Crackstarter

Own up and feel better, bobby, nothing like dead letters and past philanderings with the truth to unsheathe you as truly ruthlessly delusional, uncouth, rude and blinkered, boinked and buzzed on purple juice. Crow not that dogood nazis and driveways nuts did you in. Your sin was in not singing. Your win is winding down anyhow, loud as you are, fond as you are wagging fingers at foes, trusting no one cept those Etobicoke hos. Dial me and I'll return your call: you must resign, that is all.

Second Floor Ryerson Library

Potent pizza is a perfect pestilence possibility. I was screwing a large caboose into an onion bun and it occurred to me, shall I shallot a scarecrow? Shall I shimmy with slimy murk into a bodum of unfair frothery? Things are piglet-worthy and mucusmaking. 

If ever a cylindrical cullulent pigeon did unman a masked mysterioso then surely sixteen succubi could collect an unemployment cheque from a red-faced postman. If a college degree meant anarchy then the streets of Quebec would be swept with sweaty pit stains and colander-cudgelling jesuvants. If a jesuit, I mean, did quaggle and fleck then surely his hysteria about the biscuit was just another knottleneck? Poor pissed pachyderms, prancing without the ability to jump, large elephantine fairy queens dusting rhythm guitars like so many Ron Wood replacements uttering magic passwords in the basement of the Rivoli, lacking hot heat, lacking fresh feet, drying wet wit with looks of loathing and curled lips, eating too many tofu tacos in an underwear commercial's catering van restroom.

Can I quell a Cosbyfest? Could Theo ever drive a bus? We waste what we waver, we waive all rights to disenslavement that is emancipation if we neglect the ballot box out of jade frustration. I was warm to the world but cooked like a log, blackened charcoal in my nether zones and soggy from the bog. If a klepto took my tethering hooks--how will I climb a mountain? I shake like Evgeni Malkin, he of fame, of mispronounceable name. Twagger your digits like a disapproving simpleton sloshing about in tens and twenties from hours vending Bingo cards at the bingo place on St. Clair, where chain smokers don't care and lives wind down like the west wind, and a win is a win and a loss means it's time for a smokebreak.

Have a cup of ice-cold gelato. It's after 1pm; I'm drowning on my tip toes in Arizona heat, killing strangers with stares and oozing blackheads from my feet. We ooze proud, we yodel ever loud, we will publish or perish or perhaps both at once, going on vacation for 72 months. Can I call you in the morrow? I need a ride to the Scarborough Zoo, my driver has the flu. He was not reliable like you.

Hamish Macbain trolled for hours in the wild, eating dried skins from the tree whose name no one has written, taken tidbits of misfits and missed facts and complaints and loaded them all onto a server in a closet in a hallway of an office in the suburbs of the capital city of a minor province in a confederacy of future lands locked down under empire struggling for solvency due to solar flares interfering with economic growth models fashioned by 19th century professors amid the dust of a chalkboard.

15 lacklustre scintillating pronouncements

1. Cardigans are totally unnecessary.
2. Warm winter wetnaps are useful for three w-words in a row.
3. When we think about the piling on of popular opinion, we may as well soak our heads in a tile bath.
4. Would it not be strange to unlock a locket and see that it was full of shark teeth. That means you were actually in love a shark, or you were a shark dentist (that is, a dentist for sharks). Or your lover got eaten by a shark, and you decided to avenge her. That is the full set of solutions.
5. I was sitting in a restaurant and the waitress came up to me and asked for fifty cents. I said 'are you really a waitress' and she said 'please sir, get into the movie theatre.' I forgot to add, this took place in a movie theatre, and the first part is made up.
6. Nothing exists that does not exist. 
7. That is: Nothing is that isn't
8. Existence exists
9. Farmers farm
10. And yet, words don't always mean what they say?
11. Ok back on track: if you are ever in Toronto I can recommend an excellent sandwich.
12. When I get like this, and I'm NOT in front of a keyboard, there's a lot of lousy dancing.
13. My problem is I can remember almost everything I've ever said. Repetition is the enemy. And yet, the underlying form is not to be touched. Form over content.
14. I could have a niche covering all the people who kill bats for a living, who need cheap Rx pills mailed in five business days or less, who polish saxophones for military marching bands; these are important segments.
15. Ever get frustrated by the keyboard or the mouse? I mean, have we ever blamed QWERTY? What would literature be like if we had the Dvorak keyboard? I know I would probably be a Romanian count.

