My wife's hazel eyes changed color in the night. This morning they are green. Why the changed neither of us can figure, but we both agree it is an improvement. Today I'm going to buy her a nice green sweater to match her new eyes, and she is already hinting at emeralds. Emeralds are fragile and don't set well into jewelry. I made mention of this, and I hope that will be the end of it.

The fat whale overslept and missed his bus. One more day like this and I'm going to see the buzzard, he said. The next morning same thing. That's it, the fat whale said, off to the buzzard with me. At the buzzard's apartment things were a bubblin'. He stood before the front steps, alarm clock in hand, and looked up at the third floor window, where from he could hear turkey's arguing, proud-fish sobbing, a lion overcome with loneliness, and what sounded like a buffalo stomping around in indignation. Maybe another day, the fat whale said.

It's two days before Christmas and as is my custom I am overslept and down to the wire for present buying. I'm stressed. My sister's mix tape is taping and I'm a prisoner here until it's done. Then it's up to a bead shop on Main Street and over to my friend Charlotte's house to catch the ferry. OK. Conventional wisdom says don't fight being depressed if you have reason to be, and don't dwell. Don't dwell, but be depressed? I have to admit I don't understand. I MISS MY BABY. C'mon. Pearl of wisdom.

At this stage (stages for me are abundant, fickle and erratic) I have a solid footing and a poor to pathetic personality. I am comfortable with this. I worry that no woman will ever again find the time to think the pulp of me appealing, but then I can't predict the advancing stages. And anyway, women are not on my radar. The whole idea of second loves waves at me like a sail from the cavern of the storm. Every woman is a question and a definite answer. Truth be told, my affections are going nowhere until she comes back and I get another crack at it. I'm dedicated to my purgatory. I'm getting on with my life, but making all plans around next summer. Every day I pray she doesn't meet him before then, and then remind myself of the chief importance of her happiness. I feel her eyes on me every time I play with the dog, am kind to a friend, or think I look good walking. I'm a terrific mess.

But my next stage might find me hilarious again, charming, thoughtful, considerate, caring, clear minded, friendly, not easily angered, humble, successful, widely liked and respected, engaged, excited, adventurous, confident, grounded, replete with new, practical talents, sober, employed, possessing a cell phone and an automobile, unencumbered by anxiety or secondary disturbances, having taste, tact, and tenderness, with libido unharmed, bursting with stories, basking in future endeavors, happy, and otherwise totally fatherhood material. By summer.

Some thoughts(full of contradictions, no doubt).

I think I’m on the mend. Or at least I’m on an upswing and -with any luck- my next plummet won’t be as dramatic as this last one.

I don’t like socially volatile scenarios, scenarios where I have to navigate through the zoo of human emotions.

I’m sick of thinking about myself all the time. When I say I’m sick of thinking about myself it’s a round about way of saying I’m sick of thinking about other people and how their sadness affects me.

I saw so many girls downtown today that made my heart flutter. I have no choice but to believe in love at first sight because I fell in love like six times today.

I don’t really have that much trouble attracting girls; I mean I don’t have any glaring impediments in that department. Other than my unusual level of fear, of course.

I need to work on my self-confidence, accept my limitations and work within them to better myself.

I’m a little hazy these days, but not enough so that I can’t do my job properly or have a little fun from time to time.

My dangerous lows are an unfortunate inevitability but I mustn’t break under their weight, I mustn’t be fatalistic.

I think I’m finally coming down to planet earth after several years of total romanticism and fantasy.

I think central to my problems is a strong desire to be understood.

I never used to expect so much from myself; I’m displeased with myself but I don’t think I was ever much better.

It’s a confounding conflict in me that I want to meet a girl who A. doesn’t want to change me and B. makes me want to improve myself.

Sexually, I probably need to discover some freaky new thing that’ll make me wild. But until then, I’m gonna be pitchin’ notably fewer tents.

It seems lately that you are whatever you think you are. Because the only person paying attention to your slight behavioral changes, is you.

God only knows what kind of impressions I’m making as a sad twit who hates himself, but I’m sure they’re no worse than the impressions I’d be making as the egoist I’m always wishing I was.

Artists need to spend a lot of time by themselves; making art, introspecting and investigating other artists and their methods. These are areas I’ve been neglecting lately.

I sometimes fear I don’t know enough about the world around me to hold the interest of a good woman for more than a few fleeting weeks.

I’m reading this tedious book because I had a brief interaction with a pretty girl who liked it.

I had a conversation recently with a girl I was once infatuated with. Thankfully I’m now capable of thinking of her as just an ordinary human being with flaws and blemishes; she’s no longer above scrutiny. She still seems funny and thoughtful, but lots of people are.

Two computer geeks sit across from each other in a crowded deli, one has a mustache and the other has the kind of smirk on his face that can’t be controlled.

“The thing is,” says the one with the smirk,” I wouldn’t have acted the way I did around her if you hadn’t told me you liked her.”

“You’re an asshole.” Says the guy with the mustache.

“I’m serious, human relations are so weird, I was deliberately acting aloof around her so you would seem like a nice guy. Usually I’m pawing and fawning like an idiot when they’re that pretty.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Says the guy with the mustache, his sternness at odds with the comical amount of mayonnaise in his mustache.

“And then at the Christmas party she starts flirting with me like crazy. I’m sorry man, but girls who look like that get to make all the decisions. We’re all just witless mules waiting to answer to their whims. I mean what am I supposed to do?”

“For starters you can choke on your tongue.” Responds the man with the mustache.

I don’t have anything to do at work and I sit in a really high traffic spot. So, everyone can see I’m not doing much of anything all day. Today I drew uninspired doodles of anxious people on post its. If they’re not gonna give me any work to do they at least could have stuck me in a cubicle. Then at least I could pretend I was busy, but no, I’m right in the middle of all the action. Everyone else has work to do so they’re all pretty unreceptive to my weird jokes. The lack of affirmation makes me resort to ever-more childish antics until I end up embarrassed. Then I sit there silently listening to Adam Carolla on my Ipod, I like that guy a lot, I tend to enjoy the loudmouth-types, the ones who say audacious things without feeling any shame. I like Adam Carolla, John Kricfalusi, and Ben Weasel; I live vicariously thru their self-assuredness. I daydreamed a lot today about having magical power over 18 year old girls, they would be defenseless against my charms for the entirety of their eighteenth year. The day they turned 19 though my spell would be over and they’d be left to decide for themselves: is this guy worth a damn or have I lost my mind? I imagine it would be sad as hell ‘cuz invariably they’d all leave me after I’d grown attached. Until one day maybe one of them would stay on for her nineteenth year, of her own free will no less. What a treat that would be and then her twentieth, twenty first and twenty second years would follow with any luck. If this failed to happen at least I could continue spending my days and years in the company of charming young women at the doorstep to adulthood. Oh people would talk, they’d say, “that creepy old buzzard has some kind of a scam going, he’s not charming, handsome or even polite.” Let them talk I’d say, the men would all be jealous and the girls would all scornfully mock and pity me, but what a life I’d lead! As years progressed and my body grew tired and old, I’d yearn for the girl who'd love me past her magic-induced year of devotion. I’d have less and less in common with the youth and one day I would die, essentially alone save for a beautiful young girl I’d known for less than a year.

I used to read this blog and feel sorry for the anonymous people behind all the moaning contributions about the elusiveness of love. I thought, 'you only have to be open to it and to work hard on being lovable'. Now my heart is vapor. I want to tear it out of my chest and give it to a bum. When I talk to people I feel like the mouth of a terrible cave. And all I have to look forward to is to joining you.

Oct 29th 2005(unedited for your reading pleasure)

I forewent Ellie O's party this evening in lieu of a night with Meg Ryan and Billy Chrystal.  You might say that time spent alone watching romantic comedies is a little on the self-important side of the sadness spectrum.  But, let's be realistic, that's the side you want to stay on 'cuz the other side is where all the fatalities occur.  I did a bit of drawing today but my hands were lazy and my mind was soft.  

I should be able to spring back from rejection with alacrity, reminding myself of my enormous creativity and unparalleled charisma.  But, until I shape said enormous creativity into tangible matter and/or display said charisma to appropriate audiences, love will remain elusive.  

You know, you really do have these high hopes when you sit down to write.  You think to yourself, "this time, this time I'm gonna nail it."  But alas, ambiguity takes control-as she always does- reminding you that you really know very little and any moments of clarity you may have are just annoying little glitches that seem like answers but are really just questions masquerading thru the fancy dress party in your mind.  Whew! Not the hottest rant I've ever been on but I've had worse audiences, the type that just sit there, mouths agape, looking around for an escape route;  surveying the crowd for someone normal to interact with.  Someone less intense, less hostile, less self-obsessed.  Less is more.    

