Sat May 26 12




2:08 pm



I know downtown is just over there - a subway ride that takes 15 minutes.

In know people are walking around.

I don't know if they take it in the way I do.

Maybe they're too busy just going somewhere.



A decade ago, I'd be down there with them. 80% of my attention would be on just being there looking around. The going somewhere was immaterial. I've kind of done it. Don't feel like it today.

But it still makes me curious that so many still do. That so many are out there in bright clothes this afternoon. They must have quite a lot to live for.



And there goes a DC9 up there (in the sky).

A bit of magic and adventure?  I just see a man doing his job.

Enslaved by This Week in November, Every Year

This is the time of the year when the world wins.
It completely takes over and enchants me. I am at its whim.
And its whim is always to break my heart.
Yesterday in an unusually warm and soft-lit afternoon, I was totally bossed around by emotion.
I could have cried all afternoon, looking at the street and succumbing to an old memory.
It took place in 1974 and the weather, everything circumstantial, was identical. The light.
This time of the year, this week in fact, enslaves me.
I cannot get out of it.
Today it is passing somewhat, but only because I can pick up a pen and write about it.
I must write it out of my system.
But the pull!

Waiting has always been my method.

3:20 had come and gone.

Maybe it came when I was just out with the dog.  He'd wanted go as soon as I got here.

And the sun came so that was auspicious, as they say. As they say in the Buddhist temples.

I got up just before 11 this morning, going to bed whether I wanted to or not, at 5:50 am, about.
Desperately did not want to get into an apt-bound rut. Walked around, made 1 coffee. Fed the cat.
Started doing some looking up on the Internet. For starting businesses online from home.

On the fairly smooth drive up here, I stopped in at the Milton Indigo and was all set to buy a hot new book called "Crush It. by some new wunderkind, but what might have been a catalyst for me. They didn't have it or I could find it. I had already tucked 3 books under my arm - two by an unknown-to-me French novelist and one on the state of digital cultare BS by a guy I'd seen on TVO and the like. I'd put a little pot of water on to boil when I went out and now made a coffee. I think I may have another before I head out - back down south.

9:32 2ndcup Brant St.

There was a couple of different routes I could have taken to get here and it was no sure thing that I was going to end up here anyway. The snow that was predicted is now started. The roads were beginning to get dicey.I took the safe route, Campbellville Rd and Guelph line.
There's only 1 couple in here beside me tonight. And they have Lou Reed playing, At first, I thought it was Willie Nelson.
Look at the enthusiasm on these kid's faces. They seem happy. They have this thing they imagine called a future.
Now they playing the Cure - Boys Don't Cry. These kids were born before any of this music was recorded.
I was somehow up even in apt this morning looking up all that stuff about online biz. What is my heart really in it?
That girl is really skinny. She is cute and has the knack of little things to wear. The black coat/jacket and orange scarf.
Jeans and black shoes. Shoelettes.
Others are coming in now.
Young Burlington couples.

It's hard to get pumped about starting an online business when the wise men tell you it's all for not. What do they recommend? Keep living, make a living?
Transmitting to an ether with no receivers.
Publish directly to the abyss, the void.
Vacuumland.

Keep living to make a living.
The people around me tell me one thing.
It's like they don't question it for one minute.
The body tells me another thing.
The mind just whips everything around in its blender.
Waiting has always been my method. It even gave me time to observe. I just wouldn't take anything seriously. And yet it weighed on me and everyone thought I was pretty serious.

(The Cure is getting tedious.)

And what I imagined everyone thought was pretty important. Like bringing home girlfriends to the parents, I would bring home my ideas to what I thought my friends would think.
All my ideas would have to change.
Waiting.

two bottles of women's perfume

 

A safe place is a smell:

I keep two bottles of women's perfume.

They are the same perfume.

It took me years to find it, trying to recapture the smell of M and not finding it till I met D who wore the same fragrance. Thinking of M, I bought some and gave it a whiff now and then. Later, when I wanted to remember D, I'd take a whiff of it then. But I didn't want to get them confused and out of respect for them, for two very different people, and two very different relationships, I was forced to to buy another bottle. I also didn't want the associations with the same smell to get confused. I had to make a visual distinction between the two, and I didn't want to label the one "m" and the other "d" (in case someone should see), I used a dab of nail polish and put a spot n one of the bottles.

