Yes, That One Was a Real Heart-Warmer.

The Happy Conclusion.

e.s.t. asks of us: "What are you putting up with in your life?" My answer to that would be "fucking everything, practically." If there was ever a gap between desire and actualization, my life can be propped up in front of the jury as a luridly-hued Exhibit A. Days are a bog of despair and joy, contentment and resentment jockeying for attention, blindsiding moments of exultation and weird grief, bracing shots of love chased by longings for death, of teary gratitude watching a crisp leaf fall, and later gazing at the sunset over the water only to dwell on Woolfian endings. I feel thwarted but I don't know what needs to be done to fix it.

I hate my job, even though it is the best job I've ever had. Are a middling wage, free cereal, and not having to comb my hair really the requirements I should be looking for in a career? And why would I rather attend an unthinking job every day than a demanding job? Why do I feel so possessive of my meagre brain power, so that a lump of rebellion rises at the notion of success in a "respectable" field? How would law, or medicine, or criminology (my original area of study) be more desperate than the blue collar route I'm on? So why do I believe that? What part of me am I so jealous about sharing that I feel such choices would be sap me and distract me? Distract me from what? I need to know, so I can start doing...that.

Every day I board this cognitive dissonance locomotive. On one hand I yearn to chuck it all in the can, and set out into the wild unknowns, the way all of my friends did, and you most likely did, when you were in your early twenties and everyone expected you to be careless and cavalier and untidily blowing through Old World cities like a gypsy tumbleweed. Sometimes I look back on the last 10 years and think them a colossal waste. What passivity, craving the security afforded by minimum-wage paychecks and shit apartments more than the lure of the wild unknowns. How pot-bound. Is that the type of person I am, a fearful person?

Then at other times I think of the years as a necessary time of detoxification and re-evaluation...of unraveling...unraveling as much as I can a pretty amateur wiring job, arcs happening all over the place and the smell of melting plastic. A lot of stupid things were put in my brain, making up it's formative framework: nutty religious dogma, the cross-pollination of genes from an indifferent dad and chronically depressed mom that led to some real loser thinking being ingrained in there like cigarette butts ground into a rug. Maybe the beauty of the larger world would have been a distraction instead of a blasting cap for introspection and growth. Maybe years of slogging through menial jobs and shit apartments and shit romance was just what I needed while my brain sorted stuff out, even though it definitely did not feel like it at the time, and it doesn't exactly ring true now, but sometimes it hits me how appreciably far I've come from turning out the way I coulda.
Also, I wonder if I have a soul so easily transportable. I love the sliver of sea I live by, I relish small domestic habits, and the forests and mountains of B.C. will always be home, home, home. Then there's a more recent discovery...through self-hypnosis, or frequently in the dreamy state I achieve while wandering along, I've become aware of internal by-ways that surprise me with how untainted (by my influence) they seem, a suggestion of entire worlds beneath the surface that appear to be without my meddling fingermarks all over them. I don't know what it is, some atavistic consciousness or genetic memory? But there are actual beaches I can walk along, stone tunnels and vistas of a sky that is refreshingly, blessedly unEarthly. All available right inside...the price of admission just a welcome state of self-unconsciousness.

That development aside, the unending conflicts make me frustrated and pacey, and I have frequent aspic headaches that strike like cerebral cobras. (They are actually known as "icepick" headaches but my doctor has a wonderful clipped accent so I prefer 'aspic', my original interpretation...)
I feel that I'm smart, but just smart enough to have the good sense to be dissatisfied that I'm not smart enough to pull off brilliance. Smart enough to feel the draft from the gaping holes in my character's fabric, but not smart enough to add meaning to the mere task of living, and make the everyday into something better...better for me, but most of all, for others. That is one conclusion I've reached even though I can't hash out anything else properly - my life is entirely too self-concerned. Even the things that inflame me (social injustice, willfull ignorance, people being dicks to the animals) are tempered by fear, and most definitely wanting to protect myself from being overwhelmed by horrified feelings, by not knowing the full extent of a bad situation. So I suffer from an affliction of willed ignorance myself. Not a remarkable conclusion, but it has the force of a revelation for one so immured in her shit. I feel that it's useful to know that despite the mess, which I likely will never fully get tidied up, this energy can be turned away from me and into some other beings and there can be benefits, positive benefits, without me having to be a better person or satisfied with my place in the world or even running on an even keel. If I improve my lot, it does no one any good except me, but devoting a portion of the mania to others hard done by could have repercussions that actually mean something true & good...we'll wait and see...

