27.2.05

some things to note.

1. mike is not a dick. sorry mike. like he's reading this. fhgwgads.

2. as i was waiting for my table at the sockeye city brunch, i saw a walker parked in the waiting area, the kind with a seat, should granny get tired. there was a sticker on it, "p. roach". i thought that was notable.

3. i was reminded of the time, in that same waiting room, someone asked me, "whaddya s'pose the schooner signifies?", pointing to a model tall ship on the wall. consider the fact that we're on a wharf called fisherman's, in a diner serving seafood almost exclusively, and there'a tall ship on every wall. "well, here's my theory. i think the red of the schooner's hull is definitely symbolic of blood, and the large traingular sails are just screaming whipped cream and wafer garnishes. i've thought long and hard about this and i think the owner of the restaurant is trying to subliminally suggest the bloody sundae for dessert". what does the schooner signify... jesus.

4. i saw a family that i swear just busted out of a time machine, straight from moscow, 1982. mom's got the rainbow crushed fake satin jogging suit and a frikkin fanny pack, her son who apparently can't let go of the flock of seagulls hairdo and dangly top-of-the-ear piercings and dad, dear old dad with his acid wash jeans and a skin tight t-shirt that says have a nice day.

5. right behind the family from moscow, was a lady with a shitzu and matching hair barely being tamed by a yellow visor.

6. i don't really lie in my articles, but you gotta pay or be someone i respect to get the real goods. no one will ever know my secrets to search engine optimization. except bahurd and the j-ho, who helped discover the secrets in the first place.

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i saw your pretty pictures

an old blinker the star song, must find it. a little fruity, i'll admit. i got a thing for fruit.

after yesterday's post, i found some old pictures of mike. one called "odd martyr look". what a dick.

i hate sundays. i hate 'em 'cause theyre perfectly fit for nothing and yet every sunday there's something i have to do. every sunday i have to write an article about search engines, search engine optimization web design corporations saving millions reaching number one best traffic in the WORLD meaningless words about 1s and 0s that give me heartburn and make me sick. i'm read around the world, i'm published in major marketing periodicals and i hate every word i say. here's a secret: one week i wrote an article that got picked up by a rather large publication and the next week i wrote one that completely contradicted the first, and it got published in the same publication. and no one noticed. morons. just string 'em along and tell 'em lies, here's what'll work for your site: cook some eggs, sunnyside up, pour sambuca over them, light it on fire and dance the hokey pokey while chanting "google is good, google is fun, google's gonna make me #1". works every time. seriously.

what i'd rather do with my sunday:

go to gerry's books and lurk in one of the foot wide aisles and listen to the melody of a tiny fishing village's used book store. ding, ding, creeek, slam "g'morning, tom! got some new books for us i see. have you finished dostoevsky's idiot, yet?" tip of the hat "gerry, good to see you. nah, long book that sucker is. keeping busy?" "well the heritage association's been harassing me about the facade, not old-looking enough. and mary's due to have her baby soon, so yeah, pretty busy". and on and on. another ding, another slam. it's really quite beautiful.

take my puppy to the baseball diamond, close the gates and let him tear up the field. catch the brunch at sockeye city on the wharf. mmm lobster shrimp crepes. sit down and write until 8pm then head to the buck and shoot some pool.

i just wanna see some pretty people, doing pretty things and get inspired.

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26.2.05

the martyr.

lemme set the mood. amazing love by pedro the lion playing in itunes. outside my window, fog tops the river mouth and the beach and the logs and boats, fishermen, foghorns, lighthouse calling and squinting to find their way. my pup is curled on the couch in a sliver of light coming through the window. no one in the office, people who've been crashing here are in the city, little brother doesn't work on weekends, john is in bed, always in bed, he'd sleep his whole life if i didn't wake him.

i rose too early, smoke, walk down the driveway in the fog, have a big glass of water to replace what the beer took, sit down. mix up some pedro, arcade fire, pinback, pinetop seven and put it on random. bookmarks > mike > inmate search output. nothing. last letter was in november and it was 3 sentences. "haven't forgotten about you, will write soon, i love you".

