those poor bastards

Apparently 'black Friday' is this gynormous post-turkey shopping day in the states where everyone hits the stores (and each other) in an effort to purchase loads of useless crap.

Do they trample each other every year or...?

Anyway, the following Monday is (by stats alone) the biggest online shopping day, so I did my part to find a suitable pair of chic boots I could live with.

So Garby, this is for you:

The 70's knee-high slouch burgundy stacked heels or the tan-coloured cowboy boots with the flower inlay?

Hit me.

"I don't understand women obsessed with shoes."

thinking outside the (shoe)box

I've never had such a short dresser.

It's one of those dressers where it's easier to open a drawer and leave the drawer open than it is to stoop and close it again. So I turn my head sideways from my pillow and five out of six drawers are just hanging open, three layers of just-worn jackets and jeans draped over them like I thought, 'well, since they're open, they might as well serve double as a mock-clothes-rack.'

The room is rectangular like a shoebox. I live in a shoebox. It's a big bed though, and maybe that's its redeeming quality.

Ever notice how when two teenagers kiss, it looks like they're actually eating each other's faces? Really ingesting each other's mouths. It's a ridiculous passion passing for hunger. I watched the whole show for a full five or ten minutes on the bus I took home to my shoebox tonight.

Toronto doesn't seem to be negatively affecting these two.

Me? I think Toronto is making my insides revolt. I haven't felt this physically unhappy since that time I spent a few months in bed back in winter 2004. Everything I eat gives me indigestion. Everything I touch gives me a rash. Fuck. Even my watch makes my wrist break out in hives. When did that ever happen? Either it's Toronto or I'm allergic to leather.

So I was long-distance to France, and my new French lover said 'Riley, what is it that you want to do? Surely it's not that you want to be a waitress permanently? You know, people become waiters to fill-in-the-blanks, then they wake up at age 30 and realize they're still waiters..."

I erupted with laughter, but stopped abruptly. Leave it to a Frenchman to say something so immediately accurate that it sounds like a joke mixed with a prophecy mixed with the apocalypse. He should have said 'hopeless people become waiters...'

I had this whimsical thought, 'if my new French lover met the old French lover, what would they say?'

And then this thought went a rye, cause I knew the answer to that question: two French men together would spew more forked-tongue wit than I'd like to handle, and they'd do it all in French.

"Nous avons fait l'amour sur la plage."

"Bien, nous, avons bu du vin rouge jusqu'a ce que le soleil ait monte."

"Oui?"

"Elle etait mediocre au mieux."

"Pour moi aussi."

"Elle est un peu trop tetu pour sa propre bonne non?"

"Oui, elle est determinee a etre sa propre solution tandis qu'elle est sa propre probleme."

(collectively) "hna hna hna"

Look. I'm more than okay. I'm having the growing pains I should have had ages ago when I should have taken a year off to go 'find myself'' backpacking in Australia or something equally stereotypical.

Almost without fail, I've successfully managed to alienate everyone I've ever slept with.

well done

The big blue house we lived in back on the coast had it's own life. Six women lived with two washrooms, a spare bedroom, a living room and a big kitchen spread out on three floors. Out back stood a beautiful and perfect two-tiered patio in a fenced-in backyard.

It was a house of parties (turntables in the kitchen, massive tubs of ice), a house of recovery (crying our way through hours of Sex and the City in the spare bedroom) and a place that would always welcome you home.

We lovingly dubbed it the House of Estrogen.

I could write a novella about the details, like the time the basement flooded shin-deep, or the time or the time we laid on the roof the night the earth was closer to Jupiter than it had ever been before, the summer we lived on hot-dogs, or the winter storm white out - crawling out the door, hooting and laughing as we rolled past moutainous dunes of white to the only open bar in our snowsuits.

Or the morning we almost burnt the house down.

I remember turning over in the middle of the night, slowly waking to the feeling of being stifled. It was the smell. It was so strong I was making a meal of it. It was in my mouth and up my nose and behind my eyes. A smell so oppressive that the thought of it today still makes me cringe.

Bacon.

I hate pork. I don't eat anything that comes from a pig. Everything that comes from a pig has the same salty quality to it - you can find traces of the cheapest ham in the finest pork chop. I'll take a line from Samuel L. Jackson and say 'I'm not Jewish, I just don't dig on swine'. So you can imagine the smell of bacon in the middle of the night was making me sort of physically ill.

