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as well as my present paintset, brushes, primary sewing project, beads, bulk of thread and phone, i left my headphones, so instead of recording music tonight, i played a bit and invented an alternative tuning. good times. my ankle is swollen and i have two blisters. this is god’s way of telling me not to walk from strathcona downtown and back on a swollen ankle i guess. whatever. life doesn’t suck, and that is the truth, i need heavy yin style stretching, not jogging. things are too tight and almost fixed. best not ruin it to look hotter in shorts for a hot moment.

welcome to ESPN 20, sportscast commentary on the most mundane of human activities,

well, there she is bob, pacing back and forth at 1am,

will she light a cigarette? will she go and lie on her bed?

well, it looks like she’s pacing her way to her bed

oh, at the last minute it looks like she has avoided lying down in favor of chaning the song

what will she listen to?

she switches on some smashing pumpkins, quickly bored, she goes with a track off in the future she looks why she may be regretting the switch from R&B era fleetwood mac

and she is sitting down with a painting, reworking a face

my god, this unexpected shift,

oh, just as we thought we’d lost her, she stands up, she appear to be stretching her toes,

yes she does, now, let’s take a moment to check in with claire in alberqureke new mexico who is waiting for her husband to come home for dinner

i gave a friend a painting i did once. she seemed to genuinely like it and lived with me when i finished it. on the whole someone i consider an extremely good influence on my creativity, someone with whom i share some pretty fundamental similarities as a thinker and enough differences that there is no element on my style being cramped. on the whole, i think that meeting young people who were within my scope of reference and yet younger and subsequently from a very different world, in cultural terms, most of the people i comfortably spend time with/share interests with being artists of whatever form…

katie’s always been within my favor because, if anything, she’ll fight against what i’m on (sometimes, eg. ryan mcginley/vice photography as not necessarily surpreme but exceptionally interesting situationally… but on those terms, zero allowance that way). i was kind of like that also as a youngen. it’s no stress. people who are staunchly defining their own realities on their terms but with whom there is a degree of kinship (in katie’s case, i look at her bitchy qualities and see a mirror of my own mind in hindsite, and negotiate that, which reminds me of having children, and to which i am bizarrely thanful…

anyway. i gave her a painting cause she’s always someone i get good ideas when i hang out with, often due to the conversational tone and expectations… she’s someone with whom i have lived twice and benefited each time…

so i wanted it back, total hunch, and she moves, and the painting, i have lived in her home, is not within her possession. while not really interested in taking the piece back, i wanted to photograph it with my newer camera, and a return of the work if it was ever to be thrown in an alley or something, that idea being pretty valid given that i have thrown my work in an alley or whatever a lot…

it’s important not to be an asshole about your extremities. i don’t have much bad to say about mo for having a piece i made, that didn’t sell. i “hate” the work. the work would very easily snap. the paper was the sort that would chip. i wanted the work to chip once i figured this out. for this reason, it is useless to me and it would be in some form destroyed. i might break it up and glue it back together, i might cover it in paint, i might use it as note paper…

i had three pieces, which i loathed beyond

i) doing line work with complimentary colors is kind of a mindfuck, as process, creating geometric work in which every mistake is evident, in colors that make your eyes bounce…

color bouncing is good for the mood. unless under the influence of a receptor inhibitor (most psych drugs in my definition), i have no idea how that would mix. meds are like glasses. i’ve tried them on and can intellectualize them but since they felt like drugs i did them like drugs. thoughtfully, never got into downers or anything. never became a pill popper period.

i have no idea if someone on anti depressants, for example, can be manipulated that way. it’s proactive, having tested my work that way pretty heavily, the colors are extremely balanced, in sets, the work has a bit of a mondrian consideration - the meditation on the notions of balance as a “perfect” in a relatively pure form. the extent to which colors recede, in my perception of vision/experience of the pieces being mood boosting, “raver art”, i like to joke. primary colors rather than neons or darks.

extremely wide red pants in wide wale corduroy, hair dyed to match color based outfits, controlled hair, drape silhouettes, red as dominant neutral. neutral being defined as color which sits in a dominant role and grounds all color matches from a broad/near limitless, variety.

in visual terms, you can make almost anything match with read. the color is heavily loaded and evokes a different reaction when it fills a large block of space than a typical neutral - black, white, beige, tan, navy blue, denim tones of blue.

you can use any color as a neutral so long as you are mindful of undertones. there are shades of blue you do not want to mix with shades of pink. connotation is important. baby blue and baby pink reads in a very specific spot, an adult version, to me, connotes the image of a late eighties babe with really light brown hair that is somewhat fluffy, dark eyebrows, deep tan, dark or light eyes (matching hair or pale blue) of fine (small) bone structure (face and body) and low body fat.  wearing extremely pale denim, the kind that is extremely thin/soft and prone to near instant ripping if used under stress and a really pale shirt, all shrouding and yet extremely pale. 80s movie. rich girl. not necessarily the dominant “babe” or “leader of her clique”, but very much invluded. possibly anorexic though such is not written in such forms of expressed character traits so much as implicit through demeanor.

***

sore ankle. try to be a good person and wear birkenstocks in public. feet feel so dirty i have to wash them. forget that the city and exposed feet is not really my thing. posture being “off” in birkenstocks is punishing. i’ve done a fair few hours in them and walked and stuff but i was a bit off today and i got blisters. shit. ow.

i think this is my way of subconsciously forcing myself not to continue to wear those cheesy boots in public. i like how they look, it’s just a simple light gray. the toe is formed and the slight heel is well plotted against my denim. while the visual is effortless, wearing heels and walking is awful. heels period. they’re good to dance in. walk? no.

i got the zeppelin cassette with dazed and confused on it. i’ve listened to a lot of zeppelin on my iPod but never really sorted in in albums so it makes more sense to know that record as a record (i only know zeppelin IV as an album,

i fell in love with zeppelin IV night i moved to bad manners, after years of listening to the record, enjoying it even, 24 hours of no sleep midnight moving including all the purging you do when you move from a three bedroom apartment with a communal storage room (500 square feet or so), to a 10×10 foot room. back then i had secondary stoarge, but it was still pretty major as my secondary storage wasn’t what it should be.

there are things i will keep at my parent’s house until i have what i feel to be an actual home. my piano is a good example of that. it will be a costly effort, it may need to be restrung. i sometimes dream of a man with a well tuned piano and enough secure home space that i can claim my piano and experimentally tune it, with a properly tuned one as a second option. that’s really sexy to me. that’s beyond sexy.

having two guitars with different tunings is nice. i kind of miss having three guitars. it was kind of a joke, i just did it on chance, i had a guitar, it held tune well, it was in decent order, it had a definite ring to the tones. since i was working with a lot of pedals and it was an unlikely model to use within such an otherwise “fetishistic” framework (processing, experimental music) seemed interesting. it’s that thing, maybe a myth, who knows, good question either way is the strength of it, but the jazzmasters and jaguars were highly affordable when they were so popular/influential. difficult or otherwise temperamental instruments until rendered fetish objects through creative application. wild.

then i found “the knox” on craigslist. japanese guitars for sale out of a basement in cloverdale. it is a cooler guitar. it’s vintage, it’s small/light, the wash is acid sunburst (black/green/yellow)the pickguard is chrome, mirrored. it need some work. if there were a guitar shop i trusted to work on my guitar and i had money, i’d have done it, gotten it tuned up, replaced the tuning pegs, gotten the bridge adjusted, gotten some work done with the patchchord electronics for better hold. it’s kind of punk though, the guitar, and has my last name on the head. it’s so perfect for it’s purposes. i bought it from a family with kids, which was peculiar. the kid was extremely sullen and they seemed a bit timid compared to the houses i am used to.

buying instruments off craigslist is always an adventure. maybe you’re in someone’s living room in maple ridge and he’s shocked that you dont’ want to jam on his amp in a nice, newer, suburban, shoes off with carpet kind of house.

maybe you’re in a condo in delta with some dude with over $10,000 in equipment and a massive ego chatting with you for an hour and up selling you into more gear. walking from a strnager’s condo to the ATM in the “suburban hub” type neighborhood to get more money, for more gear, the general tone of the matter making it all perfectly reasonable and loving the FM tone generator more than the keyboard recorder that’d be a good idea if i ever wanted to play an organized “show” but generally less central to “playing with musical instruments”.

only children need toys. i’m not sure if other groups do, but without toys my life would have been very miserable. since playing with toys like dolls is kind of boring beyond my box of 70s, probably handmade, barbie clothes coupled with “i bought you the oscar de laurenta barbie gown for xmas, what’s oscar de laurenta mommy? oh, look at that dress hon…. wee! i like it too! kind of stuff…

i had a capacity for repulsion at a very young age. i do not know if that is peculiar. i was certainly born with a personality. i have despised the taste of make since birth and even as a child, was granted my obstinate repulsion towards the milk on my cereal which i tend to appreciate given what milk represents to me and how i feel consuming it.

