Bless My Eyes (All Three of Them)

Forgive my procrastination. But not without a product to behold. And thus, I give you my vision. This image came to me in the dark nothingness of an otherwise (exempting this product and the monetary gain my education depends on this job at the warehouse for) unproductive repetition. My job involves an incredible amount of rigid standing, myself allowed only to rest and sit for a total of an hour out of the ten I work there daily from Monday to Thursday, weekly. I am curious as to whether or not this lack of mobility has effects on my blood circulation. I think I receive a lack of blood to my brain, resulting in a state of euphoric creativity. Not entirely fruitless, I am prone to twirling and weaving narratives and - in this case - images into my conscious mental faculties, with hopes of preserving them long after as though part of an infinite scroll that can be added to or referenced for all of my existence. I am not as good with paints as I would hope, so the image is definitely lacking in comparison with the one my mind offered. I hope you can enjoy my toils.





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Now playing: King Crimson - I Talk To The Wind

Cog.

Neglect is terrible. I feel dirty and unpolished.

Work at the wood moulding warehouse has been taxing, but the repetition is meditation. I've been having visions lately, and I promise to get painting and posting soon.

Some old but still relevant news: for those of you who are familiar with my work with The Undercroft, I just finished the new issue (Volume 4, Issue 1), "Kick Out the Jams: The Culture Jamming Issue" a couple of weeks ago and if I'm not mistaken it should be at the printer getting copied for distribution or already hitting the streets of Georgetown, Acton, and Milton as I type these very words. Some newer and more relevant news: the next issue is focusing on community. I'm excited. If you want to make contributions, send here: posseproject@aztec-net.com.

Life updates aren't my bag, but they feel necessary right now. I'll get something real up here soon enough. So if you haven't already switched off, stay tuned.

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Now playing: tool - The Patient

On Scum and Other Social Nuisances

Whipping through the bowels of the city like a great worm on amphetamines, it felt like we were tempting fate in highly obnoxious fashion: covering lots of ground at a time when travel was advised against—and using public transit to do it. The ominous Swine Flu hung over our heads like an evil reaper waiting for someone to slip up, but we weren’t about to start worrying about karma either.



When the subway train squealed to a halt, eyeballs rolled upward from their fixation on the floor to the doors when they slid open and a troll-like man thundered his way in to the carriage.

He wasn’t German, but immediately upon entry he yelled “nein, ich liebe!” and shot a Hitler salute from his chest. Then he motioned with his hands as if he was shooting up the carriage with a fully loaded automatic rifle.

The worm—a creature of routine and schedule—had no objections to this new ride-along. The doors shut and we were on our way again.

He was wearing a tattered Lamb of God tee and a green army jacket not unlike the ones found in heavy abundance at army surplus boutiques. Everything about his character was rough, probably conditioned that way from sleeping on outdoor hot air vents and simple hygiene negligence. I expected he’d known a hard life. His gait was clumsy like his knee had been twisted in some unnatural fashion long ago, but the subway hand rails—things of equal grime and viral danger—helped him find a seat.

I turned to my girlfriend and basically whispered, in a cynical and repulsed “wow.” The single syllable summed up all of the rejection I harbored towards this lonely, angry creep. I figured he got a lot of that, but I had no sympathy for this breed of dung.

He caught it though, and he spat out a sloppy “shuut uup,” likely inflected that way by some hard and scary drugs.

I had irritated the beast. I felt like an unprepared anthropologist in uncharted territory who’d just offended a local. Whether governed by the city’s municipal dictums or no, for this hard man the subway was a liminal safe haven for everything and anything he wanted to throw at me. In the city you can get away with most kinds of foul nature unnoticed, why would its underground caverns of speedy transportation—filled with people tuned in and turned off listening to MP3 players and reading the Saturday news, clenching on to any distraction for dear life’s fear of boredom—be any different circumstance? In the recesses of any metropolis decorated heavily with loud looking bulletin boards and digital marquees, who would expect any less? Besides, everyone has their own things to do, and they’re not about to tailor their busy days around little peculiarities. When you drive by one of those tragic accidents, you turn your head to check out the damage, but how often do you stop? The general reaction is “not today thank you kindly. I’ll be late.” Tragic is right.

