Ok, so that gratuitous reference to Honeymoon Suite wasn’t meant as punishment. It’s just, well, I got a tumblr so that’s where you’ll see me. In the meantime, in case anyone needs their education in Canadian pop rock cheese of the 80s…

The sun is out and the weather is warmer, baring shoulders and legs, or so the illusion of deep warmth in the light gives us after a rainy cool spring.

I made ketchup from scratch, and it was easier than expected. Reading Tom Wolfe and disliking him immensely, despite the easy manner in which his prose spins before my eyes.

The straining smiles of the eager and amused, the twinkling lady in her silver dress and manicured hair, her hands curled bonily at the table, somehow brings out the harsh edge of the glassware.

My YSL scarf is tied correctly around my neck and my fringe is cut low.

The dogs are running in the park, running happily, for the few moments they are off their leash.

Today, as my ex-husband left the house to go to my ex-in-laws, I took advantage of the situation to launch a bomb. I told him that in all the years we’d been together, I’d always secretly hated Michel Sardou. He responded by bursting into tears and begging me to come back, that now that we’d been honest, Sardou would be put away forever.

Ha!

No, the real story was that I saw him leave, after he gave me a chaste peck on the cheek and a pain au chocolat, and as his fingers pulled the keychain off the hook, I noticed the extra set of keys. My mind, already racing, knew whose keys they were, what address to go to, and where to find a bottle of kerosene. Not that I’m angry really… it just seems appropriate to have violent fantasies at moments like these. Fantasies I will indulge in, for the moment, because it seems like the best thing to do.

Other best things to do are taking hot showers, naps, reading great books, seeing friends, drinking, dancing and having a marvelous time. All of these are in short order.

If I feel that I am suffering, perhaps it is appropriate. Perhaps one should go through a mourning period, to properly rid oneself of past emotions, past pain and past love, before moving forwards. There is a whole ton of me that giggles with delight at the outline of chimneys against a setting sun, or the fabulously structured castles of Bach in the air, or the charm in laughing out loud to yacht rock. These are my pleasures, no one elses. I just hope I don’t end up dating Hollywood Steve in pure desperation!

My dear Rhino has decided that I should revive this here blog with a literary meme. So, after a long break chilling out on a digital beach with a double whiskey sour and a little Ozzy Lust(h) on the brain, here’s the deal: pg. 123, write down sentences 6-8. So, in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Sebald’s tendency towards run-on sentences, and the large font and spacing, throws a wrench in the mechanics. My sentence six starts on the bottom of p.123 and runs on to p.124.

Then, through the grille of a ventilation shaft that linked his bedchamber to one of the ground-floor living rooms and inadvertently functioned as a kind of communication channel, he could be heard calling on numerous different saints for hours on end, in particular, if I remember correctly, Saints Catherine and Elizabeth, who suffered the most cruel of martyrdoms, begging them to intercede for him in the contingency, as he put it, of his imminent appearance before the judgment seat of his Heavenly Lord. Unlike Uncle Evelyn, said Austerlitz after a while, taking from his jacket pocket a kind of folder containing several postcard-sized photographs, Great-Uncle Alphonso, who was about ten years older and continued the line of the naturalist Fitzpatricks, looked positively youthful. Always even-tempered, he spent most of his time out of doors, going on long expeditions even in the worst of weather, or when it was fine sitting on a camp stool somewhere near the house in his white smock, a straw hat on his head, painting watercolours.

Rather intriguing in a melancholy and curmudgeonly fashion, I feel this entry is slightly beyond the limits of the criteria (and hopelessly useless to comment on). So, I’m taking a page out of Rhino’s Petit Anglais, hoping that in this chapter he makes it to the toilet before wetting his spanking new peg-legged Acne jeans, and have resorted to cheating. In my second book, Josh Wolk’s Cabin Pressure, these are the three sentences in question:

“Big day at fishing this afternoon, when Rob Stilson caught a three-pound bass!” Yay for humans! Boo for fish!

This should further enrage my recent militant vegan lurkers into a soy-powered frenzy, disproving the oft-held opinion that vegetarianism is linked to pacifism and good body odour. Don’t know who else to pass this to since it’s been a long time since I visited Blogtown. Kevin, my sister, and my cousin… will you please stand up!

No I can’t. It’s late at night, Paris time 6am, and I find myself dealing with horrible jetlag by staying up to watch coverage of Super Tuesday, those darn American elections. And, after sitting through the different speeches, Senator McCain’s victory speech was cut short by none other than Barack Obama. Call me a pessimist, but I have a deep fear of rhetoricians. So, it was lingering distaste that I sat through the beginning of his speech.

It was speckled, in the beginning, with informal English, well employed to disarm the audience. It’s a nice trick, one that was of great use by that other great rhetorician, Bill Clinton. But, what threw me off was the slow, slightly dropping tonality of his utterances. If you could draw it in the air, the sound would arc down, as if the tape playback had slowed down, dropping the pitch. It reminded me of that satin dressing coat clad gang leader, Cyrus, from The Warriors. As he pontificated on, the utterances almost Baptist in demanding response, I couldn’t get the image out of my mind.

