Vagabond

 

Daphne left rehab against medical advisement or whatever and she’s been shooting speedballs in her aunt’s basement in Airdrie. Speedballs make you magnificently loopy, although I personally never understood the appeal. You mix cocaine and opiates is what you do, you cook them together in the same spoon, and basically the idea is you have the minute-long rush off the cocaine that makes you feel like you are having a heart attack and your eardrums are on the verge of rupturing, and once that is over you are blissfully high on the opiates for a good six hours or so, depending on your tolerance and duration of daily use. When I was using intravenous drugs on the weekends as a young man, I was perfectly happy to settle for the six hours of not thinking and of being suffused with supernatural warmth without the initiating  cocaine blitzkrieg, though I would do speedballs with friends who were doing them so as not to be a spoilsport. Poor wobbly and restless Daphne. I’ve extended her an offer to make use of the daybed in the basement for a few nights. She can use whatever she wants as long as she does so safely and out of my direct range of vision. I guess Daphne recently saw an episode of Black Mirror called “White Christmas” with John Hamm in it and it really rocked her in a maximally discomfiting sort of way, although she seems to get off on it the way she would a coke rush. Daphne is seized by new terrors with respect to the concept of immortality and the fact that it may be far less desirable than any of us earthlings have yet been able to properly divine. Her fundamental point: immortality does not on the face of it seem desirable at a time when the planet is a mouldering heap of trash with dimwitted humans endlessly butting heads. What would a “life savings” become in the context of the economics of immortality? Would people become trapped in tortuous ordeals, as though on a reel? Would space-time become fundamentally different, opening up like a flower? Would mass sterility somehow figure, like in the wildly overrated 2006 Alfonso Cuarón movie Children of Men? Maybe a whole other scene,  à la Freud, could be produced and demonstrated. Maybe every single human being who ever existed could come back to life in some audio-visual or fully sensory form that we could access and with which we could play and experiment. One of the characters in the recent Richard Powers novel Playground would by all accounts appear to have believed since he was a little boy that technology will someday resurrect all who lived and died in one form or another; I remembered as I read the book that as a boy I had likewise contemplated this enormous and confounding idea. How do these things get planted in us? I put the question to Daphne and Daphne said with great self-assurance that these sorts of deeply embedded unconscious ‘memes’ are information from the future bouncing back off of us. Consider, added Daphne, the movie Vagabond by Agnès Varda. I was pleased to do so, as it’s a film we screened at the Plaza on 35mm film back when that was still possible and I was still a film programmer. I remember that Daphne had been in attendance that night. We smoked a joint together outside the theatre with my girlfriend at the time. Daphne says that on the night of the screening I had said that Vagabond is above all about two things: the logic of tracking shots plus the principle that death is a process of organic transition. I didn’t remember making that second observation, but would have to concede that it certainly sounds like me. Amazingly from my standpoint, it was Daphne, high and scratching herself, who then proceeded to consider the physics of the death problem. If death is an organic transition it has cosmic implications and material ones, reaching backward and forward in time. The point of beginning her movie with a  languorous consideration of the frozen corpse of the protagonist and then setting about recreating the final weeks of this young woman’s life, like a kind of psychospiritual audio-visual detective story, is that having entered into death in space-time, the young woman’s material-organic death has implications going both backward and forward in time, but we don’t get to see the future, we see only the before-death as a quantum territory wherein the evental death actively reinscribes and reencodes the living material past. I was quite surprised to hear Daphne speak so coherently in her current state/condition, especially insofar as abstract thought will invariably become aberrant and perverse in those in active addiction. I also confess to having felt a little sheepish for never having myself had the proper sense to call Vagabond a metaphysical film outright. It is. And in exactly the way Daphne lays it out. In light of this I feel even worse about the stupid joke I made as Daphne was going downstairs for the night and I to my bedroom. I told her that if she died in my house I’d kill her.

Xenoglaux 2025

Psycho Yet Again: June Prose Poem

Any of you dreary and predictably irascible asshats want to help cordon off a special little piece of activated resistance? even if it’s practically a bust or a bust of us, endless lovemaking and base subsistence, lying on a cot that is all I got whilst airforce communards drop their loads on the ill-prepared retards whom we shan’t ever hold in high regard, even if we are that, soothsaying cat, so somebody better show up and show humility unless they want a whole new disability. Even in the worst of times the man who looks like Simón Bolívar won’t lower himself so lower depths as to get in my car when we need to make our escape immediately and head straight west into the tsunami my lady love thoughtfully preordered for me. Is that a gargantuan train wreck or just a crick in one guy’s neck? I’m feeling thick upstairs but mighty limp in my underwear beneath this infernal sun that won’t play fair. Another day, another duty paid at customs, hirsute bear-men for rent that come with their own natty silver buttons. I’ve seen thieves sneak into jewelry stores through the sewers and been upbraided by management for failing to get my prunes properly stewed at Mount Galatea, Spray Lakes Valley, the Kananaskis. Do I know how to make your woman squirt? Go ahead and ask her if you think you won’t get your feelings hurt, forever inert and on alert, the elastic and forever placating Papa No-Person, the grubby nobody equipped only for handing out allowance money. And if I retain, O Lord, a bit of the pitiful reek of a Norman Bates, that don’t necessarily mean that a man’s mother isn’t his best friend. In the end I’ll take what I can get because the going has got stuck and I’m so easily dropped or blocked-off by the blockbusters and their ballbuster underlings. Norman, did you kill your mother? In a manner of speaking, yes, in the sense that I killed her, but at the same time I was sure I was her so the case really isn’t all that clear, my dear, and even as Anthony Perkins was demonstrably queer, not that anybody ought to jeer, I could just as easily be the Honeysuckle Rose fastened to your rear or the earwig set on spelunking way down into your ear. How many hundreds of clams will it take until we finally uncover the greater sham? Sam-I-Am is siamese if you please, people-pleasing Aesop-on-the-rocks jock-of-all-cops queasily awaiting this dinner of multicoloured cocks. Bear-up, child, and rub this nauseating unguent on your chest in preparation for the great e’er-foretold unrest, the tugging at the apron strings of polite society who tries her best to be dainty but cosigns unspeakable cruelty mainly. This is the place I leave all who followed me, hounded me consistently, or weren’t even decent enough people to earn so much as a dollop of my symphony's available sympathy, “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” playing on repeat accompanied by sweet meats and pigs’ feet, gemstone bedecked glitterati hot tub party and sanguine reading of the minutes, Club Officials doing their unseemly business directly adjacent to the tar pits, unthinkable and ruinous extortion at the hands of would-be Martian culprits, I’ll break in and despoil any place as long as it remains under control of the indefensible human race, the rate race, whatever the fuck, the rat being the patron saint of infrastructure, porousness and coarse odour of piss that is infrastructure, asparagus, Latinate declensions from forbidden sub-dimensions make good order and governance a 360 degree rotating food-fighting irrelevance like the famous seven irrelevant rearmost elephants. Please turn things over and set them afire all Looney Tunes. They say there’s a lady down the way who thinks I look good but is concerned I might be gay. I’m gonna invite her to the riots later today and we’ll see if she can throw a brick well enough to carry my bairn.            