“`

i always thought barbie was kind of gross. like, her body was ugly. barbie breasts are kind of gross, shape wise. formally, the hourglass shape between waist and hip is appealing, i can intellectually understand why men are aroused by signs that a woman’s waist tapers from her hips. i avoid a lot of exercise based entirely on the effect it has upon this part of my figure. a lot of abdominal exercises thicken your waist. the only effective things to do are suck in your stomach and stretch the length of the waist… this being said, barbie always seemed kind of gross to me.

you do a lot more than barbie as an only child. draw, write stories, read books, wander around, daydream. practice dancing, practice piano, make songs yourself on the piano, go to activities, homework if you get homework (yuck, the only reason i got straight As in 9th grade is because i did my homework on my lunch break when i didn’t finish it in class. that and acting like a keener. i had them darn near convinced to let me skip 9th grade before i’d gotten my first report card. problem was, i was given a median grade in a math test, my offer to do math 9 and take math 10 in summer school… anyway. yeah, that’s what you do when you transfer to a new school and drop (awful) french. i always hated that i failed in that attempt, that i passed the math 9 final (very good for me at the beginning of the year), and i wrote a rough draft of a novel, filling spiral bound three subject notebook (my favorite thing as a teenager) after spiral bound three subject notebook… and i got out of sports. and i’d written and distributed my first fanzine by myself, with no friend support or encouragement, within the next 365 days. (and had my first kiss, and a very colorful summer for my age, getting in things from lollapalooza to shows in weird, unconventional venues to smoking pot to kissing boys to drama to a heck of a lot that has nothing to do with waking up at 5:30 in the morning, swimming laps many, many hours a day and being bored shitless otherwise.

i always liked things like waking up at 5am to swim laps in richmond before the sun warmed the pool up and a day of racing or whatever other example of this sort of parenting ideology… this being said, bored shitless wasn’t working for me. my mom turned into a bit of a soccer mom, judging races and screaming on the side lines and stuff. i think she likes those things. i don’t really understand them myself. she’s a louder person than i am, i hate being loud, people whose energy permit me to be quiet without forcing me into it are ideal for me.

i think having many friends is a really good idea if you’re going to get married. i decided this at some point in my life and made sure i created just that, people who can go into the cycle. at a certain point it occurred to me that while people could always be around in my life, the same people/person, that it was a good sign when the pursuit of passion overrode sentimental attachment. i try to have a very heterosexual relationship with my friends is how i’d explain this. this can vary. there are friends in there who are like siblings to me, friends who are pleasantries, they’re all of the highest standard for their purpose, it’s never a list that’s full, the objective is to have enough friends who actually work for my life that maintain consistently social without feeling like i am being trapped or held back by my friends. i’ve had friends who i felt trapped with. i don’t have very nice things to say about the experience. being a really blunt person, conversationally, relatively objective/down to earth to negotiate this without being flat out mean…

in a culture that is riddled with divorce, one of the most important things you can do is look at your failed relationships and accept that it was you, and why, and whether you are then dealing with incompatibilities that are challenges or evidence of having quit while you were a head (possible nuisances).

being adaptable and being unadaptable are important dynamics to have a hold on.

from this you can attempt to clearly look at men, enjoying them pretty freely, but less attached to what will and will not work. you can con men pretty easily if you are willing to flirt with them. men are very mailable this way. that can be very useful, and very enjoyable.

wanting to be with someone because you enjoy how you can manipulate them is a double edge sword, worded as such.

one of the biggest tests of a relationship is whether you enjoy ho the other person is changing you. any relationship. it is inevitable that knowing people is influential to your being, i’d dare to say that arguing that is evidence of desensitization or delusion.

knowing what you expect from a man is important. i’m totally turned on by that piano scenairo i just described - having a house where i felt i was going to live permanently and there being enough space/the mindset, where i could get my piano moved and experimentally tune it while having a second piano around well tuned. that’s dreamy. it is not to be expected in it’s literal form, i am not going to turn down any mister right because they can’t make that happen, but because something else was going on. the concept is whimsical but relevant to my character.

a man who can either write something i revere or understands that he does not understand writing is ideal.

***

my dad tells me about some CEO in France being interviewed saying, I’d get shot is I made as much as the American CEOs and literally meaning it.

i tend to think that people who are wealthy to the extent that we might classify as actual wealth given possibility, should do things like buy plots of developable into high rise, or something equally profit machine, and designate it a artist negotiated parkspace with a certain ratio of sustainable, indigenous, organic food. things that poor people can turn to. a bum is walking down the street and dude is actually hungry, there’s an apple tree and they are in season, maybe there’ll be one there. proximity to things like soup kitchens and social welfare programs being central. for example, in vancouver, take a block somewhere in the DTES and do this. make a space where people can set up tents. i’m not saying it wouldn’t be a very dangerous place, i’m saying that someone who wanted to sleep could, even theoretically, crash without being harassed by the cops. there’s a let them die to that. i’ve never really seen the DTES as a warzone. i gather that’s pretty clear. i’ve witnessed suggestions of it. watching people “not from this neighborhood walk away, hyped up and gangsta and a guy clearly from the neighborhood slowly wobbling out of said alley with a giant, gashing headwound. it’s an alley near openheimer. it’s patrolled by security guards. it was a fluke or a well studied decision to wack someone in the head with a blunt object over and over in a fashion not meant to kill/render unconscious beyond a brief second, but gnarly…

i don’t really think that a park where there are some foods people can eat and maybe a volunteer conditional coop where you get meals in exchange for 30 minutes work if such were needed… i dunno… i could ask rachel but i think she’ll be pretty existentialist about her harm reduction PHD until she is certified. it’s why i know she’s smart. the extent to which our passions discipline our mind, so it’s constant translation, but she has good taste in music and seems generally cool so it can be interesting. we’ve both made that effort. i was on her first date with her boyfriend, which is kind of cute given that he seemed to be mister right, that after meeting him i would have been disappointed if she weren’t living in NYC with him on the exact path she took.

i find talking with people who are outside my frame/tunnel are good. i got a lot of ideas and a boost in the weird ways artists are interested in politics from hanging out with someone on the last step of the PHD path in the matter, with the theoretical bias that make it more manageable to my arty ideals given the themes in harm reduction and how sociological/experimental they are.

building a park with some potatoes and other sturdy but edible foods in the ghetto type area of vancouver isn’t harm reduction in the clinical, post doctorate sense of things. there are no statistics about violence figures there is not meditation on legalities beyond a massive waiver/sign/user agreement at the park’s entries voiding the owner and city/caveat emptor or whatever…

the idea is interesting to me though. so is the idea of putting a trailer park at the corner of hastings and clarke or something. it really just seems about what this city has to say for itself. sometimes i imagine the former expo lands that aren’t developed or maybe even town down being a trailer park, the yaletown skyline framing the backdrop… maybe the free anchor zone of the inlet would be a virtual maze of houseboats and other such floating structures. squatamala or whatever…

i often imagine what it would be like to be so rich that you could play with acres. that’s less being actually rich as it is having the money to make it happen/keep it up somewhere remote to things like getting jobs. you can probably live off $1000 a year if you are remote, project oriented and off the utility grid/growing a percent of your own food (either fully farming or doing trade, keeping in mind sustainable soil is balancing nitrates and plants to foster symbiosis, healthy harmony.

amongst the chief concerns i have when i think about this idea, in a very empty/remote country outside the major cities, where such could maybe even get a level of anti up grant funding at some point if it could be fed into the discourse of contemporary art and appear impressive/interesting/flattering to canada/whatever,

-a lot of thoughts about human behaviour. well engineered personality dynamics.

one of the big things i come to thinking about well engineered personality dynamics i that i can be a lot of people but have favorites and things i am always, none the less, there are versions of myself i prefer.