Now, perhaps this is a false allusion, perhaps Obama will be able to tie the US together in some unprecedented display of bi-partisan unity. Somehow, I fear that is the same dream that haunted our dear Cyrus. “It’s all for the taking, if we want it.” But is it really?

"When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them." — Isak Dinesen Out of Africa, 1937

It’s hard to imagine death. Like love, it is a state that knows no other, knows neither past nor future. It is a fact of being that excludes all others. But we shouldn’t have to think of it that way. Like a tale well told, often the meaning of the climax eclipses us, seems to hold a seed of the unmentionable, the thing that excludes description nor understanding in words.

He was a jolly old man, who told numerous bad jokes and played the trumpet. Always sitting at the head of the table, his eyes looked outwards at life with an egotism that was honest. That made him loveable. His body ressembled a basketball in life, round, tapering bluntly at the head and feet. In death, his skin was cool, like any other. The sky was piercingly blue the day he was lowered into the ground. There were many at the funeral, and there were many who really missed the old man. It is in those who continue to love him that straightens the graveyard, giving sense to the sharp lines of the branches and the blank thud of a rose hitting the wood.

Au revoir, cher Roland.

I realize that this here blog is fast becoming a graveyard of obscure and depressing remarks. Bear with me. This station will resume its normal programming post-haste. In the meantime, I would like to remind everyone that for some people Halloween only comes once a year. Some people. The rest of you monsters like to wear your costumes all year round, and frankly, that’s why I love you! Mwah!

And it’s supposed to get better. I know. Everybody says so, so it must be true. Except that I don’t know how anyone else lives. We don’t live anyone else’s lives, no matter how many stories we hear, read, and are told. In this present moment, everyone’s else’s reality is opaque as reason cannot sway a believer.

In the Assassination of Jesse James, James knows that Robert Ford intends to kill him. One of them will surely kill the other, but in a moment of rare grace, James turns his back to his assassin, allowing him the liberty to shoot quickly, without danger. Grace and mercy. Grace and mercy, for all but the killer. And what of Ford? Forced through circumstance and blind desire to kill the object of his affection, the rest of his life is a quiet repetition of this moment. If Robert Ford goes to hell, he would have done double time. Better to be killed.

What is liberty and love in these moments? People are like islands, drifting, barges, clouds, things that drift and can rot. That bump accidentally together and are doomed to separate, whether by death or distance. One boy said "it is the impossibility of being together that we are reminded of each day people are together." Somehow, all of it contradicts, makes no sense. Such extravagance, like an ornate gun with no future written on the handle.

I have forgotten how to love. I have not forgotten how to suffer. If my head could keep any lower, if my heart could find peace, somehow the sun warmth would be more than just what creeps in through the window, lighting up the dust lifted as a person passes through. 

When I was younger, I used to think that monsters were under beds, in closets, stomping up the stairs or just outside the shower curtains. As I got older, I stopped thinking that monsters existed and just believed they were part of  childhood. For most of my twenties, I stopped thinking about monsters altogether. But, in my later twenties, I started to wonder if I was turning into a monster, and if monsters were what happened to those who weren’t careful enough. Now I know differently.

There are monsters everywhere. Some of them are even my friends, beautiful and mad. But the monster I detest the most is the monster that hides under a facade of gentleness, only seeking pleasure out of its own sense of right, and heartless. Behind the salt tears is a pure hunger that changes course as it is sated. Always hunting. It is a kind of animal desire embodied, with little brain nor heart to support. But perhaps the beast is to be pitied. Who knows if, looking in the mirror, it can see itself for the monster it truly is. And how tiring it must be to always hunt. Or even worse, the fault would lie with me, blind to see under its soft pelt out of weakness. Or perhaps that even I, hiding under my smooth skin, am wolfishly fanged and has made a beast in my own image. Oh foolish child. Beware the beast. Do not fear it, but know that the wolf unveiled can be fled swiftly.

Such is all I can understand of the wolf and this be my last word on the subject. "Whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent."

People have been asking me recently how I get into all these parties. The truth is, I don’t really know. Sometimes you luck out and you’re on the list, most of the time you make up something dumb to say. I think all writers should practice their craft by making up a story to tell to a recalcitrant morlock doorman. Things I have said that have gotten me into parties this week.

"I’m not on the guest list."

"I’m on the list plus seven." 

"The other party sucked."

"My name is *semi-famous actor who actually told me to use his name to get in.*"

"My name is Sam."

Not even saying a word. 

All these have worked, and they didn’t require loads of imagination. Which only proves that I’m not any clearer than you as to how this whole thing works. It just does. And that’s what you get trawling the Internet for education. Rien.