Marie of Montréal
April 27, 2009
There had already been ninety-nine deaths in Montréal on the day Marie died. She was leaning up against her living room wall when it happened at two minutes before midnight. It was an unbearably sweaty night. You could tell because Marie had her window open. She wasn’t the type to open her window. She wasn’t the open-window type. The window stretched from the floor to the ceiling, and when you slid them sideways, they opened to produce a massive death-trap of a hole, twenty-six floors up. The apartment building was built in 1913 by a paraplegic Gypsy businessman named Liese and his wife, who was named Harold.
We were all drinking and carrying on and making passes at one another in the hours leading up to her demise. Andrew had brought a friend with him that I’d never met before, her name was Josephine, and I was madly in love with her. My love for her only deepened, at least at first, when she took me aside to show me the giant concealed dagger she carried around with her. How mad, how paranoid, how beautiful it was; a beautiful woman with a knife like that, tucked sweetly away inside a secret compartment sewn into her pants. She started to lose me a little bit when she whispered about how jealous she was of Marie’s red hair, and I convinced myself it was in jest when she proclaimed that she was intent on scalping her for it. It all seemed innocent enough, but I suppose that women with knives can only be beautiful for so long.
It wasn’t long after Josephine showed me the knife that it all happened. We were making blended drinks out of Mexican booze and limes. The blade in the blender had stopped spinning, and Marie was called in to fix her appliance. She had managed to sneak the blade out of the blender just fine, but that’s when it happened.
Antonio was in the other room playing his guitar and he cut his finger on the edge of the guitar. It was a strange accident, and a deep cut. Blood was flowing onto Marie’s Italian leather. It was a new sofa, she would not be finished paying for it for ten years, thanks to the miracle of department store credit and fake identification. Distracted by the Spanish cursing pulsing from her living room, Marie left her repairs and rushed to his attention. The bloody scene was too much for her to bear.
The result was a screaming match between the party-goers. Marie was obviously more concerned about the state of her furniture than the well being of her ex-boyfriend Antonio. I felt I had to defend Antonio, as it was not his fault that a rogue guitar string had chosen that moment to come after him. Everyone else had picked a side and it erupted into chaos; forty drunken souls shouting various words into the air, and whoever was left over was diligently stopping the bleeding or cleaning the couch. I thought I heard trumpets, or maybe a siren through the open window. That was when I noticed Josephine clutching her knife-side, and for a moment it was the most beautiful image I had ever seen in my life. There is nothing more carnal than a woman reaching into her pants for a blade.
The madness was interrupted with a buzzer going off. Someone was at the building’s entrance. Perhaps realising that the madness had been driven too far, we did the polite thing and quieted down so that Marie could answer the speakerphone on the wall. She did.
The voice on the other end belonged in a horror film. The man was grunting and blowing air into the phone as he spoke. He sounded like Ronald Reagan, only on methamphetimines, and evil.
“I’m going to kill you, Marie. I’m going to cut your brains out.”
Now, there are few things that can put a permanent damper on one of our legendary nights, but this was certainly a candidate.
Marie laughed and buzzed the voice in. The music started up again and the blender somehow began spinning again. Moments later the little joker waltzed in. It was her new man, dressed in a tuxedo, holding flowers, and soaked to the skin with perspiration. Nobody knew his name. I was about to ask, and that’s when the Earthquake started.
The window was still open and Marie was the closest to it when the world began to shake. I grabbed her hand as the lights went out. Everyone became panicked, everyone except Marie and me. I pulled her close as everyone else crouched under tables and hid under beds. Through the shudders and swaying of the old building, our tongues twisted together. It was partly the alcohol, and it was partly the danger, but mostly it was the fact that we were married. It was the only way she could stay in the country.
It was only a little quake. After the lights came back on, we mused at how close to the open window we were, turned in opposite directions, and began to clean up as though nothing had happened.
“I didn’t see that coming!” mused the new guy.
But the good lord was not finished with us. After the surprise dissolved and the music once again spun up, the front door busted open and in rushed sixteen federal agents in assault gear, all carrying weapons. We were forced to get on the floor and put our hands on our heads.
“Get on the floor!” one of the agents said. “Put your hands on your heads!”
That’s how we knew we had to get on the floor and put our hands on our heads. We also knew because they were carrying guns. All of us knew this, except Marie. Marie stayed standing, perhaps frightened stiff from all of the madness that had been ensuing.
“Matilda, now! Down on the ground!” said the ringleader.
“You’ve got it wrong! I’m Marie Pasteur, Marie Matilda lives next door in 2603.”
If you have never seen sixteen hairy testaments to testosterone with semi-automatic rifles simultaneously go red in the face, it is even more pretty than a beautiful woman who carries a hunting knife. After apologizing and offering a phone number to Marie where she could reach someone who would pay for the damages to her door, the SWAT team left.
People started to filter out after that. The buzz had been killed, somewhere between the bloodied couch and the Earthquake and the government raid. Not soon after, it was just me and Marie sitting on her bloodstained couch. And that’s when it happened.
The way she kissed me, there on that leather sofa, is something I will never forget. When old men are on their deathbeds, before they snap out of it and think of their wives or their children, the first image that comes to them is the memory of that unforgettable snapshot in time when their bodies were truly and completely synchronized with the love they felt for a woman. That was my moment, and it was better than yours, or anyone’s.
I needed to make love to her. But it seems that such moments are often met with the most foul, mismatched interruptions. In this case, it was Marie’s vomit, which was soaking into my pants.
After we cleaned up and laughed it all off, we just couldn’t seem to get back to where we were. She obviously felt ill, and wanted to sleep alone.
A picture perfect gentleman, I made her an alka-seltzer and headed for the door. I could hear it sizzling in the background as she stared at me with giant blue eyes. She kissed me on the cheek and told me that she would like to pick up where we left off some other night. I smiled, and left for home.
It was two mornings later that the police found her lying dead in her hallway, after choking to death on a partially dissolved antacid tablet.
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Andrew
August 23, 2008
Dearest,
In Vancouver I have created a holy ritual for nights when, for one reason or another, I have been unable to summon the courage to get into any kind of valuable trouble. I fill a coffee cup with gin and some kind of balancing agent and walk a few blocks until I find the ocean. They have built benches in front of the ocean, and they have put logs in the sand, and both the logs and the benches are intended for citizens of the world to sit upon and do the business of their brains and hearts. The business of my brain has been mixed up with the business of my heart for several years now, and thus I use the logs and benches for trying to unravel the two and put them back in their proper places. I am rarely successful at it, and yet it’s where I am naturally drawn when things get too twisted up.
My beach time is usually characterized by one of two sentiments. Usually, it goes something pretentious and dramatic, like this:
“Life is a carton of piss poured evenly over the cereal of my soul.”
But once in a blue moon, when the gerbil stops molesting the spinning wheel, it comes out a bit different:
“Gee, the ocean sure is beautiful.”
I’ll admit, I’ve only been wise enough to have managed the latter a handful of times.
Last night was no different. Drowning in a particularly self-destructive episode of depression, I washed the day old tea from a paper cup, filled it halfway with gin, the other half with tonic. There would be no limes for this particular outing. I set out upon the night, passing countless groups of laughing strangers who had obviously made better choices that evening than I had. I looked wishy-washy at the first empty bench I could find. After a brief pause, I moved on; this was not a bench kind of night.
Minutes later I was leaning up against a log, sand in my back pockets, looking out into the black Pacific. I looked around at the other logs. Couples. All of them. Each log was allotted one man and one woman — except I suppose for a few homosexual logs — but the point is that every log dweller was in love. And there I was, yours truly, alone in the middle of make-out alley, kept company only by a stiff drink for whom I had no love at all. In fact I was beginning to detest even the smell of her.
