Obfuscating Life (the ending para of "Air Show")

The rest of the office remains fixated on the dying plane flickering down on video on their computer screens, screaming towards end ground – their eager stomachs in a pit, jubilation turning in on it, grinning with sharp teeth and drool. Pejui, under the hot stare of Blanket Girl, is the only one that can hear the falling pilot cry - trained for years, Special Forces, one crash, one episode of anoxia. His wife has hair that smells like peeled oranges, his daughter squints before he catches her at the end of the big orange slide at the park near their house. There is pleasant warmth cradling him now, there is clarity in this journey which ends definite, traveling in one direction gaining force. Twix’s hair around his face, her little mouth opening. Pejui can hear that the pilot still screams for it, desperately: Am I alive? But what a favourable way to go, thinks Pejui: It flew, then didn’t, but we felt it all.

The Tablet - bit included in my opus after reading April's Wired

Information.

Information (/info): Creates the hilltop to stand on. Shouting down to multiples, it bookends life itself.  
The first source came from faith-filled authority. Outside of the slate stone, this authority chipped away at the bodies. A message from the sky everyone took as "word".
Then, it was painted, a surface coating which became the body layers, formed by the recognized and everyone became their own authors. 
Finally, it was embedded again by another faith-filled authority -- this time from the inside coded, with a different message appearing to those on the outside. The inside authors, the only credible ones.
Those authors have created the PIS (Personal Information Source) today. Everything you could possibly want or need is on your PIS: Up-to-date news feeds, customized settings for maintaining your home, office, pet. The post-file, post-reflexive ear. The Informer declared it as the end of human text's viability for innovation – and everyone listened. They listened through their PISs.
Because why would you save, or compose, or contemplate when the answers are literally at your proverbial fingertips, seared into the greatest of information bodies a few swipes away?

Air show, excerpt

The jets are loud above the skyline. Pejui watches everyone from the King Street location run to the south-facing window to see a barrel roll, part of an annual air show. It’s a panoramic view of the City’s tips from the office on the 20th floor, just below plumb with the playful jet. Twix screams – It’s tiny! – while slapping her hands against the glass, shooting her heels up to get a better look. Bok puts his hands on his head. The circulation department comes left office and they all remove their thick-rimmed glasses – some gold, some black, tortoise shell, but nevertheless saliently prescribed – and touch their beards to watch. The steel bird spirals and winds away smoky screws; so close the trail of exhaust lines sink to dust the tops of the high-rises.

Something new-ish

3. Tee-off
(Close up of Andi hitting a gold ball.)
Andi:
So he cheated
Kas:
Bastard…
Andi:
I threw plates at him. And then I saw her. Blonde. Tanned.
Kas:
Whatever forget him…and her.
Andi:
I think I stepped on a shard of china.
Kas:
I know I know. I don’t know what’s wrong with us. What is wrong with us!? Relationships man.
Andi:
I’ve had a few
Kas:
No you haven’t.
Andi:
I just walked out. Him and the purchased boobs he was having behind my back

(cut to the opening scene where she walks out, but show the blonde with big boobs that is in standing in the hallway on the way out.Andi has small boobs and brown hair, so this discovery is obviously a blow.)
Kas:
(Andi sighs) … we play golf …we bitch about guys. (Hits one).
Andi:
Hit balls, yeah.
Kas:
Damn balls (hits one, goes long) – right in the midway! Well your morning can’t be worse than mine.
Andi:
Um, I confirmed Josh’s cheating and have a piece of my Aunt Roberta’s Bluebell china in my foot.
Kas:
Yeah well, I think I’ve got company.
Andi:
Family?
Kas:
No.
Andi:
A dinner party? How come I wasn’t invited?
Kas:
(Hits one)No, a hole in one.
Andi:
We’re at a driving range.
Kas:
I might have a PG rating.
Andi:
Are you sure? Like several positive pregnancy tests plus a visit to the doctors for a formal test for absolution sure?
Kas:
No, but my period is late and I threw up twice this morning while brushing my teeth. You know that aquafresh orange toothpaste...why do they make that?
Andi:
Too much exercise, bad midnight-snack?
Kas:
Or bay-be.
Andi:
Who else’s baby?
(Breathes in)

