Watching the chili

I miss you, PM

More than [The size and shape of a nuclear plant cooling tower.]

But now the Internet won't leave me alone.

I would explain more [the above parentheses] but
digits are my job and spitting syllables becomes the enemy, totally foreign to
reveal my mind when my only breath is to
enjoy emptiness, embrace blank slates and
skip along with contentment upon
encountering my harried fellow
citizens in the shopping mall.

Admiring my empire from inside a bottle of ketchup

O, rude people, sad citizens, drowning in your thick-necked wizardry and donkey-minded back-and-forthery--will there be a peaceful moment for my clucking to cash your quickness? Hep, young lackeys! Untether my goats. I am hastened toward doom if no wench can cut through ear crusts and mend her wayward belching. If I sneeze in your face, and your brain is beslimed, your guts unsteady, then inhale that wet whisky and redouble yourself all the more!

Yech. I am agog, filled with brine. I rain these invectives for a reason, yet you quiver as toads under a shepherd's boot. Do you choose life, or loathing? Parcels of piffle, or proof and providence? Alliteration, or agony? All the more I impel you and yet you crumple in your daily quagmire. A martyr's death I'll choose before lurching under your bloodfisted baron's capricious yoke.

What there? An unassuming Olympiad? Call my mile-long trains and plunder them for a feast. Oh bottler, a million buckets of creamed soda! A tyrant's end to the unworthy! A joyous clanging amid the cock's drudgerous crow! A re-boinking of all redundancy and extra melting under the warm watery sun!!!

Things are rather flonk

Flonkishness abounds. There are many reasons. Copious like grains of sand. I was prappish, I was dunglish, but now all is frisia and butterscones, glashnoo and punabbly.

We wonder why it took so long for this vortex of meanderglow. But patience, like a feather grack, floats in far flung crevices.

Is there a brighter boygan? Is there a likelier mass of marzifleck—in oceans of under the riverbed? I know not.

Oh peppered pillows of pink, inside the undermount sink! Floating clockwise down a stainless steel drain, mixed up with macadamia and sprinkled by rain. Opium poppy powder pizza-pie piledrivers are often discussed, picked apart and proferred but in mid-July we sing instead the snappish chart toppers. Do I wheeze when sun rays are like lanterns of shiny hair? I don't think so, I just don't care.

As for blondie, she and me are in the middle of our history, no time to write, when we use up all the light admiring the light.

Love in the Diner (04/07)

I had a strange experience today
After a 30km bike ride to the Beaches
and back in the spitting wind,
I finally made a break at Bathurst and College
at the College St Diner which
serves excellent pancakes although it has been known
to charge 50 cents a packet for strawberry jam.

In my recent streak of sheer psychic excitement
I've concluded I must be having a telepathic effect on total strangers
so wrapped up am I in this, this thing for which I have too much respect to name
that steam is pouring out my ears and infecting others

anyway it must have been a sign when
just after I ordered the 'Can't Talk, Eating' hungry-man special
four goodlooking philosophers (definitely not Toronto natives) - one woman, three men -
well coiffed, toned, erudite and inquisitive
sat down next to me and proceeded
to hold forth on
LOVE
'what love is' one of them asked
and that hooked me
and what's the difference between love and being in love
and whether love is an overused word
how it means whatever it wants to mean to whomever wants to use it
how the word means nothing at all, really
and how words generally do that.

I couldn't believe my ears
these philosophers
thirtysomething professorial types
the kind who can breezily discern semantics over brunch
the four most intelligent people on the planet, really
having this analytical argument
about the meaning of love
in which
my universe hung in the balance
they were talking about me
everything seems to be about me lately
- I deserve a healthy shake, I know -
I would have banged my sugar shaker on the table
to get their attention
saying 'hey folks, love is war and
you're looking at one of the foot soldiers!'
but I'm trying to give up sugar
in favour of healthier smoothie-type things
and so I kept silent
and they kept mocking me
four feet away

but the coincidence was too precious so
resourceful as I am I
asked the waitress for a pen
so I could jot this down for later
that was my revenge for
them talking about me and my war
ie me writing about them
so I unfolded my bike map of toronto
with the entire city depicted
(I use that map to figure out how to get around)
and wrote all over it but now it's ruined as
in scribbling in all of this
my words filled in all of lake ontario and half of the downtown west end.

(i know I must be preoccupied these days
but there are sensible ways to deal with it and there are crazy ones for
instance
on the way out of the diner
thinking about what it all meant
I accidentally walked right smack into the
women's bathroom
I guess I was looking for you
luckily no one screamed
but boy was I red.)

Built to last

Oh big boy, long at the beginning and thin in the end, mend yourself, send yourself a note, what it was she wrote.

