I am getting my days mixed and muddled. Full
nocturnality will do that to you.
No further on the text game front today (read today as: since my last sleep cycle), but I did node the entire anthology of Beatrix Potter, my most worthy etext-series noding job yet, in my own humble estimation, in an effort to get more three-to-eight-year-olds on Everything.
Much, much later, while covertly trying to observe a friend stick-fighting-training in the park next to my house, a number of my friends were suckered into playing ground tag on the playground with the band of local ten-year-old tykes who had been previously playing the shoe-chucking game (flip your shoe off at the zenith of a swing and see who gets it the furthest).
The kids won. Some see-sawery was had, then we returned to watch 200 Motels, the movie starring Ringo Starr as the dwarf dressed like Frank Zappa. Wow. And I thought Yellow Submarine was psychadelic.
Thanks to Napster, my MP3 collection is now fully stocked with Spike Jones and songs from Parappa the Rapper. This is good. Someday soon I shall become the LORD OF ESOTERICA!
Okay, then midnight turned over and it really became the date listed in this node's title.
About 3:30 am got antsy and went on a solo night bike ride.
After circling a couple of blocks aimlessly I stumbled across a streetsweeper-truck flushing out the Chinatown lanes. In escape (er, aversion) from its water-pressure predations I was provided a direction, if not a destination. When the hooker yelled "Hey, Sexy!" at me I realized I was riding the wrong way down a one-way street. (Why, what else could that utterance have indicated?) Correcting this navigational error took me past the offices of Small Potatoes and brought me to the inexplicable and obscure Portside Park, where the bird-noises put me at ease and provoked a brief bout of spontaneous spoken word art (about, ironically, a vow of silence, to be performed with the assistance of a tape recorder) when I noticed a homeless person sleeping on a nearby bench. Mortified at the notion that I might have disturbed the rest of one who assuredly had enough other disturbances in their life, I cat-like pedaled away and back into the heart of the city. En route to the bike paths I witnessed my second-ever mud-puddle on-the-street shooting-up episode (the first at Xmas 2 in front of the Theatre E) - a surprisingly low number given that I live a five-minute walk from Canada's injection-drug number one ground zero.
Having been to the north coast of Vancouver's Downtown and not yet ready to pack it in, I followed the routes to the south beaches, passing the Tower of Bauble and a curious artificial contained rainfall in the Plaza of Nations - sprinklers mounted in the tops of the potted trees themselves appearing to water themselves. I passed Europa Lake and caught a good gust of bracing sea air on my way to what I determined would be the furthest my wanderings would take me tonight - Concorde Pacific's Floating Phallus.
(The piece of public art in question is actually named something along the lines of Illuminated Stylus or somesuch nonsense, but its vertical lines and especially the two large spherical buoys at its base make its true nature unmistakable.)
Turning back, I am torn between making small talk with and zipping past a few restless security guards stiffly walking their round but having lived with one not so long ago I am wary of disturbing the zen state of the automaton achieved which makes their mind-numbingly tedious job tolerable, thus I opt for the latter.
Passing the old Expo grounds I ponder what nature of civil disobedience my Critical Mass bike-advocacy comrades will get up to to derail this year's Molson Indy race through the heart of downtown. With such sweet thoughts on my mind the sky melts from bruises to the first hint of flush at dawn's arousal.
I am returned flush myself with inspiration for two exploitative collaborative artworks I've shelved for quite a while and full of expectations for the indeterminate future.
What I hope (er, intend) to accomplish in the remainder of the day (presently 5:16 am):
What I hope (grr, intend) to avoid accomplishing:
Sleeping like a big loutish log just when the world wakes up and interesting things start happening, snoozing through engagements and appointments and awakening just as everything shuts down again.
in our last episode... | p_i-logs | and then, all of a sudden...