Our particular carriage was pretty empty, carrying my girlfriend and I, this freak fascist, and a couple of dreadlocked pot enthusiasts wearing leis of marijuana leaves. Before the man clambered in they were enjoying some chuckle-full conversations about brownies, conspiracies, and hacky sack. But upon his vulgar entrance they all fell silent and kept to themselves. Stoned and silent, they were like statues of absolutel neutrality—grey and eerie: appropriate décor for city transit.

My girlfriend told me, “don’t look at him” as if I could blend into the background and he was some dumb animal with a Crestaceous intellect. I figured her logic wasn’t too far off—his head was so full of blind hate it seemed like a respectable estimation. But I was denied that confirmation when he demanded my attention immediately afterward.

“You see this?” He had the right sleeve of his jacket rolled up to the elbow. His left hand was holding his right arm so that his palm faced me and I saw the inside of his wrist. Where you usually see forked veins and parallel tendons, I saw the infected result of a heavy drug hunger. A red and purple pain hole with the black center hollowed out, likely irritated by nervous scratching and digging with dirty nails. And then he turned his hand around so the back of his hand faced me, and he launched his middle finger to the sky.

He muttered in his impeccable English, “I kill you.” Suddenly he was bigger than Swine Flu or the plague, and I felt the grip of immediate danger.

I wanted to call his bluff and scream scum of the earth; call him infectious human waste and the Nazi muck I wouldn’t soil the treads of my shoes with. I wanted to scrub the grime of every dark alley and cluttered gutter of the city with his face. I blamed every pseudo-liberal politician who promised social reform and only changed taxes so that everyone got equally swindled and every conservative that kept its plan of action secret and went around kissing babies and offering tax cuts to seniors to buy votes. You never see a politician on the streets, doing groceries, or riding public transit. You never see them living with the rest of their country—not without a suited up fleet of security.

I wondered why society ever did away with public humiliation and shaming rituals. I wanted to lock this swine in the stocks and write “Nazi Filth” on his forehead with indelible ink – maybe dress up some politicians in clown costumes and chain them to security camera polls. Let the general public deal with them, I thought. “Here is your viral Swine pandemic! Let loose your rotten vegetables and tell them how you feel,” I’d tell them.

Despite my disgust and rejection, I knew I couldn’t do much as one. I resorted to the only device of protest I had left available to me. I fell into zen silence and blocked him out. With no reactions on my end, he had nothing left to throw my way. He muttered to himself in incomprehensible tongues until the worm screamed to another halt. It was our stop. My girlfriend and I got up to leave, and I was happy this dumb animal stayed put.

The train doors shut behind us and we were safe, but the scum was still out there: a grimy stain was zooming through the city’s underside. It was too big for one person to handle, but at the same time apparently too small to receive appropriate attention.


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Now playing: Gallows - Crucifucks

Carpe Noctem

I looked to the sky
From my city locale
And I saw
The complaints
Of the daytime dwelling.
The noisy proprietors of
Thunderous voices had
Shouted "Carpe diem!"
Too long
And I saw that my sky was tainted.
Those voices
That shut out the dark
And propped up their sconces
Felt the day too short
And inflicted their choices
On my midnight.

They feared the challenge
Brought on by dusk's early presence.
And they were quick to shout and condemn the nocturnal actions
As evil and mischievous.
Curious creatures too mysterious and divine
To accept, the bats and owls
Were too ugly and unpleasant to approach.

I wondered if they felt small
In comparison to such vastness –
Rejecting lustrous gifts sent from
Light years away
For fear of incompatibility with an ancient and overbearing
Tao of navigation
They faded the bright lights provided already
For billions of years
And sought a thick cover of neon comforts
Like children plugging in night lights.

This failure,
This blindness,
This "seeking the light"
That rejects
A time of opportunity
And a universe of beauty
Leads to the very action
That leaves those very day dwellers in the dark
And it is what sets them behind the prospering nocturnal.

Stranger Than Fiction: From the Chumps-Élysées to Congested Queen St. West

Today Garibaldi the horse turned against his prescribed occupation and bucked his respected driver at the Élysée Palace to run free of duty and captivity, but only for a brief tour de la Rue de Rivoli in Paris, France.