This realization was the perfect food for my hungry, growing dissatisfaction with my sick and empty life. I sneered when the kissing started. I could hear someone laughing behind me, and knew without question that they were laughing at my unfortunate love life. After a while, even the innocent Ocean began to irritate me, with each powerful wave curling over the next, it was as if it was bragging about just how much more powerful, how much more beautiful, how much more important it was than me. Everybody loves the ocean. People come for miles to see it, to swim in it, to hear it, to watch it. Fucking ocean.
And that’s when Andrew came out of nowhere. To be honest, he scared the holy hell out of me.
“Spare some change?”
I apologized and told him that I had no change. There were three dollars or so hidden in that little change pocket in my pants. He cursed something in some other language and then started walking away. I was ready to go back to moping when he turned around again, a bit more menacing, and asked if he could instead use my telephone. How did he know I had one? Had he been watching me that long? Was this going to be a mugging? It was, after all, rather dark, and the other log dwellers were far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to hear my screams over the sound of their slobbery sucking lip sounds. It struck me that I had best comply.
“Okay, but I’m paranoid, so I’m going to dial and hold the phone to your head.”
He said nothing and sat down right next to me, so close that our shoulders would touch, if I were not twisting myself away. And then the screaming started, out of nowhere, and I have paraphrased it like this:
“Fucking bitch, fucking hell, stupid slut. Fucking Shit!! Have you eaten?”
Upon realising he had asked me a question, I remained as calm as I could and informed him that yes, I had eaten dinner a couple hours prior. He continued.
“At least one of us is full. You know where I been, man? You know where I been?”
“No, where?”
“I been to hell for the last week, fucking that’s where I fucking been.”
“What happened?”
“I got stabbed three times, nearly hit my Kidney, I got arrested twice, fucking shit man!”
I am not sure if I’m being fully accurate as to the order of his curse words, or even the order in which he explained the events of his week, but he went on to tell me that it took all the strength he had inside not to kill the man who had stabbed him. He said he had chased him down the next day, pushed him to the ground, put his knife in his face, and told him he was going to kill him. Apparently his foe peed himself. But Andrew insisted on reiterating, again and again, that he had decided he was so ready to kill him, he was going to kill him with his knife, he was going to cut out his eyes and shit in their sockets. Upon hearing this, I decided it was time to lighten the mood with some gentle humour.
“It’s probably good that you didn’t.”
His eyes widened and he flinched as though he was going to punch me in the face. He decided not to, and asked again about my phone. I nodded and explained the rules again, and he pulled his gigantic wallet out. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a wallet photo of Jesus Christ, and the business card of a constable. He fished countless pieces of scrap paper out, examining each one, explaining that he had to find the number of a shelter he was trying to stay at for the night. As he searched, he told me his name and I told him mine. He explained that he had just immigrated with his family from the Philippines. His dad lived in Surrey, but he could not go back there because the man who knifed him up had friends, apparently. He found the number. I dialed it, apologized for the formality, and held the handset to his ear. After a brief pause:
“Hello? Hello, I called earlier about needing to sleep there tonight…. I know it’s past 10pm…. I know, I am sorry…. oh come on man…. give it up…. fucking shit man, what’s your fucking problem? fuck you then!”
It was apparent that Andrew’s anger problem was likely causing him a bit of trouble in life. He punched the log, the one true holy log, the log meant for lovebirds and depressed rich people. His knuckles began to bleed.
“Aww fuck, now my knuckles are bloody, fucking shit! See those garbage cans back there? See them on the fucking ground? That was me with my fucking feet, I get so fucking angry I just want those garbage cans to be people. I want them to be people that I can fucking kill. It’s nothing like getting stabbed, you want to see my stab wound, I know, so here it fucking is.”
I fiddled with my cup. Part of me had been sure the stabbing part was an exaggeration or something. But Andrew ripped off his shirt and revealed three giant cuts with gigantic bruises around them, and stitches through the middle. I asked him if it had hurt, and he laughed. This lightened the mood a little bit, but I couldn’t help but presume he still had plans to kill me, or at least steal my phone.
A bit further back on the grass, some kids started laughing loudly. Andrew cocked his head up, and it all fell apart again.
“What the fuck, what the fuck is this shit? Why you got to make these sounds? Why you got to be so fucking loud? What the fuck? Are you kidding me? Fucking bitches!! Fucking bitches!!”
He then looked me straight in the eye and asked me if I had a girlfriend. I told him no, that I had just had a rough break-up with a long-time girlfriend. He told me that his fiancé had just called him from the Philippines to inform him that in his two-month absence, she had become pregnant with someone else’s child and that he should stop calling her. He went on to tell me that he loved her with all his heart and that he wanted to tear her heart out and feed it to his dog. I quietly sipped my gin and offered what condolences I could articulate.
After trying a few other numbers and getting only answering machines, he got up and dusted himself off. I asked him what he was going to do. He told me he was going to go sleep in the park. He shook my hand. I told him to take care of himself. I meant it, I was suddenly worried for him, especially now that it was apparent he had no intention of stabbing me. He thanked me for my help, and turned to the ocean. In an unexpected moment of tenderness, he looked back at me, and smiled.
“That’s just beautiful, isn’t it?”
And then, after picking through the litter basket a few logs back, he was gone. And I — having had my manhood handed to me in a paper bag by some higher power — dusted myself off, took a deep breath, and walked slowly back to a warm bed.
Poetry
At your height…………
July 25, 2008
At your height
What were you?
A monster.
Cookies for bank line patients
the driver for a famous actor and/or actress
Coldplay’s manger.
The high priest of Sudan?
Condom barrier monster.
A master of indecision.
The trickster in charge of serious behavior
A master of masters
The one who orders the drink
from the next childhood hero
making love to a bar post
holding steady to the pillar
stroking the one cheek
while the other holds the tongue
feeling the wind
against the face
isn’t it amazing?
You can’t buy this sort of river
It flows without any regard
for you
and your problems
or your certainty
or your movement
or your lust.
Buy a cigar.
Make it your new best friend
Hold it like a lover
Smoke it like a client
Finish it like you would someone you care about
And I will be there
To ash upon
Play your record
Scratch it to pieces
over my head
While I giggle
for you are my lover
And I am your tongue
Reeling
Listening to Coldplay
Ordering drinks
Indecisive
Genocidal.
Unprotected sex
with the master
who is distracted and unaware
at her height
I wish her luck.
Dear Diary
Rainy July Sixth
July 06, 2008
Dearest,
I miss you terribly,
With love.
Dear Diary
Sail on, Mon Ami.
June 30, 2008
Dearest,
My cat died today.
I’m going to miss him a lot.
He had been with me since I was ten.
He saved my skin more than once.
When I was living like a human;
he reminded me I was an animal.
A very talented animal.
And that is all.
Bless you, Sunny.
-M
Ranting
Regret
May 24, 2008
Walking on sidewalks littered with puddles and cigarettes and yellow lines. Your shiniest red shoes, muted at the tip, flirting with the edge. Coy, grinny faces. Tripping over ourselves to get to the door first. Hurdling bicycles. Dodging fast moving vehicles. Making eyes at the slow moving ones. Lying on grass infested with ants and other creatures and not even crinkling our noses when they make homes of our skin.
Playing musical instruments as if we knew what we were doing. Running out of orange juice. Taking photographs of each other. Slow-dancing to Leonard Cohen songs. Arguing the merits of religion and science and combining both with dirty thoughts. Cursing the aftershocks for their impotence. Buying transistor radios and telling knock-knock jokes to security guards at the Vatican.
Packing plastic picnics and eating the picnics in places where picnics aren’t naturally eaten. Playing war games with the Chinese. Visiting our local zoo, all-at-once thinking to ourselves how adorable the lions are and then clenching our fists in frustration that they have been captured and caged, their adorable faces put on display for foreigners to relish in. We are freedom fighters. We want for justice. We will save the world.
