slip down the way.

lists.

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:06:19 GMT

And Jacob had a list on the door of his refrigerator, I paraphrase:

get better job
music
read
find a nice girl

(I can cross the last one off)

exergue.

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:51:53 GMT

I find myself, again, at this point, this bottom – like the base of mason jar, like the glass: hard, cool, smooth, transparent, distorting. You can’t quite put you hand into it, your finger on it – I can’t quiet scrap the bottom.

But what has this jar of a life held – what is virtuous about the container, its substance or its absence? I think, perhaps, that I am not a jar. Or, rather, that I haven’t been. The state of being a vessel, that ends as means, the substance is to be absence and let it, like lightening, fill you out like an eclipse. Substitution as negation; structuring to permit play.

Jackie D: I think that we need to talk.

-

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:06:08 GMT

Tell me again about the waters of thy birthworld, Usul.

tachy-

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:58:30 GMT

Like in my guts it's liquid and it lodges and hunts the prey of my blood like meticulous mechanical spiders. There is an other, another other that steps in your steps; another set of nerves counter firing against their first set that's why you shake; hold out your hand and see it tremble. An other set of nerves, a back and a forth. There is really two of you in the same body, another push to the pull. The dialect of neurology, a war of the self poised at a paradoxical crisis between being and becoming. Yet it slips towards a common problem space, the same volume which makes up the terrain of the phenomenal, the market of the possible.

“The ontological terrain of Empire, completely plowed and irrigated by a powerful, self-valorizing, and constituent labor, is thus planted with a virtuality that seeks to be real. The keys of possibility, or really of the modalities of being that transform the virtuality into reality, reside in the realm beyond measure” (Empire, Hardt and Negri: 359).

What they allude to, in overly conceptual neo-Marxist fashion, is Baudrillard's murderous quality of images, the simulation that supplants the real. But their, unlike Baumann's liquidification of real, misses an keening Nietzschean insight, that it is the real that seeks to be virtual as well, the will to nothingness. The symbolic exchange is one of excess, rather what I mean to say is this: “Le tourniquet de la representation y devient fou, mais d'une folie implosive, qui, loin d'etre excentrique, louche vers le centre, verse sa propre repetition en abyme” (L'Echange symbolique et la mort).

I write not to be understood but to absolve its negation.

could you.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:25:53 GMT

It is on nights like this I realize that I am just bone and plastic, ash and rime; the fat of firstlings and the fruit thereof. But we all know the whirpool of panic and grief, the hearthooks that catch into our mates and our mates. And yet, rarely do we do what is meant to be done and so often we leave undone that which ought to have been done. So, and we'll say this again: fight and kiss and bleed and sweat but please for our sake make it every second of it count. It is the first duty of a revolutionary to love. Everything else is as meaningless as a poster of Che tacked to your bedroom wall.

it's late.

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:53:39 GMT

It is the the summer and I am a stranger and my friends they have gone.

The truth of it is just that - I have left and they have gone and I miss them.

Come back.

livid.

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:49:23 GMT

The difference between acute horror and chronic dread is that in one your body is at stake and the other is where your soul becomes the prison of the body; the very agency is transmuted into faux-security and determinism. One seeks total awareness and understanding but the colonization of different life-worlds (new and emerging markets) is always a bloody battle; the modernist flagship rails with broadsides and tacnukes. Its strategic ethics lay the camps with their medico-legalistic exceptions. And make sure and loyal cadavers and dust with the simulation of the black singularity that is the imploded and dead the social.

To you who seek ever blinding clarity of neuropsychophramacopia and the athletic sexing of the priest but not the god, you dance but you do not pray.

tell me what to swallow.

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:10:09 GMT

Look at the most ordinary of men, at a time when a little beauty has contrived to steal into their darkness.

Plot-summary: Golaud, grandson of King Allemonde, has lost his way hunting in a forest. He sees Melisande crying beside a pool of water. Afraid and avoiding questions she tells him she comes from a place to which she does not wish to return. He offers to retrieve her crown, which he sees lying in the water; she forbids him.

