fin.

so. one year, one blog later.
i've dealt with some strange characters, become reacquainted with old Friends, had an adventure or two, found Two Great jobs, did a piece of art or fifty, did a bit of important thinking, had an interesting debate or two, or three, battled demons, moved, thought about books, read some interesting things in books, set my ass on fire, thought about human failings, dressed well,and delved some more into the profound language of self-identity.

and that's enough of that. without further hesitation, i now withdraw from blogland, for the time being, anyhow, to take my happy meanderings elsewhere. dear reader(s), thank you for your patronage.

Crowego

EH, our new (and as yet unqueried as to prefered blog identity) Brick Office Sprite, proffered this to me today, after a recent discussion 'bout, (three guesses), books.
it is SOOO rare that i like any poetry. unless it's ee cummings, Lewis Carroll, or from Stephen Crane's Black Riders, the best book of poetry EVER written. but this, i love.
edification to follow:

Crow followed Ulysses until he turned
As a worm, which Crow ate.

Grappling with Hercules' two puff-adders
He strangled in error Dejanira.

The gold melted out of Hercules' ashes
Is an electrode in Crow's brain.

Drinking Beowulf's blood, and wrapped in his hide,
Crow communes with poltergeists out of old ponds.

His wings are the stiff back of his only book,
Himself the only page - of solid ink.

So he gazes into the quag of the past
Like a gypsy into the crystal of the future,

Like a leopard into a fat land.

Ted Hughes.

11 down, 5 to go.

and on and on i draw...

magnet mania.

Madame Gerard and I spent our evening yesterday discussing printing methods, comic books, and then making fridge magnets at the Cameron House for the second installment of the fridge magnet making extravaganza. all i know is the organizer's name is Lise, the website (click above) is anutforajaroftuna.com, and the evening was Lovely.

word of the day.

a few years ago i spent some of my time chasing around paltry pay cheques by doing extras work for film and all that. it was this word that prefaced every role description (so to speak) i got for work. when this was required, i was the first number on the list.
and today, today, dear reader(s), i finally find out what it means.


Today's Word: Funky (Adjective)

Pronunciation: ['fung-kee]

Definition 1: (1) Cowardly (1837 Dickens), (2) depressed, or (3) smelling of old and moldy cheese. The November 1954 issue of Time Magazine referred to "Funky, authentic, swinging blues, down to earth, smelling of earth." Today its meaning is very diffuse but is, roughly: authentic, less than fresh, earthy, in the broadest senses of these terms.

Usage 1: Today's word is used frequently but the meaning is difficult to pin down; we have attempted a brief survey of the possibilities above. The adjective may be compared (funkier, funkiest) and the adverb is "funkily." The noun may be "funk" or "funkiness."

the cretin centre and the useless quest.

went to the open house for the Gladstone Hotel yesterday and it really was amazing. the Gladstone has been renovated, or revitalized, rather, according to the original building plans, and it looks Totally BEEAUUUTTIFFFUULLL. the rooms, for those not in the know, are individually designed by a whack of toronto artists and they include everything from fun-fur garden of eden murals to bookish early 20th century hideaways to buzzing brothel closets, to an easy rider theme room to fluorescent bright canadiana; take your pick.
they are going to have to handle it like Japan handles its love hotels: with a wall of illuminated photographs of the rooms from which patrons take their pick. but honestly, HOW MUCH did it make me want to be affluent enough to give up my little apartment and live by room hopping there?
this of course brings up the concern of how in effect this would be possible, given my antipathy towards all things that money tends to gravitate towards, from useless jobs, to (some) useless people, to useless objects.

which brings me to today's useless quest.

i decided today to try to love the eaton centre. somehow. at least for the 14 or so minutes i was condemned to wander through there, on a quest for a phone battery.
how can millions of people be wrong, afterall? i'm a little tired of the constant "it's all evil" shtick about these huge consumerist places. (even if it is all evil) it keeps things going...it keeps my jobs going, it keeps me (vaguely) making art...let's face it, people wouldn't make things if noone were buying...

but then i found myself accidentally tipping over an electronic rotating tie rack (oh,no, i'm NOT kidding) and somehow, somehow i lost my resolve to be tolerant.

google image search.

doing research this morning, looking for pictures of circus MC's for reference, and who is one of the pocketful number of hits i get but some guy i went to university with 10(!) years ago. i had Totally forgotten, he did some fire performance for us during a festive night of revellry at Liberal Arts College. weird small googl-ish world.

aaahhh, Rochdale.

as if TPM and Coach House and Houselink as well aren't enough, my mum revealed to me tonight that she used to make a weekly pilgrimage from Etobicoke to Rochdale (to a health food store that existed in that building in the 70's) so get the almonds and unhulled sesame seeds (or some such thing) with which she made my baby formula.
it's like some weird preordained thing, isn't it, the whole Rochdale connection. weird weird.

and the necessary update for my personal posterity.

my 14 completed pages went back down to 9 yesterday, after my first (at Last) successful forray into getting editorial advice. as we went over the story i realized that it bottomed out in two places, or teetered on the edge of excessive obscurity (not difficult in my brain.)
nearly a crisis, but nothing 7 hours of hair pulling, intense thought, tears, tea, and redrawing didn't fix. i'm back up to 9 completed ('xcept for colour), 7 scrapped, 7 new pages mapped out and ready to draw, and only one spread still a little dodgy. woosh.
it's fucking work, man.
and for what, i ask, at moments like these? WHO KNOWS.
but it keeps me out of trouble, i suppose.

pondering.

