Sex Coffee Poetry

Punditing

2008-09-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

It's official, folks. Science says conservatives are physiologically inferior to liberals. They're just scaredy-cats. You might even say, pussies.

Short story

2008-07-30T19:48:00.001-07:00

So I've a hit a road block with this short story. So I'm going to post what I have in hope that people reading it, and some feedback will jog the creativity.

---

We were in front of Super Sexe, looking for people to beat up. I was wearing sunglasses. One of the punks broke the lens when he hit me.

I wasn't living for anything except myself. I was too beautiful to kill myself. All I needed was cocaine and my reflection, a punk to beat the shit out of at night, Nadia and J.P.

We were living on Cazelais, in an apartment without even a fucking fridge or a stove because our landlord was too Portuguese to buy one before he leased it to us. The place was slated for demolition in a year. I hate St. Henri. The deps close at eleven when you can't buy liquor any more, and everyone's either a dead-beat or works their whole life – or they think they're the type of person who shouldn't like living in the Plateau, which is bullshit when you own a flatcap and a vest.

In the winter the neighbourhood was such a drag we wouldn't ever leave. We'd spend days smoking opium, stroking each other like our genitals were fabricy flower petals. It took hours for Nadia to make me come and then I'd just dream of winged odalisques fanning me with the tropic heat out of their vaginas before I even touched her. And then she was just skin. She was her breasts and her candy-corn nipples, her little hill of a belly, her thighs and her feet, and sometimes I would stare at J.P. instead. He had one of those Adonis-chests, and I'd force him to make out with me if I got bored. They were both mine.

Sometimes Nadia and I would play games on the metro. During rush hour I'd get on at Peel, in the second-to-last-car, and she'd get on at McGill wearing a skirt without anything underneath, and she'd snake her way up to me through the people. We'd act like we didn't know each other, standing awkwardly close to each other with her cunt right next to my hand. She'd press up against it, accidentally a couple of times, and then she'd get into it, bumping and rubbing and so I'd slip my hand under skirt to get her hot. When the crowd changed at Berri-UQAM I'd re-adjust myself so my dick was against her, and still nobody noticed or they pretended not to. She'd unzip my fly and pull it out and it inside her, and then we really got going and people would get off to move to another car and we grinded all the way up the Green Line or until security came and kicked us out, and we'd both have to go finish the job ourselves in the closest bathroom. Or for a real rush we'd wait for the sweeper train. She'd dress up like a street urchin, wearing a biker's jacket she'd found in the dumpster that smelled like piss, step on the train without any shoes on and curl up in the corner and cry like she was only on the metro to get out of the cold. Then I'd come over, put my arm around her, take her jacket off and start stroking her face, thumbing away the tears and kissing her and she'd squirm and try to get away and start fighting me, and I'd pin her down and force her out of her clothes and hammer into her until she liked it. Then we might just lie there until we got to Angrignon.

We knew there was something wrong with us, that we were neurotic and diseased and rotting in boredom, that were sick with cancer and cocaine and crazy, and shit, we never checked, maybe one of us had AIDS.

But that was the point. We'd have gone batshit dull in a sterile life, so we railed and shot up until things got exciting, and then they got boring again because eventually you run out of new kicks to try until all that's left is strychnine. The zeitgeist is depleted. The only cause is style.

J.P. had just had a gig so he was buying me drinks at Sharx. I recognized one of the guys playing pool from T.V. -- we invited him over to do lines with us. J.P. is an agent for movie-actors, you know, and I'm a fashion editor for a hot shot magazine, you know, and this is your first time in Montreal, is it? Let's show him some real local colour, eh, J.P, let's take him across the street for a drink at Bar Diana, eh, J.P., don't feed liquor to the natives, by the way, Mr. Celebrity. He got used to the place. After a half-dozen shots he even danced with a forty-five year-old woman with no teeth, and a couple hours after last call – this man's a celebrity, you know, he's above last call, and he's got money, Mr. Barkeep – we stumbled down the hill to Little Burgundy, telling our celebrity how dangerous, and how black this part of town was, and all the murders and shootings we'd seen down here, and behind the huge factory at the bottom of Guy J.P. played the knife trick on him. That's where you take a knife and you thrust it at someone, but you drop the handle and grab the blade so only your hand hits them in the gut. But J.P. was so drunk he got it wrong. We ditched the knife down in the canal and hoofed it. The lousy part about Little Burgundy is it's always crawling with racist pigs who're just waiting for a race riot, and soon they'd find a dead T.V. star down there.

