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Showing posts from June, 2012

only had a heart

It's the Canada Day long weekend! What do I feel about Canada Day? Not much. And I think that's entirely the point. I once heard Ricky Gervais say that he could watch England compete at almost anything, that he'd always stop and watch and cheer and want desperately for England to win. Whereas I only cheer for Canada in sports where we're not supposed to win. Never hockey, for example. Because the chest-thumping morons don't need any encouragement. Because chest-thumping (and -- hopefully -- moronic behaviour) isn't very Canadian.

off to see the wizard

Well, if the wizard lives anywhere, it's Montreal -- every trip I take there I spend half my time in wonderment, the other half in confusion. So much energy and style and tastelessness and ruin. The city is a sea of orange cones. Can I go down that street? How do I get through that door without touching it? On the traffic ramps we tell Oona to say a prayer that the whole thing won't fall down on us. Busy people in pretty cars , she says. Mentalist. At a red light the guy beside us gets tired of waiting and just goes anyway. Downtown I see a girl wearing a full-length flamenco dress, complete with a slit up the thigh. The intersection is a mess, a mass of swarming people because the street has collapsed a few days before into a giant sinkhole. Getting from the parkade to our hotel room requires three elevators, two escalators, eleven doors and fourteen turns. All worth it to see my niece Stella. Catherine and the girls drove down as well (Nick stayed home,

fifty thousand

you know ; mixed media on canvas; 8 x 8 x 1.5 inches. * * * * * Last week Google informed me (or rather, I consulted Google, who tracks this sort of thing, and tells me what statistics I need to be informed of) that this blog had achieved fifty thousand page views (or visits). I felt profoundly underwhelmed. Oh no, that's a big number , my wife said. Hmm , I replied, not really listening. But I have since found myself looking at that number and trying (in a searching but wandering and very un-Google-like manner) to process it.  First of all, how true is that total? Not very, I suspect. I would guess at least five thousand of those page views are from robots. I used to enable spam filters but people complained about what a pain in the ass it was to leave comments (Google filters demand that you reveal yourself as human by re-typing a password). So now I let the robots in. They visit, leave their links to organic vitamins or 3D animation courses or nude celebrities, and

splash

THE CITY a blind study in cool. Puts her in an evil mood. This lasts ten years. By the end of it, all she could do was go into the bathroom and splash water on her face, trying to wake from it, trying to break free. Didn’t work. She’d stand there, bent over as if in prayer – not her own prayer but the exotic prayers she saw on TV – collecting water in her cupped hands, and when she splashed she’d bend even lower, so as to make less of a mess of it. Didn’t work. The evidence of her unhappy splashing was left all over the rim of the sink, on the front of her pressed blouse, in slivered drops at the base of her neck, in splattered patterns on the floor. The public bathroom cold, echoey. No one there to see or care. Not caring was an integral part of the city, of the study, and her evil, evil mood. As she stood there with the water running, catching and scooping it in handfuls, leaning in to throw it against her face, into her eyes, against her nose, her forehead (rubbing hard, with her in

magicians

the magician never explains; mixed media on canvas, 8 x 8 x 1.5 inches, in the shop * * * * * So many things disconcerting but none more so than the Beach Boys through a supermarket sound system during Saturday morning groceries. Always something deeply wrong with them. Looking through HELLO! Canada at the checkout -- does it ever seem to you that Jennifer Aniston is just a smallish woman with a perky nose? Yet the fascination goes on and on. She's like Elizabeth Taylor without the rough stuff. The checkout clerk tells me that ants will not cross a line of cayenne pepper. I don't know , I say, these ones are pretty big .  * * * * * A kind of ant-pocalypse on Saturday, opening a cupboard and whole bunches falling out, then the scramble to escape. Big black ant squishings. Grind them under your heel, wipe them on the rug. The ant traps promise to KILL THE QUEEN, but that sounds a bit like magic. * * * * * Helped a friend move a lathe. Belleville lo

Last night, on television, I watched a bee change the frequency/pitch of its wing beat, so as to lure a flower into opening up, and then spraying it with pollen. Greedy, magical bee.

