When The Link Dies, We'll Have Another Bastard's Peace

The Link is learning to skate in the 6th floor hallway with Clay's board.
The Link is I can turn corners now.
The Link is sign-out time 5:59 am.
The Link is listening intently to Tito stories when normal people are an hour or two from waking up.
The Link is two Alexes, two Julias, and a rag-tag bunch of other names.
The Link is Reggie's on a Monday night for a rum and coke and the Habs losing again, express.
The Link is Link nightmares.
The Link is lawyering up.
The Link is Tito: 57 articles, Justin: 41 articles, [...] Ashley: 22 articles, Manley: 13 articles, Diego: 9 articles.
The Link is drink machines that have "Out of Order" signs that are not out of order.
The Link is singing along to Coconut Records - West Coast.
The Link is a backrub for your ears.
The Link is pizza diplomacy.
The Link is comprised of the journalists you trust, since 1980.
The Link is using periods instead of question marks to reduce the chance of ambiguity.

hey

life is the process by which old things are stripped from us. we are forced to make do with the new and that is how we proceed.

right? tell me it's going to be alright.

wading through the hot hummer heat. days slow and weeks slower still. someday i'll come out on the other side, right? this isn't like a stone one-entrance tunnel overfilled by german kids, right? no stampedes, happy, happy. i'm so easily scared. like cattle. rattle, rattle, let it rattle, clatter, clatter, cataclysm. i can't write anymore. no more words. i'm an empty well. épuisé.

Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light

Windswept is on the shelf. Indefinitely. This is a band breaking up. We are all still friends. Who knows what the future holds. It was time. Etc.

I've got a side-project. It's a novel about friends and the lottery. It's somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1000 words long right now, although the bulk of it is written on Loto Quebec printouts and needs to be typed up, and what has been written is a bit from all over in the narrative, cobbled willy-nilly from flashes of inspiration while at work.

Anyway, it's less ambitious, tighter, and I can see the whole of it in my mind much better than I could see Windswept when I was starting out. I loved that old thing but it wasn't built on a strong foundation. I guess I hope I'll have the energy and the guts to come back to it someday. But right now it feels like all the other novels that I started and didn't finish back in the day, through NaNoWriMo. Good in places but irreparably flawed and incapable of making it out into the world on its own two (whatever) legs.

New novel, code-titled J.H.W.H., is less frilly, less poetic. It's about a story. I'm going to try to contain my tendencies to go off ridiculously. It's a first person narrative, which I'm pretty new at, but the character is pretty there in my mind so I'm not too worried. Anyway we'll see how it all goes.

So that's that. Windswept was getting harder and harder to fly. I think I have a good chance with this new story.

So out with the thinning wings and in with the winning things.

Domino's and I Have the Same Ideas About 21st-Century Child-Rearing

Taken straight from the Terms of Service:

"In any case, you affirm that you are over the age of 13, as the Domino's Website is not intended for children under 13. If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the Domino's Website - there are lots of other great web sites for you. Talk to your parents about what sites are appropriate for you."

untitled grind

i wonder which i hate worse: being poor or working. we'll find out, i guess. i've applied to five jobs now so far this summer. it amazes me every now and then that i actually have gotten one and that i may get a second yet—better yet, that it is my avowed intent to do this very thing. i told elise—she from the upstairs, she of the mustache—this yesterday, albeit in french. who is this typing this blog? what has he done with the proverbial real me? who knows. i'm always being visited by the feeling, a few hours into a given shift: this isn't that bad. and then i get paid and that's a minor miracle. money money money. if i can actually get that second job i will wind up in a wholly new position: possessing money i don't have the time to spend. now that would be something.

i haven't been writing.

i got a job and i've worked 51 hours and people have stolen merchandise from under my nose and i sell crack-pipes to crack-heads day-in and day-out. at least my french is better than my german. but i guess what all of this serves to teach me is that i'm still never as bad as i fear i'll be—but at the same time i'm often not as good as i think i am. happy medium? what happy medium? i don't win prose-poetry online contests. i don't even enter them. my novel is shit, and i think it's probably the best thing i've ever written so there you go. 99th percentile my ass. if only i could stop thinking for a little while. i guess this is why people become alcoholics.

i'm not as sad as this makes me sound. still high off habs hockey. i need to stop—

you know, whatever. and start on those other things. (i read in the skin of a lion and it made me wonder if ondaatje doesn't deserve richler/rushdie/seth status. we'll see.)

out.

Tidal Wind

Let me walk with my emotions,
let me do the dance of life.
We are skin-cell dust in oceans,
balanced on a diver's knife.