I probably should have gotten up and sourced it out. Instead I tossed in bed and blamed our downstairs roommate who I knew had been out partying the night before. She was the only one in the house who truly loved bacon (ironically, since she was also actually the only Jewish one). I probably should have at least yelled down to her, but I grumbled, blew the bacon bits out of my nose, pulled the blankets over my head and crashed.

In the morning I found her on the front step with her head in her hands.

"God, fuck you! Who craves bacon at friggin three in the morning? It's all I could smell! You suck."

She lifted her hands and turned her face up to me. She looked like a bag of shit. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face was smeared with makeup.

"I don't remember the bacon," she whined, " I think I must have been hungry but... I think I nearly killed us all."

I walked into the kitchen and there it was. A warped frying pan and the thin black twisted remains of what were five pieces of bacon. I flicked at charred mess on the pan and the burnt bacon crumbled like ash.

"Idiot."

So she'd come home trashed, stuck the bacon in the pan, cranked the heat and passed out.

I've always told that story, of how our lovely blue house was almost a flash in the pan, and laughed. I always laughed until a couple nights ago, when I came home, dug some chicken wings out of the freezer, stuck em in the oven, turned on my computer and fell asleep.

Now our Jewish roommate was drunk-off-her ass when she cooked her bacon to bits, but me? I was just exhausted.

Yesterday morning I turned off the oven, threw the pan outside in the snow and just starred at the little black stones that used to be chicken wings.

I don't even like chicken wings.

Idiot.

image by cycle60

Well it's happened. Winter is here and it's snowing and the snow is sticking. I suppose I should say something more about it, but snow is snow and snow happens every year.

I have yet to purchase a pair of winter boots though. Here's the rub - everything I've looked at is too trendy. Trend-city. Please tell me: what's with all the fur?

running the hare out of time

"fuckity fuck FUCK fuck fuck!"

psst. That's me. That's me and I just stubbed my toe. Oh damn, you should see me, for real, I'm hoping on one foot like a complete fucking moron.

Shit. I shouldn't interrupt the story. Where was I?

Right.

Just before I stubbed my toe, I'd been chasing the black rabbit. The rabbit is from the UK. Honest to God, it's a fucking British rabbit - seriously, you have no idea... they're so suave.

So I was chasing this black rabbit.

Running.

Yeah that's the way I run.

What.

Whatever. It looks alright. I run like I'm comfortable running. That's what someone told me once. He and I were running through the old trees that day. The trees are gone now - a hurricane took them down - but I remember what they looked like, and I remember running between them, my grey newbalance sneakers were fresh out of the box and I could do anything when I was wearing them. But that summer was a long time ago and I digress -- that's not part of the story.

The black rabbit had it in his head that I was simple. He faked to the right, to the left. He thought for sure he'd lose me. Instead, I read that little hare like the fairytale he is and stuck behind him, just a step behind. The grass was wet and neither of us were tiring.

The black rabbit flashed across a flat rock, and I followed only to find him suddenly stopped on the far side of the stone.

My toe was throbbing.

"Know what your problem is?" asked the black rabbit.

I said no (naturally, no one in the world knows what their own fucking problem is).

"Well, I'll tell you what your problem is."

God he's so fucking cheeky isn't he? Fucking Euro-trash rabbit.

"Your problem is that you chase me and chase me and you never catch me... but the thing is, you could. You easily could. You're not trying hard enough, and we both know it."

hooo-haaa. hoooo-haaaa (That's us breathing - we're really really out of breath so this little exchange was taking quite a bit of time).

I reached down, clutched my toe, leaned back and allowed my weight to drag me to the ground.

"Stop being so scared," said the cheeky rabbit, "I'll run forever, but you can't. So, you better figure this out... I'll wait just for now, but get up, cause we're about to go again."

Fucking little fucking bugger. He's sitting and twisting his whiskers at me, and that's where we are right now.

Now I don't know why the rabbit happened to be British, but it may have had something to do with his bad teeth and the fact that he looks so smug...

How liberating would it be to just 'go crazy'?

"Oh yeah, that's so-and-so... she just went crazy."

