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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Another Extremely Blurry Post

Don't have much time so here it is:

1. Spicy Korean foods could easily power our most advanced starships. But it takes gastronomical ambition.
2. Environmental degradation fouls my mood. I'd sign up for the nearest reforestation project 'cept the signup sheet itself draws my tears.
   
3. A loud gong to announce the arrival of each email would never rival the popularity of that Guitar Hero game.
4. You need not whisper in my presence: my iPod trackpad is rotated clockwise to the max.
   
5. 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.
6. Ever think about why wooly mammoths got stuck frozen in ice? They must have had extremely inept interns.
7. 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!
   
8. I was taller once. Then I realized all my shoes were at a 90-degree angle.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. Ever used a drinking straw as an explosive device? Neither have I. But dammit, there I go, handing al-Qaeda another brilliant idea.
12. 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

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.

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