The French Revolution represents the rupture of an equilibrium which paved the way for new forms of representations (new forms of democracies, new moral questions such as that of reproduction). This break with the old system rendered the crisis not only explicit but made of crisis the new organizing force. ‘We can think of it this way: previous social forms counted on a certain calm, and crisis came periodically; but now an epoch has opened when we live in permanent crisis. What is provisional now are the moments of status quo’. What Kristeva is suggesting is then a stalling of the modernist project at the point of crisis, that is modernism now equals crisis. She also proposes a way out of crisis. Against a defensive rejection of the achievements of modernism, she believes that a move beyond the narratives of modernism will entail a ‘passing through’ those narratives. In other words, to transcend the modernist deadlock is to work through its narratives, and more importantly its points of resistance with the aim of finding new modes of representations that would permit to move the project beyond obstruction.

Eyes lit / I pawn short breaths / A fawn's dark eye lids /Dada dada die /But life's breast / Like a sun against my head.

He looks at me and talks of the absurdity of cloning as cancer; that the relation is not there so I say; I tell the motherfucker that it’s about trafficking in excess, an excession of cells, bodies which there are too many to begin with. The revolutionary female body in stochastic motion; the hips, the lips and the guts counter-possessed by a (the) hysterical male: sanguine, miscreant, obsolete – and yet utterly (oh God I’m coming please hit me again I need you to please) necessary. You need to do better than just applying band-aids in ethics and therapeutic regimes. So long as we all know they’re being gang raped, there in the camps, it will make all better and yet I call them on these pathetic attempts to willfully ignore the shear failure of – the shear unknowable failure; the collapse and implosion of meaning and all they give me is glucose-addled notions of hope. My faith left me forever ago – at least have the honesty to openly accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. You must believe you can be forgiven and are worthy to be redeemed in order to be saved.

Writing two years ago I have the identical thing to say: ‘Boastful, belligerent and eager to disprove and argue every point, I start fights with everyone. There's a contesting quality to my arrogance.’

Again I will quote for you the only true thing I have ever said, listen:

When I said I loved you that was it. Don’t you understand you betrayed me; we could read eachothers thoughts.

I’m vulnerable and desperately drinking, lapping at your waters only to spit it out at you, to speak, sputtering 'see I would drink from your cup!'

-

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:40:39 GMT

There is a slight simile that comes

And then I say
The main problem with the feminist ideology is just that
Ideology the imaginary relations to the real conditions of life
There can no longer be real conditions just imaginary relations

And she says
I feel better now; it’s not
That you’re a misogynist

It’s that you believe in nothing at all

keeko.

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:45:44 GMT

And you find yourself lying face first in the dull shag carpet trying, thinking only of – only able to make the half-sounds of syllables. The hum and the crush and wait, weight. The heady damp of the rain, the wealthy promise of summer in the spring finding it difficult to do anything but and you’re returned to the space where it cycles the stops, the rhythm of awaking and the dreams that come feverish with the seductive pull of the simulation, the dream which is more than real. It pulls the last of your waking soul through your lips and in-out with your breath. It replaces it with the spirit of an espresso bar, chromo and sleek and hot with all the glamour of an assembly-line but a little hip, and a little pretentious too. O little blood, just a little blood left, and she speaks and it sounds-like oceans and orcas.

She says “number thirty-five: What are you doing this summer? Hopefully something that involves lots and lots of blood.

Number thirty-six: Did you get any compliments today? Well I just woke up but I'm pretty sure today is not a day for compliments.

Number thirty-seven: Do you have any expensive jewellery? Kind of. I have a gold locket with nobody's face inside.

Number thirty-eight: What would you rather be doing? That’s what I’ve been asking myself all morning.

Number thirty-nine: It's 4:00AM, your phone rings, who do you expect it to be? I don't.

Number forty: Does a heartbreak feel as bad as it sounds? Never.

Number forty one: How much money do you have on you? Not nearly enough to run away.

Number forty-two: Do you speak another language other than English? Nonsense.

Number forty-three: Is there someone you want to fight? I don't have the energy for it.

Number forty-four: What are you thinking about right now? What a great day it's going to be, fucking yeah.

Number forty-five: What were you doing an hour ago? Lying in bed trying to devise a way to either die or run far, far away.

Number forty-six: Do you wear the seatbelt in the car? How would I risk death that way?

Number forty-seven: Has anyone ever mistaken you for someone else? A couple of times.

Number forty-eight: What's something you really want right now, be honest? I don't fucking know any more.

Number forty-nine: How is life going for you right now? I'll spare the details.

Number fifty: Are you a forgiving person? Yeah. Always.

Number fifty-one: Are you talking to anyone while doing this? I'm so fucking sick of talking.

Number fifty-two: Do you want a relationship right now? Nothing, I want nothing.

