"I got a job as a Chinaman..."

Bob Dylan, on how he chose his career (Playboy interview, 1966):

Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

Blizz blather from the Hem-hawser

Dear punk buddies, I greet you! Welcome to my thoughts. A few ground rules: do not step on the walls, the floor or inhale the fumes.

Ok first item: shrill moans from the froo-froo Malignotech. Who disagrees? Good then, the others can shut their pie holes. We all vote in favour, froo froo, whoop do doo.

Ok next item: zonking in the parlour when your mother's on the phone - good idea or swinishly ogresome? Aha, five hands raised in runamok moodiness - ok sirs and dames, dissent noted and your names forever blacklisted. As they say in Purvish County - please count your friends on my middle finger! {to be continued}

"It's WHO you know..."

Words break hearts
study invisibility
few syllables from thinkmaker,
stunned silence

imaginative laziness
narrowminded nepotism
penchant for pre-approved lists
distorts reality
repeats history
'we only accept
published authors'
ensures mediocrity
unplowed potential

I don't have patience
for unsurprising revelations

afraid to lose a job
ie enemy of truth
I don't love truth when I might die.

Halifax café

Halifax on Blowers street in the afternoon, by George you come here too.

Goulash grammage and first past the postage, loco, no locus of control, soul sold - crown to soles. I was swooning like a big baboon. Sweet as sugar in a carrot cake, freshly baked and iced with all the fixings of a fake.

Insert a guffah, laugh at the almighty, sing sad sugar to outshine Aphrodite. Opus magnum, drink me a gin. I was quick with my wallet and pricked on a pin.

A typo turned my mind on something unthought and worth a speed bump, like pixie swill at a vegan cafe and translating from the French 'cafe au lait' suddenly I have a headache today, how little I am, shriveled and fearful, a hatful of feathers and belly of beer, stuck somewhere in outer nowheresville, crunching my gears.

Pass out fridge magnets on the corner to pump up my band, we play five free shows on the sidewalk this week, hear us, pity us, fill our hats as we weep.

Okay bean bag bean burrito mocha man sits and steals a wireless signal, down looking at the downtrodden waltzing past with squeegee rags and cigarette drags, I have huffed and puffed my poverty away - I took a day job and jumped into the bay - relief from desperation struck me with dismay

Sideways I touch this. Never a straight line, a direct line to your soul, downward digging devilish mole. Stream no filter no filtration such frustration we were first for elation digital pagination, same topic as every other, remembering how I was in awe at the Smothers Brothers. Turning off the monitor in disgust, looking for a pink thermometer to measure my distrust, then burning all my albums (protects my memories from rust).

"That was my nickname in high school..."

'Big Taco'
'The Sweaterless Peasant'
'Donut King'
'Harlem's Roundest'
'The Juice Wagon'
'Axe Sharpener'
'Sweet and Low'
'El Dominio'
'Poison Peacock'
'Thor's Werewolf'
'Black Fungus'
'Mocha Flavour'
'Sticky Buns'...?

I play this game with certain people I really like, called "That was my nickname in high school."

It is usually inspired by odd noun-phrase snippets, hilarious adjective-verb combinations and come-by-chance signage. The point of the game is to interrupt a conversation with a completely random interjection involving the last words noticed or spoken. Eg. " 'Razor toes' ? Funny you mention it; that was my nickname in high school!" This de-kilters the conversation just enough to be amusing.

"That was my nickname" is based on 'spontaneous decontextualization' (a term I just now invented) and keeping an open mind to the absurd at all times. It's a fun game.

five bucks if you can use these words in a paragraph

Muskrat
tongue
wasp
cardboard
semiconductor
queequeg
marzipam
bloat
half-nelson
fusion
longevity
distill
benzodiazepine
far flung
Madras
yosemite
ululate
Vishnu
qatar
impish

The Great Gay Peacock flies to Newark

(yet another brilliant story...)

