The MegaRant is almost ready!

If you want an advance peek at this harrowing collection, leave me a comment below with your email address, and I'll send you a WORD file of the current State of the Union of the MegaRant. I would really appreciate some feedback on this one before I attempt to finish it off - so please, hit me with some MegaGiveAndTake and ask for your copy. Continue to be a part of online history!

unfiltered cupcakes

(Meet the surly frontliners at the sewage treatment plant - find out what they put up with!)

"I've been short on posts lately, and some friends have complained that I'm slacking.

This is a) 'absolutely untrue', as I'm still posting about 3-4 times a week, and b) this is 'relatively true' - I used to post sometimes 10 times a week.

I guess this is a rite of passage for every blogger - working through the slow periods, etc. - getting your second wind after being online for over a year (my first blogday was this past March 1 - though technically it will be Feb 29 2008, since I started on a leap year - happy belated bloggiversary to me)... anyway I am sorry.

But in that vein, check out the following excerpt of pure 'keyboard brine' which my fingers pumped out last night. The following bit took about 3.5 minutes to write, and will probably take about 3.5 days to make sense out of; it's unedited, with all typos left to scar your eyeballs:

Mar 20-05 rant

Velevet was the ordeer of the moment, ghte ghoul I was feeling in the yard, it was umberto eco the thirds most understood write in the western hemopsere this iss the meaning we hope to cleave that when people come toghet in the flu cod the moment it will not ver overided by some know itall from inside a cpu, I was rock and roll keyboardist I could open ip the ocean with these owreds tot the rhytrhj of the sambe, the eat in the eating the ehteral moment the coddled truck driver who doesn’t’ get fired because ehje got some piece of blakcail over the management, things like that the corruption that makes your vlood shiver and th emietahpora that doesn’t do uyou any good,. He threw a bit of tumbleweed in to the truch and I was stuck with his overlordish swampo neck , the tallest beast the bovine smelling smalts the heifer of neglect. Into the brain pan that I saved for easter lamb’s faces I stuck three tablets of cyanide to murder the lamb should thet ever decided to strat form the flock and the ot gt. God you have forsaken your littlest lamb, said the motion of the people in the nightimte it wsa their unspoken mass communication between them, this new kind of group telepathy and this occaiosnal lucidity within moment of hwoling rage, thi sis the shame the rteaser what makes you think I still jave all my marvels, this is smeagol and gollum at their most existential and tearing at each other with their shrivelled cave man dfleh, he never would have left the cave if it weren’t gfor the good and great thoughts that made men wantr toi edplor5e the wordkl . I was carving out ad face in to the mpoutina dn it was the greatest I ever saw, she was blonde and green eyed and her ears were like two slices of beef liver, covered with onins and mashed potatoes, overprices becaue of the college street location but that is the wat it is when you psay for nostalgia. This is the moment of pure truculent agony, this is the moment of the firestorm the first fistfight, the flowing glowing coals of the firelight, I was touchin on a river of gunk, to find some trsesre I was propesctign for thoughts so many drift by and sad I have to toucht tjem all so I was coing to invest a more effiecent boioiler some sort of process to improve my yields but there can never be a separate a cujltued pearl spearete form the rest it is na moment of torment and neglet, it is a moemtn of pure electoral fishiness.,

So, dear reader, you see the (extremely) raw materials I have to work with. And this is a typical first draft! Then again, with these kinds of 'horrible ramble posts' I don't even consider myself a writer. I'm more like a coroner, searching to find cause of death, or a forensics investigator struggling to reconstruct a crime. Eventually I will edit the above into something I find quasi-coherent, and serve it back as a 'filtered cupcake'. And that process could take a long long time - certainly more than 3.5 minutes. For my own self-serving vanity, I just want you to realize how much work I put into this lil' flea circus.

