October 15th: Cashmere Thoughts

I think it's a pretty good thing that I haven't gotten around to posting anything in 6 weeks or so. Don't you? I'm too in the thick of it, and not getting sick of it. It's nice. I think I'll stay, border disputes and all. Maybe it's just the music talking, but I feel like I can do this. Bring it on, if you think you can rock. Confidence is a strange mistress. Like "Happiness is a warm gun," you know. Same sorta sentence structure. Okay, enough for today. I've got a life I can live.

the September issue

Two weeks from now I'll be contemplating life from the other side of 21. Circumstances being what they are, I s'pose I'll be thinking more about age and time and maturity this 9/16 than usual. Hopefully I'll be too aged and time-worn and mature to condense them into simple equations and straightforward answers, à la Wiesel, though.

Things have been going really well, though. My worry-muscles are atrophying. Slowly. But—

surely.

I'm not thinking too much about school yet. I'm not working too much. I'm not writing but it doesn't bother me too much. There'll be time for that, to write and to un-write, for visions and revisions which a minute will, etc.

A few weeks ago I was hit for the first time by a fear of death. Those that know me know that I can be an uncommonly morbid person at times, but for some reason, the idea of dying never scared me that much, though. Perhaps my morbidity springs from a lack of fear. Perhaps the lack of fear springs from the morbidity. Who knows.

Anyway, I was riding the train home from Oshawa, and wondering what it would be like to be 70. I've never expected to live that long, but it's my grandmother's 70th birthday two days from now. It must be scary to know you're so much closer to death than birth. The mouth looming, the issue but a distant memory. And the inevitability of it. Like the open ocean.

I guess that's why I always wanted to be able to take my own life. It strips much of the fear and powerlessness from it. It becomes more a personal decision than the end of all that you are. You can even half-trick yourself into believing it won't kill you. (The mind knows nothing of death; it never can. The whole of it is life.) And then it does. Rien de plus simple.

And yet I don't think I've ever wanted to kill myself less. Life's balance-like once again. The more precious living, the more feared dying. Like lyrics in a Conor Oberst song.

Anyway. I have stuff to do. This thing isn't going to live itself for me.

Adios, muchachos.

the September opening

Well Jesus Christ, I'm alone again. So what did you do those three days you were dead? 'Cause this problem's gonna last more than the weekend.

Slowing pains, growing pains. Miss, miss. I'm trying to quell the familiar melodrama sharkcircling in the dark, peachpit spots in my heart. You know, the poisonous ones. It's been a long time since I've been so emotional day-in day-out. We all know why I'm listening to so much A Wilhelm Scream; to so much Brand New. Why I keep trying to write poetry. Why the novel's on hold again. Why I hang too close to the wrong couples.

Et après un moment de silence—le déluge. Now give me a second to choose between a sweater and a dorky raincoat. Think, think.

July 12th. Thought like a wire.

"I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She twentythree when we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy. Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you? Are you not happy in your home, you poor little naughty boy? Wants to sew on buttons for me. I must answer. Write it in the library."

How do you argue with this? How is it possible to say so much in so few words? Out of context this barely even makes sense. Reading it in the context of the story to that point, it made me want to cry. Two words—"Rudy" and "naughty"—and you're done for. Some things are nobody's fault. Little tragedies. We move on like so.

July 5th. Asleep in your thought.