In the town of Littlepocket, New Jersey was a small band of onion-eating postal workers. Postal workers were not popular as a rule, and the onions made it worse. The onions arrived, strangely, not in the mail, but on a bus filled with Mexican sweatshop workers who were employed in the shoe-manufacturing side of the Hudson River.

Littlepocket was home to the Precision Dance Competition, where young men and women stole away and precisely danced the Koochoo, the Wombat and the Delorean [recalls Back to the Future].

One of the great hopes of the dance world was Edgar F. Gunwaddle, who was sympathetic to the Mexican plight and grew visibly reddened whenever his mom made reference to tacos, or hired Mexicans to water her suburban lawn.

Edgar was an activist, and the dancing made his a celebrated cause, for let it not be said that a man's legs have never danced him into the record books.

Edgar worked night and day on the Peacock, a crazed dance that made him sweat. The Peacock was a stinky dance, and it was not without practical and social peril. Edgar was a bashful stinkmaker in his private life who refused to fart or even be caught without deodorant in his over-the-shoulder laptop sack. Imagine, then, the stink of sweat.

Peacocks were plentiful, as it was 1999. The great peacock hunt had not fully decimated the beplumaged game fowl and many fine feathers spread across the eastern seaboard. They clogged the propellors of ships, blocking up the drainage pipes and littering the beach coast.

Storkels Mendacus Mulberry was a beach worker charged with general maintenance and shoreline vigilance. He strutted about the surf's edge like a grand Iroquois chief, or a great janitor from beyond the mists of centuries. Mulberry drove an elevated hovercraft across the glades and bays of the New Jersey peacock-feather delta. He searched for flotsam and jetsam through the lens of his optical X-Viewtron binoculars and cussed at the clouds whenever they threatened his sorties with a contratempal rain.

Obadiah Von Boatwater was Mulberry's liege upon the hovercraft. The man was a grand Ethiopian chessmaster, a top ranked pogo stick-hopper who somehow found himself exiled to the deltas of New Jersey. The Nubian could sing great Sinatra and his plaintive guttural rumbles did not just clear phlegm from his throat but somehow attracted the peacocks of the delta.

These three characters collided one night in mid-river, Boatwater and Mulberry in their patrol craft and Edgar F. Gunwaddle in his bare bones laser. It was a mischance that scuttled a great dancer's career. Gunwaddle drowned and as he choked and thrashed the two shoreline vigilantes splashed at him with paddles to stoke some buoyancy into the man. But this could only aggravate him and Gunwaddle sank to the bottom of the man-claiming Hudson, kicking and thrashing his last glorious Peacock down into the mud.

The police arrived but could not reclaim the waterlogged corpse and their dredgings only returned sundry rotten planks and tires from the riverbed.

[unfinished of course]

CNE

sweet smells my mind

remembering her hair,

jetscreams everywhere

airshow blow-by

blonde with blue eye

what time wasted I

and now must we die

having lived just now

alive

Smiles from my other life

Heartening proof that the Internet has not fully annihilated the past: MiSC.ots!

yee-haws while you can

Astonishingly correct, derelict and sweaty.
smashing horrific devilishly explicit - I'm out of honorifics
- I'm simply a sleuth
freakishly Turkish and bonded to teeth
I'd mix a wet martini but I've got no sweet vermouth

washed into whirlpools and dried on the dock,
unlocked and spun out, it's eternadoubt,
so erase graffiti, my dear Sylvester-Tweety
"Cartoons are what I'm on about."

I quiver as I wait: it's a date with Michaela Simmons Jasper Tate!
High fives to Ebeneezer 'the Colon Cleaner' Johnson-Skinner, bean-counting with tweezer feelers; he scammed a scumbag subscription from the Publishers' Clearing House
"online beejeezus-healers' hot summer sale spectacular" with free
push-button crackhead codebreakers and hot-flash menopausal McDonald's grandma pie-a-la-mode-baking features, three to a box, twist off the box-top and you've got yourself a cure to chronic chest congestion and dry, hacking throat coughs...

It is difficult...

writing in a vacuum.

The world must cease to be.

The world without us... where cupcakes are free.