Yours in cupcakes,

~Freddie FIAC, chief cupcake foreman"

ps Please don't ask me to explain why the flea circus matters in the first place - it's years before I'm answering that one :-)

Three billion women

And all for me
It’s the playboy galaxy
There’s Betty and Zoe and Sherry
and Constance and Penelope

They smile at me
Call me cute
I’d ask them out
but
The point is moot

She's not “can you whistle my tune?”
it's just
“toot my flute”
-So I sit and eat my
Jujee fruit


(he mocks himself)

more ouija sentences

A heaven in my mind, did not unwind the fine fickle twine from my life line, the high climb, the happy swine I was, rolling in time with my rinds my brine and my slime.

These are thin moments, unnoticed torments, unanswered phones, draughty open doors and dust blown from secret shelfish tomes... My bones have owned me, my skins have clothed me; I am no one if not a gnome from Nome, a roaming nomad wiping feet politely on notepads, boring alone with no privacy into virgin dirt, sharing intestines on this telepathological prototype, hammering at hierarchy, histrionic in real time, cleansing weighty wordiness from a senselessly shocked and sleepy high society.

Sides of bacon get me quakin; cholesterol and menthol, cancer sticks and cancer stripes, we tots slurping lollies, in trollies, in desks, at a board meeting, in a casket, not long for this life, so please please find me a beautiful wife; I just want someone to treat real nice.

You knaves, you sit in caves, crow about your peer-pressure tactics, progressive taxes and pats on the backs. Reward inanity, cheer for incompetence. Vampires suck blood, mediocrity relieves anxiety. It's work less, not worth less; enjoy leisure, celebrate senselessly, tis the season, tis the season - as long as you fit in you don't need a reason. It's 'A equals B', it's you and me - it's the Golden Age of Stupidity.

Paddy's riff

yo yo I'm lean and green
a guiness machine, bash my
fists with smithwicks pricks
- a dream-age teen, shamrock sheen, leprechaun
mean, rainbow rims and gold-tooth grin,
a woolskin weave, kiss me clean, i'm
a blarneystone beam, crossed peat and Shaw,
Joyce me raw, shlonk my jaw in a dublin crawl,
the post-pub brawl, they're
drunken on the Mall,
so gay this way, pray
in your pints, high as kites
lowlife punks and bandwagon skunks with good old boys
and lifelong stoolies 24 hours of freshness, foolishness and folly bloomin
with Molly in Paddy's
daylong daze.

take a 5-minute metaphysic and call me in the morning

(loopiness factor: 9)

I am writing in a total vacuum. Finally I'm behaving according to theory

It is a test, to be swallowed by a whale, to be like Jonah or Job in the Bible... those are always the best stories the ones that stick they call it ancient scripture but really if it's still around it's because it’s relevant NOW and only now and at its apex. All histories in the present are at their apex. Ancient history is the most relevant thing, if we still remember it; who can forget it. I need to study calculus to understand why things seem like a snapshot but over time they fade. This is a reverse-Polaroid present; instant retinal imaging crumbling into the biased contingency of memory.

The person I was ten minutes ago, where did he go? No no Mr Hume, I believe in cause and effect cause and effect, the best the language I needed to invent to make a mark in my chosen field. Sure the brightest men may not be on television; at least they have their circle of friends among whom original ideas still circulate - a small hope is all a good man needs to exploit. This is the consolation for the ivory towered principals, this is the reward for the maggot breath midget? I am not even thinking these thoughts as they tumble out into the screen; they are passing through gaping holes I decided not to sieve, like an asteroid hurtling at you from the edge of a tunnel.

(On prosody): There are cadences that allow me to control my universe, and then there are rhythms that own me completely and to which I submit; I turn off my brain. Then I am pure trusty scribe, asking no questions, having blind faith in my stream of nonconsciousness, allowing all manner of outrage atrocity to mingle with beauty; pandora’s box meets the garden of eden. I used to write things for the fun of it, now I write out of morbid curiousity to see what can be conjured from fingers that have their own volition, educated by the unconscious rhythms of a practised guitar pick. There are notes on a guitar that follow one another; there are certain letters that make a certain word; there are certain words that my fingers are trained to emit in their complex reptilian cerebellar patterns. Call it a semantic photon - a discrete indivisible sentence packet - oh but that's fallacy fallacy language is productive and infinite meaning does not obey the laws of thermodynamics, meaning can be created and never destroyed (at least perhaps in the mind of the God). Meaning is metaphysical? - sorry but what's the point of saying something if I'm not able to comprehend it?