when i turned 19, i went to a bar, first time legally in august a few weeks after my birthday. my friend, c, hit it off with some guy and usually it's me who gets attention from men, so i just chatted with his creepy friend to let c have her fun. they invited us out to their boat to watch a movie and against better judgement we went. long story short, the creepy guy i was left to entertain ended up having his way with me on the deck, against my will. i was shocked, all fucked up, i kept it to myself and told c we should go, she wanted to stay so i sat in the cabin of the boat with this prick who just raped me. she gave them our numbers, still no objection from me. i just stood there, useless. we left. i told c that something had happened and i don't know what. i don't really even know if she gets it to this day.

dropped off at home, i get inside and call another friend and spill everything. he doesn't know how to deal with it and we end up hanging up, same with the next friend. then i call mike, this kid who just annoyed the hell out of me for the past year, i dunno why, but i choose him and tell him everything. we spent maybe 8 hours on the phone. he called everyday for the next eternity to see how i was. he was only 15.

he had his own shit to deal with, too. big shit, terrible shit i can't even fathom and we'd just stay up all night talking and leaning on each other and get sleepless goofiness and laugh our asses off as the sun rose. he was always there, when my ex beat me up, mike wanted to get some of his friends together and chase him across the country, asked him not to, my ex wasn't worth landing in jail. he would write beautiful notes and poetry and songs and under any circumstance make me laugh. he was fucking brilliant, i've never been so intimidated by anyone's genius, and he is a genius, invitations from mensa n' all.

then he got into heroin. he had a lot of pain. and a lot of money. i didn't like who he was on heroin and i told him that and he fucked off for 3 or 4 years and i didn't know where he was or if he was alive and i thought about him all the time, i just missed him and i looked for him, googled and asked around and shit. this past august my search results on google turned up an article about an atm robbery and some kid named mike doing 9 years. he'd poured his millions into heroin and had none left and hadda hit up some lady at the bank for a couple hundreds. nicely, i might add - and he didn't tell me that, the article did - made sure the woman was alright promised her everything was going to be fine and left her with some money so she wasn't completely fucked and told her he wouldn't harm her car and where he would leave it for her. i know, it doesn't make it ok, but it helps me justify the fact that i love him.

so. i write to him. i get letters back and i'm fucking ecstatic, hearing from him has made my decade, just knowing he's alright, like letting out a big phew. he sends 4 letters. then nothing.

i know what he's doing. he's sparing me. he's being a fucking martyr again and what the fuck can i do? nothing. i'm at a complete loss. i just miss my friend. i miss 'im. i just wanna hear him tell me how much he loves muenster cheese again. hear him giggle. listen to him sing along with honky's ladder by the afghan whigs.

i just wanna know him again.

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25.2.05

the forest.

in the forest up the mountains a little, the green of spring:

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24.2.05

song of the moment: paramour by pinetop seven - woot - sounds like layne staley a bit

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d'ya want some salami?

i knew this kid once, murray. we travelled around west australia for a while together with our families. he was cute, giant dimples and huge brown eyes. really quiet, all he ever really wanted to do was read and play video games. his little brother would poke him and and squeak "hey murray! hey murray!" and eventually murray would get up and play with his brother. they'd go swimming or play road hockey or just skate. the funny thing is, within an hour, murray would always be injured bad enough to go to the hospital. he'd get his little engine going and the energy would just build and build until murray's mind could no longer tell him "bad idea". the first time i ever met murray was at a swimming pool as he was being hauled off to the hospital, blood pouring from his face. he'd dove to the bottom in the shallow end of the pool.

we took this road trip up the coast of western australia, from perth to kalbarri to coral bay, monkey mia & exmouth. murray's family was driving this tiny little orange datsun and their mom was always trying to feed them salami. "murray? benji? d'ya want some salami?". we would joke, when we drove behind them, that we saw sticks of salami flying out the windows of their car.

we'd put on a show for the other car when we were in front. my brother and i pretended to have a fist fight in the back window. murrays family passed us and got in front and they tried to do the same thing, we saw them pretending to fist fight in the back window and it went on and on and we saw the car start to pull into a gas station and the doors open and murray and benji being pulled out of the car by their folks, bloody noses, kicking and screaming. heh.

i was just thinking about murray.