Close up of mouth saying this with a cigarette in it. Cut to scene with her and the possible stoner baby daddy with a suit on, good looking but long shaggy hair, and young. In a hotel room.
potential stoner baby daddy:
So like, Charlie sheen’s name isn’t really Charlie Sheen right, it’s like something un-wonderbread, like Carlos Estevez…like Emilio.
Kas:
Fascinating. (Taking off his pants and pushing him on the bed) we don’t have much time before they cut the cake.
Stoner:
And like Bob Dylan’s name is like, not Bob Dylan. It’s like something so like, I dunno, it’s like Russell finestein or soemthing. Really Jewish sounding.
Kas:
(Taking off clothes) wonderful, wonderful, what, really?!
Stoner:
Yeah!
Kas:
Uh huh so… (Looks down at bed)
Stoner:
Oh right, (and they hop on to the bed). I think it’s lemon cake.

Back to golf course:

Kas:

(says squinting) Carrot with Marzipan icing.

Andi:
Bob Dylan’s name isn’t Bob Dylan?
Kas:
Is that important?
Andi:
No. Fuck. So what are you going to do?
Kas:
I don’t know.
Andi:
I guess every name has the potential to be cool, or not, at birth...Bob Dylan... My everyday reality has flipped on itself.
Kas:
Oh really, cause I thought mine did.

Big A shall now only refer to Big Anne Michaels

The people that you meet, whether you believe in fated paths or not, invariably shape your life. This also applies to the books you meet. If you are a writer, or have a strong connection to language, you go one further and recognize the authors as the shapers. Today, after hearing murmurs of her and her perfection, I have finally met (read) Anne Michaels.

An old university friend of mine first recommended me to her. "Read her!" he said,"she writes maybe one book every five years but people wait for them because they are perfect." Tonight I took a huge bite out of Fugitive Pieces, her debut and the winner and nominee of almost every lit prize known to man.

Michaels lives in Toronto, and she is actually the aunt of a close friend of an ex-boss of mine. How cool is that? (Yes, distant distant relation, but still...perhaps one day I will have some way of gaining an interview.)

Every line felt like home. I'm not trying to flatter myself, but I felt like I was reading my own stuff - familiar like a sister; stuff that came from an older and better me. I'm not talking about subject or story, I'm talking about voice. Maybe she's just that good at connecting with her readers, but I have definitely found my new lit hero (sorry Big Annie Proulx). Again, I have no major sociological, human, or psychological loss/connection with the proper subject matter, but one line of a tertiary character's really hit me flat and real: "write to save yourself, and someday you'll write because you've been saved."

This next statement may sound grilled cheese, but that line just killed me because whenever I am finding it hard to punch on with the motherlode monstrosity of a project I have been chasing for years, I just remind myself: this writing is for survival. From there, I can go on.

Thank you, Anne. I am going to read everything you have ever shared.

If you don't like her writing, you don't know what you are talking about.

It's important to write something beautiful, but it's also important to write about something

-> Looking for my audience; the right truth.
-> Got some feedback on my fiction today that surprised me. The plastic reading experience can give the writer a power to tell a truth they didn't even know they knew.
-> I want to move to San Francisco. Will I ever get to India? Or France? Or Italy? (Right now, some great force really doesn't want me to!) - my passport application was rejected 3 times, and my accommodations have dissolved.

Where/ When?

MOMENTOUS: I GET $50 for making shit up!!!!

My story, Baggy Orange Shorts, got published as one of eight prize winners for "The Summer of Funny" at Pique magazine in Whistler. My story is at the bottom. They say it is in "no particular order" and we all receive $50 big ones. HA! Special thanks goes out to Parker, my former creative writing teacher, and Claudia, fellow writer/supporter/voice (bahaha do I sound like an asshole yet?)

