede and peel themselves in ways explicit and sweet rather than implicitly deleterious. The way people make jokes about themselves after giving insult or tell these secret wrinkles to ones who in any other conversation might have left with only a basket of hi-how-are-you's. What I am thinking now is an unfinished thought, but, as with our Danish prince, there's the rub.

As almost all hats are.

2010-09-26T18:48:00.003-04:00

Public transit is the most tremendous liminal space, where people incise others--their bags, bustle, and temperature revising the atmosphere, and everyone is frictive but pretends like they are the only one existing there. Estranging themselves, looking out the window, at the floor, their phone, the advertisements, anywhere but the person whose knee they are leaning against or whose noise and breath are curling around the back of their shoulder, with every other existing for the others as abstracted phenomena.

I can hear you now.

2010-09-05T17:25:00.004-04:00

I returned home from a short trip of shopping errands for an axe, a large roll of duct tape, and some packages of garbage bags, and set them out in my bedroom at the rear of the house, whose large sliding glass doors are uncurtained to the new neighbours I have across the backyard. Someone must think someone is up to something.

The concept of that which does not exist.

2010-09-04T14:22:00.001-04:00

When you get the mean reds.

2010-07-12T23:58:00.002-04:00

Walking my boy late at night with whisky in my mug, and on the sidewalk I pass someone a few years younger than me singing an old punk song--actually, sneering it, a spat at the air between herself and her next steps--with her face painted, streaked black like a spiderweb or some KISS tryout. And she is carrying an umbrella and a stereo, with great and long, thin sheets of plastic tucked into her ball cap, whose beak is upturned. I nod as she interrupts those lyrics to say hello.

And curiously, on my way back homeward she is a block ahead. I can hear her shouting toward nothing, even her muttering is loud enough. I pause when she stops for a moment to trade the stereo's hand for the umbrella. When she starts again she swaggers, tapping that umbrella on the concrete to flare its grey up with attitude. Like seeing a sashay out of Breakfast at Tiffany's, though her song streaming back has changed to those do-do-do's from "Low Rider," and nodding my head at that, because everyone deserves that feeling up there.

The only desert within our means.

2010-07-09T14:04:00.003-04:00

One evening not long ago, while walking through the park I saw an old man in clean shirt and slacks pull up to the curb and calmly walk over to a young tree. He leaned down and scooped his grocery bag full with mulch, then placed the bag into his trunk and drove down the street.

Yesterday afternoon I watched a woman crouching in the thick heat and following a pigeon as it hopped along the sidewalk, she trying to pour water onto it out of a plastic bottle.

This morning I listened to the basement dwellers beneath me argue about something that got lost as words progressed, becoming a drone about the other's persistent argument and nag, both voices sharing the perfect moaning characteristic.

And I sit beneath a ceiling fan, watching its strings push, my little one flopping over in his sleep and letting out his little dog groan. Holding a book and alone in this apartment, I miss my lips and spill coffee on my shirt with no one to see.

Summit.

2010-06-27T21:01:00.004-04:00

There are two very different voices about state ideals here, but it is not difficult to know on which end there is an active comradery. Endless hundreds of police officers in riot gear who box in both protesters and bystanders on public streets and detain them without explanation is not in the interest of what the Toronto mayor has described as that city's and this country's "democratic ideals." I am interested in the tone behind these people's show of national interests by singing their anthem and what that means for them--and what it means for the riot police who interrupt a peaceful protest, swinging their batons only once--or as soon as--their anthem has finished.

Someone I know pointed out something valuable. Two police cruisers parked across from one another on Queen West were torched yesterday, but only because they were entirely abandoned. Media caught video of people vandalizing and then setting fire to the cars, but there were no police officers in sight. The fact that this is what is constantly shown on television programs such as CP24's enables the legitimization of a 1.2 billion dollar security bill for the G20 summit, so the police cruisers were abandoned there purposefully, like bait. And public, designated protest zones, are squeezed out of the geography.

But the evidence is in the shoes.

Because they know but do not tell.

