red-handed

Have I told you before how dumb graphic design is? Graphic design is dumb. It's what the dumb kids do. Let's put it this way: if little Jonny comes to you and says he wants to go to design school, tell him that you'd rather give him the start-up money for a crack cocaine business: better (infinitely better) money, smarter class of people and work that actually provides a valuable service. Graphic design is dumb. It makes you dumb. It makes you dumb (and angry) because it makes you say the same thing, over and over, to the same people, all fucking day long. Yes, you just need to supply me with the text. All you have to do is supply me with the text. Yep, just send me the text and I'll get started. All you have to do is give me the text in the order you want it to appear. If you have artwork, then supply that as well, but if you don't, then I can create that for you. Don't worry, I'll put it all together for you. Just give me the text. No, not some now and som

In the shop . There are no blameless moments. This is never a time when things come together and crystallize and stand there, shining and perfect. They can only teeter, and then fall down, exploding over everything.

C was away most of the Sunday but I thought that was no reason for Oona and I not to have a nice dinner anyway. So I made baked chicken and rice. Boneless, creamy. Delicious. Oona being Oona, she picked at it like some fussy Caesar poking through sheep entrails. Oona eating supper! she lied, over and over again. Dessert, of course, was an entirely different matter . I've seen zombies eat less frenetically.

O, the rejections have been coming in fast and furious these last few weeks. I duly add them to the pile. Well, not a pile really, but a badly distended folder. Of course, a folder doesn't photograph nearly as well as a pile. Even worse, most rejections these days are electronic. So, before my muse became entirely dated, I decided to dig through it for my top ten rejections. Southwest Review Pretty much a perfect example of the anonymous rejection slip. And it is so simple! Just print these up six or seven to a sheet, task some unpaid intern to cut them out as slips (a bit crooked, but this is only an intern) and demolish your slush pile in one fell swoop by getting that same intern to stuff (or slip) these flimsy verdicts into the very self-addressed, stamped envelopes that the submitters have provided. We are fulfilling our mandate! Now give us more grant money! Chances that your work was actually read: none. Exile Ah. Cool, crisp, almost supercilious in its manner. On glossy c

Literally. It was craziness. Even Oona thought so. * * * * * Also (slightly) crazy: we watched Morvern Callar on the weekend.

Mixed media on canvas, 7 x 5 x 1.5 inches; for a project with a poet.

The gulls were all whirling and fairly screaming as I turned the corner onto Princess Street on Sunday morning. Crashed packets of garbage, then a million broken bits rolling around. It was a gull party. At least the wind was warm. I don't know why I walked up Division, which I usually avoid, because the effect is certainly disaffecting ... I understand why you might mindlessly pile up beer bottles on your front step, but why go to the effort of smashing them? Division Street's ugliness is unrelenting enough to dismiss until you think just for a few seconds about the kind of people who do walk it: the unemployed (or unemployable) and upper middle-class Queen's students. Guess who leaves more of a mess? Of course the Money Mart is a classic touch, kind of a flagship for the suffering. I did find a dime on the sidewalk, about a block from my studio, but I declined to pick it up because it was floating in piss. This might turn out to be bad luck later.

At the No Frills on Saturday night; everyone seemed in a hurry; yet these were not the kind of people who seemed to hurry for anything; I soon found out why; the store was closing in five minutes; people rushed around; looking like leaky balloons; people yelled at each other; a very old man in a tattered suit raised his voice to the cashier; he'd already given a charitable donation two times this week; and asked two more times on top of that; and why did everyone think he was a millionaire; when I got up to the checkout, the cashier was relieved when I nodded 'fine' to the same request; it's awkward for everyone, I said; as I packed my groceries, a soft-spoken wide-eyed woman told me that she had forgotten potatoes, and now she couldn't make Shepherd's Pie; why do people talk to me?; I certainly wouldn't talk to me; in the nearly empty parking lot, some guy in a truck was playing the Eagles really, really loud.

Dark, nebulous, gauzed over with doom ... how could I not like a picture that is like the world found at the bottom of a bottle of absinthe? By Ieva Jansone .

