March 16, 2012

I'm sick.
I want to get a knife and cut open my stomach so I can scoop the bad stuff out.
I want to get a knife and cut off my eyelids, tracing around the socket's edge, because they feel so itchy and warm.
I want to go out in the rain in my pajamas and let the cold take away the ungodly heat.
So I did.
Yesterday, before work.
That might actually be why I'm feeling terrible again today. Totally worth it though. Now I'm looking out the window and just want to go roll around in the grass.

Here are some fever induced drabbles. I didn't wanna post 'em at first because stupid, but then I thought, it's a daylog. I can post anything I want in a daylog without feeling too bad because the only reason someone's reading this is because they actually looked up daylogs. It's the equivalent of going into your sister's room, reading the diary she left open on the bed, and then complaining about the poor quality of the entries. I should know, I've done exactly that before. In keeping with the spirit, these past two paragraphs were 100 words. Refrigerator magnet toothpaste.

* * * * * * *

A bird hatched from one of the eggs in the carton in the fridge. Its wings were made from thin slats of ice that resembled frosted glass. Inside it, white mist and cold air held it together.

He heard the noise it made and opened the door. As soon as he did, it went tearing through the house. They all chased it, trying to catch it with blankets and pillowcases.

In the end, it wound up flying into the glass slider door and shattering into a hundred crystalline pieces. The mist holding it together vanished.

The ice started to melt.

* * * * * * *

The bird people of Avion were all very pretty, and usually very kind, but they were not very bright.

When a couple found a lost little boy, they adopted him. Until he was thirteen, he was stuck in their floating city, unable to fly. Then he made paper wings and jumped off the edge.

The wings worked, but his parents were so sure he should've died that they acted as though he were a ghost.

Eventually, he decided to go along with it, pleasing his parents as now he wasn't a restless spirit, but the happy ghost of their son.

* * * * * * *

She went outside and found her brother in the garden, hiding in the bushes. She peeked in to see what he was up to.

"How're you doing that?" she said after a moment.

He looked up at her guiltily. "Doing what?"

She pointed at the blobs of light that were drifting out of his fingertips. They changed colors and shapes as they went, constantly morphing and growing larger as they went.

"Oh. I dunno."

They watched the lights float above their heads, through the leaves.

"Promise you won't tell mom?" he said.

"I promise."

The wind carried the lights away.

* * * * * * *

There was a new face in the mirror that morning.

The face was small and kind of pointy with slanty yellow eyes the same color as its hair. It was unquestionably a he. Odd, because last she checked she was still a she. She waved to the boy awkwardly.

"Uh. Hi."

He didn't wave back, but nodded at her. "Yo."

"What happened to my reflection?"

He shrugged. "She's out sick today. I'm her replacement. Just pretend I'm her."

"Um."

"You gonna brush your teeth?" he said.

She shook her head and slowly backed out of the room. "Maybe not today."

* * * * * * *

The hall closet was screaming. Again.

There was nothing inside that could've been making the noise; she'd emptied it out earlier. So she banged around inside with a broom and cursed loudly until the closet shut up again, possibly from shock. The wail died down to a whimper, then silence.

She flicked the light off and closed the door.

The screaming began almost instantly.

She threw open the door. It stopped.

It occurred to her that the closet might be afraid of the dark.

"Fine," she said. She left the light on and closed the door.

The closet stayed quiet.

* * * * * * *

Around midnight, he heard the sounds of animals fighting in the backyard. He groaned and went to check.

For a split second, he saw the shape of a black panther tearing into the body of a bear. As soon as the porch light came on, though, there was nothing but a cat daintily licking blood off its paws.

He glowered at it. "What have I told you about bringing home bears?"

The cat ignored him. It trotted up to the porch and walked into the house, leaving bloody paw prints.He grumbled and closed the door. It was too early for this.

* * * * * * *

His shoulder's been itching all week.

At work, he tries desperately not to scratch his shoulders. If he does, they'll start to bleed again. At the stoplight while driving home, he presses himself into the seat and tries rubbing his back to alleviate the itch. It doesn't work.

When he finally gets home, he runs into the bathroom, pulls off his shirt, and checks the mirror.

The two scabbed spots are getting worse. He wonders if they're infected. It looks like something's actually growing there. He doesn't notice the tiny, downy feathers stuck to the bloodied inside of his shirt.

* * * * * * *

A new girl came to school, and she was the cutest necromancer I ever did see. But I was way too shy to talk to her.

Instead, I left a bunch of flowers on her desk during recess. She didn't like them, though, and threw them away. During lunch, I tried to give her my chocolate milk. She didn't want it.

Then during second recess, I found a dead crow.

I brought it to her and she smiled. We spent the rest of recess playing with the reanimated Mr. Caw.

What can I say? Girls like guys who like animals.

I've accumulated a list of things I wanted to review, especially as we have some kind of review-quest happening, but I can't find the motivation. Busy with work, busy with my almost-no-budget film. Our actor in a wheelchair appears in one scene; the business that offered their premises was not wheelchair accessible. We got someone to make a ramp for them, so now they are. This makes us happy.

So yeah...

Movies:

The Artist: Hollywood writes another love letter to itself. It's well acted and entertaining, and it took coglioni to make a black-and-white and essentially silent movie in 2012 and expect success. I don't know about that Best Picture Oscar, but I don't take the Oscars seriously.

