mockie talky

Over the last year and a half I've written down enough of my conversations with Schmutzie that I've got a respectable mini-anthology going on. For those of you who like this sort of thing, here's a guide to the VERY BEST of the marital chitchat. And by very best I mean whatever I had.

The apple core incident
Topics include: fruit waste, starving children, unhealthy fixations

The creepy bargain
Topics include: parsimony, fish with bugs for tongues, disgust

Falcon powder
Topics include: bird discomfort, bird pulverization

Time is a number if you read it right
Topics include: darkness, imprisoning me, all that I see, absolute horror

The invention of Chanklemas
Topics inlcude: deceiving children, sock abundance

Debeakotheque
Topics include: bird mutilation, bisons, kitchen tools

On the way to the Easter bash
Topics include: driving, talking, driving, talking, where's the goddamn party?

Passing through
Topics include: I can't believe we had this conversation, I can't believe I wrote it down

Swift diddle
Topics include: doughnuts, porn, fornication, speed, outbursts

Peas afire
Topics include: fire, mushy peas, rebreathers, Hull

The pie that satisfies
Topics include: fungus-bungus pizza, 'phone fingers', Basque food

Finishing the search
Topics include: novels, sudden comprehension, nudity

A peasant in the head
Topics include: hair, thatched roof cottage heads, peasants

Chickens are birds
Topics include: chickens are birds

Less talk, more action
Topics include: kissing, more kissing

Questions for study:

1. Why do you think the topic of mutilating or imitating birds comes up so often? Which do you imagine would be more fun?

2. What exactly is a fungus-bungus pizza? Discuss.

3. Please compare and contrast any two conversations. Please mention: theme, setting, mood, style, and tone. Due by end of period.

4. It's clear that the characters in these dialogues share a fascination with disgusting and inedible food. Just saying.

5. Would you say that the most significant conflict in these dialogues is Man vs. Puffin? Why or why not? And where's a clip art picture of a man punching a puffin when you want one?

a few things

First, I'd like to thank Finslippy for linking to me and my talented wife Schmutzie, but I'm a little concerned with the excerpt that shows, to a giant chunk of the blogobunch, that I am the kind of guy that throws his garbage into his wife's bath. As you can readily guess, no such thing happened. What loving husband would toss out the trash into the tub? Here's what really went on:

Lazy lazy afternoon. Schmutzie in the bath. Palinode passes by, holding an apple core. He wants nothing more than to dispose of his core in a socially responsible manner.

Schmutzie: Hey you...

Palinode: Yes?

Schmutz: Can you come in here for a second?

Pal: I have to throw out this apple core. It's very important.

S: Come in here first.

P: I was about to phone the community garden and see if they needed this apple core for composting. They're closing in ten minutes and if I don't get this core into their compost in time, the food bank may not have enough fresh corn and tomatoes to feed the starving children of the city. Whatever you need from me, weigh it first against the needs of the starving children.

S: Let's not disappoint the social Darwinists. Come in here.

P: But -

S: And bring that apple core in here.

P: Okay, here I am.

S: Good, now throw the apple core in my bath.

P: What? That's crazy.

S: Don't ask questions, just throw it in.

P: I don't know why you want this, but I can't be a part of it.

S: Whatever.

Schmutzie sits up in the bath and bats the apple core out of Palinode's hand. The old brown remnant of fruit lands in the water with a sodden splash.

S: Now that's what I'm talking about.

P: Oh my god. runs out of room.

S: Whatever.

P: (from next room) Hello? Community Gardens? I can't bring the apple core in. Will the children be alright? Will they - Oh good lord. I'm so sorry.

S: Well, I got my bit of trash. That's what counts.

She runs a bit more hot water. The core bobs and swirls under the stream, eliciting a high-pitched titter from Schmutzie. A howl of socially responsible activist despair arises from the next room.

Okay, so I set the record straight. Next up, people have been reporting troubles with their gander (see last entry, in which I do not suggest but simply advise people on the use of ganders in analysis and argument). As this confusing image may or may not demonstrate, ganders are highly prized creatures:



The lesson to be drawn from this is that ganders are so rare, so valuable, that even artificial ones can inspire incomprehensible sports contests. So don't complain if your gander is giving you trouble. Just be thankful.

more

It's been long enough since my last post that someone named Anonymous - who the hell gives their kid a name like that? - demanded more from me. Actually, they demanded two different things from me. Let's take a gander at their comment (to take a gander at, v. to apply a male goose to an object or situation as a means of focusing attention (colloq). Still illegal in the southern US and Dubai):

okay, where's your next post. I want more.

It looks simple, but if you bring your gander in a bit closer (so that the beak is pointing right at the words) you'll see that Anonymous doesn't necessarily want the next post, he or she is just... curious. Just wants to know where the post has gotten to. Say, Palinode, where's the post at these days? Anonymous could best be described as post-curious. Which is illegal in Florida.

So far I've got a casual inquiry about a specific but hypothetical object, the post. Then Anonymous says flat-out:

I want more.

You want more... post? That doesn't really scan. I don't know what you want more of, Anonymous. I don't know why your parents gave you that name and I don't know what you want from me. More what? More heads of cabbage? Because I've got 'em. More estuary property watershed rights? Valuable stuff. More sitcoms revolving around a dysfunctional family with an impotent patriarch, a long-suffering mother who functions as the conscience of the family, a sexpot daughter and an effeminate/sensitive/intellectual but not actually gay son? And the gay thing is a running gag? That's a hoot. But I can't give you more of that kind of thing. I can only give you more bootleg CDs.

I realize that I'm being a little disingenuous here. I can also give you more cheese, more Veruca Salt fanfic, more clutter, more angels in the LDS firmament, more of what you know you want but are just too damned shy to ask for. I'm here for you, Anonymous. You just have to let me know what you want.

In other news, I've joined Nanowrimo this month and am trying like ol' crippled Yahweh to keep up the 1667-words-per-day count. Most of the novel makes as much sense as this entry. In fact, I'm going to count this entry as part of my Nanowrimo bid. It'll be an inexplicable daydream experienced by a secondary character selling oranges from a cart on a boulevard.

In other news: Ol' Crippled Yahweh.

forward

This is a low point.

Weblog, I had almost forgotten your existence. Over the last two weeks you were becoming a thing recognized but not fully grasped, like a familiar tree whose name you do not know. Therefore (trust me here) it behooves me (from O.E. behofian "to have need of") to gather myself on what I look forward to.

1. Nanowrimo (November 1-30). I've signed up for good old National Novel Writing Month this year, and I've been overtaken by this strange enthusiasm for the project. Normally I wouldn't go near that kind of thing - who wants to type out 1500 words a day for an entire month on top of the rest of your life? - but for some reason it finally seems correct. In past years I've been disgusted by the notion of seeing what comes out of my mind when I'm forced to blather, but this time I'm genuinely curious as to what my brain will make my thoughts look like on paper. I've even got the title picked out: Death in Brownsville. I've never been to Brownsville, but I read an article about migrant workers there once. So I feel well prepared.


2. Safe neutering of your pet (October 31). I never thought I'd look forward to having an animal's testicles removed, but I now recognize it as a common experience among pet owners. Our cat gets more rambuctious every day, morphing in an eyeblink from a sleepy pet to a little fur-clad bullet with testicles. Like the ring of Sauron, those testicles are the source and engine of all that cat's evil. Once we take them and cast them into the fires of Mount Doom I know we'll all feel a lot better. As long as Gollum doesn't get ahold of those things. The wearer of the Black Furry Testicles is endowed with super speed and the ability to knock things from high ledges.


3. Costa Rica. It seems strange that I once wrote a guide to Costa Rica, not knowing that my parents would go all Costa Rica-happy and invite us down there for Christmas vacation, but in retrospect I suppose it was for-too-ee-tus. For to eat us? No, fortituous. Or perhaps I'm being dealt an obscure punishment for writing such a pack of lies about a country with no standing army, where a full 25% of the land is a wildlife preserve. This will be my first real vacation in years. And for those of you who know me, may I say that travelling for work and spending my nights in hotel rooms with a cameraman does not constitute a vacation.

comedy of the commons

According to a Globe and Mail story (click on Der Title above), US tourism is at an all-time low in Canada, a result of high gas prices, a strong CanaDollar and long lines at the border as the dinosaurs of Homeland Security curl up and rot in their customs booths. The online version doesn't mention it, but the paper article points out that Windsor, Ontario is suffering from the loss of American tourists.

Oh no. Downtown Windsor faces the prospect of becoming a seedy, ugly bytown populated with strip clubs and cigar stores, where crackwhores knock on minivan windows in broad daylight, where suburbanites and senior citizens shun the downtown in mingled disgust and fear, where the lead-poisoned employees of motor plants shuffle down the streets and unleash skyward pleas to an absent god, where even an evening at the movies is ruined by packs of drooling chuckleheads who laugh like methed-up hyenas when David Carradine calls Uma Thurman a cunt, where the most notable building is a casino that looks like a brushed-aluminum soft ice cream cone, where -

Ah. No, that was Windsor when I went there last summer. I'd hate to see it in a slump.

phoque cancer

Marking fall

Yesterday marked the first day that I could see my breath before me as I walked to work. The air smelled of cold damp and the sharp tang of dead leaves. It was a great morning. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the Fuck Cancer t-shirt.

