the thing about the morning

is that it's a slippery mo-fo - all full of promise and possibility. tricks you into thinking it could go on all day. i hate that.

so the fact that i have wasted way too much time this weekend playing on facebook and wandering the internet is making me a little nervous, but the wide open space of 9:30 am is doing nothing to make me stop. viz:



apparently, i also resemble susan sontag, maria bello, and debra winger, but this one was the funniest.


belle & sebastian - my wandering days are over

uh oh

one word: facebook.

the ultimate distraction. this might require therapy.

it's only a couple more days (get over yourself)

i hate cognitive science. no - i mean, i HATE cognitive science. it's not that the stuff isn't interesting (it is). it's not even that i find the prof annoying, pompous, and ineffectual (i do). it's more that it's my last exam and i feel like i know the stuff already and i'm fighting my inner 2-year-old who is adamantly protesting the fact that i have to jump through hoops like studying and exam-writing to finish this stupid course which i probably shouldn't have taken in the first place. and yeah, i know this will all pass by monday eve, and i'll be glad to have done it, and i'll get to feel the release of having wrapped a rather long and grueling course. but in the meantime, i feel like embracing my internal temper tantrum and jumping up and down, and screaming at the top of my lungs "BUT I DON'T WANT TO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

phew. that feels better.


the ramones - i wanna be sedated

hey you, i know you...

in studying for my psychology exam, which i write this afternoon, i came across this concept of self-evaluative maintenance. basically, it's an ego-preserving non-compete clause among friends - i.e., if your friend is better than you at something that counts to you, you either get a new aspiration, or ditch the friend. evidentally, this same impulse also leads people to associate themselves with winners and disassociate themselves from losers.

so in this vein, since i am not currently a writer or a photographer, and as i'm not much in the mood to cull friends, i hereby associate myself shamelessly with a couple of winners:

a shout-out to zoe whittall, whose new novel bottle rocket hearts, just published by cormorant, is gonna be launching on wednesday, may 2nd at the gladstone. ontario literati zoe, sky gilbert, maggie macdonald, and elvira kurt'll all be there. and so will i, although a bit late. doors 7:30 pm.



and also at the gladstone, as part of the contact photography festival and all the way from beautiful montreal, my pal pierre dalpé. he's exhibiting his personae series of photographs -- way cool visual explorations of identity, perception, and reality. check it out. opening on thursday, may 3, 7 - 10 pm, at the gladstone art bar. runs to may 27.






morcheeba - part of the process

and the sun is still sleepy warm too

i'm not an early riser by nature. i love me my bed. but the past couple of mornings i've been up shortly after the sun, and i can see why people do it. on the back deck with a coffee and the wet smell of night's end, the muted citysounds, and the chipper conversations of starlings and those ubiquitous little brown birds whose names i have never known. even if it's all an illusion, it's peaceful out there.

i once had a cat stevens album that got stuck in my car tape deck for an entire summer (cat's greatest hits on one side, and paul simon's graceland on the other). i couldn't listen to either for years thereafter, i was so sick of them. and while this isn't my favourite tune, it's apt. and this morning has got me feeling so expansive, that even if it isn't, and even if it's cheesy and maybe a little too christian-like, i'm gonna post it.


cat stevens - morning has broken

okay jen, i'll bite

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it's 21 degrees outside and i am happy

the summer my parents split up - that would be the summer after my first year of university - i had a love-on for the indigo girls. i don't listen to them very much anymore, but that summer i must've played nomads, indians, and saints - the cassette version no less - upwards of a hundred times over. i have this image of driving across saskatchewan, moving my mom out to the west coast, and forcing everyone in the car to listen to watershed just one more time. it's a tune that says summer to me.


the indigo girls - watershed

9 car pile-up

one of the weird things about losing someone you love is the way time piles up, like some awful freeway accident, starting from the minute they die, and going on, i imagine, until you do.

it's my mother's birthday today. she would have been 63. and in the time since her death, the world has slid into a new post-9/11 state of perpetual war, paranoia, and profound distrust. i still imagine having conversations with her - we always were good at the chatter - but i can no longer imagine what her responses would be. the world, in some ways, seems so irrevocably changed. of course, i imagine people thought the same during and after the vietnam war, during and after every war, every major cultural shift probably, and maybe they were right. i mean, things always change... i guess the difference is that my mom is no longer changing along with it. and i am.

