He lived in that house for 55 years, and crawled into the same single bed every night as though there weren’t other beds, other possibilities anywhere else in the world. I imagine his sheets held against the sunlight stream would still hold the image of his body at rest, like a secular shroud; the path he strode across the room slipper-grooved into the hardwood from the slow shuffle of age. For 55 years, this simple city contained him.
Venture wide. Try subtropical heat, the incessant trickle of a bead of sweat beneath your shirt. Try the bustle of innercity chaos, try a short jaunt by aircraft, try sushi, try jazz. Waterski. Feel a cat’s nose (really feel it), but do this in Corfu or Oslo. Melt into the delicate slope of a hip and stay there. Then release. Venture far.
Why I'll Never Work as a D-Girl for a feature film Company Again, Reason #53:
My overview of a script written by the boss' best friend's son:
This same story arc was much better done in "The Jerk" -- screw-up creates fad, fad comes back to bite him. The "fart on vinyl" line. Done to death. Bring cheese, however, is entirely new. Though I think there may have been a "bring bread" thing in "The Last Time I Committed Suicide", but then again only about 13 people saw that film, so it doesn’t matter.
While the dialogue is strong for the most part, and captures the voice of the generation, yet there are times when it’s too hip for it’s own good (of the "Ginger vs. Maryanne" variety) and spirals in on itself like water in a flushing toilet. Like that. For example, the douche discussion. Also, the voices could use more distinction. As it is, they all blend together in the same heightened dude-diction and if the names were erased, it would be difficult to distinguish between the characters.
In general, I just don't think I'm the best person in the office to critique a script about testicular grooming products.
You know your friends are amazing when they agree to accompany you to low-rent wrestling for your pre-birthday celebration. Next month, we hardly need anyone's birthday as an excuse to go. I haven't laughed so hard in ages. There was "Gorilla", a hirsute chap wearing tiger-striped fun fur, complete with tail. There was the Puerto Rican hardcore wrestler (weapon of choice: the bread loaf pan), whose audience-given nickname of Menudo enraged his eight-year old son enough that the sweet child suggested that we all fuck off. There was the young Meatloaf, who decried his non-virginal state. Oh, right, and there was the guy who takes care of Mark's daughter five days a week. How many more sleeps until we get to go again!?!
Does the process of aging mean I have perpetual ill-health that just shifts from one ailment to another? For weeks, my teeth ached. Now it’s my back. I even attempted poor-man’s-chiropractic last night by chugging a bottle of Coke in the hopes that letting fly would knock my vertebrae back into line. While fun in its own right, this belching technique doesn’t work. Mark suggested adding beans and toast to the mix but my tailbone is just fine.
After a day of body invasion – new tooth, semi-aligned spine – I fell into a ten hour dream of sitting in a windowsill in full embrace with someone I don’t know at all. But I know exactly who he is in the waking world. At least my brain knows how to take care of itself when my body doesn’t.
Putting the finishing touches on my Squat CD mix today. Swapping out Low & The Dirty Three for Billy Bragg & The Blokes, and adding an old Bowie track, the mix now also includes the pinnacle of cheesiness – Tim Curry’s "I Do The Rock" (which I mention only because I know no one would think to bite this track -- see the June 10th installment). Oh, forgive me. I know not what hell I’m unleashing on the unsuspecting listeners of TEAM USA.
3:00 am – wake with excruciating back pain
4:30 am – try sleeping on the floor with a hotpack
5:30 am – manage to fall asleep with shoulder on a phonebook
7:00 am – wake up, start phoning chiropractor
9:00 am – drag pathetic self to chiropractor, having not been able to reach them by phone, in the hopes that they are open.
