In November the prairie winds howl with memories
of winter and the voices of a thousand wheat creatures
make speeches about loneliness on
the slope of her spine with a gentle hand and finds her eyes
fighting bright in the darkest parts of night on
now wife and he is rich with the promise of life on
soul of spring and the smothered whispers of two score ten bear
witness to the perfect architecture of them on
president bartlet and mrs. lanningham reveal, during an interaction in the fourth season, that if you're the president of the united states you can choose any number of paintings from the national art gallery and have them hung in your office. how cool is that? i'm salivating. what kind of president would choose a pollock, i wonder. i'm not sure that they even have warhols in the national art gallery, but if they did, would any president elect borrow one to hang? my guess is no.
if you have ever taken an art class you will remember what it is to be asked to draw a person without lifting your pen from the paper. remember that and imagine a dancer, a woman with breasts and spirit, moving her limbs, muscles strained.
before -- pirate themed streetcar party. need i say more? yes. i've showered, blow-dried, moisturized and feel that i'm ready to conquer the red beast. after - it was crazy. we showed up expecting to be the only ones sporting earings, mustaches: pirate costumes. but we were wrong, they were everywhere. we worried, for a brief moment, that there wouldn't be any music on the streetcar. we were promptly corrected: a few men in black pants and t-shirts spun happy hardcore followed by breaks. nick was especially happy about the breaks, as he generally is.
finch and dufferin: i dare you to find worse. i come up here every now and again for work -- my company has access to a boardroom on alness street. the landscape's unreal this far north. hideous high-rise apartment buidlings, noisy four lane streets framed by stripmalls containing businesses that all look as though they're having a closing out sale. shitty restaurants, bridal shops, a strip bar or two. second floor nail salons and dental offices, bus benches that remind you to call this real estate agent or that personal injury lawyer. it's thoroughly depressing. and accessible only by bus.
mansbridge: are you guys fucking up the evacuation effort?
pinecones are small, brown crunchy things, not summer
the street is loud when i sit at my desk. it's seventeen minutes to eight and traffic is at its peak, pigeons coo on the roof near my window and trees everywhere are wilting from the heat. i see my favourite books lined up, in the spaces near to me. a collection of twice-read grisham paperpacks are heaped on the window sill. slivery poetry chapbooks are jammed between hardcover copies of barney's version, sowing the wind, a russian textbook: troika. donations from my mother: rankin, thayer and tanenbaum have been chucked lazily about the place -- i haven't read them.
an hour and a half spent feeling sorry for myself, listening to sarah harmer and devendra banhart on repeat, drinking heineken and smoking belmont cigarettes (which can be challenging with a fan blowing at you on high, for the record). a cold shower because the hot water tank simply isn't big enough, followed by a few minutes in front of the mirror with a pair of dull tweezers. squeeze my fat ass into a pair of jeans, fish through my collection of equally unflattering shirts and select one. inevitably get deodorant all over it and pick another. go meet gay friend who has eleven o'clock date but is willing to entertain until then. find some patio, drink a few pints, check cell phone three or four times for missed calls. smoke more cigarettes. stumble home flushed by 1045. check tv guide for anything promising. find nothing. crack open another tall can of heineken, light a cigarette, mix things up with a little ariane moffat and wait for sleep.
an album by ariane moffatt. i like it very much. they were interviewing her this morning on tv5, that's how i discovered it. she was plainly attractive and had a very soothing voice. i would imagine that it's very good crying music, this. but let's not indulge that, shall we?
my sister is coming tomorrow and staying with me for six weeks. my mother warns me that she doesn't wash dishes and watches television endlessly. i am of the opinion that the satellite to basic cable transition will find her being a little more active.
to tease out the truth in something takes a long time. it is difficult for everyone, but particularly hard for me, i think. imagine that ideas were paintings. if you were me, you would feel as though you were an inch from the thing, your body pressed close and casting a shadow, your proximity preventing you from making sense of the small pocket of colour on which your eyes were fixed. there would a wobbly memory of something similar you had once observed, under the same conditions. you would recall, without intention, the sound and tone of the other voices you'd heard. the voices that sounded most like those of your parents, of your first love or of a favourite teacher would be remembered best: their patterns speech, their choices of words, their taste. amidst the commotion you would do your best to piece together an understanding. you would appeal to the voice you respected most for guidance: you would swallow foreign impressions, unfamiliar sentiments. you would strain with your own eyes to see more or more clearly and you would fail. but amidst the commotion, the conviction of your borrowed words would be enough to find you passing the test, moving on to the next piece in some grand procession of ignorance, burdened with the definite guilt that some young thing might hear your voice trustworthy.