The 99% Televisual Man

When I was young I studied the literary and flakey European philosophers known as Continental philosophers rather than the more stodgy and fundamentally British ones they called Analytical. I was a poet more than I was a logician. Wittgenstein was an Analytical, one of their demigods in fact, protege as he was to Bertrand Russell, but I always harboured a kind of special fondness for him on account of having deduced early on that he was both autistic and a closeted homosexual. Philosophically, for me personally, you can sum up Wittgy’s Sturm und Drang and reduce it to something pure and simple and maybe (increasingly) useful: there is no meaning for people—nor will they ever find any—outside of the operative communications apparatus, whatever the particularities of that apparatus may happen to be in any given place and time. Unfortunately, as everybody and their loud, opinionated uncle knows, the communications apparatus right now, summer of 2025, isn’t even a vague whisper of a ghost of itself, and a lot of this has to do with the internet (of things), a planetary network/web made from real material parts and running 24/7, which is no longer like the maypole around which we gather and dance a jig, but much more like a Tower of Babel that will divest us in short order of our ability to communicate or collaborate meaningfully with one another at all. When I was young there were only a certain amount of channels on the television and everybody was basically drinking their news and entertainment right out of the same trough. The absurd level of harebrained consensus was maddening and troubling, from my always slightly-outcast vantage point, but it was eerily consistent and from the perspective of now probably almost idyllic. Sex and gender have quite little to do with it: if I meet a new person at any time in this 21st century reality in which I find myself bumbling through an embodied experience, I will not have any idea where they get their news and entertainment until they start laying it out for me.

I went on a date last night that was awkward, rife with unhealthy communication tactics flowing in both directions, and ultimately totally demoralizing, mostly because she and I obviously don’t like one another very much…and have already done this twice before. What I’m saying is, this is the third time we’ve had sex after a sad and lacklustre date. She has no consciousness of who I am or what my tastes will tend toward. Last night I had to watch two episodes of Mom, a new or newish piece-of-shit Chuck Lorre sitcom I’d never even heard of, just because I said I liked Anna Faris. She seemed slightly ashamed when I told her I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like making her feel that way. So then we had sex, and the density of the nightmare thickens. I haven’t even mentioned her once to my sponsor. I got home from the date shortly before midnight, ate a bag of candy, and lay in bed sleeplessly staring at the bedside lamp I knew I’d use to defend myself should some nocturnal interloper seek to enter my house with ill-intention. I’m the kind of guy who can think about an intruder long enough to hope one actually shows up.

Having slept almost not at all and being in a funk because of the date, my finances, and a hundred other bullshit things, I arrived at Ernie’s for my coffee as I normally do on my way to my morning A.A. meeting a little later than usual. Then I realized also that there were four people in front of me in line, such that I had to make a choice as to whether I wanted to go to my meeting at all, or if I wanted to sit down and drink a coffee and eat a cream cheese bagel. I did the latter, sitting for a while scanning newspaper headlines from around the world on my phone. Hatred for my fellow man was at a manageable simmer. After a short while, as the place was sort of clearing out, an extremely well-dressed, tall, and attractive couple sat at a table nearby and as I began to listen in on their private conversation I was reminded immediately of the marvellous Javier Marías novel The Infatuations, which is narrated by a woman who spies on an attractive and compelling couple in a café day after day…with horrendous results. I did not intend to ever repeat this exact experiment, should that even be remotely possible, but I was immediately fascinated by what the tall young man was talking about, which related to an episode of Black Mirror, the popular streaming series sort of in the spirit of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and an episode which apparently features the actor Jon Hamm and has quite disturbing implications in the sense that it suggests that some kind of criminal justice infrastructure conjoined to A.I. and quantum computing could in the near future develop ways of torturing persons, in whatever state of embodiment, infinitely. The smart and composed girlfriend said this was exactly the way ratings-obsessed streaming platform executives would imagine a fully-syndicated eternity, but as I was finishing the dregs of my coffee and bunching up my napkin, it seemed to me that the premise of that Black Mirror episode I’d never even seen was the most terrifying thing I had heard in my life, at least since learning about the ubiquity of death itself.

