listening to Whitey..

..and half running half hiking up Mount Royal from home, down low on Notre Dame...up, up to the top where tourists film static scenes of city doing nothing but those things that cities do... and all the way down turning back up to different heights, sheltered amongst trees in a grove quiet from the prying screams of children and tourist bunches, and back down along wooded, dirt trails, tripping on roots and coming too close to spider webs wrapped tightly between branches; reaching crumbling stone stairs that used to be the way up before the glistening banisters and raw wood steps became the path to go along... all the way down near the streets, hearing the cars but not seeing them, taking a left turn instead of a right, reaching more crumbling stone stairs but these ones have an ancient maple tree strewn across their way, climbing through the branches and down more steps until, a fence. fighting through spider web lattice to climb up six feet and drop eight down to the last two stone steps, and a road.
...and further down, a sign outside St. Paul's Cathedral read, 'Organ Recital' and that too, I couldn't resist.

overheard

..but, it's our responsibility to be intelligently crippled.

directed by Ishu Patel
words by Marilyn Bowering

Darkness becomes me.

some times i say all the wrong things and give all the wrong reasons for saying wrong things, and the world doesn't understand me, or maybe it does but right now i like to think that it doesn't, because that's easier than acknowledging my own lesser points--the abnormalities that show me for who i am, not who i've pretended to be all these years--and then i wake up some days and forget that i've been faking, because it's suddenly become me and now it's impossible to separate fact from fiction and that's just fucking queer.

just today i am realising that it's the imperfection in a person, a song, a line, an image that completes it...i've been striving all these months to be perfect and i've only just discovered that ugliness makes it so...photos mottled by edges of windows, reflections distorted by unplanned movements are the depth of crisp lines and clear cut messages without the bullshit of being calculated.

and then I found

From days in the roller derby on Broad Street spread out on the tarmac like sunscreen on your back at the beach we used to go to. Flowers smell like stale toast and dandelions are still all I ever think of anymore--it's like you erased the good and the bad in the instant you told me, 'it's not for us' but it was us anyway. The days I spend counting flower petals hoping to land on 'he loves me' but always ending on 'not'. You remind me of the smell of salt on the wind as it races back from the sea, wild and bursting with stories we can't read; but I breathe you anyway.

resurfacing

..dumbstruck on the balcony smoking opium half pipes and thinking about last summer I spent digging for clams in the garden--bare now with twig gravestones marking the leaves as they fade to the colour of dust, and then dust to settle amongst the pebbles that now call this place home...

Italian

I want to be like the old Italian men who meander the path along the canal, shirtless on their bikes, slowly and with purpose. Their tans are etched into their bodies; some have white lines where their shorts meet the skin, the contrast looks natural. Their skin stretches smoothly over their wiry frames, white hair cut clean and out of the way, there is only a tiny roll of flesh on the stomach where it bends forward toward the handlebars... their contentment is contagious, but their disdain for average is obvious. They own this place.

intrinsic need.

the feeling that life is without want for living when devoid of it.
my eyes flutter when the breeze is still, it's you i'm thinking of.

a place, a time or a memory--necessity for that which no longer exists.
but did it ever?

today it's a beach, a mountain covered in greenery; movement, a smiling face and waves that never begin, that forget to end.
air flows deep inside of me lighting fires in the darkest caverns of my chest; give way no light, here.

to travel is to behold, and there are kinds of travel that don't require open eyes.
the heaviness of my dream weighs like metal fingertips around my throat, and you disappear down the street.

i recognise this place from home.

HOT TOWN summer in the city/ back of my neck getting dirty and gritty...

I'M SO BROKE AND ALL I WANT TO DO IS TAKE PHOTOS--if only my eyes were cameras, the things I see, you'd see, you'd feel, you'd need in the way that we need air, and wind, and rain and all of the elements that pull us with vocation into memories and spin us out into open water, horizons bleeding red, orange sunshine rising and falling into the darkening dusk before morning.