The difficulty of the Fuck Cancer T-shirt

At lunchtime yesterday I went to Fratelli's Café, a noon-hour restaurant that belonged to a family named Fratelli about fifteen years ago. Since then it's been owned by (among others) a Korean couple who served sushi along with Italian sandwiches and espresso, a born-again biker who loved to extoll the virtues of virtuous living while entertaining me with tales of organized crime in the Maritimes, and most recently, a lumbering hollow-eyed guy with long blonde hair who looks like he took a hit of speed in 1974 and hasn't slept since. He employs little skater girls in touques and baggy cargo pants. They slouch around the counter, shuffle over to the tables, saunter back, slump over the espresso machine, and generally contrive to look as bored as possible. I suspect they're a major draw for the IT lunchtime crowd, a herd of slightly puffy guys in their twenties and thirties, khaki pants and checked shirts turned out, keycards swinging from their lanyards, a Blackberry holstered at the belt. How many times per day in cities across North America is this scene repeated? The numbers from Seattle alone must be staggering.

I generally show up at the tail end of the IT rush, when everyone is filtering out and the café enters the start of the long lazy afternoon, the slow stretch from one to four. After one o' clock the customers tend to be people who, like me, have waited out the rush, with its rustle of golf shirts and clack of heels, people who prefer to eat in relative quiet (this usually ends when the owner comes out of the kitchen and says "Anyone here like Led Zeppelin?" and then cranks up the stereo for a few minutes). People who need a brief break from the people who show up at noon. The skater girls sweep the floor and most of them leave. A couple hang around at a table or lean against the concrete planters in the courtyard and smoke. Somewhere in the midst of this slow time yesterday a boy walked in wearing a Fuck Cancer t-shirt.

Aw, Phoque

I call it a Fuck Cancer t-shirt - as opposed "a t-shirt that says Fuck Cancer on it" - because teenage boys never do anything original, and this one was probably the first of the many that I will see over the next few years. Despite the contrivance and crassness, the smarmy calibration between the offensive and laudatory, I still wanted one for myself. I wanted to get up and run down the halls of hospitals and retirement complexes, bursting into the oncology ward with a raised fist, screaming "Fuck Cancer! Fuck it man!" and then running out again. The wearing of the shirt reminded me of the time that our grade 4 class found out that the French word for seal was "phoque". Much running around at recess and irritating of teachers followed.

I wondered what I'd do if I were the person behind the counter when Mr. Fuck Cancer came in and asked for an Italian soda. My likely reaction would be to ignore the shirt politely and make him his blueberry bullfrog or whatever they're calling sodas nowadays. Then I'd stand around and realize that I'd missed my moment - the responsible moment in which I say, Turn that t-shirt inside out and you've got a deal, young man. Undoubtedly that would be the guy's cue to tell me that I was being a fascist, and can't I read? Don't I see that fucking cancer is a good thing? Why would I want to silence such a positive message? Would I rather that he came in with a t-shirt that said Down With Health and Positive Feelings In This World? Which is what the wearers of Fuck Cancer t-shirts and kids running around a playground screaming "Phoque! That means seal in French" are always waiting for. I recall a few kids crying out "What did I do? I wasn't swearing! I said 'seal' in French!" as stone-faced teachers harvested them from the playground.

phoque cancer

What exactly does it mean to fuck cancer? We all know what it means when someone screams out "Fuck You!" or dismisses someone out of hand with a fuck-him-he's-not-worth-it kind of gesture, but to fuck cancer suggests a sustained determination to ignore the disease, to carry on regardless. Fuck Cancer is not an exhortation to allocate more funds for its treatment or bend resources to the task of eradicating it. It's a dismissal of cancer altogether, which is even less productive than running around hospital corridors and screaming at old people. In which case I would have to play the stone-faced teacher to the phoque cancer kid in the Fuck Cancer shirt, and kick him out to the street.

television

I produce a television show. But I don't consider it proper television, ie. a program that I'd sit down and watch. So by that solipsistic standard, what is television? Let's do this by process of elimination:

CSI's All Over. The CSI franchise is not television. It is a medieval morality play armed with forensic technology, in which a crooked and corrupt humanity perverts the Lord's work while a team of Inquisitors moves among them with implements of divination, tracing out the unholy shape of murder. By the time the hour is up, every suspect, every witness has been called before the inquisition, wherein their souls are pinned and pneumisected for the satisfaction of the high priest. It is a telling feature of the CSIs that even witnesses have sins to hide or rationalize. No one is innocent. We rarely witness the actual moment of arrest of the guilty, since their guilt has been decreed by these explicators of invisible evidence.

Laws & Orders. As Talmud is to Torah, so are the Law & Order shows to CSI. Whereas CSI is concerned with uncovering the unregenerate nature of humankind, Laws & Orders provide the exegesis on the process of punishment. The pupils and the teachers come and go, but the fallibility of language and custom in the face of evil must always be dealt with. Watch for this knuckly premise in an upcoming episode: Can the government devise a law so perfect that it cannot be broken? It'll guest star David Caruso, won't it?

Any Sitcom You Can Think Of. When I watch a sitcom, I envision a flight on a jet plane that circles and returns its passengers to the point of origin. Everybody hits the tarmac, takes a stretch and then - hey, wait a minute. If you bought a ticket from Cedar Falls to Albuquerque and ended up in Cedar Falls, you'd be rightly peeved. But we all watch sitcoms without a word of complaint. When I was a child I used to wonder why sitcom characters bitched for 25 minutes and then concluded that they were happy all along. Schnieder wants a better job? He gets one and decides that he likes his old one better. Monroe wants to get laid? He tries unsuccessfully and concludes that he's better off a virgin. Even as a child I realized something was off here.

Ghost Whisperer. An uncomfortable blend of sentimental spirituality and Jennifer Love Hewitt's over-perky boobs pointing at everything. Does anyone remember when she played a plain-Jane character on Party of Five? Did she show up at a wrap party in a low-cut shirt and give the producer a host of really unseemly ideas? Or did Hewitt perceive on her own the revenue possibilities of her cleavage?

Lost. That's not a TV show. That's a kind of pulp serial music video. We're all waiting for the secret decoder ring.

Soap operas. Well they're certainly not operas. There's maybe some background music in the nightclubs, plus that sexy saxophonist always pops up for the bedroom stuff. And with the exception of the occasional shower scene, I've never seen any soap. At best soap is implied in the extreme cleanliness of the cast. Maybe they should be called cold cream operas.

Based on the couple of episodes I've seen, Veronica Mars appears to be television, but I always forget airtimes.

Mulholland Drive could have been television, but ABC didn't appreciate a pilot featuring a filth-encrusted hobo who controlled the characters' destinies from the alley behind a Winky's. Or maybe they didn't like the albino cowboy. Hard to say. So David Lynch did what he probably wanted to do with the show all along, which was to tuck the narrative into a dream, throw in some lesbian sex, add a floor show, and cap the whole thing off with an inverted backward-running story of jealousy, broken dreams and suicide. No y banda.

The Wire, Deadwood, The Sopranos, The L Word are all really fantastic television, more or less devoid of pacifying sermons. They run on cable networks, though, and for these shows you must pay money. You get what you pay for, which is why network television is free. Although in most instances what you get is less again.

the creepy bargain

Intermission. A hemi-demi lit theatre. Audience members shuffling in, shuffling out, bunching together here, wandering loosely there. Schmutzie and Palinode are already seated. Schmutzie leans over and gives Palinode's ear a kiss.

Palinode: Now my ear's wet.

Schmutzie: That's too bad.

P: Do you have a sponge tongue or something?

S: Something more absorbent?

P: Yeah, that way you could kiss my ear then bring out the sponge tongue.

S: An interchangeable tongue? That's really gross.

P: But necessary.

S: It's like that fish they found with the parasite tongue.

P: That'd be so cool to bring a fish home with another fish* inside it posing as its tongue.

S: What? That'd be digusting.

P: It would be a bargain. Two fishes for the price of one.

S: No. Not a bargain. It would just be creepy.

P: A creepy bargain.

S: No.

P: Sure. It would be like getting some pork chops with a severed hand in the package. A creepy bargain.

S: It wouldn't be like that at all.

P: Yes it would.

S: You can't just make up a good thing and a bad thing, put them together, and then say "Oooh, that's a creepy bargain". That doesn't work.

P: Works fine. As long as you're not paying for both.

S: I could say "a box of chocolates with a spleen at the bottom" but that doesn't make it a bargain of any kind. It doesn't work.

