Clog Up Your Right Ventricle
I came up with a fuck-rock band called The Trim Army. They will march in unison to liberate trim from within the clutches of squareness. Does “square” still mean you’ve never kissed? In any case a square doesn’t get trim. More like, doesn’t understand it.
There’s a cold coming on and I can tell because in class tonight I had one of those windpipe itches. You know, when your throat hurts so bad with itch that you wish you could slide a ruler or a horsewhip into your esophagus to scratch that shit? And instead of coughing, I tried to hold it in, to assume a zenlike mien where my third eye was focused so intently on the itch that my conciousness would assume the itch’s form, and I could kill the itch with an application of pure reason. Like, check your premises, itch. But this shift in consciousness had the effect of intensifying the itch, probably through its defense mechanism—an itch is a living thing, BTW, independent of the host organism—and it released its inky discharge, nearly choking me. It felt like being jabbed in the throat with a pen from the inside. My eyes watered into tears and I left the room for about five minutes, wandering confusedly between the bathroom and water fountain in search of a cure, an answer, a kindred soul. That’s how I know a cold’s coming on.
OK I’m tired tonight. You write something. The end. P.S. I better start seeing some activity in my referrer logs from all the bitches out there. The end 2.
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The Garment Renaissance
I’m amongst the French, who are a fashionable people. There are those who call them a petty people, forever obsessed with ses amusements, their fashion, their romantic rituals, their food, their cigarettes. Others call them a romantic people with an well-developed sense of fun, play, and possibility. Whatever they are, they sure as hell please my eye.
Play the game. When in Rome, etc. My hideous and worn clothes are a dead Anglo giveaway. No matter where you are from, it is not right for one to frump his way down a Montreal street in unstrategically ripped jeans and bulky polyester blends, so I’ve decided to upgrade my wardrobe a little. Buying clothes is the most demoralizing of human activity. You see, clothes have long ago ceased being mere swatches of fabric intended to cover the body. Clothes are an extension of the id—an expression of one’s aesthetic preferences, an instant and unmistakeable brand on the self, a lightning rod for stereotypes, and a demographic survey all in one. To dress in a certain manner is to pick an enclosure of styles from which you are subsequently not to deviate. You are immediately and unintentionally granted access to a subculture of which you may or may not want to be a member. Baggy pants mean you’re a skater or a long-haired galoot, no exceptions, if you wear sports-team clothing you’re a perpetual adolescent, and hats mean you’re trying to look like some erstwhile man of letters. Only PR whores wear crisp dress shirts to work, and leave the seizure-inducing wool sweaters to The Cos.
My current dress style says: “this man sits in front of a computer all day”. You don’t need me to tell you this is bad. High-tech is not an easy place to be fashionable. A coworker of mine claims himself as a strict adherent to the dress style called “Old Navy clothes, as purchased by my mom”. This is what I’m up against.
I desperately need a new pair of jeans. My favourites, an ugly pair of Bluenotes purchased on a whim years ago, have frayed around all the pockets, as if the white outlines around my wallet and cell phone were burned into the denim itself. Their shape is lost, and they are terrible.
And the clothes-buying process is so relentless and ugly. You trudge into a clothing store downtown, the hyper-stylish kind, a fresh wave of chic hitting you in the face as you stand there pigeon-toed in your tattered jacket and Winnipeg Jets t-shirt. A fleet of impeccably groomed salespeople flits about, hoop earrings wobbling side-to-side as they hang things, itemize things. Your plan is to grab the jeans and get the heck outta there. Your face gets warm as it hits you how out of place you are, and you briefly consider turning back, until a girl hooking a shirt on a nearby rack leans over and asks if you need help. Her hair is brushed across her head in a big, round sweeping arc, like she’s wearing a beetle’s carapace on her forehead.
“Looking for jeans.”
“Did you have a particular style, in mind?
“Don’t really know what I’m looking for.” The confession of a hapless feeb.
