For a few habit forming years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.