bring-it-2

oNe day wE stepPed ouT

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 23:14:09 +0100

One day we stepped out, away from the hiding place. We had decided to breathe some fresh air, and after all that - all the stories we told one another about the monsters lurking outside, the air dirtied by belching industry, and our hearts clenching at the thought, our stomachs tightening - after all that, it was easy. Cool air calmed our bristling brains. No monsters. Not even any sloppy, bursting industry. No structural imprisonment - no baffling schemes to denude us. We were just simply, calmly, undeniably free.

And we laughed heartily about the years spent huddling around little cold machines that promised everything but gave nothing. We laughed and we feasted. We looked at one another for what seemed the first time. Same eyes same mouth same body same everything, but somehow - (we were infused with merriment) was it the depth of colour? The grace of the lines? The whole flexibility of the thing? - we saw something new. No more bitter, petty dramas about whose ice cream cone was bigger or more delicious, no more fisticuffs over who got to sit in which old smelly chair, no more whispering behind backs the same old tiresome recycled secrets that we all knew anyway except that we kept pretending they were brand new, the wave of the future! - we had held them over one another's heads like weapons, and traded them under the folds of long coats like tokens of alliance...

Poof! Gone like smoke in a puff of gentle wind. Bye-bye - we don't need you anymore!

toroNto liCe

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:00:52 +0100

lice caught me one night right in the middle of shaking the can to get more paint but i think it was out anyway

they came around the corner silently... i think somebody called them, since i had been walking around stupidly with the can and the stencil just hanging in my hands for anyone to see...

and then they were all over me, ready to chase over fences through backyards and doberman's jaws

but i didn't bother with that

just told them robin had jumped in the ocean and didn't come back, that i was just spraying her face on the sidewalks of toronto to pay tribute... i wanted to go all over canada doing that, but i lost my nerve after that

almost booked for mischief, but the lice just threw the slip with annoyance into the bottom of the car to join so many others...it must have been a frustrating night for them, having let off so many potential felons

big guy with a tiny

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:54:44 +0100

dog, no no!

i used to sing that to the preschoolers in Bangkok. They loved it, though I think they were probably responding to my crazy faces more than anything else. they didn't really understand the words after all.

big guy with a tiny dog, no no!

mycelium runNing

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:57:15 +0100

This is a very interesting book regarding the current state of mushroom research.

It seems that mycellium can selectively absorb huge amounts of heavy metals, including radioactive cesium!

More research is necessary, of course, but the current findings are incredible...

check it out!

[look it up on google books: mycelium running]

walk in central park

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:33:42 +0100

Burnaby....

i went for a walk in burnaby central park yesterday... lovely big old trees and periodic stations for doing squats and other strengthening moves... the bars housed inside frames and just sitting out in the weather transformed by elements

once they were shiny and new

the squirrels there approached me, rather than running away, expecting food, i guess

discarded empty husks of peanuts could still be seen, not yet buried or reclaimed by the mushrooms

evidence of recent feedings

I pass a sign whose words, if they were heeded, command park visitors not to feed the wildlife or the birds

by wildlife, they meant the squirrels, and i suppose there were probably unseen moles and mice and such, but it's not like bears lived in those woods -- maybe a few raccoons and skunks.

but the squirrels were the only ones cute or brave enough to risk head-on contact with humans

they don't realize that if we ever run out of peanuts, for whatever reason, we'll probably eat THEM.

the raccoons haven't forgotten, brazen as they are

but everyone feeds the squirrels in spite of the lonely imperial sign

a sign which invokes the whole question of humans' role in nature and whether we affect other life

it's a silly question, really, because of course humans affect ecosystems.

But the sign really points to a moral debate, and it's a cloudy one at best.

it's ok to domesticate cats, dogs, and other farm animals; it's ok to keep birds, fish, and snakes as pets

in fact, in those situations, one is expected to feed the wildlife

but squirrels living in a public park are off limits -- we wouldn't want them to become dependent on us, after all; how would we resolve the question of responsibility? To which individuals would we assign it? and ultimately, who would pay?

it often comes down to that, doesn't it?