P: Somebody would be looking for their spleen, it's true. But that's a free spleen for you.

S: It doesn't work!

P: I wouldn't pay for a spleen on its own, but if you throw one in for free, I'm there.

*The creature that devours a fish's tongue and then attaches itself to the tongue's stub is not a fish but a kind of bug. I didn't know this at the time of the conversation. Mea maxima culpa.

a winner and all that

In my last entry I proposed a contest to guess my first name from a list of my Googled needs. Ye are smart folk, and two of youse answered correctly (I'm experimenting here with some archaic second person plural pronouns, pay no mind). Since I had two correct answers, both win a prize in the mail, just as I had promised.

1st prize goes to Jason, an Episcopalian priest currently working on his Ph.D in Episcopaleontology at Cambridge. At first I thought of disqualifying him on the grounds that he may have simply asked the Lord, who knows my name. Invoking the omniscient conduit is cheating! Then I remembered that God doesn't speak to Episcopalians anymore. So. Since Jason lives in the UK, I'm going to send him by mail the Treasures of the New World. A galleon loaded down with tobacco, coffee beans, maize, potato root, tomatoes, and a curious hemp distillate taken for pleasure around these parts. Jason, I've press-ganged an entire crew, and your galleon will be arriving in Liverpool in six weeks' time. If you don't want the bother of a galleon - and a trip to Liverpool - send me your mailing address at palinode at gmail dot com. And I should say: the reference to the saint was not too obtuse. If you'd guessed wrong then it definitely would have been obtuse.

2nd prize goes to The Absurdist, who, despite his sobriquet, answered my question in as straightforward a manner as possible. He wrote "Your name is Aidan". Not very absurd. Especially since that's my name. For something absurd, Absurdist, check out Miss A's comment here. Nonetheless, you win a prize by mail. What's the prize? Hmmm. Since I detected a religious colouring to your weblog, I think I'll send you The Pleasures of a Godless Life. Sleeping in on Sundays, Betting on Dogfights, Fornicating with All Kinds of Everything Including Keira Knightley. That should be enough to shake your faith up a little.

*Note: all prizes will actually be collages of photos from old magazines. No refunds.

all my terrible aching needs

Schmutzie borrowed this from Sweetney, and now I hoist this over my shoulders and toss it into the waste pit of my weblog. The game is simple: Google "[your name] needs" and skim the best of the results. I didn't use the name Palinode (since a palinode needs nothing but its subject material, and even that it abandons). Instead I used my real name, which I've used on this site once or twice but don't feel like abusing with overuse. Suffice it to say that my name, which was extremely unusual when I was born in the early seventies, has now become a favourite of new parents for both boys and girls. It's also showing up on soap operas, Sex & The City and one of the CSIs, so my Googled needs tend to the melodramatic and pediatric. Without searching my site or cheating by Googling portions of these phrases, see if you can guess my name. Winner receives something. I don't know what yet, but I'll send it to you by mail! That's always a slice of fresh-cut fun.

Palinode needs to be with Kendall
Palinode needs a decent storyline
Palinode needs serious convincing - he's been burned
Palinode needs a friend right now
Maria thinks seeing her face right now is the last thing Palinode needs
Palinode needs to be put in a hospital and kept there while new medications are tried
Palinode needs some basic geography help
Palinode needs me to be there
Palinode needs to see a doctor
Palinode needs a clue
Palinode needs to be calmed down enough to be put into his crib w/o screaming his head off the second we put him down.
Palinode needs something more exciting to do
Palinode needs some better choices than who've they've been throwing him with.
Palinode needs Simone. Or Kendall. Or me.
Palinode needs to catch Mel Baxter and to do so he needs to camp out at the resort.
Palinode needs an enema. Palinode needs an enema. Palinode needs an enema. [this one worries me a little]
Palinode needs Lara to help him remember his music
Palinode needs that encouragement in his life
Palinode needs someone wild and fun
Palinode needs a strong character to play against him
Palinode needs the respirator to help out his lungs
Palinode needs to steer clear of the local gang of thugs led by Johnno
Palinode needs a way to help them
Palinode needs only a major to finish
Palinode needs sesame street chicken
Palinode needs his mama around
Palinode needs treatment for his neurological problems
Palinode needs two takes to find his happy face
Palinode needs to spend some time on the floor too
Palinode needs a chaperone
Palinode needs me to scare away monsters in his closet and under his bed.
Palinode needs a little brother or sister
Palinode needs your help to make the Rooftop Playground a reality
Palinode needs to have me up and about
Palinode needs cereal
Palinode needs a puppy!
Palinode needs a serious dose of chocolate and a long-ass bath
Palinode needs to learn how to go out and socialise without my help
Palinode needs serious convincing - He's been burned
Palinode needs the computer for the International work
Palinode needs a playmate
Palinode needs to keep pursuing Kendall
Palinode needs one, tool that is
Palinode needs to be surrounded by people who are going to be a constant in his life
Palinode needs me to balance him still
Palinode needs a break
Palinode needs help
Palinode needs to let lying dogs sleep
Palinode needs to stop with all that linguistics and language crap
Palinode needs a lot of names, doesn't he?
Palinode needs his diaper changed
Palinode needs to be fed every three hours
Palinode needs to get a haircut and a real job
Palinode needs to tidy it up
Palinode needs me
Palinode needs Mia - but not like that
Palinode needs a woman
Palinode needs a middle name
Palinode needs one of those
Palinode needs 47 cards
Palinode needs to do something
HOLY CRAP Palinode needs to learn now to drive
Palinode needs You
Palinode needs a new blankie
Palinode needs more tummy time
Palinode needs that kind of medical attention
Palinode needs to find a Roger Moore chat room now

There you go. I'm a barrel of needs. Give me my 47 cards and my tummy time or I'll take a shiv to you.

let freedom reign within twelve months

I had a dream a few nights past that I was thirty five years old. That's all I remember. I was thirty-five in my dream. Since I turned thirty-four recently, why would my brain go to the trouble of pretending that I'm one year older? If I were awake and caught my brain dressing up as a marginally older version of myself, I'd rebuke it for its obvious lack of ambition. Then I'd take over, give myself a chunky metal body with pincers for hands (important, those pincers), lasers for teeth (for that bright smile of death), and age myself two hundred years. Or whenever the aliens finally roll in to steal our planet's natural resources. Point is, I'd be able to defend the planet with my fearsome pincers and laser teeth, sending all off-planet marauders back to skulk in the bowels of their lunar fastness.

As it is, my brain exercises its shallow imaginings when I'm asleep and defenseless, forcing me to experience the unexciting spectacle of myself one year from now. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll have a dream of asking for porridge at an IHOP or wandering the aisles of a Payless factory outlet.

industrious wednesday answer to idle tuesday question

Yesterday (or yeasterdye, as they say in New Zealandese) I asked my readers what they would buy from me, if I were to offer it for sale on my site.

Blackbird said that she would buy all the tea in China from me, so I checked my kitchen cupboards. I have 48 individual sachets of Red Rose Tea in their original gauze mesh, plus I have 5 grams of Japanese Sencha green tea, and a box of Camel Brand pellet-like gunpowder green tea, which I imagine could be loaded into a shotgun for all those home-invasion moments. These items are too precious to me for retailing.

My vast tea estates have been seized by regional armed governments and now they produce opium, or so I hear. This is a better drug than tea. Point of trivia: Schmutzie once took a green tea bath and emerged no greener than before. So all those stories you hear are bull.

Guanilo offered to purchase: "that bitchin' diving apparatus" on the right-hand side of the screen (click to reach my profile); potato chips; or a bagel. I love options. I understand that a diversified economy is a strong economy, and I'm a tower of fiduciary strength (ein Festeberg ist unser Palinode).

That bitching diving gear that you want so badly, Guanilo, is not meant for submarine ventures. Slide that one on and you'll never survive a tour of the reefs. It's a Draeger apparatus, a breathing device worn by intrepid Draegermen as they stalk the dark disastrous corridors of mine accidents for trapped miners. Draegermen are known for their courage, as exemplified by the 1937 film Draegerman Courage. Before I enter into a contract to sell you this device, Guanilo, I must know: are you prepared for the awesome responbility that comes with this device? Because you'll be a subterranean superhero.

Potato chips I can work with. There's even a chance for profit on both ends: if you keep the empty bag, you can sell it to Saviabella, who's in the market for a robot vagina. Ms. Bella: please note that all robot vaginas are sold "as-is" and do not come with a warranty of any kind. Do not attempt to reverse engineer, disassemble or make copies of the robot vagina without expression transmitted permission of the robot. In the event of accident, injury or death in the course of use of said vagina, dealer shall be indemnified and held harmless and not forced to watch Double Jeopardy starring Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones, nor any of its DVD extras, featurettes, commentaries or interactive menus, nor any celebrity interviews, 'making-of' minidocs, nor any photo galleries or trailers, teasers, wallpapers or screensavers.

As for a bagel, I don't think I can help you there. My bagels have certain ideas about being reduced to their exchange value.

