anatomia!

I've just finished watching the first half of The Best of Youth for the second time. I have yet to see the second part. I'm actually glad I got the chance to see it this way - it's been four or five months since I saw part one at the Metro, and I have to confess that at the time it took me a while to separate the characters from each other and just grasp the basic mechanics of the story. This time, though, everything is just leaping out. The Iliad references. The fucking great music that's used not sloppily like an Alfredo sauce but gingerly like - erm, ginger. The fantastic character actors. I've made the stylistic choice to write a bunch of sentences with no predicates and I'm going to go with it. The skeleton that's in the very first scene. The fact that the guy who plays Carlo Tomassi looks just like the guy who played John-boy on The Waltons. All the Larger Themes.

The story is peppered with what are obviously some major historical and cultural touchstones from the past forty years but I don't recognize any of them, since it's Italy. I wonder how Italians feel about the movie. Is it too bald-faced a reflection of their nation's recent past? Do they think it's cheesy? How do Italians really feel about Fausto Leali? Did they all press pause after the jukebox scene and hop on LimeWire to download '"A chi" like I did? Or is Fausto Leali to Italy what Anne Murray is to Canada? These are things I want to know!

But they can wait till I see part two, which will be tomorrow. I can not sleep fast enough.

toryland

I was seriously getting excited about the ladytron show tonight but I just found out it's only a dj set. Way to waste money you fat porker.

Ah well, I got to see the ESO for free earlier today. And I suppose it'll be at least somewhat entertaining... still kinda feelin' had though. Posters didn't mention a dj-only set, and to my way of thinking 22 bucks is a bit much to see anyone spin (even boy george). Two drinks and that's fifty bucks I won't have for europe.

another in an endless string of gifts from me to you

I present to you the lyrics to "Sexual Pervert" by Men's Recovery Project.

You're welcome.


Sexual pervert
World is his napkin
Sitting quiet on the bus noone noone noone knows it's him

Sexual pervert
Riding to the park
Long since graduated from the private parts

Sexual pervert
Here comes his stop
He could be anyone
Trying to get off
Trying to trying to get off
Trying to get off
Trying to get off
Sexual pervert
Trying to get off
Trying to get off
Trying to trying to get off
Off

Not exactly Aaron Copeland themes, but beautiful just the same, you know?

k-holed

what the fuck. i can't even move anymore.

this, finally, is where you get after eating nothing but garbage for a week. you don't need ketamine, kiddies, just work yourself to exhaustion and eat cheese fries for breakfast. same dif.

get down

Truth is, I hate that fucking house. I was glad to leave it last year, and I'm glad I've sold it now. The whole thing of owning it, watching it degrade because I never had the money for fixing shit that needed fixing, flailing away at unrewarding personal relationships with others who shared the same roof...

...my last tenant will be my mother. She needs a place to stay for two weeks while... something happens. I don't know what. She's finished seminary school, and will now be an ordained minister of the Lutheran church. Or I guess you actually get ordained when a church decides you'll fit the bill for their community. You can't be an ordained minister if you're an unemployed one. That, I guess, is what the word means. She doesn't know yet where she'll end up. In the meantime she needs a place to crash, and I've got an empty house for a few more weeks yet.

This last stretch of ownership, wherein I do my best to meet the conditions of the sale which are remarkably lax yet still somehow overwhelming in the amount of attention they demand from me, is wearing me out. On Wednesday I lugged a dead washing machine up a flight of stairs by myself. I used a dolly, of course, it would have been impossible otherwise - it nearly was at any rate. I'd gotten the thing about halfway up, at great pains, when I realised that the physics of the equation were about to get a lot harder, since the angle against which I was pulling it was getting closer and closer to straight sideways even though I still had four steps to go - I was so frightened I would tire and lose my grip and send it tumbling down into a wall.

Somehow I made it - the last step gave me the same feeling I get when I watch a Canadian figure skater leap twirling madly into the air as my foot slipped a half inch and my biceps shuddered and the possibility that it was all going to end very badly, possibly even with serious physical injury, loomed large. But it came. The mass of metal kershunked its way over the lip of the final step, and I was so moved - moved - I nearly let it fall on my legs in a tumult of emotional exhaustion.

