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.
7/13/2008
6/09/2008
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.)
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.)
5/27/2008
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.
Aggrandize, release, contemplate, celebrate, scrivel in disappearing ink what everyone thinks. The columnists, calumnists, trysts in the mist, the abcess, the cyst.
5/14/2008
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 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.
5/08/2008
5/05/2008
To/from us
We tumbled head over shoulder, face down on the sidewalk, end over end, jacket on the pavement, quite literally on the way to the movies, metaphorically much more. Open doors, evaporating clouds, hearing music never known because our hearts are turned up loud.
We got a little left tonight, we stroll along the lake, we won that right, your day off today after all, and I see your eyes are made of light.
My job's making music out of music. I mix it up to make it right. Now you've meta-musician, skip the sounds and wave to the waves, each song a ripple stitched together, interlinked as levers, free, no cost except what we couldn't save.
On the wall is the picture of the shadow of the kiss in the sand, and the stereo plays the eternal band, it's Mick and Keith and Bowie and the Cult and sweet soul sister, your little hand is in my hand.
We got a little left tonight, we stroll along the lake, we won that right, your day off today after all, and I see your eyes are made of light.
My job's making music out of music. I mix it up to make it right. Now you've meta-musician, skip the sounds and wave to the waves, each song a ripple stitched together, interlinked as levers, free, no cost except what we couldn't save.
On the wall is the picture of the shadow of the kiss in the sand, and the stereo plays the eternal band, it's Mick and Keith and Bowie and the Cult and sweet soul sister, your little hand is in my hand.
4/30/2008
M&J Discuss Anticipation
(March 31, 2007)
M: So you met her?
J: Not yet
M: What are you going to do?
J: Repaint my walls. Buy new clothes, get a face lift, the usual.
M: But you don’t have to change, you’re good enough.
J: Oh but good enough isn’t good enough for me.
M: For me or for her?
J: For her for me.
M: What does she want?
J: I don’t know but I’m afraid.
M: That's not right.
J: Oh but it is.
...
M: Facebook makes all my friends look so small
J: We were special once.
M: I never understood, don’t fill in all those likes and dislikes.
...
J: Generalized anxiety or somesuch.
...
J: I’m spotting flaws in Bob Dylan’s vocal delivery.
M: You are intolerable.
J: What is the point? I get jarred every time I go up North.
M: Aren’t you tired of nothing making sense?
J: I still believe I can fight the world.
M: You’re a fook
J: God bless the fools. They refuse to accept reality.
M: I said fook, not fool.
J: Whatever.
M: I think so often a word spoken at the right time could change a person’s life.
J: At my 100th birthday, I’m going to get up and make a three hour speech. I will have every single guest stand up and I will say something nice about each of them,
M; Why don’t you just wash everyone’s feet?
J: That would take too long.
M: More than three hours?
J: Never mind. I’ve had it to here being where love’s a small word.
M: Neil Diamond?
J: Yep
M: So you met her?
J: Not yet
M: What are you going to do?
J: Repaint my walls. Buy new clothes, get a face lift, the usual.
M: But you don’t have to change, you’re good enough.
J: Oh but good enough isn’t good enough for me.
M: For me or for her?
J: For her for me.
M: What does she want?
J: I don’t know but I’m afraid.
M: That's not right.
J: Oh but it is.
...
M: Facebook makes all my friends look so small
J: We were special once.
M: I never understood, don’t fill in all those likes and dislikes.
...
J: Generalized anxiety or somesuch.
...
J: I’m spotting flaws in Bob Dylan’s vocal delivery.
M: You are intolerable.
J: What is the point? I get jarred every time I go up North.
M: Aren’t you tired of nothing making sense?
J: I still believe I can fight the world.
M: You’re a fook
J: God bless the fools. They refuse to accept reality.
M: I said fook, not fool.
J: Whatever.
M: I think so often a word spoken at the right time could change a person’s life.
J: At my 100th birthday, I’m going to get up and make a three hour speech. I will have every single guest stand up and I will say something nice about each of them,
M; Why don’t you just wash everyone’s feet?