Anonymous, the rules for Underwater Hun are not for sale. They are free to anyone who sends me an SASE, unless they have long red hair, in which case they must shave their beard.

idle tuesday question

I keep getting spam asking me questions like "Having Trouble Attracting Customers to your Website?"

I want to tell the spammers that my site's not selling anything. What would you people buy from me?

for me, the tmi entry

Oh very well.

Fifteen years ago
- I was nineteen years old. I had left the Maritimes one year before and was still coming up with all sorts of pretentious adjectives for the prairies.
- I had flunked grade 12 (whoo-hoo!) and so had just finished my extra year in high school. I made it through with decent marks, partly because the relentless disorientation of adolescence had calmed a bit, and I was able to show up every day and sit in class. It was still very difficult to do, but I managed.
- After I moved to the prairie city, one year beforehand, I'd started to lose interest in dating - or did dating lose interest in me? I went out with a few girls but it felt a bit mechanical. By October of 1989 it had been close to a year since my last girlfriend.
- I was skinny. I think I was thirty-forty pounds under my current weight, and currently I'm pretty slim. I was skinny because I smoked too much and frequently forgot to eat. I slept little, which is pretty much how it's been since I was a very small child. I do not remember ever being hungry during my late teens, but I recall feeling constantly overheated, as if I were running a low-grade fever.
- On the day before my 19th birthday I visited a place called the Big Muddy, a coulee-ridden swatch of patchy grassland just north of the US border. You could stand right at the border fence and look south into the US. The land was equally bare but tinged with red towards the southern horizon. It was the beginning of the badlands. I had never seen America before.
- I had thick curly hair, which at that point had not begun to thin. I smelled of leather and American cigarettes.

Ten years ago
- If you've a mind for arithmetic, you'll figure out that I was twenty-four at this point. I was living a bigger city at this point, having left university midway through an English degree. Up until two years before, I had never lived on my own, never payed a bill, never gone grocery shopping for myself, never run out of cash midway through the week. I was managing a used bookstore and making enough money for an apartment, tobacco and sufficient food to maintain my weight (although my weight dipped to under 100 pounds not long after I first moved there in mid '93. I was horrified to see such a number on the scale and began to force myself to eat regularly. I still felt overheated most of the time, but at least I filled out).
- In the summer of 1995 my dry streak with dating ended with a bang. I had a fling with an girl who was unnervingly similar to my first great highschool love. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was not so much a relationship as it was an exorcism.
- I had just left one roommate and moved in with a friend of mine named Tony, whom I can only describe as a cross between Lenny Bruce and a Prussian general. I'm not certain how our personalities meshed, but somehow they did.
- On my 24th birthday a friend painted the Zig-Zag man on a t-shirt for me, partly because I smoked Drum all the time, and partly because I looked like the Zig-Zag man whenever I grew a beard.
- In September I moved back to the prairie city that where I lived at nineteen and live now. I went back to university and met a girl named Friday whom I dated for three years. I learned the fine art of campus drinking.

Five years ago
- What was I, twenty-nine? By this time my hair was no longer thick, and I was keeping my head shaved. I had begun to look like all those other guys out there with shaved heads, hoop earrings and little tufts of hair beneath their lip. Mind you, I made it look good.
- I wasn't married by then, but I was only months away from getting engaged, on an absolutely ice-cold winter's night, to Schmutzie. We were doing a kind of yo-yo dating, taking buses on weekends between each other's cities. I did not know at the time that I was going to marry her, but she had figured out that she was going to marry me, so it worked out nicely.
- Autumn of 2000 was the last time I got ID'd for anything. The Schmutz and I walked into a casino lounge and were promptly asked for ID by a guy in a black suit who was almost certainly five years younger than either of us. I could've out-experienced that bastard any day of the week, but we were so flattered at being ID'd that we just walked out and wandered around for the rest of the night. There's a strong possibility that we saw The Way of the Gun that same weekend. Remember that slow motion car chase scene? That was awesome.
- By this time I had started working in the telefilm-o-vision industry, doing research and writing treatments for a small company that made historical documentaries on the Holocaust. Those were cheery times.

One year ago
- Colour me thirty-three. I had been married three years at this point and living in a cramped apartment with Schmutzie and some finches. With the exception of the apartment, I'm a happy man.
- If it's early October, then I was in the passenger seat of a Saab 95 going north through France on my way to Karlsruhe in southern Germany. I had just spent a week in the Netherlands and a week in the south of France, interviewing survivors and family about the North Sea Flood and the Malpasset Dam Collapse. I knew when we left Fréjus and St-Raphael that I would miss those places for a long long time. And I do.
- I was two days away from buying a nice second hand SLR camera in Karlsruhe. I spent the next four weeks mostly taking photos of Smart Cars. I came home from the Europe on Halloween. I'd been paying so little attention to the goings on in the outside world that the costumes worn by airport staff in Calgary completely flummoxed me.
- It's hard to sum up or make sense of my life one year ago because details are so fresh in my mind. The autumn of 2004 marked the beginning of a change in my life, from traveling field producer to stationary show producer. The long periods away from home combined with weeks of inactivity were difficult to deal with - I ended up restless but tired, sitting at home but wanting to go out, wanting to pack my days with something purposeful but too disconnected to do it. Mostly I wanted to do something that would impress The Schmutz, but I didn't know what. I only knew that I couldn't continue on this way.
- In November of the year the road trips started to dry up (production slows down from November-January) and I started filling in as a producer on the show. It was largely a make-work project, but I turned out to be good at it.

Yesterday
- Christ, yesterday was Sunday. It seem unfair to have to talk about Sundays. I went for brunch with some friends (not least among them Politiko and Tahini Monkey) and walked around a little bit with The Schmutz. In the afternoon I read How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World and Elaine Scarry's lecture On Beauty and Being Just. Schmutzie appeared to spend the entire day doing laundry. I made Moroccan carrots and black beans and rice for supper. We watched an episode of The Family Guy as we ate. Later on The Schmutz went to bed early, falling asleep on the couch with her faux-converse on and her cheek smushed up against my shoulder. I was restless and watched an episode of Firefly. That calmed me down some.
- This weekend I watched Serenity, A History of Violence and Land of the Dead. Is it wrong that I found them all to be very similar films?
- I got some feedback on a short story I'd been working on from The Schmutz. She liked it.
- We're now living in a much bigger and better place, in an old brownstone with high ceilings, unpainted baseboards and transom windows above the doors (the brass latch informs us that the patent dates to April 1899). We took an undersized sick black cat home from the Humane Society just a month ago and named him Oskar.
- I picked Oskar because I got a vibe from him that I thought of as 'levelheaded'. The vibe was actually 'sick and malnourished'. Obviously my catdar needs some work.
- I've been producing the show officially for six months now, and I've weathered a pretty stressful transition. This life, it's a good one.

Five Songs I Know All the Words To:
- "Holiday in Cambodia" by Dead Kennedys
- "Casimir Pulaski Day" by Sufjan Stevens
- "Ziggy Stardust" by David Bowie
- "Redemption Song" by Bob Marley
- "Both Hands" by Ani Difranco

Five Snacks I Eat:
- Smoked oysters with white cheddar on crackers
- avocado on toast
- salsa and chips
- almonds
- rapple chaps, no dap

Five Things I Would Do with $100,000,000.00:
- build a golem that actually works
- accentuate the positive by buying lots of stuff
- pay off the debts of family and friends and make them feel really bad about it
- with the increased leisure time, stalk Alan Greenspan
- buy a stable of fine Arabian horses and dip them in gold

Five Places I Would Run Away To:
- Costa Rica
- Big Sur
- St. John's
- south of France
- Schmutzie's choice, but it better be warm and near the sea

Five Things I Would Never Wear:
- the acid wash ensemble
- the fuscia tank top
- the baggy zebra-stripe pants
- the "Don't Argue with Your Wife, Dicker" baseball cap I saw one day in a discount department store window
- the activewear

Five Favourite Television Shows:
- them Whedon shows
- Deadwood, motherfucker. Godamnit!
- The Wire
- that shiny new Battlestar Galactica
- Lawst

Five Great Joys:
- It's hard to pump the snark out of this category, but I'm trying. First great joy is finding a book you've forgotten you were dying to read.
- Second great joy is the autumn afternoon with no wind and bright-leaved trees.
- Third great joy is spending lazy afternoons with The Schmutz.
- Fourth great joy is a well-turned phrase.
- Fifth great joy is effortless, free-flowing conversation, jumping back and forth from subject to subject, sawing away at the limb of afternoon until it breaks.

Five Favourite Toys:
- not a toy guy, but I liked the Death Star model when I was a kid.