i recently decided i didn’t want a job that had anything to do with the fact that when need be, i can be very conventional and pragmatic and linear and look at numbers and process something and stuff like that. those sorts of activities have their place and i like to do things well so mastering them doesn’t get in my way. you aren’t really going to bother to sit down and practice algebra because you did something with numbers properly in an area of life it was necessary and didn’t really enjoy it. you might if you fuck up and it becomes a headache.

letting your brain detereorate is controversial. i am inclined to believe that i am not interested being equally good in everything i do. here are things i care about more. i am a formed character to some degree degree. i have no real capacity to pretend that i won’t be making art for the rest of my life in some form. whether my life be extremely short as lonliness is as bad as being stuck with the wrong person and neither really seem like matters where someone isn’t bound to physically die.

the wrong person is such a huge question in heterosexual feminism. how women are conditioned to define the “right” or “wrong” person is also questionable.

inevitably, the right person is pure instinct. there acn be formulas, but those are judged in bigger questions than their specifics. do i feel god, do i like what this is promoting, do i feel there is enough stimulation, is it rounded to my needs, is there anything missing that i need. am i happy. am i being a version of myself i favor.

expecting things i self confidence. i expect a lot.

i came to the basic truth of the matter, that someone to share a house with and raise children is a very complicated question when you have choices. since this is something the ancestors wanted, best ask how this is better and make it rule as a thanks for bothering. there are a lot of really complicated questions i could pose here but i’m not really that interested right just now. maybe later. maybe not.

i’m wearing a slip, a striped gap t shirt, juicy couture knee socks, stella mccartney adidas splt sole ballet flats, both in greay, bright pink, turquoise. my hair is a mess maybe. i can’t tell. it’s 11pm. that’s dinner time. blech.

i made a new journey today.

i wanted to jog but the wild animals are getting some daylight. i have seen two bears! little guys, but bears! i’d never seen a bear anywhere but a zoo! i’d heard of them, my parents, they’d seen them, evidence, surely, but, somehow, i only ever see deer (and lots of deer, in my backyard! literally, they just saunter in and eat from the garden, it’s organic and my dad is kind of intense about that stuff, like, he reads back issues of farmers almanac, to say nothing of having it back over ten years… magazines, books, if there were TV programs worth watching no doubt, tons of that kind of stuff… the animals seem to like it!

i decided i’d go up the big hill right across the bridge. then i wandered all the way to the poco boarder, which is quite a walk (for anyone familiar with the tri cities, the poco/coquitlam boarder north of a certain point up river begins at coast meredian rather than somewhere between westwood street and some strange block east of the bridge or whatever. the coquitlam/poco boarder is one of the weirder suburban boarders. there is a river. logically, the river should be the divide. this being said, it’s a very jagged boarder, running on a diagonal in a generally east/west consideration as the north and south are clearly defined by a river (logic) and a mountain range that becomes never never land (gee…).

and i wandered about as far into never never land as you might find in these parts… up to the top of coast meridan which is into burke mountain, a mountain my house is adjacent to. basically, my parents live at the very foot of a small mountain in the immediate valley which houses a river, which i live very close to.

the river, i hadn’t ever bothered with trails, was something i used to wander through a few hundred meters of forest completely un pathed/trailed. that’s climbing over logs and negotiating brush and stuff. fun times. i have a lot of weird memroies of finding a stone skip to the island after wandering upstream and stuff from being a younger teenager… hanging out by myself cause no one lived around me… being a total only child… good memories. being alone makes me want to kill myself, yes, but not to the point where it’s pathological. i dont’ feel the need to use the phone a lot… i just need to be occupied. i find “doing nothing” by myself extremely depressing.

so i wandered up the mountain. along the development, not trails, not to the top, but up pretty much as high as it’s developed, into this weird mountain rurality of 9 acre lots. kids doing dirtbike in the backyard that has a pool in it, farms, a hunting and gun club, driveways that begin the first 2 acres of land and suggest a home somewhere, up there, past all the land…

it got me totally romantic. i started looking at real estate listings, just wandering to pick up a bottle of wine past a real estate office, pricing. if nothing it’ll motivate me not to waste money.

anyway. i was deep into the strange little community i’d never really explored by foot, despite being, no, that’s a bitch of a walk, it is literally climbing into a mountain, this is farm fences and multi acre property 10 minute drive (?) from a fairly commercial hub and less than one hour from a decent sized city within the country. far less than an hour…

anyway… i was up there, the little valley to the slope, a massive cul de sac that proved quite the adventure. somewhere up the ways there was a dog. since turning around seemed foolish as i was going west, and might find a route back further west, i knew i had to face it. the dog barked. i assessed the fence while standing quiet. i noticed that the fence would not contain the dog. it was very loud yet as i stood quiet it did not bark. from this i assumed that he was a barky dog but not an attack threat. i began to walk. the dogs began to bark very loud. knowing that, in the case that the dog was a potential menace, running would only escalate the situation, i walked till i was a bit from the dogs before i started running. generally, running out emotions is nice, you’re way whatever, you go for a walk, think it out a bit, when you about to peak you just start running and exorcise anything unpleasant as your body is filled with adrenaline . empowering. running in fear, not so hot. i was on an uneven surface and off my ball due to the general headspace. i went over my ankle pretty bad. it’s quite embarrassing. i am not interested in my clumsy/uncoordinated qualities. i’m not happy that my ankle is swollen.

i’d hoped walking it out would help. i didn’t have my cel phone. shocker. i wouldn’t have called besides which, nowhere to really mark where i am, annoying, etcetera. luckily it was a far quicker walk down than up.

went and made some art at tahina’s. fun. i’d never heared OM on speakers. they are a headphone or vinyl band i concluded. got some work done i’d have done alone in my room otherwise. people who’ve studied art at a university (while i know that emily carr is no longer an institute of art and design and, instead, a unversity, despite the universe in university implying a broad scope of topics. i mean an actual university, where your electives fall into areas where no one in your class is at all creative and your teacher isn’t catering to that. they can be, it’s really a liberal arts college, the one i went to, and i used it for what it was good for, liberal arts and my visual art focus.

university and artists is strange. you have to have been able to get decent academic grades to get into university. for me, i’ve been known to write tests well. i attended 75% of the time instead of 40% and wrote tests well. i attempted to convey that i cared but it wasn’t evident of any passion. the easiest way to get an As is to care.

classes i got at least on A in in high school,

math

science

physical education/pe/gym

art

video

english

social studies/history

humanities

current events

i can’t remember, there may be more. i had a year where i got high honor role grades. the only thing that kept me off straight As was my drama grade first semester of 9th, for example, i did not get an A in drama, it is a bit of a metaphor for a lot of things. not being a generalist, drama and what that can mean, work ethic, you name it…

after i got straight As in my academics, i felt like i’d made my point. that was the end of that. on year. fuck it.

i tend not to like to get anything less than As in non school contexts. i’ve gotten As to learn how to get As but found that i could focus on what i was actually interested in and generally get Bs with out making a huge effort and, fuck, i was shocked that i graduated highschool. i had attendance ranging from 10%-the 75% or maybe that’s being a bit too generous, maybe 60%, it’s been years, i can’t remember much to the exact number of days i skipped, i do know that 11th grade, i didn’t go to school when i had my period.

i felt pretty good about life when i didn’t go to school on my period. i guess that was the beginnings of my own personal experience in defining myself as a feminist thinker, rather than follower as it is very telling to my general feelings about feminist at this time (i’m not going to stop wearing pants because they are vulgar, i don’t really look all that bad in pants i’ve come to notice, so long as they are to my liking, i do, however, know that they are vulgar. you know, i don’t shave my armpits because that’s kind of gross, i do wax my legs though.

i think i went to university to study philosophy. that was the idea. it resonated but i was a bit young. it got pretty grounded back to the fact that all i liked to do was make art and i took some classes to see if i could hack it in school. i didn’t apply to art school when i was finishing high school. i made art, even obsessively, but didn’t really have any interest in going to emily carr. the application piece didn’t really “grab” me,  joy was playing with going and so we sat around and talked about the things we’d do for our application piece. i was just “being a friend” and i liked to make art and even considered myself an artist to a degree. i’d gone through conceptual art mindfucks pretty young and had some pretty heavy thoughts on the subject before my 17th birthday… i’d dealt with some pretty cool art classes.

