Buck Daruma, You Wish

I found this one in 30 seconds, because the tokyo nightscape thing Karl gave me was only ever meant to be temporary and was starting to feel really old.

Now, I HATE this design. I've only had it 30 seconds and I hate it. But it's got potential. If I could replace the flames with something less dramatic and intrusive, and change all the colours, and grey out the snowflake/ice crystal so that the text could actually be read, this actually isn't bad at all.

So I'll stick with it, even though it's shitty, for a few days while I see if I can't smooth out the rough edges.

It's been a looong time.
How have you been?

In an "about me" I wrote, sometime before we switched versions of movable type, I made a promise that I've been trying to keep (and that I stil hold myself to whether or not you're aware of it). There was also a couple quotes, which also still feel appropriate. The quote was by Steve McQueen, which said "I live for myself, and I answer to no man". or something like that. It was a reminder to myself that I do this shit for me, and that I write when I want to write, even if that means this place lies fallow for months, even years at a time. If you don't like that, fuck off. But the promise was a promise not to bullshit you, and it was really a promise not to bullshit myself, And that's what's been on my mind the last 3 days or so. Because there's some stuff I've been wanting to finish up, for me, stuff that needs to be outside my head now.

What actually dragged me in here was the comments. For some reason I'm getting about 70-100 spam comments every single day. I just upped the aggressiveness of the spam filter as high as it would go and deleted everything I could find. I might have been overzealous so if I deleted a real live comment from one of my 3(4?) readers I'm truly sorry.

The stuff I was talking about back in November and December is still very immediate for me, still very much on my mind. Let's keep this short; I have some stuff coming down the pipe. I'll continue shortly.

I'm unsettled. I will eventually write something more meditative on why I'm unsettled - the short story is that I'm trying to "kick the bird", actually several birds, and this is day one - but right now I'm still going through it, and it's making me squirrely.

I broke down and made food ten minutes ago (was trying to fast, will try again tomorrow I guess) because I'm too hot (that's the excercise) and I couldn't sleep. The weird visual imprecations the media gallery on the left make as I type remind me of the freeze frame images I used to get while high on speed back in J's garden years ago.

Hitchens hates cliche because Martin Amis hates cliche and I agree that they are right and yet at the same time they are so, so terribly wrong. Martin Amis is more wrong because he is also (and these things are related) a grammar nazi, which misses the point and purpose of grammar. David Cameron will make a shitty PM for the same reasons Gordon Brown was a shitty PM, with the added handicap that his party will fuck up an already worsening relationship with Europe at a time when the UK could really use someone who won't fuck up relations with Europe.

I can't explain what tonight feels like. Something is askew.

I'm reading Dea's comment on my previous post and I miss her sensitivity and intelligence and wit and for the life of me I can't tell whether I agree that I was talking about something different from her or not. I can't quite tell what I was trying to say and I find it harder still to parse out what she was trying to say and then the boat sinks completely long before I compare the two.

I think a big part of what I was trying to say - what I feel more, now - is that our lives as human beings, in the western world at least, are more and more becoming intricate constructs of myths, none of which are true. And the most pervasive, the most dangerous, of those myths are the ones concerning our own identities and who we are and how we relate to others and what we value. I've seen this in America's war on work, in Jamie Oliver's doomed campaign to change the way we relate to food... the things we believe are ours, the things we believe are worth striving for, there's a whole gestalt I'm just skimming the surface of here that's deeply fucked up in our culture now, and the age thing was just one tiny part of it.

And that's enough of me raving like a paranoid hobo on a street corner for a little while longer. The curried yams are finally digesting and it's time to try and sleep for a bit. Hopefully the next thing I write will actually be interesting, if only to me.

"You are old, father William", the young man said, "and your hair has become very white;
and yet you incesantly stand on your head -- do you think, at your age, it is right?"

At one of the parties I recall clearly this NYE (which means it was pretty early on), I overheard a snippet of conversation regarding an old friend that had moved away. "she said to me on the phone that her life is so different now. she says she's strong and wise. Strong. and wise".