Five current Reads:
- HA! by Gordon Sheppared
- The Iron Council by China Méaville
- How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen
- On Beauty And Being Just by Elaine Scarry
- Not in Front of the Children: Indecency, Censorship and the Innocence of Youth by Marjorie Heins

Five People I'm Tagging
- Uh-uh. Tagging is the pox of blogs.

how I go from trash to robot vaginas in just one entry

I've been thinking about trash for the last four-five months. In that brief slice of the year when the ground isn't hiding under a foot of snow, our city is ridged with drifts of trash. Plastic bags billowing across intersections or spinning around in alcoves, slurpee cups and drinking boxes rolling around gutters, straws and chip bags and unidentifiable mulch. The trash emerges from under the snow and builds furiously until November or thereabouts, when it goes back into hibernation. Enough of it is biodegrabable and so does not drown us in our homes as we sit and wait for further episodes of Cold Case.

I was out looking at trash today - because raising my eyes means looking at fast-food huts and car dealerships - when I cut through an alleyway and passed an auto junkyard. The sights of the shells of old cars, some blooming with rust, others jacked up on cinderblocks and missing tires, made me realize that there's a useful distinction to be made between trash and junk. Junk is the thing at the end of our repeated use. It's worn, blunted, broken, bleached, chipped, scraped, scuffed, corroded, screwed up and usually kind of dirty. Junk is junk because we've exhausted it, worn out its possibilities and left it somewhere to disintegrate. But even at its most exhausted, junk is infinitely recyclable, useful to someone else. A piece of old furniture or a stained old futon usually disappears in minutes when left next to a dumpster; old scraps of metal end up in a piece of sculpture; a crib belonging to someone's grandparents gets handed down. An object absorbs the history of its use, incarnates in tiny measure the era from which it springs, and as junk it gives back that history, as a stone at evening radiates the heat of the day. Junk is valuable apart from its usefulness, as it takes on the curious aesthetic dimensions of accidental art. Sometimes junk occurs on such a scale that it suggests mystery, as in the abruptly abandoned prairie houses of the Depression, with books still on shelves, mirrors hung on walls and cutlery left in the drawers. At its grandest junk becomes ruins.

Trash is junk's evil twin. Typically, trash isn't stuff - it just contained stuff at some point. Plastic bags, coffee cups, lids and sleeves, straws, slips, receipts, cigarette packs and pinched balls of foil, bubble wrap, styrofoam chunks, cardboard and tape. Trash is almost always branded, the containers carrying the brand for whatever was inside it - a shipping box of diapers, a beaf 'n' bean burrito, a few grams of crushed ketchup chips. Trash is completely transient, meant to attract briefly and then be forgotten. It's strange that something meant to be so impermanent ends up being so persisent. Trash doesn't weather. It just moulders, loses distinctiveness, gathers at curbs and works its way into the sewers. In a city like mine that gets very little rain, it never gets washed away properly, and by autumn the roadsides are lined with a mulch of leaves, plastic and slowly decomposing cardboard. It makes you feel like you're living in a gigantic landfill.

Chip bags are the weirdest trash of all. Are they plastic or metal? They appear to be some kind of high-tech fusion of the two. An open chip bag, all shiny with grease. It's like a robot vagina. Chip bags are the future skins of cyborgs.

So in conclusion I'd like to declare September 27th to be International Robot Vagina Day. With parades, symposia, and a good old pancake breakfast.



*But not one of those patented baby-choking cribs that were all the rage in the early eighties.

life with kyle

A moment ago I picked up the phone. I said "Hello?" (which is standard in Canada). The person on the other end said: "Yeah, is Kyle there?"

Kyle.

Prospective mothers everywhere: Kyle rhymes with bile. You get me? The first thing I think of when I meet someone named Kyle is a splash of puke on the pavement. Don't name your sons Kyle.

In fact, I'm declaring a moratorium on Kyles. My place is an official Kyle-free zone. Why? Because when someone calls me on a Saturday afternoon and asks for Kyle, I get to say "No, sorry, you've got the wrong number". I never want to have to respond this way:

You want to talk to Kyle? Yeah, dude, just a second. Hey Kyle! Yeah, you, loser! Phone for you! Get your ass away from the X-Box and come talk to your friend here! He'll be with you in a second. What? What? PHONE! Someone's on the PHONE, Kyle! Stop playing Morrowind and answer the fucking PHONE!... No, I'm not - I don't CARE if it's a portable, I'm busy over here! It's your friend, Kyle. It's YOUR friend. It's not - I'm not coming over so you can stare at the screen, asshole! Forget about it! Yeah, forget it! Hold on a sec. You're embarrasing yourself in front of your friend here, is what you're doing. Yeah, he's embarrassed for you. What's he gonna think, Kyle? You ever think how it looks when you can't even come to the phone? You know how that looks to other people? It's - what? No, you shut up, Kyle! YOU shut up for a change! He'll call you back.

Now that I think about it, I missed a great opportunity.

True stories from The Matrix

#1
Six years ago, some time during the early days of sweater weather, on a Wednesday evening, I wandered downtown and watched The Matrix on its opening night. I sat down by myself, having heard nearly nothing about the film. All I knew was that at some point in the film, Keanu Reeves would shoot at some guy in a suit and sunglasses, and the guy in the suit would dodge the bullets. I was all up for a bullet-dodging film. But pretty quickly I realized that The Matrix was really the deranged fantasy of lonely computer nerds who read Philip K. Dick in their spare time. What if, the movie was slyly asking us, those puffy guys in the mall with the golf shirts and the security key cards round their necks were kung-fu superheroes? What if they all knew how the world worked and everybody else was just a snotty ol' lump of stupid-goo? Could it be that these doughnut-chewing code twiddlers are not only smarter and cooler than us, but are also able to kick our noses through our assholes in the time it takes us to ask for a cruller? The Matrix came back with the most terrifying response of all: Only those who know, may know.

I was very poor in '99, too poor to afford a movie and a beer in the same evening. In one of those paradoxes of poverty, being poor meant I could afford to stay up all night drinking coffee, so I went from the theatre over to a wine bar called Alfredo's. The waitresses all more or less ignored me, having figured out long ago that I was a lousy source of tips. I ran into a guy from university named Scott, who was waiting for the late show. I knew Scott through his roommate, a friend of mine and an honours English classmate. Scott habitually wore a motorcycle jacket and always composed his face in a satisfied expression that suggested the Demerol was just kicking in. His hair fell down his shoulders in oversculpted Nickelback-style blond ringlets, the sight of which always produced in me a profound irritation. Nonetheless the surrounding small towns and isolated suburbs produced a reliable stream of young women who loved his hair and would one day go on to buy Nickelback CDs, perhaps in fond remembrance of their long-ago boyfriend. We talked for a few minutes about The Matrix and then he left to see the movie.

That was the last time I ever saw Scott. True story.

#2
In May of 2003 I saw the Matrix Reloaded with my wife (the Schmutzie) and a friend named Craig.

Craig was once Scott's roommate, and indeed, I knew Scott through Craig. A crazy connection. But it gets crazier. I asked Craitg what Scott was up to, and he told me, but within a week I had completely forgotten. Is it possible that Someone - or Something - didn't want me to know the truth?

#3
And then, in November of the same year, on a work trip, I saw The Matrix Revolutions in Halifax with a friend.

And we thought it sucked. True story.

i write about the cat

The Questions About the Cat

Everyone has questions when you bring a cat home. What's its name? Is it a boy or a girl? Is it fixed? Are you going to get it fixed? When are you taking it to the vet to get it fixed? How much does fixing it cost? More for a boy or a girl? Will you be there in the room when they do it? Will you wear a mask? Do you like the thought of wearing a mask in a harshly lit room while your pet gets its genitals chopped and tied? Normal questions like that. And of course, What colour is it? and Will getting it fixed change the colour of its fur?

Here are the questions I'd ask if someone else brought home a cat. What's it doing at your place? How did it get there? Don't we have doormen to keep these sorts of visitors out? Are there no prisons? Are there no catworkhouses?

We Acquire the Cat

Those are good questions, but they miss the point. We actually want the cat. On Sunday we drove (actually, roped a friend into driving us) out to the Humane Society, a set of innocuous quonsets by the nearby steel plant a few miles from the city. I always wish the Humane Society were centrally located, but I imagine there's a law against setting up shop next to Safeway when your stock-in-trade is warehousing and killing uwanted animals.

The main building had one room for dogs and three others for rabbits and cats (all their cabbits were housed in a separate building under strict quarantine to keep the truth of their existence from reaching the general public). The first room contained the young and desperate wannabees yowling and batting our arms and shoulders; the second held the experienced actors, the ones in their prime who purred at your approach and rubbed up against the bars. The third room contained the has-beens, indifferent to our attention and awaiting an appointment with a trained and certified euthanist.* At first I wanted to bring all of them home. Then I wanted to pick the worst of the bunch, the most ragged, the ugliest, the oldest, the most demented, the angriest, the most injurious, the stinky one. Above all, I felt ashamed that I preferred one animal to another, that I thought oh that one sheds too much (it did) or that one scares the living crap out of me (it scratched me). I didn't want my own preferences and instinctive reactions to particular creatures to come into play. It was difficult to remind myself that we were saving one animal, not condeming thirty others.

