hell is just another rich uncle

Halloween is fucked. It is fucking crap, it is false, it is everything wrong.

The Celts used to celebrate Samhain, being both a season and a name of the dark lord, on October 31st. Samhain visited the homes of the worshipful. Animals and humans were sacrificed. Wishes were made, hopes were called out from breasts beaten with bloody hands. Marriages, health, money, revenge, self-gratification - it was all on the table. It was like a free pass for transgressors - getting the forces of entropy to set in motion something that would undoubtedly be mortally grave for someone, but good for you.

No wonder it's turned into an apocalyptic vanity parade. It used to be a holiday for kids. Now it is a lot closer in spirit to how it was when it started out.

I'm sitting here listening to the Swans. I'm delicate. I walked home from a party where I knew noone at all, in face paint, binoculars dangling from my neck (part of the costume), somehow diminished. I feel as though some entropy has been set loose upon me. I feel close to noone. I thought of hucking the binoculars from the High Level or some other dramas, but none of them felt real in my hand. Things were getting lost from the conception to the execution.

My girlfriend is still there now, gay and pretty, chumming with a girl who has slept with a man she had also, upon a time, slept with. He hurt them both. I guess. I don't know how you really hurt a woman. They have always seemed pretty impermeable to me.

Note: I wrote this when I was in the middle of the dark bottom. Not drunk - I hadn't brought enough liquor, which was part of it all, I think - but defeated, beaten by myself, lost in a room full of strangers. You know how that kind of thing can go. I let myself get mean and small, and this is what came out. I don't mean it now. I meant it then. The world opens up like a creaking sarcophagus and you either crawl in or grab a stake.

five bucks if you can hum the theme from it

I'm running now - two bridges, twice a week. The plan was to run during the weekdays and hit the gym on the weekends, but last weekend all I did was eat out a lot and watch Lord of War, the better to destress from the longest Friday shift of my fucking life. Oh well, they say you shouldn't really try to take on big projects when you're in the first stages of nicotine withdrawal or you'll just set yourself up.

I'm starting to sound like a chick.

Tomorrow will have been three weeks without cigarettes (never use "sans" when a simple "without" will do, or risk looking like an asshole), which means the cilia in my lungs should start returning soon. The running should get a little easier too, over the next while, pray to God.

Right now I'm drinking coffee from a french press, which is supposed to be bad for people with high cholesterol. Fuck it: filtered coffee tastes gross. I have also of late reverted to fast food assaults and chronic masturbation. Yay.

Every day, I should be asking myself: What can I do today? Instead I ask myself: What can I do today to make up for last night?

At least the answer isn't "more of the same, guv'ner!" every goddamned day. Oh, that pesky satyr - heads like a Hydra and the cutest little miniskirt...

All I can do is take it One Day at a Time, like Mackenzie Phillips did. Everyone in that show had their demons, didn't they? Schneider always had that pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his t-shirt, Bonnie Franklin had Howard Hesseman guest spots in nothing but a towel, Mackenzie had... well, she did some drugs, I s'pose... Did you know that show went for nine fucking seasons?

Time for a DVD package, I say. This sinful, shrivelled old world needs it. Plus maybe I could stop eating these peanut butter cookies my girlfriend made last night.

it's curling season - finally!

Yesterday morning over breakfast at the Blue Plate, I was informed that a mutual friend of all of ours had been arrested last week for vandalizing a curling rink. She and her friend had gone out at four in the morning with paints. She was cold sober, which is sometimes kind of an event for her, I guess.

Anyways, these two girls who together probably weigh about two fiddy if that, were taken down by, oh, god, now I'm going to start playing telephone here maybe, but I think it was four cops and two dogs. Edmonton police.

Our city is in the middle of a kind of hammerlock with respect to its metro police service these days. It dates back to the start of this year when a few cops pulled a DUI sting operation on the police commission chairman and a local columnist who had a history of writing negative things about the EPS. Nothing happened, as both men took cabs home from the Canadian Association of Journalists function they had been attending, but the tapes of what the cops were saying as they conducted the aborted operation made them all look like weasels. A couple cops were charged with discreditable conduct, insubordination, what have you. The then-Chief of Police quit/was fired, and was replaced by this Darryl da Costa guy in an interim sort of way.

Now: The EPS spent about twice as much in legal fees as its Calgary counterparts in 2003, and people want to know why. The backlog of complaints against Edmonton cops has grown so large that the IA department has had to ask for an extension on sixty-five of them. There was an e-mail passed around internally that "humourously" described how aboriginals should be dealt with by the police. Some members of the EPS may have received gifts from the private company that sought to capture the city's $90 million photo radar service contract without public tender. The EPS's past nine months' list of stuff like this just goes on and on: allegations of pepper spraying a belligerent motorist at a traffic stop and stuffing him into the trunk of the cruiser, fatally shooting a man armed with a machete, breaking into an armed suspect's house without first trying to subdue him with tear gas, intimidating and coercing a witness to a fatal police chase...

