dude, don't harsh my mellow

i flow on the waves of my brain this morning. eyes wander here, thoughts wander there...suddenly i'm focused on my headphones: filter is singing to me about feeling like a newborn. my eyes glide to the pages of my book, at the top of the page is the title: metamorphoses. the moment's synergy does not escape me, and i pause to wonder if my brain or the world is trying to tell me something.

float, float, out the streetcar window onto the velvety winter landscape.
smile...
muse...

and then my eyes are brought back to the page, so i read. it's the tale of Apollo separating the satyr Marsyas from his skin. "it was all one raw wound. blood flowed everywhere, his nerves were exposed (...) it was possible to count the throbbing organs."

jebus.
just a half-page of gore, randomly snuck in to horrify me on this quiet, lazy morning. mood killer, man - harshing my matinal mellow. and i sure as shit hope there was no hidden message from the universe in that!!

and my eyes drift again, flying from the page to ride the receding rails as i look out the subway's back window and plunge forth, forth into the day. (borne ceaselessly into the future? something like that.)

highly disconcerting

the weirdest thing has been happening to me lately.
let me start with a bit of context...

i have always been a rather excessive fan of smooches. indeed, this passion has made me responsible for international kissing games, late-night rooftop spin the bottle sessions, and oh so many countless kisses. one of the fellas i dated last year was first kissed by me mid-sentence, shortly after we met. "sorry," i bashfully exclaimed, "couldn't help myself..."

hell, there was a time when i used to make it a point to share at least one deep-down, full-on smooch with all my closest. for example, when ken first decided he would be my flatmate, we were in a bar and i reached across the table to pull him into a sweltering smooch. it was just... something i did. maybe i figured 'hell, we're gonna be roommates, now this is out of the way.' or something like that. even my queer (guy) friends didn't escape my lascivious lips.

well lately, the sight of people smooching or even the thought of it kinda... well... repulses me. and it's not just my cynicism! i've certainly found myself floundering in the anti-love-vibe before, but i have never, ever been even remotely anti-smooch. but watching movies or on the subway, or wherever i see lips joined in a passionate embrace, i kinda hear my brain going "ew."

i've had a somewhat similar transition from adoration to disgust before, with cigarette smoking. just randomly one morning (or in some cases, gradually over a week or two), the thought of smoking will just turn my stomach, and so i'll give it up until months or years later, when it appeals to me again. well, could this be happening with the smooch? could a fate of being a non-smoocher await me??

the horror! the horror!

on a hopeful note, as i was twirled around my apartment last night by an imaginary partner to acker bilk's 'stranger on the shore,' i was swept away by thoughts of gentle kisses on my temple, as fingertips brushed my hair away. so perhaps all is not lost...

thank heaven for little girls

heh, what a great weekend.

one teensy wee snippet from the jam-packed-with-flavourful-goodness-weekend:

we're sitting in angela's living room, sipping wine and talking about deep, important things like neil young and hair. you know, deliciously insignificant and highly entertaining post-bar/5 am talk. (my favourite kind.)

angela asks kelly: "are you cold? cuz you're not wearing much." the rest of us explode in laughter as angela explains, "no no no, it's just that i know i keep the apartment cold..."
yea, we get it.
but we've also been admiring that short skirt of kelly's all night...

earlier that night, kelly had come to me to seek solace from the naughty, grinning bartenders. "they keep trying to get me to bend over!" she playfully pouted. hm, i replied with seeming sympathy as my fingers reached for a nearby flyer and swept it to the floor, laughing sardonically. the bartenders were watching intently, laughing in that deeply familiar way bar colleagues have with each other. a snug, smiling incestuous family.

lately, i really miss working in bars...

strolling through the subway cars

(bear with me, i'm re-exploring poetry land - though i'll be the first to admit my greater strength lies in prose. but hey, it's good to experiment, right?)

strolling through the subway cars,
one car
second car
each boasting its own slumbering musician,
cradling their cases and exhaustion
as i tenderly smile at them.

i imagine them,
harbingers of melody
inflicting their smoky revelations
and deep down jazz
on french girls who swallow the end of the world.

la fin du monde -
at least until 8 am
when sleepless and stumbling
they are loaded onto trains
that wheel them back to anglo land,
where they can sleep,
sleep at last.

and then it's my stop,
so i step off and a quiet army of blank faces
races past me into the tunnel.
whoosh.

look at all the people i don't know.

shut up, kaen

too much
too hard
too loud too often
too much
too misled
too wrong too often

shh
shh
breathe
and shut up
and listen.

___
my brain's been racing,
indie 500 in my skull.

talking so much shit,
doing so much shit,
thinking so much shit:
what to do
how have i done it
how am i doing it
how should i be doing it
over and over and over
and over again
oi.
no wonder i'm popping
aspernol like a fiend.

shh brain, shh
take a breath,
shh brain
take a breath
and it can all go away
to become the universe,
clean
real
and quiet.

a word on words

when did language get so complicated? did a word ever just mean a word? was it always layered in subtext, context? was it always peppered with riddle?

maybe what happened is several hundred or thousand years ago, we really peaked and understood our words so well that we had to add all the neurosis and innuendo just to keep it stimulating.

perhaps we are on the evolutionary cusp of speaking telepathically. and so as a transition, we do so much thinking about words and infuse so many conscious and subconscious layers into them, just so our brains and all our psychic intuitive bits are already engaged. warming up.

perhaps.

but i'm actually pretty sure it was always complicated, this interaction business.

from the weekend's scrawls

so i invited a friend to the poetry reading i was attending tonight, though i know that most people would rather slit their wrists than listen to poets talking about wanting to slit their wrists. you can't blame 'em, really...