Slowly but surely, the bees disappeared. It was called Colony Collapse Disorder. In the beginning people would say, I read something in the newspaper the other day, about all these bees that are dying . These were page-six or -seven stories. Bad but not believing. Then they moved up. In the order of things. Then the language turned threatening. The terms had dire warnings embedded right in them, and names became conflated with consequences. The bees: they left their hives and flew into oblivion. The problem with bees is that they are domesticated creatures; there are no feral bees left. Once they leave the hive, the farm, the company of man, that’s it. It was amazing to think of the weight they carried, and how far. Vampire Mites were certainly part of the problem – the sight of bees with deformed wings was appalling. But there was a greater sickness at work here. The bees behaved like rats leaving a sinking ship, only without panic, and no attempt to swim. * * * *

spiders

Spiders I live at the Lady Dorchester for two years. It is a short, beige building at the end of a cul-de-sac. Beige is too generous. On the east side is an empty lot – cracked pavement split by waist-high weeds and glittering with flecks of paint and broken glass. On the west side is a raised brick bungalow with stained curtains pressed against the windows. It is empty, and the house is for sale, although the realtor’s sign lies in pieces on the sidewalk. Between the Lady Dorchester and the house is a laneway but it doesn’t go anywhere – just trails off after a hundred metres or so into the high grass. Beyond that are fields of garbage and old washing machines and eventually some trees and a little crick filled with tires and some shopping carts. The Lady Dorchester has no shade. The apartment windows are stuffed with tinfoil and faded blankets. Inside it smells like dog, cigarettes, piss and sweat. Maybe some hash oil. The overall effect reminds me of rotting grain. T

heiwa park

My father always warned me never to get involved with women. He said marriage was expensive and disappointing, and that love was flawed because love was never happy standing still. “Even a loyal dog will die on you,” he said. Our modest apartment was too small for a dog. My father was generally an unhappy man. When he passed away it was like a shrug in the darkness. It was up to me to organize the funeral. Besides mother and myself, two officials from the company attended. The most affordable place I could find for his remains was on the fourth floor of the Takichi Grave Apartments. His locker was three feet long, two feet wide and one foot high. It contained an urn with his ashes, his favourite suit, a pair of shoes, a newspaper and a tin of dessert cigars. I continued living in our apartment. My mother cooked and cleaned for me, but in a way she now needed me more than I needed her, not only for my income as a computer programmer but for the occasional exchange of words, the s

kings and queens

O god, everyone loves a parade, don't they? Everyone except me that is, who must have something leaking from his fun chromosome (just this weekend C called me "gloomy"), although I do get a bit righteous about it when certain overgrown parades -- for nothing more than celebrating someone filling a job posting for which there were no other candidates -- cost 1.3 billion pounds. Jesus. Some solace to be had from the Stanley Cup playoffs, which have been infinitely more enjoyable this year, mostly because there are no Canadian teams left (and thus many happy weeks of not having to hear the phrase "Canada's team"), but also because the teams that did advance were exactly the kind of teams that NHL headquarters fears and loathes, as in small market or no market, revealing the whole production for what it is, which is professional athletes playing for a trophy that is meaningless outside of the sport. Go Kings!

june is story time

Kim moves her stuff down to the basement. It’s cooler down there in the half-finished room beside the old washer and dryer. Maybe ten years ago her dad had used it for an office, he was always saying he was going to start this business or that, one year it was real estate and the next it was an ice cream truck and then it was 3D cameras, there’s still a desk and a blank notepad and a cork board with a small red poster tacked to it which reads MAKE IT HAPPEN in gold-coloured lettering. Kim can tell its age just by looking at the font, it’s all fat and funky like the sixties. Kim takes the desk apart, packs everything under the stairs. She thinks it’s probably better that her dad is dead, because that way he’s escaped having to follow through with anything. Kim’s new set-up is simple: a mattress, a fitted sheet, a comforter, a pillow, a small pile of clothes, a little reading lamp and ten books she is determined to finish. If I’m going to suffer then I might as well enrich my mind, s