Writing Windswept has taught me a thing or two about novelry. It's amazing how working on a 2-years-plus project will erect a framework for interpreting the world around the parts of you that collect and analyze sense data. What I mean to say is, stuff that might previously have occurred to you as a charming, if quaint, curiosity, can, under the influence of a novel, suddenly become the seed for something enormous without any warning whatsoever. Case in point, this little segment from one of the chapters near the end, which grew from a play on words on a strange two-word combo—"carrion dawn"—I stumbled across in Mark Z. Danielewski's mind-eatingly good House of Leaves into a paragraph about certain beautiful aspects of nature, and then into a bit about the early stages of hard drug use; sort of a Requiem for a Dream split-second montage in word form. Lemme think what you know.

~~~~

He let the heroin, the miracle drug of it, into him. It was ice cream childhoods all over again. He was on another plane, another plane of mind, he was crossing state lines, he whipped through insanity and unconsciousness and Florida and grace and landed in play, in playful dreams of artless theatre, in lines of dialogue he had memorized in the womb, all those summer moons ago. All the universe's thoughts were laid bare to him, stripped without tease, naked without shame, clear and plain as all the faces he knew in the floating darknesses he was privy to when he closed his eyes to blink. He had the floor-plans, the blue-print, the key-ring to everything.

He smiled, lunar landing, in celebration of things; he gloried the way the guitar's six-stringed theory made madmen and madwomen of us audience all. The way every atom waited for the fall of Troy, for the rise of day. The way we kept inculcating the buzzes we felt in our veins not to stop. The way the highest starkest snows were fragmented yet unimpeachable. The way we loved. The way water ran and jumped when it was asked politely. The way the sky opened up like a breaking origami at the first fold of sun.

So carry on, dawn. Carry on.

June 23rd. Thought in the head.

I guess I have, in the ocean-sized great elephant graveyard of my weaknesses, lying among the ancient ivories, perched on the most bleached and dry of gigantic rib-cages, a weakness for beautiful things.



These three paintings are by a New York-based tattoo artist and painter named Regino Gonzales, and they are making me right stupid au moment. Never before have I wanted a tattoo involving a black snake on my body as fervently as I want one right now. And the multimedia aspect, juxtaposing senses of real space and non-real space, is pretty genius.



Those mice are block-tan-coloured! Whole parts of that snake are smudged! The rabbit, tree, birds and random strings are perfectly centered in an empty field of whiteness! But the detail is so good, the mock-nature painting aspect is so spot-on, that it feels almost real enough to transcend the fuzziness, hot pink birds, and strangely contrived situations back into the genre/realm of a still life or something.



I wish I was an international playboy. I wouldn't need to work, I could spend my days writing and drawing, and I could solve all my problems by buying and commissioning art, and wearing sunglasses 83% of the time. True fax.

May 12th. A whole thought of walking to do.

For some reason, when reading Nino Ricci's very good the Origin of Species this past weekend, the quote "April is the cruelest month"—tossed off in passing by a minor character, and not sourced—stuck in my head as being from Chaucer. That was "April with her showers sweet," though. I guess the cruelty-accusation came from Eliot. Anyway, it hasn't been April for a minute now, so maybe he was wrong.

Last night I dreamt—in my fucked up way of things, and as well as Dan Yemin saying "Hey Alexander!" at the corner of René-Levesque and Greene, and having shampoo-covered sex with some woman who thought my toes were disgusting—that I got an A+ in English Montreal Lit. I'd managed to convince myself, over the past couple days, staring at the blank space where the letter grade was to show up on the My Grades page at My Concordia, that I deserved an A-, maybe—à la limite—an A.

When I got on my computer to check this morning, I remembered the dreamt A+ and the heady glory of it and I realized that it was never going to happen. I cursed my brain. And lo and behold, there, lying in wait for me, was a B+. I really hate myself right now. This is a fucking bird course; 31 people got an A or A-, and I was part of the 20 or so who didn't. English is my fucking thing, man. And the worst of it is that that god-awful B+ in that class I should have been able to ace with my eyes closed was the best fucking grade I've gotten in an English class yet. Basically what I'm saying is that I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me.

Hastie asked me a few weeks ago why I cared so much about marks and all that shit. I didn't give him a very convincing answer. I don't even know if it's something I can rationalize, anymore. I just care. I care so fucking much, and I'm so fucking useless anyway. And that little difference between an A- and a B+ is the difference between a 3.33 and a 3.47 on the semester. It's not like a 3.47 is even respectable, but it's... it's getting there.

I really, really have to get my shit together for next year. Finally I have a bunch of courses I actually want to be in, I'm on top of things, I know how university works. It's gonna have to be a fucking shower of As. I am going to need to bathe in them to be happy. Fuck me. Fuck my life—or at least, the mess I'm making of it. And this is really too melodramatic for me to want to leave here; I feel like I haven't matured a bit since I was sixteen, but I need it to remind me that I need to start fucking trying harder.