From the note book

I love snow that goes up

When I see you the music changes

A bum steels
Your bike wheels

Prophet Offit

That part of my pie chart is a Pac Man

The mountain is unknowable - it is my experience with it that makes it something.

"He just sits there mute until someone hints at something depressing or awful and suddenly he lights up like a Christmas tree and wants to tell everybody about how terribly sad it all is."

Who brings the light to those
who need to know their shadows?

A guy comes into a barbershop and says, "What's fast? I'm double parked".
"A mohawk," the barber says.
"Sounds good," says the man.

If you try to control your face to show honesty it becomes transparent, so it is just as clear when honesty is projected through it.

Surrender your pride from the battle it's fighting so you can put it in charge of being capable of change.

Superficial and essential are sometimes interchangeable, such as in, desire, rhythm, beauty, etc. (especially where the body is concerned).

We need the darkness to know the difference

My eyes do what all eyes do
and go where all eyes go
I've only been where I have been
and know but what I know

"When the world is beautiful"

When objects animate to defy you what you are seeing is a reflection of yourself.

Blue sun on a black horse

Put yourself in the service of something bigger than yourself and stop trying to climb on top of it

Oh creature of my commanding
I am grateful for your understanding
I am not the peak of this pole
Oh creature you are not my own

For the edge of the world I am making
And with me - you're coming
But oh Creature I am not staying

October 20 2004:

Even before I opened my eyes this morning I felt doomed. It was already 8:45. I wondered why Laura hadn’t called. I looked around for my phone, thinking it must be stuffed in the recesses of my pants or jacket where I couldn’t hear it, but it was sitting on the computer desk on the other side of the room. I knew I hadn’t missed her call then because I had been hitting the snooze button since 7:30. It was too late to take Lili to school anyway, and seeing as Laura hadn’t called I assumed all was well enough and I might as well get right the hell back to bed, which is when the phone rang. I remember the conversation only vaguely better than I remember the dream it proceeded – which had something to do with the grave mishandling of a time machine – but it went more or less as follows:

“Good morning Laura,” I didn’t even look at the phone – she’s the only one who would ever have cause to call me at this hour.
Half asleep she croaked, “Are you still asleep?”
“Mhm.”
“Me too – what the hell happened?”
“I dunno,” I said.
“Should I meet you at the store?”
“Hell no,” I said, “I gotta go to work.” Then she made some feeble sounds of dissapointment and we hung up. I fell immediately back to sleep and continued swatting my alarm clock until 10:30 – already an hour late for work – at which point I called in and said I would be late.

I worried all the way to work and told myself that some days start out like this and end much better. I wasn’t thinking about Lili or about missing work. I was still ruminating over the familiar sense of doom I had awoken with. I was doomed not to understand what anyone was saying or what they wanted from me today, I was doomed not to get a phone call or even a passing thought from Erin, I was especially doomed to want one despite my abounding denial of the fact, and moreover I was doomed to worry about and curse myself for it – all of it – and to bewail foolishly over the days when I had it.

I should interject here. I felt this way late last night too, and the night before, and mostly every night for the last good solid couple of months. This is not so troubling in itself because I have felt this way more or less consistently for years - spotted here and there with periods of relief lasting sometimes hours, sometimes weeks. I had a good couple of months towards the end of last summer. Anyway, so last night I got stoned with Hernan and watched a real piece of shit we rented from Moon Boy and then this morning bid Hernan happy trails as he was leaving for a week to visit his parents in Calgary. When I got into bed I began going over how to fix things up a little, and I thought it would be a really good idea to start this daily journal writing crap again. I opened my eyes, looked across the room at my computer and said out loud, “Journal! Journal! Journal! Journal!” so I wouldn’t forget. I thought if I was constantly being forced to remember my days I might begin to find them amusing again. So that’s what this is about. I think it’s working because it reads so far like I’m writing to a third party. That’s good. The eye in the sky – that’s who I lived for in those days when I say I had it, and was happy. (I know better than to derive any real hope from this little reprieve. It’s possible to force a kind of happiness over yourself for a stretch, but when one day you hit your wife you can’t blame it on the six months of snow you also said you loved.)

No one cared that I was late, except Dianna, who is a cold, spiteful shadow of a person with nothing else to care about. She didn’t say anything, even though I was a full 45 minutes later than I said I would be when I called. She just glared at me as I wheeled my bike past the front counter and disappeared out the back door to get coffee. At about eleven I put on a big show like I was finally getting to it, and went and hid in the dark room where by fortunate circumstance no one can bother me without knocking first. I turned on the CBC, ate a cinnamon bun and went right back to sleep on the dark room floor. I think it was getting close to noon when Dianna finally knocked and yelled, “Dan!”
“Just a minute,” I chirped, and before opening the door picked up a photo off the counter I could have been working on. “Yes?” I said, pulling the door open. She’s one of those people who’s face is so heavy with dissatisfaction you you want to lunge out and catch it before it hits the floor. She looked right at me – she’s always looks right at you like she’s trying to make a point.
“Molly Wood is coming into look at another proof in the next couple of hours so you better get to it,” she said. “She’s only in town for a few hours and she needs to see it.” I smiled right at her like this was good news and pushed the door shut again without a word.

The rest of my day was just as mindless. I printed a bunch of shitty photos of a White Spot and had lunch with Matt. We ate free burger’s and fries courtesy of our ludicrously unhappy friends who work the burger joint down at the market. (Keith says he stares down at the deep fat fryer all day and thinks about melting his face off in it.) I didn’t bring them any fruit today like I like to do, but between Matt and I we tipped them about five bucks. Hernan called me from just over Kelowna, he said, to ask me to pick up his sunglasses for him, which he left at Benny’s Market this morning on his way to the airport. I'd forgotten he was leaving so told him, “Why don’t you get them your fucking self?” to which he became frustrated for having to explain. “Aren’t you not supposed to use your phone on an airplane?” I asked, “Doesn’t it fuck up the signals or something?”
“No,” he said, “it doesn’t.” I was sure he was wrong so I didn’t argue the point and got the hell off the phone. On the way home I thought of an obvious thing I was doing wrong with my life and had the idea to write it down. I thought I should continue to make a list of these things (I have already cataloged a few) and I should pin it to my door. When I got in I hauled my typewriter out into the middle of the kitchen floor and wrote:


BEFORE YOU LEAVE THE HOUSE! REMEMBER TO:

- LOOK THEM IN THE EYE

- REMEMBER WHAT IS HAPPENING

These were the two things I had already noted. I couldn’t remember the new one and eventually gave up, stuck the incomplete list to the door and went to return that shitty video to Moon Boy down the street.

I was beckoned by the glow of John, Dave and Grae’s living room window next door to Moon Boy’s and went inside to complain some more. I don’t feel so bad complaining to them because it's probably the only thing we could do competently as a team. When I came in they were watching a hockey rerun and John was all antsy. We watched the game for a little while and talked about I don’t even know what, and then I just came out with it. “I think I hate her,” I said. They both laughed right away, which made me feel a little better, and then John said, “The Unicorn?” I said yes and then I said I hated myself too.
“The difference between you and me is,” John said, “when I get depressed I blame everyone else for being uninteresting.” Then Dave drove us all over the city looking for a slurpee machine that worked. He took us to the Shell station way up on Clark and 12th because he said the quality of the ones at the 7-11 down the street has been slipping. But he only drinks cola slurpees and the Pepsi one was turned off at the Shell station so we had to go Main and 15th. I ate a doughnut and then we drove home.

This has been somewhat uplifting.