Dressing in our finest and eating at the hot dog vendor. Mustard on my tie. Ketchup on your dress. Driving hybrid automobiles and wheeling around aimlessly to make up the difference. Working in the oil sands. Keeping the mistakes of our fathers away from the fridge magnet notepads. Bathtubs for two. Ice cream for breakfast. Beads of sweat on your forehead. Tears on my tongue. Laughter on the radio. Watching your eyes watching my eyes watching your eyes. Believing the words that come out of us. Denying the ones that come between us.
Bottles of gin and vermouth at our feet. Olives between our toes. Making love with the window open. Waking up alive, but with one lifeless arm, bent beneath your body all night, confused and happy, with no place to go.
Poetry
Birthday
May 23, 2008
Two-hundred and seventy-two days
to rotate in a sack
like a roast on a spit
connected by a cable
growing my organs
shaping my brow
kicking the walls
making love with pleasant afterthoughts
happy where I was
and happy to be here
the slowest tempos beat my new heart
quiet carves my bones
emptiness sculpts my belly
loneliness feels good
for the last time
doctors spying on my privates
through their ultra-sonic goo
spoiling the surprise
for my noisy parents
Two-hundred and seventy-three days later
The air has been let out of the balloon
The man chews through the lifeline
The heart beats faster
Automatic tears
Ripped from my world
like a chick from a nest
in a hurricane
Twenty-seven years later,
I still don’t hold a grudge
Let’s celebrate.
Fiction
The Tale of Big Fat Napoleon
Big Fat Napoleon sat on a big fat chair upholstered with stretchy skin pulled from the cracked skinny bones of his enemies. He could not move himself an inch, not even to pass gas, for he had eaten himself into an oblivion of fruit tarts and giant drumsticks torn from over-fattened chickens. He had hired a woman named Céleste to feed and care for the chickens, who were kept in a small room in the south side of the castle, marked by a sign on the door that read, quite affectionately, Une Douleur D’estomac pour Bonaparte.
Céleste was meant to be a name reserved for beautiful women but something went wrong in France the day she was born. Within the first two years of her life she managed to balloon into a sixty pound toddler, and by the time she reached adulthood she weighed more than her father and mother combined. Surely it was the rich food that was to blame. Meats and cheeses stirred together with sugar and cream. She insisted upon only the most gluttonous of meals, and her simple-minded parents were eager to comply. So how fitting that at age thirty she be transferred from her home, unmarried, to Napoleon’s residence? Napoleon had selected her himself, after searching high and low for the French nation’s foremost expert on obscene corpulence. The result of this hiring was a delicious collection of birds, and a perpetually satiated conquerer.
Adjacent to the chicken room was the empirical patio. On it was an assembly of tables and chairs constructed out of bones and skin and spare timber and iron. Big Fat Napoleon, in a permanent perch upon his big fat chair and thus immobilized beyond repair, could only sit and watch the birds peck at the furniture.
Occasionally a drunken beggar would come and rearrange the chairs and tables. Big Fat Napoleon couldn’t look in their eyes. They would hurry around the place, picking up one chair at a time, putting it back where they found it, and looking through the window in search of approval. And then on to the next chair. Once they were finished tidying the terrace, they would always give one last intentional, puppy-dog glance towards the plump ruler, certain that they would be receiving some sort of payment. Instead, they would be swiftly killed, and Napoleon would have another patio chair made out of them.
And that is how Big Fat Napoleon furnished his terrace.
Beyond the story of his terrace and his chickens, there were of course his maidens. Napoleon loved his maidens. He had a machine invented that extended itself beneath his buttocks and thrust him up off his seat at regular intervals, thus making it possible for him to make some form of love to the women he lusted after. Upon performing the mandatory act they would dismount, and after reassembling themselves they would curtsey and back away slowly. Napoleon would already be biting into his next drumstick. His fickle royal tongue only desired to have each maiden once, after which they were donated to some nobleman for marrying and further violation.
All of these luxuries were the spoils of a life spent conquering his neighbours, climaxed with his victory at Waterloo. Some scholars and thinkers (all now executed of course) had expressed their concern that he was resting on his laurels and getting too cocky. This was not so. His hard work was merely paying off. These were the Napoleonic golden years, years during which he was meant to eat, drink, copulate, laugh, and of course, execute as many dissenters as he possibly could in order to keep the masses in fear of him. It was a beautiful time.
Yet every gold rush ends. You may think it was the chickens that went first, but no, the chickens continued to reproduce healthily and not even an ungodly appetite could drain the supply. So then you might presume there was suddenly a lack of poverty-stricken trespassers to kill and convert to outdoor furnishings; but thanks to Napoleon’s squandering of the nation’s wealth for his own pleasures, there were more and more peasants arriving each and every day.
No, friends, it was the well of women that ran dry first; a shortage that caused Big Fat Napoleon’s royal testicles to change colour and pressurize, which in turn sent his fluids and sexual rage flowing backwards into his skull, creating in him a sex holocaust and resulting in the deaths of nearly all of his servants. All except one.
Céleste was a virgin and instead drew pleasure from the process of feeding cheese curd and gravy to innocent chickens. She had flirted a few times with the idea of lovemaking but knew that it was far out of the realm of possibility: she weighed nearly a half-ton and was far too concerned with crushing the pelvis of even the most ample man. And beyond that, she had never attracted the interest of anyone, at least not beyond the chickens she so lovingly cared for. No one, that is, until Napoleon ran out of females to abuse.
Napoleon did not lust after Céleste in the same way he did the thousands that came before her. It was something he kept very close to his chest, but in actuality, he had developed a sort of fondness for her. Throughout the golden age he had written off the feelings as a mere subtle gratitude for stuffing him so full with the meats of greasy, pot-bellied chickens. After all, what better thing can a woman do for a man?
But with his fluids trapped and his sex machine thrown out of commission, Big Fat Napoleon found himself with space to consider these things, after careful consideration, the Emperor decided he had fallen in love with his ample chicken-keeping mistress. Thus he called for her.
No ring in human history was large enough to fit around the cucumber fingers of Céleste St. Louise, and Napoleon had killed all of his metal workers. Nonetheless, it was a marriage in their minds, and it was important to her that it be consummated. Beyond consummation, it was important to him that he also have sexual intercourse with her. It was a perfect marriage.
She stepped on a stool fashioned from the skull of the King of England, and with a great heave, forced herself upon the rolling fields of his noodley flesh. Big Fat Napoleon’s thrusting machine was switched on, powered by candlelight and a tank full of rats.
The first thrust was magnificent. There was something special about one full ton of human flesh coming together in the name of true love and mutual need. It is a shame that no one but I, your humble narrator, was around to witness it. Truly a grotesque and beautiful sight. Unfortunately, like all things in our story, the good things leave us and are replaced with nothing but problems and sadness; which is not so much the moral of the tale but rather an obstruction, meant to throw you off course and depress the weak readers. It was upon the second thrust that the magnificent Napoleonic sex machine creaked and moaned, cracking and bending under the weight of the two, and eventually buckled under the pressure. Napoleon was left unable to conquer his last mistress.
And so there they rested. Big Fat Céleste, hunched over Big Fat Napoleon, motionless and far too exhausted to resolve the situation. It was there in that pathetic heap that they died, and the golden age of colonial France met its end. Yet there should be no one with any love for their lives who forgets the story of Big Fat Napoleon. After all, that is what this short recounting of his life was about. True Love.