J.P. only ever let me kiss him if he was on LSD. Then he'd take his shirt off and I'd hover over him, his body was elegant, he was an Adonis, a Casanova, and I'd just caress him with a hard-on like the Carnaval shuttle launch, and blast Plutonium off into the solar system when I coaxed just one kiss out of him. Then he'd put his shirt back on and pretend it never happened.

I was on my way back to Cazelais from the hospital. I had on an eye-patch – I was a fucking cyclops. I wasn't even the weirdest looking guy on the Metro but I still felt every time someone glanced my way and thought, “what the fuck happened to that guy?”

EUREKA!

2008-06-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

I've figured it out.

The universe is probably real, and not an illusion. Why? Ambient noise. Or ambient vision, ambient people, just a constant flow of shit in your perception that you don't clue into because to clue into it all would overwhelm your head.

Would all that exist if it was all just in your head?

Goodbye reality, hello salvia divinorum

2008-05-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

Whether it was the quality salvia Jamie got from Different Strokes, or the psyched-out vibes coming out of my Haight-Ashbury pipe, saliva divinorum worked for me this time. And holy shit did it work.

It was totally unexpected. Nothing could have prepared me for the trip, but I was expecting things would start looking kinda fragmentary and glow a bit, or I'd be scared that this is how I was going to die (past effects of salvia). Maybe it's success on Jamie should have convinced me otherwise.

He bought the ticket first. After setting down the pipe, he said "I'm definitely tripping on something." Then he sat silent for a moment.

"Jamie, is it working?"

No response.

He looks at me very seriously. He gets up. He takes a few steps forward. He looks at me very seriously. He checks the time on his cellphone. 10 seconds later he does it again. He fumblingly gets his wallet back into his pocket. He takes a few steps. Sits back down on the picnic table. He stands up again. I light a cigarette and stop asking him questions. He says something before I finish and can kind of talk to me, but apparently he didn't really remember it.

"Enjoy the ride?"

"I don't really know."

We discuss whether I should hit it now or not. He's still pretty twisted, but very eager for me to join him hallucinating. I decide it might be dangerous, but before his mind's straight again I figure it can't be that dangerous, prep a bowl and hit it.

I burn my finger. I set the pipe down although a good deal of salvia is still burning. The world is shimmering. Then... I don't really remember. I can't remember if I fell straight into the first of hallucination or if there was a moment of total oblivion in between. I guess I wouldn't remember a moment of total oblivion anyway, that's the point. Then I recoil from it. My consciousness is screaming, flailing to get back, and it starts literally tracing my identity. JASON JASON JASON JASON JASON, and my mind is actually tracing my body, starting at the head, jaggedly outlining me and at each jag another mental shape of myself blasts up. My consciousness has been ejected from my life and is now tracing my identity as it physically outlines my body, and this is it, this is the end, not dying, far far stranger than any idea of dying but now some sort of hell I'm reeling from where my identity is recalled. I hit my neck -- and there's Jamie. He says something sinister. I'm expecting to get to the my shoulder. Everybody else in my life is going to show up as points on the outline of my body. Waterloo Park is where my life came to an end and now I'm going to move through it in reverse, re-tracing my past.

When that didn't happen I still wasn't entirely sure the ordeal was over. Such bizarre circumstances -- Jamie had called me to do salvia after work, just the 2 of us. We go to the park and he walks me to the end. Jamie, a friend I don't know too well, don't talk to that much, suddenly he's the agent of this cosmic trick.

But no. No. He's just Jamie. I'm... in this park. Drug. RIGHT! Salvia! I'll straighten out in a few minutes. The world is still shimmering. The shadows are actual empty abysses. There's a streetlight behind a tree creating orange and black patterns on the grass. Hours later I realized it was that pattern my eyes saw when my consciousness was tracing the physical outline of my head, and it was my head turning to see Jamie that convinced me I'd reached my neck.

Whoa. I can talk now. Things are re-assembling. I remember what my name is. I remember how I got here, my job. Jamie says he's going to walk over there to check out the trees.

"Wait!"

"What?"

"One second." I'm not ready to be alone yet.

I sit down and space out. I can see the brightly lit towers of uptown Waterloo, with a low-lying moon right above them, and the lake in the park in between. It's very beautiful.

I turn around. Jamie's gone. FUCK! He wasn't real.

"Jamie!!!"

"What?"

"Where did you go?"

"To check out these trees, I told you."

"Oh. Shit."

