When the Temperature Drops

“If that’s all you want, then sure. That’s it. It’s yours. Go for it.” he said, head dropping slightly, silently to the left. His hair dangled over his eyes as if he were one of those water dogs whose eyes you can never really quite see.

“How much is it then?” She looked surprised.

“Well, I can always tell you that. But that’s not really what’s at issue here. I’m talking about possibility here. You can have anything – anything – yet this is all you want. Seems odd to me.” He flopped down onto his hand, elbow stoutly propped on the counter.

She paused a moment, looking at him from a slant. “Yeah, man. That’s pretty much all I want. Can you please tell me how much you require from me… in payment, I mean.”

“Yes, of course. But, you see, I’m trying to tell you something here. I’m trying to impress on you an idea. I’m trying to break through to you here, you see. You can allow yourself to want more than this. You’re not limited to this. You can have it all. You can grab hold of every thread that possibility has to offer – every moment, time, opportunity, event or thing, even wealth -you can grab hold of them and pull till they all come tumbling down. They can all wash over you as if you were a unicorn standing under a waterfall. Do you understand now? Do you get it? Get what I’m saying?” His face was still supported by his hand which was supported by his arm, which was supported by the counter. His eyes still nowhere to be found.

She took a deep breath, realizing that this was turning into a situation that she was being forced to deal with. She really hated having to deal with anything, even when she did so of her own volition – but particularly hated being forced to do so. The vein on her forehead began pulsing visibly as she struggled to keep her frustration in check.. She had rage issues and didn’t want this to turn ugly.

“Look,” she said tersely and slowly through a clenched jaw, “I am here to buy a carton of eggs, 2 stalks of broccoli, a loaf of bread and an eggplant. This is all I came for, all I need and all I want. Okay? So please, tell me what I owe you for these items, let me give that amount to you and then let me be on my way. Agreed?”

“Shit – did you realise that you’re buying all ‘B’ and ‘E’ things?! This happens very rarely, but when it does it is really quite memorable. You came to this grocery store to ‘B’ ‘E’ – to BE! to be and keep on being! Broccoli, Eggs, Bread and Eggplant! Wow! My God. Be! Be! Be!” His zany eyes finally glinted through the curtain of hair.

“Stop it NOW. If you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to either speak to your manager or walk out of her with all these ‘be’-ings for free. Do you understand me? Stop it. Let me pay. Let me leave. It’s as simple as that. Do you realize that there is a line-up of people forming behind me. They all want to pay for their things and get out of here. Just like I do.” Indeed, behind her, a long queue of people had formed, and they were all watching the conversation unfold in either bemused indifference or apprehensive impatience.

He looked up from behind his frivolous fringe at the waiting customers.

“Oh!” he ejaculated, “My God. Yes of course, I’m very sorry. I have this heart condition that makes me become esoteric whenever the temperature drops. It’s hereditary, you see. It was a congenital…”

“Shut up. ring me through.”

“… it was a congenital condition that is actually quite rare, if you can believe it…” he continued obliviously.

She had had enough. She picked up the ‘B’ and ‘E’ things that she had attempted to purchase, put them aggressively in a bag, and walked out of the door as the cashier continued to mumble something about how his family became quite the interesting dinner guests whenever winter came around.

The next customer walked up to the cash cautiously and placed his things on the sticky, black conveyor belt. He looked up at the cashier anxiously. The cashier stopped abruptly, looking at the new customer as if through fresh eyes.  “Oh, hello.” he said pleasantly.

The customer nodded acknowledgement at the greeting.

“Will that be all?” asked the cashier.

“Yes.” replied the customer firmly.

The cashier peered at the customer through his gratuitously cumbersome bangs, and after an awkward moment, said, “Sure. If that’s all you want, of course there’s no problem. It’s yours. Go for it. But I happen to believe that you are more than the sum of these things.” The cashier’s head dangled to the left once more.

The customer groaned loudly, as did everyone else who was caught in this grocer’s queue, like flies in a spider’s web or butter on toast. The people in the lineup clutched their unpurchased goods so tightly in their hands that almost all at once, their knuckles whitened.

Unpoem

wrote slam poetry in my head all night

psychic paper dirty and smeared.

dribbled soppy love/hate atop

those imaginary hilroy blues

brilliant prose broke forth

like projectile vomit

Unstoppable

wished your ears tickled red

hoped you had an uneasy 2am

prayed you were wise enough to ignore it

Now my coffee-sopped innards rage

like twisters in kansas and tsunamis elsewhere

While i try desperately to revive

those gleaming shards of salvageable material

and fail.