             

There is something to what the young lady said, too. It were as though television was always there to hook you then serially hurt you, much like a large 19th century novel might kill off your favourite character somewhere in the vicinity of page 400. When I was living with Louise she really loved Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad, neither of which did anything for me. My complaint with Breaking Bad was that Walter White was the only dynamic, fully human character in the whole show and that the writers kept throwing out plot points like they were smoking crystal themselves. It was almost like the days of the old-timey ‘cliff hangers.’ That being said, I did make it through a few seasons of Better Call Saul on my own, precisely because l liked the characters and the non-codependent relationship between Jimmy and Kim. I stopped watching Better Call Saul the season where the final episode has the brother, played brilliantly by Michael McKean, dying in a house fire. I simply did not wish to see how much more awful things were going to get.

Cover Tune

 

Work Reprimand

Larry, how’s it going? Please step into the office if you don’t mind and close the door quietly behind you. Terrific. Okay, look, this isn’t the first time I’ve called you in here and I suspect it won’t be the last, which is okay…I remain confident that we can all work together to develop a more evolved mindset. But you’re actually getting worse, and that is an issue. You remain clumsy, slow, accident prone, and increasingly you are menacing and surly when approached by most anyone. I mean, look at this. At 7:35 this morning you commented Bro, I fuckin hate you on a Facebook post from a complete stranger with a ridiculous moniker. What was it? Oh, yeah, CrispixAlpha. That is a horrible way to start your day, Larry! I know you have a chronic mental illness and that that means having a hard and baffling life with chilling abyssal zones of harsh incoherence, the psyche is the nesting place of traumas, but, really, though, you must have been the kind of kid who fiercely protected all his toys and lashed out at anybody who’d approach within a certain perimeter. You have the deep and deeply unhealthy hacking cough of someone who’s swallowed a silo. You are self-protective and defiant. You know, hell, I absolutely used to be like that myself. Somebody would come up to me and say who are you? And I’d say I ain’t anybody you need to worry yourself about, buster. Don’t fret as of yet, kid. Speaking of kids, that young woman you were sort of dating was awfully young. It didn’t look good. And from what I could tell, though she had a sweet temperament she also had a fucked-up heart and contaminated worldview. That’s on you only in the sense that you didn’t see it coming and then it flattened you. It’s also on you because you shouldn’t have pursued anything with this person in the damned first. The first gal in her twenties you meet who’s into jazz music and you go all disco oblivion. The ladies in Interstellar Transmissions call you the Jazz Spaniel. How do you feel about that? You still snorting coke? It’s the same basic set-up wherever you go…have gone…you’re bounced about like a pinball to the tune of almost no actual productivity and eventually you attain pitiful burnout, nothing but lint in your pockets. Do you think of your online life as a kind of therapeutic harassment or something? That’s just incredibly sad. No sensible person would want to spend any time extending it a thought. Why blacken the horizons any further? We need to have a No Identities office party. Leave Your Identities at the Door. I want you to connect with Clark. His energy is extremely unthreatening and frankly it makes me a little jealous. And I want you to implement a particular adjustment with respect to your daily meditations and your daily self-talk. The universal consciousness suggests referring to yourself as human instead of any other noun, proper or not. Not Larry, but, you know: hey, human, what’s the lowdown? I hope this can help maybe get you way outside of yourself for a while so you can see the world and see that you aren’t any more special than us other dick-lickers. Right? Don’t look despondent. It’s all gravy. I’m expecting you at the Nondenominational Cleansing Ceremony. 2:00, Larry. Try and put on a good face, a'ight? 

Astrophage

I hadn’t seen Theresa since we’d played a wedding at Lake Louise in January and now it was April already and here she was walking down the street with her bass clarinet and some fella I’d never laid eyes on previous. I couldn’t get much of a read on the guy. He had the beard of a craft beer aficionado. Seemed like the kind of guy who’d always be ready to oblige you with a handshake or broad grin. I literally did a 180° and booked it back in the direction from which I’d come.  It hasn’t yet been easy for me to find ease anywhere, my childhood having been plagued by all kinds of visions of how ghastly things were going to get, how poorly I’d handle it, and the torments and agonies I would suffer for having had so little a proper part in the part I played. Theresa doesn’t prick up her ears when I’m with her until what I’m talking about briefly overlaps with one or another of her personal interests. A conniving careerist who isn’t going anywhere special, she startled me over dinner once by angrily describing how another friend—a guy we both know, perhaps her lover or former such—avoids her and then mopes and then grandstands, all of this stuff that Theresa was doing to me at the precise moment she was clumsily delineating the thing. What are you gonna do? Someone can be looking right at you and obviously have a lot on their mind, then proceed to tell you that they have nothing to say and everything’s okay. Nothing is ever okay on this planet, Jones. I no longer have the remotest capacity to divine what is going on around me, especially with respect to people I think of or previously thought of as friends. It’s a contagion of emotional withholding; it may correspond tangentially to solar flares and shifts in planetary axis and all these sorts of things. We have the degeneration of U.S. statecraft to the level of candy floss and bumper cars. We have all-too well documented evidence of the nightmarish zeal brought to bear in Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. This is all stuff of which I’ve been terrified since I was in grade two at Woodlands Elementary and having to see all this sordid destiny through to the end has positively shredded my last goddamn nerve. What could anybody want from me? My psychiatrist says I can start looking for employment when I stop showing up at the emergency room for a spell. Whatever I have to offer may not be there tomorrow as that is the way of all things in transit. That is the way of Heraclitean flux. It doesn’t debate or abide contracts. It’s all the different kinds of weather we know and don’t know. Who out there I wonder has the most up-to-date numbers on the unknown unknowns? I will take the Buddhist stance here and strive to live the mandate: I don’t know, and it’s terrific. “A crowd of facts,” observes Henderson in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, “came upon me with accompanying pressure in the chest.” The philosopher Byung-Chul Han advocates immersion in a “hovering time” that can avail us visions of “temporal sedimentations issuing a phosphorescent glow.” Take this if you will, from his 2021 book The Scent of Time: “The spell of profound boredom will only be genuinely broken if the ‘vita activa’ incorporates the ‘vita contemplativa’ into its critical pole and once again serves the latter.” If you cannot read, learn, and discuss openly then you can contribute to nothing other than the real-time downfall of postindustrial society, and I’m confident you are not very likely to ever see your own personal part in it just like those clueless jet-setting billionaires can’t see theirs. Nietzsche is largely talking about the ‘Protestant work ethic’ when he writes: “Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.” The artless bustling business of people might be the whole imposter civilizational facade its very self. You have enough jobs, you quickly catch on that nothing on God’s earth is run all that well. The inefficiencies and redundancies are astonishing. People who are manufactured more or less by the state are prepared early to inform on one another, to compete for status, to maintain plausible deniability, and to go ahead and do what they think they can get away with. In a basic sort of inherently socio-mechanistic context like that you can very easily see how conspiracies of silence may come to predominate. I’m not good at fixing this problem. Wherever I touch it the big bad bastard gets all the more inflamed. I don’t have the illusion of permanence, breaking it all down as I do to the twelve-stepper’s twenty-four hours. I have managed one day at a time well enough to still be here. But everything has to pass through a filter in order to meet and greet the reader, so going forward now for however long I am going to do stories that are essays and essays that are stories, and all the characters are going to be composites just like all of us already are, neither selves nor mere animals, but rather something much more akin to the capricious wrath of Zeus.