J: That would take too long.
M: More than three hours?
J: Never mind. I’ve had it to here being where love’s a small word.
M: Neil Diamond?
J: Yep
4/03/2008
July 24, 2005
(prequel to as-yet nonexistent brunch blog)
What: Brunch
Where: 10:40am Cafe Luna, Dovercourt and Argyle, Toronto
Who: PT [that's me], KF, DT, SB, MG.
Resolutions passed:
MG reports attempt at 'lost key' ploy to pick up cute waitress at Hooters, but does not succeed. Embroiled in own deceit, he is forced to discuss whereabouts of phantom non-keys with manager, as waitress was nonplussed. MG to return for 3rd Hooters outing in less than a month after otherwise lifelong Hooters boycott.
Party Announced: "Theme Thursday", July 28. Normally "Waffle Wednesdays" but to conform to alliterative nomenclatural procedures this will be "Theme Thursday, colon, waffles." Possibility of chicken and waffles or other savoury, non-Belgian recipes. Unfortunately MV (third Chateau Nice housemate, sidelined with ovaries) cannot attend. 'Moon waffles' proposed to celebrate the anniversarial achievement of that great astronaut and dessert aficionado, Neil Armstrong.
SB relates near-brush with megastardom, demonstrating scanning equipment for Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible 3. Unfortch SB does not get to demo scanner and meet the megastar.
Out of nowhere PT proclaims high-speed mag-lev trains needed across Canada, a project for national unity. Airplanes (those white elephants of the sky) do not suffice.
MG to visit Germany for World Cup and then wants to stay for Oktoberfest. Thinks it impractical to stay away that long. PT suggests he bone up on German and then be key Canadian player in the beer fest, influencing international events with linguistic fluency.
Talk of Masonry, conspiracy theory, secret handshakes, pirates, and gold buried in Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Botched attempt by PT to take cellphone photo of Masonic symbol etched above restroom toilet.
MG is reading a book about psychic American troops training to explode goats' hearts with staring tactics. Incredulity around the table.
Final bill: $101.90 plus tip = $120
What: Brunch
Where: 10:40am Cafe Luna, Dovercourt and Argyle, Toronto
Who: PT [that's me], KF, DT, SB, MG.
Resolutions passed:
- brunch
- conversation
MG reports attempt at 'lost key' ploy to pick up cute waitress at Hooters, but does not succeed. Embroiled in own deceit, he is forced to discuss whereabouts of phantom non-keys with manager, as waitress was nonplussed. MG to return for 3rd Hooters outing in less than a month after otherwise lifelong Hooters boycott.
Party Announced: "Theme Thursday", July 28. Normally "Waffle Wednesdays" but to conform to alliterative nomenclatural procedures this will be "Theme Thursday, colon, waffles." Possibility of chicken and waffles or other savoury, non-Belgian recipes. Unfortunately MV (third Chateau Nice housemate, sidelined with ovaries) cannot attend. 'Moon waffles' proposed to celebrate the anniversarial achievement of that great astronaut and dessert aficionado, Neil Armstrong.
SB relates near-brush with megastardom, demonstrating scanning equipment for Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible 3. Unfortch SB does not get to demo scanner and meet the megastar.
Out of nowhere PT proclaims high-speed mag-lev trains needed across Canada, a project for national unity. Airplanes (those white elephants of the sky) do not suffice.
MG to visit Germany for World Cup and then wants to stay for Oktoberfest. Thinks it impractical to stay away that long. PT suggests he bone up on German and then be key Canadian player in the beer fest, influencing international events with linguistic fluency.
Talk of Masonry, conspiracy theory, secret handshakes, pirates, and gold buried in Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Botched attempt by PT to take cellphone photo of Masonic symbol etched above restroom toilet.
MG is reading a book about psychic American troops training to explode goats' hearts with staring tactics. Incredulity around the table.