As I said, I recall this part of the evening with extreme clarity. What I recall thinking at this point was "what bullshit."

Ever since, I've been mulling on and off the myth of wise old age. We have this idea, this expectation, that as people get older they "become comfortable in their skins", settle into these golden-haloed personas that dispense the experience of years with benign jedi-like smiles from their comfy sofas.

I have no doubt that some people, through often herculean efforts (I should really say sisyphean, given their ultimate lasting power in most cases), manage to become more conservative in their approach to life. Fewer people still manage to glean some tiny insight into the workings of human conscioussness, and an even tinier apprecaiation of their own motivations and desires. Again, not the same thing. The people who actually claim to have been transformed into "wise beings" almost uniformly end up to have learned a newer and more sophisticated set of tools with which to engage in denial, and mistake this for the real thing. And this is the result of persistent work; the devouring of libraries, hours spent on the meditating cushion, years on your knees confessing sins to some priest or abbot or rabbi.

Most parents cannot recall their childhood, and this is while they still have most of their mental faculties. There are exceptions, obviously, but they mostly serve simply to highlight the truth of the matter all the more brightly. Age does not provide wisdom, or comfort, or peace, or grace. These are myths. They are dangerous myths because too many people believe in them and buy into them early on, Like my friend in Osoyoos.

I'm looking back on what I just wrote, and I dislike it. it doesn't say what I want it to say. I'm gonna publish it now anyway, because that's kind of my point, even if it's shittily made. life is imperfect, full of mistakes, and doesn't get better as you get older. To paraphrase Dan savage talking about Marriage: "[life] is is an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted, leavened by the occasional orgasm." (Dan's next statement in this week's column suggested that if you were unable to forgive your partner, you weren't cut out for marriage, and I think that carries through as well; if you can't forgive yourself for your own failures in life, then you're probably doomed to run away from that life, either literally or figuratively).

If, on the other hand, you are prepared to consider that you are and will always be a fucking idiot, then you have a tiny chance of letting yourself in on the joke, which is probably the closest thing to actual wisdom any of us is ever likely to see in this existence. And that's available at any age at all.

At some point very soon I'll have to dismantle this machine. The fuckers at telus tell me they can't reconnect in the new place till Dec 8, so that means It will be a few days till I sit down and write a big old post about addiction.

Till then.

I was one sentence away from becoming Canadian.

I let it go because what I wanted more than being Canadian was a lasting relationship with someone I've grown to love and respect as a friend and confidante, someone I care for deeply and desire almost constantly. And that seemed to me a true thing and more important than a piece of paper.

And because I wanted this thing more, because my desire to be truly partnered to someone I loved was more important than my desire to be secure, I've lost both. She's left me. (let's call her Eve).

As we speak, she's sleeping over at the home of the new guy she met a couple weeks ago. But a month and a half ago she sat down in this room next to this computer and offerred to apply as a common law pair for landed status.

There are two things that need to be said about this offer. The first is that it came out of the blue; I wasn't expecting it at all, had no inkling that this was on her mind. The second is that I remember the offer being presented with a spirit of "here, we can do this, you don't seem such a liability", a statement that was all but actually said in various different ways (e.g. "you've refused any kind of help from anyone so I don't really wory about having to pay for you, you're very resourceful").

As I've said before, I love eve. As will be clear by the time I finish my second post, I'm deeply depressed right now and my persecptions are skewed. I don't know, can't know, if I did the right thing. And it eats at me like a worm, like the first ever worm, like the mindless insatiable thing with teeth like the jagged edges of time that will one day eat the whole world and spit it out again, as it has done before. I can't eat, I can't sleep, and now I'm finding it harder and harder to work. I promised myself I would never write anything personal in here again and I'm breaking that promise because the bile of my own thoughts is choking me and I need to spit them out over the side, so I've come here. Because I don't know anymore.