Waitressing

The bartender keeps telling me to squish my breasts together and put them on the counter and he'll get my drinks quicker. Its funny at first (sort of...) but it becomes clear this is a truth around here. Its my second shift and all the waitresses keep giving me their ugly bits of wisdom; how to smile, offer water to the girls, remember what liquor is premium or select, ring in items and which tables are liable to walk out without paying, what clothes get more tips and how to BE NICE. I really don't want to be nice, I want to be mean. I don't like the way people are watching me, evaluating me, waiting for me to fuck up. Waiting to talk about me, a performer. I'm not a performer, yet here I am performing a stupid fucked up function. Slathered in fake. Absorbed in disgust.

blah

I’m such an incredibly irrational person.  I mean, say for instance there’s a girl in my life and there appears to be some kind of mutual attraction.  Immediately in this situation I start thinking one of two things; I either think, holy shit, I better think of some way to make this girl want to be with me forever, or I start to think of ways to extricate myself from this situation so I never have to go thru the agony of talking to this person ever again.  Sometimes I think these things in such close proximity of each other I feel like a schizophrenic person.  To say I’m not casual is an incredible understatement.  It’s important to add here that I start thinking these things well before I’ve kissed this girl or had any sort of discussion as to how either of us is feeling.  I flip flop wildly between thinking I’m way too nuts for such a wonderful girl, to thinking, oh my god, I can’t handle listening to this neurotic person try to impress me with how smart she is.  People talk about fear of commitment as if it’s a bad thing.  That is totally insane, especially for a person like me; you see, I don’t choose who my dating partners are, I don’t see a nice looking girl and walk over to her and strike up a conversation, buy her a drink and have her write her number on my hand in ball point pen.  No, I have to jump in there when a girl is still confused by my erratic, bullshit behavior, and hope I can keep her sort of interested while at the same time not scaring the shit out of her.  My fear of commitment is one of the only rational fears I have;  I’m terrified of bed bugs, my boss, the cops, teenagers and cab drivers-- the list could go on and on.  And always at the top of my list is pretty girls, but even when things seem to be going well with a girl, I’m hugely suspicious of myself and this other person.  And for good reason.  This is potentially someone I’m going to be spending the majority of my time with.  It’s not like I’m interviewing someone to do my taxes once a year or to be my dental hygienist.  This person cannot annoy me; it’s not an option.  And god knows I’m annoying; and inconsiderate; and jealous, ill tempered and out of shape.  Somehow still, I occasionally find myself in a position where a girl briefly considers spending her free time with me in a romantic capacity.  First of all, the bravery of these women alone is commendable, but that on top of it they have to face my mindless, insecure, self-hating scrutiny is enough to drive a man insane.    

Stupid fucking drawings for your stupid fucking eyes.

I had a daydream today about putting on an art show.  I’d call it, “stupid fucking drawings for your stupid fucking eyes.”  It would be full of drawings done when I’m high and it could be accompanied with writing I’ve done in my most desperate and volatile times.  In my dream I become the toast of the town.   The reality however is quite different; I drew for pleasure for the first time in months  yesterday.  I went to my local blenz café and was shocked by my inability to draw a satisfactory street scene.  My lines were unconfident and there was a real clinical look to everything.  Not to mention the complete lack of style displayed.  And I don’t mean style in the superficial, egotistical sense of the word; I’ve long since abandoned my teenaged dreams of having a recognizable “personal style.”  When I say style I mean flavor, I want to draw like a professional but I also want it to have nuanced little graphic cheats and for everything to appear effortless and organic.  Even when I’m drawing something as mundane as a street corner, I’d like for there to be a unified visual statement in the drawing.  It’s fine if the statement is a stolen one too,  I’m not proud. Writing about art is STUPID.  I tried to make up for the lack of life in my street drawings by throwing in the usual cast of cartoon mainstays, these are usually bunnies with pig noses, turtles, sexy girls who kind of look like they have down syndrome and cute witches and clowns.  None of these old favorites succeeded in making me feel like I was worth a damn.   As I was drawing I became more and more interested in the conversation of the old men sitting next to me, from what I could gather these three old guys were bachelors and they were gossiping about their friend who had recently scored with a much younger philipino woman.  I started to feel lonely enough that I wanted them to talk to me, but also, anxious enough that I didn’t want to have to brave whatever confusion the generation gap might cause.  One of the old guys did talk to me for a second, he kind of apologized for flicking cigarette ash in my direction and for some inexplicable reason my reaction was also to apologize.  I may be the meekest human being on the face of the planet.

Two middle aged men are playing Scrabble. One of them puts down the word “wont”. “That’s a contraction,” the other one says.
“It’s not won’t, it’s wont,” the first retorts, “which is a word.”
“Oh yeah? An English word?!” says the other.
“Yes, and English word,” says the perpetrator.
“Well I never heard of it,” the other says, “Why don’t you use it in a sentence.”
“Easter island had poured its collective genius into the construction and manufacture of hundreds of equally phenomenal bois parlants, or “talking boards,” as 19th century scholars were wont to call them.”

The futility of it all.

At the wedding the other night they sat me right next to this guy who's dating the girl i spend most days daydreaming about. Talking to him politely and amicably felt like i was selling myself out. I would have preferred to thrash him around intellectually and make him feel small and insignificant but instead i asked him about his work and joked with him about the groom's family. I actually had a pretty pleasant time at the wedding all things considered. I talked to Stan about manufacturing personalities we can be proud of, being honest while also being funny and our ongoing struggles with self-confidence. When I was leaving I made the awful mistake of hugging the girl whose beauty and charm haunts my sleep. She looked at me sort of apologetically and hugged me lovingly, I rested my head sadly against her neck and felt the warmth of her body against mine.

What it is to be cool.

I sometimes make the mistake of doing drugs. This weekend for example we rode our bikes to the beach in the blistering heat and ate Stan’s brownies. He said, “brownies are a good time,” I knew they wouldn’t be but I did them because we were making a day of it; who am I to interrupt the natural flow of a Sunday? Long before the drugs took effect, my brain started to stress about what could potentially happen to me. For someone as completely uncool as me, I spend an awful lot of time considering what it is to be cool. Coolness is a precarious blend of self-assuredness, casual detachment, wit and charm; it is the sum of all the qualities I’ve failed to cultivate, and to be totally honest, I hate it because I ain’t it. My own inability to be cool is one thing, but witnessing my close friends try -and fail phenomenally- at being cool is particularly punishing to my senses. Especially when I’m growing higher by the minute. I love Stan dearly but he sure can be an ass; I’m quite certain that rudeness and mean-spiritedness are never cool characteristics anyway. Imagine if you can, a pleasant and attractive woman in her early twenties approaching you on the beach, she’s talking on her phone loudly and happily. There is a quality in her voice that’s mildly reminiscent of girls in high school who finish each sentence with an upward inflection, each sentence then sounding something like a question. Certainly though it’s not the thing to notice about this girl: she’s got lustrous blond curls, a cute face and a very pleasant round quality that’s arguably preferable to her skinnier beach equivalents. You can imagine then how shocked I was to hear Stan blatantly mock this girl’s phone conversation. It wasn’t just one or two cutting remarks under his breath either. It was really quite malicious, he imitated each thing she said with the hammiest bopper voice he could muster. Andrew and I exchanged pained expressions as we ushered our condescending (and decidedly uncool) friend down the beach to a shadier spot. Here we could really melt into the sand without getting sun burnt. This is where my all too familiar feelings of stoned paranoia started to show their ugly head. It’s usually at these times Andrew likes to pound home his feigned belief that the effects of marijuana are universally agreeable and anyone who says otherwise is participating in a humiliating form of self-important theatrics. This always succeeds in making the feelings worse even though I’m on to his trick. We eventually decided to go for a swim. The tide was really far out and it felt a bit like Laurence of Arabia journeying northward to destroy the Ottoman Empire. When we finally reached the water, truly, I was high.

Border Police: Lettuce Unit.

I haven't ridden my bike even once since I've been home, sorry. Your lettuce caused me no small amount of stress at the border too, they pulled us over into their little panic room(I'm pretty sure it's 'cuz i couldn't look the guy in the eye) and asked us all sorts of questions, "why Idaho? I was there a few weeks ago and there's nothing there!"-- said the woman. They searched the car and got quite caught up on Stan's gin seng. They weren't too worried about the lettuce though. When the guy asked if there were any pointy needles or anything I burst out with, "there's some lettuce!" This made Stan and Oliver laugh which made me even more nervous, 'cuz i thought maybe they'd think we were high.

Snowball

Little Nettie Yule was minding her business one sunny, Spring day, in the playroom of her home in Kansas City, Missouri. She needed some quiet time away from her younger sister Ethel who was being particularly bothersome that day.

Nettie was not interested in playing with dolls like all the other girls her age. She was far more interested in animals. Her parents, not at all interested in taking on the responsibility of a dog or cat, had just a week before brought home two hamsters, one for each of their little girls.

Nettie and Ethel were delighted with their new hairy, little friends. Nettie especially. She named her hamster Bear, for bears were her very favourite type of animal and she had been terribly disappointed when she did not receive a bear for Christmas a few months before.

Ethel named her hamster Snowball. Within a few days though, Ethel became disenchanted with poor Snowball who was much smaller than Bear. To little Ethel, Snowball seemed downright lazy. She couldn't understand why Bear was always running on the wheel while Snowball just slept in the corner of the cage.

On this day, Nettie, in an attempt for peace and quiet decided to sneak off to the playroom where the hamster cage was. She wanted to play with Bear and Snowball.