This is what the magazine has to say about the outcome:

Every season has a mood. Fall is for reflection, winter is somber and serious, and spring is the joy of rebirth. Summer has always belonged to the jesters. It's the season of humour writers like Stephen Leacock and P.J. O'Rourke, of ice cream stains on khaki shorts, of bellyflops into just swimmable lakes, of people going "ooh, ow, ah," while waddling across hot beaches with soft feet, weighted down with folding chairs, beach bags and coolers. The heat makes us dizzy, the cold beer and deck chairs make our problems seem less serious.
I'm pleased to say that Pique received a lot of great submissions to our first Summer of Funny humour contest this year, almost 20 submissions. Judging was extremely difficult, as nothing is more subjective than comedy. Some people are partial to scatology, a branch of humour that is focused on the things we excrete like sulfurous gas and poo. Others defer to irony, which is ironically the most difficult type of humour to define because it tends to disappear the moment you point it out.
...
Without further ado, here is our list of prize winners, in no particular order. All of our submissions will be posted online so you can judge for yourself, but these are the entries we enjoyed the most.
As for prizing, the editorial board - Pique writers could not agree on any kind of ranking for our finalists and the consensus was to share the $400 out among the top eight entries.

READ IT HERE. (scroll to the bottom)

Big DC

I snapped this badass photo of Big DC (Doug Coupland) from the West Coast, in Toronto today.

Like Bang! But, I kept walking with the pictures.

Walking down concrete stairs at the train station, I imagined I fell; it was a picture so severe that I had to run my tongue along my front teeth. It would have been like: bang! No, it would have demanded it's own sound effect.

But I didn't fall.

sneak re-peek

Two women on the train are talking in front of me. One’s holding a peach and she’s given up on her looks – grey short hair, no make-up, fat arms and legs in a pink tank top. Three stud holes in her ears make me think she’s had somewhat of a wilder life. Either that, or she is nearing fifty and unfolding her “before I die” checklist. I don’t really understand the aesthetics of many stud holes anyhow. You’ve seen one... The two women are talking about their dentist, Dominique. Apparently he’s very gentle. “my kids used to argue about going in to see him first,” says the other women. Little thinner, but with the same I don’t give a shit attributes – shorn hair, peppered with grey and a yellow tank top with with jeans and white, generic sneakers. She has taught skin though. Makes me think that she doesn’t work, she looks so well rested and unsacaved by the world. I feel more haggard at 18 than I’m sure she ever felt in her whole fifty or so years.
“He’s been so busy lately” continues three ear studs. “So busy, that he got that new dental hygienist.”
“Oh yes,” says taught skin, “isn’t she just gorgeous. You’d think she goes out all the time, but all she does is just sit around. She told me that. She said she doesn’t even go out to parties.”
“Really! But she’s so young and pretty.”
“I know, I couldn’t believe it either.”
They continue to talk about Dominique the dentist, how caring, how calm and good with children, how funny. You’d think they were auctioning him off.
“Oh he’s been so busy though,” repeats taught skin. “He doesn’t even say hello or hug me anymore…he always does that.”
“He never hugged me,” says ear studs. “Ever. I don’t think he ever hugged me. No, actually he has.”
“I was also invited to his wedding.”
“What! I didn’t know you guys were that close. I didn’t even know he had a wife, I thought he was single. I was hinting at setting him up with my niece last year. Now I just feel like an idiot.”
“But his wife left him since”
“What! How come I don’t know any of this.”
“Maybe you never asked.”
“Isn’t that a weird thing to do? Hug someone, but never tell them your personal issues?”
“maybe he wanted to keep them secret. I’ve been going to him for twenty years.”
“My kids have been going to him for twenty years."
“Maybe you should have talked to him about this stuff. What do you guys talk about?”
“I don’t know, the weather, the news, my new pool, the price of teeth bleach, regular everyday stuff.”
“Well maybe you should have dug a little deeper. We talk about family a lot.”
“At the dentist? Like while you are in the chair?”

Then, taught skin, in her ragged mental state, looks at me strange. I hadn’t noticed I had been staring at her coldly. Almost transfixed by the unraveling hypothet of a relationship she hadn’t known had been imagined.

sneak peak...