Portrait of Michel Simon

La chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931)

Blanche (Walerian Borowczyk, 1971)

When Michel Simon plays a part, we penetrate the core of the human heart.

- François Truffaut

April Prose Poem

The old faithful witch of the wood is here to join me in conducting tonight’s ceremonies; there is a buffet in the church basement, help yourselves, Jezebel’s space wagon has the wingspan of twelve-hundred gulls, out in the thick jello green where there ain’t no laws at all, that’s where you find yourself granted 100% total pixilated recall, a gift you’d rather not have been given and for which you have no damn use at all, Jerusalem being marked and Rome about to fall, the blue movie shimmering on island in den, we are the outreach workers of mossy purgatory, slide down off the crucifix and fix ourselves some ripe curses to affix to the automobiles in the motorcade that reach out to us personally in damp telepathic neural-tongue, begging: please mister, get in me!

The belle of the ball could not be here with us tonight, she sends her regrets, but she had to leave seven minutes ago when I looked up her dress and told her she’s a pest, it’s not like she was brought here under duress in her little red dress with Peanuts characters on her purse, her adamant directions: make these pale Jesus-freaks understand a field agent or saboteur have to lie and dissimulate frequently so you need to understand as well as understanding may that if work lies intended to undermine and compromise crawl over into your waking life, something with fangs this way cometh, phasing-out in bisexual colorus, blue, pink, purple...and you’re Jupiter red no matter how you’re spread. 

The pure past exists in two presents that the spiritual supplicant must name, and face, and then suppress, ‘cause I assure you it’s a complete fucking mess, like going out behind the church and coming back with cum on your dress, your hair all mussed and distressed; I got two men who are precision shots at the back of the room, Libertatia in 1700, Cthulhu Club, pumping in that Studio One dub, it’s the same shit forever that we won’t stop shitting, never thinking we clever, shaded from censure, but no longer able to act out Sacher-Masoch as a cassock raiding the grain elevators of Saskatchewan, face obscured by kerchief,  cut so thin that the margins rescind and all Holly Golightlys go lightly, the old faithful witch of the wood cuts herself a switch, fills in the gap: make no mistake, Jezel, it is cannibalistically that I chew on your lip just as the identity of an overcoded aggregate cannot be certified legit.

    

The My Dinner with Andre Dinner

 Yev;

Miraculously, it's April, 2025. In the process of organizing and getting all the myriad stuff set up for packing, I have this week had the advantage of consulting notebooks and journals I have not laid eyes upon in many a moon, such that I now may state, with other unmentioned bits of evidence also in underhanded hand covering my back, that the two of us have not been in the same room or on the same hot tarmac or any such place in very nearly seventeen years. Having fallen headlong into criminal misadventures intended to enrich us but clearly more inclined to imperil us mortally, we came to the stark conclusion that your mentor and personal handler Augie had been spot on the money when he said that sometimes you see a bullet coming at you very slow and it infuriates you that there's nothing you can do to move yourself out of the way. We figured we'd hedge on the yet-unproven prophecy and drive up into Ontario through Michigan and up to Québec's Laurentian Mountains, near the town of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, right on Lac Brûlé, where you had a group of friends and co-conspiracists likewise squatting in tense anonymity and waiting for the heat to blow off. Your friends were holding their nerves together like weathered bundles of frazzled red wool utilizing the tried-and-true Canadian method of sitting by the lake and remaining agreeably inebriated all the livelong day on Labatt 50 and Canadian Club. They pumped me full of beer and whisky, not that I was exactly fending them off, and by nightfall I was wobbly and nauseous, just in time for the guys to give me psilocybin mushrooms. Shortly thereafter I was peaking on the hallucinogenics in the back of a car looking out the sunroof at the gigantic towering trees of the forest as they zoomed by majestically and "Tainted Love" played on the sound system. And then I was puking all over somebody's boat house. I could not locate you the next morning and have not seen you since, though it pleases me to see we've both kept busy, and you can go right ahead and apprise me of where you see my narrative veering from yours.