This is what I know. I know that I tried to move furniture over to my new apartment for 12 hours yesterday, tried until about 5am, and I couldn't move more than two plants. I can't even touch most of what I still think of as *our* belongings. I spent most of that 12 hours 'not throwing up'.

If you love someone, you can't put them through an immigration process unless they love you as well. You need to know this, you need to be sure of this. Because the process can be hard, and it can be invasive, and you can be asked all kinds of painful questions about your relationship by men who really should be fucked in the ass with a 2X4. And I wouldn't wish that kind of discomfort, that kind of pressure, on someone who simply pitied me and wanted to help.

There's more to it than that, I could add more, but that's at the core of things.

The sentence I wanted was this one, or one like it: "I love you, and I think we have a chance together if we get this thing done. And I'm prepared to do it because I want to see what our relationship looks like if you're Landed."

That was the sentence I wanted. I didn't want promises, I know promises aren't worth shit. I wanted to be reassured, to know, that we were doing this as a thing together, and that it wasn't just being offerred to me. Because that makes all the difference if and when the shit hits the fan, and in my experience shit always hits the fan.

That was what I wanted. I wanted, I needed, for us to go into this together, if we were going to do it at all. Instead, I said no, because I wasn't sure. And six weeks later She has a new relationship and the biggest fight of my day is putting on the smile that I give to her when I see her to let her know it's all right. I love her so much, and she's really into this new guy and I really am happy for them both. And I want to make sure that she only sees that side of how I feel and not the other side, which is the side that's tying blurry sentences here 20 minutes after I should have left for work.

I want to move this stuff befor she realises that I don't have the strength to do it. That I feel completely fucking devastated and I can't even be sure of the reasons for my decisions anymore, even after I've typed them out.

I was one sentence away from a happy ending.

I have to go.

I don't know how to go on. And I'm pretty sure I don't really want to anyway.

The original plan, when starting up again, was to write every single day, first thing in the morning. Actually, it's still the plan; I have a book that I was given way back that suggests this is a good excercise for opening up the creative process. However, the reality is that, LIke Karl, I find myself working 16 hour days and dragging my sorry startled ass out of bed already half an hour late for the next day more often than I'd like to admit. As a side effect of this lifestyle, on the days that I actually DO have off, waking up at noon is a pretty common feature. Having breakfast around oneish. showering at two. gingerly pointing my zimmer frame over to the computer at 3.

reading Circe's posts is often an excercise in angst and guilt; as a human being, she strives more than single person I know, and I find that reading about her herculean efforts often casts a pall on my own, because at the end of the day I am a lazy fucker. I could be taking japanese lessons right this second. I could be in a gym on machines or climbing or sparring. I could be trying to build the neural net I've been talking about for the past 4 years, you know actually building it, not just mumbling about it to some girl I want to impress at a party. Fuck, I could be heading out to a party. Or volunteering.

Yet, despite what amounts to a mere 50 hours a week plus commutes and a tiny bit of appartment hunting, I feel completely strung out. a blasted shell. I once told a good friend that people are like springs; if you put them under some limited about of stress they adapt, and a restoring forces returns them to normal when the load is again removed. But increase that load beyond a certain point and you cross the "elastic limit", the point beyond which it becomes deformed and can never again return to being the way it was. I feel, most mornings, as though I passed my elastic limit about 8 years ago. Now I require sherpas to assist and a reward for completing such simple acts as taking out the garbage.

But this is a very commmon feeling. There's a book out there called "no time" by some woman who studies this kind of thing that I will eventually get around to reading and then writing about in here. And yes I am fully aware of the complex interplay of ironies in that last statement.

Fuck it all.

Let's test out the new Movable type linking system. here's a picture of Eva Herzigova in some slutty dress, apparently.

I was gonna tell you about leaves.

There's a message on my phone that's over three months old. It's an invitation to a party in Vancouver that I never attended, partly because I could not find the time but more so (if I'm truthful with myself) because I was being a wallflower, afraid to poke my head out of the little coccoon of my own life and get to know a bunch of strangers.