For You-ni-verse

for eyes unseen

silence unheard

For lips unopened

and wounds incurred

For bellies filled

with swallowed air

and vanities satisfied

with undue care

for acts of kindness

gone unreturned

and wise lessons

left unlearned

For hopes dashed

and passions undriven

I beg forgiveness

for not having forgiven

Commenting on the German School shooting in which a 17-yr old kid killed 16 people, I found a disturbing throw-away line in two of the reports that I’ve read- from the Washington Post and from BBC News World. Washington Post published:

“I don’t want to speculate too much about this,” Rech said at a news conference. “But it is noteworthy that primarily girls were killed — eight girls and one boy . . . The teachers killed were women.

Three teachers and nine students were killed inside the two-story school building, where about 1,000 students ages 10 to 16 are enrolled, authorities said.”

The BBC had a single sentence at the end of the article that expressed the apparent targetting of women in the shooting. However, some very loud silence followed after these short sentences.

The German Police said that they found pornography and violent videos on the kid’s personal computer, which isn’t all that surprising, after all, what 17 yr old boy doesn’t have these things on their computer nowadays? It would be more informative if it was violent pornography or, say, a letter describing the boy’s motives.

What bothers me is the relative silence on news sites about the possibility that women were the main targets in the school shooting. What, there can only be one Montreal Massacre? Or is the violence-against-women thing too banal? Too passe?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Yet another Reason why the Catholic Church should go down in Flames

The BBC World website reported today that the Archbishop of the Catholic Church in Olinda and Recife (Brazil), Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, has excommunicated those involved in giving a nine-year old rape victim an abortion. The nine-year old child became pregnant with twins after being repeatedly raped by her step-father. Her mother helped her find a hospital and doctors who would give the poor girl an abortion. In Brazil, the law only allows for abortion in cases of incest, rape or considerable risk to the mother’s health. All three of these conditions applied to this little nine-year old girl. The Archbishop condemned the abortion and all those that were involved in arranging it, save for the little girl, who the church agreed not to hold responsible for the abortion because of her young age.

Now think about this. If the girl is to young to be held responsible for undergoing an abortion in the church’s eyes, then how could she possible have been able to go through with the pregnancy and be responsible for two infants when they would have come to term?? After the holocaust denier caused the Catholic church to come under fire just a while ago, all of the members of the Catholic church should take the hint, and shut their self-righteous and misguided traps once and for all. Or at least untill the outrage over their last debacle has died down.

FeedBack

I dare say that, yes, this world was once mine, My roots burrowed through this soil and bore life through like blue veins. I once sat in a green field as if it were my bedding, and watched the stars as if the sky were a mirror. I was connected to it viscerally. It was me and I it. It shone with prismatic clarity. I spoke in unison with all the chirping of the crickets. I had no idea that I was yet the primordial fool. I was ripped from it with anything but surgical precision. No anesthesia. It still hurts. Now, like Freud’s men-babes, I want to be granted re-entry to its cosmic, loving, outraged comfort. But it does not yield.

i missed the colours of that world, that unity and identity. But, like tinted flowers in fresh water, the coulour has drained out and I see what others had told me I ought to see for so long. The world has become a painting with its colour sucked out. Pigment resting on grey and off-white, and nearly-carbon-black. I thought it would never happen. I’m like the Little Prince who has lost his first sketch, and now cannot test if the adults around me understand where I’m coming from.

However, I can assure you that it’s not novelty I crave – getting swamped by critiques of modernity has made sure of that. Perhaps I crave simplicity and virtue. I crave Socratic discussions on right and wrong modes of being, and return to a time when they actually meant something. I want to whole-heartedly denounce the stoics, the sophists and the cynics. But somehow, I can’t coherently summon the words, the argument, the care, the belief that they’re not altogether correct.

I wish i could still rely on partial information, and tout or denounce this or that from a glimpse of it. I wish I got angry at the news like I used to. And that injustice was still outrageous and not a just another matter of course. I wish I could stop having discussions about ideas in terms of the authors that first wrote them down. At least I’d have real avenues for discussion, instead of bobbing lackadaisically on this oceanic body of partial certainties, and monochromatic opinion. I’m tired of simulacrum. I want the real thing back.

Who’s with me?