Number fifty-three: would you ever change for the person you love? Fuck love.”

power/knowledge

Fri, 09 May 2008 22:28:16 GMT

And it’s as if you have not one word to speak for yourself
And in speaking for other people I speak for myself.

Until it’s such that I wear their voices and they live in my skin.
They dwell in its numb, cool sweat and frayed nerves.

Until every act of violence or kindness or whatever it is we do
To fill the time that we’ve had enough, the brink of our boundaries

Becomes indistinguishable in direction, the threshold covert covered
Like the caress cum masturbation, the harsh word cum self-mutilation.

destroyed destroyer, part IV.

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 05:16:29 GMT

And if there were energy left I'd strip the glucose
from the mulch of my veins, the fiber of my muscles.

I spent that. It's already been credited and gambled off.
The futures of my glands already traded on the TSX.

I think of the price of all this, what's it's cost me:
the anxious sweat, the heart murmurs, the liver damage.

And then again you know, of course it's true, that love cannot be bought.

a misunderstood botanist.

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 05:09:23 GMT

"Nathan! Sometimes I feel like cutting off all your hair and gluing it to the toaster or my face."

These are most of our conversations.

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:40:42 GMT

And such that the creeping terror that inflames my sternum and arm-sides and into my joins. I was talking to Bridgit in the kitchen too late last night and I was like "Marx's philosophical anthropology is all about production as the fundamental human act. Fuck that. Marx is bullshit. Story-telling is the fundamental human action." So, I'm more concerned with the dramaturgical aspects and semantics of my actions rather than the productive, rational, strategic commodified value. But this is too clear and it's not telling you anything. I mean, seriously. I need this not to be like the other times and I'm so wretched exhausted of being scared. I wonder about the intesectionality of fear and consumerism. So I smoke in my bedroom and panic. I get confessional on my beloved all her joy is abundant and I make safe for a few hours. Enough to go to lectures and be productive. See the dialectic? I just gotta be. 'Is sociology a natural science?' Dr. Hier asks, then answers: 'who the fuck cares.' Likewise, I come to terms.

Then Aaron talks about Kierkegaard's leap of faith, objective uncertainty, in our correspondence. He's talking about the Divine, but then at the end he looks at me and asks what then about love? And there it is. My spirituality isn't out there: I worship her, you and not some priest and not some shrine. My scared secret rites are so much dusts' proscriptions. But we're the same after all. I'd lost my faith, you know? And I'm a long way from home. I just gotta get it back. It's possible to transgress you're own ethical ontologies. I've sinned against myself and now. Now, I'm going to redeem myself, despite my salvation anxiety.

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 02:54:46 GMT

And I'm forced painful and kicking terrified to confront my own specter ontology. Yes you, my ethics, who has tainted you? Why are all these lines blanked out and written over; the addenda and subclauses make a mess out of what was clean and simple and fierce. I remember that first reckless terror; I was blooded, emboldened. You know, I'd make this out to be material things, to bring it off this idealistic level into something gritty and skin crawling, and it is, don't give me that - just much of what this is about [Heather and I cohabitating; that semantic entanglement,] much of that terrain, that problem space so speak, is secret, hidden. It's a secret and if you honestly thing I'm going to be specific here then you've not been reading long. Not that I'm ever that confessional. That's good, right there: feel like confessing. Fucking Catholicism, it's in my blood - it's not something I'll ever really extract. But I can't go about begging forgiveness for my past sins desperately hoping that some favour will be shown, a miracle. I don't care, the terror and the shame are its tool of supplication, of oppression.

I need to find an earlier self. The Nathan buried under the archives, the reliquary of want, sex, love, lust and that arcane core reactor of memory and it's unspeakable waste, lead sheathed and buried. Here out of Stunt Girl, my icon and totem of high school, the day after I lost my virginity:

[July. 14th.]

"i was happy. she said i deserved better. i was shy. she told me to conflict. so i did." The rest of the entry is devoted to developing this exuberant contradictory identity. I confront notions of beauty with a stark divinity of actuality. "her eyes even with the broken makeup. wonderfilled ... im crushed but im still grinning ... her flaws, stretch marks and all are divine. her lips and eyes, the whole of her was divine. i dont think she believed me."