Eventually we chose a five month old kitten, pure black except for a few strands of white on its belly and tail. He was sitting in cage 1, room 1, ignoring the ruckus as twelve year old girls floated past and cats danced in their cages to be let out. I liked him because he acted distracted but polite, extending a paw to touch my index finger out of pure courtesy. I rubbed his nose with the knuckle of my middle finger through the bars, and the texture of his nose seemed right to me, seemed somehow to indicate a degree of calm.

I was wrong. Our pet has turned out to be a yowling spoiled demon, a petulant two year old stuffed into a cat suit. One sight of human food sets off his plaintive unending siren, any surface barred to him is cause for cries. So far we haven't let him have any human food, but he appears to want everything that's ours: chips and salsa, hot coffee, madras sambar with quinoa, a vegetarian pot pie crossed with hot sauce. But I'm confident that we'll wear him out. And when he crawls up my chest and butts his tiny forehead into my face, or when I wake up in the middle of my night to find him sleeping across my neck, I just can't stay mad. A little weirded out, maybe, but not mad.

We call him Oskar.

Appendix: A List of Perilous Places in our Apartment, Together With Potential Awful Fate

open toilet lid - drowning

very heavy fireplace grille - smushing

dishwasher - extreme cleaning

bookshelves - possible toppling

basket of yarn - intestinal tomfoolery

open refrigator - fatal chillaxation

* No sites I visited would tell me how humane societies euthanise their animals. Not once in the literature of various animal shelter did the following words and phrases appear: needle, gas, incinerator, fire, Maxwell's silver hammer, chamber, club, nail gun, laudunum, ether in a handkerchief, katana, sai, nunchuk, Vibrating Palm, anvil, guillotine, deep crevasse, lonely road at night, rumble seat, weights and chains, quicklime, tar pits, front-end loader, .357, barrel, bore, bolt, pump, silencer, black gloves, 'gangland style', cap, ass, ready rock, hosepipe, exhaust, barbiturates, explosive decompression, hard vacuum, liquid nitrogen, ground glass, shiv, shank, errant multitool, aspartame, arsenic, Computer, Carousel, that laser from Diamonds Are Forever, tablesaw, skillsaw, lathe of blades, board with a nail through it, shovel, spade, military entrenching tool, systematic neglect by an uncaring adminstration unwilling to take the business of good government seriously.

easily distracted

I came into work this morning and found a sticky note on my keyboard that read "Dan O' R". And then a street address. Nothing more. Who is Dan O' R? Don't know. What does the R stand for? Unsure. What city does that street address refer to? No idea. It could be anywhere in North America. And what does Dan O' Nobody from the continent have to do with my production? Fucked if I know, people.

So. Who wrote the sticky and stuck it on my keyboard yesterday? That one's easy. I did.

falcon powder

O happy evening. The Palinode and The Lotus arrive home from a restaurant. Mid-conversation.

The Lotus: I really want to write more of those letters, like that one to the guy who smelled of talcum powder.

The Palinode: I see. (pause) I'm sorry, did you say falcon powder?

The Lotus: What? No. What?

The Palinode: What's falcon powder?

The Lotus: I said talcum powder. What's falcon powder?

The Palinode: That's what I want to know.

The Lotus: I don't think it exists.

The Palinode: Is it powder made of falcons, or is it a powder for falcons?

The Lotus: It isn't - it wouldn't be made of falcons. Foot powder isn't made of feet, you weirdo.

The Palinode: Yeah, but what kind of applications would powder for falcons have?

The Lotus: I. Wouldn't. Know. We don't own a falcon.

The Palinode: It's a niche market.

The Lotus: Uh-huh.

The Palinode: For proper falcon freshness.

The Lotus: Why not.

The Palinode: But do the unsuspecting falcons know that they're powdering themselves with falcons?

The Lotus: I'm in a different room now.

Bag-el

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This morning a cow-orker sent out a company-wide email with the subject line "Bagels outside accounting". Oh no, thought me, a bag of bagels has left behind man's authority and set out on their own moral venture. What laws will this baker's dozen flout as they build their own alien society, one unrecognizable to humans but a shelter for the inscrutable bagel mind?*

First off, as I know that bagels are nothing if not stubbornly utopian, I'm betting that they will refuse to recognize property, currency and all the striving and getting that burden humanity in a market economy. Instead they will almost certainly opt for a network of agrarian collectives, bartering goods between colonies and maintaining little contact with the outside world. There they will build their gigantic bagel ovens and boiling vats, which day and night shall pour forth more of their kind. Some will willingly put themselves into bags and ship themselves off for consumption in order to garner funds for the collectives' major food source, which is cream cheese. The rest will spend their days at work and leisure, motion and repose, gradually erecting an edifice of bagel art and philosophy to rival our own. Or they'll just rip stuff off from us and insert the word 'bagel' here and there. Whatever happens, they will eventually end up competing with us for the last few cream cheese deposits left on Earth. A hellish future awaits the world as cream cheese extraction peaks and begins its inevitable decline. As supplies drop and the demand continues to ratchet up, you can expect those bagels to put aside their philosophy and pick up weapons** to gain control over their staple.

I couldn't let such a clear threat to humanity go unanswered. I left my desk and found the bag of bagels on the little table next to the accounting office. Only four in the bag (had the rest gone before to make straight the way for some Oneida bagel colony?): two dark pumpernickel and onion, one plain, and another a complex of brown spots and mottles of blood red. Plus some cream cheese on the side.

"What's the red one?" I called out.

"That's chocolate raspberry," someone answered.

Chocolate raspberry. I understood the truth of the matter then. Cleary it was us who had failed the bagels. After such cruelty, what more could they want with human socitey? Let them have their cream cheese. Let them rain down their delicious but deadly missiles on our cities, our towns, and all our works. We obviously deserve it.

*

*And where is the bagel mind? Our scientists have dissected countless bagels in vain, smearing on the exploratory cream cheese, testing the dark oniony bagel mass with teeth and tongue, but no seat of consciousness can be found. Maybe they have some kind of hive mind, with its motive centre resting in some bagel queen slumbering in a kosher bakery, quietly generating the axioms of bageldom. Yeah, that's probably it.

**Never mind the bagel mind, where is the bagel hand? The bagel limb? How do they get so much accomplished in a day?

on listening to sufjan stevens

I cannot cannot stand compulsively humming tunes that praise The Jesus. This is what I get for listening to Seven Swans in the morning. It's great music to walk to work with at eight a.m., dappled dawn alight on pale poplar leaves while cabbage moths jitter and dragonflies in cobalt and gold slice sunbeams, oh sure. Meanwhile Sufjan sings songs about nice dresses and someone who woke him up, but then suddenly you realize he's really talking about Dual Citizen and The Intergalactic Dad, and it's too late - you're stuck singing folksy but elegant melodies inspired by Mr. Upstairs. It taints everything. Signing timsheets. Filling up a styrofoam cup at the Van Hutte machine (that's Dutch for Fucking Awful Coffee). Combing through your inbox for insignificant emails (there are no insignificant emails). Looking through your files for some lost invoice. I just can't let go and enjoy myself when Sufjan's screaming about Ol' Long White Beard* in my head.

*That's it, I'm all out of silly names for God.

nb. There's a bug on the wall next to the computer as I type. It looks a bit like a cross between a mosquito and a caraway seed. If it's a mosquito I'll definitely kill it, but if it's some inoffensive bug that only resembles a mosquito then I don't feel justified swatting it out of existence (I'm what you call a situational Janist). Bugs, I feel, should continue on with their bug lives unmolested. After all, there's not much wildlife to be seen in this city, aside from the occasional rabbit in the park. This is the prairies, where insects and grass are the whole of the ecology (assuming that bisons are a kind of hairy smelly insect). On the other hand, I hate caraway seeds, and the notion of a caraway seed with legs and wings, just looking for a nice slice of rye to ruin, is almost too much to bear.

Never mind, it's gone.

the fine things I saw on my way to work today

A loose knot of wasps dancing over a lump of mud at the end of my steps.

Burst of startled gold dragonflies erupting from a patch of timothy grass by the #15 bus stop on Cornwall.

A dainty pointy-faced schizophrenic in heavy black boots and short white pants stepping carefully off the curb.

A kamikaze horsefly barrelling into the side of my nose as I cut through the park.

My strangled yelp, followed by an attempt to look like it wasn't me who just screamed at being hit by a horsefly.

A crumpet dusted with icing sugar masquerading as breakfast food.

A politician in a cream suit and wine shirt, face like a shaved ferret, speaking smooth unaccented French into his cell phone.

Cool hallways girding the pedestrian mall.

Lots of ladeez.

A grasshopper drifting sideways into a concrete wall.

The sound of the impact impossibly dry, dryer than kindling. And strangely loud. How did so much crackling crawl into a grasshopper's armour?

