Archives for December, 2008

In June, I received an iTouch in the post. It came in an anonymous package. Due to a mistake in my address, I was only aware that I had something waiting for me at the post office after I received an email from one E. E. Even now, I’d suspect it wasn’t really meant for me, except it’s engraved on the back with run.likethewind.ca.

I only started using it a few weeks ago. It wasn’t that my old mp3 player had great sentimental value for me, only that it did the job it was supposed to do: play music. For all my geekiness, I’m not a technophile. So it surprises me how attached I’ve grown to this iPod, especially since I still hate iTunes. I have a list of reasons compiled somewhere about why it’s so great, basically just a list of its features — things like how I have a new appreciation for album covers, and how it excites me that I could create my own wallpaper (if I weren’t so lazy). And maybe I screamed a little when I discovered that this site shows up pixel perfect on the iPod’s tiny Safari screen. As a web designer, the sense of validation was incredible.

I have it with me basically all the time now, so my last.fm scrobbles have gone up exponentially (since iPods are the only music players last.fm can read). If it were waterproof, I’d be probably be dancing in the shower. The first few days I used it, people would stop to talk to me about it – total strangers sometimes. I met a man from Halifax at the corner of Yonge and Queen who wondered if I could help him with some bug he had on his own iPod. People at work, at school ask to touch it. So I was rightly intimidated all the way back in June; this is easily the sexiest piece of machinery I’ve ever owned.

I’m trying to remember now – when did I first use it? What was the first song I listened to? I can’t remember either detail, though I think I started with Nina Simone.

I wish I had a picture of it to show you – even if it does looks like every other iPod out there. Still, maybe you can identify these things by their scratches, like fingerprints. The back of mine now boasts an intricate webbing of fine lines, though it’s still shiny enough to serve as the world’s most accessorised mirror. But my camera is away for repairs, so instead of a picture, I leave you with a song.

Much love in the new year,
-f.

Odetta – Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
I use this song to put myself to sleep sometimes.

The Heavy – Colleen (via zshare)

The reason I noticed him the first time was because from a certain angle, the angle formed by my getting off the elevator and his leaving the lobby, he looked startlingly like a friend of mine, a friend who has no reason to ever be anywhere near the neighbourhood I live in, let alone the apartment complex. Just as I was about to yell his name, he shifted coordinates so that the angle fell out of place, and it became clear that he was not my friend. He was significantly taller than my friend, for one thing, and a shade darker and somewhat less aloof around the mouth – though it was still a beautiful mouth, on its own grounds. He was a couple of years older than both of us, too, just old enough that if he wasn’t a newlywed, he was probably engaged. And if neither of those things, then he was the son of a parent who wished he was.

And so he became the man I know as the man who isn’t my friend, whom I see nights when I’m coming home and he is, too. Black messenger bag, nondescript wool overcoat, dress trousers, and always in his right hand (black leather gloves) a wrinkled silver bag from Winners. No electronic paraphernalia evident, no wires or beeping phones.

He stands out a little from the mass of bodies that populate this highrise, being about a head taller than most and a particular and interesting combination of class and colour. Occasionally one of the kids forever swarming these hallways will do something stupid, something that infuriates the righteously tyrannical superintendent wife&husband duo, and we will grin in unison.

I spent the day surrounded by undegrads cramming for exams, and as a result feel young and inexcusably carefree. Additionally, I nearly missed the moon while I was walking home from the bus stop, a full-bellied white moon that I mistook for a streetlight dangling inexplicably off a twenty-first-floor balcony. I had to stop and cross the street, just to make sure it was the moon, and in the process endangered someone’s driving licence.

The lobby, except for my music and the security camera doing its relentless rounds, is empty. I commence the hop, skip, and jump routine that my body believes constitutes dancing. When he comes in, I do not stop on his account, shuffling in my wet boots around a pillar decorated with dollar-store tinsel and an apparently inebriated paper Santa Claus. As I emerge from a particularly complicated stumble, I notice the elevator has arrived and, more importantly, is about to leave, so I sprint the two steps to its doors, which are now grandly sweeping shut.