so i did nothing but contemporary art program academics for the second semester at university, applied for visual arts, almost kidding and went about yoyoing between majors. after second year, i considered applying to emily carr and while it may have been a better idea by conventional logic, i think, given my personality, that my instincts were in the right place as i got more out of the academics and 24 hour studio access downtown and that stuff than i would have out of “art school”. as far as i know, if there are cool people who i dont’ know who went to emily carr, they are probably friends of friends, in the loose, communistic sense of things. that’s about all i’d get, socially, out of emily carr, save that laid point that is the headache of university.

that i arguably finished is bizarre to me.

anyway. i was hanging out making art with a friend from art school and in a strange, 2am haze, i totally forgot my bag with my paints, projects save the paper one, thread/beads and, yes, my cel phone. fabulous.

i am quite bummed that my ankle is all wacked. i guess, truthfully, i should probably not summer jog. i tend to consider running on pavement to be a really bad idea. the shock absorption is awful. and in the forest, well, the animals are kind of a concern. i dont want to surprise a bear thanks.

i had a great day otherwise. big long adventure, possible lead on some humane employment, nice conversations with someone who’s known me for a really long time and went to university and subsequent to this, all that easy.

it’s 4am, i should go to bed. i have become kind of a degenerate lately. i’m trying to eat fruit and drink water and exercise and the rest, but all the while, sleep at dawn is pretty normal at this point… it’s just so much easier to be productive when my mom is asleep or something. i dunno… it’s just easiest to work/be active after midnight in these parts…

reading my last few blogs, it is very evident to me that i was up late at night, stretching and designing projects, completely ADD while composing them. i think i even gave myself a leg massage with ginseng miracle wonder 8 oil (very nice massage oil in with the soul glo at drugstores that sell soul glo, ingredients include - jojoba oil, ginseng, avacado oil, roemary leaf oil, a ton of other herb oils and yet, instead of being “nature’s breast” with some terrible pastel drawing evocative of the womyn’s wear sign and a $20 price tag, it has an attractive black couple and a red sunrise and great fonts and costs very little.

i am wearing, giant pink t shirt, color or which i love. black slip. messy hair. i need to floss as i had mangos for breakfast.

it is nice outside. i will go and enjoy it. first, i will walk and photograph these fields i like. then i will come back, put on my joggers and do just that.

i’m kind of in this headspace where all i want to do is smoke pot and play the guitar. since smoking pot isn’t really my ideal state of mind, since it is actually only fun while playing the guitar in all frankness, this is good, because if i were to ever smoke pot, and there were no guitar for me to play, i would be annoyed with myself for doing so. which is fine and dandy, that all i want to do is get stonned and play the guitar is a whole different story…

i will not indulge this urge. no one is on my trip musically. i will, forever, revere people who write full bands for how limited i feel when i try to write music alone. it never fills to my liking. i get kind of annoyed with the process beyond enjoying the actual practice of playing… i guess i went to enough shows to get my bearings. there isn’t really any sense that i am going to find people to play music with here. i could, theoretically, do things like go to “her jazz presents womyn’s studies” the noize show today but the truth is, if i had the cover charge i’d spend it on watercolor paper…

i thought it’d be funny to extend the attempted essay around kissing guys who are shorter than me on here. that’s so comical. i can be such a height nazi that i probably had to admit it. i’m not actually a height nazi, there’s just a certain comfort that you gain when you are amidst more than one friend and you are all the same height. i tend to notice my height a lot when i wear heels, go to shows or, eee gads, go to shows in heels. this is most kinds of shows. if anything, the arts in vancouver tend to be a shorter spread of the population than average. guys who are about or slightly below “average height” (i think five nine is average height, most of the men around my height don’t seem actually short so much as short to me because we’re the same height and i’m a girl).

there was a time when i was very self conscious about this. then i wore giant shoes for quite a while and when i took them off, it was no big deal. at least joe six two over there wasn’t my height. etcetera.

there’s a strange thing with slouching. you can stoop down or you can compress your body a bit to take a couple inches off your height. i actually started “shrinking” from the later practice. it was destroying my figure, hanging out with so many shorties so much.

i read an astrology book once where the people born in the last non cusp week of gemini in taurus (aka me) are within the saturn decan and termed “the natural”. this makes a lot of sense, i tend to manipulate matters to seem like “they’ve always been there” or “like it never happened” pretty subconsciously. with height, it’s really easy to shrink the body a few inches without looking like you are doing so. i’ve done this a lot. it’s a bizarre social skill. sometimes i have to explain to people i’m half a foot taller than that i am “way taller than them” for how i minimize the ackward truth that is the weird hunch you develop attempting to create a shared energy field while conversing with someone significantly shorter than you.

feeling gigantic can be kind of annoying. it’s been known to happen, with me. being a kid in an elementary school desk, my legs to long for it and the ADHD that is discomfort of environment is very much within my personal experience history.

i guess a lot of short guys must get off on kissing tall chicks. or it’s just kind of a non issue. i can’t tell. i’ve never been into the whole “feeling like a tall chick”. when i was younger i assumed no one shorter than me would ever be interested in me at all because it was “weird”.

i find the “weird” is dating guys who are about five eleven and putting on a pair of heels and being taller than them is actually what gets “weird”.

have i mentioned that i hate high heels?

i was wearing heels a bit. my old three velcro adidas are worn out. they are actually so worn out i shouldn’t wear them. maybe i’ll get insoles. anyway. since i am not as hot on the red detailing of my high tops as the all white of my lowtops, this left me in a shoe rut. i didn’t want to do black since it requires a black blending sock or has this terrible “line of white skin” since i don’t wear wide bottom pants.

as such, the (fantastic) almost white gray 80s boots hella’s mom somehow had passed down to me came into the picture. they are kind of perfect with my jeans. the raise is just right. the toe is good, the color isn’t quite white but all the while, within my pallet.

then i got a blister on the second smallest toe of my left foot. it looks icky. that’s walking in those boots instead of just standing/sitting somewhere kind of lazy. then i got all negative on the idea. since i also got all negative on going out, they’ll probably remain my going out shoes and i’ll just keep the stella mccartney adidas split sole ballet kicks in their little tiny bag in my purse if i want to wander around the city again, given that it weighs nothing and takes up very little space.

what i really came to, wearing heels, is that in yoga, when they tell people to put less weight into their heels, this is an area i am opposite. i must actually put more weight into my heels. wearing unsensible shoes conditions you to put more weight on the balls of your feet. more weight on my heels would better develop my posture. i noticed this standing in heels, unable to put any weight really and having to admit the lack of balance.

i think i need something good to happen. i am so sensitive at this time.

i do not “do” vintage shoes. anyone who would ever be in the position to expect me to “do” vintage shoes would have to be able to afford for me to go buy expensive or obscure designer with vintage elements (prada? i dunno… i’d laugh at anyone who wasn’t living in an impressive (and not folksy, flashy, preferably modern/conscious design, boutique house, with no mortgage, property elsewhere, no debt, surplus of savings, possible conscious investment (i tend to consider people who rent places to friends really cheap because they own them conscious investment since it’s pure profit once you remove interest rates and taxes from the equation…

anyway. yeah. vintage/used = no.

i am pretty firm about that. toronto made vintage shoes seem ok. toronto also made wearing a bra seem ok.

i wish there were alternatives to dispose of used shoes. i have a bunch. i’ll probably cut all the leather out and use it since i have leather needles and like handsewing. i dunno… i was a vegetarian for over 10 years, i will be taking the really high boots in for new soles even though i could replace them for (likely) less the cost. since i got the heels done already… they aren’t amazing enough. i’ll likely alter them at some point. since they are baggy i can tailor them and since they’re so fucking out there yet fundamentally conservative in another way (your boots should meet the line of your skirt, that gives you a little leeway since mid calf length skirts look frumpy is you are over five foot six…

what the heck do you do with rubber? cutting it up and making little miniatures isn’t really my trip, man…

i’m fine by people loving used shoes. whatever. go with it.

wearing used shoes today was awful. it has been. i don’t enjoy blisters. my footwear is designed in support of this.

i kind of just started wearing cheesy vintage boots because it was funny. like all inside jokes with myself, it has worn thin. i have some good thoughts about posture from the process. i will likely acquire a pair of decent price range, raised shoes if this happens again.

one of the weird things about heels is that they make me a bit taller.