Cabbage moths whirling around thistles on the cut by the rail yards. A few kept pace with me as I passed by.

susan & starcat after the music festival, on our couch

It looks like a sequence. It looks like something is happening. But nothing is happening.

solidarity

On Tuesday I visited the studio, where my reenactment crew were filming a shipping disaster. The DOP thought I would fill in handily as an extra for the scene in which the military ship rams the wooden schooner amidships and slices it neatly in half. I should have looked closer at the call sheets. My role: Hapless Fisherman #5. My task as extra: sit up in bed with a horrified look on my face, get tossed onto the floor, and then get doused with gallon after gallon of ice cold water. As the certainty of my fate closes in, I let out a howl of despair, for my own life, for the lives of my family, for those of my sad brave crewmates destined to find their rest at the bottom of the Atlantic (I'm the one on the left).



Then one of the set dec people dumped a bucket of water on me.



Jerks.

party

In Palinode's Palace two parties were thrown. One was held in the imaginary wing adjoining the chapel, the other in the abandoned cloister next to the hedge maze. The following is a conflation of both parties.

Saturday evening: we partied. Oh hot piranha, we partied. People streamed back and forth, along the hallway, eddying in the kitchen, smoking on the balcony, pulled into the living room and washing up on the couch. Until the break of 1:15, when everybody left to go home. That's right, people - run on home. When you were gone and it was just us and the finches, the real party rose up and started boogying across the hardwood. The real party lumbered from room to room, looking for passed-out guests, and finding none, started kicking the crap out of the furniture. Over went the couch. Floor lamp through the tv screen. Books afire. The hassock - unstuffed. The Markie Post poster - violated. Pint glasses smashed and pressurized widgets in Guinness cans fatally tampered with. Who can withstand so much sudden foam? At last, dawn wheeled over the elms and the party, deliquescent, blew away like a few last leaves. We were sleepy, spent, sticky, covered in new material (from the hassock) and finally in full possession of our new place. Later that afternoon we went to the beach.

shed

The most mysterious room of my childhood was the shed in the sidelot. When we bought the house in 1979 the shed came along with the property, a little grey building leaning slightly at an angle with a tarpaper roof and a an untreated wood door clearly salvaged from some more ancient shed. A single window set in the back let in a beam of soft sunlight, but even so the shed was never brightly lit, the illumination somehow absorbed by old cobwebs and the dark glass jars left on the shelves by a previous owner. The inside smelled of mildew and motor oil. Wasps built nests in it.

At the age of nine I loved going out to the shed but feared it slightly. Partly I feared the pendulous paper nests that wasps built every summer. What truly attracted and repulsed me were the jars on the shelves and old pieces of equipment leaning in the dim corners (what they were I can't remember now). They bore the stamp of long-gone inhabitants, people who led alien lives. Our family had moved in from the city; we were from away, and even if we'd stayed there for decades we'd still be from away (we stayed ten years). The items in the shed were artefacts in a forgotten museum, and I was both visitor and curator. Eventually my father began to fill up the shed with his from away items: metal flasks of WD 40, a bright red jerry can, a weed whacker, blades for a table saw, racks of two by fours. The museum had been taken over, and only the mildewy smell and wasps remained.

After a year or so my father decided that the grey shed wasn't big enough to contain all the wood that he was storing in it, so he removed the wood and with it built a bigger shed. This one was roomier and cleaner and smelled of treated pine, with a rough splintery floor. The old shed went back to the wasps and the glass jars and the rough dirt floor.

By this time I'd picked up some friends from the neighbourhood - Willie, Dwayne, Derek, Darren. With a name like Aidan only confirming my from away status, I was clearly on the outer edge of the group - but I had the shed. I was like the weird guy at the party whom everybody tolerates because it's his party and he's supplying the venue. We started to spend our afternoons in and around the shed, hanging out in there, staining the seats of our rugby pants when we sat on the floor, safely out the upper-air wasp traffic (they ran the top half of the shed, we ran the bottom). Eventually someone decided that we'd obviously formed a club, and we lacked only a name to make it official.

Willie decided that our club name was to be The Cobras. He said he could even get us shirts with Cobras written on it. This was particularly cool name, I realized, because with a deadly name like The Cobras we were no longer a club - we were a gang. Ain't no one gonna mess with a bunch of ten year olds and their tilting-over shed if you see COBRAS written on the shed door. Especkally when we all step out in our jackets with COBRAS on the back, snazzy gold script with a golden cobra poised to strike emblazoned beneath. We were a long way from smoking, drinking, drugs, crime, cars, girls, sex, and shaving, but the jackets, even a few shirts, were a head start. All we had to do was give Willie two dollars each. Within a week we'd be up to our upturned collars in gang chic.

I had to go through only a small amount of begging for the two dollars. My parents handed over the money with a straight face. They were clearly more worried about me giving money to Willie, who was slightly older than the rest of us, than having a bona fide gang operating out of their sidelot.

About a week after we pooled our money, Willie showed up at the clubhouse with a white 3/4 black sleeve T-shirt, the kind that usually ended with AC/DC or Ozzy Osbourne transfers. Across his front, in blocky blue iron-on letters, ran the single word C O B R A. Willie sat down with us and told us that we were a gang now. He started assigning us various gang-related tasks. Darren was supposed to get some hockey sticks and a net so we could play in the street. His brother Duane was tasked with finding some Playboys for the clubhouse. I was supposed to clean up the shed, get my dad to kill the wasps, and maybe get a dartboard.

"Why don't you get the Playboys?" asked Duane.

"I went and got us the shirts!" Willie snapped.

"There's no room to play darts in here," I said.

"If we're gonna be a gang we need a dartboard in our clubhouse," Willie explained.

"I think my Dad's got a bunch of Playboys," offered Darren.

After a few more days it became clear that we were not getting our Cobras shirts. Nobody would ask about them, but with every afternoon meeting the tension grew, especially since Willie insisted on wearing his C O B R A shirt all the time. The longer it went on the more defensive Willie would get, pressuring us to do more and more of the work and all but daring us to bring up the subject of the shirts. Eventually the B started peeling off, threatening to turn our club into the Coras. Duane grew sullen, staring into the corner as Willie outlined our list of tasks. Darren left early one day and never came back. Those missing shirts were slowly destroying our gang.

I didn't care. As soon as Willie had stepped through the shed door with that Cobra shirt, I recognized the huge gulf between what I had imagined for our gang and what our gang really was - a few kids hanging around a smelly shed getting bullied by a short-tempered con artist. There were no purple jackets with gold emblazoning on the back (where had I gotten that idea?), no great vistas of coolness. There were only a few old Playboys and Mayfairs, which in a fit of guilt I handed over to my parents. My dad spent the afternoon leafing through them at the dining room table.

The gang officially disbanded (disganged?) later that summer when Willie's father Harold bought our shed. He had a plan to put it behind his barn and use it as a smokehouse. He ran a length of heavy chain around the shed, hooked the other end onto his truck and drove. The shed lurched and jumped through the air as if kicked by a great invisible boot. It thumped down on its side and dug into the ground, which was soft and damp from a day or two of rain. Even across the lot I could hear Harold swearing as he gunned the engine. After a few minutes he and Willie showed up with planks to wedge the shed out of the ground. Willlie was still wearing the shirt, which by now said C O R A.

After a lot of grunting and kicking, they had the planks wedged in under the shed. Willie gave me a nonchalant wave as they headed back to the pickup. They pulled away and the shed leapt free again from the planks, airborne and tumbling, wreathed about with bright metal, until it hit the ground once more, alternately bouncing along and digging in like a reluctant dog, until the truck pulled it out of sight. And that was that.

ahem

I don't think I've ever seen more unfortunate ad placement. Click to enlarge at your own risk.

nan golden shower of photos

On Friday I went to the zoo. For some people this is no great accomplishment - one quick drive and ten bucks later, they're staring at a tamarind in a branch or scanning a pile of rocks and wondering where the hell the African Porcupine is supposed to be. But the closest zoo to me lies over two hundred fifty kilometres away, so I have to take a plane to see the African porcupines. Don't believe me? I'll show you.



These people didn't get to come to the zoo with me. They looked a bit uptight.



I discovered that the zoogoers were even more uptight than the passengers on the plane. By the time they showed up at the entrance to the African Savannah enclosure (a bit oxymoronic, but it's an unavoidable aspect of zoos) they were clearly lost and dazed. These two had clearly wandered out of a 1980 Sears catalogue.



I snapped a picture of this man just as he stepped into a beam of bright sun. His wife was looking straight at me. I still can't quite figure out her expression.



My ostensible purpose there was to train a new field producer for upcoming shoots, but I'd really flown 800 km to hang out with the meerkats.