Final bill: $101.90 plus tip = $120
4/01/2008
Saddest Music
- I Can't Forget You - Cracker
- Funny How Time Slips Away - Al Green
- Catch - The Cure
- Tom Traubert's Blues - Tom Waits
- Not Dark Yet - Bob Dylan
- Hung My Head - Johnny Cash
- Emozioni - Lucio Battisti (Italian)
- Hotel Supramonte - Fabrizio de Andre (Italian)
- Zero Chance - Soundgarden
- The Day John Kennedy Died - Lou Reed
- I'll Believe in Anything - Wolf Parade
- Autumn's Here - Hawksley Workman
- Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead
- Mother - John Lennon
- Bad - U2
- Fiddlers Green - The Tragically Hip
- Oh! Sweet Nuthin' - The Velvet Underground
3/26/2008
AbZorba the Priest
(clear throat, now preach)
Dryness delivers forest fires. Sustained silence breeds bursting. Bottlenecked threat blows through. Half-eaten hearts, eerie, humans, ever less human, more or less omniscient contempt. I'd cancel next season's episodes but there's news to pre-empt:
I am in love, it's good, was out of use, this sprawling blog, this lyrical noose, metaphysically ominous, abstruse, why not clot it? Ah not to let loose, lips tighten with a love bite, yet I am, mirrored, jammed, like all of us, doomed to write.
So stand, be counted. But count on nothing. Don't understand, instruct. Anticipate everything and you won't know bad luck.
My guitar's in storage after my house burned down; I've been living like a tourist, knackered from knocking and choking on Chinatown. That song I was writing? Kinda cobwebbed. Call Betty, shake that tambourine, it's after Xmas now, we're left with shriveled tangerines.
How I shovelled and shovelled, just to see the road. I've seen too many shovels forshadowing this ode. By Jove, I need the lash, everyone in mouse-shot licks lips, clicks trash.
But I disappoint myself. This excuse is balderdash.
You work, right? You have a life. This virtual truth subsides, those legends in your mind, you are like Babe Ruth, a benevolent John Booth, want to help build Yankee Stadium? God, I never have the time. If I let me off the hook, if I don't write another book, I blame Playstation, Arcadium, tedium, tribulation, the trials of the medium.
Oh go get em, giddy up, I'm rusty yeah so cut me slack; I'm serving this up, so swallow it up, I sugared it up with a bottle of catchup—and the tender bits are around the corner.
Dryness delivers forest fires. Sustained silence breeds bursting. Bottlenecked threat blows through. Half-eaten hearts, eerie, humans, ever less human, more or less omniscient contempt. I'd cancel next season's episodes but there's news to pre-empt:
I am in love, it's good, was out of use, this sprawling blog, this lyrical noose, metaphysically ominous, abstruse, why not clot it? Ah not to let loose, lips tighten with a love bite, yet I am, mirrored, jammed, like all of us, doomed to write.
So stand, be counted. But count on nothing. Don't understand, instruct. Anticipate everything and you won't know bad luck.
My guitar's in storage after my house burned down; I've been living like a tourist, knackered from knocking and choking on Chinatown. That song I was writing? Kinda cobwebbed. Call Betty, shake that tambourine, it's after Xmas now, we're left with shriveled tangerines.
How I shovelled and shovelled, just to see the road. I've seen too many shovels forshadowing this ode. By Jove, I need the lash, everyone in mouse-shot licks lips, clicks trash.
But I disappoint myself. This excuse is balderdash.
You work, right? You have a life. This virtual truth subsides, those legends in your mind, you are like Babe Ruth, a benevolent John Booth, want to help build Yankee Stadium? God, I never have the time. If I let me off the hook, if I don't write another book, I blame Playstation, Arcadium, tedium, tribulation, the trials of the medium.
Oh go get em, giddy up, I'm rusty yeah so cut me slack; I'm serving this up, so swallow it up, I sugared it up with a bottle of catchup—and the tender bits are around the corner.