Cynical Heart Softens Begrudgingly.

Brilliant to see hope trump fear.


It seems like now America can be what it thinks it is, but hasn't been for many years...

Dear Cancer,

I hate you!


The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.

-Michael Crichton

*

Why Politicized Science is Dangerous.

Can You Still Get Stamps?

A good friend is moving to England for schoolin' and we have a subversive plan. We're going to communicate via letters. We have a bunch of each others' correspondence from the late 90s, before we had $$ to buy proper groceries, never mind computers. It's a delight to me to have this back-catalogue of scribblings that would otherwise have been lost to the ether.

All my personal correspondence has dropped off since that era. I understand why, but I miss the aesthetic qualities of pen and ink missives not to mention the pleasure of finding stuff in the mailbox besides credit card offers, Canadian Geographics addressed to the last tenant (note to J. Reiber: update your damn address!) and bills, though even those bitches are largely internet-based as well.



I suspect letter writing will prove to seem monstrously inefficient, and I'll end up carrying around unmailed envelopes until they become stained and wrinkly because I keep forgetting to find some stamps, but I'd like to give it a go in the interest of maintaining a proud and waning tradition of human communication. I'm still fucking amazed that a $2 stamp can get a letter overseas. I have never been overseas, but my letters have, lucky bastards.

Blahvember First.

The day after Hallowe'en is such a fallen souffle of a day. October is loverly, a golden foggy type of month, with Hallowe'en crouching at the end of it in all it's fantastical glory. But November 1 is probably the boringest, blandest day of the year. November starts getting good again tomorrow or so, but today is just a bitch. The zest has even gone out of eating all this candy...

Last night I went out to a dance at the Anza Club for the sheer fact that it was within easy distance of my house, and because 2 years ago I had fun there once. I'm not much into crowds, or clubs, or doing things. But!! I was in the mood for some dancin.'

However I felt very outer-spacey all evening. Maybe it was the effect of draft cream ale that tasted a little grungy, or the brass/techno/sea-chanty musical hodge-podge my dance-bones couldn't seem to relate to, and of course the ever-present tides of anxiety that dampen this sort of outing all the time. I know all the action and noise is going to exacerbate my generalized existential terror and leave me feeling socially hungover for days. Wah!

The Anza Club is actually two clubs: an upstairs dance floor, plus a smaller venue downstairs that you access through the bathroom...I never realized that before. It was a cozy notion, a small rip in the accepted fabric of things, like the wardrobe into Narnia, except instead of a wardrobe it was a dirty door in a toilet, and instead of Narnia it was a dark room heavy with music and the chorizo sausage-like odour of a couple hundred people in costume.

Here's a recap of some of the costumes of the night. It's also one of the first times I've posted personal pictures, unless you count ghostly ducks, rotten flowers and graffiti as 'personal.' This site's made it a year without this sort of bloggy action!

My pal Vanny was a sexy witch and my pal Rachel was a sexy Mountie.


I wore a pirate hat...rap hands!


Rachel wrote a real member of the po-po a ticket for impersonating an officer. He took it well.

I hope by this time next week we'll have forgotten who this person is supposed to be...


Excellently, some girls pulled off dressing as the Misfits, '80s cartoon rockers extraordinaire. How magically delicious is this! They also had Jem along, but my picture of her didn't turn out so good, and she only half-heartedly returned my high-five, so...

Official winners of Hallowe'en 2008.

Their songs are better.

In Which I Spell It "Hallowe'en" Every Time.

For the first few gusty weeks of autumn, I like to wander around gloveless, be-sneakered, wearing inadequate sweaters and deluding myself that it's still 'Indian summer' ("sun's out, man!"). But once Hallowe'en is upon us, it seems to put to rest these delusions and usher in the real autumn: blood red sunsets, the smoky air of fallen leaves, gloom settling like soot over the city while the evenings are still young.