Interesting concept: Quantum Artists - unpredictable in space and time, having no fixed meaning point except upon observation, can be be pinned down only within a certain ranges of aesthetic probability.

I never thought first-person subjective analysis could be offered as strong proof of anything, then again it is the internet and everything's permissible. So I chose to exploit freedom, to bash any remaining shackle to bits and (irony) leave another temple in my wake.

I try not to mix-tape my metaphors, but music is a permasoundtrack, medley of elision one tune into another, and I’m self-referential like a rapper; I’m humble like a monk.

how to get rich quick

(today's obsolescence = tomorrow's leisure trend)

man i am tired

here's some random clauses, which should inspire me for the rest of the post:

the more complicated the instrument, the more beautiful the art

or

use space shuttle technology to draw doodles?

and - at what point will the surgeon general realize that computers are making me stupid?

How soon until there are group 'arithmetic' classes - math for fun; math to kick back, relax and socialize! - just like we have group aerobics (pick up math hotties)? As soon as a basic human faculty - calculation - is made obsolete by technology that eliminates cognitive work (computers), then as our brains atrophy from disuse, mathematics becomes a desirable social-leisure activity. And once a leisure activity, there is real money to be made. Did private gyms exist before automobiles made physical exercise unnecessary? I don't think so. And so it will be with arithmetic social clubs.

So yeah, I’ve decided I'm starting up a 12-Times Tables salon. Let's get together and multiply out loud: fifty bucks members’ fee, payable every six months. My profits increase exponentially!

Seven minutes spent recalling the weekend

Sweet success

we need another reason to get upset
something to hate
rancour and bitterness, fuel for our wittiness
we need someone to tell us no.

Romangstic

Dreaming, of mounties gunned down, the streets running with blood, the ice that kills you with cracked hips, the salt that corrodes through clothes, winter on its way out. We are melting slowly, slowly. Bitterness does not last through spring; there is the pain of rebirth. Phoenix again. Let’s head to Arizona, I cannot forget that man I love. He is a bus driver; I will follow him – on muleback if I have to - into the grand canyon of my heart. I am dodging reproaches, following that bliss; I am doing what the movie screens tell me is good. I am going to fade into that good Warner Brothers sunset. I will let those credits wash right over me.

Extreme Birthday Fun

We are scavengers in this city
We crawl ten kilometres
East to west, to do our best
I knocked over a hobo just to snag a bus transfer
I never used to be this coldblooded
But there’s a fake marble trophy on the line
And the winner gets all the biotches?

Unsolicited wallet-based enthusiasm

(incoherence factor: 8)

Hey, you all must check out my new wallet: it can out-‘wallet’ billfolds from around the globe! My new wallet - I call him Thurman the Wallet - was a great alligator once; now he ensconces my legal tender, but this is upward alligator mobility. Fie fie on the naysayers– tis a drama, an epic of crocodilian proportions, an alligatorial allegory! ...and where prithee are the fish wallets, the snakeskin billfolds; the marmoset coin-containers? This lack of mammalian moneybelts is a consumer monstrosity! Are lactating and fur-bearing non-bovines only fit for good-luck keychains? An anecdote: once there was a jackrabbit in my kitchen- Herbert Fuzzbutton by name - I sawed off his foot for luck, and he wailed most drippingly. So yes, I am a pig for wallets. I am the fiend who chases wallets down alleyways and out from around corners, and when I chance upon a virgin ‘wall’- as I call them – my yelp is gleeful and girlish! I do enjoy wallets, how they flap open exposing their leathery gums to the outside world; how they allow phalangeal access to credit cards, library cards, birth certificates and other hosts within the cornucopia we call sociomonetary flavour-plastic. If I ever won the lottery, I would probably use half the winnings to buy more wallets! What better way to proudly display my gambleriffic success? In sooth I tell you I cherish my portafolios and I wish I had a half-dozen more! My collection shall be ever-burgeoning; do you understand what I am saying??