She approached the hamster cage with a spring in her step but as she got closer she stopped short. Something didn't appear right. Bear was sleeping in the corner that Snowball was usually in but Snowball was nowhere to be found. Nettie looked closer. She opened the cage and poked at Bear with her finger. Bear stirred. It was then that Nettie noticed there was some blood on the Aspen bedding of the cage. She looked Bear over. There was some blood on his mouth and on his tiny left paw.

It was then that Ethel burst through the door of the playroom singing "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe". She may have only be five and three quarters but she knew just how to push her sister's buttons.

Ethel stopped singing when it appeared that Nettie was not about to pay her a lick of attention. Nettie was just sitting there solemnly, staring into the cage.

Ethel rushed up to join her sister's side and peered into the cage. "Where's Snowball?" Ethel asked. Nettie didn't answer. "WHERE'S MY SNOWBALL?" Ethel wailed. Nettie looked at her sister very seriously and put her hands on Ethel's little shoulders. "I'm afraid it looks like Bear might have eaten Snowball." Her lip quivered and a single tear rolled down her pink, shining cheek.

Ethel just stared at her. There was no readable emotion written on the little girl's face. She turned back to the open cage, reached in and plucked the sleeping Bear up. She held him in Nettie's face and said loudly, "FINE, this is my hamster, Snowball!"

"But!" Nettie jumped up, wild eyed. She was frantic. "You didn't even like Snowball. Yoooouuu never played with her! I loooove Bear! Give him back please!"

Ethel looked at her sister coldly and said, "No" as she turned her back and walked confidently out of the room.

I had a nightmare about this blog last night.

It

It started off as a pretty good day. The heat had been unbearable the past month. Stockton is always warm in Summer but it wasn't even May yet. It seemed that pretty much everyone around town had been shutting themselves inside with their air conditioners. I was no exception.

On this day however, I had to drag my ass out to the Toys "R" Us because it was my nephew's 3rd birthday party that afternoon and as usual I had left a simple task such as finding a gift to the last minute.

I locked up the house and walked down the scorching driveway. One look at my car just sitting there, baking in the sun and I actually contemplated calling a cab because then I could just hop into the cool car without suffering for even a moment. I decided that was stupid and that I needed to stop being a pansy.

Oh boy was that car hot. I burnt my hand on the damn belt buckle. Muttering under my breath, I started the car and headed to the mall.

Upon entering the Toys "R" Us, I felt a bit of relief. It was freezing inside! Not only that but there was no one around which is my kind of shopping. I walked up and down the aisles looking for something to jump out at me, something that Grant would love. I wanted him to be most impressed with my gift. I wanted to shine in his eyes and for him to ignore everyone else's attempts at winning him over.

I was looking at some monster trucks when I heard a man's voice say, "Honey, look at this, she'll look perfect in this!" I felt my heart flutter. Not in a good way. Against my better judgment, knowing exactly who I was going to see, I looked in the direction of the cooing voice.

Alex. MY ALEX!

There he was coming down the aisle, waving a little pink bikini as he approached a very pregnant looking woman. A very pregnant, beautiful woman with long, loose red curls. I sub-consciously put my hand to my short, thin brown hair and felt my face heat up. My vision blurred. I turned away, quickly, hoping he wouldn't see me but I was too late.

"Melanie?"

I slowly turned back to face them. "Hi Alex." I tried to sound pleasant, I really did. I tried not to sound bitter. I tried my best not to yell, "You stupid mother fuckitty fuck cunt bitch lying piece of shit "I'm not the settling down sort of guy" fuckface prick!"

I just looked at both of them awkwardly. I had successfully managed to avoid seeing his face for the past year (ok, year and 6 weeks, but who's counting?) and now I come face to face with him and her and it. I stared at her stomach. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Then I noticed that in addition to it, she had a GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING RING ON HER LEFT HAND!

Things got fuzzy. I wish I could say that I pulled myself together and moved on and picked out the best little present I could find and that I went off to the birthday party feeling good about myself and how maturely I handled the situation. But I can't. What I can say is that without giving it a thought I grabbed one of the trucks to my left and as though my arm were posessed and I had no control over it, I threw it at his head. Well, I aimed for his head I thought, only somehow I missed and it hit her in the side of the face.

I ran out of there as fast as I could. When I got to my car I noticed that I had another truck in my right hand. I drove away at lightning speed and thanked my lucky stars that I had that truck. I had a birthday party to go to afterall.

I was telling someone about my situation with my medication when I realized I was scratching soap into my arm pit and decided I liked that better.

Tracy

You used to work @ the muffin store on Cambie, you say cheers a lot and you like the Dead Kennedys.  I have Woody Allen-like glasses and I used to order really gross bran muffins just so I could talk to you.  I wish I'd asked you out when I had the chance but I was too shy.  Lunch?  

Date Nite.

I’ve invited a perfectly pleasant young woman over to my house to eat and watch Pee Wee’s Playhouse.  She’ll be here within the hour and I’m scrambling like a wild man trying to throw dinner together.  I used to be able to cook real meals but now I’m being pulled in every direction.  I’m making burgers because I don’t want her to think I care too much.  But The longer it takes her to get here the more spectacular the meal becomes; It would seem there are now sautéed mushrooms and steamed kale, chips and salsa and beer.  Before the night is over I’ll have asked her to marry me.  Such is the nature of loneliness.  In the shower I start laughing to myself about what a nervous wreck I’ve become. I start to distress about how I’m over fragranced and how all my name brand condiments won’t be the least bit impressive to her.  She’s more likely than not one of these really progressive types; no sugar, no caffeine, no sex with guys who whimper on the exhale.

Tiger and the Bear were praying one day
Down came a Demon with a harp and a beak
Tiger thanked God and conspired to eat
"We can get him close if we pay him to play"
The Bear said "It's just like a Tiger to say
Let him show us the way
The Devil does hold sway"

fart fuck

You know that feeling where you think you're going to have things all figured out in the future? And then that inevitable feeling that you probably won't ever? That's just fine. WE do pretty well for animals all things considered. One of my dad's last ditch efforts to win back the heart of my mom was to call in the middle of the night and say, in his patented gruff voice, " I have two words for you: come home." The saddest part is he probably thought it was a romantic gesture. The futility of it is also sad. My dad sure didn't understand girls very well.

The dream girl:

 

She’s the one you wish you could save all your competent and or hilarious moments for.  She’s easy to make laugh and full of the kind of self-assuredness that’s unique to sexpots and mountain lions.  She feigns enthusiasm for your pitiable efforts but in your more lucid moments it’s easy to recognize her true aloofness.

 

The reality girl:

 

Her spastic and unpredictable movements are something you can relate to personally, while her failed attempts at humor and her sometimes-clumsy command of the English language, aren’t the worst concessions you’ve been asked to make over the years.  There is something about her that’s undeniably attractive; she’s very affectionate and she has a pretty --if not beautiful-- face.

 

The forbidden girl:

 

You share a common lonesomeness with this girl and you fear the day the two of you should accidentally fall into each other’s arms.  That would truly be a mistake.    

It’s written in tongues, the language of love. Why all the greenery and flirtations. Where the hell is it coming from? The mouth? It spits and it kisses and twists, and hers speaks so beautifully. We are here for conversation, rhyme and rhythm. I’m crazy once I look at hers. Seduction: appeals towards annihilation. Repeatedly, constantly and drunkenly.

I think I might weep like a child when you finally decide to kiss me. Because that’s what girls love most, a man who can really melt into them, a man who is so certain his life is empty without you, yet doesn’t know who he is when you’re around.  Sometimes I think of myself as a clown, fighting my sadness with aggressive jokes that speak only to the most boorish people in the room, while at the same time alienating the dreary sensitive souls I could maybe benefit from knowing.  Whenever you’re kind enough to sit with me and laugh at my jokes, I’m pained by my attention-seeking volume.  Not to mention my inability to allow you to be you.  I know I want you and I know you’re worth having but I don’t know you, I know only the haze you leave me in from the moment you enter the room until the moment you leave.  Are you real?  

 

It had been years since I’d consciously given up on romantic love, romance was frowned upon in every other area of life so why should love be any different?  It took a lot of hard work but I slowly trained myself out of all my fleeting, presumptuous and self important romantic instincts.  I reshaped myself over the course of six years to be a well-oiled, productive, efficiency-oriented creature; every morning I’d eat cheerios with raisins and bananas, the banana cut exactly into seven pieces and no more than eleven raisins.  