Aggrandize, release, contemplate, celebrate, scrivel in disappearing ink what everyone thinks. The columnists, calumnists, trysts in the mist, the abcess, the cyst. (I've become victimized by ingrown hairs; I exfoliate, but they're everywhere.)

2 wheels good, 4 wheels bad

(written in 2007, posted today)

I got hit by a car, for the third time, while on my bike and I’ve got say it’s begun to upset me.

What upsets me most is how much I deserved it. A blow to my pride.

I realize I’m a tempting target, resplendent in my plastic helmet, legs pumping like a comely gazelle, just asking to be gunned down by the nearest metal death machine. I realize that bicycles have no place on the road, and that if a 15-tonne truck fails to see me it is completely my fault. Under the ‘survival of the fittest’ (not athletically fit, but 'he who possesses the most body armour' principle) there is no getting around blaming the victim.

Of course if bicycles dare to enter mixed traffic, they are vehicles under the Highway Traffic Act. Since the Highway Traffic Act was designed by motorists, for motorists, what this means is that bikes are actually cars. They are not, in fact, bikes. What a coup!

While upwardly mobile types may see this as promotion, I fear it is a misclassification. Unfortunately there is something called reality, which makes life and driving very inconvenient. The Highway Traffic Act is right: bikes are no different from a cement mixer, which is why I guess this last driver who hit me got confused; he thought I was one of his buddies and just wanted to give me a friendly tap. In a similar exercise in reality: when I put my bike helmet in the fridge, it actually becomes a watermelon, so it should come as no surprise if my girlfriend eats my helmet while I’m in the ICU recovering from latest cement-mixer love tap. Once again, it’s completely my fault.

Clearly, helmets do not belong in the fridge, and cyclists do not belong on the road. We must not allow a light, convenient mode of traffic to infest the asphalt, omitting to pollute and omitting to destroy the expensive right of way. Bicycles are too fast for downtown traffic, which according to longstanding traditions ought to function at a crawl. Have you ever seen a cyclist zip through a completely unnecessary traffic signal downtown, as though he had figured out a better way to navigate the road? Not to sit at an intersection and wait for a traffic light - what a horrendous level of efficiency! It’s as though with cyclists, the millions we spend on traffic signals would be completely redundant. This is a mockery! Not to mention we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year repairing our roadways so that cars and trucks may continue to revert them to rubble. Why, my bike’s failure to destroy the roads threatens to put thousands of construction crews out of work. Why should our politicians divert workers to build subways when they can clean up after automobile wreckage? (Enough nonsense - cars can’t drive on subway tracks, not until we invent special wheels for them.)

Of course, a car goes fast. Much faster than a bike. Yet somehow, lots of cars put together don’t go so fast. When you put 1.5 million cars in Toronto – they go very very slow. The more of them there are, the slower they go? How is this possible; I must be bad at math! Yet I’ve seen it every time downtown: the slower they go, the faster my bike goes in comparison.

But who cares about that anyway, because driving in a car makes you feel free! Free to travel across the country, stopping at every fast-food monopoly at the government-allocated rest stops along the way. Free to pay thousands in mandatory insurance fees, free to line up at the gas pump, free to be fleeced by your mechanic. So free! Free to go wherever you want to go, as long as there are roads, and as long as you don’t mind being surrounded by thousands of cars, all exercising their freedom to commute 90km a day from the suburbs – free to give up any alternative to your car! You’re an individual, so don’t bother to share space on the subway. So free! So many millions of motorists, all exercising their freedom in exactly the same way on an identical stretch of road! Freedom to do what you want - that’s what makes the Highway Traffic Act and the hundreds of rules you need to learn to obtain your license so great!

But yes, there is traffic! Solution? Build more roads, so more cars can rocket around to more places! Will the traffic come to the new roads too? I’ve got a hunch it won’t. Somehow, drivers will stop crowding the roads if we keep paving the city and turn all available urban land over to cars! I’m bad at math, so who cares about logic too!

Will we ever give up cars? Likely not. For this involves heeding another feature of reality, namely history. It was actually the League of American Wheelmen, a cycling interest group, who got American roads paved over, before there were cars everywhere, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Thankfully we have managed to forget this. We don’t want motorists to feel guilty about dispossessing someone else’s territory, pretending it was theirs all along, and then lay waste to it – those pesky Indians make us feel guilty enough for stuff like that.

And so a few of us are sacrificed each year, in the name of tunnel vision, denial and a complete lack of common sense. So be it. I managed to survive my last three love taps, but when my number comes up, I’ll fly gleefully off the handles toward the tough but fair arms of that fateful telephone pole. It’s tough love from that cement-mixer, I guess, because it’s love.

I did it!

I deactivated my Facebook.

Friendship has meaning again.

We'll see how long I last.