I curse them going and I curse them riding...

To the unconscionable son of a bitch who just rammed, at what must have been close to highway speed, into my parked car just now, and drove away: I hope the complications arising from the impact will last you the rest of your miserable life. Let a busted radiator be the very beginning of your problems.

Luckily for me, the car was already a dead, clutchless, radiatorless, lots-of-stuff-less husk of rusting inutility. Unfortunately, I had just removed the insurance and can't call the cops on this person's unpleasant ass, since it would put me in jeopardy with the law. I wasn't supposed to have it out on the street but damn, it was a good thing it was there or he'd have slammed into the car I've borrowed from my sis. Which my car, careening from the impact, did. There is no noticeable damage to hers, although mine looks like the starship enterprise at the end of - which one was it? II? III? Ah, pick one.

Out. Of. This. Neighborhood.

Dynamite: quickest fix known to man

Now that the end of my residence here is in sight, all the small things that needled me to a barely significant extent throughout all this time have become magnified. Every time I empty the garbage under the sink and stick its unforgiving metal frame back underneath the u-pipe that's too low to accept it smoothly, it bores a hole right through me. I feel like picking it up and flattening it against the floor.

The intensely prolific lint machine running amok in this house seems like it's on the verge of burying us, though there's probably less actual lint now than there has been for years. What was trapped under the bedroom rug was nothing less than a whole sweater, and let me tell you the pattern was pretty gross.

Driving my girlfriend. Picking her up at the LRT station so she won't have to bus and walk around alone in a basically unsafe neighbourhood. Chivalry can be so goddamned inconvenient sometimes. Lately though, it's unbearable. Even though I love my girl and want to be with her more rather than less, it's the going to get her that just drives me nuts. And now, when there's so many fucking things I should be doing that every day's a tally of opportunity cost and messy triage, it's much worse. It's totally unfair, I know: it takes fifteen minutes to hop in the car and drive out there, and I've already been writing this for longer than that. But I just can't seem to help the way it feels.

We've just gotten started painting to get ready for what will undoubtedly be some Manson Family tenant types, and it feels like we will never finish. Not counting the dwindling hours of this day, I have six days left to finish everything that has to - has to - be done. I'm totally overwhelmed. There's two weeks left to paint three more rooms and a hallway, find a place to store my piano (unless by some fluke it sells right away), sand the hardwood floors, stain them, get new locks on everything, fix the hole in the cupboard door that I'd put there with my fist two years ago and just covered with a crappy painting, find tenants, move, and on top of everything else the Coachella tickets I bought look like they're about to be sold at a nice little discount. Man, if I'd been able to score them at the price I'm about to sell them for, it might have been more conceivable that we'd actually be going.

I'm just panicking. It's going to be good. I just wish it had already happened.

("Scylla" and "Charybdis" images are from here.)

Jesus let me sleep

Do you know how much I hate Led Zeppelin? In particular, how much I loathe "Whole Lotta Love"? That horrible guitar freak-out with Plant making those awful sex noises that sound like a cat being fed to a rusty wood chipper, Bonzo's "tasteful" fills during same, and then oh god that dunndanh dundanh dunt! riff that makes me just absolutely die. It's dumb in the first place and then they bring it back! And plus more Bonzo breakdowns just in case you weren't aware the man could keep time. Go fuck a groupie with a fish, why don't you.

This is happening.

Many stories centre around Chief Factor John Rowand, who was in charge of Fort Edmonton for many years. No one was so completely master on the western plains as Rowand, the great little martinet who built the big house at Edmonton which they called "Rowand's Folly." It is related that, to impress the savage Indians with whom he had to deal, he had the room in which he received them "painted with such barbaric gaudiness, and the ceiling so filled with fantastic gilt scrolls, that no white man ever entered it for the first time, without a start."

I put the deposit down on it today. It's this little two-bedroom apartment at the bottom of Bellamy Hill, the oldest fucking high-rise in Edmonton (also called Rowand House - we plainsmen have our myths, and we stick with 'em), on the seventh floor with this completely amazing view. I've never had a view before, people. Not of anything that wasn't a) a decrepit old red barn, b) hundreds of acres of flat marshland (which doesn't sound so bad now but was just a bit empty, soul-speaking, to look at for five years), c) the median of a traffic circle and a giant helium ape waving from atop the SuperCuts across the other side, d) my asshole neighbor and his unfathomable series of white pickup trucks.