so mom, i don't know how to tell you this, but the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. there's a bunch of crazy right wing fucks in charge of everything, kids are shooting each other at school, there are bombs going off in iraq that are killing folk by the hundreds daily, and apparently we're frying ourselves to death by consumption (and not the kind they used to send you off to a sanitorium for). oh, and i'm kinda jobless at the moment. happy birthday. i miss you.


barry mcguire - eve of destruction

straining to hear

it's the horror of the non-stop coverage of disaster that just compounds it all for me - the eyewitness interviews, the first-person accounts rehearsed over and over again for the cameras, the grainy cellphone video footage. and my own morbid curiosity - surfing the net to find new information about killings that have so much of the world in thrall but which are so very far away.

there's a magnitude, to be sure, to this kind of firebombed violence that forces us to sit up and pay attention. an explosion that brings home how even in the most serene places - "these things just don't happen in places like this" - we're always, maybe, just a hair's breadth away from our own apocalypses. and we want to know why. we want to pick the details apart, replay the moments over and over again as if doing so might help us identify the attendant horsemen should ever they ride into our neighbourhoods. but i suppose that's also what drives the horror of it all - maybe there are no horsemen. maybe there is no why. maybe it really is senseless.

(which isn't the same as saying that there aren't causes. like guns. and poverty. and alienation. but while causes might explain, they don't necessarily make sense in any moral way, which is always what i feel like so much of this news coverage is trying to do.)

as k points out, it's the commonness of tragedy that can overwhelm in our own lives. and things like the shootings at virginia tech, at dawson college, in pennsylvania, at columbine - they're megaphones against the eardrum. sometimes, i guess, i just fear that in devoting so much attention to them, we become desensitized to the other tragedies. to the tragedies that occur in precisely those places where we do expect them to happen - in iraq, in the inner city, to the poor. and if we expect them to happen, does that make them any less tragic?

sigh. i'm not sure what i'm saying. i'm not trying to diminish what happened in virginia. it's horrific. i guess i just wanted to check in on myself to see where the horror lies - and to remind myself that the extraordinary relies on the ordinary. and the ordinary is where i live.


bach concerto in d minor for 2 violins, mvt II, largo ma non tanto (perlman & stern)

my perfect lunch

so i've recently determined that i'm going to try and eat better - you know the drill, more whole grains, less fat, more veggies and legumes. and to complement this oh-so-responsible new dietary stance, i've started taking multivitamins (but did you know you can get things called calcium chews, that are kinda like tootsie rolls, but they've got mineral goodness in them? really! it's true). and today, i finally hauled my ever-widening rear end into pool for a bit of a swim. whole new me, i tell you!

but then i got home, and i was HUNGRY. and this week, the grocery angel (also known as my dearly beloved) had delivered to my house the ingredients (by express request) for my perfect lunch:



wonder bread - white. cheese - american kraft. ketchup - heinz.
damn the resolutions. those can wait. this lunch made my day.


rufus wainwright - cigarettes and chocolate milk

post-overnight

on my bike on my way home this morning from last night's midnight shift, city streets empty save for a few souls who might be waking, might be heading home. the city smells different when the asphalt is cleared of people. i'm not a morning person but i do like being up for the night's end, for that 5 minute fadeout as streetlights become redundant. i don't know if it's the light or my own fatigue, but the world seems somehow more innocent, more primitive, more hopeful in the bleary light of 6 am than it ever does when it's fully awake.


and because i'm clearly a little bleary-eyed and sentimental myself this morning, a little early tom waits



ps. a little word of the day i was gifted with last night: pukeatrocious. i think this could be my new favourite.

the squid or the kale?

one of the perks of being underemployed and overschooled is the freedom to watch daytime television. it's a perk i don't often take advantage of since i tend to prefer the serendipitous meanderings of cyberspace to the stuff that seems to show up on my digital tv box. but yesterday i tuned in while i was eating lunch and was rewarded by a discovery channel show on the humboldt squid.