i have this strange image of myself as a “very tall short girl” due to the fact that all my mother’s sisters are about my height and as such, living in BC, i am the tallest woman in my family by a few inches. my dad is above average height. he’s five ten or so. maybe five eleven… i class male heights as follows,

i) significantly shorter than me, - if a girl i consider short is taller than them. i consider most women short. it is entirely bodily. there’s an extent to which you have to negotiate your posture against people based on their height. i have a physical need for at least one female friend who is within a general heigh similarity, it is good for my posture if nothing else.

ii) men who are not really an exercise in physical negotiation but are definitely shorter than me. many of my favorite men i have to note to myself. i was in the car with bronwyn (fellow tall only child, i assume i’ve blogged that i like all female only children on principal? have i also mentioned tall and only child is practically a cult in my views of the world?). anyway, yeah, and it came up that i’d been pretty consistently kissing guys who were shorter than me in the very meager kissing i did. now, you have to remember, there is little as arguably obnoxious as two only children around five nine in a car who have bonded in “talking like valley girls to the extreme where it’s been commented on (the first time i hung out with bronwyn some dude on the patio of the pig and looked at us from outside our conversation and just said, “whoa, you girls are pretty valley” as we shot on at 100 wpm bronwyn looked at him and valleyed, “are you dissing my valley”.

anyway. when that’s a generally allowable personality dynamic, it comes up that you’ve kissed dudes who are shorter than you.

i have this weird memory of hella being gone from the apartment and vern commenting on some junk she’d left and quotationing “the shorties” (hella’s term for who it is you are giving your charity box stuff to, more short on cash than physically short and catchy, which, with a rapper, you humor, without really feeling like you’re doing them a disservice, if it’s catchy… anyway.

i can not be a height nazi. i have done things outside the code of the height nazi. i have kissed… short dudes. that can totally be swung. i’ve done it. i’ve never had a bad date with someone a touch shorter than me. always prolific fun.

i tend to find guys around six feet tall a worse idea than guys who are a bit shorter than me or about my height. that’s cold but the truth is, if i were a guy and the height i am, i would be “over” six feet. i wouldn’t be six foot four though, which is a plateau. this is all observation ratio stuff. i’m tall enough that a lot of clothes can appear to fit, but do not. a good example of this is that i have three pairs of jeans, they are all designed with a leg that is slouchy length, subsequent to this, never having ankle as the telling sign. this being said, of the three pairs i own, there is only one that fit long enough, with the rest, the whole tailor of the garment seemed like it would make sense if i was shorter, pants like that are good if they are fairly too big. low riding pants should always need a belt. i tend to hate how they look myself. sagging asses and the like. it looks good on guys. some guys go in for that. i’ve always found that when i date guys who are about six feet tall, they lend me and give me their pants.

for a very long time, i dated guys whose pants i could borrow, if they were to wear pants i might adapt to. that can be an attractive quality but i’m not all that staunch that men should really be people you borrow clothes from heavily, like, i don’t really think that playing barbie with your boyfriend is my scene, though it has kind of happened through the wonder that is unisex clothing.

if i am thrift shopping with a vintage feel i shop in the men’s pant section. it can be a drag. a lot of it is too short for me but when you score, oh, do you score. women’s vintage pants always look bad on me. they are a miracle if they aren’t too short. it is so rare. subsequent to this, and maybe the truth that women’s pants aren’t really what i’d call a mindblowingly good idea, “was that really necessary?” is what “looking hot in pants” promoting actually healthy?

pants seem like a really questionable idea. they are quite vulgar if you think about it. to wear pants without them being kind of dumpy/tomboy becomes quite vulgar if they aren’t wide enough that they’re a max skirt but easier to move in.

really wide pants have their moments. they are “the best” pant in pure aesthetic, conforming with form without a massive difference in the butt/calf. since tailoring at the knee is central to this leg of pant, it’s a bit of a doozy unless you fluke out or devote a lot of time to finding the right piece ready to wear.

ready to wear is as bad an idea as pants. find me someone else who has my body and i’ll tell you that clothes that aren’t either loose or tailored aren’t a fluke if they don’t look god awful.

anyway. then there are guys who are “taller than me”, at which we have the bane, guys who are taller than you but would be shorter than you if they were a girl or you would be taller than if you were a guy. i call them five foot six. a five foot six inch girl is taller than a lot of people. some of my favorites even… this being said, someone who is five foot six is someone i have to negotiate my posture against. they are enough shorter than me that no one in their right mind is going to make us stand back to back. there’s no question they are shorter than me.

these guys can be a drag or a drag. they are often smaller built than i am. their frames are more demure. they never seem like they’d be able to kick ass at any sport.

i think part of the reasons that shorter guys are fun dates is because if they are “little punk shits” grown up, consistently in my track record with short guys, they probably “skated” or something. since shorter is always older by a fair bit…

shorter and older than me is totally, like, not what i stand for.

lol.

a guy who you might have to negotiate upwards a bit to kiss standing but isn’t loomingly tall over you is kind of traditionally ideal. since little short women are sometimes a bit weird and enjoy the strange sex that is a small little thing crawling over something giant. that is rarely to never a good personality trait. i’m not even that facist about being tall and yet i will, 90% of the time, give them a really derogatory nickname for being a midget if they seem to be beyond such making a nuisance of themselves. it’s nothing that i really deal with a lot, it’s just my gut and minimal experience. perhaps this is based on the fact that anything over six three is a bit too tall for me, a bit too tall can be an adventure, any body can, but that the negotiation is a bit foreign, like making out with short guys.

i’ve never had an extensive sexual affair with a short guy. i’ve kissed several. made out. i’ve touched things. shirts have been removed and stuff. clothes. i’ve been naked with short people. more than one. i can’t imagine what fucking someone who was shorter than me would be like. at one point, i developed a theory that it would be bad for my figure. i might have shared it with someone female and about my height, i can’t remember, the context wasn’t making fun of short people, the context was posing a really long, bizarre hypothesis for the sheer hilarity of doing so, that was probably a writing, not a conversation. i can’t remember.

i don’t notice people are shorter than me if they don’t annoy me. since i am highly prone to being annoyed, i notice most people are shorter than me beyond just looking and noticing what people look like for memory.

anyway. guys who are taller than me but not really enough that i could wear anything but flats without that standing to question…

when you where heels, those guys become “shorter than me” and “about my height” which “makes more sense” in relation to how i think.

then there are guys who are a really easy height. you walk with them and you get to stretch up a bit (good) and yet they won’t have to do too much crouching, like, it won’t get kind of stupid, them developing a fucking hunch so that they can be within your body space.

i think that hanging around in my neighborhood was handy in that a lot of the dudes in strathcona are about my height, which really helped with the fact that i didn’t have any chick friends who were about my height. constantly crouching or negotiating your size to make good interpersonal contact is a part of life, especially if you are about average height for a man which places a statistical 50% of the male population as shorter than you and then the 75%-whatever% of women (i have no idea, there are a few people i know where it might be less than an inch heightwise, not a ton, but there’s a decent enough selection of girls about my height. i have more than one friend that is about my height. i know a lot of people who are “tall” who i am shorter than, even by a fair bit. they often tell me i’m not as short as they are, they have no grasp of the physical negotiations that are minimizing their height difference.

that can all be totally annoying. you really need friends about your height. that isn’t everyone, but it is central to coping. i consistently know men, even if i don’t date them, for, if nothing else, this reason.

anyway. then there are guys who are way taller than me. those guys, if they were women, would be six feet tall or maybe even a bit more.

anyway.

i am officially bored with vancouver. i haven’t even seen most of the people i like here. i’m inclined to assume this is due to the truth of the fact that working on projects and random socializing are kind of what vancouver’s about. that’s sort of my take on why it is that i’ve been going to events and not calling people. i’ve had some hanging out with people.

hanging out with people can be rad or a total drag. i find, a lot of the time, it’s like taking a vitamin that tastes bad and is hard to swallow.

going to events can too.

when people are rad, things can be rad. the thing is, to stay rad you have to do rad which isn’t really that related to hanging out non productively.

anyway. i decided to “check out shows” since i like music and vancouver’s has it’s moments. i like that there are venues where weird/annoying/off rock music is normalized. i don’t necessarily want to be an attendee, but it will likely be some richard floida thing in the future (is that that guy? i can’t remember, douchey shit for people who want to feel like they are the masters of the universe without even being wealthy (your great grandchildren are “taken care of fiancially” before you have popped out your first baby?).

