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Showing posts from January, 2018

cigar-tin stories number seventy-six / / three days

Sunday: I have a stomachache. It's one of those high-end-pressure aches, some kind of clamorous, furry gas inflating me middle-ways, with enfilading fire via my esophagus. It reminds me of an episode of  LOST  –– strangely insistent but ultimately completely senseless. And then I try to think of the why –– what I might have consumed or been irradiated by to cause all this pointless suffering –– but there are no compelling suspects. Apple? Peanuts? Chocolate milk? Quiche? Heroin? It hardly matters. The stomachache is going to live its life, bathing itself in the glittering Cuban surf of my pain, and all I can do is wait for it to complete its destiny. Getting sick is always tricky in the respect that if I tell C, then I have to expend considerable effort describing the evidence to a skeptical and impatient judge who can't wait to dismiss the case.  Yeah, you had what I had this morning , she says.  It's nothing.   Oona and I are now at the part of the children's

some things at the end of January

PPPPPP ; a book art object. _________________________________ a bady designed winter menu / cigar-tin stories number seventy five For three nights running there is a big brown rabbit in our back yard. He bounds away to a safe distance when I step out onto the deck, then sits on a flower bed and digs away for something to eat (later, C tells me that she has herbs and mint in that spot). For no reason at all I feel much more benevolent towards the rabbit than I do to the squirrels, who attack our bird feeders in manic raiding parties, four or five of them racing around and leaping from the fence tops in a kind of demonic, fast-forward circus act that makes me dream about the different gauges of birdshot. _________________________________ The New Guy is thinking (out loud) about buying an electric car. My first response works through the usual things –– cost, reliability, the psychotic ambition of Elon Musk –– but very soon afterwards I realize that it really comes do

the agent from the inner circle

the agent from the inner circle ; an original mixed media painting on cradled wood panel, 24 x 24 x 1 1/2 inches Soon you will understand: she would not be here if things were going well, if certain plans had not degraded, if certain states were not in decay. She is urgency's pale representative. Skeptical, intelligent, somehow medical. Elegant, too –– in that cream-coloured coat, high at the collar, long to the knee, a swirling heart daubed to her chest. Black-handed, gloved in thin leather. Serious and Staring. A breaker of borders. A carrier of secrets and orders from a distant and unknown centre, saturated with lies and cold authority, a reader of signs, a calculator of efficiency and need, the on-site architect of control, or ruthlessness, or sudden mayhem, in the star-abraded cyan mint of early morning, in the waking light of that-which-must-be-done. Soon you will understand.

things, things made, things consumed // cigar-tin stories number seventy three

things • Two librarians are arguing in French. Otherwise the place is deserted. There is new furniture the colour of old mustard; the couches curve in graceful, modern crescents while the chairs scoop you in, their sliding black writing trays a strange extra arm. I’m reading about Albert Schultz in The Globe and Mail , then about psychopaths in Harper’s . There is also some mention of gloomy octopuses and how the summer populations of flying insects have fallen by eighty percent in the past twenty-five years. The light outside reminds me of hospitals and unused bedrooms, that piling kind of slush grey, in successive washes. • At the bank to put $100 on a separate credit card that I keep for my art business and to buy my wife presents (buying her things from our joint account feels a bit too much like Homer giving Marge a bowling ball, I'm afraid). I'm third in line when I arrive, but the person currently at the counter is doing multiple things with stacks of papers and scri