Infinite

Woke up with third eye on the back of my forehead. It was raw and sore when I woke up on Saturday, but it's become leathery and calloused in a very short span of time. Sleeping as I do with my back down to the mattress hasn't been very good for it; it's been crammed into the old pillow and is getting red and sticky. I'm trying to close it up for good, but it keeps opening, collecting and scanning every couple of weeks.
Why a third eye? Aren't two enough? I need a private eye. Where are they private eyes these days. I think they've gone out of business.

My love life.

Dating truly is fucking hell.  But, with the absence of love in one’s life, a person needs to do the proactive thing.  I personally pace and breathe crazily before dates, I try to process all my negative thoughts as quickly as possible and then I try to think about nothing until she arrives. Wherever it is we’re supposed to meet, I’m almost always early and I’ve almost always cut myself shaving.  I stand there on a corner or in a coffee shop and I have to force myself not to plan the things I’m going to tell her, all the while dabbing my bleeding face with a napkin growing more anxious than last time even.  A planned conversation is a dishonest conversation; it leaves no room for her input.  But without planning, who’s to say any words will come out of my mouth at all?  I have to convince myself even for an hour that I don’t hate every single thing about myself.  And, I must focus every last bit of scheming brain power on the task at hand:  concocting convincing new ways to spin my insanity as an appealing comic blend of neuroses and good-natured kook.  

I got off the bus tonight at 10pm and the air was hot, humid and heavy with smells from the chicken slaughter house. There were maybe 20 people sitting on the sidewalk in front of Owl Drugs where I got off. Three or four times as many were hanging around the steps of the Carnegie, and all up and down Main and Hastings there were more people. Not a single one of them in the boat. I passed a 40 year old prostitute on the sidewalk with one breast falling out, walking in bare feet and holding her pink stilettos. The sidewalks down Hastings are two and a half times the width of a lane of traffic, and I watched a man ricochet from bumper to cliff trying to stay upright. A moment later a small group of people passed by. After a long string of profanities one woman asked another who had joined company at the corner, "How you doin' ...?"
"Fucking pissed off," she snapped.
"How come?"
"Because he had a fucking gun!"

I came home tonight after the buses had stopped running so I had to walk. It was after two in the morning and there were people everywhere, pushing shopping carts, stumbling down the middle of the road, conglomerating in corners, sleeping on the side walk, riding around on mountain bikes... I passed two people sitting on the curb talking, thin like young city trees. The man had his arm around the woman and as I passed she asked him, "why do you say that?" He barked back in a voice ravaged by yelling, "Because it feels good when I say it!" and the echo of the ensuing argument followed me for blocks. The streets were filled with garbage and piss streaks and food and gum and vomit. Between the bigger pieces and piles the sidewalks were sparkled with cigarette butts and syringe wrappers, and the occasional syringe. The steps of the Carnegie Center were moving with bags and napkins and made the building look long abandoned. I passed a new community garden pronounced by fresh bark mulch, planted around the base of lighted, rotating billboard (Grolsh, scratch and win Monopoly, vote for Diamond Shreddies) and surrounded by barbed wire. Police lights flashed from a dark side street. On the other side of Hastings I saw a man seated in a wheelchair, peddling himself down the right lane with the back wheel of an otherwise stripped bicycle, which he held upside down in his lap. A woman was bragging loudly to her friend, "I got Matt, I got Mark, I got Gabriel - he's in jail; I got Junior - he's in jail; I got Rudy who's mad at me but fuck him anyway, and I got Cal. I got six boyfriend's yo! Two in jail!"

I rode the bus to work today with:

A healthy young man possessed by drugs, laughing in silence and rubbing the seats beside him with his palms.

A man wearing a scowl, waxed mustache, mirrored aviator glasses, patched plaid golf cap, and possessed by nothing below the face.

A man shivering with his shoulders pulled in and his hands clasped in his lap, possessed by a look of terror and whom I thought could tell every time I glanced at him. He was facing front, perpendicular to me and four seats away and I could smell his jeans.

Then a man got on, clapped his hands in the air and yelled, "Beautiful!" He sat down, spat on the ground, started talking aloud about his welfare check and after some muttering said, "You call this 2010?!" Then we passed a cop car pulled half onto the curb with the lights flashing silently and an officer standing arms akimbo before a man with no legs.

At the bus stop on the way home I waited beside a very old man with tubes up his nose, standing beside a small, wheeled carrier with an oxygen tank on it. A man who's face and disposition are beyond description came walking down the street with a needle behind his ear like a cigarette, followed by a woman in bare feet talking to herself. Then a very tall, bald man with an imploded, toothless face came swaggering up the sidewalk crying. He stopped to talk to me. He said some kids on the bus tried to beat him up. When I ask him his name he says, "Jesus".

And we're back!

A man appeared through the rear doors of the bus as we pulled up to a stop. He stood dead still with his eyes closed and his palms upturned while people disembarked, and then the bus pulled out again. A pair of eyeballs poked mostly out and pointed away from each other passed me while I waited on the corner for my next bus. Behind them another man was coming down the sidewalk like water boiling over, his free arm flying, yelling "HONK! HOOONK!" and yanking on his balls the other hand. I saw another man who's feet were twisted grotesquely inward to 90˚ so he walked them over each other like a wind up toy. When the bus came I boarded behind a transvestite with enormous shoulders poking out of her pink tank top. She told the driver she would get her community pass tomorrow and asked if she could please get on. He said no problem. She said, "Do you want those?" He shook his head, ate a melting ball of chocolate covered ice cream and handed her a red paper bucket that said DIBS on it. She hummed merrily to herself as she ate the ice cream balls and sucked loudly on her fingers. She had a high visibility vest dangling from her purse and I realized I had once seen her directing traffic. Across from where I sat there was a bus ad which read in small type, Are you, and then in gigantic type DEPRESSED? and below it was a questionnaire.

I came home at night. The driver announced we were detouring off Main early so I alighted at Pender St. When I got to Main and Hastings the intersection was taped off, and for at least a block West the street was full of police. Around the corner my bus had come off the cables and was stopped in the middle of the road. The driver was at the back trying to reconnect the poles to the wires above, and in the lane between the bus and the curb a man in an electric wheelchair was darting up and down and spinning in fast, bored circles. After we got on the driver tried to lower the ramp for the man but it didn't reach the street, so he told him we would get him at the next bus stop. I sat near the back and the bus drove off. We didn't wait long for him, and when he got on he parked himself at the front, facing me. He started talking to some of the other passengers and they responded with nods. He said, "I was there for four hours today waiting for him to jump eh? Some white guy came by wasted yelling jump! jump! and the cops tackled him to the ground. My brother's down there right now praying for him."

A nice rest from the drudgery chronicles.

I’ve been meaning to post on this thing for a while now and now seems like a weird time because my best friend has taken over this place with his weird stories of misery and despair.   I had planned on writing an essay on Andie MacDowel’s character, Rita, from “Ground Hog Day.”  “Ground Hog Day” is my favorite movie and I’m always realizing new things about it.  It’s the perfect redemption story and it’s the opportunity every good person deserves but never gets.  One of the things that interests me about Rita is her purpose in the story requires we only know certain things about her.   If we knew all about her life and her baggage we’d have a harder time falling in love with her and we need to believe she’s perfect to make Phil Connors’ character arc work.  But, if she’s so great then how come she’s alone at 35?  Anyway, this was going to be the premise for my essay but just writing it out makes me realize I probably couldn’t have squeezed as much good stuff out of it as I had hoped, it’s pretty thin really.  Sometimes I wish I’d studied something more substantial in school.  

Moving along, I’ve been really slammed at work lately and on my walk home today I was considering my options for the evening.  Right when I’d settled on going home, jumping on the elliptical machine and then making myself a nice spaghetti dinner, I felt the seductive pull of Tinseltown.  I dipped in there, bought my ticket for a film that will remain nameless and sat down in the dark empty theater.   There was still thirty five minutes until the movie was supposed to start so I decided to call the twenty year old girl who’d been texting me all day.  She didn’t answer but promptly texted me back to say she couldn’t talk because she was at work.  Friendships with young people are not impossible but they are strange.  Especially once you get over your initial desire to have sex with said young people.  I then decided to call the girl from work who I was totally infatuated with for a time and—let’s be honest—most probably still am.  We talked about what she’d made for dinner and what a winner of a film “Disney’s Robin Hood” is.  Nothing really all that noteworthy came up in conversation, but what did happen, was my kindred spirit entered the scene when I was on the phone.  We made eye contact and smiled.  I like to think the subtext of the smile was a tacit understanding that we were very cultured and savvy people who happened to share a curiosity about things society deems low art(formulaic mainstream comedies starring Zac Efron for example).   I promptly got off the phone with my work crush and started manufacturing a real longing for this mysterious new stranger sitting two rows in front of me.  She had wild curly hair and she was reading, that’s right folks a real book! 