Inside, I grin idiotically for no reason discernible to anyone in that tiny space, least of all me. It’s only when he gets off on the thirteenth floor that I remember that my grin, nine times out of ten, is indistinguishable from a smirk.

I wrote this and deleted it, wrote this and deleted it.
—-

Florence and The Machine – My Boy Builds Coffins (zshare)

Recently, I asked a friend to review my story about Arjun. After reading it, he wrote, it’s always impossible for me to critique your work because i never have any idea what you’re aiming for.

My boy builds coffins, he makes them all day
But it’s not just for work, and it isn’t for play.

So I tried to figure out for myself what it was I’d been aiming for, since I hadn’t given it conscious thought when I started writing it. It occurred to me that what I wanted that piece to do was hurt people. I let the thought linger a while, just to see how true it felt.
I decided that was exactly right.

What I want to do is create something beautiful and have it be no less beautiful for its causing readers pain. More precisely, I want the pain and the beauty to be mutually constitutive. I’m adamant about the hurt, though. Why that’s important, I haven’t yet figured out.

It sounds strange, and cruel (and pretentious), when I put it down in words like this, but yes, this is what I do when I write. This is the closest thing I have to an “aim.”

As sadistic as this might appear, it’s masochistic, too. Last week I wrote something that was the most painful thing I’ve ever written, which fact even I would think I was exaggerating, except I’m not.

And yet, though I have all this tangible evidence to support it, I do not believe in the cliche that writing must necessarily painful. I don’t think – or I don’t want to believe – that it needs to be this debilitating, especially when the end result is a work that stubbornly refuses to admit the hurt that went into its creation. But this probably has more to do with the things I write than with any specific culture of writing.

During a conversation I had last December on the different kinds of stories we were telling, a friend said, “And this is why I write comedies and you’ll write novels.” I can’t speak to the kind of introspection needed to write comedy, but last week’s experience taught me that when I finally do stop skirting the issues that matter most to me, writing will be intensely painful. I say “will,” because last week, when I had to write honestly and directly about things I’d spent years suppressing, I still couldn’t bring myself to write straightforward prose. There is no way I will ever be able to write about those things without having days when it’s a struggle just to look people in the eyes and sustain a conversation for longer than two minutes.

I’m going to have resign myself to this, grow some skin and a pair, and learn to make myself vulnerable. Most fervid of cliches, this.

In May, I wrote about a grocery trip my father made. The post is little more than a list of fruit, but the reason I wrote it had nothing to do with the fruit and everything to do with details found only in its opening clause and its final sentence. Everything else, every last detail about the feel and the smell of all those fruits is filler, which I produced as an exercise in self-restraint, in not explaining why that month was so painful, while managing to somehow write about it anyway. In lieu of punching a wall or speaking to my father, I wrote out a shopping list. So that list of fruits, so colorful, so pretty, and so meaningless, was my way of deflecting attention away from the few details that had triggered its writing. Those fruits were also my excuse of writing them, those details, in the first place. The camouflage was essential. Without it I could not justify to myself even speaking my hurt.

In November, with half a year’s distance separating me from that night in the kitchen, I reread that post and realised that no one could possibly have penetrated my code, even if I hadn’t consciously constructed it as code at the time. For whom was I writing, then, if I refused entry to anyone who wasn’t me? I need to practise trust, which entails being somewhat less of a coward. Generosity, honesty — I don’t remember these things always being so difficult. But I didn’t always have this much to lie about, or to protect.

My boy builds coffins, and I think it’s shame
that when each one’s been made, he can’t see it again.
He crafts every one with love and with care,
then it’s thrown in the ground. It just isn’t fair.

Nor do believe that writing is cathartic. At least that’s not my experience of writing. Instead of admitting the hurts that are central to the things I write, I skirt around them, so that nothing is ever resolved when I end a piece. Things are only different, never necessarily better. The hurt persists, the memory of the trauma not reduced, only shifted. Time, however, is its own mercy. Its passing makes me a stranger to my past selves, so that I can read previous writings outside the private, fleeting contexts in which my codes were transparent, and thus read them closer to how other people might have read them. But by then I’ve washed my hands of the things I wrote; they don’t belong me.