*crickets chirping in the distance*

On the Thermodynamics of Hellfire

Some say we, the people, are rational little beings walking around on two legs, unmoved like boulders. If that’s true, I’m the most ridiculous of boulders, because everything moves; it’s like I’m molten. There are no guidelines to follow. No street signs, no traffic code, not even the laws of thermodynamics apply here. This is lawlessness made rock. Made frog in my throat. Choking up the passageways like too many words in mid tumble. Makes me cry like an elephant at a roadside funeral. I should soak myself in iodine and jump into a pool of cotton balls. I should get healed. (As if someone, something could do it for me). I should climb into an industrial sized garbage bag (perforated) filled with echinecea leaves (dried) and then jump into a vat of hot water (boiled). I should practice cynicism, and be stoic. I should leave Dionysus alone, relegate him back to lonely mount Olympus where he belongs; leave him to his soiled libations undisturbed.

But I want to make sense of this. I want to squeeze it between my fingers like crushed grapes, or ground slugs. I want it to speak to me, and tell me where I’ve gone wrong. I want it to jangle around and make noise like a mariachi band. I want it to sing ballads in the name of lost heroes. I want it to tell me all the alternate endings for stories that were never begun. I want it to teach me something. But instead, I’m Tantalus, wading through swamps of meaning, as dream interpretation books float by. If I were a butterfly, i’d crawl back into the genie’s lamp. (He’s got a hookah in there somewhere.)  I’d fly into the flame, preferring brilliance to whatever this is.

I stopped in the fire the other day
Watched the snow fall like parachuting marines
And thought about my uterus
I’ve carried it around all my life,
Barely recognizing it was there
Until it started giving me trouble
First it was the right to own property
Then the vote, of course
And now. It hurts.
It does unruly things
Keeps me worried and awake
It used to be so neutral, so nonchalant.
So non-confrontational,
Like a lone hippie in a head shop
Simply content, unassuming.
But now, it’s always lurking around.
Making rude comments and watching for my reaction
Like a brat testing the boundaries
A visceral gadfly

A blood-and-guts terrorist

A cantankerous Cunt

If this is a gift, as the propaganda proclaims
Then where’s my gift receipt?

The values of higher education

Scene: Discrimination and the Law in Canada. Course given at unammed University in Montreal.

Prof: Quebec Canadian Judge, presiding.

Subject matter: Harassment/discrimination.

Prof: I had one case come before me, in which a woman filed a complaint against a mechanic because he had put up a poster of a woman in a tiny little bikini on his office wall.

random bursts of giggling swirl like wind through tall grass throughout the class.

Prof: (smiling) “Well, you know, some poeple feel uncomfortable with things like that, it’s important not only to be objective, but subjective too.”

(Girl raises hand) Prof, pointing to girl, “Yes”

Girl: “If it were a picture of George Clooney, would it be the same if the situation was reversed? If it were a picture of George Clooney, on a woman’s office wall ?”

Prof: “every situation is different, you see.”

My hand shoots up, Prof looks over, nods.

Me: “IT’s not just that it’s a picture of someone. If it were a picture of a fully clad Julia Roberts, it probably wouldn’t be offensive. If it were a picture of a sharp-looking George Clooney looking good in a suit, that would also not be offensive.” (white guy behind me pipes up, speaking over me, challenging: “that would make me uncomfortable!”) Now if it were a picture of a chippendale, nude on a sandy beach but for a barely-there g-string it would be different.

White guy behind me, gelled hair, tight black t-shirt: “Whatever, so what if it’s a girl in a bikini?! It’s not like she’d totally naked, and what would it matter anyway?”

First speaking girl looks perplexed, intemittently nodding and shaking her head.

The whole class bursts into sharp snippets of speech. People’s heads nodding, shaking uncontrollably.

Prof: “We must always provide for the region in which a complaint is made. This is from Saskatchewan, even a big bikini has a different effect than it would here. Maybe if it were here,, in Montreal, even a g-string would not…. Oh, I don’t know, actually… Anyway, let’s move on to pay equity. Which is that a job mostly performed by women should not be paid less than a job mostly performed by men if it is of equal value.”

Snickering spreads through the class, dying quickly.

Me: (screaming silently inside my head, eyes wide; disbelieving. Checking watch: one more hour of this…)

-Fin-

If you can’t join them, beat them…. I mean, if you can’t beat them….

Btw: finding pictures of lewd male models on beaches is actually surprisingly difficult.  I’m so tired of this society.

Pachabell