This aquarium sits on a fractalized squiggle, I don't recognize it, it's artificial.

Oh to bore you with details, to banish all reference points, to explode the sun. Oh to be done, being bored, to outlive the One. Bored at insignificance, lament the last living existentialist, to wonder why we create new digits, memory so easily erased, cannot be etched on immortal copper, bronzed and stuck in one place. I am happy today, borderline silly, all the way gay, love my sweet woman, we cycled by the river and kissed each other's shoulders - oh what a day.

An unnecessary display of force. 'These aren't the droids you're looking for' a quicker passage to my illegal Millenium Falcon.

Blanket

(no excuses, none necessary)

I mimed in silence, rode rainbows to Venice, through cloudy gondoliers with typhoon paddles, to the glistening summer evening ponds lit up by fireflies and bonfire light.
...yeah I drained my skull in the basement,
cleared out mucus, marveled at the miracle blank canvass, the second-third-fourth-chancedness, depackaging, gleaming white casement, superficie, public relations statement, another image replacement.

Joy is no longer obsolete - I've got blastoff feet, enough-strength-to-achieve-orbit feet.
Regeneration - reinvention, I've achieved meaning, self-deception recognition, so cancel that part of you that is a whore
You are better than this, my dear one, and you can ask for more.

Why do it? Why give in? When nothing is forbidden except the word sin — you give away your cookies and end up in the dust bin.

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!)

6 things that bother me about Optimus Prime

1. His name isn't Optimus Del Sexy.
2. Energon, smenergon. Trailer-trucks run on diesel fuel, so Optimus is far from carbon-neutral.
3. The Autobots are awesome mech-aliens with the firepower to destroy whole cities. You'd think their leader would maybe have a girlfriend.
   
4. Tens of thousands of kids dress like him every year — but has Optimus ever given you Hallowe'en candy?
5. I'm disturbed by all these scenes where Jazz keeps riding up into the trailer.
6. Humanity-destroying evil is a turnoff, but at least Megatron knows what he wants.

Funniest thing I overheard this morning

'It's such a shame you are whoring yourself, just so you can one day publish a book about what a whore you are.'

More pelican notes

If I ever get old I want to be like you.

I just listened to you sum up the meaning of life, in under two minutes, and I want to listen again and again

Pure feeling wells, cannot dwell or oversell – let’s call things as they are, so we can be sure of just one thing, the fullness you find feeding hungry people, there are those in particular who ask me for just a little more, and there is always more.

If I have to start the conversation well I’ll tell about my appreciation for the sun. If you ask me anything I give detailed replies.

My head aches, I’ve been soaring. Can’t make sense of an old man’s epiphany, expanding to include the dawn of the century.

Full of
and overflowing
So thankful for what I’m owing

Fear accusation of triteness; I don’t express my love for you simply out of politeness.

These are your eyes

multicoloured flashes
green blue lightning
strangers ogle, waitresses gush
lucky me
I bask all day
puts a stupid grin
on me;
the irony is that
wherever you gaze we
see the
brilliance only
you can't see.

(and mirrors aren't the same)

I was on hiatus...

...due to extreme happiness. Just gimme couple seconds, ok

To tide you over...

8 forthcoming certainties:

1. After a comet passes less than 5,000 miles from the Northern hemisphere, Texas will self-replicate, somewhere in Europe. Cowboys who speak French will no longer be shot at.
2. Small toads will get together and discuss ways to become even smaller. They will marvel at nearby grasshoppers, who will spit at the toads and call them whores.
3. Light switches will finally get together and demand that we stop tickling them.
4. The number of dogs in the world will fluctuate wildly after the International Zoological Society redefines 'dog' as 'a four-legged creature too large to be hurled from a slingshot'.
   
