June 30, 2005

I am at blue Monday 'cuz I forgot to inform the good people at Bell that my credit card info had changed so they cut off my internet.

So I am using a free wifi connection to try and finish some work before I blow this burg for a month of fun on the west coast. I have been here for about three hours already, I have two more hours 'til they close.

However, the cafe owner just turned on this red lamp in the window and started playing bollywood music, I am on a sofa lying in the window and I feel like I just went from normal cafe atmosphere to the red light district of webdesign...

I can't wait to find a job that doesn't involve spending five hours cradling my lap-top on my lap worrying about the effects of radiation.

In fact, laptop is a misnomer, better this little fucker should be called a Dell Cancer-Crotch.

June 29, 2005

I have been doing a lot of thinking about writing lately. About whether I could actually write something longer, more meaningful, not about myself, and not destined to grace a screen but actually a printed page.

Even the mode would transform the act I think.

Last night I read a story that Maya has taped to her bedroom wall, it was written by Mayas sister and was incredibly moving, carefully written and shockingly great. It was taped to the wall in peices. Each peice formed a discreet scene so I could read the pages in whatever order I chose, the story just sort of came together from those vignettes it wasn't nailed down to the reader/author pact of page order = times passage.

I can't really do the story justice in summary. It was of trees and of a leaf, and of Sam. As I read it, the leaf launches itself from its tree and gets trapped in sams car windshield, prompting sam to ask andrea to marry him. of course those are the physical entities only, again bound to a narrative thread. The leaf is certainly not just a leaf and the metaphors float very delicately over the surface of the images which are all of time and greenery and safety.

The entire 10 minute interlude reading Mayas wall was intimidating and beautiful. I went home and thought. Can I actually write or do I just over-use a large vocabulary.

Anyways, than I read these two passsages by Margaret Drabble;

Some of them do die. Nostalgia can be lethal. A new medical condition is discovered and named. It is called Sudden Death Syndrome. For no reason, for the sake of a smell, a perfume, a memory, a dream, the heart panics, fibrillates, then stops.

Perhaps for this subject matter, one should seek the most disjunctive, the most disruptive, the most uneasy and incompetent of forms, a form that offers not a grain of comfort or repose. Too easily we take refuge with the known. Particular anguish, particular pain, is in its way, comfortable.Unless of course it happens to be our own."

She is writing in both these cases about the Cambodian Genocide. And about the relocation of the Boat people. I am interested especially in the second quote where she descibes the comprehension of tragedy as being akin to the picaresque. We can't deal unless we bring it down to something of our own human stature. ie one inidvidual or one family, one experience that is singular. because to comprehend things on a universal scale is simply not appealing to human beings, on the whole.

Of course, this is also an intimidating thing, To a wannabe writer. Drabble has apparently made a pact with herself to avoid the simply nostalgic or emotional and to try and present a tragic stroy outside of the common emotional techniques of a narrative construct. Maya's sister too, is letting a leaf carry all the meaning in her story.

It is amazing stuff, I just don't know how I am going to learn to do it. I think my first step is to try to get rid of the need to explain things and just write..

From oples to you...Rick mercer has a blog now!

My favorite political commentary and I don't even need a tv.

I am not going to critique it yet, because I am too tired to even read it.

There is this weird canadian politics meme happening here at theflink, and in order to keep it keeping on, I would like to mention that once upon a time, I wanted to start a political campaign to make Mercer a write-in candidate for prime minister..

Maybe we could still make it happen.. Mercer for PM, a funnier country, and one that pronounces party the maritime way.

June 28, 2005

So Stephen Harper has decided it's the Bloq Quebecois' fault that gay marriage is getting so much support in parliament.

In fact he says, the Bloq Quebecois' support for bill c-38 doesn't actually represent the opinion of real Canadians, like those english speaking ones, who all hate the idea of gay marriage with a passion just like they hate conjugating avoir in the present conditionel.

Haters logic. Well really stupid alientating logic, which pretty much guarantees that the only blue seen in this province will remain that of the bloq for a while yet. Not that this bothers me so much, but c'mon that is like such incredibly bad strategy. Is Harper a hand puppet? What's up his ass that he creates the sound bites of a nazi muppet.

Stephen Harper should get even darkers sunglasses (see photo) and hide both his shame and his incredible ignorance of what "real" canadians want. Which is obviously not his party or is ideology, or he wouldn't come off always sounding like such a reprobate gadfly.

****************

Another of these weird tangential stories. I was at Janes on Sunday watching her tv and stealing her air-co, and she mentined that she ahd goaded her mother into having a fight about the October Crisis.

"What did you fight about" I asked.

"Well, I said Trudeau didn't neccesarily have to call out the war measures act."

"Yeah what'd your mom say?"

"She said, I had no idea what I was talking about since I wasn't even born yet."

"She has a point."

"I guess, I just think Trudeau completely alienated Quebec and if he hadn't done it, then we would never have had the referendum and all that"

"Why did he do it anyways?" (Toronto born and bred)

"There were these cells, and you only ever knew who was in your own cell they were doing all sorts of crazy stuff, people were being kidnapped, someone was even murdered, they blew up mailboxes."

"With the mail in them?"

"No they made sure to take the mail out first stupid."

Once again, my hard hitting political inquiry leaves no stone unturned.

I would like to point out that when janes mom returned she confessed to a fear of sending important documents by mail as she worried that they would be blown up.