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Showing posts from April, 2010

time flies, said the bird

untitled ; pen and ink on onion paper. Last day at the office. In for thirteen hours yesterday, straight through lunch, then the graveyard of the parking lot, carrying boxes in darkness. Today's still crashy but I can see the end. A file is just somebody's problem. Sometimes it's a real problem, sometimes not. Either way, after a certain number of piles you just want to set them all on fire. Which is a good time to get out for awhile. I'll have four months at home with my little bird. We'll see how it flies.

mayday

mayday ; mixed media on canvas, 8 x 8 inches. Snowing this morning ... {!}. Sky like road through a forest; you know to keep going, but the light comes in gaps. Strangely, I drove to work for a change, the first time since I don't know when, so I could move some things out of my cubicle ( enough with this stuff in many places; I am not a hedgehog and this is not winter, despite appearances on several fronts). Four more days 'til I'm off on parental leave.

more scenes, seens, not-seens

Sunday morning: two guys in their twenties, one dressed all in black, one dressed all in white. 7:45 a.m. The guy in black was blonde, the guy in white was raven-haired. Of course. The guy in black was more leather and chains, while the guy in white wore flimsy layers, soft fabrics. He flowed . Side by side, hands in their pockets, coming home from who knows where. Going north on Division. Somewhere else in the city, two crumpled girls hating the sunlight. Saturday afternoon: watching C make a left turn on a red light. An easy, lazy kind of turn. Just as she finished the manoeuvre I said, You just made a left turn on a red light. She took her foot off the gas, slowed right down, starting looking around and behind her -- What? I did not! Did I? -- like she could reverse out of it and take it back, make time go backwards. Just keep going , I said.

it's friday

Friday ; pen and ink on paper (old math paper), 7.5 x 4.5 inches. It's Friday, a bit fuzzy, vaguely somewhere beyond punctuation. I have one week of work left before I go on four months of parental leave. A million things I should do, a million more that are just fading away. Like I've said to C recently, sometimes you just need the reset button. If someone could come into your office today and hypnotize you into thinking that it was the first day of your new job, would you do it? What if everyone else was hypnotized too, so that slate was effectively wiped clean? No bad history, no toxic personalities, no malaise, no cynicism, no seeping despair. Even the coffee still tastes good. Or maybe you could be hypnotized into this guy , so that you just don't care. I'd say it's a push. Have a good weekend!

Scene

Scene ; pen and ink on paper (old math textbook page), 7.5 x 4.5 inches. Seen or Heard, Lately: x} My breath, this morning. x} A syringe, on the sidewalk. x} Some kid channelling Meatloaf -- the black trench coat and the black t-shirt and the black jeans and the headphones and that certain bemused corpulence, barreling along. x} Sticky black midges. In clouds. In thousands. You walk through them and listen to the miniature hailstorm, pinging off your coat, off your skin. Then it's a straight line to a sink, and digging them out of your ears. x} The Telephone Girl. First she was at one pay telephone -- and anyone who uses a phonebooth these days gets my attention -- and then she was at the next one, all in the course of my walk home the other night. Like she timewarped ahead of me. Both times she seemed scrambly and frantic with her big manilla envelope. But she still looked okay, and I thought she might even be middle class, until she turned away from the phone to talk to a guy wh

everyone ...

everyone is someone to tip into ; mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches. The string series continues. * * * * * Did you have a good weekend? Ours wasn't bad. My back improved -- slowly -- and things hobbled along. We still went swimming on Saturday afternoon; Oona quickly splashed herself into exhaustion. That night we watched the Guy Ritchie version of Sherlock Holmes ... apparently, he's a bit of an action hero now. Good for him. On Sunday morning I finished the painting above. C did a ton of yard work (read: stretchy-neck stuff), and I made a roast pork and baked squash for supper. It was delicious.

yesterday ...

Yesterday? Not so much. Because yesterday was one long experiment in pain. How much will it hurt to walk? To roll over? To stand up? My back was bad in the morning and it quickly degenerated throughout the day. It felt like metal bands were being tightened around my hips and across my lower back, with a shiny little star of pain just right of centre. I was walking around like an old man with his careful sideways steps, like some world burglar not up to the job. Chest out and tipped: I was like Redd Foxx creaking around the stage, all agony and expletives and tottering rage. In short: I was fucked. *Sigh*. This seems to happen every month or two. I guess it goes with the territory of being tall, and getting older. C didn't really understand until I cancelled my studio night. And she didn't really *really* get it until she watched me make three attempts to sit up. But then she dug out some muscle relaxants, and I finally got a decent night's sleep. And today I'm on the