I can't believe we've lived so long and are still so far apart

In junior high, I wore black leggings, oversized t-shirts and chuck taylors or rainbow-stitched doc martins.

I still had buck teeth, cause it was before the orthodontist took a drill saw and sanded down the tips of them to make me 'look better'. My mother freaked. I came home and my two big front buck teeth were just gone. They'd fallen in line with the rest of my pearly whites. I rubbed my tongue over the tips of them for months until my mouth acclimatized to the smoothness of them. When you're twelve or so, an enormous change like that is simply reduced to an anomaly that keeps you preoccupied saying "see!" with your lips pulling back into a wide jaw-displaying grin.

In social studies class, they showed us a US-made video about finance and keeping your money in order, but instead of saying 'dollars', they said 'bucks'. Bucks, bucks, bucks over and over until the deep voice narrating started sounding like an authoritative constipated chicken.

"If Tony has five bucks and he spends one buck, then he should put the other four bucks in the bank so he can save his bucks -- don't you think Tony is good with his bucks?"

WTF? I thought a buck was a deer.

Everyone else made a purse in Home Ec, but I made a bridle bag. It came apart the very first time I used it. I'd spent more time staring at my then-crush than sewing. I never learned to properly work a sewing machine. I still have a muted frustration when I look at one.

In elementary school sex ed, grade five, the most controversial we ever got was dropping a tampon in a glass of water. It took me a few years to understand why the female teacher had absolutely no reaction as the tiny cotton stick virtually blew up like a balloon, sucking up every last drop in the cup, expanding until it had no more room to go except up to the rim. The boys stifled laughter. The girls gasped in horror. Even with all of us so young -- trust the male audience to see detached humor in it, but for the young girls to leave that afternoon with a sense of impending doom.

"This is as close as they can get," said my wiry-black haired grade seven teacher, swallowing hard as she pointed to an illustration of a naked man and a naked woman facing each other, "unless they want to get closer. If they want to get closer, the man has to... "

A couple girls in the back shrieked with laughter. The male audience understood at this moment, for the first time, where their own perpetual gender-based embarrassment would come for the rest of their lives and their faces turned red as they shrank into their seats.

Closer? That's how I figured it in my head for years. You could stand close to one another, you could touch - be physically closer, but sex, actual sex was getting as close as you could possibly get.

Going any further, being any closer together than sex was, well, an impossibility.

At my first school dance, my long green crushed velvet skirt got tucked into my opaque green nylons after a trip to the washroom. No one told me my full-assed lace trimmed white panties were on full display all night. I swore never to go to another dance.

In shop I made salt and pepper shakers and painted them all over with little blue and yellow flowers.

The first Bob Dylan song I ever heard - 'Silvio' - is still my favourite and sparked the beginning of a vinyl Dylan collection I still play to this day.

I starred as the plot-facilitating sidekick in the school play about a beauty shop.

I didn't have my first kiss until I was fourteen, but I remember exactly what shirt I was wearing, who's basement we were in and what music was playing on the stereo. I remember his spit running down the corner of my mouth and wondering "is it always this wet?"

In highschool I wore bell bottoms, work pants, logo'd tees, a patchwork leather jacket, army shirts and any manner of vintage footwear.

I got high for the first time in class. I got drunk for the first time in the woods and cried.

The title of this post is what I wrote in my graduation yearbook bio.

In all that time I never once thought I'd have to figure myself out, and I have nothing to regret except that -- because now I don't think I am the sum of any of these things, and there's so much I want to do that I haven't done.

I really haven't been that impressed yet.

the tiniest violin

I had a few very sad realizations in my life today.

This morning the alarm clock I've used since as long as I can remember setting an alarm didn't go off and I've discovered (to my utter sleep-deprived dismay) that it will never go off again.

As if saying goodbye to my trusty alarm clock wasn't bad enough, I also bled the Chanel perfume bottle I've been nursing for two years dry after my shower - wrenching the absolute final drop from it.

To top it all off, I came to the conclusion tonight that Torontonian men will never adequately tip their servers, since they couldn't calculate %15 of their bill to save their effing lives, even with the help of women who (by appearances only anyway) should have an aptitude for extremely basic mathematics.

Yeah that last one's sad in a different way.

romantic terrorism

I was cradling my cell with one shoulder, trying to irritate the operator with a fake British accent.