dripping descriptor

...Queen Street's home to those with small asses, I catch myself thinking, as the ennuied Vietnamese pouts behind the counter– she hates her job – while the Portuguese teen with pink sweater and chopsticks in her hair froths milk; the cash register clanks rusty. The radio plays canon pop out the speakers; it’s morning music, predictable as a prayer book...

Rugged and hatless

(rambles on individualism?)

Draidle my indecision, wheedle and cause elision, I collect fragments in a jar for shards, the larder pantry and the collection of brain lint: Sweet causality, I turned myself into a special effect, a notable glimmer on a much larger and deeper surface; no more dull totalitarianism for the mind, more like one small star among billions, my little solar system with its own laws of gravitation, exceptions to the general theory. The confidence of an absolute, the fog of special relativity (I fell in love with my third cousin? ;-) ); I am a prime candidate for hemorrhoids – shit or get off the pot. (the opposite of a watertight argument, someone more interested in asking questions than proving self-righteousness.)

I was listening to Lucio all day - he was on a desperate erotic stomp. He sang a song for a song that could find a girl. Who knows where she is; send the music after her. On the radio, passed along by satellite beacons, she catches your intentions an ocean away. (I’m not romantic; I can’t trust birds, roses or rainbows to relay messages; I won't let smoke signals do my dirty work.)

Don’t ask me to sacrifice myself to you, she says, I won’t live for you. You can’t make me happy – it’s not within your power. I can help you live for your own sake though - there is no greater favour. I will let you die, if you don’t let me live… Let me live, and I will help make it possible for you to live…

So stop taxing me! And turn off your vicious medieval philosophy of death.

sugarpepperpuff

Angel speaks to me and says all is ready, he reserved a room for me; the acrobat twirls on the thin wire, such tension, thoughts swirl and light laugher peripherating the tightrope – but there’s not enough distraction in the world to move him from his purpose. Where in the world are we; where in the world could she be? Looking under rocks for the jewel the tiny treasure I remember from homespun happinesses, the small translucent shells that glisten with magic or gasoline from ocean, the gravity mocking puff balls floating through the air from dandelions, those everywhere annoyance-delights; I can run through tall grass the chase I give, catching flies in my bare hand – I scare myself sometimes; I have preternatural reflexes. Like an animal. The angel tells me that’s what happens with some – I should be thankful; half hunter, half jester. Flinging out gifts, singing out sunshine, fighting dry winter skin with sugar pepper parsely and cinnamon.

The hype, it seems, was not entirely empty

If you live in Canada, check out the National Post this Thursday - Arts and Life section. Angry Brown Man and I are newsworthy pun-dits!

And so - excitement - the cupcakes become all the more sweet.

If you buy one of our Pun Gent shirts (available in March - see 'Merch Madness'), I'll reimburse you the 75 cents for picking up the paper. Deal? deal... So much fun!

surviving joy

saw pure joy today

been long enough

saw her joy again

- not long enough -

but

there she goes again

and

we'll be tough

- tough, when she's gone -

because joy is enough.

Hold still

Hold still

While I brush away

your eyelash

While I

hold still

let me be

beside you still

Don’t turn

Don’t paint your face--

I like it that way

please

We don’t have all day;

One of us has to

blink, but

please

wait, hold

still--

I want to

linger

on your eyelash

zazuby pamoobi ladooby

(this is your brain on jazz?)

zazuby, pamoobi, ladooby-la
fringa fonga funkifaw
higgle snuggle toggle noose
mama got locked in a google booth

clicky zap, flippy pap
wiggy waggy, piggy bobby
quocky flecky himmy haw
jason mitzin' twibby craw!

netty nockers, wangy dong
digi pixie singin' song
macky billy antitrust
mozilly fibro-coptic lust

nurry nurry flashy fry
silly syllogismic pi
mon-manny baddy, glo-bebe gong
soon be nothin write or wrong.