This view is of the most beautiful landscape in all of Alberta: Edmonton's River Valley.

It's going to be small for me. We have just so goddamned much stuff, and I figure we're going to have to cut it by at least a third. I'd like to keep the garage of this place for storage, but I understand that a garage is part of the appeal of house life and if it's at all possible I should include it in the deal. Most of all I just want a good tenant, and everything I can do to sweeten the deal is something I should try to do.

This means work. Sanding the hardwoods. Painting over the cerulean walls in the bathroom. (Who the fuck was I when I picked that colour?) Cleaning this messy house like it's never been done before. A garage sale would make sense, but who's got the time, the time, the precious time? There's three more weeks left in this month. I work a lot of it. I am freaking out. I'm panicking. I'm totally elbow-chewingly mad with dread and anticipation and as I sit here my brain is sweating so hard I'm getting thirsty.

Sadly, my piano is going to have to find a new home. It simply can't make the journey up into the sky with us. I think that'll be the saddest thing of all.

I don't think I'll miss this house. There were a lot of really great parties here, and just as many times when I lost my fucking mind in a melting depression brought on by too much booze and too much pot, or not enough of either. I tried to rock the world from this house. I called it the Mirador de Beacon Heights, though it was only a bungalow. It was definitely some kind of dominion. But all the way along, there were things that never matched up for me about this house. In a way, all the space kind of bugged me. Especially when my roommates, my bandmates, my buddies, one by one had left for their own place and their own healthy adult life. It always felt too big for me.

Too: the backyard is unconscionably rectangular, and it's broken up by this apple tree that stands right squat in the center of it like a referee. I always meant to cut it down and put a firepit there, but that would've just led to the same problem, aesthetically.

The front lawn is constantly being killed by these enormous spruces which, while admittedly gorgeous, just aren't what most people see when they look at a house. Most people see the lawn. Our lawn is this pathetic dry brown ring of vegetation around the edges, ceding the bulk of space to a figure-eight of mud and spruce needles. It's embarassing to mow it.

I am so, so sick of shoveling snow. That's over. I shovel enough at work, anyways, fuck I wanna come home and do it fer?

One thing I definitely am not going to miss this hellhole of a neighborhood. Olde Towne Beverly, honey, you need to stuff your tits back in your dress.

Creamy white garage sales

A few nights ago I had this really ugly dream - like, Evil Was Present. Most of it's gone, but the most vivid image is still with me like I just woke up from it. It was this close shot of this guy's mouth with a cigarette being held to it, and his face was rotting. Open sores were being stretched into gray mottled caverns across his skin, When he would take a drag, the smoke would bleed from his openings and drift across his face until he expelled it.

He kind of looked like Nicolas Cage.

I've been smoke-free for a fortnight now, and I thought that if I posted that here it might make it more real somehow - more of something I'll have to live up to. I'm getting back into the life of a musician again, and I'll need every psychological trick I can muster to face the biggest cig trigger of them all - the jam session.

Matter of fact, there's a lot of tests I haven't passed yet: post-job interview uncontrollable shakings, a night out at a new bar, a night out at an old bar, traffic accidents, the death of someone close, the death of someone distant, the death of someone famous, the imminent and outright cancellation of my credit, running the Terry Fox Marathon of Hope, being constipated, a really fucking good fried chicken dinner, hangin' with my step-mom, going to the Muttart Conservatory to check out the tropical plants, being kidnapped, fighting more than one person at a time... any one of these, or maybe something I haven't thought of yet, could be the very thing that causes me to ferret out a new pack of coffin nails.

Oh and now we're planning on moving, by the end of the month, which is only going to mean more stress-induced temptation. I have lived in this house for six years now, which is about as long as I've ever spent anywhere, and I have a lot of crap to deal with. Even though I've known that this has been coming down for a year or so and have therefore not been accumulating more of it, it's still just a lot of crap. A lot. And the blatant, beautiful fact that is staring me in the face as of today? Why, it's the following:

Most of it? Just gonna have to go, buddy.

