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.

December 26th. Thought gonna be around for a while.

She left for two and a half weeks in Paris and the French alps Thursday night.

It's been 41 and a half hours since I last heard from her, which I think is the probably the longest we've gone since July or maybe even June. I keep on over-thinking everything about everything (this letter, that letter, the third letter, the goodbye, the return, the time in between, for her and for me), which I'd forgotten about my tendency to do in the absence of actual contact. That may be the most dangerous aspect, like the cold of the water which kills you long before your legs give out. But I've been trying to keep tabs and caps on my thinking. So I'll just leave it at the dull lull of loneliness and try to focus on other things.

I should be getting more done, for instance. I told her if I didn't feel like I'd made enough of a change by the time she'd gotten back I'd call up my therapist again. I don't want to have to do that. And yet the reason I am the way I am is because it's what's easiest for me.

There's the protein issue, there's the Olympics issue, there's the job issue (no magazine puns, please) and also my new phone is a near constant-disappointment. Strange that something so much newer could be such a step back in terms of functionality in so many regards. But it looks nice, right? The struggles can be private. That's what I always look for in things: can it make me appear problem-free? Because I'm always better at solving problems when nobody's looking. I just need to be able to concentrate. That's why I turn my music off when I'm doing new things out in public, even though I keep my headphones on. I just need to be able to think.

Ironic.

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.

April 18th. Thought twists.

I am coming apart at the seam. Am I? I am. Compound and compound again, re-tread, overdub, loop back and thread through. I am just a maze of mistakes. A haze of mistakes. You could get lost in them (I frequently do). I remember back in mid-January when Will thought I was going to pieces again. I laughed then, but if I had a job and/or a girlfriend today I wouldn't tomorrow morning.

I'm going to bed. Maybe the next few hours will be a cleansing salve, an opening salvo, a saving grace-period. Until then I'll keep my win-some, lose-some smile on. Nights like these I am all teeth.

Cheers.

March 25th. Thought with peril.

A little past midnight, maybe, as I was walking home from Will's place—the usual route, down Northcliffe to Cote St-Antoine and along it to Sherbrooke and along it to St-Marc—I was crossing Metcalfe when I saw a car, a white Chevy Aveo, I think, coming north. It's a stop-sign intersection, but the guy wasn't slowing down, so I stopped around the halfway point to let him pass. As he came closer, without slowing down, he swerved toward me. I only had a second or so to jump backwards, out of the way. I was listening to Wavering Radiant, the new ISIS record, and the volume was a little higher than it usually is because I'd been taking the Metro earlier. The aural disconnect the music provided made it a really strange experience. I didn't get much of a look at him as he whipped past me, other than to see that it was a guy with dark hair, and that he was alone in the car. If I'd been a little slower, or he'd been going a little faster, he would have hit me for sure. I don't think it would have killed me, but I'm not really an expert on car accidents. I had my cell with me, anyway, and I knew enough about the area to have told the operator where to send the ambulance, assuming I'd retained consciousness. I say this because I can't imagine the guy would have stuck around. As it was, I could tell despite the music that he didn't even honk. It was really surreal. I turned around and caught a glimpse of the car as it turned north at the next cross street, which is Forden. I don't think he slowed down at all.

A block or two later I passed the police station I visited when I was in kindergarten. I still remember venturing into a cell with a few other kids and having the cop jokingly lock us in. I can't remember whether or not I got a chance to grip the bars, though. I wondered to myself whether, had I not been recently arrested, I would have ventured over to the parked police car at the corner and talked to the cop inside about it. It's strange how little things affect our perceptions.

I wrote a sort-of will before going to the demonstration. At the time, it was in case I got hit in the head with a rubber bullet, but I guess it would work just as well for noiseless car accidents, too. Maybe when the semester's over I'll look into making it legal. I don't know why then; it just seems like a better time.

I wonder where that nutjob was going, anyway, and why he had to drive so fast to get there. Maybe it's a good thing that I don't have a license. I'm always running behind. God knows I would try to make up for it by speeding down quiet night streets every now and then.

February 27th. Thought the Sun.

I am all about the lyrics to 'Archers' by Brand New right now. Do I know what they are exactly? No. Vaguely? Yes. I am easily swayed by nice drums and harmonies and this and that. Musical terms I don't fully grasp and never will. I'm an aesthete. I know sonic beauty when I sees it.

My sister is 18 now. I think my non-living at home has done her a world of good, but a lot of that I'm sure was just time and friends and the little right decisions that come from seeing situations and knowing which move to make this time around. Anyway I am really happy about the person she's become and about the person she'll have become a year from now or two years from now. I am dreaming of being avuncular to the beautiful children she'll have. I was never named Hank, I never worked for the DEA, I will never live in Albuquerque, but what should go unsaid will go double for me. I can make good, just like that. Snap. I'm twenty, it's as good a time as any to have a mid-life crisis.

I had a good talk with Shirine about attraction and how my little stupidities are maybe sometimes not so stupid. It's nice to feel those hands on my mind's shoulders, the towel, and the reassuring voice in my ear. I can take 'im down in the next round and I can be suave in the round after that and maybe before long the judges decide it's a technical take-out. In the stands there are middle-aged men who have staked their hard earned dollar amounts on my wordplay and they are sweating and chanting my name inside of the caverns that are their skulls. And if I lose? Hey, we're men. We never get anything right on the first try.

I'll see you next time, though. And that's clean money; a tax write-off.