Up & Away
Lexical Tomfoolery
Not now, then
Yeah, s'me

"I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course - the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end."
- Douglas Adams

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2005
January
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2004
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June
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August
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October
November A B
December

Res Ipsa Loquitur
A Life Misanthrophilic
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Mes Amis
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Adralien
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January 18, 2006

Got to love suddenly waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning - and I mean sitting bolt-upright wide-awake here; not rolling over, looking at the baleful red glare of the alarm clock and mumbling "ohmuhfuggingo's fourinthuhfugginmorn" - with the first thought that pops into your head being:

"I'm a failure."

It's pretty hard to get back to sleep after something like that. So here I am. How's your day going?
As far as dreams are concerned, that last thing I can remember dreaming about was my brother making a "crash suit" for his baby (he doesn't actually have a baby, though) out of a Red Robin flour bag and some Kleenex. It wasn't even a suit, really. He'd just put the baby in the bag and packed the Kleenex around it, leaving a hole for the head and arms to poke out. It was actually pretty cute - and it worked.

What does it mean when you dream about holding a baby out at arms' length and dropping it, repeatedly?

January 16, 2006

Wow.
So it would seem that love really is blind. Funny that the greatest of all things turns out to be just a hefty dose of dopamine. Well... every silver lining has a cloud, I guess. It's interesting, too, that the article points out that - much like any other drug - once the effects wear off we find ourselves wondering what exactly we were thinking in the first place. Might explain how so many jackasses get laid on a regular basis while I sit at home drinking wine and writing about dopamine, but that's another story.
I suppose I could spend the next hour pontificating on that it's only a matter of time before good ol' Big Brother figures out how to slip us the neurological cocktail required to make us fall for "The Man" - as it were - but that's not really my cup of tea. The whole "spend the next hour pontificating" thing, that is. I've already gotten up twice and wandered about my apartment since writing the first sentence of this paragraph. And for those of you out there that have never seen my apartment, let me assure you: there aren't all that many places to go.
Maybe that's the crux of the problem (no, not that my apartment is not big enough, but I can see how my syntax might lead you to that conclusion), that I can't stay focused long enough to trigger a significant dopamine reaction in the women that I'm attracted to. Hell, I can't stay focused long enough to write a coherent blog piece... and that concerns me. It's not that I'm scatterbrained, nor am I absent-minded; it's those moments when I pause to formulate a turn of phrase that my brain leaps into fifth gear and suddenly I'm thinking about the merits of central pivot irrigation rather than the topic at hand. Or - case in point - I just got up to refill my glass and found myself thinking about Ender's Game.
I mean, it's roughly ten feet from my chair to the wine bottle (Bukowski would of course be wondering why the hell the bottle is ten feet away), but in those few steps, my mind can (and did) make the series of leaps required to get from central pivot irrigation to Orson Scott Card - but for some reason allowed me those few steps back to sit down and write about it.

* * *

Sigh.
Speaking of focus and trains of thought, I just had to answer the phone. Upon returning to the desk an errant elbow knocked over my aforementioned glass of wine and spilled it all over the keyboard. The good news is, it still works; the bad news is, I spent an hour or so popping out all the keys to clean the mess up... and another hour or so trying to remember where they all go. There are times I am unparalleled in my wisdom. Or lack thereof.
Subsequently, my train of thought has not only been derailed, but the rails lifted and salt ploughed into the ground so that nothing ever grows there again.

January 11, 2006

Well it is indeed later, albeit a day laterer than I had originally intended. I hate it when I'm right about these things - I ended up getting so distracted by something that I can't even remember what I did for the better part of the day. The responsible bits of my psyche are currently kicking me in the shins of my mind and insisting I seek medical advice concerning the appalling state of my memory; the mellower portions of my id are confident that it's nothing to worry about, that it's completely reasonable to forget the null moments of the day; and my besotted, loud-mouthed alcoholic genes are wondering where the fuck I put the bourbon.
The rest of my brain is all, "Dude, that is one long-ass sentence you got there." Is it any wonder I lose track of time with all this ruckus going on? I can't hardly keep track of my thoughts, let alone maintain a schedule. This is to say nothing of my knack for shitcanning any or all of my plans at the drop of a hat - of all the things I had planned to do yesterday, I accomplished but one, and it the most trivial of the lot. I also bought some DVDs. I think it's fairly obvious that the aforementioned responsible bits of my psyche get outvoted on a regular basis. To be perfectly honest, they get told to shut up and sit down rather often, too.

I suspect this might be the reason I'm always having so goddamn much fun.

* * *

There was supposed to me more to the above, but I got distracted. Honest. So, two hours and a half a bottle of wine later, I offer you the following:

GEeK POeM
I am like a neutron star
everyone is drawn to me
this is because my charm
and charisma are at such a high density

That was written on a scrap of paper tucked between the pages of a book found lying at the bottom of a box in the back of my bedroom closet whilst searching for a power cable for the new windoze box currently sitting cold and lifeless on my living room floor. Funny thing is, I have absolutely no recollection of writing this little gem, nor do I have any idea what it was doing acting as a bookmark in a dog-eared copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House. The literati among you might like to know it was marking "Report on the Barnhouse Effect"; then again, they might not.
As an aside, am I not rocking the prepositions in the first sentence of the last paragraph? Seriously.
As far as that poetic fragment is concerned... well. It would have been nice to see where exactly I was going with it, but as with most scraps of paper found lying about my domicile, there really is no making heads or tails of them. They're seldom dull, though. I'll give me that.