Poetry
I am just like everyone else
May 19, 2008
I am just like everyone else
thirsty for your poison
in the cupboard
out of reach
lonesome for a face
blocked out by my own hand
frightened of the lines forming
If there is no one here to count them
I am just like everyone else
afloat on a river
dragging garbage rafts from the city
to the pretty countryside
for brainless animals to eat
to cough up and
to eat again
I am just like everyone else
in love with you
the one in my head
the one pulling on the strings
the one at the end of the strings
the strings themselves
I am just like everyone else
drinking coffee on the shoreline
waiting for the tide to take me in
making sketches of future lovers
burping obnoxious babies wearing
little hitler moustaches
and the cutest miniature
bow ties
I am just like everyone else
on a leash held by my mother
hanging my head out this window
in a car driven by my father
on the way to the veterinarian
plotting the escape
scanning the fire hydrants
looking for a stray soul
to make love with
Fiction
My Cannibal Darling is a Gentle Soul
May 17, 2008
My lover wears perky dresses that accent her ears and cause on-looking men to mumble pseudo-religious gibberish in her general direction in the hopes that her lobes will gather the information and transmute their words into something meaningful. She also adores kittens and likes run-on sentences.
She walks with long legs. She crosses them only occasionally. Her shoes have giant posts which extend from the back and thrust her body towards the front, recklessly aiming her assets and thus gathering further disciples. I love to walk alongside her, occasionally glancing at the way her thin white dress moves against her burnt skin, or sneaking a glimpse of the legendary, magnificent ears. She is talented and she is cruel. She could eat a man’s heart. Not figuratively, I mean truly eat the heart of a man, perhaps even directly out of his chest.
My cannibal darling is a gentle soul. She cooks dinners high in protein with ethnic spices and garnished with healthy yet inedible garden items. Like pine cones or acorns. Past lovers have died choking on these ornaments. I know better. I’m different.
Two days ago I purchased a motor for our boat. We jointly own a boat. Up until now it had been powered by paddles and sweat and potential. I had been promising my lover a motor for a full month and finally I had mustered the courage to outfit it with the power and ease of modern combustion. I laboured for hours, screwing the engine to the wooden slabs on the boat, which opposes my instinct, for I am not usually good with my hands. I did it all for her love, for the love of her mind, for the love of her body, for the love of seeing her body soaring faster past the water in our boat.
Yesterday my lover left me for a man with nothing more to offer than a dirty old raft and a toupée. He could not even row his raft because he had no arms, he had lost them in a freak motoring accident. Thus he spent his days lying upon his raft, floating aimlessly across the lake, his legs submerged off to one side, smiling into the sun. Somehow, as I spent my day vigourously renovating my world for the love of that woman, she had spent hers falling in love with an armless man with little more direction than a grass snake in a gallon of motor oil.
My lover took her long legs, she took her beautiful dress, she took her sex and her thoughts and her compassion, and she gave it to this man. This was all only yesterday. Today I find myself with a motor on a boat that I cannot bring myself to use. I am merely floating, legs in the water, giggling to myself. As the wind dies down and I settle into the centre of the sea, you, dear listener, have now become the object of my lusty desires.
Dear Diary
It’s What Men in Stained Raincoats Pay For
May 16, 2008
Dearest,
Things end. They sometimes draw out, in thick yet fading lines of smoke and haze, molesting the inside of your lungs and inhibiting what is usually exquisitely keen judgement. Other times, things end quickly. Like getting hit by a car, or a bus. Like sitting and playing dominoes with your grandfather on a beautiful sunny day just before a planet-eating alien missile strikes the Earth, destroying it completely and in a tenth of a second.
In addition to different sorts of ends, there are different kinds of things. Big things, small things, beautiful things, and make-believe things. Things that mean something to you, and things that you can let go of with a thrust and a smile. There are things that end when you can acknowledge that it was indeed their time to end. Or, more inconveniently and more commonly, there are often things that end so rudely and without good reason, that the only explanation you can squeeze out of your defeated little soul is that it was all a sham, all some big fabricated lie, and that you have just been had by the greatest impostor since Judas Iscariot.
It is the impostors and the frauds that hurt the worst. Adding to the pain and confusion is the uncertainty as to whether or not you were really the victim of any kind of swindle at all.
This is the sort of thing that I, dear reader, am apparently meant to be bothered with now.
My mind, throughout this little adventure, has been a pot of something on a stove with the flame just a little too blue and too high. It wasn’t safe, but it was going to be delicious sooner. The bottom was burning. It was the kind of sweet, molassesy, marshmellow-on-fire aroma that I knew in my head was not right, but the very thought of devouring the stuff gave me the tunnel vision of a man starving and trapped in the wreckage of an airplane in the Swiss alps.
And then it came time to consume what had been cooking. The first time I went in for a taste, it burnt my tongue. You can shrug off a tongue-burning rather easily, and thus I went in for another once it had cooled slightly. Within minutes I was in the bathroom. Everything in my body was telling me it was not for human ingestion. Somehow I was back at the pot within an hour or two, giving it another try. There is something so beautiful and arrogant about what you convince yourself is a true gut feeling, but merely turns out to be a brain one.
After several trips back to the electric fence, I am finally ready to toss this poison in the sink, and rinse it down the drain to be blended into a million pieces, thanks to the magic of modern appliances. There is still a part of me that hesitates, a part of me that believes that perhaps it is simply an exotic dish that needs further spices and stirring before it is ready. That part of me is a desperate, gullible insect. And perhaps this has created in me a more jaded, less trusting individual. I do know this, however: with the time I had spent stirring this counterfeit porridge, I could have been out dining on the various culinary exploits our rich planet has to offer. How sad to be distracted from the fork and knife for so long! I need some colour and a bottle of real wine.
And yes, to answer your question, I am indeed angry enough to compare you, whoever you are, to a bowl of burnt porridge. And then life goes on.
With love.
Dear Diary
The Shoe and the Other Foot
May 10, 2008
Dearest,
This town called Vancouver walks with the other foot forward. Meanwhile my city, an egg-frying chicken coop of a town, uses its right foot. The heavy foot that you always wash first. A kicking foot. The foot with the first toes to be clipped, and the last lace to be tied. It is an ugly foot, battered and scarred from its predominance, and foul-smelling, from so often finding itself buried within the asses of neighbouring right-foot walkers.
Conversely, each and every time I cross the bridge into downtown Vancouver, I am greeted by an army of left-stepping humans. Healthy feet, too. They glow special, pregnant with some kind of special knowledge that those of us in the right-stepping towns have missed completely. Even the right-handed left-steppers have the glow. And all of this has me no longer stepping at all, but rather hopping from place to place, both feet departing and meeting the concrete at the exact same moment. I had best figure it out soon, so as not to break an ankle. Everybody knows that two-footed hopping is the number one cause of ankle breakage in North America.
In addition to the foot-stepping, Vancouverites also make a habit of mouth-curling. It is a strange thing to see so many strangers communally shaping their mouths in the same way, and always as they pass me in the street. Upon recognition that I am near, they meet their eyes with mine, and curl the edges of their mouth upwards. It sounds like it might look creepy to a right-stepper, I know, but believe me, it is a beautiful and warm expression and I wish I knew how to do it. I have tried a few times but I think those on the receiving end thought I was squinting from the sun.
Compare this to when I am in my hometown and passing by other humans, and feel reduced to a footnote. If their mouths curl, it is only because they are sneezing or frightened or trying to assert themselves and their right-stepping ways.
And all the while I dream of learning how to shift my weight to the left and begin the slow path to glowing and mouth-curling and everything else that goes along with it. It would seem that no matter how hard I want to be an honorary lefty, I must become one of them entirely in order to left-step in any real way.
As we drove down Granville upon first arriving here, my little brother was telling me about an interview he heard with some high-minded scientist who insisted that one must choose their city with great care. He believes that all cities are not conducive to happiness for every person in the same way. Some cities can secretly be infecting citizens who don’t belong with a sort of mind pollution. While other cities can inspire and renew. So what happens if I am a left-stepper carrying a right-stepping library card? Do I leave everything I have built in my right-stepping world and build anew with my left foot in front? And if so, when do I do it? And who do I bring along?
I certainly would want to bring you. You are the best and most beautiful pair of ears I have ever typed into.