In the end, the sign is yet another layer in the great unfolding drama of "Humans' Domestic Space versus the Wilderness". On that scale, a city park is a little bit gray, I suppose, but it must lean in the direction of "wilderness", depending on the park, of course. Take central park in New York City, for example. Arguably, this park falls more into the "domestic space" category, even with its zoo of bizarre animals that don't belong in that habitat anyway, and which would, in most instances, be considered "wild".

Within that zoo, it isn't morally acceptable to get into the giraffe's pen. One can stand outside the pen and enjoy the warmth of human social acceptance, but get inside and suddenly you're "crazy". The subtext here is that the giraffe's pen is a little tiny pocket of "wilderness" within a swathe of domestic space; notwithstanding the giraffe's dependence on its "keepers" in this situation, it remains a wild animal in wild space.

But all of this is merely the infinitely subtle gradations of the real point, which is this: humans still consider themselves separate from the rest of nature. From this spring comes an unending flow of misunderstanding and debate -- since it isn't true, we have to justify the belief: we have to build cities, for instance; we have to erect giant fences marking the boundaries of wildness. We have to write and study essays and theories regarding the superiority of the human species, we have to make movies which pose the alternate view that humans are in fact a disease, or the most inferior lifeform inhabiting the planet. We have to develop a scale or hierarchy of life and determine where to place every species on this scale, according to criteria that we invent, meanwhile acknowledging that we haven't discovered all of the species currently alive, or even some that once lived but now breathe no more.

it's an absurd project with no end and no purpose, except that it allows us to justify the actions we take which limit the capacity of the earth to produce abundant, self-sustaining, and diverse webs of life [clear-cutting forests, lakes of toxic tailings from the alberta tar sands, etc]. We take these actions to enrich our own lives, again according to criteria that are rarely examined and in any case invented by us without consultation in the "wilderness".

Let's examine this project, these criteria, these beliefs.

Let's have the courage to do that.

sliM

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:14:49 +0100

Yellow light is coming out of his head

fighting snakes

spit venom

he's holding a hockey stick and slapping pucks through window panes

but it's just an old barn

we're planning to tear it down next week anyway, and take the big old beams for our living room

it's the trend these days

we'll impress our visitors, maybe even get into a magazine

but slim, there, wearing his goalie's mask and slapping those pucks

we'll have to lock him up in the cellar again

he's always telling guests to “fuck off!” and his breath smells bad and he's missing a couple of teeth – well to be more exact, two of his teeth were broken off a few years ago. He never had them treated so they've just been rotting away in his head. He likes the pain, i guess, but we knew that.

He used to burn himself with matches and stuff... cut scratches into his skin with razor blades and whatnot. Said it was art, performance art, because he did it in the big old rusty bathtub in the yard, and he had some heavy dissonant music playing. He'd taped posters, with a picture of a weed-eater cutting a flower to shreds, to telephone poles – advertising a one-time only performance of his “piece” GER, or Green Earth Red.

And then the day arrived, and actually a few people had wandered to our house out of curiosity or boredom, and Slim started playing his heavy dissonant CD, stripped off his clothes, never acknowledging the presence of anybody, stepped into the bathtub and proceeded to cut himself with the razor.

One woman was talking loudly about how disgusting it all was and that somebody should stop him, but nobody really wanted to. The fact was, anybody from the town probably wanted to cut Slim themselves, but to see him inflict wounds to his own body was even better.

Slim stole everything from everybody. We all knew it, but nobody could catch him or prove anything. The police even raided our place a couple times, responding to complaints, but they found nothing. Videotapes of his thieving just showed a shadowy figure with no identifiable features. He was good at it, I guess.