now i'd never heard of the humboldt squid before, but apparently they're known as vicious predators - a sort of lower order (not to mention smaller sized) kraken. even so, they're pretty big puppies - some can grow to a length of 6 feet, and weigh a hundred pounds or more. they travel in schools of a thousand animals plus, and feed crazily, since they only have a year to live, and they clearly have a lot of growth to accomplish in that time. the thing is, they've been associated with attacks on fishers - and on each other - in what sounds like a sort of sharks-gone-mad sort of way, so they tend to be quite feared, and then of course destroyed with the wrath we reserve for those things that show us up as vulnerable.

the purpose of this documentary, though, was to recast the humboldt as a gentle giant that only attacks when provoked (for example, by the fishers that are thinning their ranks in a rather barbarous fashion). otherwise, the squid show a remarkable level of playfulness, curiosity, peaceability, problem-solving ability, cooperative behaviour, and communicativeness. in short, the humboldt, cast in the right light, might look a lot like us.

i suppose it's kind of naive on my part to be moved by this. i remember years ago hearing a quirks and quarks show about the play behaviour of octopuses (octopi?) and thinking that i really had to reconsider my selective pescevegetarian stance (i did, though not the way i had intended... instead of dropping the pesce part, i dropped the vegetarian part).

i'm not entirely sure what i'm musing about here - only that it really does seem alarming how divorced most of us have become from the means of our food-getting. and how, in becoming so, we've also moved away from an understanding of other animals as sensate, let alone cognate. i know i'm guilty of this kind of thinking, if only as justification for my weakness for the 25 cent chicken wing... which makes me feel pretty crummy. not to mention cheap.

and while i love the stuff i stumble on on the discovery channel, it almost always presents what is for me, moreso than it is for my friend jen, who posted in a similar vein yesterday, a struggle with the moral quicksand that underlies my gustatory carnal pleasures. so thank you, discovery channel. thank you, humboldt squid. even if i don't end up riding the vegetarian bandwagon again, i'm glad of the reminder of the agreement implicit in my love of sushi, in that whopper i crave at least once a month, in that brilliant lamb tibs at the queen of sheba. sigh. i expect i'll be flailing around in the quicksand-space for a time to come yet...


the beatles - octopus's garden

and i wasn't sure they would ever get along...

so much for fighting like cats and dogs.

9w1 and you?

grey, wet, and freaking cold here in toronto today. it feels like november in vancouver. a morning spent shivering in the dog park, then bathing the resultant filthy beast. i feel like i should mention vonnegut's passing, if only to admit that i've never read anything he wrote. but now that that's done, i'm fresh out of thought. and whenever that happens, i figure i may as well go fatalist - and what better way to go than via the enneagram. since k first mentioned it a couple of weeks ago, and my friend j just sent me a link to an even better online version, i've been obsessing (read - wasting valuable study time) about it.

so instead of yammering emptily on today, i'll let the fine folks at eclecticenergies.com amuse you all for the afternoon (well, anyone who hasn't already done the test), and challenge you to take the enneagram test. then tell me what you are.


jenny lewis with the watson twins - the charging sky

interior

it's about the turn inwards, the way the mind detaches, becomes still, watchful. it comes on like thunder, a rumble under the breath, the downward shift of the barometer. it suffuses, fog-like, diffuse, rising up from inside, spreading outwards the way frostbite travels inwards. it's a numbness, an enoughness, a too-muchness. it's elusive, this old travelling companion, slippery like light off a chrome surface, or maybe more like that halo that frames - no, bleeds into - your target when you shoot right into the light. you'd think after all the time we've been together, all the terrain we've covered, i might anticipate it with a little more accuracy. but it's always a surprise guest, the one that slips in with the invited, the one upon whom it would be rude to close the door. "come on in," i always end up saying. "come on in and make yourself at home."


ryan adams - damn, sam (i love a woman that rains)

googlestalgia

i've gone on here before about getting lost in cyberworld. i slip into it easily - skipping my way through other people's cyberworlds, hyperlink to hyperlink. but every now and then, i stumble on bits of my old life. current photos of ex-lovers, old friends, the people i've lost reminding me of the person i've been. and for all those ancient hurts and dusty grainy remembrances, for all the times i've thought "i'm sorry" and the times i've thought "fuck off" and the times i've justified/forgotten/buried the things i found hardest to accept, i can't get past the nugget of affection. that is why we came together, and sometimes it's why we came apart. but it's still there, somewhere, under the avalanche of future that buried it.