3/17/2008
Throat clear
Beaten up and broken sided, long ago you were divided. He said I miss my wire act, my fruitful lack, rug patch and sad sack. Oh we didn't realize it did we, that everything would be read, the long tail roll call, by no one at all, this long holler into an empty drum, full of it, tossed by it, plucking its whiny thrum. So "the ants have megaphones" and their opinions are clones, rushing water on my eyes has got me stoned. Auditory hallucinogenic psychosis too long at the screen and the threat so long as you're sitting is deep-vein thrombosis.
2/13/2008
I'm Not Racist When You're Already Dead
Top ten peoples of antiquity I despise:
1. Phoenicians - apparently the first civilization to create the bireme. And the last civilization to discover deodorant! They became the Carthaginians, who were sacked by the Romans, aka my peeps. They spoke Punic. Or should it be P.U.nic. Famous for inventing the alphabet, and I glory in using their invention against them.
2. Visigoths - led by Alaric I, they sacked Rome - aka my peeps - in 410 AD. It still hurts, like they sacked me at 4:10 am Tuesday morning.
3. Cimbri - threatened my peeps around the 2nd century BC. I scoff at their Jutlandian origins.
Rounding out the top 10, minus justifications and unreadable Wikipedia links (besides it should be obvious):
4. Dravidians
5. Mycenaeans
6. Nubians
7. Amakelites (real sore spot there)
8. Beothuk
9. Gazpatcho
10. Minestrone
Ok, those last two are more soup than people. Nevertheless!
1. Phoenicians - apparently the first civilization to create the bireme. And the last civilization to discover deodorant! They became the Carthaginians, who were sacked by the Romans, aka my peeps. They spoke Punic. Or should it be P.U.nic. Famous for inventing the alphabet, and I glory in using their invention against them.
2. Visigoths - led by Alaric I, they sacked Rome - aka my peeps - in 410 AD. It still hurts, like they sacked me at 4:10 am Tuesday morning.
3. Cimbri - threatened my peeps around the 2nd century BC. I scoff at their Jutlandian origins.
Rounding out the top 10, minus justifications and unreadable Wikipedia links (besides it should be obvious):
4. Dravidians
5. Mycenaeans
6. Nubians
7. Amakelites (real sore spot there)
8. Beothuk
9. Gazpatcho
10. Minestrone
Ok, those last two are more soup than people. Nevertheless!
2/09/2008
5 ways to tell he doesn't like your turtleneck
(Cosmo, look out)
1) 'He' is your boss and you try to suck up by working late and he just says "You're fired for wearing that turtleneck."
2) You're sitting in a bus shelter and a crow flies at your face and pecks your forehead. Just then you get a text message asking you to buy a new turtleneck.
3) His favourite game is Words that Rhyme with Things I Hate and his answers are always "Thor Gerbil Heck" or "Yore Werble Schmeck."
4) He enters a pet store and cuts the neck off one of the turtles, and as he's arrested he says it's all your fault. You refuse to visit him in jail and he's partially relieved.
5) He successfully removes you from the endangered species list.
1) 'He' is your boss and you try to suck up by working late and he just says "You're fired for wearing that turtleneck."
2) You're sitting in a bus shelter and a crow flies at your face and pecks your forehead. Just then you get a text message asking you to buy a new turtleneck.
3) His favourite game is Words that Rhyme with Things I Hate and his answers are always "Thor Gerbil Heck" or "Yore Werble Schmeck."
4) He enters a pet store and cuts the neck off one of the turtles, and as he's arrested he says it's all your fault. You refuse to visit him in jail and he's partially relieved.
5) He successfully removes you from the endangered species list.
Waiting for the furniture to sell
Bodacious cutlass cuddles crowd pesky moray eels. Fashion fish fisticuffs gurgle to crescendo, raucous rallentando when your legs begin to go. Eek on mean streets, drag snow to sidewalks, talk hours to your mother on a walk around the block. He who was toned? Thrown in the clink. Outlaw maverick dries fruit inside a sink. Vishnu drank in shame, inside outside, that's how he earned his fame. Now it's Meebo and twitter, everyone too busy to hire a babysitter. The Mexicans are mild, Plaxico drove them wild. I'm from New England so I'm like a whining child. Oh you bugbears, sellers beware, hooking plastic drums to the tips of your hair - please learn to share. Now what to do with Friday nights? Explore alleyways with flashlights, place bets on fistfights, check my skin for parasites, awake my inner luddite.