"wot time does thee er, street car stop runing due to the Santa Claus parade?"

I'm was singing 'walking in memphis' like Robbie Williams might do it under my breath, my head tilted back, my fingers forming a little tunnel around one eye.

Snap.

I'm taking fake pictures of real balloons. Everytime I think 'wow, two green ones together floating past the thirtieth floor - sun glinting through them as they twist upward - it's kismet! it's perfect!' Then I'd see five red ones dancing together. More kismet. More perfect.

I was thinking about romance. It was a beautiful day; a walk-in-the-park kind of a day, a make-you-pine-for-a-little-romance kind of a day. But I wasn't pining, see, because I'm happy being independent.

I like standing close to the edge of the rushing subway train as it rolls into the station so I can feel the rush of stale air lift my hair off my shoulders.

It's that I don't implicitly trust being in love. I think it's blinding and dangeous, and when it goes wrong it can hurt worse than any other kind of pain.

Ironic thing... a couple years back in Toronto, an anonymous TTC rider pushed an unsuspecting young girl off the platform and inescapably into the path of the oncoming subway train for no reason whatsoever (unless you count impulsive lunacy). Now here's me, and I won't put any faith in romance for fear of getting burned, but I will stand dangerously close to the yellow line as the train flies by to feel alive - thrilled to paint myself in solitary strength - and put my faith in the strangers behind me not to push me to my certain death.


From the TORONTO STAR:

Riders hug walls in wake of tragedy
By Michelle Shephard
28 September 1997

"Shanahan, a 22-year-old Newfoundland native, took her first-ever ride on the subway yesterday. When she returns home she'll have one message for travellers: 'You gotta be safe riding the subway.'
It was a warning that people, hugging the walls at Dundas station yesterday, appeared acutely aware of, in the wake of Friday's crime...
...Although the platform was not crowded, few commuters ventured on to the bumpy yellow area lining the platform edge.
On Friday morning Charlene Minkowski was on the platform at the Dundas station on her way to meet her boyfriend. A man pushed her into the path of the oncoming train. She later died in hospital.
...'This has had a profound impact on people because we often assume trust. This random act has diminished that trust and that in itself is a very sad thing,' said 36-year-old Jeff Williams as he exited a subway train, looking over his shoulder."


Yeah we're all sad but damnit Shephard, what the fuck is 'looking over his shoulder' supposed to mean? Why the hell didn't editors red-pen that out of this waste-of-space? No offence, but extrapolation and extraneous dramatic flourishes are just a couple hallmarks of bad print journalism.

I guess that's just how the Star rolled in '97.

dickheads

"I have never in my life gotten such a perpetually negative impression of someone, and that's saying something, because I give everyone a chance," I was grumbling while unceremoniously stabbing a filter with an espresso tab.

"Just stay out of his way... just get the hell out of his way," my blonde waiter counterpart replied, sounding like she'd said it or heard it all before.

I guess I should rewind and explain that my new boss had just made me feel like the snot he blew into a klenex. And the reason, something seemingly so small and insignificant that no one would believe the nightmares it's given me, is a shirt. Actually, to be a little more specific, it's a little green alligator on a shirt.

The uniform at this bar is a black chemise lacoste polo - long sleeve for dining room, short sleeve for cocktailing. I currently don't happen to own one of these extravagant items, and since they retail for up to and over $100, I'm sure I wouldn't fucking wear one to work if I did.

So I've got one (theoretically) coming from some anonymous ebay-er, and in the meantime, one of the girls has given me loan of her extra short-sleeve polo until the snail mail delivers.

Since the saga of the shirt, I've discovered how small the general manager's penis is.

"What's wrong with this picture..hmm?" (he's pointing at me, but as usual, not looking at me).

"Uh. What?" I stammer.

"What is wrong with this picture?" He repeats himself and this time he's actually looking at me, well not at me, but at my bare arm to which he's maniacally gesturing.

"Oh sorry, I ah, I'm in the dining room today, right, ah - I'm - it's coming."

"It's coming as in your Mommy is driving down with it right now?"

Now I'm not brilliant or anything, but I'm pretty sure this asshole thinks I'm a child.

And how's this for ironic: I'm more educated than he is. But in lieu of mutual respect, here's this piece-of-shit GM who uses two per cent of my incredibly hard-earned tips to fund his mid-life crisis crotch rocket.