A rundown of styles, cuts, and stitchings ensues. She shows you to the Wall of Jeans which sits on the far end of the store, underneath framed posters of long-haired people in cowboy hats. She slings six pairs of pants over your shoulder, half of which you hate. This one’s too skaterish. Too tight. Not the right shade of blue. Way too fucking expensive. Too much acid- in the wash. Too evocative of 80s movies. Too budget. The first pair was the best but I didn’t have the heart to tell her up front.
“She will try to sell you two pairs,” you say to yourself in the changeroom while bunching the other five pairs, “and a belt, and shirts.” Pushy mall salespeople make us keenly aware of our own susceptibility. It is a hostile relationship, I think, and one with total disregard for the role of the customer, who is in the store seeking a service, and not to withstand some gruelling rite of passage.
You make a break for the cash register and face the gauntlet of extra deals, two-for-one offers, and reward point programs. Exhausted, you slink off, bag in hand, to get the damn things hemmed.
Repeat.
Fashion is hard work, no doubt. Ideally I will not do this again for five years, but two or three seems normal. I think I lost my interest in fashion when jeans suddenly went from $40 to $80 in just a couple of years, and haven’t returned. Such an arbitrary price. Such an arbitrary industry. At least homeless people won’t look down on my attire anymore, and who knows, I might even cause someone to strike up a conversation with me in French for once.
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Impressions on a Bugged-Out Town
Here are some of my favourite things about the parallel universe called Montreal so far.
- The way French people jump back and forth between English and French like they’re trying to throw a smokescreen to eavesdroppers. Sometimes even mid-sentence. Yet to figure this shit out. Related Item: the fact that nobody remembers you are English even after you’ve talked to them twenty times.
- “Il fait frette osti!”
- The existence not only of the St. Hubert restaurant chain, but of imitators. Also, the fact that St. Hubert (”St. Hub”) sells an entire product line, which is much like McDonalds selling not only Big Mac Sauce in a jar at your local grocer, but McNugget BBQ Sauce, Filets-O-Fish w/ home breading kit, Burger Salt™, McGriddle pancake mix, and Orange Drink powder.
- An eerie dearth of average-looking people. If I didn’t know better I’d suspect the City of Montreal was halfway through some clandestine eugenics regime, meant to send the Joe and Jane Schmoes out to the suburbs, to Longeuil and Ste-Denis. The range of looks is between heart-stoppingly gorgeous and hideous gnomelike, with nothing in between.
- The way “Avenue des Pins” is pronounced “Pine”.
- The juxtaposition of those pink furry boots and the dribbly sticky brown snow in front of all the fashionista shops on Ste.Catherine, I mean how do they keep those fuzzy fluorescent things clean is what I’m saying, like do they take them off and vacuum them like a shag rug or what.
- Steamed hot dogs after midnight like it’s my medicine.
- I love how in Quebec customer service auto-answers say “Pour service en Francais, appuyez le numero 1, For service in English, press 9.” Nine! The number furthest from 1! To represent that The English are a world away! Then you press 9 and they answer the phone in French anyway.
- Another week, another festival. Any excuse to party. This week we’re celebrating, hang on, let me check the calendar….what the…lights? We’re celebrating lights? Downtown streets are cordoned off, traffic gated, to pay homage to frosted tungsten bulbs? Well, no, we’re not celebrating light, we’re celebrating the reflection of light off an iridescent glass of distilled alcohol mixed with a fruit drink of some kind. Here, let us raise a toast—to the glint of young thighs wrapped in black skirts, under the manic throb of a disco ball in a heated gazebo at Place-des-arts! To lights! Next week’s toast: to maple syrup!
- Mass alcoholism, problem gambling, voracious pornography consumptch, sordid parlours of sleaze everywhere, easily fifteen strip clubs within walking distance of my apartment, cab drivers with no insurance who drive like maniacs, nicotine stains, the patchy palsied lungs of an entire populace, sinking and rising in unison and hacking up a gumball of phlegm all at once, if the mood strikes. Just knowing that it’s all there, if I were to one day need it.