Apparently they shared an enclosure with the African porcupines, but I couldn't see them anywhere.

basement

I don't get basements. Finished, unfinished, mildewed or bleached, boiler room to laundry room to teenage lair to adult den, basements are repositories of stillness and menace. Even the finished ones, with the mini bar in the corner and low shag carpet licking the cheap veneer baseboards and the bathroom chock full of kitschy bathroom crap and a toilet that needs plunging twice a week. Especially the finished basement, where the polyvinyl armature of civilization suffers the expeditious sowbug. Nothing dispels the minor charm of a basement den like the sight of a roach making a dash for the corner. Basements are graves that for some reason we have chosen to turn into rec rooms, fine and private places where an embrace is still an option. I don't get why we continue to create homes that include, along with the master bedroom and en suite tub, a sinkhole of angst. Maybe it's a trade-off: we now have so much casual luxury that we can afford an Egyptian-style tomb in our very own home, packed full of the little rewards that make life easy.

Basements are graves and graves are shuttles to the next world. Once they were boats that bobbed along to the far bank of the Styx. The last century turned them into spaceships arcing up to heaven or ferrying up through the clouds on a ramp of light. That's why movie aliens are so unremittingly hostile to us these days. They're the unwanted dead, re-animated and ugly and bent on returning their deaths to us from the celestial heaven we've dreamt up. Remember Close Encounters? Those aliens were children, emissaries of the future showing up with a positive message and a five-note phat hook for the baby boomers. Not a basement in sight. But War of the Worlds - that movie's all ours. That belongs to the generation that grew up in a basement, surfing channels and playing video games, sneaking in boys or girls and getting hammered, all the while growing to fit the dimensions of those rooms, accumulating toxins in the gills. We're ready for a movie where, when those aliens come, we run screaming and barricade ourselves in a choice basement. And what a surprise it is when the aliens get in.

bird facts

Ever since I was a child, or maybe ever since I came to work today, I wanted to write an encyclopedia designed to be recovered after the apocalypse, when the ruined descendants of our once-proud race wander the barren lands of post-industria, drawing out from the poisoned sandy soil a few mean sprouts for their pots, huddling for shelter in the lee of concrete slabs hove up from the beds of underground parking lots and foundations of office buildings long since stumbled down onto their own footprints, economies old and new wiped away and replaced by an irradiated hunger and a savage bronze sky - well, when that all happens, I thought it would be cool if our mutated progeny found an encyclopedia on a foraging mission into one of the Zones of the Ancient Overlords (that's any urban area currently over 50 000) and returned with my gigantic book packed full of utter bullshit about everything. Here are some samples.

Bird - Although many ancient writings refer to birds, they do not in point of fact exist. Birds were invented as a piece of wish fulfillment by the ancient Athenians, who longed to defy gravity but did not have sufficient technology to imagine anti-gravity boots. They also supposed that birds would escort the souls of the dead down to the underworld. This was how dumb they were. No one was more surprised than the Athenians when the animals that they had made up to keep their mortal bodies company actually appeared. They still weren't real.

Species of birds - It was thought that the world held 10 000 species of birds, but we now know this to be nonsense. Look around you - how could so many birds fit into the world? We would be overwhelmed by such numbers. The truth is that there is only one species of bird, and since birds were never real in the first place, there is only one bird. But it is everywhere.

Composition of birds - Most birds are made of anodized aluminum. They can be broken down into over 2700 individual pieces, each one hand-milled by a certified Guild Member. Such birds can be heavy and cumbersome to the novice, but with a bit of practice and a good harness you'll find that the performance is worth the extra weight.

Dangers of birds - The chief danger posed by birds lies in the invitation they extend, in the mind of the beholder, of the bird's existence. Once the beholder accepts the reality of the bird, they are then vulnerable to attacks of beak, claw, and offensive trilling. Further exacerbation of this danger arises from the typical bird's composition of heavy metals (cadmium, vanadium etc.) and highly radioactive waste, not anodized aluminum as some sources would have it.

Here is a picture of a bird in its larval stage:



Note the delicate wing structure already emergent along the flanks.

the illustrated p'node

I have of late - I know not wherefore - lost all my words. Therefore I give you pictures, from a roll of film that had been sloshing around in my desk drawer for a few weeks.

In June The Lotus and Self went camping out at a friend's farm, where we watched fireworks, ate like horrible pigs and broke the law within the chambers of our gut,the roseate corridors of our bloodstream and the chemical bridges between axon and dendrite. You can read about it in great detail over here. We also brought a tent, but since neither of us are campers, we neglected to bring poles for the tent. Fortunately for us, The Lotus carries the magicked mummified hand of MacGyver in her backpack, so we tied the tent to a branch, staked it to the ground, draped a tarp over the branch as a token against the elements. And what a sorry-ass motherfucker it turned out to be:


And that was the tent at its best, before the evening rainclouds dropped half the Pacific Ocean on us. After that things took a turn for the soggy. Here's my shadow.


The strange bulge between my legs is either my backpack or my way oversized scrotum again.

After we set up the tent we met this little girl, who, with her gleeful expression and clasped hands, reminded me of a nun on crystal meth.



I wasn't far off. Within seconds her cherubic facade cracked and she lashed out with furious fists at all foolish enough to approach.



It was like being caught in a tiny human hurricane of bruises. It's okay, you don't have to believe me. I know what's true in this world. What's true is what I tell myself in my office.

Speaking of true things, here's a picture of my wife from a trip to Saskatoon a week or two later. She's the one on the left.



The long-haired shadow on the right is her friend Frances. Here's Batty, who was also sitting with us.



And here's another friend of mine. We call him Starcat. He updates infrequently, enjoys mathematical puzzles, cats, walks in the park. Turn-ons: women with glasses, women without glasses. Turn-offs: people who comment on his morphing arm.



For a brief while a girl named Theresa showed up, looked a bit bored, read a bit, wandered off. She seemed nice. I took her picture.



Lastly, here is a car that I've watched corrode slowly over the last five years. No one will fix it, no one will plate it, no one will take the time to come and turn it into a little cube of metal. Instead it rusts, indifferent to sun and rain. I dig the mufflers.

circuit

My city is changing again. Every so often I turn down a street and discover a new building or an empty lot that I'd never noticed before, and it occurs to me that a whole cycle of construction and destruction has wheeled around without me noticing, and now there's a puke-ugly car dealership lording it over the block where a row of old brick warehouses once stood. Or a crumbling old movie theatre disappears behind its facade and a grocery store unfolds in its place.

I'm sorry, I can't continue this. I have no internet right now at home. My ISP is staffed by bureaucratic assholes who like to make us wait for a week before sending out a technician to "hook up" our computer to the "internet". I use my oh-so ironic quotation marks in order to highlight the fact that he hooked up nothing to nothing, and that the internet is not being piped in to our new place. Now we wait for tech support to call us. That's right: we don't call tech support. Tech support takes our calls, fumbles around and then tells us when someone who knows something about IT calls back. Our ISP: run out of a guano-covered tarpaper shed in an abandoned lot.

Yes, I have the internet at work. That's where I am. But as I type I can hear the business manager and the legal affairs guy chatting away in the next room about contracts and sales and markets. And I have realized something: as decent folk as they are, as decent as all these employees and middle- and upper managers may be, as much as they smile and drink water from paper cups and ask me what I'm doing for the long weekend, I just hate them. Really. I can't think because the sound of their murmured voices in the next room squishes my brain until all the metaphors dribble out. I have jokes to crack and stories to relate and thoughts that I've been collecting for the last week at least, but the email announcing free Avril Lavigne tickets for management first and then employees if any tickets are left over swishes down like a giant broom and all is swept away.

On the plus side, our new place kicks so much ass that, um, there's sore asses for blocks around. Now that I think about it, our new place may not kick ass so much as commit a lot of sodomy.

things we found in our new place

1. a shrimp beneath the stove. We poked at it, asked a few questions (how's the plumbing here? When does the building manager turn the rads on?) but it refused to answer. It had gathered its dust bunnies and was content to rest.

2. a pepper inside the freezer, and I don't mean open-up-the-freezer-door-and-there's-your-pepper, I mean pry-off-the-bottom-panel-and-there's-your-stanky-old-pepper-just-settin'-a-spell.

3. black feathers under the stove, fridge, inside the door of the fridge. I'm an understanding person, but black feathers? What were these people cooking up? Crow cake? Raven ragout? Blackbird blancmange?

4. Black mold in the freezer, which we killed with every single thing we had in our house that was remotely toxic, chemical, sharp, blunted, horsepowered, whatever.

5. an incomprehensible piece of high-technology lightweight plastic mesh clearly intended to cover something, but no object looks appropriate, so it must be a cover for some other equally high-tech piece of plastic. Whatever it is, it's meant to help outdoorsy types stay alive on the North Pole and at the Earth's core.

6. Speaking of the Earth's core, the stuff under the stove was clearly part of the mantle, that miles-deep impenetrable crust made of rock, metals and utter filth.

7. We also found the hollow laughter of the 'cleaners' who had apparently come by a few weeks ago.

8. Plus we locked ourselves out and had to use boltcutters to sleep in our appointed bed.

Moving.