And then I had to figure out how to get it in the back of my dad's pickup. And then I had to do the whole thing over with the dryer, and then with the dead husk of a hot water heater.

And that was just the first of three days worth of the same thing. Ugly and broken furniture, absolutely useless gigantic pieces of trash. This plus I get a message from the person who moved in with the upstairs tenant without anyone asking me in the first place if it was okay, and yes, it matters, making sure I haven't tossed out her fucking board games. Who gives a shit.

The good thing about all of this is that I get to drive to work, unload the truck over the edge of the unloading dock, watch the stuff land six feet below on hard concrete, then go inside on the tip floor and get into my loader and crush, crush, fucking destroy the things. Thank god for heavy duty equipment and the badass men and women who use them to scar the earth and everything on it, or we might forget that we're supposed to be at least a little bit in charge of things. That every once in awhile we can pull up a corner of the earth, reach underneath for the scurrying hellfire demon, and utter to it the last words it will hear before we tear and mangle and smash it for ever: I told you not to fucking move.

the children go wild for maundy thursday, and the ceremonial washing of their feet

My father's apartment building burned down a few days ago. It's insured, but what he'll get out of them is of course up in the air. Also yet to be determined is: cause, rehabilitative possibilities, how much my father cares.

He sounded pretty nonchalant talking about it over the phone.

We got more mileage phone-wise out of talking about the upcoming trip out to Rosebud to see my cousin act in a play. He's doing a series of tv commercials for Shaw cable, they're not awful, we're all chuffed for him.

My cousin gave scripture readings at our grandpa's funeral - at the time I thought he was weirdly over-the-top. Calm down, I remember silently imparting to him - you've already got the gig. Of course I'd gone up and sang some churchy song earlier, I'm sorry I can't remember what it was just now, does that make me a shit? I'm listening to Sly and the Family Stone in my girlfriend's earbuds at this moment so I can't focus on it. It's not important right now. The message I am trying to pass on to you is that sometimes when you try to apply your weaselly little shitheel artistry to the life outside of and wholly unconcerned with you, you yourself don't buy it. It's like writing yourself a cheque for a million dollars. Then you stand in front of all these people you know, people connected with you genetically and united in grief but removed, somehow. Look, I gave myself this: is it good?

The two of us got our family showcase. And I actually connected with my grandma through it - not sure how present she was for that, but her thanks to me are a much better memory than the dying green glow of the pong game they had or the organ they wouldn't let me goof around on or the wheat grinder in the basement I used to make flour with because it was the only fun thing there was to do. Or: collecting eggs from the chicken coop. Staring uncomprehendingly at the Model A which my dad as a teen had oxied the roof off of, for the purpose of home-crafting a convertible (and certainly ruined in the process, to my eyes), bagged and tagged out in the brush behind the fenced yard. Walking out along the muddy footpaths, leading nowhere.

There is a house up the hill from our apartment building that was burned down by some neo-nazi skinheads (important to distinguish what kind of skinheads) that got upset by a communist russian flag that one of the tenants was using to tie his room together. I just took a walk around the neighborhood - the smell of burned wood floats forever in the spring. We like our fires here in E-town. We get boners for flames licking at boards and bricks. Next door and further up the hill a band practises often, sending incorporeal echoes across the street. They sound like they're coming from the ruins.

Entropy. I remember a lot of things about that apartment building of my dad's. Weekends doing work. I remember the old wringer-washer the tenants used to share, the no-way-this-meets-any-fire-code stairwell of incorruptible darkness and wet mustiness, scoring and laying salmon tiles on warped and cracking cement. Tough knotty brushes in the face pushing the lawnmower round the bushes in the yard. Near indigent tenants, some old and gentle, some young and insane.

The building is - was - one of the throwbacks of Camrose, one of the crummy husks in the town's centre left to fend for itself, a sociological butt end, a smithereen already. The grocery store it used to be three blocks from is now called "Liquidation World". Safeway's now sittin' pretty out on the ring road, giving to Wild Rose Country's motoring bon-vivants what goodies the satellite Wendy's/Tim Hortons does not. Opposing apostrophe philosophies! Who will win out?

Camrose has sprawl - it fancies itself a little mini-Edmonton. You just want to slap it in the face. And puke on it.