Jumping jacks

I was wondering: will you let me stay. I have a couple things to say. Can I offer you raisins? They come from northern California. I've never been to California. Can I call you tomorrow? Call me anytime. I'll sign you up for favours if you speak a word my way.

No time.  Sir you are sliding away. I read in his book that he struggled every way, became himself each day. Take pain as part of the package. Don't let the 21st century trick you into numbness. We traded technology for profound dumbness.

I walked with an exchange student, wondering what she saw in my country. From a land of crushing humanity, I'd pay my leg to breathe free. The most honourable people. The devils slip among them. It's a numbers game. We are orders of magnitude  from an agreement. You see the forest, they see a dream. You see empty land, they see a promise. You have a loaf of bread, while they will work for the crumbs. You haven't got a chance against their suffering and their love.

I dare myself to show. I have no need to control this; no desire to know. Every time you sit that same fountain showers cold; I have never checked the plumbing; you were born on a mountain of gold. You have treasures in your toetips. You are young yet to be sold. The day you count backwards from the price you named to frame your game in blameless numbing riskfree bliss is the day your scent went cold.

Time to move

Dragged from under a rock, I finally learned to talk. Eaten by the river in his underwear, chalk river radiation or abnormal solar flare. Crow pizza parties for the doughty and the hearty, we're lucky to have roadkill, times are tough, don't be a buzzkill, don't make me get rough. Sign your union card, get your brother Marty too, he's only twenty-one, he can work for thirty or thirty-five years until his back is done.

I was away at the beach when I found out about the quake. The sand shifted, dunes by the dozen and so it was the same. The roads were all wrecked through, my Bug fell in a pothole, flushed by the tidal wave, just another Tuesday in the Maldives, an underwater Atlantis with downgraded credit rating, a small island paradise with a minor plague of race-baiting, work-hating, subsidy generating, midnight gyrating sugar-daddy-babies, ladies looking for young lambs with rich wool scarves, tarted up trollops with coco scented arms, fixing gyroscopes to throw their silken poison darts.

Mellow my memories, chilled in the fridge, time slows down when you stare at a crib, the orbit doesn't budge, not even an inch. (I miss that veal sandwich at Keele just south of Finch). We got a big dumb leader you just have to see. He can't read. It's obscene; you won't believe what we've elected, I think it's 1933.

What do we do in the face of such ooze? We don't huff the glue. We got to unpack the boxes. We got to tear down the drywalls, save what we can use. We got to live, me and you, and to do we got to move.

When I was six years old

When I was six years old the other kids would make me the unofficial referee in the foot-hockey games we played. I always felt weird about that.

We played with a tennis ball, on an asphalt surface, between two chain-link fences, about 200 feet apart. I usually played defense. I was the last guy between them and our goalie, who protected the net (the fence posts) wearing his jacket off his body on his arms like an apron. There are tens of thousands of kids who grew up playing goalie this way. For all of us, tennis-ball soccer was real hockey.

I was good at defense. Especially blocking shots and picking the ball off the forward. A lot of the time there was dispute over whether someone had actually scored. Everyone on each team would argue for their side, that the ball definitely did go in or it didn't.

Except I could never bring myself to argue for my side if I thought we were wrong - that, as far as I saw, our guy's shot did not go in the net. The thing was, I wish our team did score, so if we in fact did not, I was always reluctant to tell what I saw. I wanted those guys to settle it  themselves. But eventually one of them would ask what I saw. I hated that.

How could my teammates not be honest and just let it drop if we didn't score? Why did I have to come down against my own side? But I had this reputation, see--that I wouldn't take advantage. That I wouldn't lie. As soon as I told them what I thought happened, the argument was usually over. Everyone would repeat what I said about the ball going in or not going in. The game would go on. Some of teammates would be upset that, because of me, we didn't score, but they didn't seem to argue.

To this day I think about how bizarre that was. I was six years old and I had this quasi-judicial authority. I loved foot hockey. I guess I should have felt complimented they relied on me to be the ref and make the call. Instead I felt annoyed, embarrassed, and alone.

Stop arguing, be honest and solve your own problems, people!

An Exercise in Foolishness

Part 1 – Scene with no figurative language:

I was at the front of the group of bicycles lined up behind the stoplight, which was red. The cyclists were one behind the other. A blue and yellow City garbage truck pulled along trying to make a right hand turn, but was stopped by the line of commuters who came from behind me and started pedaling before the light turned green.