100 Rifles: This one was a big deal when I was a kid, because we heard it had a nude Rachel Welch and stuff. Much later, I learned it held a position as one of the first first Hollywood Westerns to take a pro-Native angle and one of the first mainstream films to feature interracial sex. I finally saw it, and may review it for one reason: it has the most conflicted racial subtexts imaginable.

Books:

Room by Emma Donoghue (minor spoilers): The book deserves a review, and I may write it one day. The first half may be slow, but it fleshes out the characters and their world, and has a creeping, pervasive suspense mainstream thriller and horror writers should envy. The second half plays like a real-world Stranger in a Strange Land.

The author lives nearby. We've never met.

Summer of Night by Dan Simmons: A younger Simmons serves up his own (King-approved) version of Stephen King's It, with implausibly competent heroic kids in the early 1960s, an eldritch Lovecrafted horror in a small town, an out-of-place creepy underage sex scene, and a tortuous historical backstory. It starts out promising to be an improved version of that mix; it really doesn't play out that way.

Magazine:

On Spec: My sale last year netted me some money and a subscription, so I've been reading it regularly, instead of sporadically. I'm an issue behind. The stories have been well-crafted, and reflect the diversity in SF and fantasy of which the mundane audience remains largely unaware.

TV:

The Walking Dead: I've been reviewing the eps elsewhere. I might do an overview of seasons one and two, if no one beats me to it.

The second half of Season Two is better than the first half, but not as good as Season One.

Theatre:

Beard by Jason Rip: This is Rip's revival, slightly revised, of his play about Roy McDonald. We thoroughly enjoyed it. As a bonus, Roy was in the house that night, and they brought him up on stage to perform the ending alongside the actor playing him. Dueling McDonalds. I forgot to ask him when the long braided tail of his beard broke off; that important information should appear in my write-up.

Tempting Providence by Robert Chafe: For Canada Day, maybe? It's the play about Myra Bennett (née Grimsley) aka "Nurse," the British nurse who settled in rural Newfoundland in 1921 and became a local legend, bringing medical care off the beaten track, delivering babies, sewing a foot back on, and (as a bonus) living to 100. It's brilliantly-staged and well-acted, a little slow of pace in places, often witty, but I'd probably just do a write-up about her.

We ran into an old friend afterwards, who was in town for that night only.

Comics:

The current run on Action: they've rebooted Superman again, but they're handling his early years and career in a somewhat novel fashion. I don't like the new outfit much, though they've left the door open to bring the old one back into continuity-- a word which has little meaning in any case, in American comics.

JLA: New Frontier: Almost inspirational, a postcard to the postwar dreams of the world that birthed me, as much as a superhero story.

Me:

Uh, I'm okay.

Twenty years ago, I finished work in August and had new prospects in September. I had recently met a young woman and we'd started dating. I'd planned a trip, first to my home town, and then across Canada to the east coast.

I stayed with Kevin in Montreal (we lost contact, years ago), a couple I knew from university in Quebec City (very sporadic contact anymore), an ex and her husband in Halifax (I think we talked about five years ago), and Heather in Ottawa (I occasionally hear about her life from mutual friends), on the way back. I slept in an off-season dorm in Fredericton, a B&B near Ottawa (en route), and cheap motel near the Quebec-Ontario border.

I bought my new girlfriend a silk scarf that complemented her eyes. By request, I gathered sea shells from the Atlantic for her mother. I kept one myself from the Bay of Fundy, marked like hieroglyphics. As someone else wrote at this site, I could whisper to myself "You are as free now as you ever have been or ever will be." I was well into my twenties, but in some respects, my adult life began in earnest that year.

The job stuck. I broke up with that beautiful young woman a year later and spent too much time wishing I could have made it work. I met my wife awhile later at one of those jonbar points that mark life. We traveled in different circles then, and our personal and family histories couldn't be more different. Change anything about that afternoon, and we likely wouldn't even know each other in 2012.

We live in a white house in a very friendly neighbourhood, close to downtown. A street cat moved in a few years ago. The kid across the street and his buddies named her Slim, and that stuck.

I had a dream, a few nights ago.

No, not the one where I cross impossible and unnecessary bridges, presumably designed by M.C. Escher, to visit a town on Lake Huron, only to discover myself trailing a bad stereotype of a Cold War Russian Villain in some version of the forthcoming Avengers movie. Not the one where a basketball player wants to pretend he's interviewing me in front of a room full of teenagers trying to write while Internet Memes blare on an outsized screen.

In this one, I'm either leaving or returning from that road trip, twenty years in the past. A tired trucker veers off-course and I see a flock of pterosaurs and darkness and light. Voices whisper in a white house.

I wake up in a hospital room. The woman I dated then, and her mom and dad are in the room. I've been in a coma for a day or so. My parents arrive soon after, having driven their way all day. But I also see my future wife, whom I did not know then, and my friend Singularity Girl, who would have been a child in another country. It's as though I'm watching the quantum probabilities collapse into the life I've led.

I'm making a nearly-no-budget film, trying to sell a novel, and resigning from the editorial staff of a site that I don't visit as often as I once did, but which remains a pretty nifty online magazine.

But time moves along, the probabilities collapse, and we're never what we once were.

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