I will be a good boy

Back onsies! May 7th Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver. Infinitely more affordable, and not accompanied by a lot of boring breakbeat acts. Now all that has to happen is the Cocteau Twins announce some dates (you know they will) and I'll be set.

I'm so new! Wheee!

The pictures in the sidebar were all taken by the same person, with the possible exception of the one of my cat. In fact I'm sure I took that one, since it's the only one that doesn't have any composition going for it. Aw, it's cute, though.

WELDTRON!!!

The National Post is an explosion of rancourous Martin-loathing today. The newspaper's OP-Ed/Letters section, recently blown up to four freakin' pages, is given in at least two-thirds part to single-minded denouncement of our refusal to support the U.S. Missile Defence plan.

The headline, in, like, seriously, WWII-sized font, is "BUSH WON'T CALL PM". He won't return a call Paul Martin made last week, apparently out of disdain for our refusal to sign on. Canada's "no" on missile defence is a week old, but now that this slight has come to light, it's a real news story. If CanWest-Global ever gets into the high school newspaper business, you can bet they'll run similarly revealing expositions with headlines like "NO PROM DATE FOR SU VP".

What's amazing is what happens on p. A14. A whole page is given up to editorials previously published in American newspapers about Canada's "no". One is a particularly smarmy bit from the Boston Herald that finds a "striking contrast" between Bush and Putin's agreement "in principle" that nuclear proliferation is a bad thing (well, fucking duh) and Canada's "no". The conclusion is that perhaps a "presidential public tongue lashing" for Martin would change our "no" to a cowering "okay", since it seemed to have a similar effect on Putin.

The horrible thing about Martin is that yeah, maybe it would. The people he's paid to lead, however, wold be even more resolutely convinced that This Bush Is A Dick. I mean, he's not returning our calls and that makes us the asshole?

But I haven't even gotten to the amazing bit. There beside the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal editorials on same, is this outrageously insane propaganda piece from some guy who sells welding equipment in Alice, Texas:

I own a small Corporation that sells electronic controls to the welding industry. Our market is narrow since our products apply specifically to American-made welding machinery, and few applications exist external to the United States. I am the majority stockholder and President of the company. Today, I made a decision not to sell our manufactured products into Canada.

While it is uncommon to sell our products outside the bounds of the United States, we do get inquires and orders from other countries. This morning, I received an email requesting one of our catalogs along with a request for technical assistance pertaining to a U.S.-made machine located in Quebec.

This was a request from an individual in a country that hated Americans and all that it stood for, asking for technical assistance and requesting information on our uniquely American products. The products and services we offer would enhance this Canadian's ability to save on the cost of repairs to his equipment, assistance he was apparently unable to receive in his own country.

Over the past few years, I have rejected sales from French Canadians, and now I expand this to the whole of Canada. As of today, no technical information will be given to Canadians and no sales will be made to Canadians until their hate for Americans and our way of life changes.

My company Web site has the phrase "Made in Texas by Texans" on the home page and it has been there for years. Now I will be placing a notice that we do not sell to Canada and the reasons why.

Some may think this as a stupid idea since I will lose sales. Like I said, they don't amount to much anyway; and the idea that I can irritate individual Canadians by refusing to sell to them; along with providing them the reasons for doing so; lets them know that at least one American is standing up and doing the only patriotic thing he can do to stave off the impending damage that Canada will do to our security.

What is this doing in a nationally syndicated newspaper under the header "Issues and Ideas"? This guy already has some bizarre problem with "French Canadians" and now he's widened his umbrella for all of us to feel his non-selling-of-the-welding-gadgets wrath. What has this got to do with anything but my last goddamn nerve?

Never mind that there is blessed nada we can do about the missile defence agenda other than register our disapproval at the idea. It is going ahead and we will be involved, and we will be funding it with our own money somehow, probably, and all of this is just a Liberal posture to make Martin look good to a public who has been vociferously against this crazy fucking plan since Reagan first brought it up.

We are, grudgingly, expanding our defense budget. We have been listening to all the experts who have been telling us how important it is to have a role to play, to narrow our focus, to put our money behind something solid and real so that we can have a credible impact in international affairs. Then we are berated for not signing on to the one military motive which has the most egregious science and least chance for real payoff. What do they want us to do, kiss their ring? Keep your miserable welding accessories, asshole.