cheers to you, clm. you look well, and happy. i hope you are.


norah jones - those sweet words

god in the details

so yesterday was passover, this weekend easter. on my way home from the dog park this morning, ann, the eldest of a brood of four homeschoolers whom i know only through my cordial relations with the owners of a doodle named basil, wished me a happy easter. i returned the wish, though with the realization that i know pretty much nothing about easter. i mean, of course i know the basic story - it's hard to grow up in this country without grasping at least that - but i don't know anything about easter, in much the same way that i don't know anything about christmas either.

j is always amazed by this. over the winter break, i revealed to her that the only time i had ever been to church was to listen to or play music. church doesn't simply doesn't signify to me in the same way as it signifies to her. i often wonder what i missed by growing up without it... would my world look different? my mind? does faith allow or encourage a way of approaching "fact" in some fundamentally other way?

in a somehow related way, i talked to e about passover this morning too. if i know little about jesus and easter, i know even less about passover. so she told me the story, and we talked about the relationship of belief to tradition to... well, belief. and we both noted how, in growing up with a lack of god in our lives, we find the ability to believe (which seems more to me to be about the ability to suspend disbelief) almost unbridgeably foreign. and it's not that i don't want to believe; it's more, truly, that i can't. like there was some critical period in development that related to developing the ability to believe - truly believe - in god. and i missed it. and some days i wonder if in missing that, i missed out on some important way of seeing the world. and then on other days, i think maybe that the god i wasn't raised with just took another form for me - maybe it lives in science, in thought-space, in relation-space, in my own reluctance to dig too deep, and in the idea that anything is possible and we couldn't, or maybe shouldn't, work too hard at understanding. maybe it's just that my non-god doesn't wear human-like clothing. but in the end, i suppose it's just as ineffable as any religious deity, and just as powerful.


ry cooder - i think it's going to work out fine

high fidelity

when i saw the movie, i was so taken by john cusack's character. the obsessive tape making, the effort to get it just right. i remember making those tapes when i was a teenager... it was such a fine art. or so i thought at the time.

first there would be a list: all the songs that came into my head, that conveyed the mood i was trying to get at, that i wanted to share with whoever i might be sharing the tape with. then came the shuffle: play the song list in my head, imagine the breaks between and the effect of one ending leading into the opening chords of the next track, rearranging accordingly. then finetuning: where on the tape was the sideflip going to occur? was that appropriate? would it work there? rearrange again, accordingly. then the final pass - last chance to change a certain song. remember, this is going to be permanent. this is going to *say* something about you. and finally, the naming. what to call this mix? and the sides? will side A and side B suffice, or does it need something more clever, something more personal? and the finishing touches - the case. get the right pen - something that won't smudge. all caps or all lower case? definitely not cursive, but should there be two colours of ink? so much work went into those old tapes, so much of self, so many attempts at becoming a self.

a few years ago, when i replaced the last tape deck in my life with a cd player, i got rid of all those old tapes. i still think of them sometimes, though. and miss them.


Mixed Tapes

They almost ask for musical backing, some feelings,
or even to be sung, but since life (you know this)
isn't opera, and your all-too-spoken arias
are prey to mundane upstaging, missteps
of the tongue, you pick tracks of singers scattered
in time, and temper -- yet bound by the way
they overheard your heart, and pinched
its unformed lines -- and you record them
in skewed new orders:
.......................Nick Drake opening for Nina Simone,
John Prine in bed with Edith Piaf,
and later, languid and alone, tragic smoker
under a Gatsby-green light, on a summertime pier....
No, you choose the name.

You know how clichés, the same
you'd never leave in a poem, that would shame you
breathed into a mouthpiece, are disguised
somehow -- or are they renewed, justified
by the right tune? Still missing you.
Keep kissing you.
Maybe that's what a tune is for. Maybe
it's why you burn mixed disks, make tapes
in hi-fi, normal bias - 60 to 90 minutes
is best; no rushed declarations of love.
You'll sit up with a bottle of something red,
a tape deck, and this clichéd, constant
aching, to reclaim lines you mean so deeply
they must be your own.


With this kiss my life begins.


You're not alone, anymore.

-- Steven Heighton, from The Address Book


Nick Drake - From the Morning