It started with candy when he just ten years old. His friend Jason showed him how, while the clerk was looking away or distracted with another customer, to count loudly “One, two, three...” meanwhile stuffing handfuls of penny-malt balls into the paper bag, so that he might have bagged up to three-hundred of them, but only counted forty, and the clerk never bothered to check. From there, he moved on to bicycles to trash cans to old Mrs Crawford's teapot collection.

Still don't know what he did with all that stuff.

hunGry

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:23:09 +0100

are you hungry today?

the stomach makes noise and she notices, looking over in the bed, and suddenly we're both wondering how we got there, not yet willing to admit the previous night's cliche of drinking, mindless talk always swerving towards sexual topics, and then the drunken sex that neither remembers. ["was it any good? shall we try again, perhaps with the aid of another famous aphrodisiac: coffee?"]

"when you kiss a guy, do you prefer a clean-shaven face, or a bit stubbly?" a question with an obvious answer, no doubt, but of the course the subtext is "would you like to kiss ME?" because my face is shaven closely, because i want kisses this evening at some point, and i want them deep, involving tongues and long-lasting full-bodied enthusiasm.

but if she answers that she likes stubble, she's lying of course, but what she's really saying is that she would prefer to kiss another man; thanks, but no thanks. And please push off, because your presence may discourage the advances of that cutie-pie over there whose attention i've been trying to attract by throwing my hair across my shoulders and exposing my neck in his direction.

coRal's sKeleton

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:24:00 +0100

the long road rises up the mountain out of the clouds

but down here it's foggy

we can barely see our own noses

burning gas and coral's skeleton

going down - what floor sir?

we'll eat cockroaches

every day will be an episode of fear factor

every meal more disgusting than the last

but we'll invent new ways to cook the roaches

mix them with hemp seeds and grind them up into patties and serve them at the heart attack grill

Pass the sPoon

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:22:05 +0100

we don't know yet where we're going yet because it's all just blurry yet get on a jet and fly around look for the lost ones flinging arms into space to see if anybody touches them fingers splayed without finesse and eyes tightly clenched but we open them and then focus real tight
on a tin can
empty
that once held pieces of tuna flesh
not dolphin, for sure, no dolphin
said so right on the package

a bucket of margarine with a spoon over there
my friend says pass the spoon i'm hungry
he eats it pure
there's nothing else no money
or will
[but we must be blessed
because friends arrive who toil in gardens growing vegetables and fruit
and we have a feast to end all days
if only all days could end this way
faces that glow in the dark, not from chernobyl, but from something else
health and friendship and ease]
haha april fool's!
noboy comes and we just eat that bucket of margarine, staring into space not even smelling the mildew anymore
and wondering what it all means
do we have to kill to eat? we ask and contemplate
do we have to eat?
we could soak in the sun's rays like trees and leaves -- hemoglobin's kin is chlorophyll, my friend says
just one molecule different
margarine is plastic's brother, i say, just one molecule different
just one tiny gene different and we're chimps, he says
we're chimps, i say.
we're humans, he says. We think, we feel, we have souls, we're better than them, we're better than them!
we're animals, i say, no difference.
there's a difference, he says. we're on the top of the pyramid. the food chain feeds us
margarine, i say, pass the spoon. it feeds us one-molecule-away-from-plastic grease mixed with salt
and we're bloody grateful, he says, when you're hungry, this shit tastes delicious
the food chain, i say. let's thank the plankton
and the whales that eat them, he says. Let's thank the strawberries
that we dream about, i say, and the slugs that eat them before we get a chance, and which we wouldn't want to eat even if the margarine ran out.
and whatever eats them, he says, the slugs. what eats slugs?
i had a dog that ate them, i say. maybe birds, but i speculate
fungi, he says, for sure those little fungal buggers love the slugs
and eventually we trace the food chain all the way back to shakespeare who chronicles the legendary path of the king who dies, is eaten by worms, whom the fisherman captures to bait his fish, who eats the worm that ate the king, so that when it comes back around we're all cannibals
everyone has been everyone else's mother at one time or another, it is said, but we've all eaten one another, too
what an odd place, he says. Pass the spoon.