With love.
Poetry
There is a Light
May 04, 2008
There is a light
upstairs, still on
wasting the electric
running up a fortune
keeping you awake
bleeding through the eyes
interrupting dark pretty thoughts
running you out of town
melting the monsters
warming your tears
raising the curtain
on rhetorical wrinkles
making love with your worry
reminding you of grandmother
streaking up the corners
cleaning the dirty mirror
dust on the edges
i will always be here
to pay these bills
with this love
there is a light
brighter than this lonely fog
warmer than this basement floor
clean like our ugly brains
once you find the switch
you wouldn’t dare
turn it off
Ranting
The Wayward Tongue and the Missing Lick
February 14, 2007
In the thick of some recent moment I metamorphosed into a drooling barnyard animal, foaming at the mouth with desire for some carrot from my past. The management took it upon themselves to slip in a new, less impressive menu when I wasn’t looking, and ever since I have been determined to recover that which came before it.
At first I was calm and collected with a hint of insatiability. My patience mingled with your distance like a schizophrenic reunited with a past lover, back from before his illness truly set in. It was never an obvious spurning, but rather a quick refocusing of energy, so daft that I didn’t even see it happening. It was not until the pattern became emphasized and pronounced that I developed into the monster that lies before you.
I hate love. It’s so honest and balanced and exhaustible. Nothing like pornography. Nothing like mixing painkillers with cocaine with gin. Nothing like God wearing high heels, or burnt out monks giving in and opting for some page in the Kama Sutra. This is the generic brand that we both know tastes like shit but saves us a quarter at checkout. If I wasn’t so in love with the food itself, perhaps the varied degrees of quality to which it is produced would make me more decisive.
And here I am like an anteater on your face. A vacuum so powerful even Hoover would find himself with an embarrassing erection. You turn every which way, but I am determined to continue until there is no face left at all; the only solution to this look of dissatisfaction is to tear it right off of your skull, and I am intent on doing so with two lips and a sucking motion.
We used to be humans, touching each other as though we walked on two limbs and ate with cutlery. And now here we are, propelled into an act of undeniable bestial vulgarity, one of us clinging, the other frightened and desperate for air.
Our first osculation manifested the same result yet came without baggage or concern. I remember you leaning in when I was looking the other way. When I turned to face you you were already nose to nose with my surprise, and in an instant you had your lips pressed beyond mine. It was a baseball to the mouth, but it was glorious. I knew what you meant, and I sure as hell could give you some meaning back, if I knew it was coming. The months that were to follow were a breathtaking display of endurance. It was a notable achievement that the passionate, near-permanent affixation to one other did not affect our ability to breath air and circulate our blood, despite the unbelievable physical contortions.
Some time afterwards, one of us has made the conscious decision to cancel the show, and I now find myself pining for the encore. You lie sleeping across the room, and I doubt you will hear this. Still, I needed to say it for myself. I don’t want the hook to catch either of us, but it’s likely coming, and unless we become moving targets, we don’t stand a chance.
You are breathing so calmly and resolute, over there. I am furiously typing lies onto a screen, fabricating dissent from spare parts I found in this otherwise empty attic. It’s beautiful when you’re asleep without me. Even though it’s dark, I think I can see you and your automatic thoughts, and they speak a lot more highly of this production than your manual ones. You lick your lips and sigh gently, you shift when you encounter a block in the road, and come to rest in a more accommodating position. That’s what I want, in even more ways than the endless ways in which I want you.
The image of my horse-tongue barging down your throat makes me uncomfortable, and that means we’re both feeling cramped in here. Lets just go back to the way things were before the performance ended, before the truth Nazis elbowed into our bed, and before love became something you could eat.
Until then I am on a hunger strike, and with luck, my slobberings will fade into nothing, which is without question their natural habitat. Goodnight, barnyard friends!
Dear Diary
Writer’s Block, and Other Symptoms of Dying
September 04, 2006
I woke up this morning scratching a thinning head of hair. At one point it had been a glorious head of hair, hair I would mould into many extravagant and enormous styles; styles which in some cases, upon looking back, call into question my sobriety at the time. Such a history is a beautiful and meaningful one to have, it reminds me that I was at one point truly young. Yes, young, and perhaps misguided when wielding a comb and a canister of hairspray, but it was youth, glorious youth. I pranced around, loaded with a remarkable certainty: that no matter how unsightly the towering monstrosities I constructed upon my head, I would wake up the following morning with a tussled, thick, flowing canvas on which to paint my next embarrassing masterpiece.
The last few years, however, have seen far less prancing, and the once fertile canvas is blank. Not blank in terms of infinite potential, but rather, actually blank. My hairs have have steadily been retreating from their follicles and into sinks and pillows, perhaps after suffering through one too many spikey-haired art experiments. And I am left with giant scalpy spaces which sabotage any attempt at even the simplest of hairstyles. What’s worse, I am left with a new kind of remarkable certainty: the remaining strands of my youth are undeniably plotting their escape too.
Now, I did not set out to complain about my various bald spots, nor did I intend to make this a piece on my insufferable vanity. I have nothing to complain about, really. The problem is apparently easily solved with a day-long hair transplant and some post-op pain pills. This is about more than hair. This is about more than just myself. This is about the entire human race, about the future of mankind. It struck me this morning as I meditated on the blur of the last four or five years. There is an atom bomb ticking in the closet of every human being. It cannot be dismantled. It will be detonated remotely by some perverted being — be it God or aliens or something else — who is intent on destroying us all on a whim, however it is seen fit. And it will not come with one single, painless vapourisation. No, the sick little machine releases some sort of radioactive aging gas before striking, poisoning us slowly and methodically, making us ugly, and stupid, and weak. When the bomb finally goes off, just before our bodies explode into nothing, we will find ourselves to be far different people than when we first started. Yes friends, we are all going to die.
When I first started dying, I was twenty-one. The hair loss could have been mistaken for an increase in stress. The recurring aching in the belly blamed on indigestion. An impeded mathematical proficiency perhaps chocked up to artistically redirected energies. Looking back, I was fooling myself. This was the drawn out, unmistakable fade-in to the final scene in a film. Back then, I hadn’t even thought of myself to be out of the opening credits.
What was to follow was an perfectly formed denouement. The synapses in the brain became naked. They revealed themselves to be ugly little bridges, joining themselves in the shape of a circle, wound tight like the hairline strands in copper wire. And this circular pathway of thought was pure evil. I was transformed into a dog, mildly drunk from licking spilt champagne from a carpet, chasing its tail late into New Year’s Eve. And it was not a new year in any metaphorical sense, rife with open futures and new beginnings. It was a new year, bloated with empty resolutions and recent regrets. And so the synapses would fire, every lap around the copper ring picking up little fragments of dust and debris from the worries and fears of my so-called youth.
What I was left with, once I saw myself in rotation, was a swelling stockpile of symptoms and afflictions. My stomach was a melting marshmellow. My head was a garbage compress. My guts swirled at all hours of the day, twisting and bloating. My heart, or whatever else lives beneath the skin of the chest, began to tighten and burn. And the twirling neurons in the annular pathways of my brain began to send messages to me throughout my days, slowly ramping up the propaganda. Before long, I had been convinced I was constantly on the cusp of a heart attack, or a stroke, or testicular cancer. Before you know it you’re being medicated at midnight with psycho-pharmaceuticals by doctors in emergency rooms, or dodging smiles from therapists with eastern-European accents who sit far away across tiny white offices. Your dog dies, the woman you love can no longer look you in the eye, your parents divorce, your family members die or leave town, and your friends whisper behind your back. All the while, you feel like the numbers in your age have been reversed and are now imprisoned in the body of a sixty-two year old.
And this is how a young man becomes aware of his imminent death. Imminence, of course, remains undefined in any temporal sort of way, but rather the word is accurate because it is menacing, and because it is certain.