2010-06-01T22:47:00.003-04:00

Here is that wiggling responsibility, then, and my following him around to watch him do bad things on the floor, or hop after our cat, or fall asleep on his back has been making me me wriggle out of my own. I have stacks of books sitting behind me and in front of me, and beach sand still stuck to my feet. I have to retrieve a few hundred dollars for rent and write a few papers, but I am buying brews and writing songs. Responsibility, along with its constant pluralizing, is a difficult gravity to stand under. But this guy swam for the first time, he chews on his leash, and I think he might like me a bit.

In the non-place, a new place.

2010-04-25T14:35:00.004-04:00

Replacing a grand disappointment is often made with the adoption of a whole new, wiggling responsibility. It replaces a distant hope with an immediate presence for letting one feel one's worth. Reading Deleuze and Hardt, and thinking that cultural capital very much includes the requirement of a certain level of mentality, gives a picture of our anxious Western world as a place of immaterial power that makes a mind into a discourse. And so a person such as you or such as I may whine in our lives, but only should if I am doing so with the realization that I have been given the gift of having such a place for it. Because of this, that mentality is a burdensome struggle, and a pleasurable burden, and that (soon to come) wiggling responsiblity will be a lovely reminder. And so, in the middle of this, there is a still holding resolution for this still relatively new year, which hopes not to attempt to keep my spirit so abidingly still--and to suppose that all else may as well--but that things flow, and the best footing to look for is only the ability to ride a wavering world.

Strike flat the thick rotundity.

2010-04-03T18:15:00.003-04:00

A flock of leaves streamed across the street like a chorus call as my car passed between afternoon and evening. Dribbling past several driveways more, a woman stood in her flower garden near the curb, raking leaves in a windstorm.

Round to rounds / The break in half.

2010-03-24T23:56:00.014-04:00

This summer, like two summers ago, I will be living by and beside myself, stretched alone for months on a decades old wood floor, my spine digging, wishing for a horse to ride through the surf, straight forever along this place between everything and nothing, no saddle, but aching for a cat I've barely known to step across my shins or my neck or anywhere, please, and remind me or take me away, fixing.

After that, who knows but God, and it is of little consequence today. And, of course, today is the first time since when that I write something that is not academic, and in wishing to show it today is the day that determines it not to be shown. So those essays, then, where everything is giving way to nothing, where the next weeks of nothing blot everything.

Conceive man without thought.

2010-03-18T19:34:00.006-04:00

I wonder about the careers people have. There are baseball players and actors, yes, who have the opportunity to do what they wish to do for however long they like. But the others, everyone else and their daily bread, is who I wonder about, and whether they were consciously chosen or were assumed out of necessity, either for family or for the disappointment of losing the paid pastime they would wish for. Not in the sense of being a six year old who wishes and wills to be a pilot when they grow up, but when they are that grown up, faced with the moment they have to really choose--yet can do so only when that choice is shortened and the very sense of choice disappears because what they, as adults, may have been hoping to do, have been needing to do, is disallowed. Suffocated from that wished for choice either by lacking qualifications or discrimination or whatever inability. Oh-for-six means that one's aging, dry hopes, sitting in a gravel mess, can but live only in embarrassment beside the fresh seeds around him being carried off by their warm winds. Those baseball players may say that there is always next year, but if, what if, there is not. And what does one do with a gravel mess but learn to become a stone himself.

To cease upon the midnight.

2010-03-03T20:53:00.003-05:00

Long ago, here, I wrote about levers and pulleys, and the sudden opportunities to dance when one is on your floor. The world whisks in such a way as to make a man's hands shake. Captured by circumstance, back then I had missed an element perhaps more impactful, it seems, to note of the world's wind that of course one must have come from elsewhere before, and by that course would see fit to step upon new floors, for new feet, where the dances differ and the company appeals. For, from head to toe, somewhere the steps must stumble here--perhaps the goofy hat, perhaps the lack of proper shoes, or somewhere in the length between. Even these materials can only poorly cover the drawings one may acquire across one's skin. Their ink has a weight that may spill in the desired direction, pushing one's body to make its wished moves, but if come upon a mountainous obstacle its weight makes one to tumble back, stumble down. It is right out of that stumble, perhaps, that another's shining doors appear, and one bows out. The appeal of loose toes, yes, of quicker steps. And here one must meet that, bow out, or otherwise break in half in trying to stand with the winds and their pulleys.