 After the movie ended--it’s good by the way, if you’ve figured out what it is and you’re on the fence about seeing it—I briefly tried to think of a way to talk to my new passing fancy.  I got a better look at her in the hall though and noticed she was a bit younger than I’d initially thought.  This is when my fantasy about her being a bookish eccentric with an interest in bogus movies started to disintegrate.  From the look of her she appeared to be more the kind to have a school girl crush on Zac Efron than my initial deduction that she was either a columnist for a magazine or an aspiring screenwriter.   That said, she was still cute and she still had smiled at me earlier.  Lost in introspection for a moment I lost sight of her and thought, oh well, I had the wrong idea about her anyway.  However, when I stepped outside our paths once again crossed.  It would seem we were awkwardly walking in the same direction.  I crossed the street to get away from her for fear that she’d think not only was I following her home but that I’d been stalking her all day.  We were keeping a similar pace and just when I thought she was going to go a different direction than me, she continued right along with me toward the Cambie street bridge.  Now it was getting weird, so I decided to cross the street and talk to her because watching dumb romantic comedies turns you into a bit of a dreamy retard when it comes to certain things.  

An average looking man was talking to himself when I got on the bus today. He was half yelling, "I wouldn't have left it in there," as I sat down, and then he trailed off. A block or two later he said the same thing, and then later again he added, "Because I was afraid something like that was going to happen." As I was getting off he said, "The Devil, he looked just like him. I don't know what it was about him..." It was sunny and hot and the corner of Main and Hastings was in pandemonium.

On the way home the intersection was clogged with fire trucks, police wagons and ambulances. A man rode by on a bicycle wearing another bicycle around his neck. Someone walked out into traffic to beg for change with a paper Starbucks cup. When the first car he came to refused him he made off crying in a high pitched squeal like a very small child. A man picking up cigarette butts on the other side of the street stepped around him like he didn't even notice. Then a man with no legs below the top of the knees pushed himself past in a battered wheel chair, singing to himself. On the bus I sat across from a muscle man who loudly ordered around his girlfriend while she stood near by holding bags of groceries. When she got a seat next to me he interrogated her across the aisle about the day she'd had registering for a recovery program like he knew all the answers. Then a man got on with a large, broad nose oozing puss and blood like it had been boiled and pressed through a metal sieve up to the hilt of his nostrils and no further. Beside the muscle bound man, there was an enormous homeless person hugging a bundle of blankets who had been yelling periodically that the bus ride was taking too long. When the man with the melting nose passed down the aisle between us he yelled, "JESUS! FUCK!" At the next stop a man with one leg was waiting. When the man with the blankets heard the beeping of the wheelchair ramp unfolding he yelled again, "Oh CHRRRIIIST! FUCK!"

I got on the bus at 11:30 this morning. A man covered in black dirt got on and fell asleep on the row of chairs in front of me. When I was changing buses at the corner I passed a man who asked me, "Up or down?" Twenty feet behind him two police officers had someone cornered against the fence of the Carnegie Center's courtyard and were casually interrogating him. As I approached I head the man say, "OK, I am mentally unstable right now but..."

On the way home I decided to walk to a farther bus stop up Hastings St. On the way I passed a man coming in the other direction, praying to God in Farsi, in a terrified, blubbering panic. Then I passed a man walking very angrily with his head down, muttering to himself. His only audible words were, "You FUCK... FUCKING... FUCKING... I'll FUCKING... tell me to FUCKING..." Then I walked by a man passed out in a doorway beside a fresh bag of green grapes. He was reclined like the Venus of Urbino with one palm upturned and a needed sticking out of his arm.

I got on the bus at noon today and sat across from a young man in his early twenties who looked like he hadn't slept. He had a tattoo from his wrist to his elbow of a tall, narrow cabinet with a lot of shelves, and the shelves were filled of objects. I made out a bunch of bananas, a free mason symbol, a heart and waves. Then he picked up his back pack, pulled out a can of Colt 45, opened it and began drinking. Through the window behind him, I saw as we passed a man in handcuffs being talked to by three police officers. He was standing on the curb with his back to the police car and was facing a crowd of ten or fifteen of his peers. They were all seated on a low cement wall, looking on with little interest and talking amongst themselves. None of them looked to be in as good health or were dressed as nicely as the man under arrest. Further down the street we passed a very skinny woman in a mini skirt and pink tank top carrying three dripping ice cream cones and talking to her self. I changed buses at Main and Hastings. There was a large crowd of people there hanging out in the shade of two tall trees that grow out of the fenced in courtyard of the Carnegie Center. Two men seated on the side walk in different parts of the shade were smoking crack, and a woman sitting in the sun on the sidewalk was drinking from a bottle of Wiser's. Another man was knelt over a newspaper anxiously scribbling down numbers and symbols and scratching the sores on his face. When the bus came a man with a giant head of frizzy hair escorted a prostitute on board with him. At the next bus stop about 20 Chinese seniors got on board and a man standing behind me said, "You must feel like a giant eh?" When I turned around to meet him he had barbed wire tattooed around his neck and a red and black Iron Cross tattooed over his adam's apple.

On the way home I passed a short man with black and gray hair wearing a trench coat and large framed glasses with red lenses in them. His face was small and gaunt and he had stuffed in his mouth a rotten upper denture which was twice too big for him and forced his jaw open as it stuck out. Beside him a woman was on her hands and knees poking around in the cracks of the pavement with a stick. She was wearing a jean mini skirt and a sparkled halter top. She looked like she weighed less than 80 pounds. At the bus stop I noticed the old couple next to me were smoking a joint. The woman saw me looking as I stepped onto the bus and said, "You must be craving eh?" and started laughing. At the back of the bus three hardened looking people were talking loudly amongst themselves and teasing a friend who stood by the doors with her back to them. When they all got off the bus together the larger of the two men cornered the woman against a wall as the bus pulled out of sight.

I followed a man and a prostitute to the bus stop this morning. They were running very heavily and very slowly, arguing with each other, no bus in sight. When I caught up to them she was seated in his lap on the bus stop bench and they were talking about the money they were going to get that day. When the bus came I stood by the back door while a short man next to me repeated, "You think you're pretty strong". I could hear him clearly but it was crowded and I was wearing headphones so I pretended I couldn't. I got off at the corner of Main and Hastings to change buses. As I was approaching the bus stop I looked up to find a grey haired man facing me in the middle of the sidewalk, smoking a crack pipe. Behind him, blocking the door to the bus, a man with cerebral palsy was laying prostrate in a big, black relining electric wheel chair, wearing only a diaper and a stained white t-shirt. His helper was smoking a cigarette and didn't mind that his client was in the way, so when the bus came we all squeezed past his head while he looked up at us.

On the way home I got off the bus at Main and Hastings. A man was slumped forward on the bus stop bench with a line of drool hanging off the end of his cigarette. I waited for my bus on the opposite corner while a man sat on the side walk, swaying back and forth with his head between his knees and dangling a big cross between his ankles. A woman came out of the adjacent building and started telling him that she finally dumped her boyfriend, but he didn't respond. When the bus came I stood beside a woman with what looked like third degree burns running across her head from ear to ear in a perfectly straight, three inch wide stripe. A big puff of hair rose off the front of her head and at the back it was pulled tight into a bun. She lay sideways in a clean floral print dress, resting her head on the back of the seat and sighing loudly the rest of the way home.

Last night I went to this metal show and this hot metal girl approached me before the headlining band and she was all like, "are you ready to rock out with your cock out?"  along with some other typically metal pleasantries.  She seemed quite drunk and then she started hugging me and stuff which was exciting to put it lightly.  Then, much to my sadness, she looks up at me and says,  "oh my god,  I thought you were somebody else."  This is my life.  

Hey "Person Tomorrow"

You know what I like to do? When I get over a bad period I reassure my past self that it's going to be OK. I think it works great the other way around.

This barely makes sense.

It seems lately I flow seamlessly from being depressed about one girl into being depressed about the next girl.  I’m not the begging type, I’m not going to grovel and crawl for months and years buying you gifts and drawing you pictures; there’s just no time and it’s hard enough to stay upbeat and attentive for girls who actually like me back.  Furthermore, it’s a sick joke this business of never giving up-- convincing her you’re the one.  I’m not the one. I’m not that one anyway.  I couldn’t keep a straight face if I were to say, “hey listen, just gimme a shot, you won’t regret it, I’ve got a few surprises up my sleeve, there’s more to me than meets the eye, I’m a provider baby.”  Nope, I’m an open book, I’m about as neurotic as they come and any woman that dares to love me has her work cut out for her.  I mean I’ll try my very fucking best to hold it together for her but the truth is I’m a miserable bastard.  My previous lovers will attest to this.  I’m happiest when I work myself up into a romantic frenzy though, when my feet are so high off the ground that the inevitable crash becomes hilariously ominous and when the voices of my detractors disappear into the thundering hum of my creativity.  And, were an unimaginably brave girl to appear --a girl who wanted to live in a crazy lawless universe-- I must say I’d be thrilled to hell.  These sorts of things can’t last though.

