red-handed

... in a library book.

A girl behind the counter at the art supplies store turns to the other clerk and says, I can't even look at other artists' work, because it's like night pollution, and I don't want that in my head, because then I can't create anything. * * * * * A spur-of-the-moment trip to Zeller's, of all places, on Saturday afternoon, because the coffee maker just died, quietly, that little orange light suddenly meaningless. Zeller's in the middle of going out of business, turning itself into a Target. The girls at the checkout less than motivated. C says they'll have to re-apply for their jobs. We get in a short line, this middle-aged woman waiting for a price on a can of spray paint with a broken cap. Waiting and waiting. The guys in hardware not answering. Will never answer. They're probably high. We give up, go to the next line. It's a cluster fuck. After taking things out to the car, we have to go back through the store because I've promis

you caught my eye when you drifted by ; acrylic ink on photo paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. For my project with Ariel . * * * * * Oona was feeling a little low this morning so I decided we should be polite to each other instead of our usual antagonistic behaviour, which is me telling her all sorts of outrageous lies -- Mommy? Oh, she moved away. To Uncle David's. They're starting a chicken farm. Also, I'm changing your name to Patty Batty. Effective immediately. -- and her countering by telling me I'm silly, and that she wants the purple yogurt, right now, so Get it . It was rather nice, and quiet, how we cooperated, and went on our way. When we got to daycare, she even told me that she liked my jean jacket, and I said thank you. And when I told her that mommy would pick her up at the end of the day, she even refrained from openly cheering, but only smiled a little.

I think every person, every morning, should have to sit down in front of a computer simulation that shows how they will age, how their face will change over time, how they will wither, and shrink, until they die. Not only would it provide us each an overwhelming sense of insignificance -- and then, by extension, humility and compassion -- but the net impression, hammered home, would be one of being defeated. Strangely, and from a wildly different route, I received the same impression from watching the documentary Inside Job last night. I mean, we all know that the system veers between senseless and corrupt, and certainly the curtain has now been pulled back enough on the economy for most people to see that the financial services sector is a shit-house, stinking with fat lizards, with the vacant and depraved, who actually produce nothing of value and still receive all the system's rewards, playing games like fires, but the truly demoralizing part comes with how seemingly unstopp

Went to a local art thing last night. The trouble with local art things is that they are put on by local artists. Meaning: they never start on time. So, if you show up the standard fifteen minutes early, and the event starts fifteen minutes late, then you've just lost half an hour of your life sitting there switching your wedding ring from hand to hand, wondering why you didn't bring a mint and examining the interior lighting. Sure, you've staked out a nice seat, right in the middle, but people will just volunteer you to move, without asking, so their late friends can join them in the row, so you wind up just sitting at the end anyway, and then you're really caught.

The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg A well-born girl of English and Irish extraction, niece of Lord Northcliffe, declines an Oxford scholarship to study singing under Frau Alma Schadow in Hamburg, marries a young German lawyer there, becomes a German citizen and stays in Germany despite waking up one morning to find Hitler in power, has some children, in rapid succession, and then even moves to Berlin, to be at the heart of some whispered alternative Germany, where people are intelligent, and decent, and loathe the Nazis, and with their bright souls are willing to shepherd the nation back to respectability again, once that monstrous regime has been removed, as surely it will be, if only the Allies could see that, and encourage certain German generals to act, but then the war comes, and so much success, and no one dares move against that, but they can't move in the time of defeats either, because of the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, underlined with carpe

Look, I'm green (actually yellow, overall, in an infused way) with envy.   Somehow, like some kind of grotesque accounting error, we scheduled our vacation time (cottage, no internet, erratic tv) to miss the Olympics. It felt a bit odd, not knowing who was abusing who, nation-wise. Whenever I turned on the radio, catching snatches of trumpet-accompanied news here and there, all they could ever talk about was the medal count, and how important it was, and what it signified. None of it made any sense -- a gold medal performance has about as much influence on popular, amateur athletics (and public fitness) as the space trips of astronauts do on the prevalence of science clubs. Yes, yes I know -- the valour of the games, the triumph of the human spirit. Somewhere, some young person will be inspired to pursue athletic excellence! Or just excellence in general! Uh huh. Well, if *that's* the reason they're spending all that money (fifteen billion pounds!), then they/we might

* * * * * The distance from our home in Kingston, Ontario to C's cottage on the Northumberland Strait is roughly the same in length and character as: a) Napoleon's retreat from Moscow b) Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole c) Moses wandering the desert for forty years d) one thousand, three hundred and forty-six stomach-lacerating miles e) all of the above * * * * * Days 1 and 2 are the travel days, the just-get-through-it days, the o-my-god-the-traffic-in-Montreal days, and I-forgot-all-about-mullets-until-we-reached-rural Quebec days, the days of carefully timed stops and yes I'll have gravy with the fries and up hills and down valleys and trees and lakes and then trees and lakes again, and too hot then too cold, recycled air and endless ribbons of pavement and those yellow lines fishing deep inside you, pulling you through a sort of non-time that seems endless. Oona sang endlessly mashed-up versions of t