And that somehow is a good feeling, knowing that distance/escape is possible.

The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.
- Fernando Pessoa, “Autopsychography.” trans Richard Zenith.

Mystic – Beautiful Resistance (via zshare)

At the subway station, I slouch against a wall and fish small change out of my wallet. Head bent over the fistful of silver, I begin the necessary tortuous mental arithmetic.

“You wanna buy a token?”
I barely look up. “No, I’m good, thanks,” and continue sorting through the collection of dimes and nickels and quarters.

“But I need the food,” says the voice, as though taken aback at having to explain this. Too late I catch the prefatory ellipsis. I look up now.

For weeks I’ve been oblivious to my immediate surroundings, a strange blindness that prevents me from registering the presence of things directly in front of me. The more frightening result of this is that faces have become impenetrable to me, refusing entry to intent or nuance. Additionally, everything always appears to be happening on the very edge of my vision, outside the immediate and tiny sphere of my consciousness, even and especially those things directly in front of me.

“Oh.” I try to focus on his face, to see it as a coherent whole, instead of fixing on its disconnected pieces. He has a wide-eyed and slightly unseeing gaze, locked in a face framed by thin and straggly grey hair. “I’m sorry. Yeah, I need a token.” I commence again my desperate attempt at personal finance, but abandon the effort before getting past the first coin. Going haphazardly by weight and colour, I pour most of the mass of change into his open palm.

I’m just about walking away when I turn, embarrassed at my inability to do simple math. “Wait, is that right?” I’m thinking that maybe I short-changed him. Maybe that wasn’t 2.75 that I gave him. “Do you need more?”

“Sure,” he says, surprised, as though I’d asked the most obvious question. There is still that bemused look in his eyes, which are still the only thing I see, though I can’t tell what colour his eyes are. “Whatever you’ve got,” he says.

I empty the rest of the the change in his hand. “Thanks,” I say, for the token. “Have fun.” This is the meaningless goodbye that I make as I head to the turnstile.

Underground, waiting for the northbound, suddenly the casual brutality of the conversation hits me, its straightforwardly demeaning logic of need and the flat carelessness of my self-absorption. Have fun, I said. I swear out loud, startling the woman standing on my right.

Fleetingly, I consider going back up the stairs and apologising to him for my careless cruelty. Too late I note the slightly abashed note in his voice when he said he needed food, and the continued bewilderment when I asked him if needed more change. We were having two different conversations, his answers and my questions not quite meeting.

But what would I say to him, what paltry excuse could I offer for my crudeness — that I don’t understand faces and voices and words any more, that the delay between hearing and emotional comprehension has grown so long that I inflict these daily cruelties now everywhere, accidental and oblivious hurts.

So I don’t apologise to him, because that would have been a supremely self-serving thing to do. Instead, I let out an exasperated, tired Fuck and wait for the train doors to open.

It is November. I have been waiting for winter for a year now.

A junkie walking through the twilight
I’m on my way home
I left three days ago, but no one seems to know I’m gone
Home is where the hatred is
Home is filled with pain and it,
might not be such a bad idea if I never, never went home again

stand as far away from me as you can and ask me why
hang on to your rosary beads
close your eyes to watch me die
you keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it
God, but did you ever try
to turn your sick soul inside out
so that the world, so that the world
can watch you die

home is where I live inside my white powder dreams
home was once an empty vacuum that’s filled now with my silent screams
home is where the needle marks
try to heal my broken heart
and it might not be such a bad idea if I never, if I never went home again
home again
home again
home again
kick it, quit it
kick it, quit it
kick it, quit it
kick it, can’t go home again

Gil Scott-Heron – Home Is Where The Hatred Is (z-share)
Esther Phillips – Home Is Where The Hatred Is (z-share)

Gil Scott-Heron – Angel Dust (live performance) (z-share)