Pre-emptive placement to guarantee maximum eyeball exposure. A stinker, ain't I? Hey, it's only ahead by a half-hour - I might not even be finished formatting it by then!)And as it turns out, it took me well over a half hour to 'get my affairs in order' (finish the week-log) and get my ass to the hospital!
Above all else, I should assert that I figured out what mischarged referred to in my last day log entry! A week back, I was undercharged a dollar on an ice cream cone from the Casa Gelato! Instead of giving back the ill-got gains I pocketed it, left the store with my triple scoop of death and INSTANT KARMA struck! All three glorious scoops tumbling down to the road! Boo hoo. SO ANYHOW, a couple of days later, I was undercharged by $5 for a gigantic cannister of pesto (like, enough to last me for the rest of the year gigantic.) Again I kept the savings, not counting my money 'till I was out of the store. Now, that's five times as much filthy lucre on my conscience, so I was expecting a retribution fully five times as foul, but it has not yet manifested. (Perhaps this psychological torture is the punishment itself?) In any event, this explains to some degree my lying low recently.
Wack dating disclaimer pour le posterité: because of my schedule and my distance from the UTC demarkating line, I write the events of what elapsed on June 7th when E2 thinks it's June 8th and when I refer to abstract points in time such as "yesterday" in a day log, it generally refers to two days previous to the date in the node title. ** Note - in the case of this particular log, this disclaimer is bunk.
Additional: Since I wrote this in skeleton form and had a 12-hour nap before fully fleshing it out, E2 believes it's now in fact the 9th. For point of reference I will assert that what I refer to as "yesterday" in this writeup is in fact Tuesday the 6th and what I call "today" was Wednesday the 7th. /me ponders asking nate to ask e2 what time zone ours account are associated with so it can keep track of what day it is where any given user is for those of us too oblivious to rely on the UTC clock objectively. I think the best solution would in fact to post my days-past day logs under the appropriate days for what happened when but I am (I hate to admit) affected by whether people will see it or not and I think the chances of its being seen increase if the day it masquerades under the name of is in fact today. (Except in this case, where the entire previous week masquerades as tomorrow. YeesH!)
In retrospect, this backlog is glorious; I've been too busy doing things to write about them. Experience is surpassing interpretation! I can't remember the last time life was so interesting. Summer will do that to you.
YOU KNOW WHAT? Maybe I should just make this a week log, while I'm at it. SHEESH!
With that-all out of the way, yesterday (Tuesday) morning I nearly got my face clawed by a crow. Scary stuff, starting out innocently enough. Entering our front gate a crow was cawing at me. I stopped, looked at it, thought "there must be a new crow nest somewhere really nearby" and cawed back.
Caw, caw!
Caw, caw!
I say - now there are two crows croaking at me. I shift my gaze from the first on the left to the second on the right and feel something brush my cheek. I am looking at two crows. HOLY SHIZNITZ, the thing that brushed my face was the first crow flying close enough to my face (and eyes) to touch it! Only by the grace of the sky-god did I not have my eyes clawed and pecked out! Feeling no particular Oedipal urges, I quickly shielded my face (my valuable face!) and shuffled back into the safety of my house. The crows have not since been seen. Maybe they were just ornery? Or maybe they felt I gave them bad press?