Well now this Darryl da Costa has gotten in trouble for accepting a couple of pairs of Oilers tickets from the same company seeking to keep the photo radar contract. Needless to say, a lot of people want to bring a close to his "interim" as a result. The problem that arises? Noone else wants to do the job.

Meanwhile, we just had our 31st murder of the year this past weekend: Sara Easton, shot on the street, walking home with 10 friends including her boyfriend, from a neighborhood bar called Orlando's 2, where she had celebrated her eighteenth birthday.

Oh yeah, and then there's the serial killer.

How many breakfast tables in the past year have had conversations like the one my friends had the other morning pass over them? Isn't it time for the city as a whole to start wondering if our metropolitan police force is maybe misallocating its resources? I say: How about turf them all and get the RCMP to do it.

Some guys on the EPS like to wear these t-shirts with pictures of rats on them with red circles and a red slash at a forty-five degree angle through the circle. "No rats", the t-shirts mean to say. As in don't rat out on a fellow cop. How Chicago. How 1970's.

I saw a t-shirt last year that read "I heart Whyte Ave cops". I thought that one was funnier.

well there's always something to be glad about

I live in the park and dress in my head. I live in the closet and dress in my park. I live in the forest and park in my dress. I live in the grass and dress in my nethers. I fuck in the car and steal for a living.

I collapse in the bath and sleep in my death. I live in the house and dress in my bed. I live in the colonies and dress in my teeth. J'habite dans la salle et j'habille dans ma pere. I live in the wire and dress in my painting. Castor sings and Pollux plays guitar.

billy ocean's "suddenly", for, like, a fucking month at least -

Quit smoking. This is the third time that I have, and this time it has to stick. It's the people who quit and start and quit and start over and over who really get fucked up, because quitting is as stressful as smoking. If you smoke, you should just smoke, and accept that your life will be nasty, brutish and short. You might even be able to enjoy some of it.

When I see someone with a cig in hand who looks obviously unhealthy, beaten-down, completely suffering from the effects of smoking, I think: Well, we all choose our poison.

Teenagers look stupid smoking, because of all the practised affectation and the bad clothes. I understand why teenagers smoke. I just don't want to look at them doing it.

If you're a teenager, you probably look stupid doing pretty much anything except for delivering Meals on Wheels or playing chess. And even then the chance is you still look stupid. There's nothing you can do about it except dig it. Learn humility.

Adults also pretty much look stupid. The difference is we have learned humility because we've gone out there and made some failure. Humility is like a tat for your aura.

Weird. I read some Vonnegut, and next thing you know I'm writing in this bad Vonnegut rip-off tone with the same fake bohemian flourishes that stick to everything I do. I need to take a course. In how to write.

My girlfriend takes one. A few of them, actually. Last year she had what I saw at the time, and still do, as a breakthrough - instead of aping all these semi-famous (in a local kind of way) campus newspaper navel-chewers that pepper the arts weeklies of our city, she started writing seriously from herself. She found the glimmer of a voice. She got some depth.

Now she feels stuck, or so she explained to me this morning. She is having a crisis of confidence. Seems like a natural part of the cycle. Inconveniently timed, I suppose, but there never is a good time to stick your foot in shit.

I still think what she's writing is good. In her last couple of pieces, she's been trying to stretch, to write something more fanciful, not so much from her own experience, and from what I hear it hasn't really been flying in class. I jokingly suggested she write a short fiction with a main character with the same name as herself, a la Johnathan Safran Foer (What a name! Some random pounding of the keyboard), and go meta-. She informed me someone in the class has already done this. This makes me blanch in disgust.

Maybe taking a course in how to write would drive me fucking crazy.

Oh well, a digression.

I'm a whole week quit from cigarettes, and I am exercising more, and having oatmeal for breakfast. The rest of my life is still pretty much the same, health-wise, so we'll see if I've changed enough. I hope so. I hate changing.

goodbye boozey tuesday

The results are in! After years and years of alcohol and fast food abuse, smoking, sedentary pastimes like blogging, and a new job that requires me to just sit, I have achieved high cholesterol! Now I get to quit smoking, start eating healthier, and work out more often! Trust me that even though all of these sentences will end in exclamation points, this news makes me positively slump!

The human body is so boring! I don't know how anyone can be a medical doctor! Admittedly there are some rare conditions, diseases, allergies, and so on, but for the most part people respond pretty much exactly the same way to the same stimulus! If only our physiognomies were so variegated that we needed to be given a diagnostic exam in our youth, to determine which activities and foods will make us thrive, and which will slowly kill us! Imagine knowing that every day you had to chew a little bark and lie down for a whole hour every afternoon, or else you would slowly become shorter! Imagine if pomegranate seeds hardened your arteries! For one person, a healthy breakfast would be pump cheese and marijuana, for another, bagels fried in battery acid!

Imagine being allergic to God! Catholic schools and twelve-step group meetings giving someone actual hives!

But it doesn't work that way! Human beings are predictable organisms, and will pretty much respond in like kind to the same stimuli! And I am no different from anyone else! That, really, is the most depressing part of this!