9:10 am – they are not open. Mope at locked door for ten minutes
9:20 am – receive phonecall from physiotherapist confirming cancellation slot at 3 pm in North Vancouver
10:30 am – arrive at dentist office, also in North Vancouver, get real fake tooth, replacing fake fake tooth
12:00 noon – arrive at office in Vancouver. Deal with the email that caused the excruciating back pain in the first place
1:00 pm – receive amazing birthday present from London
2:15 pm – leave to pick up mom’s car
3:00 pm – ahhhh, physio
No pressure or anything: yesterday, my Cainer basically said "today is THE day of your LIFE". It started out low and neurotic over my final draft for the Australian show, but a quick pass on the ending and fart-injection from the story editor redeemed my faith in this script. I don’t think I’ll ever mature to the point where farts aren’t funny anymore. I keep saying that my all-time career aspiration is to be a comedian on the children’s birthday party circuit because all you really need to do is stand in front of the sugar-fixed kids and say "fart". Kills ‘em every time.
I digress. Fart humour was merely the icing on the cake of THE day – the crux was a phone conversation about my little wrestling show with a bicoastal television scribe who used to write for the big wrestling show. "You’d never say "faking", you’d never use the word "fake". It’s always "working". You "work" an angle."
Also dealing with fakery -- this interview between Nardwuar and Bill Kaysing regarding the conspiracy theory that, not only was the 1969 moonlanding staged by Disney, but that no one has actually landed on the moon since. I love the Grampa Simpsonesque bit about hanging a lemon on the command capsule.
Ego-stroking in my inbox from the story editor, whose last email was a blanket "moving to LA" notice that included the more successful members of Kids in the Hall in the CC: list. It's the perfect way to end a perfect week. Too much time spent in the sun (physically) though, means I'm a bit How's Your News by nightfall. Droopy-eyed and furnace-cheeked, all I could manage for the night was inaction on the patio with a honey ale and Jimmy Corrigan. (There's no such thing as too much time spent in the sun as far as ego-stroking goes).
In preparation for my 33rd birthday, my mom escorted me to Videomatica, where I clutched the new Criterion Collection DVD of Grey Gardens to my chest with glee while she laid down the plastic. Though never one to make plans more than a few hours in advance, I've already sussed out the destination for Saturday night: Low-rent Wrestling. If all else fails, it counts as research.
Dad and I had a few driving games to pass the forty-five minute drive between the city and home, though he would only entertain the suggestion of such games on the country roads - the main highway was strictly for serious adult driving - and never during the winter, no matter which route we took home. The roads were too unpredictable until late spring, until the threat of black ice was far past.
Dad could take the winding sections with no hands, steering with his knees pressed firmly to the bottom of the wheel. I thought he was magic when he drove the car like that, his hands placed flat on the padded ceiling, instructing the machine to veer left, veer right.
On the long straights, he would let me climb onto his lap and steer while he controlled the pedals, taking the elastic from my hair so my ponytail wouldn't scratch his nose. Every so often he'd have to right the wheel as the car had a natural pull to the left. When the front driver's side tire crossed the line into the oncoming lane, dad would place his firm hand on the wheel at two o'clock, cigarette burning between fingers, and gently direct us back on track.
The last game was saved for nights after shopping or movies in the city. On the stretches through the country, those spots where the road laid straight as a spine in the soil, Dad would wait until we were the only car in sight, then push in the headlight knob until all was black. Until the only lights were the living room lamps of houses tucked away in the rolling plains, like stars hung low on the landscape. We drove blind like that until I screamed to see again.
I wasn't with him when he hit the bridge, when the Tornado slammed into the railing which separated asphalt from the Bow River ravine, but it had happened at night, and we didn't receive the phone call from the hospital until early the next morning. There was the expression on mom's face as she twisted the cord around her finger. She stared at the onions in the bowl on the kitchen table, transfixed on the onions there, as if unable to focus on anything else but the onions, their yellowed skin.
Mom slowed her car when we reached that spot on the way into the city, and I could see the black streaks in the pavement leading to the crumpled steel girder, the streams of beryl blue paint against the cautionary yellow metal. He was in traction, and he was fine. The railing on the bridge broke his fall when he didn't break in time.