Compression.

2010-02-27T14:34:00.000-05:00

Incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue.

2010-02-26T00:36:00.006-05:00

Someone I know asked me, unknowingly untimely, what I think my future will be. What I said was, is, a nice tall kitchen. One with old wood floors and painted white, cupboards to the ceiling, and a bright, tall window with some hanging plants streaming down its sides. And I would be cooking soups and baking cookies, singing softly to some songs. My cat, Peter, strolling about my bare feet, and one of my doggies, Henry, laying a happy watch from the kitchen's doorway. Oh yes, but.

Wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

2010-02-25T22:58:00.003-05:00

I've got these beige walls and curtains that can drive a person crazy. It spoils all else. It is, they are, a loneliness of lacking which saps the colour out of the objects it holds. All of the things within, these glasses, those pictures to the left, these little notes, my plants, several dozen midterms, myself, all sit in a solitary stillness that is anxiously stirring within the madness of this neutralization of vigour. And the funny thing about a person's head is that its encasement is somehow both within and far beyond whatever room it sits in and the incessant body it drags about, so that to itself it can really hear the music out in the living room on the other side of the door and on the other side of town, can really see the movements of hands and eyes and all the real colour there that moves them. But in here all these exhalations, everything, is painted beige.

Caught between every rib.

2010-02-19T12:28:00.002-05:00

When I was young, perhaps around nine or ten, Oprah (yes, that's the one) long ago changed her show's theme from something upbeat and fabulous to a more solemn celebration of "spirit." This was still long before Dr. Phil came along, though here she was already largely focusing her shows on miraculous stories and self-improvement. She did still have those episodes where she gave away cars like pieces of gum. But there was one day where with a guest she proclaimed that every person should look at themselves naked in the mirror every day. She does it and this, she said, was the best way to get to know oneself, and the truest way to see one's own beauty. To see one's body without any form of clothing is, I think, a nice point of advice. Clothing, material or metaphorical, can hide a person from even their own face.

There is a further element that I have been thinking of. A mirror shows us ourselves, it shows me my furrowed brow, my shoulders freckled like paint flecks thrown from fingers, but what it is doing best is showing us that we are not a flat reflection of a world we can stare at. But that we have bodies--that it is because of them that our lives must move, bodies with which we can taste food, hold puppies, and see the spectrums of the bright grey sky. Bodies through which (or in which, or with which, or as which) our souls can grow in goodness or whatever other direction. And the only way to do those things and to understand them best is by looking at oneself in the mirror without clothes on. Thanks, Oprah.

It's me and the king and the beast.

2010-02-18T23:58:00.014-05:00

On account of my scheduled creativity being sapped or invaded by PhD rejections and MA coursework such as reading about humankind's coevolution with technology and textuality, self-reflective novels, and Derrida lately, here is a story.

I have these dreams about God. Where God is that majesty, and I am this speck. And there is a demon who chases after me, bounding over coal-coloured mountains. God does not move, and the only way I may reach him is to chase after, while being chased by that snarling and morphing being. The one whose energy reaches and claws at me is one that I do not want to be devoured by, and my energy is as if reaching toward a cool pillar, unmoving, and one that turns whichever way required to face anything but the curling tips of my own fingers.

Driving along the Highway of Heroes a few days ago, the overpasses were populated by what must have summed to be several hundreds of people, accomodated by firetrucks, ambulances, and whatever other municipal vehicles. I thought perhaps there was an impressively organized Olympics protest going on that stretched over a good number of kilometres. I wondered, while listening to Andrew Bird and then Rancid and then Interpol and then an old mix I gave someone, why all of these people were hanging or waving their flags and only facing the direction opposite to what I was driving. Why not both sides? Was I and the dirtied white Volkswagen that just cut me off not worth advertising to for protest? This was before I realized what kind of a highway I was on, and I apologize Northumberland. But I began to think of the forms one must take to be celebrated, the types of deaths required, the commitments one must make and keep. I passed the oncoming hearse, then, and the procession of unlabelled police cars. And considered the unlabelled velcro stickiness by which we keep our presentative selves.