Even I have a bigger dick.

buy me a pony

"Well, the story is, I was at a horse show, and they said, 'can you come right now?' So I rushed over to a friend's place, threw on her dress and went over...I was nineteen..."

She was just nineteen when she started in make-up for TSN.

I'm looking at her sitting there in the half-pilot half-make-up chair, her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap. Everything about her screams stylish. She's got a casual inviting grace. I want her to sweep blush across my cheeks.

"...so I got the job on the spot. I was the first make-up person TSN ever had...."

She was nineteen then and probably smoking hot. She walked in and the Exec at the time took one look at her and just said 'yeah, you've got the job.' I bet that's just how it happened. Not that she's not talented (doubtless she is), but looks like hers go a long way -- blonde, blue-eyed and statuesque.

She's touched eons of faces. She's touched the most influential Canadians in sport. She's a legend in the business. She's had a career full of unexpected drama and beauty, and nowadays, she's also a mom.

We were sitting in the green room chatting and were delighted to discover we've got this something uncommon in common - horses. I invest only half the soul I used to, and she's given up the dream of being an equestrian extraordinaire, but I still ride, and it's her kids who now carry her torch.

So I've sent away for my chaps and my paddock boots, and very shortly she wants me to be setting up courses for a couple of little girls, sending them over fences and teaching them all of the horsey-things it took me my lifetime to learn.

What I'm trying to say is, I think I've got a part-time job giving horse-back riding lessons. Now, how fucking perfect is that?

Getting to ride up here is payment enough.

that is me - taken this summer

spirits presiding

I read once somewhere that in France there's this saying: 'avoir l'esprit d'escalier.' Translated liberally it means to 'have the wit of the stairs,' or 'the spirit of the staircase.'

It's the moment "you discover the answer, but it's too late." It's the instant your brain compiles the disarming reply to an insult, a cunning witticism, the perfect words, but the opportunity's gone. Like you're leaving the party, coat over one arm, headed to the door, going down the stairs, and presto - it comes to you - the exact phrase at the wrong time, the show stopping response after the curtain has already fallen, and there's nothing you can do with it.

I rehearse conversations in my head on the streetcar. Prophesizing what the other person will say, what I'll say back and in what tone... but in the end it's always like the French say - esprit d'escalier - what I should've said when I had the chance. Things I should have had the guts to say or do.

It's the ghost of who you never were. It's the gun that never fired. It's the sizzle of a match that fails to light.

I should have told the drunk molester at the bar that I'd gladly feed his own cock to him. I should have struck up a conversation with the editor of that highly regarded magazine when we were at the same function. I should have said, "I love you" when it meant something.

I'm trying real fucking hard to be the person I imagine I could've been in retrospect.

So, what is it that you left unsaid?

"What's echelon mean?"

Group I guess. I dunno. I used to know I think, I mean I must know since I wrote it, but I dunno. Why'd I write that when I just could have written 'group'?

I turned up the music and spun the computer chair around. I dunno why I even write the blog actually.

It was late and things were sloppy, and all night I kept getting the feeling I must have really awful breath because everything I started to say seemed just foul and boring and it made me nervous that no one was interested in conversation.

I watched the girl I'd brought to the party slide her hands across the slight waist of a actress-friend of mine.

Shit sorry, I forgot we don't say 'actress' anymore - like we don't say stewardess or waitress. Whatever. An actor who's also a girl was now kissing the other girl I brought to the party.

It's so pretty when women kiss. They stick their necks out like swans and lean forward expectantly creating this swayed arc. It's really incapable of being anything but soft even when it's urgent.

I kept thinking I'd given up late nights, but today here's the sun I haven't seen in a while.

I'm just biding my time you know. Really soon I'm going to escape all the expectancy and find the sun again, and I'm not going to use words like 'echelon' anymore - I'm just going to say what I mean.

this is a remembrance day post

The lower echelon of farm animals is a funny lot. They've all got their usefulness (think dairy, meat, cheap labour etc), but sometimes they're more than willing to take on odd jobs outside their busy schedules. Example - pigs often share pens with chickens to serve as protectors and vermin-killers. Goats can be surrogate mothers for orphaned horses. And in the tradition of animal sacrifice, the sheep grazing in the artillery depressions on the long sloping spine of France's Vimy Ridge are keeping the grass short, and the belief alive that some things are worth dying for.