I've been working on a screenplay about Dorothy Wordsworth for years, and yes, I know all about Julien Temple's Pandaemonium. Though I haven't yet seen it, I get the impression his is about Wordsworth and Coleridge. I'm more interested in the subtle undertones of the relationship between William and his sister Dorothy during the Grasmere years when they shared a home in the Lakes District. She often took notes which would later become the basis for his poems -- The Daffodils (I wandered lonely as a cloud), for instance. Ponder on this: the night before William wed Mary Hutchinson, Dorothy wore the ring, and it had to be pried from her finger the next morning.
I keep thinking I should apply to the Canada Council for a travel grant, and when I see pictures like these, I think I should just forget the paperwork and go.
I think children and mullets alike are most attracted to Old Style Pilsner because of the colourful can, much like crows to shiny objects. This is a beer that tells a story -- before you even crack back the tab, Old Style lays out a morality play right there on the label. I can’t even remember the details of the art anymore, save for the Red Baron-esque Fokker. There may have been a teepee involved as well. However, I have a long and drawn out story about getting busted at fifteen for open alcohol in a public place. The public place in question: a dirt road in the middle of a nowhere, Saskatchewan. You’d think with all that flatness we would have been able to see the RCMP cruiser coming at us for miles, but they happened to be hiding in a rare tuft of shubbery. Of course, the confiscated case of beer was none other than OSP.
Frustration -- Low – I’ve been curating and culling tracks for the second installment of Squat, the excellent cd exchange cult. We have Taang!, not Kool-Aid. Members have been known to impress potential suitors and indie music snobs alike with our 24-volume first round. And, yes, there were a few tracks by Low. But the "low" in this case is my level of frustation over the fact that Jon’s latest mp3 postings are a quick and direct mirror of my hours of curating and culling. This has happened on more than two occasions. Jon -- you'd better not bite the new Pink track or I'll have to fly to Rhode Island and drink you under the table just so I can kick you when you're down.
Shruggery -- High – I think I’ll incorporate myself and sell shares. I have this magic touch – I’m the one before "the one". Never fails. Date me, and you’re sure to meet your dream girl immediately afterwards, or at least find that vinyl of Dreamboat Annie you’ve been covetting for months.
I'd like to thank the Academy, my agent, my manager, my entertainment lawyer, big ups to God, shout out to Mark for nominating me, and to Charles for designing such bootylicious costumes.
I bitch about this city, sure, but then it's all redeemed on a night like last night. While the cool kids were rocking out to The Hives and The Mooney Suzuki, Mark and I were on The Drive. It was warm enough for walking, and it was as though history held my hand and led me up the street, starting from ten years ago when I saw Troy at Bukowski's. We lived in the same house in picturesque Oak Bay for about a month. Four couples in a three bedroom house, the only furniture besides beds were two large couches for the bands that crashed there, a foosball table that functioned part-time as a depository for dirty dishes, and a pool table that filled the garage. All nonstop on the stereo.
Then, as Mark and I strolled from one bar to the next, we ran headlong into Ted Dave (representing five years ago) who was celebrating the release of his latest comic. From there to the folks I see on a daily basis when we arrived at the Silvertone to find a couple of coworkers half-seas over on the patio. Both Mark and I seemed to get past our recent bout of flirtation-retardation (he much more so than me) -- yet, future dates are on the horizon.
I ended up walking home from the Silvertone, from here to here, adoring every city block along the way, especially the empty lot and concealling shrubbery near here. Phew.
Then, just now, the re-enactment of a scene from Ghost World as I flipped through a stack of 78s at a neighbourhood garage sale while the seller gave me the running commentary of each recording.
You know the procrastination level in the house is at an all-time high when Minesweeper becomes a gripping diversion. If only I had the hammock, I'd be napping on the patio instead of procrastinating here.