i’m all for letting those people feel like masters of the universe, i mean, it’s virtual reality, but i’m not really in favor of massive, acquired, intergenerational wealth. i believe this is why people have revolution history, over throw, civil war…

i think in proper patriotism, the empire of the state over rules the empires of certain citizens. i suspect, at this point in history, that the vested interests of certain individuals/empires supersede a lot of common sense.

this brings for vehicles of conditioning.

folk music is popular because you have, statistically, met someone who has made a record and can sense whether there are agendas. hearing music you’ve seen live repeatedly is grounding against the spectacle.

my interest in music is fairly emotive. i don’t like “emo” music, what it became. when people “are a emo” and maybe born after 198? it’s actually kind of uncomfortable. i find “taste in music” works along the following guidelines.

if a man is interested in music and has records, they must not piss me off if he plays them. since i like a lot of music but that exists within certain fields of taste. i didn’t think about this for years. i actually got a crush on a guy i suspected to have bad taste in music and didn’t care. or i told myself that.

for a long time, i figured that i should hold any man accountable to familiarity with the record collection i have semi appropriated from my parents. or that i shouldn’t have to ever pretend he knew more about records than me. i get very annoyed with having to condescend a man about records. music in general.

i would never date a guy who was in a band where i couldn’t approve the business model, for example. i have a good track record when it comes to dating and hard pragmatics. as far as i know, every guy in a band i’ve ever kissed has toured overseas. that’s incidental, some weren’t even in bands when i kissed them, just people who were interesting to me.

the idea of dating an artist who couldn’t open doors for me seems kind of short sighted. given that i enjoy bestowing reverence upon men.

that translates into older. sometimes, i am very pro the adventure of “building it together” but that takes someone who i can look at and say, “you look like a lifetime of fun in bed”.

you can make a “lifetime of fun in bed” with a good attitude towards things like physical fitness and forms of fun in bed that are not necessarily the “old in out in out”. the “old in out in out” is fantastic. i am very much pro it. when crazy religious fanatics go off about deviation from “the old in out in out” being satanic, i mean, i know that they are being extremely harsh and that such promotes hate and that in an over populated world and a social experiment of a culture, that people who, if they have kids, will be 100% planned pregnancy have their virtues. this being said, the old in out in out between a man and a woman, man oh man, what a miracle…

having sex without wanting to procreate is inherently perverted. between people who could not (the same sex) it is sensualist and maybe not even really classifiable with sex in the heterosexual sense of things. it is sex for pleasure.

heterosexuality is the negotiation of the fact that sex is pleasurable and that the practice of it while wanting the end result that is the biological purpose of the activity to fail. in a way, it can be paralleled to praying for failure.

what it comes down to though is that men are, really, the most appealing creatures to do those things with. subsequent, the burdens of the load that is the suspension of being able to bare children and that being socially acceptable is our bizarre world.

i can very easily become unhinged from that kind of our world.

i sometimes want to become very rich so that i can encourage my pubescent daughters to get knocked up.

the teenage class started as a bit of a joke one day, walking to a car from wreck beach. i think i drew some fashion pictures in my sketchbook. i can see myself finding a life partner, making maybe even more money than a lot of “squares” and raising children, without really becoming institutionalized.

i didn’t become punk rock because i felt rejected. for this reason, a lot of punk rock rejected me. i actually ran screaming from my preppy bitch friends. they weren’t “that” preppy but it’s the easiest way to describe them. i wasn’t “lifetime as a normal kid” i was actually a fucking weirdo who sat in the library doing things because my school didn’t have designated playgrounds for each class and even that’s a bit of a headache. having a pretty good run of a playground whenever i wanted, i wasn’t really that cool with the idea of “standing in line at the playground”, it seemed kind of hesher to me somethow, or a bit armchair jockey, i dunno, maybe if i hadn’t had a couple playgrounds and lots of kids and no real decisive separation between “home” and “park” as a kid…

anyway. school wasn’t really that pleasurable for me (catholic school is way more interesting than public school. “fuck, what is this drag, who are these dorks, where am i?” and that was just the majority of the teachers, the building, the students were here nor there, most people kind of escape me. sometimes i’ve looked on facebook at people who’ve added me, or friend of friend opened, who were in the institutions of my youth, people i don’t keep up with i mean, they all seem kind of unremarkable whether that be successful or not. all i am really interested in is making art, enjoying myself when i can manage it, exercising and what i term paid/laid which is equally the exact truth but also a greater theme, that of still being indeterminate.

being heterosexual is complex. you are undefined as a woman until you understand how the man you are going to stay with is going to change you. this is fairly central. there are women who try to run the show here, i just keep it within, “you don’t seem annoying” which i find tends to translate into someone who is going to mellow me out while not stifling my creativity.

my creativity isn’t based on negative emotion. that’s a bit of a trap. i make almost all of my work sober. i do get why making rock music and “the influence” are so normal.

***

finger nails are annoying. i’m glad i have them certainly, but they are a bit of a hassle. for my lifestyle, and most, very short fingernails are useful. so is long hair- it can be easiest kept in a uniform shape without that being invasive or otherwise high maintenance. long hair can be “high maintenance” looking when so desired without that being necessary to appear put together. short fingernails are along the same lines.

i) i like to putter around with a guitar. confucius said no scholar should ever be without his lute (or something, it’s translated and subsequently not that quotable verbatim). i “dig that” i suppose. i tend to play with instruments over watching tv, for example. any nail white makes the notes sound bad. perhaps, being some kind of a different player than i am, that could differ. i’m very sensitive to nails being lifted or bent, so fingernail playing gives me shivers.

ii) i have been known to work with paint. that can be very meticulous, and i have some very tidy practices, but on the whole, working with art supplies, best it not catch under your fingernails…

my nails are presently at that level of short where they have a millimeter of white. this is pretty constant and half the reason for nail cutting. it’s totally grossing me out.

i hate on fingernails. they totally gross me out.

***

good photos with a 4×5 or medium format camera

-people on a roof on one of the houses on franklin street that includes the view acting like you act if you are living at franklin and salsbury.

i’m kind of a sorority chick in this demented way. i’m not hard core and it’s not a place where i’d consider myself to be in my element as an activist in a really stereotypical sense. i can definitely network though and i tend to live in frat houses (let’s just go with frat, sorority is so colored, and implies things kind of removed from that.

my first apartment somehow became a sorority house. xtinaknox + tall chicks from vernon. only 4 but whatever, it was bizarre that anyone but me who was cool lived in that apartment… i moved into it assuming that i was, at 22, a “boring yuppie” and it even housed couch surfing french canadians for a full month…

at that point, well, i guess i just accepted it.

i) is franklin street.

a lot of people have lived on franklin between commercial and victoria. it is the most bizarre block in town. a few many story, 2-3 apartment big old houses with amazing views and tractor lots in the backyard on a really actually gnarly street that is very quiet…

anyway. i’d totally shoot it.

ii) i’m of the mind that on the whole, “real estate shots” done subtle on good film is very vancouver. like, things we take for granted, like the way i can see the tops of evergreen forest when i look out my window lying down…

anyway. back to houses.

then i lived on powell street, which is a kind of brutal neighborhood, like, cracktown/openheimer park but it was a cool building somehow. then bad manners. then vern’s.

that place in toronto, myabe that’s why i couldn’t hack it, it didn’t seem like it’d become prolific and a shared experience with people… other than katie, who i’d alredy been roommates with anyway…

***

a few weeks ago, i was sitting around thinking that anyone influencing the lack of sexual interaction in my life should be struck dead for the evil of their deeds. my deepest of hearts felt the impact of this statement and asked, “even if it were your own mother”; especially my own mother i muttered in my head…

soon thereafter the concerns with the cat escalated. i really like my cat. lil neitzsch… and my brain said, if this is because the cat is doing it and it’s dying and i thought, fuck it man, let her die.

luckily lil neitzsch just had some flees. poor lil thing. 8 years old, indoor cat, out in the grass, gets flees. thought she was fucking dying. then again, blood sucking parasitic bugs on your body don’t really sound like a good time. thankfully, that’s been resolved. not hippie enough for my satisfaction, but when my mother is in charge in that department… oh well…

***

i had kind of an annoying day in ways. the “half an hour” till i had plans turned into three hours. luckily the person in question is actually kind of useful (activity partners = extra patience and no real damage on “busy”). i got a lot done. it worked out best. then i went to pub 340 where i sat for many hours. there was an “all day show”. i didn’t drink anything. i didn’t “watch” any bands.

i think “shows” are over for me now. i dunno. i’m high maintenance when not occupied. going to a show type event with a guy who just lets you stand and be quiet, for the experience of live music, that’s cool, but going alone… i like mingling and stuff. i do it in bits. this being said, i wasn’t really revved to mingle quite frankly. the music sometimes sounded good. i made the best of it.

making the best of what might be argued a shitty deal isn’t really where my head is at. when shit happens, yeah, but putting myself into a shitty situation to negotiate it… well… i dealt with a full time job for over two years, that’s enough of that none sense for ever let’s hope.