there is a cpu humming very loudly next to my head. two green apples next to my laptop are the only organic things in sight. i hate being relegated to the IT room. clement, the small chinese computer man, doesn't speak to me or smile. he likes keeping the window open so we can hear the lovely sound of traffic from finch avenue but he insists on drawing the blinds so that the only light in the room is fluorescent. i'm staring at my green apples and thank god they're such pleasing colour. the walls are grey, in here. so's the carpet. so are the cubicles. grey, all of it. grey, for heaven's sake! the man in the office next door keeps birds, because it's a marketing company, and people in marketing are quirky like that. the birds chirp and chirp and at first it was endearing but i'm just about ready to kill them now. the quirky marketing man also has an axe and several knives sticking out of his door, as though someone had tried to break in. it's a quirk thing. i have fantasies about using those knives. don't turn your back on me, clement.
in the backyard of my grandparents' old house, since sold, in edmonton. that's their garden and the sandbox of my youth. it was a great sandbox. i learned to bake there. donated by my grandmother's kitchen: several bowls, a few good mixing spoons, a cake mold and two muffin tins. my grandfather, the venerable thomas loudon leadbeater, always puttered about the garden while i was cooking. do you see the cement circles leading to the back? i used to leap from each to each. as i got older and my legs got longer i could skip every other stone and later i only needed every third to make it back to the house. the bush on the left grew raspberries and behind the white gate was the alley. it gave out on to 148th street. i think.
(1) my clear pastic mouse flashes in red, epileptic fury and it is alive, requires attention (2) the futon remembers the shape of my laziness and the smell of my anxiety (3) i cannot bite my nails in public they way i'd like to: i would be embarassed (4) there is no soundtrack to my life outside these walls (5) the doorframes know my height and respect it (6) i am comfortable here
i left my kitchen window open last night, when i went out. it gives on to a fire escape and i came home to find little dirty animal prints on the floor, the garbage can open and my unfinished breakfast lying victim on the floor. those furry bastards. i thought i could hear them all day, ruffling in the closets, although i'm almost certain they must've come and gone late last night. they've done this before, those criminal creatures, last time it was to rob our cat (now departed, see i miss this cat) of his few worldly possessions: half a bowl of whiskies and a plate of dry kibble dinner. i will remember to close the kitchen window. i will remember to close the kitchen window.
living alone and working from home is getting to me. the toilet's been leaking for months and all of a sudden i decided to call bill, my super, to come and fix it. he showed up and i offered him a beer, a glass of water. "tell me about your day, bill. how're things in the building?" he was anxious to get home and didn't take me up on any of my offers. the toilet got fixed, though. and he talked to me briefly, enough to get me through the day.
because i'm crying a lot these days, not sure why. not even a combination of bobby darin and pasta salad is fixing me. apples with peanut butter either. i guess there's always wine and cigarettes but that doesn't really fix, it just blinds. maybe blind is better.
as though he were my child. professor puffy pants. mister flashlight eyes. major hijinx. mister love store. are you open for business? he's in new west minster now, with his grandma. my former roommate's mother. and by the way, he is eating tulips. he loves flowers. almost as much as i love him.
it's terrible, i know. so nineteen ninety-five. but there's something about her music that makes me comfortable, keeps me coming back. i'm listening to fire door. here's a poem that i wrote when i was nineteen. not so long ago, i know. but long enough that you're not allowed to judge me on it. the punctuation's all wrong. thanks in advance for looking the other way.we were standing in a bathroom doorway
when you asked, smiling cagily if
i’d ever been gay and if
it had been (here, you winced)
in that ani difranco way i heard
footsteps creaking closer and i think
you did, too because you smiled
and closed your eyes the way
you do sometimes and i was deseperate to say
that no pop culture reference could ever
convey my sincerity, sarah
but i faltered, tripped over my own words
and somebody else’s footsteps
fell to the pavement with a thud
and barely managed to mutter
that i didn’t think so
not in that way, i mean
take (a) half a big bag of pasta -- the shell kind, you know, the ones that get stuck inside eachother, spooning (b) a couple of green onions, a.k.a. scallions (c) a few stalks of celery (d) more mayo than i'd care to think about (e) two cans of tuna --> don't get the skipjack, come on kids, splurge! (f) half a yellow pepper, chopped because the red ones were sold out (g) s & p (h) a table spoon of dijon (i) tender loving care and two hours in the fridge...best served with beer, and lots of it!
i can't feel
and here i am eating mr. noodles out of styrofoam, drinking instant coffee and pretending to know about trunk groups and clli codes in my patch-painted village apartment which, by the way, has mice. i discovered them (their droppings, to be precise) yesterday. they are not my friends.
Definition
Passive-aggressive personality disorder is a chronic condition in which a person seems to passively comply with the desires and needs of others, but actually passively resists them, becoming increasingly hostile and angry.
Psychiatrists no longer recognize this condition as an official diagnosis. However, the symptoms are problematic to many people and may be helped by professional attention, so we include it here.
Causes, incidence, and risk factors
The causes are unknown, but, like most personality disorders, a combination of genetic and environmental factors are probably responsible.