Of course, those citizens were repatriating a young soldier and memorializing the goodness that his absence has produced. That would have been a related news item, if I were to have read the news. This worldly neglect of mine is one thing which creates such horrendous analogies. And that, of course, followed by a related dream where some ones I know were chasing me with bloody mouths, equipped with shouldered artillery and eyes like slits in an endless Team Fortress 2 sequence of ridiculous yet terrifying animation. My thoughts were that I was driving away from these things so that I could better understand them upon my return, but they followed me anyhow. So now that I am home, and that they are elsewhere other than their homes, makes me really wonder about my understanding. I can sense that there have been "meantimes" which have altered these situations in my absence--meantimes of circumstances that involve and are shared by myself, but which my self is not present to be interacted with--and am now sensing those meantimes as existent throughout all the parts of life. So there is my own present, then, where I can roll along for an evening and let my treads fix momentarily upon thoughts that have placed me in a sense I might previously have been unaware of. Because I am a part of some thing which is beyond me, where my reach, mine, is truer than my own arms' immediate wingspan. While I am gone and reading in a different city, people back home can be refereeing a hockey game, or getting surgery, or enjoying a movie with their siblings by an old windmill, or out dancing downtown, or at home cleaning the bathroom, and these are things that occur because I am gone. These are things that can occur because I am gone. And my nervousness for each of these, in being gone, is then without consequence. The gone-ness is a goodness, then, where the hope of my substantive fluidity can finally dissipate into another's. That is where the heroism is, at least for these next seven or eight minutes--in being bitten by the beast, to be gone for some goodness to go on.

Save your applause for the end of the show.

2010-02-05T02:40:00.001-05:00

Incense hangs upon the boughs.

2010-02-04T23:18:00.006-05:00

To have your eyes open and to sit up straight. But you open your eyes too wide and for too long to see more than is good for your body. Your eyes dry up and strain and you have to squeeze them shut. Now your lids together feel like your hands do while on a washcloth's tight twist when wringing it out.

And I would say man's plague is the opportunity to think far ahead of a moment. And that this is brought out of pasting together what drips out, into one interpreted picture, something which turns the crisp of that present moment into translucence. But it may just be a thing of this life, to see pieces that are floating about separately and severally, yet to see them as already come together. The image of this dimly lit metaphor I offer, this candle, would be of a figure looking at the parts of a photograph, standing still as if before a camera, and watching them fit into place. To see a lense through which to see.

The whole of the photograph already exists, then, for each piece to be fitted together. There is an inverse of this, though, and though still flickering dim and noiseless. As if it is that photograph's puzzling pieces that peer, and see the person as if they are instead the object of view. The photograph taking the person. Where, and only analagously, if you think of an intervening camera being brought into an event, when standing within the sudden frames of a candid photograph, one blinks, and suddenly that candidness means more than the moment being captured. As if that blink is letting down, disobeying the camera's flash that has shot out, reaching, choosing only you. There is, always, more than that. And those eyes can open as wide as they can to see as much as they can, only to blot it all out with the longest blink.

No sphere of immanence.

2010-02-03T12:35:00.003-05:00

Someone I know said that Merleau-Ponty said, the best way to read things closely is to sit up with your eyes open.

Show the world its own shame.

2010-01-21T17:12:00.002-05:00

So far.

Nothing where virtue is not.

2010-01-14T15:51:00.006-05:00

A new child met his uncle today. I had never held a brand new baby in my life, had never thought I would or should. I had wished to, but the kind of shaking that my hands always have I thought would lead to some harm. But this, my young nephew, how could that be resisted.

A little boy whose sparking eyes looked up at me and whose hands grasped my fingertips. This perfect sort of thing, which made me think that I ought to tuck in my wrinkled shirt or clean my dirtied boots. Because it deserves the freshness it also holds. Such a change occurs in people when they hold in their arms this being that contains an entire long life in its freshly weighted lungs. They receive joy from the sight of the confident sleep of a baby.