Hold it. If you think that this is some kind of depressing country song of an inaugural essay, you are missing everything.
This writer, now into five years of certainty regarding his looming death, is already plotting his resurrection. An unbearable writer’s block is finally coming to an end tonight. Soon, once I have officially died, they will carry me to the centre of the city and slide my rigid body in behind the door handles of city hall. After three or four days, the politicians trapped inside will be forced to give in to the demands of my will. I will make a healthy living —in my second life — writing articulate and heartfelt letters to citizens informing them that their water is being shut off due to lack of payment.
Until that day comes, I offer up all of this writing to you, the Internet, in the hopes that someone out there may benefit from my pre-ressurection confusion. If you find yourself liking any of it… God help you.
Ranting
In Your Underwear
August 14, 2006
There is a small collection of obscure fluff on your wool coat. I brush it off, and you give me the eyes. Not your famous lusty ones, or the smart-ass ones you use when I make one of my frequent mistakes. These are eyes that penetrate all of that petty nothingness, eyes that actually tell me something. I wouldn’t dare tell you what they tell me. That would have told too much.
You walk in circles around me with your appetite. Your insatiability is the envy of all of my idle personalities, while my prolific personality finds it eternally satisfying to have you by their side. My insecure personality is afraid of you, and he is also afraid of my intelligent personality. My visual personality sees how beautiful you are, and my perceptive one can’t help but marvel at how rare that is. My romantic personality loves you more than he loves himself; while my selfish, insecure one wants you to want him more than oxygen. All of us should get together and drink North Korean wine on the eve of some international holiday.
If one day you were to leave, I would find myself trapped among all of these characters, cornered by a mob of complexes and breached emotion. I would find a place to sit, someplace busy and non-charming, and focus my vision in between various objects until I forgot about those telltale eyes that used to make me so temporarily happy. At the moment of my forgetting, you would reappear as a ghost, and we would walk around the city and I would get acquainted with the idea that I could pass my hand through your body as though it were nothing. You would tell me about what you meant when you gave me those eyes, and I would shake my head in disbelief, insisting that I knew you were lying. You would finally admit that you were.
We’d go down to the river and let the cold change our minds. You would regret leaving, and I would regret staying. You would resign yourself to resting your transparent head on my shoulder, and hovering your glowing hand over my dull one.
That kind of future can’t happen as long as it’s unexpected. And besides, such an empty future will never take away my ever-present muse. You listen to the cheesy lyrics when you’re underneath the covers, and you twirl your tongue and trick me into being honest. That kind of deceit will always be welcome in this bed, but it will always be the only exception of it’s kind.
Mine is almost always here, and yours is almost always there. If yours is ever here or if mine is ever there, you’ll still find a way to trick me, and I’ll still be glad to fall for it.
And so it’s winter time, and I know it won’t be long before I melt it all away. Despite all of the uncertainty, and despite all of these arrogant seasons, you give me that look, and I know that you’re here to stay.
Ranting
Telegrams from the Back Room
August 04, 2006
Time twists me up like a rag soaked in old lady perfume and day-old mop water.
Twenty years ago I attained nirvana at the mere prospect of eating week-old cake. Fifteen years ago I discovered obsession and initially attached it to the game of baseball. Ten years ago I decided that baseball was meaningless and instead threw myself into a well filled with music, one that have yet to properly dig myself out of. Nine years ago I decided that making love to a woman should be the only goal I need achieve, and I therefore presumed I could die quite comfortably after completing the orgasm associated with such an event. Eight years ago I decided that the reason love wasn’t being properly made was due to several seemingly permanent spots on my face, along with my inability to appear comfortable in nearly every situation. Seven years ago I found myself confused by my desire for another orgasm after being presented with the first one slightly ahead of schedule. Six years ago I realized that making love to a woman was the first rail in a ladder pointed towards making love to a different woman. Five years ago I travelled across a continent and sold myself to an Italian-esque southerner who promised me money in exchange for my soul. Four years and eight months ago I discovered I could crave things I didn’t want in exchange for pain. Four years and six months ago I fled the south in search of those things. Four years ago I realized that even more pain could be achieved if I craved the pain of craving pain that I didn’t crave, and so I craved it. Three years and six months ago I replaced the craving with yet another woman to make love to. Three years ago I got frightened of myself and threw up in the street. Two years and six months ago I nearly died from too much intelligence. Two years and four months ago I met my match, and she met me. Two years and three months ago I discovered a fear of loss, and it quite turned me on. Two years and two months ago I began to write random things in exchange for praise from strangers. Two years ago I decided I would start dying. One year and five months ago I contracted my first disease. One year and four months ago I contracted my second, and it didn’t take long before new diseases were necessary on a weekly basis just to keep the electrons in flow. One year ago I began to smoke fear like crack. Eleven months ago I forgot my name. Ten months ago I made a face at her and she giggled like the childhood I skipped. Nine months ago I conceived my return from a long absence. Eight months ago I became absent. Seven months ago I was frantically searching garbage bin doctor degrees for clues. Six months ago I realized I was for the first time actually in love with somebody, despite having actually said the words a million times before. Five months ago a therapist named Jan closed my file and told me I was cured. Four months ago my body began erupting like a Mickey Mouse Club volcano. Three months ago I found God. Two months ago I replaced him with a Pamphlet. A month or so ago I moved into a castle with walls made of raspberry jam. A couple of weeks ago I found out one of my best friends was slowly dying of a terminal illness. Thirteen days ago he showed me that I was slowly dying of one too. One dozen days ago I fell into a coma of light alcohol consumption and upside-down lyric writing. Eleven days ago I wanted to give you a ring but I knew you wouldn’t answer. Ten days ago I cried into a pillow because I couldn’t remember what it felt like to breathe without trying. Nine days ago I shot a client in the forehead while sleeping. Eight days ago I was spinning lies at gunpoint. A week ago I was so distracted with relief that I went to sleep without thinking about how much wakefulness hurt. Six days ago I woke up without a reason to panic, so I made one out of hollandaise sauce and materialism. Five days ago I stretched out on my floor for one full hour and pretended I was enlightened. Four days ago I was enlightened. On Tuesday I had a cancer in my throat. On Wednesday I decided that was silly. Yesterday I loved watching you come.
There have only been one and a half hours thus far today, and it would appear I’ve got quite the mess to clean up.
Poetry
The Rich are Getting Richer
December 14, 2005
-Who did carrie end up with?
-Mr. Big
-I just hate that.
-Better than ending up with that other guy.
Poetry
Chocolate Shop
June 08, 2005
You breath into me
And I breath into you
My heart is in pieces
in a chocolate shop
Fiction
The Invisible Hand: A Food Related Anecdote
January 06, 2005
Rolling a cart through the average North American grocery store has become something of a cinematic experience. Once a relatively calm, sedated environment visited by goals-oriented, list-wielding human beings; the supermarket has reinvented itself as the unrivalled destination for the solution-crazed masses. You may have yet to notice the subtle transition, but it becomes frighteningly evident when you accidentally drop the family pack of fat-reduced sausage and look around for yourself.
As your cravings for cylindrically-packed meats subside, the meditative chant of the fluorescent lighting above you pervades through the Elton John classic that drips menacingly from a tinny speaker in the corner of the warehouse. Gazing down an adjacent isle, you spot the first victim. An obese woman in a flowery dress stands gazing upwards across a vast wall of painted cereal boxes. A sweet, fibrous mural painted with the pupils of children in mind. Her five young offspring dangle from every possible perch, demanding their individual cravings be satisfied. She seems unaware of their presence, and instead weighs her options, a box in each hand. From the superfluity of choices, she has spent twenty minutes narrowing it down to the final two. In her left hand, the red and yellow box labeled Sugar Puffs, now with reduced sugar glows warmly as the obvious household favourite. In her right, the traditional Frosted Flakes, with an official looking emblem declaring 21 essential nutrients emblazoned above an impossibly happy tiger. The sweat drips from her brow and collects at her mouth which shifts in expression intermittently. First overwhelmed, then confused, her lips pause briefly at ponderous before arriving at the inevitable convinced. She places the defeated Frosted Flakes back amongst a sea of it’s blue brethren and continues on her long and arduous journey, with one family-sized box of Sugar Puffs added to her mountainous cart. Judging from the sequence of facial expressions, she had decided that since both options had been healthy products, she might as well go with the one that would shut her kids up.