ANGER

I went to a rock show tonite, I guess that’s what you’d call it anyway. The second band that played—and the last band I would be willing to sit thru, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back if you will—was one of these “noise” bands. A more accurate term however is post-music. It brought to mind the scene in “The Royal Tanenbaums” when Royal has to sit thru Margot’s play and when she asks him what he thought of it, he says, “what play? It was just a bunch of kids in animal costumes.” So that’s essentially how the young people of today make me feel; I’m like an estranged philistine with no soul and no willingness to humor people’s egotistical and childish desire to be artists. On the subject of Wes Anderson, I was on a 13 hour long bus ride the other day and this man who quite resembled Mr. Anderson got on the bus about 8 hours in. The rest of us who’d been together for hours at this point had grown quite accustomed to each other --at least in a superficial sort of way-- when this man and several other people got on the bus effectively filling up all the seats. My first feeling of revulsion with this man was aroused when he found himself without a place to sit. There was a girl sitting in front of me who’d fallen asleep and thusly was taking up two seats. The Wes Anderson look-alike stood above her and kind of looked around at the rest of us so as to suggest we were all complicit in this woman’s unforgivable rudeness. He then proceeded to slap her chair in the weirdest most aggressively meek manner. She woke up and drowsily moved for him to sit down. His equally irritating wife sat across the aisle from him reading a tiny little bible in the most theatrical way imaginable, it was after all Easter Sunday and by god none of us were going to be afforded the luxury of forgetting that boring fact on this woman’s watch. This is when it gets really interesting, at all the previous stops the passengers had been allowed to get off the bus to stretch their legs, have a cigarette and take a shit or whatever but, at this stop we were asked to please remain seated. I guess this didn’t go over very well with this one rather weatherworn woman (she actually looked like she may have at one time been a man) it would seem that this woman’s desire for a cigarette had reached calamitous proportions and she disappeared into the washroom to have a few quick puffs. Before you could blink, the man who looked like Wes Anderson had jumped out of his seat and was marching to the front of the bus to report this woman’s outrageous audacity. The bus driver who, I must admit I’d also already formed negative opinions about, promptly came to the back of the bus and demanded that the woman vacate the premises. In a typical Canadian way nobody stood up for this woman. Nobody took it upon themselves to say, “ya know, it’s not that big a deal. Are we really gonna desert this woman in the middle of nowhere ‘cuz she made a stupid mistake?” Nope, there wasn’t a single word of protest from any of us as this woman thrashed her way to the front of the bus and out onto the lonely streets of Chiliwack. I was ashamed of myself and for the rest of the trip I had violent thoughts about the snitch and his idiot wife.

The person tomorrow.

I'm always going to be me, you know? I keep thinking I'll do things in the future like I'm gonna want to do them then. But I'll be the same, I'll be the same person not wanting to do it. I went through this phase last year called "Future Me", I'd make a lunch every night before I went to bed so that I'd have one at school, so "Future Me" wouldn't have to worry about it or spend any money. It was all about looking out and preparing for "Future Me" like she was someone else, someone more important that appears the next day. But it was always just me and I'd sit there with my lunch and barely thank "Past Me". So, I stopped that. I stopped really looking out for future me. That doesn't mean that I'm living in some proverbial moment, thinking only of today. I'm just leaving my comfortability and security in the air.

Kelly the snail.

There once was a girl snail named Kelly.  All the weirdest boy snails were in love with her because she was nice to them and she didn’t smell bad and she wasn’t as slimy as all the other girl snails.  One Friday she left for a big adventure to a neighboring yard where the humans let the grass grow real tall and all the creatures weren’t nearly as boring as the ones in Kelly’s yard.  There were grasshoppers and mung flies and shitty beetles but Kelly wasn’t scared, she was meeting her best snail buds Billy and Mikey and Debra Sou.  This was gonna be the best snail weekend ever with camping and singing and weenie roasts, Kelly was thrilled to hell.  She had to get up really early though to make her hair pretty and brush her teeth and she was on the road by 5a.m.  She had a little snail bindle and a bagged lunch consisting of turkey chili(weird food for a snail, I know!)  After about an hour travelling--remember snails are notoriously slow--  Kelly stopped to take a swim in a puddle.  A little known snail fact is that they love to swim and they actually get out of their shells to do so, this fact has escaped the inquisitive minds of human scientists for centuries.

After her swim she dried herself off with a leaf, got back in her shell and continued on her merry way.   

To be continued…     

I love getting older. I'm nearly thirty. It's the best. My twenties had no respect for me. They said, "you're a chicken!" and I was a chicken. I think anyone who starts longing for their youth the moment it's passed is missing the point. Youth is eternal. That's the nice thing about it; it's always there.

Dec 30th 2oo2

I'm still depressed. I could just leave it at that but where's the sport in brevity? I went to see "About Schmidt" today. I like going to movies by myself, the whole alone in a crowd watching some universally poignant movie thing apeals to me greatly. Jack Nicholson made me cry today. Thanks Jack. I miss my friend Bob of whom I've become quite dependent. He's in his hometown of Armstrong for another week. Fair Eleanor O'Connor has wormed her way into my heart and her iridescence is proving to be quite life affirming. I spent two days with her in victoria that were very rad. She's the perfect counter piece to my predilection to lethargy. And she's pretty. I want to love her and I guess that's half the battle. The ghosts of past infatuations do still haunt me from time to time. All I want to do is watch movies. Especially movies that glorify the american way; I want to be dazzled by Audrey Hepburn and seduced by Mia Farrow; I want things to work out for the little guy and have the odious villain humiliated in public; I want that tender moment to last a lifetime and for every moment of everyday to be like a first kiss. I'm 23 years old and if I must age I want it to be a glorious affair with my friends by my side and some kind of legacy to be proud of. I miss my Dad, even the act of writing that brings tears to the surface.

I'm done

I'm alternating between dragging my feet thru life and thrashing around restlessly like a misunderstood five year old. I got a bad attitude and no one to blame for my troubles but me. I realise now everything my parents told me about respecting one's elders was way off; i'm dumb as a mule now that i've reached adulthood. I'm stuborn and bitter and immovably obstinate; I'm restless and manic and lacking vigour; i got bad breath and bad posture and bad ideas about how to go about things; i'm turned right off by challenges and romantic meanderings; i got nothing important to say and no one who'd listen if i did. I'm burnt out and high strung and out of ideas. I'm sick of food and drink and all forms of simple pleasure, yet I'm too cowardly and self loathing to indulge in pleasures of the flesh. I'm jealous as hell of the youth and their righteous certainty; i'm bored to shit of my peers and their complacency.

I'm one of those.

I was in costco today thinking about how I owe about two thousand dollars on various bills. I'm about that age where I'm expected to move out, get my own place and start paying for my prescriptions. It's not easy when I keep getting new ailments. These sex headaches are the newest ones. They are thunderclaps; like the roof of my head is bulging out in acute pressure points. I have to finish this later... he's coming to get me now.

BULLSHIT

I’m not sensitive like I’m a nice guy or anything.  I’m sensitive like I’m ill equipped to live in this cruel world.  I can’t relate to characters in novels and movies that are so hardened that their introspective moments are cold and analytical as opposed to frantic and paranoid.  Anyway, that’s not the reason I have you here; my intentions are more romantic in nature.  Turns out you’re the new thing that keeps me awake at night and the only way my feeble mind can think of to engage with you, is by speaking with outrageous certainty in your general earshot.  My cowardice is a peculiar one in that I don’t mind making a total fool of myself, proclaiming loudly and forcefully opinions that I may or may not own, in the hopes something will resonate with you or make you smile.  The unfortunate fact that I can’t look you in the eye makes it difficult to deduce which of my proclamations are registering with you favorably though.  I had an enormous crush on Mia Secord who sat next to me in grade ten English and I tried similar tactics to try to win her affections to a disastrous and comical end.  Though my adolescent bombast failed to win the heart of the beautiful young Mia Secord, in retrospect I believe it succeeded in wooing my flighty and eccentric grade ten English teacher.   Miss Blaine always reminded me of Elaine Benes partly because of their similar sounding names, partly because of her wild curly brown hair but mostly because of her unfeminine relatability. 