Signs and tests
Personality disorders are diagnosed by psychological evaluation and a careful history of the extent and time course of the symptoms. Some of the common signs of passive-aggressive personality disorder include:
Treatment
Counseling may be of value in helping the person identify and change the behavior.
Expectations (prognosis)
The outcome can be good with treatment.
Complications
“But as long as the hot clouds do not reach us, we won't go,” said Supriatun by mobile phone from Indonesia. The hot clouds wouldn't reach you in Sudbury. Everything here is slowly cold. Residents smile the graduation of a season, only to greet the next, to burn leaves, to be cold again. Lives soothed by scheduled cups of Tim Hortons coffee, measured in pay periods, in rounds of bar-born unprotected sex. The landscape's rough: rocky, I'd say.
i've been having a serious amount of trouble with google's beta apps recently: gtalk is blinking, gmail is blinking, blogger is practically blind...the desktop app, though cool, has been unreliable and a monster drain on my poor comp's day to day. then, as though the frustration of trial software weren't enough, someone close to me introduced the possibility that google isn't the innocent novelty i would have it be. stuff about caches, metabots, world domination. as it turns out they're keeping everything on a server somewhere, so that when i search google, i'm really searching google's stash of info, not the web. i must've been living under a rock because everyone seems to know this but me. sitting on my father's 1973 corduroy ikea sofa (which miraculously still holds its shape) i experiment with the idea that google is god. it knows everything about my life, is everpresent, omnipowerful, mysterious. it will most definitely outlive me. maybe i should start praying to google. maybe i should ask it for a job.
with some highschool creative writing course...as though six verses in iambic pentameter actually mattered to the canadian canon...she's much wittier than i was at her age, i think. lazier and more inhibited, though. a bottle of wine later, i proposed something. i think i'm a glass away from correct rhythm and real aid:Their trays and ways find me wanting a break
As though that were enough to stay awake
I’d like to think that work means more than this
Although right now I’d do much more for bliss
Red stains, blue stains, green stains and work tonight
I thought I’d once had soul to make a fight
But truth be told I’m too damn tired for that
And dream I’d quit right now but for that rat
He makes me think I’ve got no good to me
Makes me want to change the things I see
Makes me want to do something much more
Much more like a good thing and even more
The night is dark when I am done as though
Things were so great so bright without a row!
As though this weren’t the only thing there is
As though I had much more to bring than this
But truth be told it’s just words now are left
And words we know aren’t much but lower cleff
Versions of the thing we’d rather say
And what better to do on this bright day
after i'd read a random blog promising that the following meme (As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.) was propagating itself through the blogosphere: (1) find the book closest to you (2) flip to page 161 (3) find the fifth sentence and publish it, complete with these instructions. the book closest to me at the time was a thick telecommunications binder which didn't have page numbers just some weird section, sub-section way of seperating sentences. the next closest thing (several hours later) was "mots de passe" by pierre desruisseaux, a collection of poetry i picked up in grade 12 when i still wanted to like words but didn't really. i've read it since. the next book, the important one, the one that passed the 161 test was john key's "sowing the wind," given to me by my grandfather after he'd read it. the inscription reads:
each of my boys a question, navigating the space between rhetoric and wondering, without worrying about form (punctuation demands response):
jonathan doubled me on his bike. i'm used to the handlebars, but he preferred peddling standing up. we rode up church street and were waived at, i felt like a float. COMMA SPLICE. we have plans for martinis on tuesday and he's promised to lend me a russian novel starring the devil. best book ever, apparently. sounds right up my ally. i'm stressed about money. relieved to know, however, that most music is still free. say i am you by the weepies.
have been worse than most. there is a nice song playing on the cbc, called "take it from me." i am quite tired and wish the song would've lasted longer. they're talking about a terrorist plot now. my cell phone is in the process of exploding: the screen is a mess of colours. i blame the terrorists. you should try blaming the terrorists, too. i want to throw something breakable across the room and watch it shatter. like a sideplate or a vase or something. i hope the week improves. i'm not doing well. really not.
should be a cat's name. not mine. cats, cats, cats, people. cats, cats, cats, crazies. crazy cat people. crazy me. crazy, crazy, crazy.
from spending the evening on the rooftop, going on prentensiously about colours and semi-colons. blue and terracotta. black and white. yale and harvard. the brick chimney sits at the same angle as the beer bottles because the tar surface is uneven. my hands hurt when i wake up to the sound of the cbc. pay cheque, coffee, yogurt, anxiety, lorazepam. a one hour biography about ellen degeneres on the star network. my superintendent has taken our ladder, our means of access. we're trapped on the third floor now, unable to get proper breeze, proper sun, a proper view. my hands are beginning to tremble, my palms red and rough from my adventures. i'm going to do something now - eat maybe, or lie down. i feel restless, unsatisfied. waiting is the worst.