Later that (Tuesday) night: Living Closet meeting (strangely, all is falling into place, though I'm getting 5 calls a day from performers asking for space ignorant that we've been booked solid since March), then I'm scheduled to perform at a reading at Bukowski's for the first time since... since I read there as a promotion for the last Living Closet, back Valentine's-Day-ish? I remember when I used to read for my own reasons rather than just for cross-promotional purposes. I am unexpectedly put on in a prime slot (2nd) and present the loved-by-everything (my top-ranked node) 25 ways not to tell someone that you're in love with them, the well-received guilt and the bumper sticker koans. My food arrives while I'm on stage. Grr. Much applause. Reminds me of why I used to do this so frequently, though objectively I view warm fuzzy feelings as a poor reason. My tablemates are amazed that I use half the ketchup bottle on my fries - more amazed when I point out to them that I ran out of ketchup before I ran out of fry. The barfly salad is dang tasty - peanut satay'd chicken pieces, sprouts, udon noodles, nice krispy lettuce and grapes. Aw bjyeah. "When do you get out of UBC?" I am asked. Apparently my appearing on-campus has been misconstrued as my attending class there. Tee hee. I explain my situation, my affinity for picnics there, my contacts at CiTR and my addiction to Dance Dance Revolution in the arcade.
Wednesday morning I have scheduled for a breakfast with a friend. We do end up sharing a meal, but it is far from breakfast. Contact each other on phone circa noon - I mention how thirsty I am, boast that I will get a slurpee at the near-her-house convenience store to quench it. Am blocked by conversation-with-roommate for too long - I am late! Late! Stopping only to acquire two coconut buns as appeasement, I zip straight to her house without stopping for the Slurpee. She notices the omission. Since her guy is leaving the continent that night we hang around her house, breakfastless, until hearing back from him regarding how he'll be spending his last evening on this side of the water. A couple of phone exchanges are had with him, mostly summarized as "I don't know yet - I'll call in a few hours when I know." We fill the time in a nap the likes of which I haven't known since the afternoon of April 1st, after the draining Fool's Parade. Damn, but I could get used to that.
We take turns adding to a comic book made for PlaceboMan upon his departure depending on which of us is most lucid at the time. Given that my segments involve a decapitated kangaroo head (the old war wound!) launching poisonous snakes at a zeppelin full of evil mutants bombing Paris, the word "lucid" when applied to my participation may well be an overstatement. The Man shows up, briefly. We partake of Too Much Thai Food (note: like the goat cheese rule, there is in fact no such thing as TMTF.)
Upon the acquisition of the food we say our goodbyes again, some hugging is enacted, and Michelle and I are dropped at the bus stop back to the TabHouse for Movie Night!
No movies are shewn at Movie Night. Instead, yam and I sing "Used Car Lot" from recovered high school choir manuscripts, and she soundly trumps my false-sense-of-security arse (after my successes at #everything trivia, no doubt) in a round of Trivial Pursuit.
I advertised in advance that this would be a cut-short non-movie Movie Night because a couple of days prior, at the Hungarian Restaurant at the Pre-Going-Away-Party lunch, I saw someone putting up a poster with the magic word on it: klezmer. Tonight, 10 pm, the Sugar Refinery. Yam and Joe acquire an expected bout of narcolepsy, so they go home. Succulent departs to her proper home in the event of a last-minute Another-Goodbye from Merlyn, so I show up alone. (... but, I should reiterate, you're never alone when you've got yiddish party music playing in your brain.)
The band's name is Yiddish for "a little bit of good fortune." Travish is there (strangely, he's always my sole companion in the coolest unexpected experiences. If neither of us are otherwise engaged at age 35, we have made a pact to marry each other.) He shares Ivar + Yolande's to-be-parenthood with me - babies! ack! See the bottom of this log for strange resonnance, however. I get my first glimpse of werewolf, spiral-magician and Drippytown Gazette editor (and former Terminal City columnist) Robert Dayton. Interesting.
The music begins, and is so amazing that the h0t woman next to me goes virtually unnoticed.
"This is awfully... naughty music, isn't it?!" sez she.
Completely oblivious to the subtext, lost in the swirling clarinet, all I can spit out many minutes later is a curt "...Slinky!" in acknowledgement.
Dancing (dancing! The only other time I can recall losing such abandon is in a cow field in Belgium to Orbital last August!), spinning so hard I lose my hair-elastic. Somewhere in the mess a glass of red wine is shattered by my provocative seatmate and that somehow makes everything official.
