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."