MegaRant

I've been working on something called The MegaRant - which is part of Liberty is a Bagel (coming soon, I swear!). It's taking a Mega-long time though, as it's hard to wrap the noodle around all the Mega things I've written, especially when I keep thinking of Mega-new ideas for how to present them. When I'm done it should be one 70-page Mega-long (non)poem. Will it be any good? I have no idea. But it will be Mega, definitely. And then there's the rest of the (non)poems to worry about. Man they should call this web site Freedom is Mega-chore. ;-)

(and now some computer wag will now say that a few thousand MegaRants will make him start to Gigal!)

meaning = absence of suffering?

When I was a boy I killed a bird that flew into my window.
I ran outside. Its head was wrenched completely backwards. It was bleeding, jumping around spastically.
Seeing pain like that makes a body sick to its stomach. I had to act.
I'm not sure who was putting whom out of his misery.
How did I know he had suffered enough?
I threw a rock on top him. A muffled thud. I didn't blink.
I knew it was important, even at the time. That's why I remember it.
I'm not sure I'd want anyone to make that decision for me.
(You too can donate your bodily organs to philosophy.)
But animals don't have souls. Hmm. Does it still work as an example?
Probably not.
I'd still like to thank that bird, for donating his body to philosophy.
...
(let he who is possessed of the meaning of life cast the first stone...)
...
ps when in doubt, blame the windowmaker.

Transcribing brainwaves, 15 minutes at a time

It’s ‘like versus like’ that’s interesting, it’s the close things that cause the most friction, and sparks fly between two nearly identical things, so we bonded brothers stick together like flies in spider-webs of mutual mistrust. The sweet blackness, the woman with rotund behind who shakes to the beat of the hum-drum, and that drum pulsates and vanishes untraceably like so many heisenberg electrons in the desert tribal twilight… but today I fight back: in the kitchen there was dust; I vacuumed, swept, then mopped with soap, then water again; the dirt reappears always, so you sweep again until it is smelling of pristine Lysol cleanliness, fleeting and temporary but existentially significant. A job well done makes it fun to be alive. Sweet sizzling sausages! There is a pizza burning in the oven! Yet another task. I spend half the weekend in a motional stupor, there was the grand man moving pianos and over here is a tall tiger ready to pounce. Same old same old. In walked a drag queen named Stephanie the telecom girl, me the grill cleaner the sweet water drinker the wasted fried beast ther teeth gnash grit and alone smashing and the accidental slicing of your finger open when cleaning the gun. The trigger is cold, set on stun, but the locked safety, thank god—the last thing we want is a firefight. Clean up the crumbs.

Sweet Toronto, here is diversity. We preach tolerance in this city and don’t accept anyone who doesn’t believe in it, so selective in our socially accepted prejudices. Swing back and forth between competing ideologies, your yin and yang is a stupid vicious blender; oscillation its middle name, and the lamentable pseudo-reasoning that flows from a hypocritical compromise…

It is a shamanry, this sweet translucency of half-truths, journalistic, rhetorical, one-sided fallacious phallogic used to serve the ends of tiny men; green one day and yellow the next. What makes it possible? The internet has no memory. Computers do, but this web we wander does not remember. Everything’s present-tense and subject to change; our overloaded neurons don't have a chance; there is no memory to electricity, there is only on and off, off and on; lightning bolts infinite and taken from on high – seeing is almost believing – but the light fails and you realize how ridiculous your world really is without that currency. In the inexorable darkness, straight lines are our best friends, a hand guiding blind along the inner wall of a labyrinth. Daedalus, you could have been our friend. Insecure demonic prick. Selling out to Minos and Minotaurs…. The dark is something we run from, and we go camping one week of the year to remind us of that. The tidal wave, mother nature returning home after a stray – have we gotten a bit too comfortable?