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23.2.05

forever in debt to your priceless advice

my geography teacher in grade 12 told me once "you can be anything you want" - prior to this advice my life consisted of a lot of criminal activity and failing grades across the board. i decided to take his word for it and now i own one of the most influencial companies in the seo industry, according to the founder of become.com

passing on this advice has been nothing but pure hell. it's amazing how bent on sucking everyone is.

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you're looking at a huge portion of my reason for being.

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22.2.05

swashbuckle this.

dinner with grams tonight. the server was a little needy. she actually seemed sad when we were leaving, "okaaaaay". ugh, i hate the standard customer service whine. shut up, i showed you my id, you KNOW i'm not four, why do you talk to me as though i am? "i'm sorry, can you say that a little lower, you hit some notes there human ears can't hear".

every day i thank myself for being smart enough to drop the whole working for someone else scene. it's just bad news.

there was an excrutiatingly beautiful sunset tonight. purple and orange and yellow and red. and just over the beach by my house, mist slowly rising hiding all but the silhouettes of the coast mountain peaks. wish i had a camera.

this is my tiny little village:



well, i've got to go defend my trivial pursuit title. peace out, hoes.

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king nothing

sometimes i just wish there would be quiet. someone is always talking. people with no lives living through mine, no friends hangin out with mine, everything i do is doubled. follow, tag along, mirror. chat chat chat. there's never an end to the chatter. 8am - 9am is my only refuge - the kid hasn't come for work yet and mr. vlu is in bed. i listen to the kaiser chiefs and write tiny little paragraphs to barely meet my creative needs. not that i'm some great artist or anything. but the soul needs what it needs. sometimes i just need to be alone. with my keyboard and my stories.

last night was gross. ran into some old friends i used to hang out with when i was like 15 or so. still living at home, minimum wage jobs, getting in bar fights and smoking pot, and throwing around racial slurs as though they have something to feel superior about. why is it always the hickest rednecks that think they're superior? yes, the buddhist vegetarian hardworking soft spoken smiling asians are definitely a problem, but you with your frequent fist fights, in your taco del mar apron, living at drunken mommy's, smoking pounds of weed with no direction in life, YOU are king. man, i felt out of place.

it would be nice if sometimes humanity would just retreat and leave me alone in my head with my keyboard and my stories.

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21.2.05

rip hst

hunter s thompson shot himself. all the good guys do it to themselves. is life really that hard?

"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. " - hst

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song of the moment: cause=time by broken social scene

"they all want to love the cause
they all want to be the cause
they all want to f*ck the cause"

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20.2.05

i found this hard cover copy of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde from 1946 yesterday. i love old stinky books. i inherited from my great aunt her massive book collection, and the best one by far is this old medical encyclopedia. it's so old the title's worn off the front cover, the binding is gone and it's missing the first 30 pages or so, so i have no idea what it's called, what edition it is and what year it was printed, but in the "alcoholism, treament of" entry it says "Very little can be done for the habitual drunkard". so that's that.

i love old objects of any kind. i look at them and stare and wonder and suddenly a scene comes to life around the object, a scene i imagine might have happened back in the object's days of newness. imagine who read my medical encyclopedia, who needed to know that very little can be done for the habitual drunkard and other such medical tales?

surfing blogger for a while, reading other people's drivel. i'm bookmarking the ones that sounded like me at one point in time or another, eventually i'll be able to put together, in chronological order, a string of blogs that represent how i wrote and what i wrote about at different points in my life. why? i dunno if anyone's done that before. i'm a pioneer.