(need)

the Van

Last night riding shotgun between Alex and Charlton on the way home from the bar, I faced backwards staring straight at the boys crammed onto the back seat-bench. On the floor, it was both the comfiest and least informed car ride I've ever had. The whole time we shared headphones listening to Guns N' Roses: enlightening since I'd sort of written them off. It was the first time all day that I forgot about my sunburn.

paint the

yesterday we painted--puff--puff--paint, and globs of red drifted across the time stiffened paper. flowers and vegetal matter were all that streamed from my brush tip in blue, purple and that red, dark red. black lines took over and a crossword puzzle of hieroglyphs materialised behind colour. and then water. it never looked like anything until i spilled water over it, and then it became art--a wicked beauty pretending, and that was nice.

when i go running i take my keys off the chain and stuff them in my sports bra. i don't have pockets, and this leaves my hands free to wave at the sun. a sun that bakes rivulets of sweat into my forearms and crusts the line between face and hair. music wafts from hard trance to joy division and think about life, and then i do. i stop halfway through to lie on the grass shaded by trees, and pretend to stretch while i stare at the strange man reading a women's health magazine while his legs dangle above the canal. it's hot and i'd rather stay here, but i catch sight of a woman running quickly by on the other side of the canal, and i decide it's better for me if i keep going.

cadboro bay

On the beach near the wild stone creatures we played poker with seashells and I went all in. Waves crept up the sand, giant tongues rolling turning pebbles a darker shade of gray. And all the while a driftwood fortress kept us from wind and in the cast of the sun until it disappeared too below the horizon, and sailboats twisted across the top of seaweed speckled waters catching and throwing out the wind―a Utopian game of soft ball none could win...

FYEye

i got sick of trying to upload photos over here so there's a new place for that now:

http://xanshian.wordpress.com/

have fuuuuuuuuuun!

photohh snaps*

in my excitement i forget to close brackets and as a consequence side thoughts go on for hours.

lately i'm feeling stagnant. stuck, lilting, fading into the marshes of life that surround me these days. it's hard to know what to do with myself when all the essays and presentations and films have dried up and my camera has taken a three day hiatus from winding properly and i'm not sure what to do other than take it into the shoppe, but that will have to wait because tonight for some reason they're showing my movie and i guess i should go. it's not really my movie in particular, it's everyone in the class's movies, but still i guess it's a big deal.
but other than looking for a job--which i should--what is there to do anymore. as annoying as school can be, at least it's time consuming and that makes me feel good about myself. useful. even if toward no greater purpose. it's an in-the-moment type of usefulness that i gather drives people mad when it eludes them. it's eluding me. maybe i'll go mad too.
when the sky isn't excavating half a foot of snow down on to the city i ride my bike up and down the canal, one side, then the next and listening to a full tank of mp3 mixtures--the strangeness of which never fails to amuse or alarm, depending on my mood.
the other day i rode my bicycle into a gated compound--some sort of reserve, preserving the old grain elevators that mirror the new buildings of the old port on the other side of the canal. For some reason the gate has been open the last two times i've passed by, and of course i've gone inside. the first time, matt and i sat on the edge of a lock and took photos and chatted about very little. it was nice. the second time i rode my bike in alone and sat on the bridge looking out at the emptiness of the world around me--empty of people anyway, full of grass and insects and birds flirting: it is spring after all. i sat for a while and watched the tour boat/bus that is the reason that the gates were open at all pass over the traffic filled bridge above me, not thinking of the consequences. later, when i moved to leave i found the gate padlocked shut--stuck inside the compound alone, surrounded by people on the other side of the fence, the canal, the bridge... eventually i rode out to the end of the lock and followed a bridge there to the boardwalk of the old port. the only thing separating me from the boardwalk was a ten foot fence at end of the bridge two meters below and beside the bridge was the beginnings of another bridge and it was here i deemed it easiest to hoist my steel framed (and heavy) bike over the railing to the lower bridge, myself following shortly after. so many people stared at me, presumably wondering why i'd need or even want to break out. it's true, if i had a house there i'd rarely leave if ever.
but i'm still encased in this stagnant malignancy (more the cranky kind) of post schoolishness and caught between needing money, needing a break before working, and sudden onset boredom.
but as of now, i just don't have much to say. i'm taking it in, reading, accumulating, garnering, gathering, procuring, acquiring... filling up on somebody else for a change.