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.

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.

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?"

Poof Dervish

Screed magnet motorhead said "I am ghetto war slave" as she drove long nails into the knave. She brave, enmeshed in a maze. This day, this minute, hopping like an unkilled snapper on a skillet. I don't look, stare into sidewalk air, this jazz evening green tea becomes me, I haven't revealed the rules while winning the game, which isn't entirely fair.

Unlike tall soda boys, loud tweedy-duddies, we don't speak like sentences tend to speak, spoken thoughts unbroken plots and narrow corridors. I don't publish, I don't petition, I sit at home and read books about investments and nutrition. I have 5 minutes to write this, so I've lost after having 11 days to fight this. We build it up, it overflows, who will click? Thickness that sickness, sun of a brickness.

Extremely Blurry Post

I have only a couple seconds, ok:

• First, LOVE the new LEOPARD. It takes away so many compu-noyances from my OS X life-cycle! MacIntosh, thy name is... satisfaction.
  
• Next -- anyone seen The Wire? Great show -- apparently -- but neither have I. And what's this about a serial killer named Dexter? Another great show I intend to keep hearing about from other people.
  
• I wonder, how do you move your apartment into a bunch of boxes, when you've been living all this time outside of a box. Is that all my life is, a bunch of boxable crap to be put in a box? Yes it is.
• I wish I spoke Gaelic. Also, I wish I knew why.
• I've been told I have a hair dangling from my jacket. But not every day.
• Nobody talks like this any more: "I AM A ROBOT! GIVE ME CANDY!" I mean, Hallowe'en was soooo long ago.
• People don't give the Taxman enough credit. Did John and George die in vain? The Beatles made music for a reason. So pay your taxes, while my keyboard gently weeps.
  
• If I was a whale with digestion problems, I would consider outsourcing my stomach functions to a school of piranha.
• Proselytize all you like, you cannot stop sidewalk litterbugs. My solution: sidewalk sledgehammers.
• When donuts are finally shaped like the infinity symbol, every donut could last forever. Coffee Time's two-day-old product will finally be appealing in comparison.
  
• I've yet to make my mark on the puppet theatre scene. I've also never climbed a skyscraper using just the stairs. These will be my dying regrets.
  

Inauspicious comeback

We are drunk, loving lifelessness, fill each day with nightlong bluster. So contain what you can't create (contain it, that is, explain it: drain it of life). Drink wine with someone else's wife, raw steak tartare with your wit, your carving knife.

The approval I seek: my mind's eye's Everest peak. Blind to what I seek. Pride won't let me speak.

Don't name names or play blame games, lay in bed with collectors of strife. He loved her, and she swallowed his forboding incoherence, left him a beggar in heaven, silent and innocent.

Key to success: possess pretension to transcend daily drudgery -- never mind what a masterpiece monotony may make.

Insects are exalted somehow: silk from worms, jewels from bottom-feeders, diamonds from coal, gold from oil. (Are dinosaurs Catholic? We are the agents of their ascension, resurrecting fossil fuel corpses to inject into the stratosphere).

Don't mind me, while you drink coffee, quietly having a religious experience.

Grimly gathering dust by court order, my card-castle dictionary's writhing collapse. I'm still stupefied by bricks and mortar. How do buildings go up - who could plan that well? I know why they fall. A well-intentioned man pleases no one at all. What sticks gather Earth; what's lost in the entropy? Include unwritten notes from my latest symphony.

"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.