some things i should probably mention about this blog. i don't believe in spellcheck, the subconscious is a powerful thing and if it wanted me to spell receipt r-e-c-i-e-p-t, there's got to be good reason. i also believe in very little punctuation and have all but eliminated the exclamation - i think it's overused and ruining almost everything i have to read (doesn't make me like the new band "!!!" - how pretentious a name is that? it's NOT a name). i save it only for the things i am truly exclaiming. i don't do smilies and am under no circumstances objective.

i sit at this computer way too much. maybe i'll go to the buck n' ear, have a beer, play some pool.

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"howja feel about the hockey?"

everyday my dad calls. it's always the same thing, "howja feel about the hockey?"

the hockey. let's get into that for a sec.

no season pros: when i go to the bars now, i can actually get the pool table without the silly ritual of dropping some coin on the table and watching strangers play to make sure they understand you're next. saturdays out in the sun don't end abruptly at 4pm for hockey night in canada. my don cherry nightmares have ceased. i no longer spend the better part of my days wondering exactly how messier's head got to be so big. consumption of beer now begins at around 8pm instead of when the puck drops. i get more reading, writing and work done. my business partners aren't pre-occupied. haven't seen a fight on a sheet of ice between two men dressed in shorts stuffed with pillows and shoes with knives bolted to them in quite some time. not tearing my hair out due to boredom when the 3rd hour of a regular season game starts has left my hair looking quite nice if i do say so myself. conversations amongst friends actually touch on topics that matter!

no season cons: less social getherings (calling someone up to "chill" isn't as exciting as, say, "hey wanna watch my canucks clean the ice with your leafs?"). playoffs in vancouver are a fun time for everyone, comraderie, parties, flag waving, cheers heard all over the city simultaneously, it's an atmosphere i definitely miss. no reason to squeeze the playoff chicken or rearrange furniture for luck.

no season trump: revoltingly spoiled grown men are no longer making obscene amounts of money to play a game they supposedly love. multi-billionaires are no longer making obscene amounts of money to sell tickets at sick prices to watch the aforementioned spoiled grown men chase rubber on ice.

i say to hell with the nhl. if i'm ever inspired to watch hockey again, i'll go down the street and watch real men play for nothing.

that's all i have to say about hockey.

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19.2.05

amy's magical leafing techniques

so many songs, so many songs, thank u garth, thank u for telling me to check out pinback!

i discovered a whole new world today. relations from frigid kingston flew to my sunny city in search of a rubber stamp store. we located one down the street. kids, i walked into an alternate universe. there were stamps everywhere, big ones, little ones, rabbits and bears and dogs and trains and flowers, trees, words, martinis and beer, books and teapots, christmas trees, easter eggs, the star of david and the mona lisa. ribbons, glitter, origami, colored wire, shaped hole punches, stickers, paints and embossers. there was a CLASS taking place in the back of the store, little tiny japanese women cutting shapes and poking holes and folding paper.

the jewel, my friends, the absolute jewel of this absurd store was placed nonchalantly on a shelf under packages of different colored gold leaf. a video case, with a poor resolution picture of an aging, permanently-sad-faced, chunky house wife and the choppy, grainy swoop of calligraphy spelling out "amy's magical leafing techniques". dang what i wouldn't give to see what's on that tape. i really should have bought it. but i went to the used bookstore instead and bought a little vonnegut, steinbeck & r.l. stevenson.

i'm off to go smoke in the moonlight. happy saturday.

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song of the moment: lover's spit by broken social scene.

p.s. a quick note before seafood, check out the book i'm writing, feedback is welcome, bad and good. i dunno, when you read something a thousand times, you tend to lose perspective.