It should already be clear that I miss you still and reflect upon you regularly, though not in some lovesick puppydog way you'd obviously never expect or tolerate of me. This really funny thing happened tonight and I'm confident it will make for a good story; it also happens to centrally hinge on a lovely woman I just met for the first time who reminds me more than a little of you. I have these friends who live over in the Renfrew neighbourhood near the detox facility. In a lovely old stucco house with two dogs and a big fenced-in backyard with a fire pit where my friends are wont to host parties and barbecues. His name is Maurizio and hers is Sarah. He is a multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer while she does drawings and tapestries and works as a university administrator. Normally, Maurizio would text to invite me over for a dinner or a fire pit hang, but earlier today it was Sarah who messaged me, extending an invitation to both join them tonight for barbecued hamburgers and to meet an old university friend of Sarah's named Cecilia who is just in town for a few days and is assuredly the kind of lady out of whom I'd be liable to get a kick.    

      

Cecilia looks a bit like you, there can't be any denying it, though originally she's from Belize and definitely has that hotblooded Latina thing going on...to go with her vivacious physicality and slender, athletic build. She came to Canada at thirteen, lived in Nova Scotia until the end of high school, and has resided in Montreal ever since. Sarah was right. I was pretty taken with this comely visitor right off the bat. While we were out back by the barbecue with the dogs running around and fetching, Sarah told Cecilia that I'm writing a book on the whole history of movies and then it was indicated that I ought to explain said (totally unwritten) book. I told them that the book begins with Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and the birth of cinema in the late 19th century and ends prognosticating at length about possible image cultures of the future, but that right now I'm looking at Hong Kong action films and melodramas of the '80s and '90s with a critical eye for considerations of urban infrastructure and the metaphysics of simultaneity. I elaborated by means of example: in one of my all-time favourite Hong Kong films, PTU by Johnny To, the operative viewpoint is less 'bird's eye' than 'malfunctioning satellite.' To hopefully further clarify: I'm looking at basic problems of geophysical locality. Maurizio in chef's chapeau was engrossed in his burger-flipping responsibilities and Sarah did not appear to make a mental mark of so much as a single thing I'd said, but Cecilia grew both animated and visibly pensive. She could see that the implications of my concept were extensive, perhaps too much so, and she was doubtlessly right on both fronts. She told me she had loved the movies and almost hid under them like a big, safe blanket when she'd been a child. She said she was lonesome and squirrely all the way back to the cabbage patch. Classical Hollywood movies are Cecilia's favourites and she attributes this to her ongoing tendency to seek refuge in Turner Classic Movies when visiting her mother, also a fan of the station, in Nova Scotia. This really popped my lids open because it's the exact same way with me: how is one supposed to manage Halloween without Bride of Frankenstein or Christmas without The Bishop's Wife? After we laughed a little about that I asked if she had any standout Classical Hollywood favourites to which she answered: Marlene Dietrich movies! especially Shanghai Express and The Scarlet Empress. I had to confess in direct honesty and a spirit of openness that Shanghai Express might well also be my favourite of Dietrich's pictures if only because it pairs her with the incandescent and searing Anna May Wong. Cecilia said the cutest thing: they are ancestral astral cousins.      

Meandering chatter pertaining and not pertaining to motion pictures and the gods and goddesses of the hallowed silver screen led us circuitously back to the kitchen and the unfussily-set dining table. While we were all sitting down Cecilia got excited and said that she'd almost forgotten the wonderful semi-old classic movie she'd just seen in a small boutique theatre in Montreal before her departure and brief journey west. The film was My Dinner with Andre (from '81), which I'm confident you recall is the widely-beloved pic in which Louis Malle films Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn having dinner at some chic joint in Manhattan. I've seen the film numerous times and was about say so when out of the blue Sarah, who had not for some while appeared to be paying much attention, burst out almost as though without the remotest capacity to suppress the impulse, with: I hate that movie! Maurizio stiffened in his seat and cleared his throat, eyes wandering slightly askance. Cecilia sat there with her hands folded and was obviously crestfallen and a mite thrown but she didn't appear to be all that damaged or perturbed. After a brief silence, I asked Sarah if she wanted to walk us through the animosity. Her first point was that she'd spent a good deal more time than the rest of us with these fake metropolitan NYC New Yorker magazine dweebs and that she'd been to their parties and beheld the inconceivable and apparently invincible tedium vouchsafed therein. Plus also Wallace Shawn has an annoying nasally voice and an annoying goblin laugh. I said I was reminded of a bit in Don DeLillo about hip high society parties that are boring and demoralizing in the manner of the most punishing stretches in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Maurizio perked up, being a fan of the author, as I knew well he was, and asked if I knew which DeLillo that was from. I said I thought it was Americana, the first one. Letting out a hardy laugh, Maurizio said Americana was the first DeLillo he had read as a teenager and that when asked by his father what it was about he'd said it's about a troubled advertising executive who sits around his office masturbating, only for his father to respond, quick, sharp as a tack: this man sounds more like a lawyer to me. After this there was some pregnant silence and burger-gnoshing. 

Having sat on it for a good two or three minutes—all of us mostly sort of just sitting and munching our burgers—Cecilia said that it's true that Wallace Shawn has the conspicuous vocal-type characteristics attributed to him by surly old college buddy Sarah, and it's kind of interesting because it is actually true that Cecilia underwent a gradual transfer of identification while watching MY DINNER WITH ANDRE with an audience in Montreal, first identifying with Wallace Shawn's beaten-down playwright, who in the film is after all 36, same age as Cecilia, and whose grievances with respect to work, time, and money seemed timely and pertinent for her personally, and then identifying gradually much more with Andre Gregory, who at first seems a little slick and smarmy but who ultimately wins the love of the audience because he is full of, per Cecilia herself: sweetness, gentility, and joie de vivre. It's true also, she added, that Gregory's gospel of the fall of a mankind already plenty fallen seems ineffaceable, whether by virtue of the hordes of zombie consumers we encounter every day or all those who have outsourced their neural programming to the most unscrupulous of agents. And then this additional and very direct tidbit directly from the mouth of Cecilia: I really like the author Malcolm Gladwell and I pay attention, you might catch a good read on the stuff that's tipping and get yourself way off to the periphery to own the good humour you deserve having had the opportunity to reflect and to see that what you have done are good works and that you deserve in serenity whatever it is that is going to happen to you, because that impassable future distance is right here and right now the full measure of you. At this moment I noticed that while Maurizio and Sarah were enjoying their customary canned India Pale Ale, Cecilia was drinking soda like me. I asked her if she goes to church. Yes, I love it best when the priest can't sing but tries very, very hard.