5. Madonna will finally declare war on Pakistan. Pakistan will lose horribly, and change its name to Rosie O'Donnell - a sad nation of defeated radical Islamic lesbians.
6. The insanity is complete when all mucus is banned from airports, except for what can be placed in a clear re-sealable 90mL container.
7. As global warming drenches coastal cities with rising floods, aqua-commuting will become increasingly sophisticated, resulting in advancements such as moisture-proof laptops, inkless newspapers and an underwater Starbucks.
8. U2 will finally start to suck, after naming a future album Abraham Lincoln's Groovy Gettysburg Go-Go. Lincoln's ghost will haunt the band, driving Bono insane, until he begs the Edge to shoot him in a crowded theatre. In the same spirit Larry Mullen, Jr. will free Adam Clayton, who it turns out was an Irish slave who could not play the bass worth a lick.

Feed the dragon #68

(until I think of something interesting...)

Marvellous minute in an ocean of crunk. Cut to Mr. Dressup and a copper-plated trunk. Puppets self-assemble and chatter over brunch. I've asked for strawberry banana and the robes of a monk. The brother sat down and began to whistle, rubbed my stubbled face until I would bristle, "Touch me not - I'm a model; this pose is for the magazine!" then I admitted to the doctor I'm allergic to tartrazine. Cheetos dropped from the sky like hydrogenated butterflies, but I'm a bee sting baby and dislike the honey hives...

15 more astonishing predictions

(just, because)

1. Ann Coulter's new book, This is How to Skin a Cat, will receive horrible reviews.
2. A reality tv show Communist Stars will feature Danny DeVito, aka the red dwarf.
3. Anthropologists in Montreal will argue that the invention of the wheel was merely a fortunate by-product of primitive man's repeated failed attempts to invent the bagel.
4. The Association of Fast-Food Mascots will be sullied by scandal when Grimace steps forward and admits to being proof that, yes, your face will stay that way.
5. Clothes hooks and hangers will be obsolete with the discovery of self-levitating clothes. In turn, self-levitating clothes will be obsolete with the discovery of clothes that leave the house on their own and go to the office for you, allowing everyone to stay at home and make sweet sweet love.
6. Nutritionists will announce that 85 percent of the average person's recommended daily allowance of niacin can be found in fiery car crashes. However, saner heads will point out that car crashes far exceed the RDA of brain shrapnel, causing nutritionists to back away from their prior claim, to the relief of everyone.
7. Mortuaries will - unsurprisingly - tip their hand in the abortion debate, when the Association of Undertakers says that all women should have the right to an abortion, as long as all fetuses have the right to a funeral.
8. Science will achieve a new low, after an apparently useless multi-million-dollar study is released which proves that being peed on by a camel causes hiccups. This discovery forges an unlikely alliance among scientists, the Christian Right and Middle Eastern camel breeders — after a further study proves that hiccups cure atheism.
9. Another study will show that violence among teenagers is not caused by video games. Conversely, video-game violence will be inextricably linked to video-game designing adults who were violent as children, teenagers, and adults.
10. Procrastination will reach epidemic proportions, when 'a stitch in time' is revealed to save nothing at all — because Velcro has become mandatory.
11. PETA will once again protest the signs of the Zodiac, and achieve a small victory when 'Aquarius' agrees to change its name to 'Aquarium.' Unfortunately for the animal rights organization, goldfish will then be hunted to extinction.
12. Antitrust legislators will rule against God's dominion over heaven and Earth, citing an unfair monopoly. God will phone Bill Gates to seek commiseration, but Bill Gates will be unsympathetic, and hang up. God will smite Bill Gates with Microsoft Vista.
13. Savvy bakeries will get out of the breadmaking business, and go into the perfume business selling bread-scented lines. Calvin Klein will latch onto this crossover notion, open a bakery and make a killing selling loaves of bread that taste like Elle Macpherson.
14. Archaeological evidence reveals that one of the marvels of the Ancient World 'jumped the shark' back in 1350 BC, when in an attempt to appeal to the youth demographic, the Sphinx stopped asking its famous riddles and simply queried Egyptian passersby with the rather unchallenging 'Do you know what the Sphinx is cooking?'
15. Lobe-nibbling lovers will become understandably paranoid - at the same time, marketers of nacho chips to cannibals will leap for joy - after Oprah proclaims that human ears dipped in salsa are simply delicious.