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my brother calls it a hangsum.

bubbly discomfort. a night of mexican and jaimaican beer. heaven, send me some tums.

mike. miss 'im so terribly much. i get the stares and the eye-rolling and the non-listen from everyone. missing a felonious recovering addict serving his 2nd year of a 9 year sentence in the same correctional institution as a death row, isn't exactly something you wanna broadcast. so why am i broadcasting it you ask? 'cause i've never really been good at hiding things that were on my mind. and one of the most important friendships of my life certainly is worth a few eye rolls.

people tend to roll their eyes at just about anything, anyhow. rain. dogs. dust, the news, my t-shirt. that's the answer to everything nowadays. it's why customer service is nowhere to be found. it's why war criminals can keep committing war crimes. it's why elections can be stolen. instead of saying shit all, people roll their eyes then sit down and shovel deep fried battered chicken fat in their faces and listen to eminem and think they're all liberal 'cause they don't approve of bush.

get off your fat asses today, go do something.

i gotta go eat seafood with old easterners.

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18.2.05

garbage day.

today was garbage. there's usually a total lack of reason no matter where you go, what you do, who you talk to, but today was unquestionably the most unreasonable day of all.

i never did get around to reading the new york times. business has got me tangled in red tape so hopelessly that i couldn't even read my english-bureaucratic dictionary. what i did notice, briefly, is that someone out there decided to tell the press that nasa found proof of life on mars and nasa swiftly denied the rumours. i wonder if i would have seen that in the times.

bradifer-gate with a side of jolie? wtf? who cares? my mom called me the other day and said "hey, hon, did you hear? chuck and camilla are getting married" "chuck and camilla?" "yeah, chuck and camilla" "who the dang are chuck and camilla?" "prince charles and camilla parker whatever" "hey mom, did you hear? half of asia is DEAD, the most fascist man to ever exist runs the most powerful country in the world and unless you can bring to life kurt cobain or jack kerouac, i don't give a fluck about celebs and their asinign melodrama". i didn't really say that. i love my mom. i humored her as i always do. "great mom, that oughtta be a wedding to see".

ok. i lie. i get a little starry-eyed sometimes, i'm only human. i actually have a bit of a thing for authors. i write a lot of fan mail. once nada surf wrote me back and said my fan-mail attempt sounded like a suicide note from lester bangs.

my favorite fan mail attempt was Jimmy Lerner, 'cause he writes me and it makes a boring day designing bed and breakfast web sites a little more fun. and his book was great. i was sad 'cause a friend went to jail, so i looked for books about it. looked and looked to no avail, finally jimmy's book popped off the shelf and i read it and i was moved and i wrote him and i understand a little more what my friend is going through. and i made a new one. jimmy's cool as hell.

the gates in new york city. wow. i think orange is my new favorite color.

song of the moment: seville by pinback. thanks garth.

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chrome's foot

my friend has had a sore foot for like two weeks i guess. everyone tells her to see a doctor. she's like a man, she refuses to see a doctor. we're joking now, about how she'll go tomorrow and the doc'll say "too bad you didn't come in a few days sooner, we're going to have to amputate now" and she'll get it cut off and have to learn to walk on a plastic foot and she'll hide it from us for 20 years, just so we can't say "told u so".

p.s. i just saw garden state with natalie portman. yikes. that was f'n good. i sniffled a bit, but i'm a bit of a suck.

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17.2.05

song of the moment: neighborhood #1 by the arcade fire - sounds like he's saying "my windowdio"

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old friends.

last night i found a friend i hadnt spoken to in 5 or so years. i'm happy. especially since he's very involved in politics, something i've hidden from 'cause it drives me nuts, sad, angry, yank politics, the "greatest" nation all of you fooled into fascism, thinking you're the most free of all, staring down your nose at cuba and iraq. blah. u can't feel that much about something and not share. but no one i know likes to discuss or do anything that really means anything, and i hid from it, i pretended it wasn't there, 'cause i can't know this stuff and be so angry alone. i'd have gone terribly off. maybe i'll read the new york times today, though. yeah, it'll make me angry, no doubt, but last night i found an old friend and maybe i'll share it with him.

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