Having witnessed the blindness first hand, things become easier and easier to see. You sweep from aisle to aisle, sorting through the diseased. A lawyer sifting through omega-enriched blue cheese dressings. A scale-molesting teenager digging for fat-free sour cream. The row of people wrestling for the last can of Slim Fast. You begin to feel claustrophobic, your heart racing faster as you suddenly encounter the busiest isle in the whole place. Humans racing from shelf to shelf like insects collecting shards of lettuce, letting out quiet agonising moans when other humans blocks their path. You’ve entered the natural foods aisle.
Suddenly, no food concept is too mundane to either be enriched with or fabricated completely from soy. Rows of tofu sausages and chickenless nuggets give way to a shelf overcrowded with soy cookies, soy chips and soy cake mixes. The freezers are packed full of soy ice creams and popsicles. And if it’s not made from soy, it is organic, so as to imply it is without question the purest kind of food possible, delivered straight from the hand of God himself, even if it happens to be in the shape of a wiener.
As you make your way to the check-out, Rocket Man is meeting it’s climax, and you become emotional. The usual parade of tabloids at the counter have now been matched with an equal number of healthy eating propaganda mags. You catch a few people flipping through them, abruptly looking at their conveyer belt of items with alarm, and casually sliding the can of chocolate whipped cream off to the side. Following suit, you can’t help but question your own choices, if only for a second.
At home, you start scanning the content of your cupboards in a mad rage. You begin to notice that almost everything you’ve purchased has been enriched with vitamin C. Even things that you don’t eat, such as your kitchen cleaners and air fresheners, are all enriched with vitamin C. And then you remember what you learned on the discovery channel; that your daily requirement of the magical vitamin can be found in a couple of grapefruits, or your nightly encounter with toothpaste. It is at this moment that you come to the embarrassing realisation that you have been had.
At what point did your noble desire for health and wellness shift into a gullible, maniacal vendetta seeking out every last gimmick and ploy?
Desperate to escape from such disillusion, you flip on the television to clear your mind. Adverts for toothbrushes and shampoo slowly sedate you, until the significance of the subject matter slaps you in the face with an invisible hand. For a moment, you had bought into the idea that the innovative new toothbrush being hawked at you was necessary. It was as though without it, your teeth would fall out within days, and your inability to chew would result in death by starvation. You had actually planned on buying that toothbrush. Your life depended on it.
Chased away by what had usually been a trustworthy television, you dash outside into the late afternoon sun. It feels as though all of this marketing is chasing after you, as if it were a physical entity hot on your heels. If you are unable to outrun it, it will most certainly devour you and convert you into one of them. One of those cereal buying, smoothie drinking, lettuce-munching freaks.
That’s no way to live, you tell yourself as you dive into your car and twist the ignition. Those people are being consumed by their own mortality! They can’t eat a simple meal without pulling out a calculator in order to ensure the proper balance between carbohydrates and protein. They actually weigh their food, for Christ’s sake! And all because they live their lives in fear of illness and death, seeking out every possible means of adding days to their lifespan. You shift into high gear, hurtling towards the core of the city.
In your gas/electric hybrid, an SUV containing only one woman pulls up in the lane next to you. She’s singing along to what is most likely bad music, oblivious to the space she is so blindly wasting. You begin to honk your horn furiously at her, and after rolling down your window, you begin to shout obscenities. Catching a glimpse of yourself in the rear-view mirror, you notice the vein in your forehead has begun to swell. After receiving no response from the evil woman, you deduct that her music was turned up too loud to notice you. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Slowly, you drift towards her, and when inches away from brushing up against the giant car, she turns and notices your intrusion. Startled, she slides further away from you. You can’t help but persist. There is a lesson to be taught here, and you need not even touch her. The fear of collision is enough. Your slow saunter into her personal space eventually results in her sliding off the road, and flipping into the ditch.
This is life, and what happened in the grocery store was a mere signpost.
As you reach the office tower headquarters of the mega-food-mart store, you leave your car in the middle of the street and dance like a mentally-ill leprechaun into the lobby. The elevator doors begin to close, but there is a man already inside and he foolishly opens them to make way for you. You thank him with a smile and press the tallest button. Once the doors close, you give him your best Hannibal Lector.
“What did you have for lunch today?” you ask the man, frothing at the mouth. The man is justifiably creeped out, and you spend the rest of the elevator ride in awkward silence. Reaching the fiftieth floor, you depart from the elevator and head towards the boardroom with determination. Swinging the doors open, Elton John sits eating a bowl of Cheerios in the corner of the glass room, all the while cheering you along:
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no
The broken glass wasn’t nearly as painful as you thought it would be. As the cool city air begins to accelerate against your face, you sing with the voice of a man who has waited his entire life to make a difference.
I’m a rocket man. Rocket man. Burning out his fuse up here alone.
Ranting
The Real World™
December 14, 2004
Up until the eleventh of December, I had been living comfortably in a protective bubble. My contact with the Real World™ was merely through distant observation, or in listening to the woes of others who found themselves immersed in it. On one frosty winter’s evening in particular, however, I found myself locked in a nearly fatal collision with what I have now defined as the Real World™—repeated again for emphasis.
I would first like to ensure that you have all taken good care to notice the trademark I have attached to the end of the Real World™. I have chosen to do this so as not to confuse today’s subject with The Real World. Actual reality is not up for discussion today, since when it comes to true reality, there is nothing much to talk about. It’s real.
Instead what I’ve been inspired to write about today is, repeated yet again, The Real World™—which by it’s very nature manifests itself as the farthest thing from real you could possibly imagine.
The event in question can be described as, without exaggeration, one of the most perfect case studies I have seen on this subject. Much like a wild tribe of natives suddenly happened upon deep within the Amazon, this tribe of Real Worlders™ seemed completely untouched by the influence of the trademark-less Real World. And yet, as I write this, I still cannot convince myself of this, and find myself wondering if, terribly, they have not only been influenced by The Real World, but saturated in it—a saturation that has caused the addition of the trademark and has completely removed most traces of actual reality. Is it possible that the threat of reality actually causes the demise of reality itself?
Okay, I’m stalling. Though I may be slightly uneasy about admitting my whereabouts two nights ago, I’ll cut the crap.
It was an office party. Of the Christmas variety.
Now, I promise you all I had good reason behind my attendance, as I am not one who usually partakes in such corporate nothingness. I was accompanying my girlfriend—who I assure you was just as jaded about the experience as I was. Being quite new to the company, it was assumed that her presence would help ensure that the necessary paychecks would still be cut. But the clincher, in all honesty, was the offer of free food and unlimited free alcohol at what was supposedly one of the finest restaurants in town.
We arrived as a group of sober strangers, united only in the intention to suffocate our livers with the soft, comforting pillow that is alcohol. Fine wines were turned away by the boss-type attendees, who instead opted for the most boring tasting bottles I’ve ever tasted in my life. I quickly discovered that while these were people who preferred to be perceived as fine diners, there was in reality nothing about them worthy of the adjective. As I will soon explain, in The Real World™, the only thing that really matters IS perception—false perception, if possible.
In any case, we went for gin.