***

people who like tori amos and don’t adore how funny shit is frighten me. i can’t listen to a tori amos album fully through. she grates on me. this being said, funny woman.

i’ve been back to tapes in the little i’ve been driving. classic rock rules but i’ve been hitting the stations during bad playlists. ministry (no), the klf (no). i was going through a tape that had

company flo - “got it” (this song is still kind of rad, “i brought a telephone full of nitroglycerin to the local knife fight, thanks for listening…” and what is that other really epic one? the serious ritalin boy flow? el p. def jux. i’d forgotten that i’d forgotten about that.

a wolf eyes song i’m not so hot on from that record with the palm tree painting on the cover. i think the best thing wolf eyes ever did that i heard was play the sugar refinery. equal to being pretty defining of what i’d find sexy/open my mind to in the next X years, it was an amazing show. the best part was when the twee fucks there for bruchetta covered there ears. i think they may have snapped a group shot with a possibly digital camera (they weren’t that mainsteam then) that was totally nauseating. in my mind, they did some group shots, with maybe a real camera though since it was 2001.

the meltdown, el gato blanco. while “members of the crainium”, “yappie girl vocals” and dissonant guitars were kind of compelling for a hot minute there a million years ago, this just kind of annoys me now. wow, remedial spanish. blech.

francoise hardy, j’ai coupe le telephone. this song pisses me off. i speak french. j’ai coupe le telephone, et je reste dans mon lis… je n’es besoin, de person, ou rien. i think this shit, past a brief phase, is awful and likely appealing to vaguely anorexic middle class girls who wish they looked like anna karina or something. i was never really like that. that kind of bores me shitless.

that this heat song, can’t remember the name. it’s so classic. i’m not as big on this heat as i was when i was younger, like, i’d probably sell that vinyl if someone really wanted it (more than fair enough, they are so good).

that instrumental of l’histoire de melody nelson where jane birkin is just giggling and getting off high pitched over a guitar track. i dunno. when i first started having sex my boyfriend told me he sometimes felt like he was fucking in a japaname. i kind of miss the fun sounds you can make whilst fucking. it takes the right kind of lay for that to be any fun. i had this awful neighbor who would scream things in foreign languages during sex. she struck me as a total dyke fucking men as a show. that’s a really harsh thing to say but so is airshaft sex noises so whatever. i think there are people who find all that very sophisticated. let them continue to exist for the chopping block of satire. sometimes when people try to affect sophistication without any real evidence of fundamental vision i want to start yokeling on about how i am totally with the russian revolution for driving nabakov from the country and that whole put the infant child in front of the firing squad shit having some sense to it… i dunno. i think it’s important to have a pretentious literary figure you like to rail on. nabakov is mine. generally, sighting russian literature period is kind of gauche in my thoughts. “i’m reading tolstoy”, “oh, of course you are”.

i remove some things from that. tolstoy’s challenge is actually a really influencial essay to me and it’s so fucking harsh that i can stand by it. aesthetics essays and literature have nothing to do with each other further to such. if nabakov ever wrote about anything except what a fuckin mama’s boy, whether by biography or ambiance, he is and it were aesthetic essays, and i was in the situation where i had to read them (yeah, i’d read nabakov by choice, fuck off, i tried, it was embarassingly annoying)… anyway. i’d give it a fair chance. i hope i’d hate it though.

i kind of like serge gainsbourg because this is the digression to present. i dunno. it’s not that it, itself, is cheesy, nor he, beyond the fact that european cultures are a bit more comfortable with being cheesy from what i can see (which is fine and maybe even healthy. ancestral homelands versus a giant social experiment, jee…). anyway. this being said, i rarely have the urge to listen to the serge. i’d almost prefer some abismal 80s number over what sounds like the calypso function on a casio where he’s half dead and still growling you sweet nothings en francais, or whatever… i dunno. i avoid that stuff. if serge gainsbourg records satisfied me, i’d have stayed in toronto.

speaking of toronto, let’s digress from that mix tape.

going out isn’t really my thing. i know i “have to” right now. at least a bit. i need to shake it up. i’m obviously bored with punk shows. by the end of the night, i was tracing the outlines in band photos in exclaim and even critiquing them, on page. by the way, have i mentioned, i’ll do band photos for people? have i mentioned this? have i mentioned that i’ve been staring at records up to including things like pictures of nico and eno together, t rex, france gall, to say nothing of cover art like the proper somegirls sleeve and the king crimson records since i was three? have i mentioned that bang up visuals are really a good idea? fuck… i mean. i don’t think i’d shoot vancougar unless they paid me and, beyond that, fuck, whoever did… holy shit, i mean, fuck man, you direct the double chin out of the shot when you shoot an all girl band. you also do things like tell people to move quarter inches so that their line isn’t hunchback. you, now moving away from the picture of vancougar in exclaim that was so bad i got why it is that i don’t know or care to know anything about that band after the one show where i got stuck… anyway. you “push hips forward” or maybe even give little lessons in things like the fact that if your mouth is both held wide and turned down that unless you have big, puffy lips, you look awful and that mouth corners should always turn up unless the lips are pushed forward, not pulled wide… squeeze your shoulder blades together, yes, this too…

i think part of the reason that i am sick of twee, restrained images in music. sure, you are making stuff that can go within classic rock, just keep your aesthetic proper to what you are doing and make it look comfortable, but, no, i hate poorly shot photographs of musicians and see so many of them… and i’ve been into the david bailey rock and roll book so i know how good band photography can be…

anyway. i probably don’t want to shoot anyone’s band. chances are high i’d even charge money. i just wanted to write this to summarize a day where i photographed seven inches and went through a copy of exclaim with a pen and an hour to kill.

i’m not so hot on “an hour to kill” i concluded. i had a good talk with timmy. i like music. but, really, i was so lamed out given everything i could have done tonight.

***

***

“SHIT, WHAT NOW?”

“SHE PRODUCED A THESIS ON THE ECOLOGICAL IMPACT OF CANCER RESEARCH”

“IT’S MAKING PEOPLE SO FUCKING UNCOMFORTABLE”

“RADIATION THERAPY, THAT SOUNDS REALLY ECOLOGICALLY SOUND TO ME”

“YEAH, THE BOOMERS ARE SO FUCKING NIHLISTIC ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD, LET THEM DO THEIR PART WAS WHAT SHE TOLD ME”

“HUH?”

“WELL, I GUESS HER PARENTS ARE PRETTY PESSIMISTIC ABOUT THE WORLD AND EQUAL TO NOT WANTING TO LISTEN TO IT BECAUSE IT SEEMED TO BE A PROJECTION OF THE TRUTHS OF GETTING OLD BY A MASSIVE BLOCK OF THE POPULATION, IT KIND OF OCCURRED TO HER THAT THE ONLY ANSWER TO “THE AGING POPULATION” WAS TO STOP FIGHTING WITH ARGUABLY UNGODLY MEANS TO KEEP THEM TAXING THE ECO SYSTEM IN THEIR OLD AGE”

“JESUS”

“IT’S PRETTY NO BULLSHIT, AND EASIER TO TAKE THAN THOSE KIDS WHO ARE INTO THE ACTIVE DISCOURSE OF THE END OF FOREIGN AID”

“IT KIND OF REMINDS ME OF GENOCIDE?”

“WHAT, GOING INTO CULTURALLY SEPARATE PLACES AND IMPOSING OUR VALUES UPON THEM?”