He comes back. We smoke a cigarette. Chill out a bit. I'm still not entirely aware of space-time. The universe is great. A few people and places flash through my head -- I have these. They exist. It's wonderful. And I can do anything. There's no reason or limitation, the world is mine to do anything in. I can scorch the universe with my presence.

2 year anniversary

2008-05-14T23:33:00.000-07:00

Wow. So I just noticed that as of 5 days ago, Sex Coffee Poetry has been around for 2 years. May 10, 2006. Holy shit.

Since it's an anniversary, how about a return to (intended, but never really actual) form. Here's a poem from my chap-book, The Queen and the Kaiser. (By the way, the actual poem the Queen and the Kaiser, for which the chapbook takes its name, is getting published by Soliloquies this fall).

LSD in the Village

“O squat piss-churner by the bridge were't not for your familiar Canuckian brand or your noen re-assurances of unAmerican culture you'd seem a Molochian bowel spewing poison into the mouths of mortal millions!”

I screamed at the Molson factory.

I filled Mike's apartment's dull sockets with Beat-Romantic Kitchener eyes

and saw mad prodigies of electrified paper lay down their abundant visions on the walls in pastel,

illuminations vomited from menace of melted liquid unbroken 14 hour consciousness.

“Why the fuck did you make me read this at a time like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Quote: 'LSD is a stupid drug. Terrible things happen when you lose control of yourself, like throwing yourself out of a window.'”

“Oh Bill Burroughs, you bastard. He's out to sabotage us.”

I didn't like that I believed that statement,

so I sat still smoking for 3 hours to take the edge off.

There were no revelations,

no spiritual ecstasies,

no Fear freak-outs.

The Molson factory was no Coit Tower,

Ile-Helene no Alcatraz,

Jacques Cartier no Golden Gate,

and I no Gregory Corso.

Super Delegates, Stupid People

2008-05-14T10:34:00.001-07:00

Super-delegates.

Why does the U.S. have them?

Because some people still think Barack Obama is a Muslim.

When I first found out about the whole super-delegate thing, I was shocked, appalled that America's flouting of "democracy" could be so blatant (I mean, we all know the whole thing's a sham anyway, but I didn't know it was so obvious).

But there's a pretty good reason for them.

"Think of the stupidest person you know. Half of the world is half as smart as they are."

People are dumb. They really shouldn't be allowed to make their own decisions. Giving them political power is probably a bad idea. Appealing to the mainstream makes politics dumber.

In an ideal world, stupid people would be educated and enlightened, and democracy would flourish and civilization would prosper into a grandeur humanity had never before known.

Instead? Super-delegates. Or the parliament. But y'know, who cares?

2008-04-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

Ciao, Montreal, nice to meet you.

I'm back in Kitchener. I'm still adapting to widespread ugliness, the absence of deps on every block, and now old friends. Need to get back into old rhythms, or new rhythms with old people. And I need to get back into the rhythm of this town, which is a lot slower, less colourful, and uncivil (the proof of Montreal's civility is the way people will line up on the sidewalk for the bus).

Victoria Street is the weirdest street, and walking down it last night pretty much clinched Society of the Spectacle for me. Guy Debord's all like: "The world isn't real any more! It's turned into a spectacle, or an image, that propagates itself and people spend their lives producing and contemplating the spectacle." Victoria street, from downtown to my house, is one long strip of fast food joints, auto shops, and non-classified drive-by commercial crap and all the signs involved. You don't walk down Victoria. There's a reason there's no sidewalk. You drive down it. Driving down it, the street isn't a real place, it's just passing through advertisement, and if you stop it's to buy something, and you buy it in a manufactured atmosphere, half-utilitarian half-physical-manifestation-of-a-T.V.-ad. The car isolates you from the physical space, and so on a long highly trafficked strip there are still things, places people go, people working and eating and buying, but it's all boiled down to base function.

I can't wait for gas to hit $3 a litre. COME ON DEATH OF SUBURBIA!!!

Don't get me wrong, the automobile is an incredible thing, but it separated time from space, which should be correlative things, time being movement through space, but thanks to humans creating speed with technical things, time became more relevant and space less relevant to human life.

Rigodon dance

2008-04-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

I just bought Down with Rappers by Common Unity, which you should all go buy if you live in Montreal. It's on the shelf at HMV!