Back in the spring of 1917 the allied forces pounded the ridge with something like 40,000 tonnes of ammunition before and during a battle that's still one of the most important events in Canadian history, if not the most important event in the history of the nation.

Cold sleet drenched the hillside on the first day. By the end, it would be a driving snow. Deep underground, German soldiers cupped their hands over their ears in the dark as the noise from guns blasting into the ground above their heads filled the tunnels. They were packed like rats in a sewer suffering unbearable odor and a mind-splitting din.

Behind the curtain of artillery fire crept a wave of Canadian assualt troops, each carrying a rifle and bayonet with 120 rounds of ammunition, two grenades, five sandbags, food rations, a waterproof sheet, a gas mask and goggles, a ground flare and a water bottle. Stronger troops also heaped a shovel onto that load. As far as I'm concerned, you'd have to be an ox. But these guys were my age, younger - little brothers, best friends, lovers. Vimy would be their first battle united under Canada's banner.

Canadians did what no one else could when they led the charge to storm Vimy - they took it in just four days - and almost 4000 of them died doing it, many of those bodies sinking deep into a cesspool of French mud, never to be found.

France gave the hill and the surrounding area to Canada as a commemoration of their victory: a patch of Canadiana on French soil. Sculptor Walter Allward's original concept for the memorial was a statue rapt with triumph, but that was before anyone at home finally understood the horrors of trench warfare or the absolute Hieronymus Bosch-esque hell of the WWI front lines.

The sorrowful monument stands 15 stories on a crest at looking down over the Douai plains, and when I visited Vimy the sight of it dwarfed my life.

It was really the sheep that stuck with me though - a small herd of them grazing the off-limits length of the ridge. They're there now, peacefully and casually nibbling the grass blanketing the pox-marked countryside, ambling into blown out hollows and past dead tree stumps all still visible nearly ten years shy of a hundred years later - just munching away, blissfully unaware.

Every now and again one of them blows up.

A ball of exploded sheep poofs into the air.

Or one of them loses a leg.

BLAM!

When the allies dumped 40,000 tonnes of ammunition onto Vimy's shallow hillside much of it went un-detonated. So much of it in fact, that most of Vimy is virtually impassable by machine or man.

War reverberates.

I stood near the edge of the memorial and watched the sheep go on complacently eating. They're oblivious that many of their number and most of their predecessors are war amps or casualties. They don't seem to acknowledge that just under the surface lie innumerable sacrifices, important histories, the lives of others just like them - dead so the smorgasbord of life can go on.

Today, let's help the sheep remember.

home cooked

One of the chefs at my night job is exactly what your mother'd be like if she cooked you food, cooed and fussed and called you 'baby' a lot, but then followed it all up really loudly with shit like "I'm gunna put yer salad dressing on the side, cause I know you don't get the chance to eat the fuckin thing all at once and I wouldn't want 'er looking like a can of smashed assholes everytime you came back to take a bite."

She's heaven.

anti-love note

Orange Pekoe and a werthers original on an empty stomach are giving me a hot-in-the-head feeling right now. There's a dull burning building behind my eyes. Overwhelming sensation. It's like being high without all the perks.

"Riley, can you look up all the stuff about Rob Babcock?"

Rob. ROOOOoooob Babcock. Cock. I'm rolling his name around on my tongue with the werthers, mixing with the gooey toffee until it sounds sticky. Emphasis on the 'Buh' sound and the 'K' in cock. Ob BuhbuhcaK.

Rob Babcock is the Toronto Raptors GM, who (now, notoriously) said: "we're gonna suck bad this year boys."

What a maroon.

Take some tea. Squeeze out the bag. Suck on the toffee and mumble 'maroon' until it's sticky too.

The tea is blooming in hot pink blotches on my face like red spores. The toffee is gluing my eyelids shut and making me dizzy. My hands are rubbing the back of my neck. My shoulders are tipping forward. I'm simmering. I'm a rolling boil.

When my head evaporates into caffeinated steam, I'm going to float into your mouth, seep into the pores on your forehead, plaque up your arteries, roll stones in your organs, toxify your innards, poison your blood and cut you until you're nothing.