letters to stella

Alien vs Oona

Last night Oona and I watched that old ghost story otherwise known as Ridley Scott's Alien . I tried to point out to her the Ten-Little-Indians construction of the plot set against the metaphor of the 'other' within us, the darkness we trigger, and let in, so that it grows and transforms and becomes the invader, the predator, and ultimately our destroyer. I thought the director's commentary might be especially insightful on these points, as well as letting us see behind the curtain of one of the landmarks of modern cinema. But then Oona replied in her usual way, which is to say that she farted three times and fell asleep on my chest, so I just put her to bed. Oh well. *I* enjoyed the movie. They all looked so young! And if nothing else there is something about Yaphet Kotto, being all jive and fun and angry, that always makes me smile. Anyway, I think we all know who the real monster is ...

Fresh Air Nazis

Isn't that funny? ; mixed media on canvas, 8 x 8 inches, the string series continues. One of the problems with spring (one of the many problems) is that it unleashes all the Fresh Air Nazis. My lovely wife C, for example, will run in from ten minutes "in the garden" (read: in our backyard, which seeps with dead mice, wet cardboard and old pee) and immediately start throwing open windows. "This house is like a furnace!" she'll say, and run down to the basement so she can take an axe to the furnace. It is at this point that I'll have to remind her that babies, despite their vigorous immune systems and love of mountaineering, do not exactly prosper when inflicted with booming draughts of ice-chilled air. (I also have to remind her that they equally dislike falling off the edge of beds -- something about the verticality of the whole thing -- but that's another story.) I often tell C that she should have married my brother Colin, who will gladly walk int

burn baby burn

Yesterday I had to quit a freelance job. I had to quit for both practical and personal reasons. It was one of those funny sort of freelance jobs, where you're only charging within the client's means. But then maybe all freelance work is funny that way, because unless you've got the kind of operation where someone is asking you for time sheets, you almost never submit a bill for the total amount of work that you've done. And this one was *really* funny that way, because it was for something I believe in, and I'd signed on to just help as much as I could, while keeping the costs below a certain (charitable) number. And then I burned out. That's the trouble; you burn out. It's like taking your car to a garage and saying to the mechanic, Will you promise to fix my car for $600? , and he agrees, and then you've got him. Because after he's fixed the brakes and replaced the fuel pump, you can say, Great, now can you do something about that fucking noise I

seen and found ...

... on the way to work the other morning ... ... ... a large grey bird, scotched and in the gutter. I would not have noticed him had it not been for the very neat hole in the centre of his chest, and the shadow of the cavity within. ... this page (above) from a book about the history of Africa, lying neatly in the street. All I could think was, Well, there you go; screwed again. ... some kid, maybe three or four years old, sticking his head out the window. It struck me how seldom I'd seen that in my life. I mean, you see it on school buses, but those are little more than prisons on wheels (I was always -- ingloriously -- a town kid who walked to school).

another whacking easter

*Easter Weekend* and I had my old friend Stella Maria to see. She's six. This means that she's still a bit rang-y, as in orangutang-y, so I'll still get hit with a stick at some point, no matter how much chocolate and freezies I deliver. On the upside, our conversations do seem to happen more by design than just falling down the occasional rabbit hole. Indeed, she *did* tell me many fine things this weekend. When I phoned ahead, I listened to her repeat my promise that I'd be arriving around 1:30. She must have said it five times. Then she told her mom that I'd be there at 5:30 sharp. She told me that she'd read over 229 000 books, and that she had a personal inventory of 89 books about animals. She informed me that Elmo was for babies, and that she had no desire to do the hokey-pokey. She announced that she and Ray-Ray were getting married. Ray-Ray is a cat. She told me that there are many kinds of aliens, but that nearly all of them try to pass themselves

Easter Weekend

Well here we are at Easter, otherwise known as that long weekend in April , which may or may not have *something* to do with Jesus, or chocolate, or eggs. Anyway. The important part, I think, is April. Because that does come with some degree of hope. I recently helped my friend Jill put together her blog , and if you think of these things in terms of character, then you'd have to ascribe a good many virtues to this cheerful site, mainly in the way of optimism and helpfulness. I mean, she's a naturopathic doctor and all that, so she almost *has* to be positive, but people like that are very favorable to have around (especially around people like me, who spend most of our time reading books about mongol hordes and watching the horizon for mushroom-shaped clouds). Please check her out . I hope everyone has a good long weekend. We're going to Ottawa and Montreal for part of it, and I'm looking forward to seeing my ol' pal Stella again.