I tried to write a rap once, about Kitchener. It was a total flop. McGimpsey suggested I make it true to the setting. The perfect example of a successful rap song about Unimpressive City, Canada, is Rigodon dance, on Down with Rappers. It's 3 francophones from Quebec City rapping in English about being from Quebec City, and they presently live in Montreal. Here's some lyrics:

"I'm from Quebec City where the cold hits you like a lead pipe,
I hold my cigarette steady ready for the frost bite,
I got my tuque and pair of gloves,
???????? snare drums to tell you where we come from,
the morning's so rough I brace the ice on the concrete to try and warm up,
and mass amounts of slush get splashed on my back
I'll be back in a rush to get past this breeze that'll freeze my ass,
Waiting for June 24 when we smoke mad spliffs
and get high as a kite on Jean-Baptiste."

"Now stomp your feet and clap your hands, everybody get ready for the Rigodon dance,
everybody! everybody! everybody get ready for the Rigodon dance!"

PBR Punk

2008-04-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

"You try keepin' it real, but you should try keepin' it RIGHT."

I was at this shindig in somebody's new apartment yesterday. My case of PBR (I have a hard time saying that with a straight face, but it's a cheap and tasty beer regardless) was sitting on the floor somewhere next to me (there was no furniture in this new apartment). There was this fellow sitting next to me. He seemed pretty drunk, as he'd just gone on telling me I needed to grow my goatee back to its fullest because he, unfortunate guy, can't grow any facial hair (face smooth as unskinned chicken flesh). He'd also just run out of beer. I'm talking to someone to my left, when he reaches into my beer case.

Animal instinct kicks in. You know the way a cat or other predatory animal will suddenly jolt into stillness and mark its prey out of the corner of its eye? The offending hand retreats, empty.

He then asks, "Hey man, mind if I have a beer?"

"All you have to do is ask, friend." Smirk.

To derive from Cypress Hill: This is 2008! Y'all need to learn some beer etiquette!

Motherfucker you're in college! You want to punk beer? Get back to high school.

Get your mind right.

Get your mind right

2008-04-16T22:28:00.000-07:00

A year or 2 ago I used to be one of those assholes who'd say shit like "I hate money." I wound up saying this to a drunk Newfie on King St. one day, and he then challenged me to back up my words by giving him all of my money. I didn't, of course, and ever since then I've realized, No, I don't actually hate money. Not only is money not the real problem (currently reading Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord), but I don't hate it. I quite like having it, actually. Loving it is too far, but it's a nice thing to have. Wise man, that drunken Newfie.

The point? When you've decided to take a stance on something, think it through just one more time to see if you're willing to back them up. If you still think the same thing, go talk to a drunken Newfie. If you can't do what he suggests, it's time to get your mind right.

poetry

2008-04-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

Life in every city is basically the same, but every city's got it's own feel. I'm thinking like Harlem Nocturne, Duke Ellington, you know? And I've wanted to write something about Montreal for a long time, but every time I see something written about Montreal by somebody who's just moved here, like myself, I think it's weak, trite, and artificial. So I've been putting it off. But here goes, a poem about my Montreal, improvised, b/c I'm feeling improvised poetry right now.

Montreal is like Washington Square Park, only French, and there's less narcs,
Montreal is like Henry Miller's life, with coke,
Montreal is like LSD in a 1 and a half under the Jacques Cartier bridge,
Montreal is like getting in a cab playing Davis driving past Lafontaine at 4 in the morning,
like getting kicked out of a bar for getting it on on the dance floor,
like adding an extra swing to your swagger
like smoking your own hand-rolleds 'cause that's the thing to do,
like gentrifying a neighbourhood by lighting the sidewalk with red,
like going off on a rant when you're so high you can't remember how you started
like puddles on a sidewalk
like St Michael's dome in the orange St-Viateur night
like Paris with English and half the assholes,
like vomit on the metro and crusty brown ice in april
like drinking Fin du Monde instead of Olde E when you're 14
like living in another country without ever having to learn the language
like getting conned out of $10 by a Quebecker at the Toronto bus terminal who "needs it go pick up his bag from the police station" which, he swears, is stuffed full of cartons of your favourite brand of cigarettes!
like if the Pope ever got into urban planning
like believing in magic again and then figuring out the magician's tricks
like going to his shows and cheering him on anyway
like hopping a turnstile without the guy in the stand really caring
or like the hip of a UdeM girl in 90s neon pink pants on the blue line, and how you'd really like to run your hand down it.

---

I am going to continue with this poem, maybe once I'm done writing this paper.

so some drunk frat asshole tried to fight me on ste-catherine's

2008-03-21T23:12:00.001-07:00

Drunk Fat Boy: [to drunk frat fellows] "I've been looking for a fight all week."

Peaceful beatnik walks past.

DFB: [to peaceful beatnik] What the fuck, man? Wanna go?

PB: Fuck off.

Peaceful beatnik continues his way down Ste-Catherine street. DFB follows, arms held like a gorilla.

DFB: What's that? Motherfucker let's go. Why you walkin' away?

PB: 'cause I don't want to fight you.

DFB: What are you a pussy?

PB: You just walk around looking for a fight? Fuck off.

DFB: Pussy, let's go.

PB: [points to the police cruiser] You wanna fight in front of a cruiser?

DFB: What the fuck. You pussy.

PB: Look, you're a dumbass.

DFB: What? Fuck you.

DFB's Friend: PUSSY!

PB: Fuck you too.

DFB's intelligent Friend: Yo what're you doing?

DFB: PUSSY!

DFB realizes his friends no longer think fighting the first guy to come along is cool. DFB turns around yelling "FUCK YOU!"

Why you wanna fight? 'cause your mind's not right.
Learn to keep your thoughts tight
and lose your ways of spite,
you're the reason women fear the night
you'll never know the heights
where fly the kites
of those who accept life's light.

Get off my streets, get out of my city, get off my fuckin' planet.
I try to preach peace and you're just a piece of shit.
I mean it when I say I'm out with "Peace."

Radical Vulvas

2008-03-09T00:14:00.000-08:00

Tonight I went to this thing called the Radical Vulvas. The first few paragraphs of this Gazette article give the low-down, the rest is some background on historical feminism and where it stands today. Basically it was this art show (music, poetry, monologues, story-sharing)/discussion forum for, well I guess feminism, but it seemed to reach a bit beyond that (shout-out to Jonathon who doesn't read this blog but did a great piece about looking for his mother). I was a little bit ill-at-ease, b/c a) I'm usually just ill-at-ease with large unknown groups, and b) feminist art forum! Gender issues are unfamiliar grounds for me -- I don't know what to say, I don't know what to contribute.

Let me give you some background as well. My favourite book? Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller writes about scrounging for food and laying every gash he can find in Paris. Latest favourite movie? Breathless - J.P. Belmondo slaps Jean seberg's ass more times than I can count. He was a misogynist, but it was an innocent misogyny. It was natural behaviour, and the character was genuinely love-struck and died because he stuck around Paris too long trying to convince the girl to run away to Rome with him. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Teresa and Tomas -- Tomas is a chronic philanderer, but for him, "making love to a woman and sleeping together are two different things." He fucked around, but Teresa was the only woman he would ever sleep with, literally, sleeping in the same bed. These are all things I admire and sympathize with and are unquestionably formative on my conceptions. Not to mention, you're a philistine to call Miller, Godard, and Kundera dumb men.

So the Radical Vulvas was something very different from my usual cultural tastes.

One thing that struck me was that by the end of the night this thing called "safety" become the theme. People were making remarks about how safe they felt there, in the sweaty-hot crowded loft on the east side of the Plateau, and it struck me for the very first time that there are places where women don't feel as safe as I do. This had never occurred to me. I mean, there's the obvious -- I can walk through downtown Kitchener at night without a second thought, but most of the girls I went to high school with (it was a downtown high school) wouldn't even consider it w/out a guy or a large group. But that's a blatant physical danger. I don't quite know what was meant when "safety" came up at the Radical Vulvas. An emotional safety? Psychological safety?

Besides that, I left the Radical Vulvas thinking, and thinking big heavy thoughts that I can't figure out yet. It was a challenging night.

Someone told a story about harvesting wheat in the B.C. interior, there were about 3-4 men and a lot of women. They were doing it with shitty tools but the women started singing and enjoying themselves, when the men got impatient and went to get lawnmowers and weedcutters which were too loud for them to sing. When I heard this I just thought, "You're out to cut wheat! So go cut wheat! That's no time for singing!" But men are genetically designed to be efficient. Millions of years of hunting down things with spears, with the alternative of you and all your family starving to death, has lead to an efficient mindset.

I still don't know how I feel about the whole thing. I toyed with the idea of the masculine side of the story -- half-assed Freudian ideas about mothers, male dependency on female love which leads to anxiety (dependencies cause anxieties) which leads to a need to control, etc. etc.

Fuck it. Who knows? I'm going to bed.

what gets you up in the morning?

2008-03-02T17:19:00.000-08:00

Why do you get up in the morning? or afternoon, evening, or whenever it is you face the world? What's your motivation?

I want to know, because what you wake up for is what you're living for. The shit you fill your day with is just the shit you fill your day with, but what forces you to shake the sleep from your eyes?

For me, it's the day's first coffee and cigarette. Class determines what time I'm setting that alarm for or whether I'm setting it at all, but it's the promise of coffee and cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch anyone?) that lure me out of bed.

Sometimes what gets me out of bed is some poetry thing. But it's occasional. I wish it were more frequent.

There's a lot of good reasons to wake up. I've had a lot of good reasons to wake up. I've woken up to see what city I'm in now, I've woken up just to stare at "mon amour" (whoever that was at the time), I've woken up to go get high with my friends. That's a life worth living. Waking up to drink coffee isn't a particularly good one, and lately I've been in the dumps 'cause Tim Hortons and Big Tobacco are the highlights of my day.

@ least I'm not working at arby's

loonie for your thoughts

2008-02-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

Oh shit! I've scotched the dope! Never put your grass in the bedside table next to the radiator!

And now the moon's gone!

What's happening around here???

Narcissism -- bad?

2008-02-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

I definitely should not be writing a blog post, but here I am anyway, procrastinating from doing this research for a film paper. Not that it's an uninteresting topic: comparing Godard's and A bout de souffle and Bande a part, both two of my new favourite movies, but I'm laaaazy, lazzy, lazarus, late. And tired.

First I've got some pimping to do. Tomas McManus is up to some interesting stuff, which has lately given me some motivation to get my hustle on, so check out his MySpace. Also, my man Dan is getting himself into the rap game, so go check out some of ravenOVERwater's YouTube videos. And I've recently gotten myself in way over my head with the THROW Collective, and will be hitting the open mic preceding the next slam at Le Cagibi at 8 p.m. on February 16th (the day before my birthday!). Trust me, it'll be FLY. I'm terrified of just performing on the same night as some of the people who're going to be bringing it to the stage that night. Art's happening all around me!

I've got in my mind another rant for you folks. Having spent way too many nights up late reading Vice magazine online, I've been thinking about the ruling value of the era: narcissism. Hipsters, gangsters, geeks, neo-cons, suburbanites, urbanites, and all but like one hippy I've ever met -- the whole damn nation. Now I'm just speculating off my ass, but I think it's a value that comes from sources nefarious and benevolent. The biggest contributor is probably our culture's rampant commercialism, but I don't think we should overlook those show-and-tell kindergarten curriculum / countercultural beat-hippy-punk rock calls for individualism. It does very little to create genuine individualism so much as people who are obsessed with being individual themselves. There's also our centuries-old abandonment of spirituality, disintegration of traditional family structures, and total disillusionment with the state and consequently our disregard for civic or societal duty.

The only thing left in the world to care about is Number 1 -- ME!

And is this a bad thing?

As far as the deep integration of commercialism in that narcissism is concerned, yes, but I think only because commercialism is mass-production by nature. I think there is a lot to be said for fashion as a statement of individuality. Fashion is its own artform on various levels, primarily in terms of the designers making clothes, but on the consumer's side as well, putting together a style out of the materials designers provide is an artistic endeavor in its own right, kinda like magnetic poetry. It takes an eye for what looks aesthetically pleasing, and there's an intended effect which must be negotiated with the actual effects of what you put together. Also consider the fact of cultural products: the music you listen to, the books and poetry you read, the movies and TV shows you like, contribute to your personal make-up. A person is nothing but what s/he acquires in life, an emptiness filled with stuff. My point: materialism is not to be disregarded in the idea of individualism, though the present state of it is non-ideal.

Supreme mathematics say: number 7 is god, and you are your own god. Narcissistic enough? Doubtless, but this is a key both to a rejuvenated spirituality and self-actualization. You are your own god, which means you're the master and maker of your own universe, you're responsible for your fate. I'd argue narcissism is inextricable, on some level, from self-empowerment.

And our selfish motivations do not necessarily mean self-absorption -- this leads to stagnation and so decay. But the goal of acquisition of knowledge and experience is to learn about ourselves and develop ourselves, and the goal of self-actualization is imprinting yourself on the world. It's a give-take, but it's all about you.

a day in the life!

2008-01-09T21:20:00.000-08:00

Bought 8 Diagrams, new Wu-tang joint. Went to CASE poetry reading at Grumpy's. Read latest version of the Queen and the Kaiser for a free beer and mardi gras beads (I'll show you my literary tits if I'm drunk). Met some guy I'd met at a house party near Snowdon. Got him high? Blond bitter poet chick eying me down... several times? Listened to 8 Diagrams. Some of the songs' choruses subtract a lot from the songs, but the verses are fresh. Straight Wu one way or another.

New Years resolutions

2008-01-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

New Years resolutions:

- take things less seriously
- slam poetry
- get fresha

Saul Williams

2007-12-30T01:18:00.001-08:00

That last post kind of pigeon-holed Saul Williams, not something I'd want to do to anyone who hadn't heard of him.

Coded Language is the best English poem I've read / heard since Howl, and might even be better, infused as it is with the type of spirituality in poetry you get with Rumi. It's visionary. Listen to this until you get every word, and they come quick.

tonight, who knows what I'm writing about?

2007-12-30T00:14:00.001-08:00

The pursuit of efficiency will turn us all into insects.

First, we behave like them. Then, certain aspects of our bodies become useless as we cease to use them, specializing into a smaller number of tasks. We lose unnecessary parts and grow new parts that are more efficient. Eventually inefficiency isn't an option, because of physical limitation. Insects are just more highly evolved.

Incidentally, pheromones are just one of a bee's means of communication, using smell, we just use sight and sound more dominantly. The only real difference in communication between humans and insects, or any other creature for that matter, is we can talk to ourselves, and do it all the time. We are possessed, by something. A voice. Words.

Words came into possession when we became so vain we spoke to ourselves (thinking), and that was when humanity became separated from natural order.

I was going to write something about Saul Williams, and this video for Amethyst Rock. Saul Williams is a brilliant poet, and this poem is a powerful perspective on white American culture
from a poet of the black nationalist movement, a position that could be quickly be compared to Mayakovsky or fuck, yes, W.B. Yeats that ivory-towered-romantic, and I'd put Williams above what I've read of either of them. White America is the object of Williams' anger, which only makes him sharper. I'd like to point out the lines:

"our influence on them is the reflection they see when they look into their minstrel mirror and talk about their culture / their existence is that of a schizophrenic vulture"

I'm thinking he means white America defines itself not in terms of what is white America but was it NOT black America, a schizophrenic, that is, not whole, a split mind, no longer capable of defining itself but constantly set in opposition to the world around them. Never in harmony with it. Possibly a reason why America seems like such a hostile place. The strongest, most living culture white America has immediate interaction with is black American culture, and so, culturally, it seeks to define itself in terms of what it is not, and it is not black America. White flight?

Also, for about a century or more, and earnestly starting in the 40s, this idea of cool or hip (defined always in opposition to conventional white American culture) among white Americans has been closeness to black influence, being diluted (and maybe regenerated several times amongst certain sub-cultures) from hepcats to hipsters and Beats and the wake of subcultures you could track up to know, and I think rap and hip hop may have started the cycle jazz did a century ago.

Didn't this post start off as a rant about insect nightmares?

Christmas Eve downtown Kitchener

2007-12-28T23:09:00.000-08:00

I wonder if being schizophrenic would be as much of a problem if more people knew how to be compassionate to strangers.

On Christmas Eve I wound up helping out this (probably) schizophrenic woman. I was walking downtown, Kitchener, with Oleg, around 10 in the evening. As we neared the YWCA and the church attached to it on Frederick St., we noticed this woman walking in the middle of the road carrying her coat. She kept edging toward and away from the sidewalk. As we passed she hesitated and asked us, totally sketched out, "Do you hear dogs barking?" She is clearly hallucinating something fierce. We tell her no, ask if she needs any help. She refuses, doing her best to act "like normal people" as she walks away in the middle of the street, carrying her coat in the dead of winter. I piece it together pretty quickly she's either tripping on a psychedelic or schizophrenic, and I now figure the latter. We insist on helping her, and she asks our names.

"Jason."

"Oleg."

"Oleg? What nationality is that?"

"Russian."

"Russian? What does your dad do?"

"Um... ah... he works at Rogers."

"Took too long to answer."

At this point I realize she probably suspects Oleg's a Soviet agent (I recently read Kaddish), as this woman's middle aged (i.e. raised in the Cold War). So I intervene and say "He's just an awkward person. Come on to the sidewalk."

"Do you want to hurt me?"

"No, we just want to help you."

I should probably paint a picture of this woman. She looked to be in her mid-forties. She was not unattractive for a middle-aged woman. Definitely a face of lost beauty. She was not your typical K-town crazy -- at least, not a life eaten by crack. At one point in the conversation we came to have, she mentioned losing all her pretty dresses, and how good she used to look.