i've been pondering whether or not i want to quit this blog. i think i have (at long last) realized that there are better and more creatively gratifying things to do (when i actually follow though on them). and this medium isn't particularly gratifying to me at the moment. i realized over the weekend that if i were to describe my average day since the onset of colder weather (i work in a tiny office and then go home to my basement apartment and draw scary pictures and read comic books; no tv, no newspaper, no roommates, just me and excessive cranial activity) i suddenly become the sort of person one might well want to cross the street to avoid.
okay, that's excessive. but i have my insular moments, it's true. gaming geeks and toy collectors have nothing on me, at those times.
except perhaps the slightly acrid smell of boys who don't shower enough; the significant lack of attention to personal hygiene and social niceties.
let's face it, it's also weird. you don't have to remember any human contact with people, you can just refer back to the posting of times gone by. i have mixed feelings about this. nothing is interesting when all of it is on public record, i think.

anyhow. i'm not altogether sure, and, since my only obligation was to keep it up for a year (or see if i could), i have 'til 31 December to decide. discussing this matter with Miz R, she said she could take it over for me, and proffered a sample to see if it could pass for mine.

i was Impressed and honored.

buy nothing day...

was friday, and in celebration/dissent we biked through the eaton centre on the tail end of critical mass's monthly ride. we ended up in Dundas Square, (!) that unexpectedly donated the space to the New Kings for the evening, which was followed by impromptu jams with the Samba Allegua (i'm SO sure that's spelt wrong), and hot soup provided by food not bombs. i have to say, the televisions in Dundas Square may have been big, but they weren't the part of the evening that had me dancing, and that's all the reassurance i need as to what the important stuff is.
we ended the evening carrying everything back to Kensington on a rickshaw, and i was, as per usual, Thrilled with the self-sufficient nature of it all.

SNOW SNOW SNOW!!!!

GLEEE!

nocturnal reveries.

weird dreams about a fat disturbing clown prowling in a dark theatre basement just before show time intent on killing/kidnapping a little boy circus performer (?!?!), and people i haven't seen since i was about 10 cancelling plans over the telephone to go to the theatre with me.
probably a result of reading snippits of strange small press fiction and then going to see Harry Potter.
'xcept that Voldemort isn't fat.

an HOURS-roaming-the-bookshops kind of a night.

read this somewhere:
little boys have dolls too; they're called tomboys.

the middle stories by Sheila Heti.

how it is that i haven't yet found, read a thousand times, and proclaimed my love in the streets for, this book, is Beyond me.
Glee glee glee.

mother-ogyny and a hallmark moment.

i have known more than one guy who Hates (to some degree or another) his mother, and for reasons none of them were ever fully willing to even try to articulate, it just seemed to me to be some weird pseudo-macho reason they had for all the reasons they were/are fucked up, and it was all just very inevitable and not even worthy of discussion.
tonight's pilfered quote of choice is for those guys, should they ever happen by this humble blog; thank you MR, and Ian Brown for soliciting the piece and editing the book, which is just So Great.

"When a man speaks of hating his mother, it strikes me as an unexpected tragedy. I resist the notion that "bad" women could somehow also be bad mothers... it's like being angry with the stars—what on earth have they ever done to you but moulded your poor dust into life? ease up. even if she's a coked-up crack whore who beat you daily with a willow switch and let your poor little ass get so red and chapped it almost fell off, she's still been through a lot, and she's still your mother...

she built you in her body, man."

...

in my own non-quote-worthy way, i had a moment, standing and chatting on Spadina tonight, thinking about the Miracle of Close Friends, So outweighs my farcical tragedies and frequent complaints, and how Recent some of these have unfolded, been discovered even, in the last year like That, and what exactly am i thinking when i try to convince myself that somehow these friendships don't exist anymore for the taking, that they were reserved for when i was in high school...
(strum of a violin in the distance) eat your heart out, Hallmark, this is the Real Shit.

and my evening spent at a breakfast cereal party drinking strange concoctions of earl grey and gin, discussing science's connections with the real world and outgrowing creative projects but finishing them anyway (which is where all the growing is), and business card art shows with a man of no importance...Shannon Gerard and Scott Waters, you (and your fellow guests) Rock my world.

progress report.

i received accolades from a Worthy (albeit unwitting) opponent on Queen street this morning, who emailed to inform me that i won an inadvertent race with her cab along Queen street on my way to work. (i had no idea) furthermore, she commended me for stopping at a red at Trinity Bellwoods Park, which I confess I find shocking, given the low-risk-for-running-the-red nature of the intersection, but she wouldn't lie, bless her. so I'm making progress! without even a conscious effort, this morning.
truly astonishing.

and today...

momentary loss of faith (scramble scramble) must stay afloat (scramble scramble)...life, my extracurricular activities, everything, eeeeeeeeee......

delusions of grandeur.

and then i spent some time on the 49th floor of the cibc building at King and Front last night, and realized that of course business people feel superior, who Wouldn't staring out over the city like God from his/her cloud?
it has to affect you, you know, having that view daily...
and then the evening seeing the Lollipop People. all i'm going to do is list their instruments and you, dear reader(s) will understand. two trombones, two cellos, a double bass, a harp, a banjo, an accordion, a harpsichord, and...a BASSOON!!!!
and a vocalist.
tres cool.

i'm sorry Miz R, but i Can't resist...

and really, MR hasn't appeared in this blog for a while, has he?

MR on Wednesday: "How many Rebeccas does it take to screw in a light bulb?... (R):don't worry about me, i'll just sit here in the dark..."
i can only joke about this since we all have chandeliers at the ready with your name on them, lady...:]