           

We didn't talk into the night. We're getting old and Cecilia and I were sober and somnolent. As it had seemed to be the case that Blue Velvet was the one film all four of us had agreed monumentally altered the topographies of our respective youths, I thought I might shoot my shot, her attenuated presence in this slow prairie city notwithstanding, and ask Cecilia as I was leaving if she wanted to go see Wild at Heart with me tomorrow (almost tonight!) at Chinook Centre. It's true. They are doing a David Lynch retrospective at a shopping mall near here. There didn't appear anything fake or phoney about it when Cecilia stood there bouncing a little on her heels and told me she'd love to. You know all too well I'd have tracked it if her affect had been the slightest bit off.

Ever,

Jason   

Fuzzy Peach Crucifaction: Self on a Shelf

 

Louis C.K.

There is a woman on our work network who would not want me using her name (just as I wouldn’t want her trotting mine around neither). We were talking and the subject of the comedian and fallen idol Louis C.K. came up. She was saying that she once believed very powerfully in the whole culture of standup comedy and improv workshops and that she never really stopped believing in the whole vaguely emancipatory ideal, it was simply that she’d more or less stopped finding anybody all that funny. Something especially miffed her about the relative success of the objectively pitiful Eugene Mirman, then she had a very ugly personal encounter with David Cross, and finally, because she has a trans sibling, she was disgusted with Louis C.K.’s trans material precisely because it was too lazy, unimaginative, and self-righteous to even be transphobic. Like, step out of yourself for a second, buddy. I brought up the matter of C.K.’s chronic unwanted masturbating-in-front-of-people. She said she couldn’t really understand it. Like, she lacked that critical point of reference or whatnot. Who does that? I really had no choice, I had to tell her. It happened to me. What?!! A good friend of mine was sitting across the room from me…a good ways away. We were talking and we were high. Suddenly he whipped his cock out, it was fully erect, and he started stroking it while looking at me with the entreaty of some half-assed geisha. He was five or six steps away from me at best and there was no chance in hell I was getting up. What he saw me looking at him with was a different sort of challenge. But it all resolved politely and without fanfare. The woman on our work network said I probably better not ever tell that story to anybody else. 

Louis XVI Prepares for His Execution

 

La petite Aurore et Guy Damien Lafleur

La petite Aurore, quelle horreur, you lived twelve months on oatmeal and Planters peanuts and doll hair, so I'd imagine, being imaginative, and they whipped you with a belt and burned your hands and cheeks on the stove, and all the good Catholic boys and girls of Dear Québec were traumatized forever because they made a movie about it and put it on TV, and of course there were only two or three channels back then, and this poor tortured girl became the best ever emblem of Québec's mongrel Catholicism and all the little French Canadian kids knew it plain as day, even as the so-called adults prevaricate, just as the plains of Abraham stand dismal and grey...je me souviens...

Guy Damien Lafleur, born in Thurso, Québec the year after my parents were born, but not in Québec, remains an all-time leading scorer for the Montreal Canadiens hockey franchise, his numbers right up there with those of Maurice “Rocket” Richard, the only other player who competes with him for status as most popular among true traditionalist Canadiens fans. At fifteen years of age and a paltry one-hundred-thirty-five pounds, Lafleur joined the Québec Jr. Aces and managed to somehow score a whopping one-hundred-sixty-one goals in one hundred games.

The Ol' Misplaced Derby Hat Job [a Comic Sketch]

 

Mr. Jackboot Jackpots, prophets make prophecies, oye. Yeah, Kid Columbus, bustin' your rumpus to follow us up the snuzzleguts and make a mark out of all of us. The Self transitions in time. Be careful what you insinuate! you got you a fungus in the bungus? a hibiscus in your soiled maroon pup tent? Have you seen my Derby hat? I've seemed to've misplaced it? Jefferson Dildo Hemingsworth! How dumb and directionless your cruelty is. Are you inured to your own cruelty?! Peekaboo, psycho! I know I ought to behave better, but in order to do so you see I must have my misplaced Derby hat first in hand and then atop temporary head. Astonishing. You are like the cunt of a moose unto, uh, things all loose on the goose. On the gander. If...if I may loosen my tie. Goddamn, Baby Brigadier. Money is not real. Money is not consideration. Why don't we test our sexual compatibility before making any hasty decision about the definitely stollen hat?

What the fuck is fucktually fucktioning right now, Little Vowel? We are standing here live from the Great Raid of 1840. Horseshit, and I'm confident as a ram that I'm as credible as I am, Sam. You were once very warm and engaging and you made lenses like Spinoza. You were fired for discrimination but deserved no astringency along the meridian. Why does the body move as it does, as though operated like a puppet among a myriad of filthy and frenetic puppets puppeteered by puppeteers unable to send communications back and forth for some reason? What guides people is mood. And beloved objects like a hat or a broach...or the plump and milky handjob girls at the dairy. The what? The...the girls...at the dairy...who are merciful and quick in their tawdry ministrations. My thing is me having good time, capital-F Fuck the torpedoes. A man at cross-purposes. Muse much? I'm not sure. I've lived 17,300 years and I have not seen anything all that worthy of special acclaim. Well, consider that a kind of hasty beginning.