I'm sorry I have to kill you.

But you don't love me like I love you and I know you never will.

goodnight dignity

Please Mr. Labatt 50, I don't care if you've had a bit on the too-much side of your own personal booze limit; I'm serious as a heart attack when I say do not grope me like that again. If I feel your hand in the vicinity of my crotch one more time I'll cut it off. I'm your server, not your damn lap dance.

And no, "my boyfriend (insert lame answer to dumbass question about my love life here)."

I'll kick you out and be glad you're gone so I don't have to fake any more witty repartee or look at your meaty face.

sooner than you think

Plumy reds, crimson cherry reds, bloody arterial reds... my favorite colour by far is any and all variation of red. It's visceral. So with that in mind, welcome to my new color scheme (replete with new header created by an amazing talent I know).

I realize my posts have been pretty shitty lately, but I've been busy being sick with an annoying head-cold. You know the kind, where the fluid block sitting like a dead weight high above your nasal cavity seems to travel back and forth between nostrils depending on what side you're laying on in bed? And when it's slowing traveling through the middle, in between your eyes somewhere up in your head, you can suddenly breathe and you figure snuffing back hard at that moment's going to keep it that way. Forget it. That shit doesn't go away until the cold does.

I think it's Toronto that's making me sick.

I walked by the Eaton's Centre yesterday and saw - to my complete dismay - an excessive barrage of fake fir and holly going up around the entrances just in time for Christmas. Just in time. Wouldn't want to be late with those Christmas decorations. Consumers need to be in the know. Sometimes I think we devote two whole months to Xmas just to panic those of us too poor to start the annual shopping. Hell, no one even calls it a holiday anymore. It's a whole damnfandangle holiday season.

"Bring it on," dead-panned one of my co-workers when he heard me complaining, "I fuckin' LOVE Christmas -- let's get this shit started."

Get the shit started indeed.

This holiday season, I'm going to take one step at a time: Remembrance Day (wear those poppies guys), November's abrupt change-for-the-colder in weather necessitating a new winter boot purchase, a plane ticket, stocking up on wine and cider, the last day at the market, the first snow and then, let's get the shit started.

in this picture...

...I wish I knew what warranted the pointed finger.

shut your tragic mouth

An old friend and I'd just seen an abysmal performance of The Goat -- Edward Albee's foray behind the dark curtains of love, sex and the sometimes tragic definition of what it means to be human. There's no simple way to say that, apparently, unless you throw a little bestiality in there somewhere.

We took the TTC together a short while before we parted ways.

He stood up to step off the subway and his dark green army pants were level my eyes as he passed by the thick plexi glass.

I heard once that army gear is entirely edible, so in case you're some unfortunate soldier who gets lost or imprisoned in enemy territory you can always make a light snack of your pants.

The edible-pants idea flashed in my mind and I thought about reaching past the glass to pluck off one of his buttons, pop it in my mouth, suck on it.

No one else would understand, but I know it would taste like summer.

I think my muses are liars and my lovers are gone. Sometimes I want to hurt everyone who ever hurt me and sometimes I just want to be someone else all together. You know that feeling - when something you used to have is missing, but you don't know what that something is? I've got that feeling.

Whatever.

I'm not tying this shit up with a tidy little euphemism.

you've got a little coke in your (beautiful) nostril

Kate Moss builds her emaciated uber-model image on super anorexic will power and a humble coke habit, gets caught in party pix revving up her snow blower and pays a visit to Betty Ford -- in barely one month she's got her 'got-well' rehab grad certificate (why they let the waif out without force-feeding her is beyond me) and emerges to find fashion string-pullers think she looks "better than ever" and are falling all over themselves to lease retail space on her face again (there are something like 3.5 million in contracts awaiting signatures from her ever-so-skeletal hand).

The moral of the story? Huff lots of blow kids! You might even get a book deal!

To master the pouty face you must be skinny and high.

There's an old man I know in the hospital and he's dying. He's the same age as my dad.

six-year-olds in knight costumes say the darndest things

"Trick or treat.. hey, NICE pumpkin!"

"Gee, thanks.. what are you supposed to be, a knight? Great costume!"

"Yah, hey, did you carve that yourself?"

"Uh-huh!"

"Wow.. It's a lobster right?"

"Um. It's a scorpion."

"Cool!"