I've always loved this time of year, and not just because of pagan thrills and delicious candy!! It's the season I love, for some reason feeling my happiest when the leaves are tumbling, the nights are lengthening, the birds wheel about restlessly, and nature in general is giving up the ghost. For some reason, interesting things seem more possible this time of year. Maybe it is the radical colors of nature sloughing off the old, or the temporal quality of the light as a pumkin-orange sun filters through thin and icy air.

I've also always had a real affinity for Hallowe'en itself. I love that our prosaic times still pencil in a slot for nonsensical fun. There's still the remnant bit of excitement from younger days, when Hallowe'en was a time of elaborate and careful planning: mapping out the best routes for maximum candy collection, piecing together a costume and decking out your face in gooey, virulently-hued makeup from Woolco that made no pretense of being hypoallergenic, and soaking up all edited-for-content horror movies airing nightly on prime time TV in the week leading up to the Big Night.

Photo via joshuahoffine.com

Monsters have always been big on my hot list. Who knows why some kids get the fascination. Even though I was terrified to the gills of the boogeyman or Freddy Krueger and that like, I wanted to believe they were possible (just not under my bed - a sort of pre-adolescent version of NIMBY).

Hell, based on my visceral reactions to being taunted about poltergeists and the undead and B-grade homicidal maniacs, I did believe they were possible. Even the shaky logic of a young child dictated that chances are monsters weren't randomly roaming the streets of this church-and-safety scissors world looking for dumb little kids to fuck with, but...surely...there may exist a summons, some ritualistic sequence of events that would capture their attention!! In grade school did you ever bunch together in a darkened bathroom with a bunch of other teenybop idiots and try to summon Bloody Mary? That totally seemed like the sort of thing that should've worked! Isn't that why everyone got so keyed up about it and why that one girl always started shrieking and bawling so loud the nuns came running??

I remember the perfect frisson of discovery whenever I went to my town's tiny library to find some book hog had finally returned a Stephen King I hadn't read yet. (I like how it's always said that way: "a Stephen King," drop the common noun 'book.' Brah's a genre unto himself. ) Whenever I was sick with the flu the only treatment was Popsicles, wrapping up on the couch in a swath of blankets, and working through some dog-eared Stephen King paperback. I don't know why I found cannibal clowns and the restless undead so comforting! Say what you want about the man now, with your sophisticated literary tastes and what have you, but I know King was the first writer I came across who took his monsters seriously.

It was nice to find out that there were people like him in the world, versus the boring people I was well-acquainted with who liked to remind you not to let your imagination run away with you - hell, don't even let it take you around the block for a stroll - and don't be ridiculous! Stop thinking about stupid shit! Smarten up! Boring people liked to remind you about boring stuff all the time.

Maybe the fascination stems from the notion that monsters are literal. They're at least there. (Or not-there/there, depending on the type of monster.) It was nice to have something solid to focus on while all around the anxieties of life spun themselves out like toxic cotton candy, doom hanging in the air like a web.

Monsters handily showed you the worst things could get. It seemed useful, albeit terrifying, to have a gauge on that sort of thing. But fear didn't have to be bottomless...there was almost always a tool, some magic to use as a foothold against the forces of evil. You just had to keep an open mind! Because knowledge couldn't hurt you. It was the non-believers who always said the wrong word or entered the forbidden room or stayed in the graveyard after sunset!


I'll leave you tonight with the excerpt of a Robert Frost poem that is particularly creepy. I'm giving you Fine Lit to help you forget that you loved "'Pet Semetary" so, so much.

SON: You wouldn't want to tell him what we have
Up attic, mother?

MOTHER: Bones -- a skeleton.

SON: But the headboard of mother's bed is pushed
Against the' attic door: the door is nailed.
It's harmless. Mother hears it in the night
Halting perplexed behind the barrier
Of door and headboard. Where it wants to get
Is back into the cellar where it came from.

MOTHER: We'll never let them, will we, son! We'll
never !

SON: It left the cellar forty years ago
And carried itself like a pile of dishes
Up one flight from the cellar to the kitchen,
Another from the kitchen to the bedroom,
Another from the bedroom to the attic,
Right past both father and mother, and neither stopped
it...