Found this on the sidewalk the other day. Not far from our house. Does picking it up and carrying it three kilometres in my pocket and straightening it out and scanning it and converting it to a web-ready file and posting it here -- does all this make me a crazy person? Perhaps. The idea of someone on our street actually doing math (instead of, say, yelling obscenities at three in the morning, or fleeing the police, or setting things on fire) is a pretty buoyant thought, though. * * * * * This morning, when Oona came around the corner to show me her pig-tails, I attached a pedometer to her pants. She better put in at least 2K today, or I'm phoning that daycare. * * * * * In other developments, I've put a new cigar-tin story in the shop . It has a kind of Victorian/Western feel.

it helps me spell things out ; collage (gesso, acrylic paint, acrylic ink, pencil, pencil crayon, layers of printed acetate, acrylic varnish, etc), 6 x 8 inches, untempered masonite board. In the shop . * * * * * Last night I had the slowest cashier in the history of the world. She was so slow, at one point I thought the groceries were going to check her out. Still, I didn't mind. It gave me a chance to catch up on my junk reading! Did you know that the girl from 3rd Rock from the Sun struggled for years with pills and alcohol? Neither did I! Stupid pills. Or that the husband of Catherine Bach (Daisy Duke) killed himself a few years ago? Again, I was in the dark on this one. She says she doesn't know why he did it, because they were so happy. Okay. Speaking of happy, I've put up a reading of a story about a guy who struggles to see what happiness (or at least purpose) is all about, over on my tumblr site . Happy!

That wasn't rain yesterday; that was something sideways. I was completely soaked five minutes into it. So my clothes got hung around my studio, while I pranced around in old pants, and by midnight the radiator gave me back dry socks to walk home in.

every forest, every night ; mixed media on canvas, 8 x 6 x 1.5. In the shop . * * * * * Do you hear it? No, it's not the wind. Yes, let's not pretend . The forest is all around us. Do you hear it? Fine, fine. Did you think you could shut yourself off it, from what you know is the sound of it, while letting instead your veins pulse with alarm? Don't. You're not even lost. Being lost is nothing, and fear will be the least of it. Try to be abstract. In a way, it's better to think of it as failure, as the culmination of an arc. That was always the inherent contradiction. You try, and try, and try, but must eventually fall short. And then, if you're lucky and thoughtful, comes a controlled but cascading kind of failure, where the flimsy reasons all tip over, revealing the heartless wet ditch that was never just a blackness. Call it math. Call it the instability of everything. Look: the forest lists with the corpses of kings and tycoons and communists and leveller

i think it's a sign of something ... if that's what you want to believe ; 6 x 8 inches, untempered masonite panel. In the shop . * * * * * A recent article on the NYR blog asked, "Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders? Does this state of affairs make any difference to what gets written?" It goes on to say, "A situation was soon reached where a precious few authors sold vast numbers of books while vast numbers of writers sold precious few books. Such however was the now towering and indeed international celebrity of the former that the latter threw themselves even more eagerly into the fray, partly because they needed their declining advances more often, partly in the hope of achieving such celebrity themselves." * * * * * This is called a lottery economy . It makes a very few people very successful while making everyone below much less successful. Are you having fun yet?

Been on a bit of a counteroffensive with the ladies of the house lately. * * * * * With C it's been over her idea that all (of her) information exists in some kind of magical cloud, a cloud that I always have in sight and consult with regularly, like the weather or goat entrails. So she should be able to tell me something once and in a tortuously roundabout way and now I have that information and will act on it. Guess what? I don't and I won't. But I already told you that, she'll say. When was that? When I was in the middle of making supper? When I was in the middle of trying to watch that movie? When I was in the other room? When I was in the middle of defusing that nuclear bomb? Because -- and I hate to tell you this -- I wasn't really listening. So if you want that massive favour that is totally 100% for you and is just one more thing on my life-constricting to-do list, then you'll have to (a) remind me and (b) give me specific instructions, not just re-

By a Star Trek "gen" artist named Gennie Summers. * * * * * O look: it's Klingon Shakespeare. I love this picture. I think it's both fun -- and funny. In fact, I thought it was so funny that I posted it on the Facebook wall of a friend of mine, along with the caption: I'm sorry that the only way you can relate to Shakespeare is by making him a Klingon. Extra funny, no? Apparently: no . She deleted it immediately . So I wrote her: omg, did you delete my Klingon Shakespeare? without hesitation , she wrote back. This was confusing. So I went away and thought about it. But I'm still confused. What I do understand is that at almost the same time I was offending one friend, I was posting this picture on someone else's wall: To which he responded: Apparently, there is a Klingon Language Institute. And I wrote back: Yes, Steve. "Apparently." Like you didn't email that doctoral thesis TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. * * * * * So what's the differen