The driver of the truck braked suddenly. The truck stopped, the driver rolled down his window and shouted a curse. “You filthy hippies!” I hadn’t begun pedaling, so I smiled at the driver and said, “Some people just don’t know how to drive.” I tried to sound apologetic. The driver of the truck spit out his window and it nearly landed on me. I spit my gum into the back of the truck as it went on its away.


Part 2 – Same scene with super flowery language:

An army of bicycles, buzzing hornets on two wheels, were lined up at the intersection of the throbbing urban jungle’s roadway artery, like unpredictable insects just asking to be swatted by the nearest metal death machine. The stoplight shone an ominous red: death would ambush those who might illegally trespass into the roadway before the anointed moment. From behind there rumbled the blue and yellow metallic Gargantua, the beastly transporter of refuse known as a garbage truck, intent on a turn to the starboard side of the road, to carry its stinking orgy of collected goo away from the pathetic consumerist citizens and their throwaway lifestyles toward the cursed burial grounds, degrading the nostrils of those who fell afoul of its sulfuric stench along the way.

The cadre of velocipedic ant-men did the unthinkable and began an assault upon the open intersection before the red lamp had given permission and ceded into a permissive green. The wheels rolled through like snakes slithering into a baby’s crib; it was Caesar crossing the Rubicon; it was a moment of pure effrontery to reason, goodness and the Highway Traffic Act.

The operator of the trash-vehicle was agog and forced to press desperate foot upon the stopping pads of the steel juggernaut, initiating an inhuman screeching blast that echoed across the roadway and ricocheted into every ear: the bicycles had put a stop to this truck driver’s sacred mission, for now.

The fuming man inside, who took the insult as though his fair mother had been debased by loutish buggerers, rapists and freakpeople, rolling down his Plexiglas barrier and unsheathed his anger in broad daylight. “You filthy hippies” was the reprimand, and it stung my soul as true, for I had not washed since the morning. I was overcome with remorse on behalf of my fellow bipedalists, although I had in fact done right by John Law and never an inch did move before my time had come and until the street lanterns above glowed green. Yet I spoke for my wayward compatriots with an entreating explanation: “Some people just don’t know how to drive.” But it inflamed the fellow’s wound all the more, and he let uncurl from his hateful gullet a sopping sponge-bath worth of heinous saliva, that rocketed past my brow and did despoil the road, as though marking the turf upon which Thomas of Canterbury himself had unjustly lost his neck.

Now I was hot, feeling caught unfairly between a man’s wrath and his target, and so did I then launch my counteroffensive, a Trudeauesque pirouette if there ever was one: I lobbed the mass of chewable gumstuff I had been working most diligently on for masticative purposes and it did so humourously tumble into the back of the villain's trash-machine as he mushed away like Achilles chasing down the armour of Patrocles.

RIP Musa

This photo totally ripped off from blogto.com

I rode by on a Monday morning and
saw the police tape.
So many times served by the waiter
in the cowboy hat
I never minded the wait

French toast smothered in maple syrup
Red bricks eaten by flames
On a weekend with so many fire alarms
In a city that lives to blame

When power goes out in a heat wave
We rush to corners to direct the cars
But when Sundays are snuffed like a lit cigar
The police state's rather lame
And my daily pass through Dundas
and Euclid never will be the same

[See "Fire destroys Musa and several homes at Dundas and Euclid"]

Forced to remove my literary niqab

This is how I write angry.

Chee boy vibe

Ms. Rhythm's dead, so I celebrate, I order up an ice cream cake - freshly chiffoned with sugar cream, spelling words that Zarathustra spake. You could pick it up, if you don't mind, three business days from now, the cashier tells me on the phone as I milk a mental cow. I have a coat that's smooth and grey, as my head will one day be. I need to walk outside sometimes just to have nothing to see. Talk to strangers at the bus shelter, ask to squeeze politely by--each trip upon the streetcars has me drinking bottled sighs--and commiserate telepathically while staring at the sky. I walk into an LCBO, they've got pretty good customer service--but middle-aged cashiers on Friday night can make a sober man feel nervous. Then I duck into an alleyway just to photograph graffiti. No one remembers hidden things; it's no wonder why we're needy.

Agh fest 2010

Agh, I am spitting again, we lug loogies to mouth, then shout. I see, agh, a cowboy atop a church organ. It's a Spaghetti Western, Ennio Morricone as the angel of life and death. A fist flashes, light extinguishes itself.