1/17/2008
Another Extremely Blurry Post
Don't have much time so here it is:
- Spicy Korean foods could easily power our most advanced starships. But it takes gastronomical ambition.
- Environmental degradation fouls my mood. I'd sign up for the nearest reforestation project 'cept the signup sheet itself draws my tears.
- A loud gong to announce the arrival of each email would never rival the popularity of that Guitar Hero game.
- You need not whisper in my presence: my iPod trackpad is rotated clockwise to the max.
- The devil fixes me a proscribed alcool, and I'll drink it. The devil digs me a pothole, I fall in it. But if the devil urges me to bet against the New England Patriots, I will consider hiring myself a new deceiver.
- Ever think about why wooly mammoths got stuck frozen in ice? They must have had extremely inept interns.
- If the Internet is shaped like a trash heap, and you are a scavenging crow, then this blog post is like a grey spoon located strategically above a rotting piece of dog meat, which prevents you from consuming the dog meat, caught as you are in the dull grey spoon's upside-down reflection and so you throw away your chopsticks and give up all hope of climbing aboard the starships fuelled by Korean food. You silly goof - learn to appreciate your culture!
- I was taller once. Then I realized all my shoes were at a 90-degree angle.
- With all our online distractions, productivity has flatlined. The imminent solution: feet keyboards, to double our 'qwerty' output. The great intellectual of future ages will be the Surfer-Man.
- Comments on this blog will reach an all-time high, if and only if I discover how to make the comment box smell like my Joop aftershave. Then if you write 'This post stinks' I know you are lying.
- Ever used a drinking straw as an explosive device? Neither have I. But dammit, there I go, handing al-Qaeda another brilliant idea.
- I was going to write a post about all the birds I've never heard about, complete with links of sites I've never visited, but that would be self-defeating. I'll stick to my detailed archive of ideas nobody ever thought of coded in text with the same colour of my blog template background. Don't believe me? Check this out: Dreidels should be given the vote
1/06/2008
More paranoia on the Internet (2005)
You think, I write, imperfect compatibility, we meet and clasp and take a piece of us with us, hold on fast. Margaret Atwood I don’t know you, don't make me think I do. Seduced by her type, she’s just my type, I like her profile, diction and spelling, I like what you write; I like to think I think like you. Drunk on like but afraid of life, imagine my surprise when I saw you with my own eyes, like Vader without his mask, couldn’t scan you with my screen; the world too real to compete with reels, wizard behind curtains reflecting better halves, scaffolding construction and façade, sacred superficie on Sunday promenade, everything is marketing and everything else is bad. Skeletons in my memory cache, trying to quit smoking but addicted to my attention patch. Self-interested philosophy as means to an end, is desire willed to existence what makes light bend? The rules aren’t straight, the planet a sphere, the longest line is a circle and every fact is a veneer. Hey bubba don’t trouble my blessed bubble with your public citizenry or democracy – leave me my fragmented mind, my splintered legions ripe for tyranny, now back to work and curiosity dulled by pomp and verbosity, info-spam-mail from CIALIS, cynical, semi-conscious, half-interested, cancelling engagements, flaccid, yawning, lukewarm.
Happy new year
Total sweet largishness divides a fence, has ten thousand thickets swarming sweetly in a breeze. Over and over, fields of crows and a telephone wire of plovers lounging and niggling termites from a telephone pole. Halftime heroics, lowlife nogoodniks nuzzle each other as lovers in a laneway curse and give their drugs away. Oh we walk well! Oh just down by the bend, each means something to an end, halftime, Miller time, time for fender bender, horse gallop Grendil, it's a self-looping never-ender.