You know, this is really a great read. I call Anglina an "Eris-witch" after we breakup. Seriously. My total obsession with Eva I can see and feel it all so well. I've always been this conflicted, melodramatic, angst-ridden, moody, arrogant romantic. It's my modus operandi. Christ, I'm still sixteen. Crisis! Aha, no. Not really. I wrote a sort of afterward in October of 2006, almost two years after the last serious entry. It got some serious questions for my future self, which turned out to have pretty boring answers. But as if I know that I'll only be reading this if I'm a distraught state, I offer myself encouragement, hope.

I've lost the pace of this: worked it out probably. Did some hidden writing.

Just so you know: I am feeling better. I'll tell you about it later.

-

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:30:00 GMT

It'll be six days now of binge drinking, cycling, drug use, midterms, insomnia, costumes, anxiety, inexplicable sadness, vulnerability and desperation.

And to you who suggest moderation and self-reflection: my aim is deconstruction and extremes. Again: But come on you sons of bitches, you wanna live forever?

Excerpts from "Beyond the Extinction of Human Life (from Empire of the Senseless)" by Kathy Acker

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:54:53 GMT

'I asked Abhor what she wanted with me. Did she also want to destroy my identity?'

She said that it was natural for her to love me, that she wanted to make amends. Closure, whatever. I didn't look her in the eyes I was inhaling on my cigarette like it didn't stop and I said that I hated her, I was so drunk okay, and nervous such that I worn my neural strands on the outside. She replied that love and hate were the same coin or some idiot cliche. "Why aren't you looking me in the eyes?" so I just starred into them for minutes. I'm not afraid. I put my forehead on hers. I stormed off.

'I didn't want her. I couldn't so I didn't want... I didn't know if phenomena such as desire which're fleeting even mattered. Psychology isn't here a dead issue.'

Yeah, fuck you. There's your amends. Closure? Go catch yourself an STI.

'That is, the I who had SEXUAL DESIRES had nothing to do with the high IQ/understanding. This IQ used to be high but, since now was corrupted blinded covered over, wants seemed more capable and intelligent than I had known. I found myself at that point, that bottom.

'I thought all that I could know was about human separation; all I couldn't know, naturally, was death. Moreover, since the I who desired and the eye who perceived had nothing to do with each other and at the same time existed in the same body --mine: I was not possible.'

And the rest of the weekend was discovering the rage and vulnerability in my lost friends and forgetting my name the music is so loud so I don't need to think. If I don't stop I can't remember, for the hundredth time I do not know and cannot remember.

'"We have the capacities for understanding and, at the same time, we understand nothing."'

nurse.

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 02:13:25 GMT

And the girls of this town prove to be abundant, aware and eager.

october.

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 02:41:16 GMT

And I inhabit that pause, the blank space before a response that indicates a heavy seriousness to the preceding statement, letting a moment go by to let the implications transmit back and forth. Yeah, it's that I live in the gaps between words, like the gaps between storm drops striking like little pebbles. As if for a moment in the dark, with just the street lights, the rain hangs in the air and it's quiet. I stretch this pin-prick of time out until it can swallow oceans. But then you wake and you find yourself hours away from that moment, your cigarette burnt to the filter, late for class and staring at the crossing light as if nothing had transpired between that moment and now. It's a focused daydreaming: like the light of a glow bug turned into a laser or a match-light next to the sun.

And it's not that I don't inhabit my skin anymore - I do, acutely; you should have felt the incomparable heat spread across my sternum and smolder on my clavicles - it's that world seems muted, distant. No, comparison with living things will not do. This small and final death has pushed me closer to the spirit world, that place overlaid on the everyday. If functions with different rules. Things have symbolic relations rather than causal ones. These stem from emotional landscapes not mathematical ones. Analytical logic loses all effectiveness such that it is replaced with an intuitive one, where one feels through things rather than thinks through them. It's a places where words become too obvious, too dumb to even consider. Imagine trying to communicate with three primary colours; tell me your story using just these colours. And don;t you see, my language has become like this: impossible and frustrating. Still I am a drift in with one foot in, one foot out.

Selection from Ted Hughes' Cave Birds. I've been reading it, between my recitations of Crow. Some passages strike at me. Like here, page 76, from The Accussed, 'Confesses his body - / The gripful of daggers.' [lines 1-2] then here 'His heart - / The soul-stuffed despot. / His stomach - / The corpse-eating god. / And his hard life-lust - the blind / Swan of insemination. / And his hard brain - sacred assassin.' [lines 5-11] Particularly the last one, as a sacred assassin. Or later in Only a Little Sleep, a Little Slumber on page 86, I find something that speaks my speech in lines 1-2 'And suddenly you / Have not a word to say for yourself.' Then at the end, in line 9-11, ' Who are you, in the nest among the bones? / You are the shyest bird among birds. / "I am the last of my kind." '

kith.