Attempt to reincarnate. Attempt to relate. Mind-reading will be a feature on our next beta release. Don't bother teasing, individuality happily ceases, empathy's well-worn when I know everything you do, we are to each other a bland familiar stew...

Oh my dove, fly away, find land. Was the Odyssey just evolutionary adaptation? I'm on cold charred Galapologan islands, finding fish with finger-hooks, eeking existence from the pages of a book.

Agh - I was drunk this month, I was a pedestrian run over by a Hummer. Winter without snow, lets the homeless lie low, on King Street, where we eat street meat, where beauty meets slush, and anyone well-dressed is probably in a rush.

Tell me a story, write about your travels. To travel is to work. Packing and unpacking like George Clooney, up in the air, we expect customer service, lug lives here through air. We mostly hit eject, sucking in information, like children eating to prepare for the next stage of growth, just a billion little larvae who've grown a second mouth.

We are electric these days, we travel in every direction instantaneously. She said "I don't need your word of mouth when I got the search engines on my side."

Drink yourself silly

Oh we are wired now, get here and stare, don't care about the crows, the cattle, the lows, we think and drink stacks of pink things, shirking on lunch hour, counting every hour as accounts receivable, unbelievable us educated fops lining up at the trough. I never wanted a job that worked, just eight hours to iron all the creases in my shirt. I figured, 'what now? go on a road trip? take a taxi to Timbuktu, tip the driver, avoid all landmines with an all-knowing GPS'. Great, so I am a success. Hey, driver, stop at the cigar store, I need to blow smoke up your pipe, I have a backlog of friends on Skype I've ignored, you hear about how I'm competing in the Olympics For the Bored?' No wonder when I'm on my bike and doored I don't mind, some adrenaline at last, this big drink all pink and fizzy they call it Sassafraz.

Commuter sentence

Winter loses bloom and leaves
on the ground and the freeze thaw cycle
makes thick jagged potholes right on major roadways like
Bathurst. I live on an arterial road, something about the circulation of the city
I bike uphill to work, I almost die every morning nearly creamed by cabbies I
ride a two wheeled prayer got to make it over frozen tiny ice hills that send
tires skidding dangerous my face brushes concrete curbs I arrive at the office covered in
sweat and dirt

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.

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.)

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.

Calm

Happiness can be deadly. Procrastinate amid generalized joy; the blog must face this new steady state. You can still write - but you don't have to shout; tired of the tongue-tied fistfight. You can't worry about calm. So invent a new category.

Once-a-year light at 8:30pm tonight. The house bottom bricks past the point of light but the treetops turn a sunset shade of green with the last rays licking leaves. Notice it all, the firefly-night delight, swing-sitting take-in-everything insight, meander on the bike, sackclothed women with hoses on the lawn, group goodbyes upon a porch, summer not for long. Tightrope walkers tree to tree in Trinity B, I stick hands to highfive strangers, oh yellow-green jerseys - go Brazil! - dogs, smirk, always dogs - please, have a kid instead.

I'm stuck on a stunning white dress, fluffy bathrobe, warm towel, my sweet success, half-baked bluster, waffles I insist are morally provocative, but a first-prize smile takes the cake. Who is to blame for this dance-sing-body-mind harmony? A woman named Justin Timberlake.

Ms. Rhythm had stopped my heart, an arrhythmia, mumbling mumbletypeg; she rained vicious undulating waves of vocab from the sky, she wanted logic to die; and so whenever I tried it felt like a lie - that is, to prompt an effect - your deliberate intentions are just like a shipwreck. She would sing mind-wringing rubbish that rang like a siren: You are sleeping and beautiful. You will never know yourself. Creep alone, unconscious as you type Sanskrit-speak, spinning at perfectly harmoniously satanically satellite suborbital outer-space speeds, forever peeking at the pink edge of dawn from the dark side of the moon.

(And so I've decided to fire her!)

10 silly noun phrases

(the delight!)

Are you ready for incredible things, big long lists and a pig in a swing?

(ALOUD)

1) Great greenish-grey petticoats, stuffed in storage bins in the metal belly of a tugboat.

2) Longlegged Lolitas licking plasticine fajitas, moody, milking mojitos on a Monday, nursing the same sugared drink till midnight on a Sunday.

3) Happy pink flamingos, pontificating about mangos, feathers plucked by a whiskeysoaked gigolo for a tickle-and-sing six-string meringue banjo.

4) Ornery toads with complaints by the truckload, hopped up against heros and cowboy zeros, running the poor unlucky Mayor, Harry McBroken-Hose, out on rails to Pocahontas House.