Outside of his own blanket wrappings, surrounding structures and the hospital were under construction. All different sorts of objects on wheels were strewn about the hallways, incubators, computers, catheter stands, these things that seem important and like they should be in use or at least placed elsewhere, in a right spot. Sitting about, doing the things that they should not. Some rooms had those translucent, zippered curtains to seal them off from the hallways. And so now, of course, I am back over here on this armed chair with wheels and never elsewhere for use. There is that little baby boy, and if I could have carried him with me.

Cut a hole and pull me through.

2010-01-03T23:04:00.002-05:00

I woke this morning and my bedroom windows were entirely frosted over, so even if I were to want to look out I could not. My windows are double-paned, much like my imperfect vision's attempts for correction. If I were to want to see anything, I would need some help. I've got a few glasses on this desk.

Some time ago I made reference to an album that I was making. At the end of the summer a few untimely misfortunes were strung together to prevent me from finishing it before school started, and then school started. And now that my windows are frosted over, I finished it. If you would like, you may download it. I would be grateful if you did.

Banquet - Swing Low
Click this link right here.

This album has pieces tied together from over several years, recorded in four different places. It has been this odd, on and off project, and is my first try at recording things myself in the various bedrooms that I have held. Oh well.

A giant's dead body.

2010-01-02T01:36:00.008-05:00

Starting one of those very timely new year posts here, the sort where you begin to talk about spending your time really living this life, and Lord knows I'm trying. But writing that can sometimes not quite work when the year just past is made to be continually precipitating upon the moments in which my eyes can not be anything but awake, the year end's abrupt changes occuring one after another to where you almost want to let them pass by while under a most incredibly perfect wool blanket. To keep things wrapped up where things can be, that is where I type this from.

What I have been thinking and writing about for some while now is that, as persons among people, we gain a sense of ourselves from others, most often to a greater extent than from only sensing ourselves. They have themselves been woven, like us, and what they present then wraps around you. When, suddenly, you are no longer able to spend that close time with those people because they have moved away or because of your own move, you can feel your whole stabbing insides stop as a result. This happens at varying levels per individual, but this stoppage reveals the sort of dependence you have upon standing nearby those ones closest to your soul. And that is because they are not simply close, or near, to your soul, but are within it. In addition to what and who you are, what they are is what has made you become. I may say for myself, then, that I am so brokenly grateful for the containment of souls I have been given. It is a grace which, to my specific ones, is an inexpressible sentiment. One could whirl obliviously and forgetfully into a new January, but it feels best to sense that grace from within this wool. From right here is where I am able to do so.

The arrival gates at Heathrow Airport.

2009-12-13T02:16:00.005-05:00

Christmas list, two thousand and nine.

Please, Santa. Please.

Another round, another round, another round.

2009-12-09T00:49:00.005-05:00

I wonder how much room is allowed for one to voice a complaint. If I want to say that I am tired or worn down by important elements of my life, of what value are those to the facts that I have youth and ability. Relatively, though sometimes separately, if I say that I am tired from being awake for twenty out of twenty-four hours each day, and that when I do sleep I am plagued by some of the worst dreams I can remember having, the truth is that I have a chair to sit on and a bed to sleep in. I can open my fridge and I can type on my computers. The place that we live in is a lucky place, and it is our only one. And, further, I have chosen this life. If I want to keep to the topic of academia, I have chosen this school, these classes, these assignments to write and to grade, these applications to send out, this time of night. 4:37 AM. Wait, no, 4:38 AM.

But I walked home through the loveliest blustering snowfall, you know. And so I do not know how bad these things are in truth. Someone next to me in the library wails "FML," bemoaning their shoe that has been scuffed by some heavy swinging door, and is met by their friend sharing anecdotally in the other's grief by lamenting that there is nothing worse but that their dryer shrunk one of their shirts. And they are going to some beach for the holidays.

We should of course feel guilty, I think, for supposing that our whole lives are so taxing to the energies of our soul. There are complaints to make, though, and yes, if there are negative points in a person's life they may feel that they are able to feel negatively about them. So they may do so, but I wonder when that should be challenged. By what means is one enabled to ache over some aspect of their life, and to what level, and why not some other aspect. When one has the kind of breath that is free to deepen as its body tires, I would wish to know where the brimming aches must cease.

