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Showing posts from February, 2015

and then my eyes turned black, because i'd filled them with ink

Reading the New York Times Book Review for February 22nd, 2015  * ––Did you know that you can go on a transatlantic cruise with acclaimed actress, artist and philanthropist Jane Seymour? WELL YOU CAN. The Queen Mary 2 leaves port on June 3rd! Just contact your travel agent by clapping your hands and blinking –– very hard –– to the tune of Live and Let Die .  ––Jeffrey Archer is out of jail? That seems quick. ––Stewart O'Nan is one of those good writers that will never, ever be famous. Sorry, Stuart!  ––Someone wrote a book about all the corruption in the Afghan government. Shocker. Don't tell me that war was a total waste of time/treasure/lives! ––For some reason, looking at the Best Seller Lists makes me close my eyes and imagine Eddie Murphy singing 'Party All the Time'. ––The 'Bookends' section –– a page of opposing views between two writers –– asks, "Does fiction have the power to sway politics?" To which I could only

little books, big fates

Oona likes to make little books. Fine, fine. I'll even bring home blank accordion booklets for her, and show her the magic of folding. Of course, for Oona there is only really one story, and that story only ends one way. To be fair, that rain of giant black swirls does look pretty deadly.

boy sad

If all my experiences at the dentist were made into a movie, and that movie had a soundtrack, then that soundtrack would lean heavily on The Moody Blues.  If you're like me, and your teeth have all the stability of an archaelogical dig run by Sid Vicious, then it's quite easy to start feeling sorry for yourself when the dental hygienist looks at your x-rays and exclaims, I can't even understand what's going on here, you've had so much work done since your last imaging!  At one point I even told her not to look so worried. And it's always been this way. I remember talking politics with visiting dental nurses (they set up in the kindergarten trailer, just off the school yard) when I was in Grade 4. They laughed and laughed, their best little customer.  A million years ago, in a downtown Winnipeg apartment that literally shook from the bus traffic below, I wrote the following story, which ended up in a 2001 issue of the Queen Street Quarterly (the

little minds, closed for business

About twice a month –– almost always on a Sunday –– Oona and I walk to the library. We make an afternoon of it. She's always excited to go.  Today we did the same, bundled up under the dazzling winter sun. But the library was closed. Closed, the sign read, for both Sunday and Monday (Family Day). I wanted to leave my own note:  Dear Library, You can be closed for Sunday.  You can be closed for Monday. You cannot be closed for both. Try to be fucking relevant,  For the people who still love you. Postscript: The story had a happy ending for Oona, who got to go to Menchie's.

what have i done to deserve this?

jenny hunger / mixed media on cradled wood panel / 8 x 10 inches –   –   – The (lovely) weather today, here in (lovely) Kingston, Ontario ... Temperature: -25.0°C Humidity: 70% Wind: NW 9 km/h Wind Chill: -33 So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

i thought they were joking

Or rather, I thought *I* was joking, making comments on random Facebook posts I'd see in my feed, someone talking about, say, their favourite Eagles song and there I'd be, writing, I heard that listening to Don Henley complain about not getting respect can give your kids autism (and self-confidence issues) . Because, you know –– I thought this whole vaccination business had run its course, like the Birthers or Flat Earthers. When in reality it was just me coating my own ignorance with a sparkling level of stupidity.  Because it's back! Take that, Black Mirror . Whatever dystopia you can dream up, real people will raise and re-raise you with even more paranoid, irrational, selfish behaviour. I mean, if we let measles come back? Fucking measles ? Well, I think we should just cash it all in at that point. Give every person an acre of natural habitat to destroy (fire? laser-robot dinosaurs? nuclear bombs the size of iPads?) and call it a day.

still in the labyrinth

Just a reminder: I still have work at Labyrinth , including this lovelorn owl. Will he ever find closeness? I guess that's up to you , owl-love denier.  –––––––––––––––––––––– Fittingly, in the deep end of winter, I am now about halfway through my leave-without-pay. I wish I had something insightful or even just clever to say about the first five months, but they had a kind of heavy speed that I'm still trying to process. There's been a lot more design work than I anticipated, which says something about creativity needing to be special-purposed or concrete in order for people to pay for it, or feel justified in paying for it, but I'm still figuring that one out, too. There will come a point where I'll just stop hustling as I prepare to go on a back-to-work hiatus (hello, laziness), but in the meantime I've got so much left to do. More owls !