The guy who left the message was also, let's face it, a bit wierd. He continually wore a three pointed jester hat, replete with little silver tinkle bells on the end of each point, and he liked to engage people with discussions of his experiments in "telepathy" (I was strongly tempted at this point to throw in a Beat poem by Tim Minchin). I'm not graceful about my distaste for magical thinking.

He called himself Howler. He'd literally invented his own name and managed to get other people to call him by his invented name and even though I am myself, as mentioned, a pretentious twat, that gives me even more of a licence I feel to call out other even more pretentious twats and expose them for what they are. We police our own. I never referred to Howler by anything other than his real name. For reasons that may even already be clear, He shall remain Howler today. Git.

I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like Howler. I did. I was incredibly fond of him, and we always hugged in the street when we ran across each other. Despite the "LSD-thinking" he was incredibly open hearted, and genuinely seemed to love everyone and everything that his life came into contact with. That kind of open compassion and goodwill, without any kind of agenda, without any sense of articfice, was infectious. You came away from visiting howler a better person. He's one of the only people that I've ever described my full family history too, because he listened without any kind of judgement.

We actually shared a large group of common friends, including some of my closest friends from university. We'd been hiking the north shore mountain in groups, we'd hung out in beat cafes at 2 am playing chess with weathered old European guys who chain smoked as they analyzed the board.

he May have been one of the organizers of the Vancouver naked critical mass bike ride; taht may be giving him too much credit. Howler wasn't really one for organising. He was an enthusiastic participant. He generally just showed up in a whole bunch of places.

The invite itself had come as I passed him in the park not two blocks from where I'm writing this, where he and two of the most gorgeous women I will ever meet were learning how to walk on stilts, possibly in preparation for the festivities I was doomed to miss (To Karl: I will discuss the hot girls in the spring. for now suffice to say that 23 is the perfect age when you're really blonde and toned and obviously not wearing a bra because gravity seems to have given you a free pass, possibly in homage).

That time in the park with the stilts and the vision in hot, young, fresh sexiness was the last time I ever saw Howler. Two weeks later, on July 12, he was at another party on Texada island, and decided to take off his clothes and walk into the sea.

He was declared missing; there were search parties. On July 20 his body washed up on shore. I still don't know, can not guess, whether his death was accident or design. Howler believed a lot of strange things, and an experiment in drowing and rebirth was not beyond him. or he may have chosen to swim underneath the island shelf; Texada has an almost unique reverse tapered undersea geology.

I don't know. I'll never know. I know that I miss my friend. And the last part of him is the message on my cellphone, a ghost message now, which I stop and listen to every two weeks or so as I edit my inbox, until my service provider changes and this vestige, too, this last whisper of the dead, is lost.

April is not the cruelest month. I don't give a fuck for dull roots and spring rain.

I was going to keep this short, but having written that sentence and title I'm overcome with thoughts. The real "cruelty" of eliot's spring is twofold: it's the 'lie' of resurgent growth, of sudden fecudity and abundance, but already containing the seed of rot within it, and it's the horror of the gunslinger's fate at the end of the novels by Stephen king; the terrible cruelty (there I said it) of being denied rest, denied an ending; to have to go on.

I have a terrible disease of the soul that causes me to always see the other side of the argument. Even here, even now. Eliot was probably only using the juxtaposition as a cheap device anyway, yet here I am thinking about the fact that maybe there's merit in seeing it his way after all. But no.

November is the cruelest month. This is when things die, with no hope of coming back, and it's only romantic if you're a pretentious twat. death is ugly and sordid and we still have to go on even though the next few months contain bitter darkness and cold hard rain or worse. So take your hollywood family rollicking in the cathedral of fluttering golden leaves and shove it up your ass. I'm not buying.

This blog is dead, and has been for a year. The whole of november - not the paltry tribute of a few pithy days - it's all the month of the dead. The dead are speaking. I want to tell you what they have to say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKoDOxrxVOY