The Red Dragon fucks the po-lice and the hippies

Yesterday, in a case of mistaken identity/address, the po-po broke into my building so the bloody front door was lockless right below my beautiful, helpless hanging city-bike and left my neighbour’s apartment open to the fucking breezes of our ghetto-ass fucking neighborhood. Didn’t leave even fucking crime-scene tape, let alone one of their sorry-ass selves to explain what had happened; I came home from a nice walk-off-the-drunk constitutional to the scene, flipped, called the police, my neighbour came home, she flipped, the police kept not getting there (for five fucking hours), and then when they did the (admittedly taut little package of a) cop who showed up said on his way to the apartment – like, ten minutes before he got there – he’d been radioed with the situation. Pig sisterfucking Judas, I lived in France for three goddamn years without witnessing such sickening institutional incompetence. Then they got the balls to wonder why everyone fucking hates them. Fucknards. So my landlord had to call someone to put in a new front door lock and I missed the first half-hour of a friend’s social activist choir performance while I waited for a key. Motherfucking motherfuckers.

Not that it mattered. A long time ago – it may have been from not being to figure out Rwanda, so we’re talking like 12 years – I think it came clear to me that sometimes you can’t give peace a chance; and though war is the worst possible necessity to arise out of any diplomatic situation, sometimes it is indeed a necessity; that as much as I wanted to look like John Lennon back then real pacifism would be dependant on everyone in the world saying “okay . . . let’s have peace . . . nnnnnnnnnnnnow!” at the same time.

When it comes to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, my only qualms are that it didn’t happen years ago when the West realized the consequences of having supported the Taliban against the Communists was the death of civil society and the social enslavement of what had been a class of functioning professional and educated women; that the forces there now are too few and badly equipped; and that apparently the American militarily is horribly trained to deal with anything. Attacking the abstract idea of having invaded Afghanistan won’t help any of those things. Has the anti-war crowd really thought this out? Or are they just looking for something to get riled about in Canada since we weren’t dumb enough to participate in the dismembering of Iraq? Of course the ideal would have been to travel back in time and respond in a more measured way to Russian aggression in Afghanistan. But until the anti-war movement comes up with a time machine, I wish they’d stop being such unhelpful bitches. They seem to be carrying over so many old tunes from Vietnam and never really answering the question of how it relates when you have a volunteer army . . . I don’t know . . . everyone pisses me off. Everyone.

The Red Dragon kicks out the jams

Last night I figured out why I've always sorta disliked the Killers and Franz Ferdinand without thinking about it too hard. It's because their music is a big noisy nonsense mess. Amazing, the epiphanies these days. I also discovered that one can dance to the Arcade Fire after several drinks and a solid month of no sex. What else . . . you know, I'm 27 and I've been going out for more than a decade. I understand some things that came out when I was first partying count as retro now. But . . . please . . . can't we leave some things in the grave? In this world full of lovely underplayed music available at the click of a mouse, can't we forswear ressurecting "Love Fool" or any other sugarpop single that was featured on television programmes when I was a teen? Familiarity doesn't make them any more palatable; less so in fact. I respectfully advise anyone in charge of the music for retro nights, whenever they feel the urge to put on "Love Fool", to put on "Paint It Black", "Touch Me", or "Midnight Confessions" instead. They'll cause the same glow of familiarity in all your listeners - well, maybe not "Midnight Confessions", but people will have probably heard it over supermarket PAs - are underplayed on dance floors since they don't come from dancey bands, and people will dance to them. I promise. They'll really like dancing to them. And if you want a female vocal, just put on the goddamn Jackson Five. Fucking "Love Fool". Make me wanna puke.

Okay, night night.

Will work for money

I strongly identify with crystallized ginger today. Delicious, yes, pretty even, and certainly easier to store than fresh or pickled ginger, but brittle and badly neglected in modern cuisine. If you understand what I mean you're way ahead of me; nonetheless, I promise you I feel like crystallized ginger. Nobody European has offered me a new job yet. The closest thing I've got to a job offer for something lucrative is in Gatineau (Québec), and from all accounts that town is such a shithole they might as well pay me in smack to nurse me through living there. I don't blame the Europeans - personally, I would never hire anyone for jobs as well-paid as the ones I'm applying to without checking their teeth and sniffing the back of their neck, and from the outset I'd been pretty sure I'll have to wait out some time in my present position, go, and THEN look, as I'd been planning before my heart grew back.

Nonetheless, the lack of Europeans jizzing all over themselves to throw money at me is adding to my crystallized-ginger feeling, because I'd take a job in La Courneuve tomorrow filing my worst ex-boyfriends' corns for the right pay (I wonder what the right pay for that would be. I think I’d do it for EUR60,000 and full benefits. Does that make me a ho?) if only to be closer to Figaro right away; we have a date now for when he’ll move here but it seems sooooooooo faaaaaaar awaaaaaaay.

Anyways, yesterday I had my first Italian conversational class, which was the blind leading the blind to a certain extent but interesting because my ‘teacher’ had just wrapped up her degree in political science with a minor in post-colonial literature. Isn’t it funny Australian and New Zealand stuff seems to count as PC literature, and Canadian stuff doesn’t – I suppose even when we were part of the empire our relationship with the United States and our internal cultural schizophrenia was more dominant in our psychology than our relationships with England and France and that’s reflected in our rather goofy (but lovable) literature.

But for just those sorts of reasons – of other, more local factors always being at play, and almost always being more urgent - "post-colonial" is a fucking dumb way to classify literature at all. Not to knock people who concentrate on it, it seems like a great excuse to study a lot of great books with a broad range of perspectives and styles, but one might as well concentrate in post-feminist literature, or post-nuclear, or post-internal combustion engine, or . . . whatevs. Choose your poison. Comparative literature in general gives me the shits. Maybe the patterns people find and base thier entire fucking academic careers on make sense, but it seems a silly, parasitic, even destructive way to interpret genius - a waste of analysis and a waste of art- sort of like using Fabergé eggs as bocce balls.

The Red Dragon sits and counts her little fingers

But insists on feeling better. Despite assoholicism up, down, and everywhere.

One thing making me feel better is this quiz from Shimura Curves. Usually I only do these in my head. Today, however, I would like a written record that I’m halfway to becoming my mother. And that that’s great. You can guess which answers are her legacy and which are dirty, dirty me. Hint: she doesn't like Schubert much.

1. Of all the bands & artists in your collection, which one do you own the most cd’s by?
Mozart. Hah!

2. What was the last song you listened to?
Body Movin’ from the Beastie Boys, but that was over the gym PA and thus doesn’t count. The last one I listened to on purpose was Un pensiero nemico di pace, which is fitting, as my thoughts are the opposite of peaceful right now.

3. What’s in your CD player right now?
Opera Proibita, Vivaldi, and a retrospective mix of 2004 pop

4. What is your favourite instrument?
Meeeeeeeeeee! Though I need tuning.

5. Who’s your favourite local band?
Golden Dogs

6. What was the last concert you attended?
Casual TSO show. With my mum.

7. What was the greatest concert you’ve ever been to?
Il barbiere de Siviglia from Opera Lyra, but that was probably the drugs. Sans drugs, Brazilian Girls, I was clean that night, I think. Or maybe the Kathleen Battle gala in Ottawa in 2001. Neil Young's was the best set I ever heard, but he came on right after Oasis so I can't really say it's the best concert.

8. What’s the worst band you’ve ever seen in concert?
Oasis. But Neil Young came on almost right after so I didn't really care.

9. What band do you love musically but hate the members of?
I don't hate people. Well, maybe Simon Cowell for creating Il Divo, but I'd probably brake if I saw him crossing the street.

10. What is the most musically involved you have ever been?
I’ve probably never understood how important it is to me better than right now.

11. What show are you looking forward to?
Magic Flute, my birthday, eeeeeeeeeee!

12. What is your favourite band shirt?
I AM NOT A FUCKING BILLBOARD. Even for a band.

13. What musician would you like to hang out with for a day?
Bach

14. What musician would you like to be in love with you for a day?
Just for a day? So if he wasn’t in Toronto I wouldn’t actually be able to nail him? Hmm. Does Leonard Cohen count as a musician? I want someone to write poetry about me.

15. What was your last musical “phase” before you wizened up?
I think the kids call it “I’m turning into my mum, nooooooooo, crank the bass! (snnrrrrrrrrrrorrrt) boom-tss-boom-tss-boom-tss . . .”

16. Sabbath or solo Ozzy?
Sabbath. But I bet there's some lovely grass in Riverdale Park whose growing I could listen to instead.

17. Did you know that filling out this survey makes you a music nerd?
No, it makes me look like my mum.

18. What was the greatest decade for music?
Easily 1790’s. Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn are active. Paganini debuts. The Beijing Opera is born, as is Rossini, Donizetti, and Schubert. And I just came.

19. What is your favourite movie soundtrack?
The Godfather, in terms of the cinematic experience. Though Run Lola Run is the only one I’ve ever bought, and I still listen to it seven years later. So there you are.

20. What would you be without music?
Inhuman. See Singing Neanderthals.

You know that I’m a wicked guy and I was born with a jealous mind

I have a feeling there are two kinds of jealousy, and one is normal; some visceral, animal emotion whence you get fucking pissed at the idea of your sweetie with someone else. And not just in some “I can’t trust you, adios” or “you slut, you’re going to give me a disease” type way either – I guess it amounts to possessiveness, the same anger one gets when a possession is stolen, even if it gets stolen by someone who can . . . uhm . . . make it happier . . . I don’t fucking know.

But there’s a second kind of jealousy – or maybe this second kind is just an intellectualization of the first, or maybe it isn’t jealousy at all. Which is, one can think the words or deeds of his* lover are calculated to make him viscerally, bestially jealous. And one associates, right or wrong, such provocation with insecurity; thinking a person who engages in it does so to get some visible, violent reassurance of importance, being too insecure to be convinced of this importance with tenderness - and hence is probably ultimately a shitty lover because confident tenderness is the tits. So the 'provoked' lover gets pissy, dissappointed, even exhausted.

Do you know what I mean? Is this actually jealousy or is there a better name for it? Anyways, I’m perturbed at the moment because I have a feeling some people who are dear to me are getting needlessly provoked into the second type of jealousy, and it’s wiping them out. I hate seeing people get wiped out by each other. It’s the worst non-traumatic emotion I can think of, hands down – fucking horrible – like a goddamn looooong T.S. Eliot poem minus the imagery. And it can last for months, years even, because it's not quite enough all at once to make you stop loving whoever and after awhile you figure it's just normal. But is it totally unrealistic not just to hope, but to expect our relationships would be more refreshing tham exhausting?

Figaro isn’t tiring or provoking yet. Although he did talk too long about how nice Maggie Cheung looked in her wardrobe from In the Mood for Love , which (though true) I resented after I made a specific effort to spare his feelings by not mentioning the dream I’d just had about getting magnificently plowed by Stéphane Rousseau**. But martyr complexes are a different issue altogether.



*Just let me use the masculine as generic, please, it’s easier.
** Neither Figaro nor Stéphane Rousseau read this blog.

Jeebusfuck, people.

As mentioned, if you Google "she was such a fine cocksucker", it leads straight to this site, which I proudly accept as a straight-up testimonial. However, today it has come to my attention, once more via Statcounter, that Googling "bittersweet and twee" also leads straight here, which I have a harder time with, as it's far too easy to imagine my oldest brother Magnum using exactly that phrase in a girly voice with a mime of lilac-sniffing light-heartedness to describe me.

Fack. What's bred in the bone will come out in the Google.

You roll over when I want more

Yesterday I made vegan cookies for Gigi. Although if I had my way I’d wander the earth baking cookies for everybody like Samuel L. Jackson at the end of Pulp Fiction, I didn’t do it out of pure altruism, nor out of a Malibu Stacy-esque desire to make cookies for the boys – hee hee hee hee! They were supposed to be payment for our first yoga lesson, supposedly in Lady’s building's gym supposedly with Lady. But Lady is a crackhead, which was disappointing.

So instead we went to Commensal, a vegetarian place off Bay. They charge you based on how much your plate weighs after you load up on the buffet, which is how I feel food should be priced – by the sheer quantity of kilos I’m about to noisily consume. And though I'm not a vegetarian, vegan, or anything else that will preclude me eating things that don’t make me die, Commensal serves things I’m occasionally willing to pay their inflated rates for. The slabs of firm tofu fried with ginger, for example, are fucking yums. Like sausage without any gross bits. They have an arame salad that is also fucking yums, and an avocado salad that's just - oof - so satisfying, in taste and texture. The sweets are also awfully good; I’m especially partial to their maple pie, but I’d eaten too much of the mains to be able to fit any into me.

So the complete blanket smoking ban everywhere that exists publicly indoors in Ontario enters into effect soon. I'm glad I've managed to stop already because it's been piss cold lately and I don't want to stay outside out of compulsion. Pope Urban VIII banned tobacco once upon a time. He said snuff was naughty because sneezing was so much like sexual ecstacy. I want to sneeze like Pope Urban VIII. Which reminds me, I've started reading The Great Transformation by former nun Karen Armstrong, and the first 30 pages of it are absorbing, even inspiring. I’ll write more about it when I’ve read more of it. Thank Jeebus there are only three days of work this week . . . work is so much worse than not-work.

Lovely Day

The gym has these amazing machines I love using, called “The Wave” (not to be confused with the Patti Smith album or the Canadian pop duo, neither of which I use) that give your booty just the most tremendous forward/lateral workout. I’d like to write that if I keep givin’er on them, my booty will be as huge and firm as the Wave Rock of Australia, but the Wave Rock is totally the wrong shape for booty. The Wave Rock is close to the Hippo’s Yawn; I believe neither of those is close to Ayers Rock, The Three Sisters, or the Olgas. Australia surely has a lot of rocks. Anyways, hopefully it will make my booty look like Ayers Rock. Except not red.

I also love the disc Opera Proibita, featuring Cecilia Bartoli. I do love her voice; I’d snuggle up with it by the fireplace, if I had a fireplace. The disc features 15 arias by Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel, and Antonio Caldara that were probably written in the opera-banning Rome of Clement XI (whence a series of jubilees, wars and earthquakes gave him an excuse to crack down on public sensuality in the first years of the 18th century). The reaction of composers and patrons (who were often rich church officials, because, you know, that’s us Catholics for you – while Tammy Faye weeps and wrings her hands, we turn hypocrisy into a fucking spectator sport) was to explore the oratorio for performance in private theatres.

Shocking sensuality burst through unplotted abstractions featuring characters like “Beauty”, “Pleasure” and “Pride” – at least, it sounds shockingly sensuous when Cecilia Bartoli sings it, and probably sounded shockingly sensuous at the time, as her parts would have been sung by castrati (thanks to another papal ban on women performing – God, those popes all needed a serious spanking), whose delivery systems must have been fucking incredible – a woman’s range with a man’s upper body – wow. Aside from how zany its history is and how beautiful Cecilia Bartoli’s voice always is, the music on the disc is lovely to hear – makes one think a little of Vivaldi, that same Baroque quality of seeming to instantly echo itself and the melody building out from the echoes, which intense coloratura vocal acrobatics make the voice do too. This shit is out of this world.

Finally, I love the Singing Neanderthals. In the body of the book, sometimes the text was a hard slog to read and it seemed like the author – indeed, the whole field of pre-historic anthropology – was pulling silly, subjective ideas out of someone’s ass, like the Sexy Hand Axe hypothesis. Sometimes what he wrote was super interesting in terms of the evolutionary history of music, like a physical, chemical description of how hominids with a sense of self and other (like us) use dancing and harmonizing to trust each other. And sometimes it was just plain super interesting, like a concise explanation of the necessity of emotion as a guide to action that must come before rationality - my analyst had been trying to convince me of that for months and it only sank in after I read it in SN last Tuesday. I’m dim. But then in the final chapters Mithen draws all the strings together and you understand Neanderthals in a whole new loving way. And you’re left with a burning regret that you’re never going to hear them sing. Delicious!

Dear YMCA of Greater Toronto:

I am going through trying times. You are really not helping.

The trying times are not so trying, not like Jeebus or Spartacus trying. So, fine, I've decided, I'll just have to live with them. Institute a good clean sensible regimen of cold showers, bike rides, Scrabble, wholesome foods and unsexy thoughts. But I'm getting pervy. And you, YMCA of Greater Toronto, are exacerbating this.

Like, while I'm at the gym on the rowing machine and pondering - I don't know - sunshine, what a poor job Yves Rocher did with my last snatchwax, the universality of the human drive to make music, if Po the Teletubby was Asian and that's why it was cutest, if I could ever sing as pretty as Nina Simone in a million years, dustbowl farming, the downward trajectory in the quality of Russell Crowe's performances since L. A. Confidential, springtime, and whether there's time for the sauna, I'll suddenly realize I've been thinking about all these things while staring unblinkingly at the crotch of the blonde guy using the free weights in front of me. I don't even like blonde men, they smell like ketchup. But there you are. Trying times.

Now, in your wisdom you have moved the rowing machines from the free-weight area to the machine area; in fact, you have put them right the fuck in front of the abdominal planks, which as any simpleton knows are the sexiest peice of equipment in the gym. First they attract exclusively men; second, exclusively super-fit men with already powerhouse abs that you just know would let them go for hours without even thinking about it, and third, exclusively uber-hot motherfuckers of men with the self-confidence to do really silly-looking exercises in front of a large exercise room full of people looking for visual distraction from thier physical pain.

I know the straight-to-gay man ratio at this YMCA is about 1:10. I don't care. You are still being utterly unsupportive of the trying times I am going through by subjecting me to this proximity to the abdominal planks while I use the rowing machine, which I must continue to do to help realize my fitness goal of being able to punch through a watermelon. Please move the rowing machines again, preferably to a place where the users face something unattractive, like the police precinct across the street or a wall with a picture of this on it.

Yours,

Mistress La Spliffe

Seeking: Attractive, talented Freemason, belonging to woman-friendly chapter

I’m thinking I might like to be a Freemason. Can anybody help me set that up? It’s not just about the symbols and handshakes. I believe in a Supreme Being and doing nice things in the name of nice friendly rationalism, and the Magic Flute rocks.

Yesterday I tried to figure out a retirement plan that would see me out comfortably until the age of 100, pffffffting as I did so. My family has lots of old people and there's been a couple of centegenarians, and I know medical science has advanced horribly and all, nonetheless I find it hard to believe I wouldn't die before that. I like naughty things too much. But just in case, I want the heroin to last right until the end.

You reckon it was hard for Bach to die? I bet it wasn't. It’s hard for me to listen to his music without thinking he had some sort of intimate sympathy with God’s will. More so than most people who write lovely music, even music I prefer. It’s like Bach just knew how the universe worked and was either able to explain it beautifully or else explained it because it was beautiful. Either way, I bet he had a nice attitude to all the things we don't know about and wasn't such a scaredy-cat.

Mmmmmm naked

I watched The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie yesterday as part of an ongoing book-and-film binge good bye to Muriel Spark, and as part of an ongoing effort to eat less reefer (it didn't seem like a very reefer-y movie), because even though it's so delicious I've been struck with a sudden paranoia my rates of consumption will make my babies have tails or be stupid.

It's weird to see beautiful naked people from the 60's. It's wierd enough to see beautiful people from the 60's on-screen when you know what they look like now - especially Jane Russell, I mean, that woman was HAWT, uber-hot, jaw-dropping hot (here's a bathtub picture because I'm so nice), and now she shows up on Italian television talkshows still looking remarkably good for her age, but - fack - I suppose when someone is as hot as Jane Russell I expect them to be a more than human, for that quantity of beauty to not be transient. There's something quite ass-backward about existence, but oh well.

Anyways, it's weird for me to see beautiful naked people from the 60's on-screen, as Pamela Franklin was in The PFMJB, and that must have been what sparked the dream I had that night about being one of Miss Brodie's students and attending a presentation/rally she'd organized in Edinburgh of the 1930's of Italian fascisti. Somehow there had been some misunderstanding and instead of the fascisti, a bunch of Australian Chippendales showed up and did their thing. Miss Brodie was perturbed but all of us thought it was pretty funny. It's nice to know my unconscious has a grasp of none-too-subtle literary subtleties.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Today is a proud, proud day.

First of all, I published a 400 circulation newsletter (almost) all by myself.

Second, I had a phone conversation with my sweetheart wherein I wanted to mention a clitoris, but was in the middle of my open plan office, and so got the point across instantly by using Toys'r'us as a euphemism.

Third, Google the phrase "She was such a fine cocksucker" and see where it takes you. Thank you, Statcounter.

More cookies

I'm trying to create (normal) vegan cookies for Gigi, which is going so-so. I eliminated milk from my recipes awhile ago, just because sometimes I can't be arsed to go out and buy milk, but I've been using an egg as a binder. Gigi suggested I use ground flax seeds instead, but I'd already been using flax in my normal cookie recipes because I'd discovered flax makes me higher faster when I add reefer. Which apparently EVERYBODY KNEW BUT ME, including J*Fish's girlf, who doesn't even like reefer.

Oh well, I love the thrill of discovery.

Anyways, experimentation made me realize I can probably use a puréed banana as a substitute for the egg, but this morning I only had one banana in the house and I needed to eat it instead of put it into the cookies for Gigi, because that's the kind of woman I am. So I used puréed rhubarb instead. As a substitute choice, that was completely arbitrary, except my mum makes a wicked rhubarb upside-down cake so I know it can be yummy. I'm going to see how they turned out now . . .

OH MY FUCK, it's fucking delicious. Ha! I'm shocked in an "I-knew-it" sort of way. And the fibre from the rhubarb makes it look like the cookie has little hairs after you take a bite, which is gross in a purposefully-gross-11-year-old's-Halloween-party kinda way. On it goes. The thrill of discovery once more, this time thanks to the fact one's friend has made the decision to stop eating anything that comes from something with a nervous system. Necessity is a motherfucker.

I admire Gigi for his decision to stop eating things with a - a face, let's say (because I bet he'd eat a Venus Flytrap if they tasted good, and those have something like a nervous system, right? Fuck, I'm ignorant.) Gigi and I used to binge on cheese and patés and what have you, so I'm sad I'm missing one of my animal-products binging partners, but, you know, good for him. I don't think I could ever do it, mostly because I don't think I would ever want to do it. Figaro claims he's vegetarian, but he's the sort of vegetarian who'll eat fish whenever and will order a big, juicy blue steak in a restaurant with a reputation for good, big, juicy blue steaks, which might not be the best kind of vegetarian, but is certainly my kind of vegetarian.

Aaaaaaaaahhh . . .

ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaa! It's a Gherkin! Foster's Gherkin! Foster's shiny Gherkin! Oh Jesus, this day has just got a whole lot brighter. MY GOD, THERE'S A GIANT SHINY GHERKIN ON THE STREETS OF LONDON!

(falls off chair and promises self to never eat magic cookies before work again)

A few points of business (one egregiously and personally bitter*):

1. Yesterday I had to pay two dollars for a pound of rhubarb at a farmer's market. This is bullshit. Rhubarb is a weed; organic or not, it's worth its weight in piss, no more. That sort of egregious overcharging is what's letting supermarket chains take over the organics market. Remember, it's not just what the market will bear; it's what the market thinks isn't fucking pseudo-hippie bullshit.

2. There is a cost-benefit analysis involved in the choice between friendship or walking away at the end of an affair. The friendship of ex . . . uhm . . . whatevers can be beautiful, but walking away lets a person deal with any issues arising from the affair alone. Choosing friendship means dealing with these issues together, which may well be impossible unless friendship was the strongest feeling throughout the affair. Because the end an affair, however inevitable, is a disappointing admission that a special brand of intimacy won’t happen in the case, and it takes understanding and respect for people to help each other get beyond that that.

Sometimes it’s MANIFEST that it’s not worth dealing with that disappointment à deux. For example: people who fuck through their inability to understand or respect each other. When the fucking ends, they must face the fact that the other person is a tedious choice to spend time with compared to all the other people available. That realization may be a reason one realizes the above-mentioned special brand of intimacy isn’t worth it and ends the affair. In such a case, the other person may feel shame - not only over repeated coitus and the hope for a special brand of intimacy with someone they can’t understand or respect, but also over rejection by someone they thought they were slumming with, and shame over the ignobility of thoughts about ‘slumming’ . . . eesh. Issues best dealt with alone, in short, or possibly with a Jungian analyst.

So one runs a cost/benefit analysis:

Cost: Accepting disappointment attendant on seeing putative friend without fucking/wanting to fuck them - and leave us not forget explaining the ongoing presence of putative friend who has made you come to one's present lover

Benefit: The continued presence of putative friend’s good qualities in one’s life - conversation, cooking, grossly intimate/hilarious flirtation, et cetera

Analysis: If you’re a twitchy prat who bored me when we weren’t fucking and then rejected me, we won't be friends no matter how much I get over it or how many times you request me to get over it. It isn’t rocket science, so please leave me be. It's been more than a year now that I've been acting as politely as possible like you should fuck off and die, and now you've made me be rude on a semi-public forum. Kudos.

3. Advertising is fucked and soul-destroying - here's interesting evidence to that effect - and writing about it pays shit. I need a new job that pays much, much better. If anyone knows of one - anywhere, especially somewhere my sweetheart and I are both legally entitled to live, tell me, like, yesterday, please.

* The rhubarb, obviously.

Life without napping

My family likes drinking and napping. Me, I like drinking but I’m not so hot at the napping. I’d love to be – the ability to catnip is an indicator of personal greatness – but I’m not. Anyways, this past weekend, spent almost exclusively with my family, meant I was at loose ends while people took their nap shifts. So outside of food preparation (I reccommend everyone use more coriander in garden salads, ça marche super-bien!), I managed to read In Evil Hour, which I think is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s first novel.

It’s been two or three years since the last time I re-read the sheer fucking treat for the inward eye, ear, nose and mouth that is One Hundred Years of Solitude, which In Evil Hour seems to prelude into a bit – it mentions the town of Macondo a few times, as well as the gypsy whose name starts with M that I’ve forgotten already. But I do know In Evil Hour has a different feel altogether. OHYOS is hardly feel-good, but it doesn’t have the same vein of edgy creepiness that runs through In Evil Hour where just enough about the town it’s set in is left undefined – juuuust enough – that it almost makes one nauseous.

As I was reading it, a niece who was being bored shitless by her stupid homework asked me what I was reading. I told her, and when she crinkled her wee brows over the author's name, pointed out that it was a Latin American book, to which she asked if Latin American books were different from English books, which is just such a great question. It’s an obvious yes, but so yummy to think about why and how. I’ve only read a handful of Latin American authors – just Paolo Coelho, and then from him only The Alchemist (I know you’re a fan, Lady, I should borrow some), Isabel Allende (who was buggered for me so bad by all the film adaptations that I stopped after The Infinite Plan - I should start again now that all the new films coming out are based on true stories and older films), Laura Esquivel (and by the end of Like Water for Chocolate, I’d had enough for a little while) and – oh man – you know, that’s it, besides all the Gabriel Garcia Marquez I could lay my hands on. So I suppose this is a call for recommendations.

Anyways, people used the term magic realism once upon a time to describe authors like the above – I’m not sure that terms gets across what I get from them, but I’m not sure I can think of an alternative. The way detail is laid out in their books seems, at first, so fucky to someone with a reading background like mine, but then after ten pages it makes perfect sense and any other way seems cumbersome. If you think about, say, the way Fermina in Love in the Time of Cholera flip-flopped over how she felt about eggplant, it tells you more about her calm marriage than Ellen’s descriptive passages in Wuthering Heights about Catherine Earnshaw’s calm marriage to Edgar. Not to say I don’t love Wuthering Heights, but jumping straight from LINTOC to Wuthering Heights might hurt it for me and I don't think the reverse is true.

Long story short, the Latin American lit I’ve read is so yummy it makes me want to learn Portugese and move to Brazil with Lady. I brought up Brazil with Figaro a couple of days ago. He started laughing, but in an “I’m thinking about it” kind of way.

Good morning little sunbeams

On Saturday night, to initiate Mother's Day celebrations, I took my mum and dad to Roy Thomson Hall to see a casual TSO performance, which means the orchestra was dressed in white and blue shirts and khaki pants instead of black. That gave me a moment of pause, wondering about when orchestras started wearing black. Do you fancy it was from when they were all in a pit during ballets and rubbish and didn't want anybody to see them? Or even when they're on stage they don't want you to notice them and just pay attention to the music? Or possibly to the soloists' very attractive dresses? I don't know.

Anyways, we missed the first two things, which was a bitch, because my mum is a violist and there was Teng Li doing some crazy beautiful Mozart sinfonia, which we only sort of heard while we waited for applause from the vestibule so we could get our seats. But we did hear - from spectacular seats in the first balcony, which is lovely in lovely Roy Thomson Hall - Haydn's 100th Symphony and the overture to the Thieving Magpie from Rossini. I've never jizzed my pants over Haydn but I was so impressed by all the percussion in the 100th on Saturday. It was pretty hot. So funny now with a modern ear to hear percussion not as a throbbing underlying beat but as a melodic section that can turn into and out of something throbbing and underlying - honestly, it was hot. Not hot like "good", but hot like "Haydn must have been a beast in the sack."

As for Rossini - I have jizzed my pants over Rossini. Love him - he and mushrooms made me love opera, but I bet he could have done it alone, which is something because my other druggy musical fondnesses like speed and jungle or reefer and Captain Beefheart really need the drugs. Anyways, I've resigned myself to maudlin tears at most operatic performances, drugged or not, because my brain doesn't know what to do with that much beauty, but I don't cry at symphonies. Just sort of bop my head and quash the urge to "dum-dum-dum-dum" along. But mum was a veritable fountain of tears. That woman - when she goes to see nice symphonies, which tend to be more economical than operas, it must be like being on mushrooms. Lucky. Anyhoo, it was worth crying over - a really tight, almost tense performance of the overture - way better than any recording I've ever heard of it. And once more, HOT percussion.

Yaaaaay.

Fucking hell, another work week.

Cookies

Yesterday I made "work-grade' reefer cookies in a bid to find the right blend that will let me smile my way through the wicked 7.5 hours. Half my mind was on the inevitable day (which I estimate to be five years away in Canada, but I'm an optimist) when it's legalized and I can sit around baking cookies for a living. Imagine.

Oh hell, I got no business plan, I just want to combine my twin loves of reefer and cookies RIGHT NOW. Anyways, the molasses is getting a little too pervasive in the recipes. That having been said, last night's batch left me smiling - maybe a mite too tight for work - and with that desperately creative "oh my god I have soooo much to tell the world and I have to write it down before I forget it" rush one gets for the first couple of years one smokes reefer - like Paul McCartney scribbling down "everything is a circle" or something and giving it to that cabbie - ah, Cali, ask Mr. S what is was, my memory is shot.

I'm not very special.

Yesterday two separate boyyyyyyyys- neither of them Figaro, he's too old for such shit (please?) at the ripe age of 32 - aired with me exactly the same manner of complaint I'd spent the evening before hashing out with my analyst. Synchronic? I'm doubting it - I think we're just going through a FRESH NEW BATCH OF GENERATIONAL ANGST. OH, JESUS PRESERVE US. At least we're not spotty this time. I'm going to write it down on the off chance there's anybody else of a similar generational angst reading. About me, evidently, wouldn't be apropos to write about the boys, though their angst was rather more interesting.

Having a horrible time imagining writing for an industry magazine for a living for much longer, let alone more than much longer. It doesn’t pay enough and it feels parasitically propagandist. Propaganda has its place, but if God swept everybody in this industry off the face of the Earth it might well be an immediate overall improvement in our race’s quality of life - so its place isn't here. Feeling non-parasitic was one of the good points of teaching and I think it’s a good third of the attraction I feel to analysis as a profession. Thing is, analyst school is expensive and I'd want to not work for the first two years of it, I really only want to work a three day week right now so I can write more, and I combine these factors with an equally lazy lover (and I don’t want him to change), a biological nudge to pass on my spectacular genes to things I can afford to cosset and put through university, and the twin but conflicting needs of wanting to see everything in the world but wanting a settled life with my loved ones around me.

My analyst told me to deal with my present feelings of relative uselessness, parasitism, and worrying that I'm letting my life be organized around another person by setting marker days - a day a realistic amount of time away - not a necessarily a deadline, but a do-things-day. It helps to have a day. To know, for example, when you're going to leave your propaganda-ass job. It also helps to have a plan C - most of us have plan A and B at best. Yesterday I spent some cookie-time thinking all the way up to plan E, which is Mongolia. Wow. Mongolia.

Don't cry for me, Argentina

But hay fever has taken me and broken me. I’m home sick today, which means working on actual fun writing projects, but first. . . oatmeal reefer cookies!!!!!! Yaaaaaay!!! I was in the mood for something heavy and low-fat, so here’s what I came up with:

½ cup bourbon
2 tablespoons strong reefer butter
3 tablespoons maple syrup

Heated to liquid, no more, together, und dahn . . .

¾ cup oats
¼ milled flax seeds

mixed in along with enough flour to make it a slightly crumbly paste, und dahn quickly mixed in

1 beaten egg
1 tablespoon fresh chopped ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon

before the egg set in the warmish paste.

Then I rolled it into 7 cookie balls and roasted it at 350 degrees farenheit for 10 minutes.

The verdict - I don't know what I was thinking with the bourbon, even after they cool you can still inhale it off them, which makes them a tad formaldehyde-y. I reccommend adjusting the recipe to put 1/3 cup milk and some vanilla exract in instead, and have a shot of bourbon on the side to warm up your tummy. Otherwise the taste is good – for those who are sweeter of tooth I recommend a powdering of icing sugar. These cookies would taste good chocolate chipped, too, although in that case you’d have to dice up the ginger finer than I’m prepared to. They’d also be good with chopped bananas mixed into the batter. In terms of height, I’m sailing lightly and buzzing nice and warm through my hay fever after two, but that might be because I’m not at work.

***Update***

Three cookies, 2.5 hours in, and I am fucking giggly. Might not feel good as the flapjacks, but it's funnier. This, for example (despite the fact that I'm much more of a pig than most of the men I know - yes, I am, believe me) made me choke with laughter.

***End Update***

Time for pretty:

“Sometimes my works look very childish, or childlike, schizophrenic or stupid, you know. But that was the good thing for me. Because, for me, the material is the paint itself. The paint expresses itself. In the mass of paint, I find my imagination and go on to paint it.”

I love when painters talk in a way that isn’t up their bums. And I love Karel Appel, who died on the third. He was in an art movement called Cobra, how fucking cute is that? It was a sort of half-assed cool-assed acronym of Copenhagen . . . uhm . . . Brussels? . . . and Amsterdam - I think - that the people in it came from. You can see some of his paintings here, and here are some to pretty up this page:

The pimp and the gimp and the guy with the limp says babe, I'm on fire

Dear Hot Mathematician:

You, who leave the country Friday, called me and didn't leave a message. I know it was you because I 411ed the number from my call log and it's your parents. So there you are. It's good that you didn't leave a message because if you're jumpy enough to not leave a message you've probably thought dirty about me, and I'm not thinking dirty about you. I'm soooo not. Anyways, it's also good you didn't leave a message because I'm pissed off you didn't leave a message, which means even if I haven't thought dirty about you I'm still dirty inside.

Yours,

Mistress La Spliffe

Moving along . . . yesterday the National Post published a hilarious opinion peice about how Hollywood is demonizing the free market by releasing films like Syriana, Alien, and - uhm - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. No wonder this rag has to advertise itself as 'the newest national newspaper' in Canada - all the other superlatives that apply wouldn't look so appealing.

Films like Syriana, Alien and - uhm - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are the free market at work, Hollywood's economics are hardly a shining example of commie financial selflessness, and maybe the reason capitalism works as well as it does in countries like mine is the ability to share critical points of view, giving Adam Smith's magical 'free hand' a little more information to work with. All of that is obvious, super obvious, uber obvious, but - have you noticed? The Western right wing is getting so fractured these days that nobody knows what a really right-wing populist stance is anymore. So the National Post digs up the bones of the Hollywood Commie card, Bill O'Reilly has to conduct polls on aspects of subtle, divisive problems like immigration and big business to know which way to rant to maintain the largest possible market share, and Liberal-baiters struggle to straddle both sides of the U.S. port security question.

I'm not gloating or anything - more complaining - Western left-wing media is equally divided, messy, and twirling in circles trying to find the most popular line, and I'm really tired of it. In my head, populism is for second-string politicians, not the press; I want the press to lead us, to suggest things to us, just possibly educate us, not regurgitate our own prejudices and spoon-feed them to us.

Pardon my bitchery, but I have to read several newspapers and magazines a day at work and they're almost all rubbish, which makes my day a little longer. On the bright side, reading the Economist has become like drinking a good G&T after five or six nasty aspartame-laced sodas. They have some sort of central premise about a universally informed, universally free market being a good thing, and whether or not one agrees one can at least appreciate the thrust of thier nice snarky broad reporting from there.

The most beautiful man in the world

Just now I’ve caught myself writing some very descriptive prose about romance which is so personal it doesn’t even interest me. Time for me to roll with it a little more; love is love and it’s fucking funny, basta. Funny. I blame the Victorians; before them we could laugh our asses off about love, I bet. I’m going to laugh at it now. But before I do, let me tell you about something nicer than the gap between morality, emotion, and my snatch; about something Lady reminded me of last night when we were explaining to each other why we needed to move to Brazil. About an old student of mine, from the first year in Paris. About Reinaldo de Souza, the most beautiful man in the world.

Reinaldo was angelic - the adjective is used advisedly. Not even the men in our mutual acquaintance could deny this, though they did laugh at the way the women’s mouths hit the floor when they realized what they were looking at. I can’t imagine how a man would feel if his girlf or wife left him for Reinaldo de Souza – horrible as anything, I suppose, but at least they would understand. Because let me put it like this – if a man ever dumps me for Monica Bellucci, I’ll understand. But Reinaldo de Souza made Monica Bellucci look like a perfume counter lady. Reinaldo de Souza was GOLD. Looking at him made you feel like your eyeballs were being gently massaged and fed Fazer milk chocolate. He made you feel the voice of a Farinelli or the violin of a Paganini had somehow been translated into flesh, into the form of this bewildering cabaret dancer.

What can I say about Reinaldo de Souza’s body, except that I remember every bit my eyes were lucky enough to be seared by in vivid detail. It was, I think, the prettiest flower in God’s garden. Except his face may have been even more beautiful; it was this perfect Brazilian cocktail of everything most lovely from every continent man has settled. I could have surfed the planes of that face for years, and even as one admired the blameless slopes under the gentle bloom of youth one knew that in 50 or 60 years that would still be a face only a psychopath could ever say no to. The whole thing was topped with darling dredlocks, quite fine, this touch of long scruffy cuteness on top of a divine corporeal package; a tacit message: “not only am I physically perfect, I’ll smoke reefer with you too!”

At this point I should have been drifting away into some fantastical, rather filthy dreamworld every time I saw him, but I couldn’t. I have never drifted into a filthy, fantastical dreamworld thinking of Reinaldo de Souza, because Reinaldo de Souza’s eyes, even in memory, bind one hard and taut to the moment. They were like – similes, where are you? Like two liquid pools of jade, like deep polished liquorice, like the warm hand of a saint, like the benediction of a loving God, like a little prayer, I’m down on my knees, you know you take me there . . . Okay. I know I sound a little silly. The thing is he really was that beautiful. It’s not as though his memory is idealized with emotion; I didn’t even have a crush on him, properly speaking. Having a crush requires greater self-consciousness than I could maintain in Reinaldo de Souza's presence – all I could do was bask mindlessly in the sheer summery beauty of his aspect.

The organization of the school where I was working meant the students were taught by multiple teachers in a month; I remember other teachers actually changed thier scheduals to give me thier classes with him because they couldn’t concentrate on the lessons when he was there, staring up with those indescribable eyes, a baffled little grin playing across that matchless face . . . I taught fine while he was there. I taught fine because the left and right globes of my brain would look up, see him standing there, and go their separate ways; my left brain would start spewing out the standard doggerel about the pretorate and my right brain would go gawwwwwww. He wasn’t a bad student though he usually showed up late and his attendance was notoriously bad – he did show up for every class we were scheduled to have together. I’m sure it’s because I was the only teacher in the school who could manage to string together coherent sentences while he stared anxiously up, a splendid little furrow in those splendid leonine brows as he struggled to understand . . . He was a complete beginner but he tried pretty hard, I think. God, when his darling, dear eyes would light up when he answered a question right – yeah, it was a problem to not just keel into those paradisiacal arms and curl up helplessly against him. But . . . yeah. . . I probably should have, in retrospect. Hindsight’s 20/20, yes? Anyways . . .

His French was also weak, I don’t think he’d been in Paris for too long. So I have no idea if Reinaldo de Souza was a nice man or not, because he was so fricking fucking frigging beautiful that you understood why the adjective shared a root word with ‘beatified’. He seemed really nice. He seemed like the sort of God-sent flawless man any woman in the world would marry and stay with for 60 years in a heartbeat. One felt this was the doting and rock-like man you wanted crying at your side as you lay on your deathbed, surrounded by the loving faces of the ten or eleven children you’d made together, and surrounded again by legions of perfect, biologically unstoppable grandchildren and great grandchildren. Oh Reinaldo . . . he was . . . just . . . Reinaldo.

Gentle readers, as you go through your day and annoyances rear their ugly heads, call up a memory of some event, person or thing of a beauty that can transcend any banality. For some, it’s the sun setting over Venice; for others, music that lifts them beyond themselves; for me, it’s Reinaldo de Souza’s smile. Oh Reinaldo de Souza. It’s been almost as long as I’ve loved men that I’ve realized Love isn’t blind so much as She has a sense of humour that likes to throw you for a loop sometimes, and that conventional beauty isn’t even a quarter of real attraction. And I’ve loved other men far, far more with my head, heart, and snatch - but you, Reinaldo; I loved you right from my ovaie.

I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf

Dear Couples:

I've been told that bickering is an inevitable symptom of an established, comfortable relationship; just one of those degenerations that come with time like a flabby midriff or nostalgia for pop music that was already shitty the first time around. And that's fine. Maybe if I had bickered with my men more, our communication would have been better and the relationships wouldn't have ended in the somehow anticlimactic freakshows they did. So good. Good for you for communicating. That's well done.

Sadly, when you bicker in front of me, and I am a captive audience who can't get away from your established, comfortable communication, I'm not thinking what a healthy relationship you have, I'm thinking of what a massive dick you sound. I'm thinking, "My god, how can he/she be such a bitch that he/she is willing to belittle his/her lover in public like this?" Or "holy FUCK, is he/she still talking about THAT? How is it possible to be that fucking petty?" Or "sweet Jesus, is he/she trying to make him/her angry and jealous on purpose? What the hell?"

What I'm trying to say is that when you bicker publicly, you're turning your absolute worst face to the world; your arrogant, insecure, vicious, angry, nasty face. Now, I can see that perhaps you'd want to avoid hypocrisy, and think perhaps that if you bicker privately it's only reasonable to bicker publicly as well. So good. Good for you for avoiding hypocrisy. That's well done. But as you bicker in front of me, I'd like you to bear three things in mind:

1. I'm finding out uncomfortable things about your personality that I'm not going to forget as soon as you stop bickering.

2. I'm blow-my-own-head-off bored and wishing to Jeebus there was someone, anyone else in the captive situation to talk to. Anyone. I'd fucking take Bill O'Fucking Reilly.

3. And finally, just - fucking - once a week or something, get a little outside of yourself while you bicker and ask yourself if these are things you'd say or ways you'd act towards your worst fucking enemy. I don't know if that would stop you from bickering but it might help you appreciate your lover a little more.

Yours,

Mistress La Spliffe

You went to school to learn what you never never knew before

I've realized my last text post could appear slighting to mathematicians, which wasn't what I wanted to be. Almost any group suffers in comparison to a dorm full of Italian sophomore engineering boys when you're Mistress La Spliffe. Mathematicians are just great. They're fascinating bastards who absorb and regurgitate information in a way I really appreciate. The males stare at my tits as helplessly as 13 year olds . . . but then, so do dorms full of Italian sophomore engineering boys.

I met one lovely mathematician who I certainly would have tried to pants if pantsing non-Figaros was my current idiom. I could have listened to his little stories about stealing fruit in Berkeley and cocaine-saturated logic rogues for hours, and the distribution of the hair on the back of his arms was eerily hypnotic - that kind of hot. He could also make me understand things about math, which is good because I can't count to seven ordinarily. Anyways, I'm having dinner with him later this week so if anyone is still interested in scoring a mathematician I'll try to shorten the degrees of seperation.

Not much else to tell you. I wanted to stay longer in Montréal, hadn't been back there - that I remember, anyways - since the Swiss left, which SO isn't fair to Montréal, especially when I consider how much better I liked Paris sans his company. The city is cute in its Olde Worlde Ghettoe sort of way, and people are better looking there. The food was great, the wedding was gorgeous, and seeing my high school clique again, mostly in a good space, was lovely. Now I must fix that problem I've been having with not being stoned. Ciao!

I want one!

Look how pretty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can read about them here.

Taking one for the team

L’histoire de Melody Nelson arrived chez Figaro yesterday, as he told me in the following words: “Yeah, so, I got your Cameltoe Classics CD.” That does look quite vicious, doesn’t it?









I need a haircut, I’m starting to look like an Old Man of the Andes. Also this will be the one that finally cuts out the tiny remnants of a crap streak job a well-meaning retard gave me before I started my master’s in 2003, and which a series of hairdressers has tried to mask since. 2003, bitches. My god my god my god. If time seems to spin wildly backwards over a series of bewildering events when I’m 27, I’ll be completely barking mad by the time I hit menopause.

Anyways, I’d get a haircut today but I’m going to Montréal after work for Miss T’s wedding. Everybody is getting married or pregnant these days, it’s like cholera. J*Fish just got word from an ex that she is heavy with child. I remember the first time one of my exes had a baby. I soooo knew he was going to have the baby, and I knew he’d have it the 12 months after I left town forever that he did. It made me feel a little funny, though. A rather shameful cocktail of ‘thank god we used protection’ and ‘oh, er, technically don’t his balls belong to me? Shouldn’t he have asked permission?’

Anyways again, this is Miss T’s wedding, the one with all the mathematicians. When I went to her shower a month or so ago it was proclaimed to the room that as the only unambiguously single female guest, and one Miss T, at least, knew parts of the checkered sexual history of, I was going to have to single-handedly marathon circle-jerk the hordes of single mathematicians in attendance, or something – the women making such statements were quite prim, some religious, so it was more words to that effect. No longer being unambiguously single aside, it wasn't cool . . . so I must give this advice to any unslutty ladies reading this blog.

Please don’t let that needling inner voice that wonders if you’ve missed out by never being loose lure you into entertaining abstract Miller-esque grandiosities about sluttery. Honestly, there is an element of personal choice involved. Women who like fucking around when they're single aren’t giant voracious snatches going through life in a perpetual state of moist readiness, and it isn't reasonable to assume they're going to jump into every high-density-of-single-man situation with open legs and a lasso. An Italian sophomore engineering boy’s dorm, maybe; a party of single Canadian mathematicians in their late 20’s, less so. Women who sleep with anything aren’t sluts, they’re dealing with some sort of complex. Just as you may well be if you espouse the bizarre belief that the percentage of the female population easily identified as sluts is endlessly occupied by finding strategies to fuck their indiscriminate ways through the mindless miasma of their own uncontrollable lust.

Whew, I feel better now.

My darling, I can't get enough of your love

Oh, bring my baby back to me . . . I’m bluer than blue can be and though experiments in flapjackery set my mood right for awhile, their reefer butter has made the past two days catastrophes of hovering up every scrap of the delicious food that crossed my path and viewing the world from the interior of a calm, lazy, pretty glass box. Yesterday I burst into an uncontrollable giggling fit that ended in a wheezing fit of choking in front of the company director when I found this little exchange. You know how I feel about Noam Chomsky so it came very close to killing me, getting me fired, and making me pee myself all at the same time. Multi-tasking.

I’m trying to rabidly dislike Noam Chomsky less. Figaro is a fan – ah, you know, I’d promised myself to not waste vacation time arguing about something we evidently inextricably disagree on, but you know what happens when you get an Aries and a Sagittarian into a political discussion in a galley kitchen after they smoke hydro. More importantly, though, since people generally disagree about things even if they adore each other and that’s fine, is that the lovely book I’m wrapped up in now, the Singing Neanderthals, mentions Chomsky’s linguistic ideas calmly and undismissively, which is making me think I should look at them more and not just be pissed off by what a dick he is. The more I read this Mithen book the more enchanted I am. I'm glad I only got it after going on a little psycho-linguists kick to help put all the terms into context but everybody would like it, I bet. Particularly if thier short term memory is uninhibited.

Last night I talked to my analyst about how I might want to be an analyst, which hadn’t come up over the twelve sessions preceding last night or on the sheet he’d had me fill out at the beginning of analysis about why I wanted to be in analysis. He didn’t give me shit about not telling him, though he did write it down in his little book and say 'Fair enough', which is one of those phrases that can mean anything from smothered rage to pleased indifference. While I won’t tell you the rather startling conclusions we came to about it, I’ll tell you we discussed a dream that had me as part of a band of mindless vampires armed with acid-filled waterguns on the prowl through an old warehouse, stalking two men who turned out to be Trey Parker and Matt Stone. When I realized it was them we were hunting to the death, I threw myself between them and the guns, and then in the next scene I was being baptized by a street-cleaner in a hospital bed. All good fun.

I’ve got class coming out of me arse, mate

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Rodelinda

She came for lunch with her young man. Both lovely examples of humanity. She brought me these. And she brought me these. Neither is available in Canada.

The chocolate-covered ones are already gone - the Muscles from Brussels in the cubicle next door helped, but mostly it was me. And I'm not even nearly sorry. Except there aren't anymore. I'm going to eat the plain ones tomorrow. Or now? Tomorrow? Now? I feel like Faye Dunaway at the end of Chinatown.

Maybe I should bring them to Luke Duke's house tonight . . . but I'm bringing him those yummy bagels from Ottawa . . . yes, I think it's safe to say they're all mine, the pretties . . . I'll share them with the Muscles again so I don't feel too greedy.

Mmmmmmmmm.

Mmmmmmmmm.

I'll give up refined sugar tomorrow.

(10 minutes pass. Mistress La Spliffe falls on her knees.)

"Dear Jeebus, please help me. I am full of sugar and ginger from Marks and Spencers and work is going to last for another hour. Please pull the fire alarm so I can leave and have a little bike ride, or run around the block, or coitus with a lazy man, or SOMETHING.

Jeebus?

Jeebus? I'm twitching!"

Pure synchronicity

Last night I heard out of the blue from Sam Craig's mum after posting his picture, and it was his six-month birthday. It's nice to know my unconscious can remember people's birthdays, even if my brain can't. Also nice to know Sam Craig is on the opposite end of the astrological spectrum from the Swiss - can't help but be good news.

Lady was writing some about how people who think she's silly for her affinity for astrology should stick thier arms up their bums. I stare at the night sky and am awed and enchanted by the vast indifference of it all, so I guess I should take a cue from that guy in Pink Flamingos and start practicing opening my asshole before I FINALLY see her Thursday. Although I do pay attention to astrology, less in terms of what I should do and more in terms of who people are. I once thought that the time of year you're born would impact your personality from the amount of time your mum spent dressing you and walking you and shit, but then I realized Figaro, the classiest of Aries, had opposite seasons in the moon-man country he comes from. So now I say we all have obvious personality elements of all the sun signs, and paying attention to astrology helps me notice them and divergences from them, and anything that can help me figure out the people around me is a Very Good Thing.

Anyways, felt a damn pronounced sort of mood indigo last night, missed my baby so bad, and it was getting to the point of that awful tinny fatigue of real depression, so I decided to fight back with getting rid of the refined sugar. It hurts, because I love refined sugar. But there’s one thing I love more than refined sugar besides reefer and sex and the people I love and truth and justice and fried food. And that, sweethearts, is maple syrup. So I did my laundry and invented a new flapjack recipe.

1.5 cup rolled oats
3 tablespoons milled flaxseeds
3 tablespoons poppyseeds

2 pears – the funny crispy juicy ones the Korean sells - neutered, peeled, and chopped up
1 cup chopped dried apricots

2 tablespoons runny honey
6 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons strong reefer butter

Mixed all the ingredients over low heat on the stove, patted them into a 7 X 7 inch baking tray, and baked them at 320F for 20 minutes. Cut them into bars, smoked a bowl, ate, and started a book called The Singing Neanderthals. Felt better. In fact, felt bathed in the warm and loving light of existence. Those are some happy fucking flapjacks, though I should have chopped the fruit finer and I reckon some nice chopped almonds would be good for those who aren’t allergic. And the Singing Neanderthals is interesting enough to warrant its own entry some day. I am going to start speaking to people again today.

Ohhhhh, Rodelinda is coming to the office for lunch, that'll be nice - goodness knows when I'll get back to Oxford to see her. Rodelinda is sweet in many ways, but one of the sweetest is the way she laughs at me when I talk about boys. Most people laugh at my cynicism, but she laughs at me when I get all soft, and, as a classic Sagittarius, I respond well to being laughed at.

Cute days have tracked us down

To all of those who know him, or will soon, look at adorable . . . uhm, if he's old enough to appear in a blog he's old enough to have a pseudonym - Sam Craig, the offspring of Mme. and M. C. of Kanata, lolling on the lap of one of her mother's I-drank-so-much-last-night-I'm-still-drunk-and-this-baby-on-my-lap-knows-it friends (me). He's a great baby.

The photo was taken chez Blonde Bitch, with whom I had a really cute day zipping around on her motor scooter and being attacked by her two gorgeous cats, one of whom was such a sweet little kitten I could have fainted, and this thing refuses to let me upload the other pictures, either of the motor scooter or the kitten.

Boooooooo. Blonde Bitch is so good at sending photos and I'm so crap at knowing what to do with them. At least you all get to see Sam Craig.

All they do is smell bad and smoke pot

Little to say this morning. Long-haul buses suck and Northern Ontario is beautiful, in about the same proportion.

Being involved with a person is scary because it makes you stare hard at the future. When you hear the word 'indefinitely', or think it, and it all seems so long - not to be together, not to love each other, but to colloborate when you've never colloborated with anybody for more than a couple years. But then, also irresistibly exciting.

And this morning's fruit smoothie has been made with flax seeds instead of bourbon; I'm out of ginger so it tastes like some sort of hippie peanut butter. Grr. The Red Dragon is gone so there's no power to my annoyance.

Oh. Today is May Day, that big old Commie holiday, and also the birthday of the Swiss, which alway struck me as hilarious since he was the last of the McCarthyites. Memories of him make me nervous - not because of all the ways he swore he'd kill me, I could take the bandy-legged little fucker, but what great evidence he is of how I don't know how to choose'em.

Oh Great Communist Overlord in the Sky, make me smart and clever this year . . . Have a nice week my doves!

North Bay is strange

Still home, not for much longer. I think four days is the optimum here - not too much, not too little. Anyhoo. North Bay is strange. I went out with my brother last night, met his much nicer new girlfriend and his crazy but funny neighbour who told some quaint old off-colour jokes. Then I woke up super early still kinda drunk in my brother's motorcycle room, went to Twiggs with him on his way to the firehall, and went home.

North Bay is strange. North Bay is a troggy Dundas and Jarvis with a low enough population density and high enough purchasing power that people don't shoot each other. And then the 5% of the population that isn't troggy has the room to breathe, and the landscape is breathtaking. Still. People fucking gossip. Trogs or not. They talk about each other here. They talk. They invent the wildest rumours. I had a safe childhood here but I don't think I could do North Bay to a child . . . I don't know . . . I don't know what kind of mother I'd be . . . I think I need lots of money so I can buy the fruit of my loins a much nicer woman from the Philippines to take care of it. My point is, North Bay is strange.

Quick plug - James Sroga, an amiable and adorable punk from my highschool, has a tattoo parlour in the arcade between Main and Oak. If you're ever passing through North Bay, don't omit to have him physically manipulate you somehow.

The Red Dragon flies away home

Still a raging bitch - but a raging bitch sharing body space with the loving daughter of the best parents ever to spring one from the loins. Home again, home again, et cetera. It's good. My mum is also home again, home again after three weeks with her parents in England. I try to avoid talking about my personal life here, let alone my parents', but I'll say nonetheless the way they're happy to see each other after a three week seperation after a kazillion years of marriage is something fucking enviable. And I adore them. I'm the luckiest daughter in the world.

Moving on. It's Carmen's birthday tomorrow, and I just found out about it today, and she's going to Romania on Monday. I suck. Amazon, don't fail me now! Carmen, if my naughty language hasn't got you off this blog, just know I'm thinking about you and wishing you the best for the next year. Better than the best. The uber-best.

Moving on some more. Last night at the new opera house was enchanting, they did fun acoustic experiments and it's lovely, fucking lovely. Like a space ship! Except cooler! You can hear a goddamn pin drop on stage. Not to mention "Les tringles de Sistre tintaient". Eeeeeeeee! I'm already jizzing over the next season. Then I met Gigi's new boyfriend, who is damn easy on the eyes and sweet to boot. A little tense to meet me, I think - not me personally, but Gigi's acquaintance in a general sense. He'll do nicely.

And here I am. Happy. Still missing my baby, but the way I feel about him is a part of me now, and not something to make myself upset over. It's better than not missing him, let's put it like that. Now if you'll excuse me, my parents have TV, so while I wait for a massive Calabrian dinner I'm going to have yet another emotional reunion, this time with Jon Stewart.

Oh Jonnnnnnnn . . .

The Red Dragon, she wail and she moan

Yesterday was a hard, vicious ass-pounding, and not in a fun way. By the end of it, I could have punched Kirk Douglas in the face even if he was dressed up as Spartacus. To shake it off I’m going to write my first journally entry.

I had a lousy bullshit dream about Paris - felt like I was walking through molasses outside of Marx Dormoy, everything was far apart and I knew the Swiss wasn’t far off. It made me wake up early, so I called Figaro, but he didn’t answer, which turned everything pigshitty. I made some yummy organic Fair Trade espresso and a delicious smoothie with carrots, bananas, ginger, orange, ice cubes and a touch of bourbon – that wasn’t pigshitty – but then I had to do lots of washing up, which was, and then I was running late, and had shit-all time at the gym, where the fucking rowing machine foot-straps kept going loose.

Sooooo . . . I went to work and realized I’d got fleeced for next season’s opera, uhm, abbonement, whatever you say in English, because Gigi and I are still under 29. I called to bitch, and it took them FOREVER to answer the phone and fix things. Lunch was late because I had to take care of the fucking phones, fielding calls from fucking pricks.

But then Figaro called and everything was great for the 20 minutes I was talking to him. Except he explained jet lag had kept him in bed until all hours, and not having done that with him was a kick in the nuts. BUT things kept being good when Gigi called and told me he’d got tickets for THE FIRST ORCHESTRA TUNING IN THE NEW OPERA HOUSE TONIGHT! There’ll be singers too! The first music played in the first opera house in the country, and Gigi and I will be there!

So then – who else fucked with me? That would be Mr. C, with whom I’d set a dinner date. I biked up to Davisville and realized I’m a fucking lungless shit because the hill I biked up every day when I was 21 was really hard to bike up. It was really hard then too, but I complained less. Anyways, when I arrived he hadn’t; over the phone it was apparent he was already well-lubricated on Bay, telling me he’d pay for a cab to join him. I said no - first, I was on my bike, and second, I didn’t want to. I’ve been so misanthropic that just having dinner at a friend’s house seemed like an experiment, and having a drink with the Bay clique, who have a serious addiction to ripping into each other behind each other’s back, was a re-introduction to socializing I had no inclination to participate in. Then he said he was acting like a jerk and waited for me to contradict him, but I couldn’t because he was, and then I went to a park and read a Muriel Spark book and thought about how I wanted to punch everybody in the world in the head.

Went home, smoked a bowl, roasted some spring potatoes and carrots, smoked another bowl, and finished the Muriel Spark book. You know, reading that over, the content really it wasn’t all that bad. The Red Dragon and sweetie-missing are wreaking havoc with my mood. I’m going to the fucking awards show now and put up with all the fucking marketing ‘creatives’, as commercial copywriters call themselves. The gross thing about those people is you can tell they really, really wish that instead of writing commercials they were writing sitcom scripts. Disgusting. But - then I’m going to make history at the new Opera House – eeeeeeeeeeeee! And then see my mum, back from England. Eeeeeeeeeeee! And then up north for the weekend. It will be pretty now – I’m looking forward to it, for once.

The Red Dragon is gonna cap some bitch . . .

According to a tescodiets.com survey (the website is hilarious – they still promote Atkins which NO ONE promotes anymore besides J*Fish and fresh grocery retailers), 95% of women would rather be slim than have significantly higher IQs. 51% would rather be slim than BOTH never have to worry about money again AND nail the celebrity of their choice. 23% of women spend more time worrying about their weight than their family, and 35% worry about it more than their finances.

Bitches.

WE SUCK.

STOP SUCKING, BITCHES.

If a man wants you all bony he should be doing other men, with their scrawny little bandy legs and flat asses, or else whacking off to Asian cartoons. And if you want yourself all bony, you’re sick.

Bitches.

The Red Dragon sits and sips her opium tea

Since Figaro left I’ve been willing to punch myself in the face for a cigarette. But I shan’t. I’ll lose my fucking mind instead. Here are my notes from yesterday’s breakfast conference:

Engagement not numbers
Guerilla
47% of it on specialty
No bullshit – too easy
Shower parties
Phil, oh Phil
Mao Zedong
P. Diddy
What – Confucius now
What we are hearing – 4000
Pissing soccer
Where’s my television
Eggs eggs eggs
One big eyebrow, like Best in Show haha
It smells like fart
I LOVE LUCY

What is shocking about these is that a part of them was an honest attempt to translate the presentations into coherent notes, which as you see resulted in a series of – nothing. Madness, and you can’t even tell where the insanity stopped being theirs and started being mine. Even if I had a scanner and you could see the beeee-youtiful pictures I drew of happy trolls on my notes, you still wouldn’t be able to tell where I’d snapped. AND there were no pains au chocolat.