12/27/2007
Tragic Flaw Jam
(preserved in a dusty file since December 2005... I dunno, gotta publish something)
Happy is the word the trolls use, abuse and even lose. People can't be happy when they live within a cave, slap themselves upon the forehead and wonder who to save. The potions I drank, they made me thank (a kind of fantastical think), my grammar was warped and the universe stank. Jello's what I was, my spine like a string, elusive and full of guile like a calculated combinatorial and dictatorially lethal diamond ring. I was under a rock and talking to slugs, I was on all sorts of drugs. I escaped into a rainbow that drizzled from a bottle, I was high on chicken wings and flying pigs and fried turkey wattle. Moses condescended from the mountain to kick the crap out of me, I was laughing as he command-mentalized me; he was old and grey and couldn’t out-dance me. O the ocean was my home (but it was steaming into foam).
I couldn’t care for my kids. I was ketchup and mustard in the same bottle, a condiment unclassifiable, a poisonous mixture brewed from spite. The marvelous magicians were wounded too; I was their hero and leader, but they were alcoholic and impotent too, they wanted me to validate them, to party all night with them. I was tired and confused so I whispered ‘all right’. The devil did a number on me, happy with my trinkets, my blinking squealing ignorance; I was his pet, a protégé, I smelled like a bed of roses and there would never be decay. My mumblings were masterpieces, my farts the sweet perfume, my sins were super-sexy, I was popular at last, I could eat cheese and wear linen, I had a maid from Ethiopia, hell I was on my way to saving the world. I had a 4000-watt speaker system, I could listen to the Boss from blocks away. And it was me who wrote the fairy tales, I was the silky spider trading rhymes for curds and whey. I sat beside the milkmaid and she would swoon at my soul, I could croon and babble and make her blush, yes I was totally on a roll.
But I rotted away that autumn, I was all sugar and no meat, I was the devil’s little bitch, and I had begged him for the beats.
The jester's union returned my registration fees, I was shunted and disowned and left to starve in a heap beside a jeep on a road filled with toads and leading into a gulch. I was struck by lightning not once but twice and my hair went silver grey. Onions rolled out my mouth, my stinky breath made babies and mothers cry and my oh my the warts on my nose grew quite large. My declarations were premature, ejaculations suspicionable, my stakes on the new frontier slipping away like a greased feather. My mind stopped rolling along, I couldn’t keep on keeping on, I was bruised to the bone by my broad sweeping fallacies, my redundant originalities, my peculiar chariots and Phaetonesque fantasies. No one needed to ride the sun, I discovered my quests were foolish and full of holes and the wind blew through me like a needle ripping through my spine, passing out the back and leaving that leaky fluid dripping like a pissing wizard from my mind.
Happy is the word the trolls use, abuse and even lose. People can't be happy when they live within a cave, slap themselves upon the forehead and wonder who to save. The potions I drank, they made me thank (a kind of fantastical think), my grammar was warped and the universe stank. Jello's what I was, my spine like a string, elusive and full of guile like a calculated combinatorial and dictatorially lethal diamond ring. I was under a rock and talking to slugs, I was on all sorts of drugs. I escaped into a rainbow that drizzled from a bottle, I was high on chicken wings and flying pigs and fried turkey wattle. Moses condescended from the mountain to kick the crap out of me, I was laughing as he command-mentalized me; he was old and grey and couldn’t out-dance me. O the ocean was my home (but it was steaming into foam).
I couldn’t care for my kids. I was ketchup and mustard in the same bottle, a condiment unclassifiable, a poisonous mixture brewed from spite. The marvelous magicians were wounded too; I was their hero and leader, but they were alcoholic and impotent too, they wanted me to validate them, to party all night with them. I was tired and confused so I whispered ‘all right’. The devil did a number on me, happy with my trinkets, my blinking squealing ignorance; I was his pet, a protégé, I smelled like a bed of roses and there would never be decay. My mumblings were masterpieces, my farts the sweet perfume, my sins were super-sexy, I was popular at last, I could eat cheese and wear linen, I had a maid from Ethiopia, hell I was on my way to saving the world. I had a 4000-watt speaker system, I could listen to the Boss from blocks away. And it was me who wrote the fairy tales, I was the silky spider trading rhymes for curds and whey. I sat beside the milkmaid and she would swoon at my soul, I could croon and babble and make her blush, yes I was totally on a roll.