Real time -- falling in love for the first time, having an accident, losing out on a job, having a kid -- is always silently bad or good. There is no spectacle for the pain or the happiness, it's only amplified by the intrinsic. Why is that? Why can't music be there to punctuate it? Nothing in life is as magical as a music video. Even when it looks like one – a muted one. That’s how Cassidy felt when they broke into Turvy’s inground pool. Three friends and her -- young firm, prime -- ripping off their summer clothes, releasing pony tails and hat hair, jumping in the pool half naked in clothes that will render transparent when water-logged. The thrill of being caught in someone else's backyard. There should have been some punk song blaring, a shaky camera, underwater kissing. But there wasn’t. Real time is just splashes and laughter, and Noodles ploughing down the diving board; his duck feet clapping the end before he becomes a falling cannon ball.

Something I Remember (In progress)

On route to Cape Cod, 1994, we were in our van counting blue cars and collecting license plates. Sister and I had a book that we would have to mark them down in as we saw them go. I think that might be illegal nowadays. But it was a book, like a colouring one, nonetheless. Then we were playing eye spy. And pretending to eat play-dough, fooling the passengers in cars stopped beside us. I pretended to take a bite out of a play-dough hotdog to a group of teenagers on the i-95.

They couldn’t get enough of the production. Laughing hysterically at the prefect synchronization of faux bite and faux chew. The way I made the play-dough hotdog look so real, the way I angled it and fit it behind my mouth on my cheek. The boy in the passenger seat in particular admired my production. Eyebrows raised, mouth wide, he was in a full toothy laughter. I did this again, to a young couple in a white sedan. This time with a play dough cookie. They liked the performance as well, probably curious as to why they cookie was blood red, or what type of cookie it was. Zia told me to stop, but I had too many fans on the road now.

Mom was bare feet on the dashboard. Her red hair blowing out of the hair sprayed formation in the car wind – the kind that isn’t real nature wind, but only blows because you are moving. Dad at the wheel, with his ray bans and a thick brown moustache with a hint of handlebar. His forearm rests on the top of the wheel, at the helm of our Ford. Sister and I start singing, “Memories” from the musical Cats, and after the first chorus my mom turns and gives a look of both adoration and fury. Only mother can master these dual facial expressions, giving her children just enough fear without fear of maternal alienation. You could probably even call these transpirations maternal.

We are going to Cape Cod for a summer holiday, one week. Zia is single, tanned and beautiful. Long black hair with thick bangs, a smooth figure, full of relaxed health, and a perfect profile (something hard to come by in my family plagued by the busts of ancestral Romans). “If you ever leave anything to me in your will,” I say to Zia, nine years old. “Leave me your nose.” Zia comes with us almost everywhere, even when she had a boyfriend, she would come with us without him. It is because of Sister and I, I am sure, and not my parents. Sister and I are young, and Zia always wanted kids.

I’m wearing an outfit Zia bought me for the car. It is a jumper, like parachute material, in neon pink and green, with zippers all over. We count the zippers (12) and pockets (4). Sister is in a “tomboy” phase, so she wears white canvas sneakers a baggy t-shirt and long black shorts to her knees. Her wavy hair is in a ponytail, two elastics strong because her hair is so thick.

Oh, Thunder in my Heart, III

Blanket Girl lives under a blanket. She has been living under the same blanket for twenty years. It’s a pink cotton world to the Blanket Girl. She has a toy train that she takes for trips under the blanket. It Choo choos and chugs around her crossed-legs while her balloon heart in the bag that is pumping in her ribs keeps lubbing and dubbing, keeping alive. The train is a Thomas train, wood and blue. It was her next door neighbor’s. She stole it from his house when he wasn’t looking, when he was playing with a GI Joe. She put the train under her shirt, in the small of her back, pinned between her jeans and her back skin, and stood straight, still, so it would stay there. So, her neighbor couldn’t see it there, resting on her back skin.