The lady, the hole and the dead zone desire.

I haven’t done any of it, K. Since I went into the phantasm.

I feel the tip of the shadow pulling through my chest. Its asking me to get in and it wants me there like gravity to the heavy heavy black and purple- spreads through the center of my vision like an undulating bruisy ink pool. I’m changing channels and the audio is chopping on a talk show, I can make out the faces but I’m dyslexic to them. The colours in them (their suits their hair and eyes) drone, but their voices are shrapnel in ultrasound, radiating through a slowly oscillating fan. There is no more, just a slow idea… just a feeling of being a cog. I might have been there, working in the machine for years; I think this is most likely.

Napolean and Groucho Marx

Tom:  You’re the kind of friend that’ll never acknowledge I’m the man I wish I was.

 

Jim:  You’re a nice guy, you’re just not as funny and smart as you think you are.

 

Tom: That’s fine, I think I’m so hilarious that if --for arguments sake-- I’m falling short of my own assessment, I’m still doing quite well.  It’s really about confidence, see?

 

Tom: You’re not confident, you’re delusional.  You think you’re one of these great men from history.  Humility can go a long way you know?

 

Jim:  Strategically, humility is only good at getting you in the door; once you’ve got people’s attention you’ve gotta show them you believe in yourself.  And who are you to talk about humility anyway?  In the privacy of your own home you’re the greatest self-promoter I know.

 

Tom: I’m just having a laugh when I sing my own praises.  I’m the best at video games among my low-life friends, I’m not Napoleon or Groucho Marx.

This is an old one.

I don’t care what anybody says, Andrew Sugarman is a true genius.  Such a genius in fact, that I’m more than a little hesitant to embark on this story about him for fear that, not only will my fictionalized version of him fail to live up to his real life genius, but that I’ll also end up having created a disgustingly clichéd version of genius indeed.

            Ignoring my levelheaded concerns about my limitations as a writer, I guess the place to start this story is with Andrew Sugarman driving down Main Street on his way to the Grocery store where he works 14 hours a week.  Andrew has worked here for 6 years and has refused every opportunity given to him to advance within the company.  Some might believe this tendency of Andrew’s to be ambitionless and lazy but I’m more inclined to believe Andrew just has better things to concern himself with than money.  Like right now for instance, Andrew is concerning himself with the piece of lettuce stuck between his teeth.  It’s important to note here that Andrew is typically a very cautious driver and his distractedly digging around in his molars for lettuce is very much uncharacteristic; in fact, I’d say it’s indeed indicative of some really big shifts going on in his head, shifts that Andrew himself may not yet be aware of.   

 

            Which brings us to David James; David James isn’t so much a genius.  My apologies to David but I’m sure he’d be the first to agree he’s not Nobel Prize material.  He is however a genuinely good person with good opinions and a great ability to get along with people from all walks of life.  Right now David is late for work, he’s riding his new bike on his way to his new job.  David’s never been the kind of person to think too far ahead in life, but right now he and his wife Carmen have a baby on the way and this is something he can no longer keep ignoring. 

There are a lot of things David still wants to do with his life; just the other night he got in a fight with Carmen because she found a very revealing list he’d written detailing his many outlandish aspirations.  Particularly noteworthy to Carmen were David’s desires to visit a brothel in Amsterdam and to compete in a mixed martial arts tournament (that’s the kind of fighting where there are essentially no rules and its participants invariably end up with cauliflower for ears.)   David did his best to defend his secret desires as mere musings but Carmen left the argument feeling her baby may end up with a father who isn’t through being a child. 

            In the back of David’s head he knows this is true, he loves Carmen dearly, passionately and without reservation but he’s felt this way about quite a few women.  There was the lovely miss Robin Kraft who David was madly in love with and who after a year of enthusiastic fornication declared abruptly that she was much keener on sex with girls, this left David shattered; there was Eleanor O’Connor who David used to call Ellie O., she was just a phenomenal girl who people used to tell David was, “way too young for him” and was, “self destructive and manipulative.” These comments never seemed to faze David much; he’s never cared what other people have thought of his girlfriends.  In fact it’s the one area in which David has always been free from other people’s negativity; that is to say David has always known what his heart feels and no amount of nay saying from close buds and family members alike is probable to change his mind about anyone. 

 

So anyway, here we are with genius Andrew plowing down Main Street in his mom’s Volvo while digging for lettuce in his molars; and, all around good guy David James questioning every aspect of his life riding his bike along 4^th avenue.  If you are an attentive reader you might well be able to predict what’s going to happen next; here’s a clue:  it involves a screeching rubber noise and then a loud thud not unlike the sound of a melon being hit with a sledge hammer.  That’s right; the always watchful and careful Andrew Sugarman has smote someone with his large, brick shaped Swedish car.  Andrew’s internal dialogue at this point is quite hilarious and neurotic; you’re just going to have to believe me though because I’m not a mind reader, nor am I a writer who’s up to the task of writing genius.  I can deduce however from having spent many hours in the company of genius, that his thinking right now is somewhere between disgust at the fragility of the human body and profound regret for having caused a fellow creature pain.

 

            The day is crisp, it’s one of those fall days when you can smell the cold; or maybe it’s just dry leaves and fireworks you smell but it’s quite complimentary to the cold regardless.  David James is splayed awkwardly on the dark-colored, solid, bituminous substance more commonly referred to as asphalt and Andrew is standing above him, cursing the fact he put off taking that first aid class for too long.  Nearby, David’s bike resembles a pretzel. “Are you alright buddy?” says Andrew regretting his choice of words but satisfied with his friendly tone. “Do you think anything’s broken?”  Asks Andrew hesitantly; he’s overwhelmingly aware of how David’s clutching his right leg.  “My leg feels pretty bad, I think it might be broken.”  This was the news Andrew had been dreading, “well the hospital's just a couple of blocks from here, if we can get you into my car it’s probably faster than waiting for an ambulance.” 

 

            The ride to the hospital is silent.  It’s really what isn’t said in these kinds of situations that’s important anyhow; it’s like when you take a cab and you wonder if it’s really worth asking the driver about his life, or if you should just sit there in silent acknowledgement of your coexistence.  Things Andrew can tell about David just by looking at him:  he’s not overly concerned with the way he dresses; Andrew sees this as a positive, in fact David’s pretension-free Velcro shoes are akin to a badge of honor as far as Andrew’s concerned.  He can also tell that hygiene isn’t a huge concern of David’s, Andrew’s no prig but he believes that one should -at the very least- give open wounds a small amount of concern; David however, not only seems casual about his injuries, but also blissfully unaware that he’s smearing blood from his arm all over the upholstery of Andrew’s mom’s car.

 

            As they pull up to the emergency entrance of the hospital, Andrew scans the area for someone that looks qualified to help them. 

I really want to end this story with some kind of catharsis on Andrew’s part. I want Andrew to really have felt something significant about life or love and I want David to have been the one that delivered the message.  Unfortunately, life lessons aren’t really the kind of thing you can plan for.  As a writer you can hope that by placing two such dynamic characters in a situation together that life living will ensue; you can even manipulate and man-handle the situation to really force a certain conclusion out of a character. But in the end, fictional characters are a lot like real characters; that is to say, you can’t really predict when life is going to slap them in the face.  Sorry to have wasted your time.  

gotta forget

I have this boy I have to forget all about. I aim to have forgotten him completely by the time I start my new job February 1^st. I’m not sure he knows how much of an impact he’s had on me but, then again, he has a certain power over girls that he appears to be quite aware of. You see, the thing I like about him is he’s been reliable up ‘til now when it comes to comedy. The thing about conversation art is you have to find a partner who can really roll with the punches; you need someone who knows when to hold back and knows when to proceed with caution. Most importantly, you need someone who knows to not take conversation to undesirable places too soon. Anyhow, I guess I was responsible for taking dialogue to a sort of undesirable place with this guy and now everything’s wrecked and I have to forget him. The really unfortunate thing is now, in order to stave off boredom, I have to seek out new-and more often than not insipid-people to converse with in his absence. I have a tendency to make up a lot of dialogues in my head; I like feeling complete control, I like to decide for myself how people respond to each jab, each cue, and how every question takes the conversation someplace new but entirely up to me. Rarely do real life conversations go as smoothly or as hilariously as the ones I make up when I’m bored. However, from time to time I’ll stumble upon someone who’s capable of improving upon themes I present and presents new themes that astonish and excite me. A person like this is extremely rare and, when they also come in the form of an unyieldingly handsome man, this is when alarm bells start to whistle and the old mind starts working overtime trying to conceive of some way to capture this creature, someway to make him mine. Forever and ever.