My father would like to shake your hand. The Great Goddamn Godandus?!! Help! I'm on a popularity contest! Awaketh. You do not know if you are the victim or the perpetrator of a crime we have not yet specified. People don't give a fuck. They throw a throwing star 'tween your frizzed-out eyes. Could be your mother dressed as your brother. It just don't relent. Lonesome and squirrelly, judge piggybacking jury. Are you here to dismantle me and shut me down kaput ad infinitum? Is that the whisper of the machine's walnut wish? Go fish, do what you wish: ain't no demands be crying in on me. Me neither. If you give over the Derby hat you definitely fuckin stole and got on yer this here minute.    

In Consideration of Intelligent Machines

 

Originally, when we were impossibly naive, we would respond to René Descartes’ assertion that one thinks therefore one is by saying how is the thinking thing and the thing that ‘is’ for sure the same thing. They are the same thing because they are separate and also united and this is the nature of molecular life, everything opened up upon a great singular multiplicity, as made plenty clear by physicists and also by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his compatriote professionnel, institutional psychiatrist Félix Guattari, he of transversal intra-complexive modalities and profound respect for psychotic/schizo insights. The spiritual history of man is his geology, layers stacked upon layers, and even the most dead and inert material things, a stone or a dead branch, are positively bustling. It has been averred that Albert Einstein fell into ultimate despair of his desired but unobtainable ‘unified field theory,’ but let’s a moment get more visceral and say that what stymied and ultimately defeated Einstein were the abysses and voids in the math, a conundrum that has driven future theoretical mathematicians and physicists to get into the racket in the first place! We know electrons and protons communicate across time in ways that defy our metrics, and I guess we know that there is dark energy and dark matter, because even though we have no means of perceiving, measuring, or assessing these opaque principles nowhere to be physically found in physical fact, the mathematics seems to require them. Where is the math headed, right? Artificial Intelligence, all across the line, running your air traffic and city traffic et cetera. And why not? Artificial Intelligence can do wild kinds of math it can’t even explain to us, so pitiably equipped are we. In 2019, the great engineer, inventor, and polymath James Lovelock, who would die in 2022 at the age of 103, argues stridently and pretty convincingly in his book Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence that incomprehensibly intelligent machines and silicon-based life will bring intelligence to bear everywhere it is lacking, and sorely so, taking control out of the hands of human beings so wonky in their daily toil and folly that they're wont on occasion to drop souped-up bat viruses on the floor ‘cause they ain’t taking their damn time…and so forth. 

The Tree of Life

 It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change [relative to] invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. 
- Hugo of Saint Victor, Didascalicon 

Boychile Janebirkin, a Diary

For Patricia Highsmith & Raymond Queneau

I just got out of the hospital. June, 2023. Somehow I intentionally threw out my last journal accidentally, which will only make sense if you are a bipolar person like me or have another chronic psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. I just spent three hours looking at photographs of cherry blossoms ('sakura') in Japan.

...

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Transect the binary apparatus. I am going to write a book about universal chaos and the transystemiticity of existing on-the-ground administrative realities. Everybody I talk to is either lying to protect themselves or lying for purposes of expedience, and they do this all day long, even in their love lives and their professional ones. They don't have much to talk about so they do indeed generally just Netflix and chill. I came from a generation of idiotic, selfish children. My God! What are the subsequent ones going to look like?!

...

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It's almost November. My eyes are as blind as sad rhythms. I can't function and any stranger can see it and it's embarrassing. It is like I was laid down and laid away. I tell myself that I once had a chance but that only makes me mad at myself and I guess at God. God is a real lavish prick who blinds you by throwing stardust in your eyes. Did I have a chance? I could not possibly've had. Joy is just the neurochemical reward of a lowborn, slithering sort of species.

...

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What did Ralph Waldo Emerson think he was talking about with this transparent eyeball business? It sounds more like some kind of H.P. Lovecraft trip. Mar-mar-mar-mar-mar-marmalade! Not everybody needs to be fucking everybody in the ass all the time, you know.

...

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The Old World is still here and it is still crumbling.

...

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February, 2024. I can tell important stuff is going on everywhere and that I'll be the last to know. Extrasensory perception is the Earl Grey tea of psychosis. I am going to write a book about God split into three parts, but not the customary three: omniscience, creation, oversight. My personal Freudian primal scene involved a hotel room and a cathode ray tube. Got home late tonight but felt scattered so I plopped down and watched Dillinger is Dead (1969), an absolutely perfect film.

...

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I Heart Cinnamon Hearts. My mother asked me if I could possibly sink any lower. "This," I said, stomping one foot, "is rock-hard surface." How do we actively think future intelligence systems? Aldous Huxley never came anywhere near adequately accounting for chaos. People don't want to take a hit and thereby ensure they take the hit. I called my mother a simpleton.

...

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The body will crouch, lean, and pivot to the left (often) in order to conceal something or protect itself. A personal deficit is cosmic accounting. On the implicate side of things virtuality is crunching the numbers at speeds beyond consideration of speed. I remember once when I was little I stole a porno mag and hid it in my dresser. I don't do rote operations or basically follow orders at all.

...

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Sometimes I think you can tell the quality of a man by how patient and tolerant he is with his children. To process this is a process, miss. Frivolous. Chelsea is running out of what little hope remained after the Pilsners and mob scene. If you had to guess, how many medications do you think I've been prescribed since 2009? I want to share my work and my life. We'll see. Chelsea will go quick into full-on interpretive delirium. We're all just playing Pattern Recognition for Dummies. And you can tell Mark Zuckerberg that I didn't break his rinky-dink website.

...

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Thinking about carnivorous plants. I once called somebody 'scrumptious' and immediately felt frightfully perverse. Today I gave a homeless man a carrot. I called Chelsea and said I was sorry if I fucked her situation up. The burlap sack is what the cat shat back. Le chat dans le sac. 