East meets West? The yin is the thing, the James Joyce Finn-again wakenings, beasts and the flute that flows, the music notes, hip-hop rock n roll and the boats bringing other men in, our time has past; let them have their turn. Shut down the libraries and give us a G-chord. We are elves fleeing from Rivendell, we sprites take flight, and now it is up to men to fight. Can we find any of quality? I don’t know you personally, but I’ve witnessed the things you did. Does accomplishment matter any more, next to marketing? And I don’t believe in resumés, they only encourage dishonesty; there is nothing that can be revealed in a job interview that I can’t observe by watching in patient silence. And why don’t you trust an honest face? I’ve been burned before, I know it’s not right to stop believing in people, but I’ve been hurt before. Bitterness is the easy way out. People like sob stories, so sad we want to be fearing-freedom and wallowing in our misery-loving company, keep me company in my hysterical misery, keep me in fear so that at least we’ll be living equally. I don’t desire happiness – I want you to be sad like me. That last sentence is pure evil. Nothing helps a bad mood quite like spreading it around, a cartoonist once said.

There is a struggle within these 1000 words, it’s like waiting for a count down to let you off a treadmill; those last 10 seconds are always an eternity, always the most excruciating. I could never be a sprinter. For some people though, it’s the milliseconds they keep track of, but the days drift by without anyone noticing.

I saw my best friend, he was finally flying; it is true, he can do it because he believes. I have seen miracles, every Sunday morning I see another. You know the man who controls the sun? He knows when and where there will be cloud. He controls the weather but what good does that do anyone? I have the best intentions I really do. That and a hitchhiker’s thumb will take you down the road to hell.

"Who are these liars putting white cement sacks at the foot of empty lots, announcing intentions to build skyscrapers, to start from scratch? What nerve." Man you have to admire that kind of determination. But it sucks to wait, to stare at an empty lot. Thanks for humiliating the rest of us with your achievement, thanks a lot. So do not remain in this sweet and excruciating aimlessness - who’s more depraved than the purposeless man? (AR). I don’t know and I don’t want to.

I never hear good ideas any more, why are they being kept secret? I never hear good ideas - are there experts keeping them under lock and key? All professions are conspiracies against the laity. All associations are hateful acts of exclusion. All generalizations are a slap in the face. The Coles Notes of wisdom.

To the magnificent muse: there is splendour in your every movement, there is the smile and the touch of your hand, you have those hands that turn everything to gold you touch my face and the aching melts away. We can come together and praise you in your absence but wouldn’t we rather just see you in person and happy? Wouldn’t you just rather come meet me for breakfast and laugh? I am certain of very few things but a good brunch is one of them.

I promise to keep quiet for a year, don’t let me speak, this noise is turning us inside out and making your spirit sore oh the wringing I’m giving it. Who can handle truth? Do what you want to me. Face me down in a hallway and take away my land and prizes, my women my stables and all my horses. Don’t ask me to explain because I don’t know how and don’t think it’s important. I never tell you anything in person because I want you to read my mind. Thank you thank thank you this is my mind. This is my mind; you are reading my mind. :-)

Elsa's ecstasy - wisdom from the goonèd saint

Sweet-tasting pepper! Great irony fluff! Assemble dragons into the boxing ring; I am here to pass out hypno-flutes. I will frapp them on the temples. I will tame these rubbery snakes. I will smash them into straight lines. I will stretch them out and etch them into stone as warnings, and they'll writhe forever in cold grey guilty granite.

You - musicians, lend me a melody! You - carpenters, build me an opera house! Summon the contractors - for today at least, they will be like honest men. O greedy ones, gather round - you are going to get your fill. Don't stop yourself from gorging - I will harness you for a higher purpose. Pass ganja 'round to the sarcastic dolphins (I have need of a higher porpoise). All the things you do, they are good - you feel light because you are immensely important. Joy is a sin, yes - but respectability will not fill the circus tents...

(On the weekend when it is cold out, you think about back rubs and hot chocolate, and try to remember what makes your spine shiver)