There was a great debate whose should get the paint as neither of them would use red fingernail polish. At least not then. I'm not going to ell you which one.

So involved in capturing the past. In a group workshop, we were told to imagine a safe place. I couldn't do it without making something up from somebody else's image or other I'd seen in the form of a photo or something somebody had put into a song or a story. But later I could. I now put my failure to conjure a sage lace down to another example of my "don't tell me what to do" way of thinking.

And now other safe places are springing up. Not all from the past.

People, places. We're going there.

Night Coffee

It's a nightly ritual. Almost nightly.

When I come out of a coffee shop, just having had my first human interaction of the day (though it's night), I make a point of inhaling the cold air and record a mental note of my first impression of the coffee.

The combination of inhaled air and coffee makes for an experience that is better than either smell or taste alone.

Sometimes there's wood smoke in the air and the coffee taste puts me in a country mood.

Sometimes the air smells like apples. The coffee adds a burnished autumn taste.

Tonight, the air was cold down by the lake and smelled of the lake. The coffee conjured many leavings of the harbour.

The Pen syringe

There is no sitting at a desk
As if there was a plan here
Work to work out on a screen
This is all too scrambled
And ad hoc
To write at a desk
This needs a twitching
Knee and any old place to scratch it down
Just the way it comes in any old way in an unplanned way on unlevel surface
There is no level surface
I have an old diet Dr. Pepper can I use for butts.
I fill it with water, then butts, then empty the stinky hazardous thing in the toilet.
The illusions of getting clean.
If I was an American I would shoot my TV playing in front of me.
The commercials need killing.
If you look at it this way:
You fill a pen with enough ink to do the job.
The way you would fill a syringe with just enough smack to accomplish the fix.
Then you use up all the ink, until the job is done. Till you’ve killed the pain.
And the beauty of it is that there is an end in sight.
There is only so much ink.
You hope you put in the right amount.
You can imagine the consequences of filling it too much or of trying to judge the exact need of your idea to be expressed.
You can limit it or be forced to milk it.
If ink cost as much as heroin, many of our problems would be solved.
But each pain that needs writing out carries a different load.
Only a hack would guess or manage the amount of ink needed per scribbling.
There is a fog tonight up on the country roads.
Scary enough to turn back and raise desires of safety.
Get back at any cost.
Jesus, if I can back to the Lakefront with all the lights and SUVs and boutiques, I’ll do anything.
I’ll subscribe to a fucking video game without stopping for food.
Or smokes or pop.
I won’t even check for the messages that won’t be there or play mood altering music. I just know there will be no safety.
Even taking pills will just put me to sleep and start the whole shitty game again tomorrow. Except there isn’t a tomorrow. It’s a goddamned repeat of today.
A repeat – a re-run.
Without commercials that don’t pay me for air time in my head.
Everything is draining out, like this ink. And the only good news is that there is only a finite amount of ink and a finite amount of time until everything runs out.
This nightly lay-me-down is a cruel habit. It’s a failure to stay awake.
I would normally or, at least I certainly did in the past – find a lot of references to spice this up. Names. Quotes. Mentions of music and cracked open images to feed on.
There is no food or sensory input that gets in nowadays.
No metaphors. No analogies. No allusions.
Just the ink running out.
The finite body will conk out, too.
And this is a race. To use up the fix before I can't even twitch anymore.
This is the kind of pen that you can't see how much ink is left.
That’s the beauty of a syringe.
You can see the capacity, you see how much of the dope solution goes in. and you FEEL the progress of the liquid going down the barrel till it's all gone.
Then it's over - for the syringe, that is. The pain is on its way to gone.
This is a crooked game I'm playing, pretending this pen is a syringe - an instrument of relief, of pain-killing.

Pulled Apart

If you find yourself in the dilemma of being strongly pulled in diverse directions by people and ideas, you can always cut the strings.

Although these people and ideas may mean a lot to you, the attraction and attachment to them could even do worse than pull you apart. They could hold you in a state of paralysis. You can always cut the strings.

But these things that seem opposite or mutually exclusive will be gone. And you will be alone. But no longer waiting to see which of these forces will win you.