This was when her heart was strong and real. The train started to slide and she leaned backwards, made up some excuse about a sore stomach, hoping the pressure of leaning backwards would stop its descent. Her neighbor cried, didn’t want her to go home but she did anyways. He always cried when she was leaving. He thought she was lying, which she was, but not about stealing, about not wanting to be there. The very proximity of their houses was the only basis of their young friendship. Blanket Girl would go to school, civil, but play with the other kids, while he would sit with his toys by the orange steel doors and brick walls of the school. He needed walls, never wanted to run into the yard with grass and soccer balls and screaming kids in air that makes your lungs cold. He needed walls. But Blanket Girl never wanted those walls.

So with the train in her back, Blanket Girl walked out of her neighbor’s brown house. Around the side, her neighbor still crying inside, she opened the side gate to her grey house, walking like a Christmas ornament, a string pulling her straight from the top of her head, dangling in danger. The train stayed, parked in her back. When she was furrowed in the shadows of the hedge that wound in the fence between brown and grey houses, she lifted the back of her shirt and held the Thomas train in her hand, small and with a smiling face. It was hers.

Now the train runs under the hot blanket. Now she doesn’t have a heart. She wears a backpack that delivers meds to her on her program. The yellow liquid through the tube she can always see on the inside of her left breast is thick like a banana flavored penicillin. It isn’t penicillin though. But, the blanket is a blanket. A real cotton one. A peach on the inside salmon outside world. The constant friction of the blanket on the top of her head pushes and pulls away some of her hair. Sometimes, the cotton is hot against this clearing for skin. The spot is the only red in her pink cotton world – or what she thinks is red, because she can’t see the top of her head under the blanket, in the dark, without a mirror. She can only feel the hot, that she imagines red.

Waiting to take a blood test

"No card. Ms. please take a number and sit down," says "Greta." Her make-up isn’t doing its job -- features melt into the pale powder and blue eye shadow. A circular, beige haze with the blue eyes on my health card. It’s too early for smiles. I might not even see her smile in the haze if some sort of a glow from white teeth doesn’t permeate, but "Greta" doesn’t have teeth for me.

I’m holding out my health card. It’s red and white, the old kind without the required headshot. I’ve had this faceless, red and white card all my life, all sixteen years, but it looks about fifty. The numbers are now simply embossed, in white plastic, like braille, previously popping in black. The plastic film on the edge is fraying too. Then again, I don’t really remember what it looked like perfectly new. I was one.

"Greta" is directing me to take a paper number out of the red, plastic "Urnext" number distributor. It’s shaped like an ear. I break off a blacked and bolded, "12" on white paper corrugated into a U and take a blue plastic chair beside a man in his 50s – arms cross, blue windbreaker, jeans, sneakers, balding, grey, smelling of body grease and mulled wine.

In this room everything is plastic. Above "Greta," on the wall, red lights on a black square tell me the lab is "now serving 3." Only open for half an hour, it’s 8:30am, and the waiting room, lined with all these blue plastic chairs, is rammed. Everyone is this waiting room is older than I am. Significantly actually. I’d say, if I had to guess an average age, it would be about 60.

Older bodies in new chairs. The chairs smelling of nothing, letting the bodies emit the smell of their houses, seeped in their spices from: cooking, wet towel must, or linens tumbling in a dryer, wet feathers or fur, a palm or a cedar plant, roses, or dying dahlias, empty fridge’s with baking powder and beer, green broccoli or a fresh bowl of pasta salad in Greek dressing. The space you live in, living in your skin. I wonder if they can smell that I’m 16. Or maybe they can’t, because my skin is too shallow now.

Some of them lean on canes and listen for the nurse to call their name, others hold plastic bags, others have their blood papers ready, listening for the nurse to call their name, so they can show their blood papers.