...

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If the people who are after you seem uncertain, do not hesitate to own them. I wonder if Sun Tzu ever advised something like this. The wisdom would probably have to be even older, if you stop and think about it. I mean, really. Human culture and bacterial cultures are fundamentally the same thing. Heart is a Ticker, Brain is a Circuitmobile. I got no pressing business to attend to and I like it that way. People will never get as uncomfortable as they need to be in order to start helping to change the world. The intelligence community runs on extortion. I want a pickled egg out of the strange blue comb jar. I will very slowly attempt to very slowly attempt. The tricks Christ pulled with resurrection, including his own, were cheap and putrid tricks. Even Donald Trump could stage a bullshit resurrection. I remember being little and how much I loved playing "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC on my little guitar. Embouchure. EmbroSure. Now with real embryos. I'll be oh so much more quirky once we land in Albuquerque.

...

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I did not interact with a single person. Wisest thing I never did.

...

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Daialogics over Dialectics. I think I found a cryptogram or maybe I'm getting sicker again. Einstein's big problem was simply that he wanted a unified field theory. I am going through a protracted constipation nightmare. Why can't we just get together and overhaul this whole motherfucker? I think folks are petrified in poor habit more than anything. They raised my Seroquel dose. 

...

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Don't all speak up at once.

...

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Holy Mother, the sunset is unreal. I am wondering how much overlap there is between 'topoanalysis' and 'calculus.' Captain Sloppy holding strong! Did I get any on my face?! Vincent van Gogh cut off part of an ear because he was an alcoholic and an artist and a sadist. The Brussels Griffon has Geman as well as Belgian roots. Cops sure can suck. Hospitals are crumbling into their foundations. Une petite hachette pour la croissance et la développement. When I'm alone I can do my Bill Cosby impersonation. William Wordsworth's worthless turd births. Very often I don't know if I want to talk or not. Call me gun-shy. That ol' hippie with the walker next door who is always so kind and endearing is it turns out also a virulent and raving racist. It took me aback. At least the woman from last night knew her St. Augustine. It's frightening out here amongst the bodysnatchers. Pass the wiseacre a stone and let it gum up his phone. Cry me a fucking river, Big Red.      

...

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The old racist hippie is feeding peas and mango to the birds. He says they'll eat anything that goes slower then ten kilometers per hour. Is humanity actually worth significant restorative efforts? I am not hurt by how stupid people are because it's merely a direct result of how stupid they always were. I don't want to go on being a regrettable thing that happened to people indefinitely. The fact that everybody everywhere seems to be behaving like the German middle classes in the 1930s is serious cause for concern. I got drunk on Cutty Sark and did not hear back from Rosalind. However, Ilana did call and was also drunk, even though she tried to say she wasn't, so we hooked up and both have new sober dates.  

...

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You can't please everybody, but you may well be astounded to discover all the varied kinds of ways you've displeased them. It can almost be an adrenaline high. Today somebody called me Girl Interrupted as a slur. There remains a future for certain, but it remains unclear as to whether or not I'm going to really benefit from that. I'm afraid that sex has to be done with people whose presence you can stomach. I'm going to put on Claire Denis' Faulkner-homage Les salauds and smoke a ganger.

...

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I drew with black marker the Pillars of Hercules on the cleavage of a Mediterranean woman in a black brassiere and cherry-red lipstick. No bye, no aloha. THIS IS THE WRATH OF GOD SPEAKING. I'M GOING TO COME DOWN AND TEAR THE APPLE CORES OUT OF YOUR THROATS, BOYS.

...

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Meshes of Go. The Go board. Wei-chi, Baduk. I have paisley premonitions. False modesty will get you laypersons nowhere with me. What is left in my chintzy plastic cup? Nothing but the howling reverberant laughter of that despicable fiend Maximilien Robespierre. Why am I the only pro around here who still pisses their pants? It's not easy being green. Life will deal a dirty dog dirty. Michelle, ma belle, I loathe you. Baby, stay still, and let me brand this Turkish Crescent on your face. Onanism is a serviceable solution (tee hee). No hablo ingles compañera. Eat pussy for Palestine or whatever. Nobody will address me straight and that is because I instil fear. I need a viewing space not subject to light pollution. I've been studying the flux of geese. Existential therapy for teenage lycanthropes, just like the Cramps promised, and frankly the chosen ultra-powerful weaklings, the fuzzy and fanged cohort, are forever the only thing to grock of any note on the intracosmic CCTV. I AM HOT FOR TEACHER. My website has beaucoup cookies. Paradise is a lean cat. Eric Dolphy was the leanest of the lean cats and he cut it too close to the grain. We are not all human. Some of us are moonmen from 1950s television. Beginnings and endings are very important for movies. I guess I got shittered in the Hot Tub Time Machine or something. Me and the baddy I pulled just by being smart. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Me, pagan?

...

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Went and saw Kinds of Kindness at a nearby shopping mall. I did not like the film, though specialized sensors throughout my body did respond intensely to Margaret Qualley, who I've nicknamed Abigail Rottentail because she holds no permanent shape and in this movie has many hairstyles. What is the lesson this movie is trying to convey respective of destiny, pattern, and repetition? The director Yorgos Lanthimos definitely doesn't know. He must have been constantly hounding the script supervisor: where are we?! what is happening?! You know what? Solitude is the ultimate expression of fanatical neediness and I do sure as the tides fanatically need my solitude. High school was a disaster, remember? A sordid popularity contest overseen by stupid and cruel adults. The hollow platitudes of the multitudes. The elephant in the room is that it's not clear there's anything you can really actually do to help the person who is suffering. It's the evening of July 23, 2024. As far as concerns Rosalind? I'm liable to imagine I would do only slightly better given a second chance.  

For Hannah Höch

L’île n’y a pas