Motion for action.

2009-12-05T02:30:00.003-05:00

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it kills you too but there will be no special hurry.

Wister left and vanished, so I have enough glasses again.

I have been writing today about a nothingness that exists between the two poles of an intersubjective relationship, and that this nothingness is everything. The space between two ends is that meaning, that the truth of everything is always unsaid.

Right on.

2009-12-02T16:11:00.003-05:00

--

I have these Christmas albums waiting to be listened to, but Dustin and Frank need to wait. For now, it's a Wister/Iser/Foucault/Husserl party, and I'm the host. And I'm out of glasses.

I just woke to eat some chocolate.

2009-11-30T21:03:00.005-05:00

Fragments.

I might consider including my Winner, Grade 5 Spelling Bee recognition in my PhD application. The winning word was "banana."

Dusk is a perfect time for music listening.

Flipping through my yearbook, I noted that a number of my high school classmates wrote about their brilliant athletic achievements as a favourite memory. I wonder if they still hold that same importance. If they do, I wonder if they feel good about that.

I might also consider including my Winner, Grade 3 Speech Contest in my PhD application. My topic was Alexander Graham Bell.

To have things like "Favourite Memory" or "Nickname" added to your yearbook entry, you had to fill out a form and hand it in by some deadline, which I missed. Those that missed it had a stock movie quote under their picture. Mine said, "What if what you think is great, really is great, but not as great, as something greater." It's from The Wedding Planner. That is a good quote. I've never seen it.

I can not wait for the briskness of tomorrow's cold morning air and for the crunch of frosted grass. The rest is fine. But that--

Tea and toast, then coke and 'za, then coffee and cake.

I'm not really sure.

One does not have it but is in it.

2009-11-16T23:42:00.010-05:00

It seems very easy for your self to become buried beneath what you feel. What is it that you feel, and what is it that makes you know what you are feeling? If something so terribly disappointing happens to you, perhaps you consider how to witheringly respond or perhaps that response just occurs, waiting in its ignition for you to then take it up. Where is the line between a framed, sophisticated melodrama and a realistic, callow loss of hope? Introspection, as an examination of the meaning behind the things you are and do, and whatever it is that happens to you, can turn all things into an artifice. And you can live forever wondering what your each subsequent sentence, movement, and emotion are, discerning them in a rationalizing manner before you even understand them through feeling. You can twist out your life wondering if they are really existent, or if they exist because you have concluded that is the proper posture to have. So what is.

For there is none in reality.

2009-11-05T00:29:00.003-05:00

When do we start into the future? I mean, when do we start projecting ourselves beyond where we are right now? After being told and told, perhaps, about our own future and how we ought to be considering it. Sitting straight, brushing teeth, choosing careers. A pinpoint, though, has no consequence. Now, right now, we look deeply into the things existing which do not yet exist, and this is what makes and is made into the present. We look towards where our feet will be. Where does that infinite reach beyond ourselves begin? When can it stop?

In the widening gyre.

2009-10-22T14:51:00.003-04:00

And we are all so fluid. We create a course, pushed by the movements of others, and pushing the movements of others, but with such a mindful kinesis. And discipline, as if wary of where our waves might be taken by the others' tide. But our fluidity continues a change that we have no control over, making the care we take something superfluous. In every movement we cannot help but make rapids of the air around us, casting others into new pools of being. Touches, looks, words, even if for a moment, even if unbeknownst, are infinite.

Ripe for fatal harvest.

2009-09-22T20:38:00.005-04:00

Here we are. Spending Tuesday afternoons talking about structuralism, how everything means nothing, and how we only ever become ourselves because we agree to. Spending Tuesday evenings waiting for Wednesday evenings, for talk about phenomenology, that everything becomes on its own, and how everything contains an essence regardless of whether we perceive it or not. Spending Thursdays through Mondays wondering where my mind is going, and beginning to feel a little unsure about what I'm sure about.

Sure. Sure you're sure?

Le Café de nuit.