Eventually I got her to trust me. Gave her a cigarette, got her to come onto the sidewalk, and gradually she calms down and opens up to me. She tells us about herself. She feels she's different from everyone else, not superior, just sees things too differently for other people to understand. She explained that that day she just "wanted to let God lead me, and sit in my suffering, to learn." She talked about how she used to work for a vet, and her frustration with the people in the church we were standing outside, how they just did as they were told, and didn't think about their spirituality. A woman stepped out of a taxi near us and got out with her large, vulgar family. As she passed she said, "Hi Trish." and they went into the church. Trish kept mentioning how she wanted to go into the church.

We kept talking, mostly I just tried to understand her, which wasn't actually that hard. It was exactly like talking to someone who'd had an important mushroom trip that gave them all this perspective on the world, they were pretty stock but genuine revelations, and it frustrated her that other people couldn't understand this. She mentioned how some of the people in the church got really angry when she tried to talk to them about this. And how someone had stolen her Christmas bag. She talked about how corrupt this city was, and I agreed but said there were a few good people here. She agreed and mentioned some of her best friends, her ex-boyfriend, who'd been deeply spiritual.

I pieced together that Trish had once been very attractive and pretty successful, working for a vet and all, friends, boyfriend. Then I think the schizophrenia became serious. Somehow she lost it all. She explained how the last 5 nights she'd stayed with a different man each night, and hadn't got any sleep because each one had tried to rape her. They all sounded like the crackheads and rummies you see around Dandy's Restaurant.

After a few more cigarettes and about a half hour of talking she seemed totally normal, thanked us, and walked into the church.

2007 was a bizarre year

2007-12-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

I'm no philosopher. I'm tactless. I see something and then I think about it, but thinking is only applying a logic to a seen object. If anything thinking occludes the seeing.

And by seeing I mean a surah kicked straight into your head. It's a degree of clarity. Understanding. When I think, things become redundant and obscure, and it's all mind trash, because the most I can do is spew out half-chewed versions of someone else's logic. I myself am not particularly logical.

Instead I've got a head for visions and surahs, messages straight from the unconscious or injected straight from the outside world that triggers some unconscious appeal.

Personally I'm a fan of a few of these:

- kiss me quick / world is sick sick... (urinal graffiti)
- Time passes because the leaves rustle (a haiku-like observation product of meditating on a staircase)
- I am everyone and everyone is Satan [meaning that humanity is separated from divine grace (no-consciousness) by vanity, which is not a bad thing, it just happened]

I've also been warned by the spirit-goddess of salvia to be wary of dying in the cold on a psychedelic, and had innumerable things revealed such as "art should be spontaneous," the value of irresponsibility, and the all-important one, the one that happened December 28, 2006, the one that kick-started all this quacked voodoo crap, the simple understanding that the world is made out of beautiful stuff. But they're more personal.

These are the things that stick. They're indelible. They don't take thinking.

hyphy in the k-hole

2007-12-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

So, some night in your life, everyone just go round up about 10-15 friends and friends-of-friends, a few cars, a ton of joints, and go party in an abandoned parking lot, make the most of it. It's wicked. Listen to some Mac Dre if you need any inspiration. Pop a lot of e if you want to be authentic hyphy.

Hunter S. Thompson literary theory

2007-12-12T01:22:00.001-08:00

Hunter S. Thompson turned the practice of journalism into a complex post-modern art form, called Gonzo journalism. Rather than an enigmatic narrator reporting details and giving some degree of the connections it made between those details, Thompson told the story of him getting the story. It's really twice-detached journalism, art that shows the journalist getting the story, providing a source for the journalist's bias and mindframe. And he was not entirely accurate in reporting himself, he was an artist in the vein of Blaise Cendrars, to create the “truth” moreso than give the “facts,” by which I think Thompson meant an artistic truth, probably about breaking down the structure of journalism. If nothing else he awakens people to the fact that there is a story about the making of every news article, which affects how it's made, because it affects its author.

Now, whether he knew he was doing this or he was just drug-addled and doing it all spontaneously and letting this happen I won't ever know, I never knew him, only saw his IMAGE which was impossibly tied up with his art, which cast him as a drug-fiend of that excess.

He probably did enough drugs to make himself think like that.

The Gonzo articles expose the inherent flaw of contemporary journalism and its desire for objectivity: there's a story behind the reporting of every story. Who reports that? Thompson aestheticized it from his seat as an artist, who didn't need the same standards of “fact-finding” as the journalist.

Reporters just report things happening from a certain perspective. Journalists are paid to make connections for us.

Topi Antelopes

2007-11-29T19:43:00.000-08:00

Did your aunts, uncles, and grandparents ever make jokes about you being so cute you must have to beat girls away with a stick?

They didn't know about topi antelopes.