***

last night was fun - shinny with Alana, Jason and most of the Tabarruk crew and others. i was even an ok defence chick, once i stopped being scared of the big bundled bodies hurtling toward me. or the puck. or the ice. heh. by next year, i hope to learn how to stop on skates (now that i have the forward propulsion part of skating down). then we'll win, you wait and see.

***

she's telling me how she doesn't like her husband's "Prokofiev version of Exodus" (yea, the bob marley song), and i have to smirk appreciatively: i love how sophisticated my also very fun friends are!

***

so i watched superman this morning (recent gift from a friend who's turned her back on VHS - oh how pathetic are we, the few remaining VHS-watching losers). already by this evening i'm a tinge obsessed: shit that christopher reeve was a handsome fella. i joke with alana that i've worn the heavy eye make-up as a subconscious way of mimicking lois lane and finding my own superman. some laughter and slinging clevers and then i say i've decided i'm going to leap off a building so that as i fall, fall, superman can come and catch me and fall in love with me. but then i realize i've limited myself, and i could never off myself that way - because she'd remember laughing at this conversation, and somehow it would haunt her.

***

skating on sunday in nathan phillips square - a gorgeous way to round off my "Tabarruk weekend!" see, there's a stage set up at one end of the rink, and bands (like Tabarruk) played the weekend away. yea, neat idea hunh. like a roller skating rink (remember those!?), only cooler (pardon the unavoidable pun).

oh the conundrum!

i have memories of my mom urging me, even in my earliest adolescence, to don moisturizer and battle those pesky signs of aging. i remember my haughty disdain for the animal-tested ridiculousness of it all. "i hope," i remember saying, "that by the time i start to wrinkle, i'll have long gone beyond all that superficial bullshit."

and oh - i still believe this. whole-heartedly. and for the most part, i really don't give a fuck.

but...

the other night i looked down at my dry hands and realized they are most definitely in their earliest proto-phases of becoming my grandfather's hands. i don't remember very much about my grandfather, but i remember we didn't really get along. and i remember this one discussion we had when i was about 12. we were talking about vigilantes, and he began to rant. he was in general a very pompous man, and this was never more obvious then when he rode his moral high horse. i spoke of social inequity, and how the police did not, in fact, serve all equally. (how did i know that already?) and though i didn't have the words to identify it, i rebelled against his right-wing blindness. he spoke upper-middle faith, and i just spoke out.

and, well... i do not want this man's hands.

oh the conundrum!

the nature of nature

in a discussion, someone gushed "nature is beautiful!" ignoring the desire to critique the girlish naiveté and cliché-ness of it all, my mind was instead instantly flooded with inumerable images of carnage. nature isn't beautiful, it's honest. it's brutal.

and the slideshow of horror played itself out in my brain; yet i contemplated the millions of images and examples i'd been spared.

the best sleep

so i had one of those nights. you know those nights where you occasionally catch yourself being mostly conscious, and wonder if you'd actually slept at all, or been lying there in a half-fog for hours? yea, one of those. although i know i did sleep, because the dreams were vivid. i'd watched last night er.. last night, which if you don't know is a brilliant movie. especially given when it came out, it was like the canadian response to armageddon. see, in last night, there's no bruce willis or big ol' holly jolly american government to save the world. there's just the end of the world (left undefined and vague for those late night, wine-soaked musings), and how people are coping with it. a little off-beat, and featuring my all-time favourite canadian actor. (if you have to be told it's callum keith rennie, you really haven't been paying attention, have you!? heh.)

my dreams... wow. a lot of tears and discussed fears. and sun. and a giant kite that i trailed behind me as i rode my bike with my nephew jake - until it threatened to get tangled in the electrical wires, and i just let it fly off. and oh the wonderdawg came for a brief visit too, and i rubbed his belly and chin and held him so tight. he was dirty, as though he'd been playing in the dirt on dog hill in high park... and my family - they were all there too. we spent a fair bit of time driving around for some reason. and at this one point, i was in the car with my mom waiting for my sister, and i was in the back seat but curled around into the front seat in a most peculiar angle. and perhaps i looked like i was curled up and napping cuz a fella ran by, tapped the window and cried out "don't sleep now, it's the last day of the world!"

maybe my family would feel special to know that in my dreams anyway, i'd spend the last day on earth with them? though given that one lives in montreal, one in toronto, and the rest on vancouver island, and we don't get along so fabulously well - maybe that one's best saved for the dreams.

and then a little over an hour before my alarm was going to nudge me into my daily grind, i found myself 100% alert. breathe, i told myself. breathe and try your little "99 bottles of beer on the wall" trick and if you do it just right and fall asleep in the next 5 minutes, you'll get a full rem cycle in.

no dice.

no dice until probably 20 minutes before my alarm went off. meaning the deepest, cosiest, best sleep i enjoyed all night was in the 20 minutes before the alarm went off, and in the several 10-minutes-of-SNOOZE i treated myself to afterwards.

bleurgh.