2009-08-29T21:38:00.004-04:00

We who are the tenants of what has become known as the customer service industry are offered a unique perspective of a person's inner workings when viewed from across that countertop. Often it is a seemingly endless repetition of impersonal greetings and instructions, a mechanical algorithm. And there are these rare occasions where a person will instead show a deep honesty. One recent night, a finely dressed middle-aged woman comes in to receive some lattes from our store. She would drift a little to the side as she approached from the door, and when she had, her voice's volume rose and lowered unnaturally. She had the kind of eyes that a bottle of wine will gift a person. And she was exasperated as her husband waited outside, parked in a needlessly large SUV or something of the sort. Perhaps she could have used anything other than what she ordered, so I offered her a small pastry on the side. And, with what I hoped would sound a caressing jest, I said now don't share that with anyone. That treat is all your own. She swayed with her drink tray. Share, she said, as if I had taunted her for a retort--share with him? Twenty-five years with him. Can you even believe it. Her speech slowed so that the last was not even a question. My surprise made our eyes meet again before she turned to leave, and the sincerity in hers gave to me only a steady, defeated look of unfathomable despair.

Somehow dreadfully cracked about the head.

2009-08-07T23:59:00.002-04:00

One of those captcha boxes today said 'halmersi' to me. And I know this sounds a logical stretch but, well, you know. So I started thinking about what those letters say when you sound them out, and how the phrase 'have mercy', all anxiously shouted upwards, seems to have so much more meaning when radically slurred. A refined language loses the deepest levels of meaning. Fanon, Bhabha, Melville, Rimbaud, and on. Have mercy.

Only a wisp of smoke from the chimney.

2009-07-31T16:11:00.002-04:00

Now, to wonder what a home is and what makes it so. I hear it said to be a word, a name, a strong one. And that it is no house, no beam or shingle, that it is life's undress rehearsal. That home is where one starts from. I wonder at the unity of souls which make a home, which warm the walls that house them. It seems a home is built upon humility and humanism, its foundation laid by a future's presence. Not a house. And, see, that one may have a blazing hearth in one's soul.

Old odd ends stolen out of holy writ.

2009-07-30T00:52:00.004-04:00

Writing and now reading these stories about figures who move behind the plots graduates in/with intoxication. Long ago with In the Skin of a Lion, right now in The Winter of Our Discontent, and Mr. Ethan Hawkley seems to be guiding his circumstances while they at the same timeevolve of their own accord, the other characters thinking as they do. As the circumstances unfold I keep finding myself with some certain expectation, only to be softened with a grey surprise as the pages flip, then flop. Some character who lets the others create events and atmosphere, spinning their motion by sitting back to watch and wait. There is such a difference to be seen in the same young man sitting in a cafe window, whether simply watching the faceless walkers drifting along the sidewalk outside, or waiting for some one who is not arriving. The same stillness, or perhaps swivelling movements, the same one there.

Whether by uproar, music, or cries for help.

2009-07-11T13:35:00.003-04:00

"The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed."

I think about this sentence, and in addition think about it within its contextualizing passages, while writing. I do not have conversations about writing with writers very often, and so am unsure of how others tend to go about. But when I write, I have found that I tend to draw my past in with a slow stroke, with some deep inhalation, and sprinkled unevenly with imagination. Or perhaps not just my past, but any aspect of my real life, present circumstances inarguably included.

So I'm writing an album right now while in the process of recording it. And some of the songs' lyrics are already existant from long ago, where their present circumstances were relevant. Some are of other topics that are relevant as we speak. The two are entirely separate. So what I wish to try, and what I'm finding to be incommunicable, is to convey the notion that all of those words sit in my pockets of history, themselves unchanging. But what those words mean when I sing them have changed. It is difficult to present not simply the changed meaning but that secret process of change to make everything whole.

When men of reason go to bed.

2009-07-11T13:09:00.003-04:00

If you're asleep all the time.