January 10, 2006

The sun made an appearance this morning for the first time in 24 days, and yet I find myself praying for rain. If we can reach 29 consecutive days of rainfall, then we'll have matched the longest wet streak in Vancouver's history. You know me - I'm all about breaking records.
Day off today. Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet (it's only 9:45 in the AM), though there are plenty of things I should be doing with it, lemme tell ya. I'm off to a fine start, however: I've kicked off the day with a pot of coffee and a little piracy; it's going to be difficult to keep going up from here. I'm sure I'll find some manner of procrastination to keep the day from becoming productive. Maybe I'll catch a matinee - that always throws a wrench into my efficiency mechanism.

More later. Maybe.

January 4, 2006

There was a time when I was articulate, I'm sure of it. It used to be that the words came and sought me out instead of me spending hours racking my brain for a simple turn of phrase. I remember the days when I described myself as a writer - now I just simply state that I write... and generally as an aside.
I wonder if this is what getting older is; if all those passions of youth were simply an attempt to nudge you towards that one thing you were 'meant' to do. Assuming, of course, that there are things that we are 'meant' to be doing. That's a supposition that always stuck in my craw, somewhat.

"Well, I'm trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you ever done for me
Was to help me to take my life less seriously
'Cause it's only life after all"
- The Indigo Girls, Closer To Fine

Now that I am older - inevitably, though it may be argued that I am afflicted with a rather severe case of puer aeternum (I hide it well) - and that the aforementioned passions have dimmed in conjunction with my aging, I question whether my rather nonchalant approach to life in general has not turned out to be a major character flaw after all. All those nudges towards excellence blissfully ignored in the simple misguided belief that I was a conduit for the Muses, and that striving to perfect my art would merely be an exercise in redundancy.

Ah, the inimitable arrogance of youth.

However. I feel I am waxing just a wee bit melodramatic, and that is never a good thing. Although it does provide me with the opportunity to assert the fact that I would have made one hell of a Goth, had I chosen to follow the Path of the Wanker.

"You've got to mess with people, day and night!"
- Utah Phillips, The Past Didn't Go Anywhere

And I do. Lord Almighty, do I mess with people. Hell, just the other day I was at an overpriced, underproduced, mismanaged, misrepresented, ill-conceived, talentless, guileless, and above all sorry-assed New Years party this year and all I could do to salvage the night was to mess with the rest of the simpletons that had forked over a hundred and fifty bones just to attend the event (and let me just state for the record that I scored a free ticket. I'd have been pissed off if I had paid good money for such a misbegotten event. But that's another story).
I just couldn't help myself. I mean, I told people that I was independently wealthy: that I had made my fortune through careful investment of the few thousand dollars I had earned breaking the legs of loan defaulters back East; I told a young Christian couple that I worked as a rent boy and had sold my ass to a bunch of foreign dignitaries in order to buy a ticket to this soiree in the hopes I would meet someone at the party that could rescue me from my sordid lifestyle and sinful ways (they had asked me how someone with blue hair could get into such an "exclusive" party); I told one woman (whose fiancee I had just met a few minutes earlier) that I had just succeeded in getting a story published in an anthology down in San Francisco - which is in fact true, but I mention solely because it was not she but rather her fiancee that tried to kiss me later that morning. The funny thing is, the lady in question was right on his arm when he tried to put the moves on me. I left shortly thereafter.

But what am I getting at? What is the point of this long-overdue but shamefully brief bit of boyish blathering? Honestly... I don't know.

"Now I can't see my reflection in the water
And I can't speak the sounds to show no pain
I can't hear the echo of my footsteps
Or remember the sounds of my own name"
- Bob Dylan, Tomorrow Is A Long Time

There are times when I honestly believe I've lost my mind; times in which I feel I'm sure I won't make it to see the dawn - but somehow I always manage to muddle my way through. And I think that's what it has taken the last year (and a bit) to teach me: that no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the situation, no matter what abuse the world decides to hurl at you, all you've got to do is hang on and you'll come out OK.

December 13, 2005

And another month slips away. Silently and stealthily to you, frenetic and frenzied to me. Oh, this loathsome disparity - again (it seems all I ever do is apologize for neglecting to update) it's not you, it's me. Honestly, you'd think I could find a spare moment or two to sit down and pound something out once a week - at the minimum - despite the long hours that come with working in the film industry.
Speaking of which, I managed to get myself picked up for the remainder of a show, and have been enjoying the great outdoors this last fortnight - and let me tell you; it has been nothing but cold and wet and misery. Come to think of it, it's lucky for you I haven't been writing about it... because really, all I'd be doing is griping about it. If it is any indication of how it went at all, the final week of shooting was not in a studio - as is the usual: warm, dry and relaxed - but rather in a frozen swamp. Mm-hmm.

Otherwise, life continues. I'm back to working at Alti-tech for the next little while - we're gearing up for the Big Launch come January, so I've got a plethora of little projects to keep me occupied (and indoors! Yay!) I also managed to come in second at the Vancouver Ultimate Players Poker Association (VUPPA) end of season poker tournament, which was a nice little bonus to help kick in the Yule. Funnily enough, I walked away with more dough than the first place winner, who was expected to buy rounds of shots for we poor losers the entire night through. I think I might just "arrange" another second-place finish next year.
Oh, and before I forget: two new photobooths for your viewing pleasure.