“BUT…”

I DON’T WANT TO RACIALIZE THE NEED FOR AN OUTLET FOR FACISM THOUGH IT IS SOMETHING I SPECIFICALLY UNDERSTAND IN RELATION TO THE EXPERIENCE OF MY WHITENESS I’D SUSPECT. I’D RATHER NOT BURDEN OTHER RACIAL AND ETHNIC GROUPS WITH THE PRESENCE OF INNATE FACISM AND A NEED FOR AN EXPRESSION OF IT. THIS MAY BE SYMPTOMATIC OF NORTH AMERICAN, LATE CAPITALISM. I WOULDN’T KNOW.

I HAVE A REAL “ROMANTIC SIDE”. I HAVE NOT REALLY TURNED TO “THE OLD WORLD” TO FULFILL IT. I TEND TO CONSIDER THAT A BIT OF A COP OUT IN ALL FRANKNESS. EXPLORING THE OLD WORK AND THAT EVEN BEING ROMANTIC, FINE, BUT PEOPLE FOR WHOM THE “OLD WORLD” ITSELF IS THE CRUX OF THEIR ROMANTICISM ARE IN QUESTIONABLE TO POOR TASTE IN MY OPINION.

I’M DIFFERENT THAN SOME PEOPLE I MEET IN THAT I WILL ACTUALLY HOLD PEOPLE ACCOUNTABLE FOR CULTURAL APPROPRIATION. THIS HAS MORE TO DO WITH IT BEING IN POOR TASTE THAN BEING A SOLDIER IN A WAR AGAINST ANYTHING. THIS BEING SAID, I THINK SOLIDER IN A WAR HAS IT’S PLACE.

IT’S REALLY EASY TO RAIL SOMEONE AGAINST THE WALL WITH THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION WHEN YOU COMPARE IT TO PUSSY FOOTING THAT THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH LATIN/AFRO/WHATEVER CULTURE IS UNBELIEVABLY TACKY AND EMBARASSING.

THE ONLY PERSON I KNOW WHO CAN BE A BIT OF A FETISHIST IN THIS RESPECT IS HELLA, BECAUSE SHE STUDIED SHINTOISM, JAPANESE LITERATURE AND SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE. SPEAKING A ROMANTIC LANGUAGE DOESN’T CUT IT HERE. I MEAN, MY VAGUE LOVE OF THE FRENCH IS RELEVANT TO THE FACT THAT I SPEAK FRENCH AND ATTENDED CATHOLIC CHURCH, IN FRENCH. HAD I NOT ENGAGED IN THE RELIGION, IN LANGUAGE, IT WOULD ALSO BE IN POOR TASTE. I ALSO DON’T MAKE MUCH OF A THING OUT OF LIKING THE FRENCH, IT’S KIND OF MINOR TO ME. A LOT OF THE THINGS FRANCOPHILES ARE ABOUT KIND OF PISS ME OFF BESIDES WHICH.

HANGING OUT WITH A PRETTY BIG SCOPE OF PEOPLE AND BEING ON BOTH SIDES OF THE BINARY, HAVING ECONOMIC PRIVILEGES AND ALL THE WHILE, NOT FEELING THAT I AM CLASSIFIABLE “rICH” (MY PARENTS HAVE NOT BOUGHT ME A HOUSE, THEY HAVE RARELY PAID MY RENT, ALL THE WHILE, THERE IS A HUGE PRO LIST THAT PUTS ME AS TEAM PRIVILEGED TO COUNTER THIS). ANYWAY, I TEND TO THINK THAT KIDS WHO ARE ON THE PAMPERED SIDE (MYSELF INCLUDED) SHOULD BE HELD TO PRETTY HARSH CLASS RHETORIC. I HAD A FRIEND WHO OWNED A SPACE WITH A STORE FRONT AS AN INVESTMENT PROPERTY, DID FUCK ALL TO PROMOTE COMMUNITY WITHIN THAT SPACE OPTION, BITCHED ABOUT CULTURE IN VANCOUVER, AND TOTALLY DIDN’T EVEN RESPOND WHEN I QUESTIONED HIM ON THIS IN A NON CONFRONTATIONAL WAY. AT THAT POINT, HE BECAME SOMEONE WHO HAD “ISSUES” IN MY BOOKS. I’D RATHER SEE SOMEONE ELSE SUCCEED AS AN ARTIST. HE NEVER UN DID THAT.

I THINK IF YOU ARE SMART ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO MAKE THESE BOUNDARIES, THEY ARE VALID AND EVEN WORTHY OF BEING EMPLOYED. I DON’T TRUST MOST PEOPLE’S MINDS AS PRECISE AND DISCIPLINED ENOUGH IN THIS RESPECT TO BE EXPOSED TO THIS SORT OF THINKING. I CONSIDER THAT REGRETTABLE WHEN I SEE CLEAR CUT CASES WORTHY AND PERHAPS EVEN BEGGING FOR CRITICISM. IN SUCH A SITUATION, I TEND TO MAKE A LITTLE GRAPH AND WRITE THE WORLD “WRIGHT OFF” ON A LOT OF NAMES. AT THAT POINT, I DON’T BURN BRIDGES OR MAKE ENEMIES, I SIMPLY NOTE IT FOR FUTURE REVISION.

I TAKE WHO I KNOW VERY SERIOUSLY AND VERY UNSERIOUSLY. COMMUNISM IS FOR POOR PEOPLE. PEOPLE WHO CAN NOT BUY A HOUSE/PROPERTY IN CASH OR DO NOT OWN ONE WITH NO MORTGAGE ARE “POOR” IN THIS BINARY.

UNDER SUCH A LOGIC, EVERYONE WITHIN A “COMMUNITY” IS “FRIEND” AND THERE ARE BOUNDRIES OR ESTABLISHED REASONS FOR KINSHIP.

THE ABOVE IS OFTEN FAULTY BECAUSE UNLESS PEOPLE CAN GENERALLY SUBSCRIBE TO THIS, THEY CAN BECOME A HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS. FACISM IS VERY USEFUL HERE. IF YOU ARE FAMILIAR WITH SOMEONE BASED ON INTERESTS AND YOU INTRODUCE THEM TO SOMEONE ELSE WITHIN THOSE INTERESTS AND THERE IS NOTHING ANNOYING ABOUT THAT AND THEY ARE ANYTHING BUT GRACIOUS THEY SHOULD, THEORETICALLY, BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THAT.

THESE MATTERS ARE OBVIOUSLY UTOPIC. IF LOVE WERE THAT CLEARCUT…

I DON’T HARP ON PEOPLE FOR BEING APATHETIC BUT I REFUSE TO APOLOGIZE FOR OTHER PEOPLE’S APATHY.

IF PEOPLE WEREN’T APATHETIC IN WAYS, THE THINGS ABOUT ME THAT ARE NOT WOULD NOT BE SO TELLING OF MY CHARACTER AND THE PLACES I ACTUALLY DON’T CARE WOULDN’T BE AS EASY TO LET SLIDE… MY LIFE WOULD BE A GIANT, GENERALIST, WASTE OF TIME. THAT WORKS FOR SOME PEOPLE, I’M NOT ONE OF THEM. THAT IS SPECIFIC TO WHO I AM.

I REALLY CAME TO THE FACT THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT ENGAGED WITH THE PRACTICE OF ART MAKING ARE A BIT ALIENATING TO ME. EVEN IF I WORK 40 HOURS A WEEK, IT IS CENTRAL TO MY LIFE IN SOME WAY. I CAN NOT WORK 40 HOURS A WEEK IN AN UNRELATED FIELD FOR THIS VERY REASON. SUBSEQUENT TO THIS, MY PRIORITIES DIFFER VASTLY FROM MANY PEOPLE’S. I’M NOT INTERESTED IN WRAPPING MY HEAD AROUND SOMEONE ELSE’S PRIORITIES IN THAT RESPECT. I AM NEVER GOING TO STOP MAKING ART OR SOME FORM. I DON’T OFTEN LIKE PEOPLE WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS STATE OF BEING.

I HAVE NO INTEREST IN BEING A FETISH OBJECT/TOKENIZED OUTSIDE OF THAT GENERATING ME SUFFICIENT PROFIT TO SUSTAIN MYSELF OR OTHER SUCH FAVOR WITHIN A PROCESS OF OBTAINING SUCH. THERE IS NOTHING WORSE THAN BEING WITHIN THOSE ROLES IN RELATIONSHIP TO PEOPLE WHO SOW NO EVIDENCE OF BEING ABLE TO EVER DO ANYTHING EXCEPT FETISH/TOKENIZE YOU.