2009-06-24T15:37:00.007-04:00

Days like these make me think of films or pictures where people go mad from the heat. Shirts are sticking, kids are running around with ice cream cones and hula hoops, dogs are in closed doorways with their tongues hanging out their open mouths. These scenes with, remember, those faded old Coca-Cola signs. Everything is a yellowy pale grey. And I don't like a sweaty brow, but hot skin is something so good you can't just imagine it. Maybe to another it's thought best to stay inside where the air is conditioned for comfort, when outside you can see how your eyes change. It gets so hot you can't touch anyone or anything, so I just stand up on my toes, as if either about to reach for something higher up there, or to step quietly enough to avoid a disturbance.

Some boats that are not steered.

2009-06-08T17:05:00.004-04:00

I have been thinking about how strange it is, really, that some of the things people are held responsible for are not ever of their own accord. Our names, our birthplace, our meek bodies that we are gifted with and all of their wavering attributes, are not anything we had to do with. Yet people are looked at by others, and they by still others, with some sense of conviction that is, however it came, mutually understood. I wonder, though, how these roles are assumed, and how a person might shape their characteristics, the things they do have control over, around those attributes that happened to have fallen face up when cast upon the reverent dirt.

On Common Existence.

2009-05-26T14:27:00.008-04:00

While they are probably no longer existent on some people's radar, Thursday's latest album is a reassurance of their relevance to rock music. Real rock music.

Common Existence wastes no time in establishing its atmosphere in the first song, and maintains it throughout the album. Frankly, I was not expecting to like this album, and dulled my first listen because of it. But every single song contains at least one part to it that has made my return listens more than satisfying. There is a constant recognition of various literary works throughout the record, which continually entices the [English student (read: me)] listener. Its lyrical content does weigh rather heavily with hospital- and sickness-themed metaphors, but ends up being nicely sewn on the last track, which makes reference to those themes as pandemically found throughout each person. This is a band that has for years made speeches on stage to encourage its audience to start their own bands, to make rock music a voice for their passion. I think I'll take this album as a further expression of that thought.

All the uses of this world.

2009-05-15T21:19:00.003-04:00

Go to http://www.inbflat.net.

There is something about a song as a work of art that takes it beyond any physical types, such as paintings or sculpture, at least in a sense. When a person sings or plays a previously written song they are able to create new meaning from something already existent. This occurs just as easily whether the song is one's own or was written by another. And even if it is sung by the one who wrote it, who did so with a particular meaning in mind, when it is later performed it can have some entirely separate meaning when it again courses through one's body. And it's doing so from something that already exists and was created with a particular meaning attached to its authorship. The same song's elements can exist in many forms. So I like to find the elements I might draw from that website and its song, if I may call it that. I would certainly recommend giving it a try.

And there is something about the way one person breathes, and how its meaning is affected by the breath of those surrounding. The gestures and their implicit, or explicit, meanings that are given by one person may be received in an entirely separate manner from what is intended. And, if received at all, they may then be imitated. The same gestures, but with a removal of primary meaning, refitted with something else that is completely unsuggested by the origin. This is a recurring idea that I have grazed over, but there are deep, misty workings that take place in what people give to one another, much more than the simple gaze.

Jude / Thaddeus.

2009-05-07T21:18:00.006-04:00

In a twistedly esoteric manner, this is related to this. No, really, I mean that.

I was talking anecdotal analogies with someone I know. The philosophical kind, of course, because what else would I do, right? I don't watch What Not To Wear and I don't watch LOST, so other things have to be made up instead.

We were thinking of a person who, since birth, has no self-consciousness; that is, their mind never registers the sensations its physical body receives. The person's mind does think and, presumably, the body senses, but it never connects with the mind's functions. What would such a person and their thoughts be like? Perhaps a very certain blank and unquestioning understanding. It would seem that a person's imagination is only made up of things, or combinations of things, that they have already experienced. And if this is the case, then a (solely) mental image can not exist. One might think, well, but of course you are using your imagination to think of this person--but that is just it. We were cobbling together the negatives of our experience.

What does that tell us but, among other things, that perhaps it is our tendency to think of things outside of our own experiences, and sometimes even to desire them. And only through the edges of experience. Knowing them as impossibility.* With us, yes, but with this person there would be no desirous hopefulness, no expressive language, no ethics, no revolutions.