My industry is a disease.

Not much else to tell you this morning. Yesterday my analyst and I started discussing my real problem. He says it will take me years to train myself out of it, and I just want him to make it go away now, because I'm paying him and I'm fucking broke, broke, broke, fuck. And in the morning I ordered L’Histoire de Melody Nelson to Figaro’s place in Italy since no fucker in Canada, including Amazon and eBay, seems to have it and as I should be being fiscally responsible it seemed the thing to avoid trans-Atlantic shipping charges. Also I think he’d like it because it’s fucking awesome. Anyways, what the fuck is up with no fucker here having that album? Canada is full of French people who should have that record on constant fucking spin, like Anglos do with the Beatles or something.

I’d still punch myself in the face for a fucking cigarette.

South Park

I've been on a bit of a South Park Binge lately - Figaro had wanted to do some catch-up as he lives in a land that gets its televised chuckles from Silvio Berlusconi's plastic surgery, and the Paramount/Viacom/Comedy Central/Scientology publicity stunt worked its magic on me. And what a welcome publicity stunt it was.

Too many of us have the early seasons of South Park lodged in our heads - the Chef Aid, shitty cameo, predictable, hah-hah-the-animation-is-so-crappy seasons that stayed on the air because of all the fat Americans who emotionally indentified with Eric Cartman's wish to kick everybody in the nuts. All the dumbfuck Americans who got up in arms because they wanted to know who Eric's daddy was to the degree that they were unable to appreciate - indeed, violently objected to that peice of broadcast genius, Not Without My Anus. Back in the day when episodes like Mecha-Streisand were few and far between and it was obvious to the dullest observer that the show's writers were being bitched around by a nervous production and broadcast team.

I think it was the movie. After the movie, I don't know what the increase in the show's ratings was and how much creative leverage that gave the writers. I just like to think its success equipped Trey Parker and Matt Stone with great big sets of arrogant iron balls. But in any case all of a sudden the 4th season is solidly, unbrokenly awesome.

Then I left the country for years.

And then they attacked Scientology, vague rumours swept around the world, Isaac Hayes maybe-quit, and here I am again. Loving South Park. Now I have to go to the Four Seasons for some breakfast conference about how to make people my age buy stuff. They'd better have those little pains au chocolat, or I'm falling asleep in protest.

So . . .

Check out these charming motherfuckers.






















Muriel Spark is dead, the Economist tells me. The Economist has the best obituaries. Fame and notoriety are only attractive for the poontang they’d help me score and I haven’t thought it worthwhile to think out a disposal plan for my corpse – I suppose I could get four or five more cats and just have them eat me – but I have to admit I’m partial to the idea of getting an obituary in the Economist. Anyways, she died, and I’m sad about it. She was pretty old when she died, but she was writing her tight little beauties of books and stories until the end. Imagine being all clever and shit like that. I have a massive soft spot for Muriel Spark because I came to her books recently and found that her style was just what I always wanted to have when writing fiction, which is so inspiring – to have an ideal in mind and then actually know it can be done.

Originality? Please. I’m a child of the 90’s. I was the demographic that got inundated with crazy airplay about Len not wanting me to steal his sunshine and that wished the singer would shut the fuck up so I could hear that cute little duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh in the voiceless bridge that I was too young to realize they’d ripped whole from the Andrea True Connection.

In other news, I’m looking hard into returningeth to thee olde countrees now. It isn’t just Figaro – the last two weeks were a vacation and we still don’t know our asses from our elbows. It’s also a lust for a bike-friendly lifestyle and unpasteurized cheese. And all the sweethearts there who I miss. Miss you, miss you, miss you. Nonetheless, if I go anytime soon, I’ll need to know it’s for MONEY. Big, fat money. I don’t mind doing more office work for awhile if there’s fat, stinking, oily scads of cash involved. It would be absolutely fascinating to have filthy, obscene wads of money and see what I blew it on.

V for vaaaaaaaaapid

In the efforts to find something non-snivelly to write about, I saw V for Vendetta. I saw it stoned, on IMAX. And it still sucked. I mean, I wasn't considering getting up and walking out or anything, but it was a waste of Hugo Weaving, John Hurt, and a really topical subject. Adaptations are getting old. Couldn't someone have written thier own bloody kazillion dollar movie script about totalitarianism and why it's a bad thing? Or just re-shot 1984 and tacked on a happy ending about how the proles revolted because they wanted to be middle class?

Geez, it was a big old snore. And alot of the conceits that probably looked great in a graphic novel, like a V-alliterative introductory speech that lasted for about 90 seconds, sounded dumb in a movie. Still, Hugo Weaving pulled it off. Hugo Weaving has a tendency to be the best thing in shit movies these days. I expect it's for the money, but it must feel good too. Proof was a great movie all around, though, and he was still lovely in that.

Exit the man, enter the dragon

Figaro is gone back to Italy, and if you want to know how I'm feeling, read my autobiography in five to ten years. Because how shit I feel will take up at least a paragraph of it, as he was replaced almost by the minute with the Red Dragon. Anyhoo. Whine whine. We had a lovely vacation, the future is pregnant with possibilities, and I'm not pregnant at all. Wheeeeeeeeee!

I'm trying to keep myself busy - in the 4 hours since I left him at the aeroport I've updated my resumé, hassled the woman's shelter that was all lazy about getting back to Lady about volunteering, done laundry, read about psycholinguistics, taped up flyers for a thing . . . I suppose I should link it here if I'm willing to tape up flyers for it in the fucking shitty-ass rain . . . and that's all, really. I don't want to talk to people right now. People make Mistress La Spliffe cry. I just want to finish typing this, eat weed butter on chala toast, snivel, and read about psycholinguistics.

I suppose I should mention that I also got some comfort food from the Indian baker's. I got the poppyseed roll, which is not my favourite item from there in general but it is my favourite comfort food. It has an obscene amount of poppyseed. I mean obscene. Sometimes more poppyseed than pastry. And it really doesn't taste that great, but it makes me feel pretty good. I wonder if eating all those poppyseeds actually does something for people.

Ohhhh my tummy.

Figaro and I have been eating like pigs. I don't want to go on about my personal life or anything, but I will say this: it's fucking glorious to be with a man who treats you like MacGyver because you've figured out all you need to make Italian hot chocolate is a double boiler, some cream, chocolate and a whisk. The only good thing about his departure this Sunday is that I can pick up with my more ascetic lifestyle that makes my ass look so much cuter. By which I mean smaller. He doesn't seem to mind it's expanding visibly. Good.

Okay, all 14 of you . . .

When you watch television, you think you're a customer; that you are who the networks and channels are catering to. But you aren't the customer. You - your attention and engagement - are the commodity. When you pay for cable, it goes to supplier and service companies - not to the channels, not the networks. The real customers of television channels and networks are large advertisers who pay for ad time. Do you see what I mean? Advertisers buy your eyes. They buy your eyes through the intermediary of the television channels, who attract your eyes by putting on shows that appeal to your market demographic.

If you don't have a problem with that, bully for you, you spineless fucking sucker. But . . .

At the end of March, Philips applied for a patent for a device that won't allow you to change channels during the advertising portion of a broadcast (that's a 'commercial break' to all you shiny-box addicted trogs) or to fast forward the ad portion of broadcasts taped with a DVR. Do not let this happen. Do you understand me? Do not let this happen. Because if you, the television public, allow this to happen, I'll stop feeling guilty for my role in the corporate passion play whose plot involves taking advantage of YOU and just figure you get what you're lazy enough to deserve.

Suckers.

News links:

New Scientist
ZDNET News

Nothing is nicer than Nina Simone's voice. I think it's time we gave up thinking God sounds like James Mason. James Mason sounds like he's gargling vomit in comparison to Nina Simone. You don't get as smart as God and then not sound like Nina Simone when you could because you're God.

Aiiii.

American journalists are so fucking dumb. They say 'tenaciousness' instead of 'tenacity'. And they're pussies who are addicted to soft reporting. Bunch of fucking pussycats. Telling us about some old gay guy having a baby with a dunderhead my age when actual events are happening in the world. American journalists SUCK.

Dummies.

Oh hello.

I feel like cotton candy and am posting from work, for the first time in ages, because home is just too interesting right now to waste time typing.

Eeeeeeeeeeesh.

Earlier this weekend we watched Pink Flamingoes. My brain was raped by it. John Waters raped my brain. On Saturday night we saw Opera Atelier's production of Orfeo. Somewhat lame. Fucking Pynkoski didn't shut up again. Nice duets. Brain. Work. Slow. Whatevs.

Hey, you know that song 'The Bends' by Radiohead? Is it just me or does it sound like Thom Yorke is singing 'baby's got Depends' once in awhile?

Lates.