02.01.06 - 8:49 a.m.

Fashionably late miscellany from the hard drive of my troubled puter

The second half of December:

School’s out. At the very end I made a movie about fake fog and an imaginary ceramic cityscape. Now I’m reading a book about dream cars the ‘50s forgot to build and daydreaming about plowing through the Canadian arctic in a bus towards someone’s past. But it doesn’t make me any less tired. I’ve been lying beneath the same constellation on my ceiling for half the time that I should every night for months.

Today it occurred to me that I exchanged living on a fault line for living on an island. Tectonics are passe over here. A lot of the fill underneath San Francisco’s Financial District is old boats, and oh how I’d love to see the earth shift and a ship’s mast wrench SOMA in two. The broken land junkyard is a good place to be.

I need to remember what I want to remind people of when I see them again. All I’m sure of right now is that my body is a disguise for my heart is the false storefront for John Ohrn’s “we never close” old fashioned love dispensary.

I think I’m finally ready for history. I want to be serious about things which are by definition not serious. I went to the Victoria Art Gallery awhile ago and saw a Chinese “oracle bone” labeled 16th-11th C BCE. Its inscription was translated: “On yesterday, the king entered through x?. He was sick and had a dream. It will be a disaster.” Then beneath it explained how rare and awesome this particular oracle bone was for mentioning a king having a dream (nothing about the disaster). I love envisioning kings trying to get people to listen to all the stuff they thought they did last night, centuries ago.

Sometime in January:

At midnight last week I had only just stepped out of a hug on a street corner when a girl leaned out the window of a passing cab and let loose a savage howl while looking right at me. What'd I do? The darkness stopped its floating and shackled me in a silhouette. The night will rub grease into your hair and the cement will put a limp in your legs and the streetlights will slash scars across your cheeks no matter who you were before.

I’ve been having dreams with no memorable content besides a loud soundtrack of bad rock n’ roll my head composed itself. It’s like all my sleeping happens slumped in the corner of that bar I swore I would never go to.

I found a toolbox by the side of the road that’s now mine. The elaborate metal logo says “Beach,” and I think about filling it with all the tools o the sand castle trade someday.

My father went to a wedding in the Northwest Territories (a dozen people huddled outside in - 40 watching the newlyweds fumble to get cold rings on their frozen fingers) and went dogsleding too. I asked him all about it. It turns out sled dogs don’t like to be petted, but are really into hugs instead. But because the right-side-dog of each pair is higher ranked socially, the left one can never be given individual attention. So you kneel to their right, lean over, and wrap your arms around both of them at once. And they wag their tails and give you fond looks. Then you scoot backwards to the next row and do the same thing. And soon a whole pack of dogs is seduced into plowing you over the tundra, from nowhere to nowhere.

Muffins taste like cotton candy and busses smell like shampoo.

“Whatever enriches the imagination, whatever complicates the consciousness and thus corrodes the cliche of daily reflex, is a high moral act.” George Steiner

see< >saw

i whisper hello to everything