5) Outer-space ambassadors obsessed with flux capacitors, spew invectives and bombast, fie-fieing aghast, spelunking every last intergalactic stalactite, either over-verbose or borderline comatose from cheap cereal-box cracktose!

6) Goonish gorillas sculpting 'I love yous' into pillars in Ancient Greece, disguising with chimp-love their secret affairs with Attican geese!

7) Lee Harvey Wallbanger, an assassin for a doppelganger. languid and dyspeptic, scrubbing his chest every five minutes for lack of antiseptic.

8) 'Oh-my-God' Mollies with polka-dot brollies, chitter-chatter and titter, each with a teetoring Tom Collins in the indentation of their hats, bought for nickels in Kensington (and lined with lavender-scented burlap).

9) Gregory Peck's pants, shredded, torn and scuppered askance, restitched with concern by a flurrying hill of hardworking ants, loaned with an honest man's bedpan to an mild-mannered monk—to wear under his cassock during Gregorian chants.

10) An ad hoc eagle, lawyerly and regal, befriended by a world-famous beagle.

(Oh Snoopy, does that smile droop? But you have no claim to frown when I'm stuffing you with goop.)

The internet cafe

He-man on Harbord street beside the alleys behind Bickford Park, tampering with hydrants for a lark - fifteen minutes after dark. Crowbar Sam and Juliet dance the downtown minuet, trading saliva and gum after smoking a cigarette. The laundromat has a wide foggy window, cleanfreaks avoid each other, apologizing for existence, inches apart in a social limbo. Flicker of the bicycle repair shop open sign neon. Slush on my pantleg but it dries soon enough, enter like an unhip oscar winner, order soup at the counter from an unshaven guff. Park to carve my stuff: Connect wirefree, float fast, giggle-tee-hee; clickety-beep bumblebeeings don’t make sense to me. Another dumb numbness. I’ve had enough. Spazzing on –asms: orgasm chasms; my big black book spasms, burps and sleeps. Spamming my brainstem; who wants to play chess. The silent screen sickens me. Do I hear correctly, yes?

Herbert Yeeshmaggots cuts down a tree

(written accidentally about two years ago - glad I found it... unedited for your pleasure)


“Curse the architectural landscaping of this part of Palmerston!”

A tall oak tree was trying to make it home before it got dark, but he was stuck in the sidewalk. He stayed that way for a hundred years, and it wasn’t until he saw a man with a chainsaw walking near a van that said “We chop trees, you be pleased, low low fees!” did he feel any hope. Now the oak tree was called Volvovia. Volvovia cried out using the pharyngeal apparatus for speaking that is located in the bark of every single tree in the world but only oak trees can truly utilize it. He said “halt there, O man bearing my chainsaw of liberation!” And the man, who was called Herbert Yeeshmaggots, did a triple take of confusion and surprise. “I am truly taken aback,” cried man after hearing the voice of the worm-eaten oak tree. The worms had been chewing at him since December 1923, but he was tall enough to survive such annelidic intrusions, and this made the tree, called Volvovia, a bit more intimidating that usual. “Can I believe my ears, a talking oak” wondered the chainsaw toting fellow, “I am the most mystified chainsaw bearer in these parts.”

“Enough pleasantry, enough urbanity,” chuckled the tree, and he summoned an owl to present a list of propositions to Mr. Yeeshmaggots. The demands read as follows: 1) please chop me down ASAP; 2) please take me home to my fatherland, which is in the woods.

Mr. Yeeshmaggots did as he was told, for the oak tree was prepared to pay handsomely. “$100 just to chop you down? That’s pretty generous for an oak tree… you acorn-possessing long-branches are alright!”

“please, Mr. Yeeshmaggots,” said the tree, “cease the flattery, the strokery, and chop me up and take me home.”

So the oak tree fell to the ground with a mighty crash, it was loud and the sawdust covered all the neighbourhood. But this was no ordinary neighbourhood.

As Volvovia came crashing down Yeeshmaggots saw the sign behind the tree: “Palmerston Environmental Freaks (PEF): we freak out about everything!”

And as the oak tree’s branches covered the sidewalk, the doors of the PEF office swung open and a skinny sour-faced woman wearing a hand-knit shawl and hemp sandals jumped out.

“I am filled with puke and disgust at what I am beholding,” cried the sour woman, who’s name was Salome Seldom-Lade

[unfinished of course]