Oh, thunder in my heart (II)

Her dad works in a "sweatshop." Not the controversial and socially unaccepted version of a sweatshop with hierarchy, cheap labour and possibly child workers, but the kind that is designed to generate actual sweat (although I'm sure sweatshops do that too). Because of the recent events that have construed its meaning, her dad's sweatshop is now called The Centre of Perspirational Science and Personal Chemistry (but the "gentleman's club" still calls it by its original name). The COPSPC is kind of like a gym, housing machines mechanically inclined to engineer worked muscle into heat into internal steam and into sweat (or that is how she thinks it works, she's not sure, because she can't see this or read about it in the dark, under the blanket). The sweat is measured in volumes of "out-pour" (this is a technical term they use). The centre does not deal with personal fitness, although muscle sculpting invariably happens during the process, creating pleasing effects for the subjects (sweat donors).

Oh, thunder in my heart.

The blanket is a hot blanket. She doesn't have a heart. She wears a backpack that will deliver meds to her on her program. The yellow liquid through the tube she can always see on the inside of her left breast is thick like a banana flavored penicillin. It isn’t penicillin though. But, the blanket is a blanket. A real cotton one. A peach on the inside salmon outside world to Anna who lives under it. She is twenty years old and has been under the blanket for ten of those old years. The constant friction gives her a smooth spot on the top of her head. Sometimes, the cotton burns against this, and it is red – or what she thinks must be because she can't see the top under the blanket, in the dark, without a mirror.

Latest Obsession

I go into phases of deep obsession with things I like. Right now, I can't get enough of this lovely man's brain-->

It's a friday bitches

I'm so glad. I have a lot of things to do. A lot of things to write. 30 minutes till it is Friday and a few dozen hours until I have a weekend off.

Sidebar:
--> The most crucial fact-check of the day: Q directed at the ROM rep -- "Is Elton John's former Cartier brooch in the Gem Vault?" Imagine. It is coming however Queen ma'am.

Entertain with a revision:

Hair like the windows after beaded water, car wash. He has mud bowl eyes and freckled cheeks. Tension bundles in the tongue that ploughs the back of his front teeth. Mary thinks he has perfectly big gums, or small teeth. He reaches over to her hair. Violins play in the pit of Mary’s stomach, tickling. Eyes are shut and smiles are forming but, David leans in only to yank a bobbypin from her hair. He slides it between his teeth, bites down on the protective coating around its prongs, shoots the pin out of his mouth – almost elbowing Mary’s chest. Now the ends are bare and sharp. “Have to do it myself I see,” he says. His hair falls back into his face as he crouches over his victim. The pin plunges in. Slice. Squirm. David removes the head. “David, you there?” she says. His tongue sticks out pink and triangular, balled up at the corner of his mouth. The fly’s six legs are electric with the pain Mary imagines is scrambling through. “David! Don’t you want to kiss me?” she says. More slicing. “But I want to kiss you” she says. David pries a leg off of the fly body – now static and throws it at Mary’s peach-pie face. David says, “I thought there would be blood.” Mary grabs David by his plaid shirt and squishes her face into his. Her neck is cranked stiff in front. Her lips are bursting and wet as they rub sideways against the tension of David’s lips that are surprisingly soft. Fingers are wide-spread and arms are stretched outwards. Eyeballs sink into cheeks, noses scrunched. Letting the air out in a “whoa” Mary releases her white-knuckles from his red plaid. Big pool eyes, brown water, he stares. The bobbypin lies still beside the fly’s remnants. Her creamy white hand slaps the sidewalk and Mary lifts herself up, barefeet, scraping her big-toe. She turns towards her house and runs inside, the wind hitting the sore on her toe that stings and she can feel her heart in her heels.

Some fiction/ and opening

Opening of Leguminous >>in progress.

My spine is chilled against the apartment window and I’m curled up on one side. I can hear Cassidy huffing a Camel, Winterfresh flavour. The wind sounds like a mouth swallowing a microphone. “I need to quit these fuckers. Gives you wrinkles, yeah?” Cassidy shares. I throw sheets across my hips, walk to the kitchen, and begin to boil water. I can hear Cassidy suck her Camel to a butt, slide her clothes on; I feel her talking into the skin where my neck meets my shoulders. I stand, staring at the steel kettle on the blue open flame. Next I feel a punch of air as my apartment door slams. My kettle is hissing. I walk to the bed, light one of the Camels she left on the bedside table, and squint through her refreshing pulls.