The only Purse at stake for Garibaldi was his life, but that is common place for him and other police steeds around the world.

One would not be mistaken to see these unsung heroes galloping the streets of heavily-populated and polluted downtown Toronto, alongside dangerous traffic and unpredictable crowds, and that's within a concrete jungle of heavy noise.

Horses are not even required in this line of work; cheaper technologies are available. Conservative folk out there would be very worried to know that such animals require costly vaccinations and living accommodations that can ultimately be avoided by instituting the use of a technology that has been popular and practical for centuries now: the bicycle.

Surely it would be easier to avoid animal rights groups altogether by not placing the horses in situations where neon reflective coats and eye blinds are necessitated, but sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

2009, Where Is Your Music?

Today I shelved my editions of Fung Yu-Lan's A Short History of Chinese Philosophy and Wing-Tsit Chan's A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy in a bout of rejection against filial and traditional practice, restraint and lionization.

A familiar pastime to be included as one of my notorious procrastination routines, I sat myself in front of my laptop and sought out my bookmark for the Exclaim Magazine website, plotting to spend the next half hour lurking bands that were slated for upcoming album releases. I was hoping for something fresh that was wholesome, but that also retained what I call necessary contempt for modern maxims. Call me elitist, but without that loathing, music just feels empty and phlegmatic to me - like ignorant bliss.

Exclaim Magazine is a good place to go if you're harbouring a canker of time-killing indulgence in your cheek; its lists of new music releases seem limitless.

However, I scrolled through this list, searching about every other artist I'd never investigated on myspace with hopes of getting a taste of the sound they'd be making available on their respected release dates, and I found little I could appreciate. I found a lot of contempt, but where I did, it was like there was too much.

I felt old and jaded and all I wanted was for somebody to put a record on and leave me to some kind of eternal rocking chair where the soundtrack provided could soothe my deep wrinkles with sweet rhetoric and cunning attitude.

All that said, I did manage to stumble upon a fun little oldie.

Harvest

Oh Mr. Scarecrow, just look at you,
Stuck on your stick, with nothing to do
Blessed with only one power which you must yield:
You must protect the harvest, you must keep the field.
Eying the crops within your peripheral view:
Don’t be surprised if sometimes your vision splits into two

Mr. Farmer created you in his visage.
Don’t let him down, you must pay homage.
Mr. Farmer won’t feed wild, no matter what the age;
It costs too much to feed what’s out of his cage.
With your stitched on smile and tattered old clothes,
Do your only job and scare off those vermin, scare off those crows.

The crows, they know better, they know
What you’re for;
So they spend all day destroying you more.
These tar coloured birds, pecking all day,
Piece by piece they’re removing the hay.

Oh Mr. Scarecrow, just look at you,
Stuck on your stick, with nothing to do
And still you hang, way up on your cross
You don’t mind you’re dead now, it’s all for the crops

Today you’ve done well, yes, certainly earned your pay;
So the farmer stuffs your holes with some fresh, farm-grown hay.
Next morning will come with another day:
Another day of torture, another day of decay.

You know Mr. Farmer, he made it this way:
But for every day that you die, there’s another to say,

I’ve stood here, young crops, long day after day,
All as a sacrifice for your simple way.
You can’t possibly fathom what I have to do,
Lose a bet everyday just to look after you
To let you grow tall and sway as the wind has you go,
I’m pinned up here; the burden of pain mine to know.

Then a day comes, with a new story to tell;
You look North, South and East, but every follower’s fell.
That monster, Mr. Farmer, he’s gone off to sell
Your devote little nation to downtown marketing hell.

Without your clone army, you feel empty and poor,
But can’t help notice the sprinkling of the compost floor
Seeds for the next batch, maybe one without a victim
This time you might do right, maybe this time you’ll teach them.

If they know of their demise this might make them feel sad,
But perhaps it will help them enjoy all the dead ever had.

Here’s your new culture to which you can preach,
You are the farmland closer whose only job is to teach.
Yes, every day you will die and Mr. Farmer will win,
But at least you reap the benefits for the time that you’re in.

Oh Mr. Scarecrow, I wish you could know:
The problem with the field is you reap what you sow.