You can never be too certain,
'cause of what can you be sure?
It's just air behind the curtain,
when life hooks you on a lure.

So I'll bob with my emotions,
and I'll kick the dance of life,
and I'll drink the strongest potions
when I balance love and strife.

It's not lessons you'll need teaching,
should you strive to walk the rift.
Leave to whales the art of beaching,
when you're swimming all adrift.

Kid, just tread with your emotions,
dip and loop the dance of life;
when out snorkeling, with notions
you will find the corals rife.

If there's thoughts down in your belly,
cough 'em up, they're enemies.
Hold 'em long, they sting like jellies;
oh you'll see, anemone.

Don't Read Too Far Into This

I woke up around two into a fever dream. I'm not even that hot anymore. I don't know. Absurdist theatre works its veiny magic. Like that time I saw Hotel Rwanda feverish and dreamt of genocide. For a good couple of minutes I was awake but afraid to turn and face the room. They—they from my dream—seemed as though they must still have been real. I don't remember exactly what about them was scary anymore. They were four; at least one a woman, and well-dressed all. But there was the scent of someone murdered on the scene.

I turned the computer on and the light it shed on the apartment was enough to get me up to spend a few minutes in the bathroom coughing. Did I really dig up a red speck, or was that just my imagination? Everything seems wrong and twisted and just a little out of reach. Like trying to play goal in Côte-St-Luc's barn on cold meds and missing every other shot. And I couldn't understand what was wrong with me. It's important to have one's wits about one. Do you believe in your hallucinations? Do you read too deeply into what you read? Do you see too deeply into what you see?

Ça a l'air grave, mon gros. Get well soon.

Notes From a Reading Week

I'm still jobless and that has to change pronto. And by pronto, I mean, by the time classes start again on March 1st.

I had a good talk with Sina about getting published which calmed me down a bit. She made me forget for a moment how badly I want to get Windswept published as soon as humanly possible, that I don't want it sitting around in my brain forever, that I want to get it out and be done with it. I don't know why. Part of it is I'm afraid it won't be as original if I let it wait. It's set in 2008 and 2009, and it's... I don't know. I don't know if I'm at a vocalizing-this-coherently stage yet. I just want it out, I want it being read. But she made good points in favour of a slow-bubble-build.

I'm doing okay, passably, in school. I want to be doing better, though. I said three A-minuses at the least. That should be realistic enough, right? Right. Okay, let's do this.

I've started working on a new short story, titled "Runners," about a member of a high school track team. It's quite apart from Windswept or any of the Montrealers stories. I think it takes place in the States, in the Eighties or Nineties, though I'm not quite sure of everything yet.

It's very inspired by the bit in Hunger where Bobby Sands recounts a symbolic anecdote from his time on a track and field team to the Catholic priest. The pure aesthetic beauty of that scene—both the story he was telling, and what the viewer got to see—was too rich too ignore. My brain sprouted a little story, a little germinating bud, while it was lying in the loam, in the thrall.

The piece is about 1,200 words right now and I'm envisioning the final product as falling in the 10k range. It's narrated in the first person, which is very new for me, and I'm keeping the wordplay and references out, because he's a high school kid and he's a runner not a writer. It's all very fun, imposing constraints on myself. For some reason writing ends up being the only thing I'm not afraid to start working on the way I'm afraid to start essays or studying or getting a new Medicare card or stuff like that. Sometimes I avoid it, of course. I avoided starting the robbery scene in Windswept for two years. But by and large I am much more afraid of forgetting an idea before I've written it down than I am of starting something and being disappointed in it. I am capable of editing, of revising, of re-writing. I am capable of renovating.

I like renovating because everyone thinks "home improvement" when they hear renovating. But the word only means "making new again." It's a beautiful, beautiful word concealed in the muck of plumbers and carpenters. But it's all there if you look at it the right way; it's hidden in plain sight. I want to write a paragraph someday where I take off "renovating"'s dorky glasses and undo her tight pony-tail and then just like in the Breakfast Club the ugly girl is prom-queen beautiful and everyone is surprised, even though she was there the whole time. Metamorphosis. Whoo.

I'm off to bed. Let's hope I don't wake up too buggy. (Here is the shortest part that doesn't embarrass me:)

We practiced together every weeknight. We would get together and go running. Normal as anything. It's important when you are a runner to be able to separate your mind from your body, like a surgeon might cut out a piece of cancer from a patient. Thoughts do not win races. You do not have time to think to yourself about the guy pulling ahead of you in the next lane. That does not even enter into it.

bla bla bla

everything is just alright.

i worry too much.

the end.