And now the spate of fires will begin. Won't they? A fire in every hearth.

A dick in every mouth. My parents lived, and taught school, in every goddamn little shit town in this fuckass province and they are all the same. If you've taken a dump in the woods you can set your clock to Czar, Alberta, which is where I nearly would've reached puberty but for the holy hand of God reaching down and making me a eunuch just in time. Why the fuck doesn't anyone ever set Czar on fire?

Oh what will I do when the air bites with snow / and the geese have all flown with the sun / I'll think of the past and my grey and fading dreams / Noone's lonesome, I'm the only one / Noone's lonesome, I'm the only one.

Jim & Jenny and the Pinetops, that. It kind of took over.

on the pink floyd being finished as long ago as that

A lot, and I mean, a lot, of this blog has been devoted to chronicling my insecurities about money. In fact, I think the reason I haven't been posting as much lately is that I haven't been living as close to the bone. I'm not actually that much further ahead, but a few lifestyle adjustments and a couple of raises have basically moved me into a position of - well not exactly solvency, but at least into that gray area between ever-impending bankruptcy and actually getting ahead.

Now, one by one, all my dragons are being slain. Two weeks ago I made my last student loan payment. It was only eighty bucks a month, but still, it's over. I've recently overcome a pernicious fear of - what, adulthood? - and actually filed tax returns for the past six years, and am awaiting a fuckload of money as my reward. Once I get it, goodbye Visa balance. Fuck you, Visa, if you're reading this, which you probably are. Fuck you forever.

We have to figure out a way to leave credit card companies in the ground before we take manned trips to Mars.

I digress. The big one is that my house looks to have been sold, and I'm getting a lot more for it than I paid. I know, the markets are hot all over, and I'm an idiot to sell now, but look: that house was a big part of the reason why I scraped the brush so many times. I'm getting out from under it without having to make a lot of costly repairs which are direly needed (new roof, new bathroom downstairs, new rugs), I'm getting a few grand more than I listed it for, and it's not like I'd be able to take care of it properly in absentia, which is where I'm planning to be in a few more months. For me, it's time. Some things have rhythms of their own that ripple in the larger circadian patterns and are lost. Fuck it. We are not just hogs at the time-governed trough. We have freedom, and can gorge and starve like - like -

- like Pigs on the Wing.

I'm experiencing a lot of jealousy w/r/t friends of mine who went to trade schools, or got Chem.E diplomas, what have you, and are now making twice what I am to work in a similarly crap environment. When these guys are my age (I pal around with dudes who are younger than me, it's been that way since grade school), they are going to be motherfucking rich, or at least a little bit rich, or very comfortable, and it'll be about that time that the oil boom will be cresting again, leaving those who pissed it all away to dry in the baking hot sun and fossilize. I sometimes feel as though I am being really irresponsible not to follow suit. Go work for Suncor or something. Two years of school, a shit job making fertilizer for some gigantic fucking enormous chemical concern, and fifteen or twenty years later a house in Aruba and a gun to ward off the zombies.

My brother, fourth year pipefitter, is making six figures. Barely, but six figures. I can tell you since I just finished doing six years worth of tax returns that it wasn't that long ago that five figures was a bit of a squeaker for me. I've progressed a lot in terms of keeping my shit tight independence wise, but I still feel as though - and hell, I'm right - everyone around me is hoisting up first-prize hammerhead sharks while I scrub the chum off the deck.

And here - the housing boom - is another Alberta Advantage I'm not quite getting right. Some A-team baby with gleaming credit is buying the house, fixing the problems, and turning it back out - probably in about three months or less - for a tidy ten or fifteen grand profit. A thing I can't do, because my credit is a flat dead facefuck. I'm getting out - unscathed, I guess, and with a second chance at straight-world credit still in my grasp - but I'm not getting mine. And so many are out here in Albertastan that if you're not, it's like you're dying standing still.

I no longer experience what I mentioned in this blog's very first post, being so close to the edge that I was waiting for my paycheque to clear at midnight so I could buy a pack of smokes. I'm not much further ahead than that right now, but within days all that will be history. What I am dealing with right now is something a lot heavier.

I fear having to deal with insanity and poverty at the same time. Same as you. You know what I'm talking about.