Because Travish has been picking my brain, I newly think I'm being like the best language model, descriptive rather than proscriptive. That is, doing things without pre-emptively (prejection?) asking myself if that's the sort of thing I would do, such as talking to strangers! (I interrupt the expert recommending many of the same bands I'd been talking to Travish about before the show - Hasidic New Wave, the Klezmatics, the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band to give the woman information on the next Living Closet, notably on account of our Something About Reptiles feature, but I also get a promise from this amazing fortunate klezmer ensemble to perform for the after-next LC event. I'm baaaad! Practically on fire!)
Travish and I are good late-night walkers, prowlers of dead streets. $500 accordion in the window of a pawn shop. Beaut. Since I complained about people asking "How are you?", he has said virtually nothing else, and we have both been discovering how I am as a result.
At 3 am, I get slurpee after all. A bit late, but still, er, something. (Not tasty, not thirst-quenching... perhaps my daily dose of artificial colour?)
When I get home, I look at the honey bear sitting on my shelf and ask myself why it's here. Closing my eyes in thought for a few seconds I am reminded of the sticky situation which prompted its acquisition and smile.
I eventually go to sleep after dealing with an old 'lit'-scene affiliate after my eliteness cachet at 4 am (7 am for them - just woke up and was considerably less lucid than I).
Thursday is the grand compromise with my parents: Family Dinner, which is itself co-opted strangely for an NDP fundraiser at Myles of Beans, a place I'd been meaning to check out for some time. Hilights include the old political woman at our table asking my mother if she kicked a politician in the crotch after he patted her on the head, and not bidding on the Bill Reid print on auction signed by Svend Robinson, David Suzuki and Raffi! Later that night I am dropped off at the Jazz Cellar to hear my friends Sight UNSeen in a stage setting for the first time. Between sets their friend lays down some Primus-inspired slap-bass funk lines, and I decide that their girl-folk would be righteously improved by synthesizing that thoroughly boyish influence into their melodies and rhythms. Thursday night is the Aurora Borealis, as far south they rumour as Florida! Of course, the sky is all clouded. Living Closet cohorts at the concert propose a chase! Eventually we could drive to a cloudless locale! Regrettably we settle for a 2 am dinner at the Naam - my first, strangely (given that I attended high school a 5 minute walk away - but I was always a Benny's kid myself). I get the last bus in to downtown and ponder perching atop the jungle gym on the playground across the street to peek between gaps in the clouds for atmospheric ionization, but instead I come in from the cold and get my mind blown by the Everything Radio concept, frantically uploading MP3s manually and finally crawling into bed at 9 am, humping the laundry basket on the other side of my bed. Not really, but I do briefly ponder the space occupied by it on my bed and wonder how many more months it will live there before I can manage to sleep next to open space. As I recall asserting before, I was overjoyed in the Horla to see that I wasn't the only one afraid of my bed.
I literally spent the next two days trying to match iDEATH's contribution to Everything Radio. (It's up now, as described in my Everything Radio writeup.) Interruptions of a couple of unexpected midnight visits with friends. Friday afternoon I am awoken by roommate Julie, who tells me she is leaving. To Quebec. She tells me what a great time she had here and a line of tear goes down my quasi-awake, still-in-bed face because I feel she is being too nice. I say "thank you" instead of "good-bye."
Unexpected Update, late late on the 11th: Now I am off to a suburb to house-sit and dog-sit for my sister while she recuperates in the hospital from the five-weeks-premature delivery of her bouncing baby boy! That explains the abrupt trailing off of this gross log entry. They have dial-up at their apartment, so I suspect this will be an unplanned Everything Vacation. I guess you'll hear all about it in a week 8)
Not a single Everything Observation, and for that I am proud. Amendment - I miss engaging in play with everythingites.
I apologize for forcing everyone to go after this monolith.
in our last episode... | p_i-logs | and then, all of a sudden...