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 05:14:19 GMT

I've moved into my new place; these seafoam walls match my sheets. We've fallen together, the lot of us: my roommates are brilliant, sincere and unpretentious jewels. I could go on about just how well Nick and I enjoy science fiction and are of similar world-view, or Hanni's exultation of my relationship advice and aspiration for soups, or Catlin and I's affection for Jello pudding, &c. We hung about the kitchen [Catlin + Nick + Myself] and demonstrated various massage techniques to one another's pleasure. We brush our teeth at the same time. We find all sorts of amusement in each other's stupid antics, expressions. We give advice. We make pots of tea. We spend indeterminate amounts of time taking ridiculous photos of ourselves.

I'd forgotten about the small joy of grocery shopping and cooking: oatmeal w/ hazelnut butter [my tastes are governed by romantic nostalgia] + plain yogurt + brown sugar, ramen w/ soy-puffs + fried portobello mushroom [Nick warned me against using the enochi mushrooms with tales of not merely food poisoning but an infection and four days of vomiting] + sprouts, instant pudding.

Regardless, I have found a home and some space of my own.

missives cont/

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 04:34:48 GMT

And for sometime I am speechless, without language and the wind in my lungs gone. But I move in with other people's parents and am reminded of the kindness of strangers.

Mostly, it's the material things, The objects in themselves that belie the most meaning, the best metaphors: so, lately it's been all bike grease, scarves and ink pens; or maybe it's in the biological: just the smoothness of her skin effulgent, the thick, hale and pristine caterpillar bigger than my thumb in the soon autumn or all my stubbly worn bruised and breached flesh, scabbed and pink. But still I am the same, just new: to myself and to others.

-

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:53:53 GMT

I smoke because I'm bored because I don't want to eat because I'm tried of waiting because all I do is wait and then it's the jitters and class conflict and alienation and this seige of my memories that flood up like heat at the back of my throat and the war in my guts so then it's another cup of coffee and I wander around in the smoke and mist and rain and maybe for second it's okay when a favorite song comes on and I'm back home but I'm here and it's not as bad as that.

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 03:31:59 GMT

Mostly, we make life where we can: sipping from the same glass, wearing eachother's pants, gaps in conversation, another cup of coffee. Making what we can of piled furniture, half painted wall and of the skittering silver fish that cozzy into warmth of our respective mattress-halves. We eat out alot: Noodle boxes, pomo cafes, inevitable sushi, regional beer. More coffee. Work, school, laundry are solitary things we don't much speak of; they're just vague and ill-defined domains in our mental agendas. We talk alot about girls; we smoke alot of pot. Those strange dreamlike barren domains. I've been smoking more, breaking all my own rules.

No, we make space where we can. It's the debris that trail about that force some pause: empty beer cans cum charred ash trays, coke bottles, toast crumbs, the single set of flatware and cutlery, the stacks of folded tshirts and jeans on floor, bike grease, sawdust. Bashing our shins and blistering our feet. It's a quiet life suitable to this soggy coast, this side of the tweed-curtain.

There is alot of time wasted. And I look at my classmates and they refuse to answer, cowards.

And I look at myself and it's so ambiguous that it's not even a question with an answer.

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 07:20:15 GMT

As I was leaving Vancouver I discovered that there is this vast black gulf of rage inside me, expansive and edgeless. Then, I found these sharp diamonds of bitterness that core into me, tearing vast hard lesions amongst this bleakness. After, in the now, I find rivers of fury and spite in this desolate landscape.

If nothing else, the straight of Georgia will separate me from that emotional wasteland, and it will be here that I make my home, free of that battered terrain of my history.

destroyed destroyer, part III.

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 02:25:18 GMT

She suffers from a clarity of spirit
leaving her body incessant, distant

like the ecosystems of oceans
full of hidden, profound life.

She pollutes them; heavy cigarettes
like spills of oil, the long black slicks

like her nights, they are so hard
to wash away: where else can water go.

She leaves me waist-deep in the warm, caustic surf
making estuaries of her sore lips, her scared legs

like when I catch her saline skin in my teeth
she is saying, is the skin broken yet?