It didn’t take long for things to change. The fact that I had suddenly entered The Real World™ first became obvious when the leader of this pack of snarling capitalists demanded that the restaurant management replace our waiter, who was most obviously not a very straight man. The waiter had been framed as rude, when in reality he was a perfectly nice guy. The rest of the evening was of course laced with loudly vocalised homophobic slurs.
The next we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore signpost we passed on our journey took the form of the national marketing director’s incredibly large breasts—or more precisely, the open discussion of them—followed by several bouts of heavy groping by the president of the company. Yes they were large, and yes they were 94% exposed, but that’s hardly cause for sexual abuse. Not that she seemed opposed.
Once the president became bored of sexually abusing one of his employees, he retreated to the restroom, where he was spotted crying into a roll of toilet paper over the choice between his wife and his mistress. Oh the humanity.
As the night went on and one sick prejudiced joke followed another, things became much more apparent. This was not an office party. This was not a corporate celebration of the birth of Santa, or whatever Christmas is. This was nothing more than an attempt at rewiring their twisted circuits. One night out of an otherwise robotic year, devoted to getting all of the ants out of your pants at once—by becoming drunken, sex-hungry, discriminatory and even violent.
The “Christmas Party” has become a capitalist tradition, and it is assumed that every place of business is required to hold one. I believe I have put two and two together, and I may be going out on a limb here: this is NOT because the corporate gods want you to have a good time. These parties serve to send a jolt of mind-numbing electricity into the business-person’s psyche to release a built-up desire for freedom. An escape from what has become a false perception of reality… and mistaken for everyday life.
These people were resetting themselves!
The bus ride to the inevitable comedy club was the camel-snapping straw. The most well tempered, sweetest, hardest working member of the company staff received everyone’s favourite gift: blow-up boxing gloves. Her reaction at first seemed grateful, but something went terribly, horribly wrong. While these parties are usually meant to sedate, the booze didn’t hit her right. Standing up on the bus, a bubble of boxing plastic attached to her hand, she moved towards her employer, and proceeded to beat the living shit out of her. Perceived in The Real World™ as “all in good fun”—but in actual reality, a pure expression of an employee who had been reset one too many times.
This woman has chosen not to remain at the company.
The anger I witnessed in that moment was a perfect example of the divide between awareness and ignorance. People who have chosen to make a thankless job the centrepiece of their lives seem to automatically switch to this land of make believe—where everything is cordial in the face of business, no matter how false and no matter how self-defeating. But when one can take it no more, reality finally takes proper hold, and expresses itself in any way it can. Reality can only be repressed, not destroyed. And we know what psychologists tell us about repression: you can’t keep packing leftovers into a tupperware container. It eventually explodes.
Is that what it takes in order to keep a job? Develop a second “yes-person” personality, one who sacrifices their standards and does whatever it takes in order to please a superior? Or is it as I theorized earlier? Does the fear of dealing with every day life actually drive people to block it out through ignorance? Is that why nobody seems to be in touch with anything close to reality?
That woman who tried to kill her boss isn’t the only one who is leaving. My girlfriend is also quitting—and rightfully so. She, like myself, finds it impossible to live in a fabricated, soul destroying Real World™. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of people aren’t so lucky, and remain trapped in their daily lives. No matter how much they insist they are happy, they are not. It is merely denial. Part of the act of creating false perception.
If you know someone who is lost within the labyrinth of a corporate life, do them a favour this Christmas and give the gift that keeps on giving. A pair of blow-up boxing gloves and a bottle of vodka.
Fiction
Sinking Ships and Pillow Slips
November 10, 2004
Morning spreads you open and inserts itself into you—an act of rape inevitably ignored by universal justice in twenty-four hour cycles. This repeat offender usually arrives with sonic accompaniment that conjures up the image of an ocean liner captain. Upon waking from a drug-induced nap, he discovers his ship is irreversibly moments away from crashing into Manhattan Island. What can he do but honk the horn?
Thankfully, technology provides you with the ability to speed the vessel’s demise—your hand lands on a the sleep button with stunning accuracy. This same technology also comes with a curse—the numbers 6:30 have become more routine than urination.
Though still half asleep, you have been programmed to slowly rise from your Martha Stewart bedding. Standing naked before your bedroom mirror, the reflection unequivocally disappoints you. This serves to wake you up just a little bit more.
Moving towards the kitchen, a pre-programmed machine has produced a viscous, bitter excuse for coffee. Your breakfast consists of something made with a majority of refined sugar and artificial flavourings, and traces of genuine food. This, combined with the robotic java, gets you to sixty-five percent.
The final to-do item on the path to consciousness is the shower. Most often this time is used unwisely for considering your past mistakes, or exercising your awful singing voice. Occasionally magic happens, however, and you provide yourself with more love than you could possibly experience the rest of the day.
Before exiting your place of dwelling, it’s time for a quick brush of the teeth. Marketing executives have taught you that your toothpaste not only whitens them, but also protects you from 164 deadly tooth and/or gum diseases. Once again, technology has provided an answer.
The door to your home is a gateway from one hell to another. While your home is an anthill of monotony, the outside world is a predictable sandbox of shit—and you’re lucky enough to hold one of six billion shovels.
The meter in your car informs you that you’re running low on air pollutants. Disturbed that your contribution to global warming could be interrupted for even a second, you race to the nearest gas station, where you have a partial orgasm complaining to yourself about the price of gas. Partial orgasms however, as they say, don’t cut it in a twenty-first century world. You put yourself over the top by spending the rest of your commute fingering old women in slow Buicks. The climax is almost as delightful as your shower, but there’s no love in it.
Your post-pleasure cigarette consists of driving along sidewalks, picking out the younger humans that look similar to those in grocery store magazines, and imagining yourself on top of them.
You work for a company that makes billions of dollars by either lying to people or causing them harm. Your day starts out in virtual quiet. After sifting through memos that insist the company’s future (and therefore your employment) is teetering on your limited use of stationary, you sit before what has become your central nervous system—a computer.
The first order of business is the email check, and as usual you are dismayed to discover one angry letter from a superior, and six-hundred forwarded messages from your drinking buddies. After randomly sampling a few of them and giggling at short video clips of overweight chimpanzees being slapped in the head with rubber chickens, you’re ready to get to work.
Three hours have passed, and you’ve done what you do. It’s off to the lunchroom, evoking memories of having your meat-loaf squished by Biff McPherson in elementary school. Waiting for you instead are several of your co-workers, with whom you sit for your fifteen minutes of freedom. Most of this time is spent cracking jokes about homosexuals—each one followed up with a disclaimer assuring that you’re just kidding, and that you actually have two gay friends.
After lunch, Hell begins to look like a viable option for workplace replacement. Your boss tells you you’re insignificant. Your spouse calls to announce how much worse his or her day was than yours. You find out your big promotion is going to the foreign guy. Your kid gets suspended and the principal calls you asking you what kind of parent you are. Your insurance premiums go up, the stock market goes down, Osama Bin Laden makes another videotape and a B-list celebrity comes out of the closet. It is your afternoons, more than any other time of the day, that you wish could shake themselves up a little.
The drive home offers you a glimmer of hope when you receive an unexpected quickie from a tailgating pickup truck.
As you pull up to your house, your house is not on fire, and your prayers have gone another day unanswered. Passing back through the gates of monotony, you proceed to either produce a bland dinner for yourself, or have one cooked for you (if you are a male trapped in a 1950s mentality).
The glow of the television wraps you like a blanket as you give in to it’s powers of sedation. Here you are anything that you want to be—a billionaire firing young go-getters, single and faced with a choice between 50 chiseled faces, trapped on a desert island among half dressed big breasted women, a news anchor, a forensics cop or later in the evening, a porn star.
After several hours of television therapy, the machine in your head kicks into autopilot and you languidly move up the stairs. If you have a significant other, he or she is already sleeping and is therefore insignificant.
The trapdoor bed you fall asleep in will be the same one you destroy the ocean liner from—seven and a half hours later.