But I rotted away that autumn, I was all sugar and no meat, I was the devil’s little bitch, and I had begged him for the beats.
The jester's union returned my registration fees, I was shunted and disowned and left to starve in a heap beside a jeep on a road filled with toads and leading into a gulch. I was struck by lightning not once but twice and my hair went silver grey. Onions rolled out my mouth, my stinky breath made babies and mothers cry and my oh my the warts on my nose grew quite large. My declarations were premature, ejaculations suspicionable, my stakes on the new frontier slipping away like a greased feather. My mind stopped rolling along, I couldn’t keep on keeping on, I was bruised to the bone by my broad sweeping fallacies, my redundant originalities, my peculiar chariots and Phaetonesque fantasies. No one needed to ride the sun, I discovered my quests were foolish and full of holes and the wind blew through me like a needle ripping through my spine, passing out the back and leaving that leaky fluid dripping like a pissing wizard from my mind.
12/19/2007
Bob the Trowel
(as mindless as I can think it)
Bob the Trowel was an unopened bumpkin on the road to revelry. He sang like a mocha man in an underwater tapestry. Bob divided his loves among the wordly, sang sonatas to the gentry and stowed his cash in Burnaby. Leroy Lambada talked him down from the ledge, after the markets crashed and Bob quite lost his head. Bob the trowel took his cue from the Messiah, turned the other cheek and called his ex-girlfriend Snazz a liar. She was busy wondering about Zoroaster the Short-Circuiting Toaster, smushed in a split-second underneath a rollercoaster. Snazz evicted her guppy and smashed a bottle 'top a table (she was drunk on Irish whiskey and halfway to the label). Freedom fighters arrived and called her 'terrorist', it was ostracism 101 and she nearly slashed her wrists. It was Family Guy that saved her, her laughter did return and she sweated out her love of Bob upon the treadmill's tortured burn.
Bob the Trowel was an unopened bumpkin on the road to revelry. He sang like a mocha man in an underwater tapestry. Bob divided his loves among the wordly, sang sonatas to the gentry and stowed his cash in Burnaby. Leroy Lambada talked him down from the ledge, after the markets crashed and Bob quite lost his head. Bob the trowel took his cue from the Messiah, turned the other cheek and called his ex-girlfriend Snazz a liar. She was busy wondering about Zoroaster the Short-Circuiting Toaster, smushed in a split-second underneath a rollercoaster. Snazz evicted her guppy and smashed a bottle 'top a table (she was drunk on Irish whiskey and halfway to the label). Freedom fighters arrived and called her 'terrorist', it was ostracism 101 and she nearly slashed her wrists. It was Family Guy that saved her, her laughter did return and she sweated out her love of Bob upon the treadmill's tortured burn.
12/13/2007
Ideas for upcoming posts:
- an etymological analysis of the words "banjo" and "milkshake" and how they influenced 18th-century historians' interpretations of the Norman conquest. (hey it's half written)
- photos of my pet pigeon, Stoolie "Stooges" MacPuffin
- dialogue featuring opposing opposable thumbs
- rant on monogrammed sweatshirts
- list of my preferred flavours of Italian ices
- noir fiction piece involving a cross-dressing juggler, Kim Jong Il, and American Pie's Jason Biggs. Don't know how it starts but halfway through Clyde "The Glide" Drexler rolls into town with a bazooka, firing rockets at all the trees. "Burn them timbers," he cries -- and he snores constantly. But he gives up militancy, takes up the hookah, and falls into sheesha dependency. To support his habit he impersonates a firefighter who breaks into houses to steal the owner's Wii. NB Drex doesn't actually do those things, but he impersonates someone who does, and so becomes a smash on the mime circuit ... oh yeah the whole thing is mimed. Could be a musical too
- Analysis: "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- Music Man, Decaying Mummy, or Mistress to the Czars?"
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