- The fact that people saunter down the street looking French and wearing a bunch of wild shit I don’t know about, even berets.
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Loving the Mic is my Hobby
Michael over at Deux souffle-durs has written a lovely and epic musing on the nature of hobbies. As I read it this morning in my pyjamas, it implored me to contemplate whether my haphazard doings could be called hobbies. Is blogging a hobby? I’ll tell you what: at times, this feels like work to me, and I’m far from prolific. Any professional writer will tell you that writing is a tough job, tantamount to hours per day of heavy lifting. No matter your degree of talent, tenacity, and love of the craft, you don’t simply sit in your leather office chair with a cognac at your elbow and tap a vein every evening. You slog and puzzle and pace the room until your sorry ass can cobble some dilapidated piece of crap together that holds its shape well enough for you to rewrite it. Hardly the same as whiling away a hazy Sunday gently paddling a canoe around a nearby lake.
The poignant bit:
In my own life, alas, I’ve been confused about these distinctions. I wonder if this is because I was pushed into a high-powered, upper-middle-class world where people pursued careers. Where’s room for a hobby — in the sense that I understand the word, anyway — in a life devoted to careerizing? Some of the upper-middle and upper-class people I’m now among pursue activities that look like hobbies: sports, travel, oddball skills, etc. Yet something often seems amiss to me. The activities seem less loved than achieved, less a function of easygoing pleasure than necessary steps in an ongoing crusade. Where does the careerizing person’s vocation end and where does his/her avocation begin?
As one of these very Kids Today trying to find the energy for extracurriculars in a hyper-careerized world, this question hammers me over the head every morning when I wake up and at night when I amble off to bed. And even though I consider every second away from the office as sacrosanct, I would be a stinking liar were I to act like I used these seconds wisely.
Many weekend hours go unaccounted once Sloth sinks its hooks in. Before you know it, Sunday evening has rolled around and you’re scrambing to finish your chores and maybe read a chapter of that book before bedtime, and oh hell I’ll just take care of it tomorrow. The weekend cannot help but sit in the gloomy umbra of the oncoming work week, robbing it of meaningful consequence. Depressing, because we work hard for our weekends only to go and waste them, or so it seems. Weekends feel more like recharging sessions for the upcoming week, the chaos of which tends to sap us dry. Fitting a productive hobby into the gaps between is a daunting task indeed.
Then again, Sloth is universal—it exists at the workplace, too. Even the sternest and most devout labourer feels on a cellular level the urge to punch out early for a beer every now and again. And anyway, what’s with the urge to treat one’s weekend like it’s a regular workday, measuring productivity on some unholy Gannt chart? Leisure is supposed to be, well, leisurely, isn’t it? Projects go half done (or until we tire of them, whichever comes first), letters stay unopened, and the bed only gets made if we’re expecting someone else to join us in it. We drink juice from a plastic Hulk Hogan tumbler and leaf through magazines on the couch while listening to the Mountain Goats.
Well, I do.
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Steve Jobs Hates Socialized Medicine
Hot Buttered Rum is the latest in drink technology about the Taylor home and my budding fascination with this drink can be laid out on three fronts, as follows: warmth, butter, and brown sugar. My career as a tippler has seen many ales, iced drinks sweating through the glass onto napkins and wrists, shots slammed like nails, things with straws, vintages and vinegars, but it’s a rare night indeed that I apply to my glass any combination of: warmth, butter, or brown sugar. H.B.R.’s got all three! We are talking a dairy product, something that comes from a cane, and the byproduct of electric heat, and that beats the cacophonous whoosh of a soda-gun any day. Plus it’s pioneer living. I could not be any more gruff and authentic right now if my drink were drawn from a mini-keg proffered underchin by a slobbering St. Bernard. Here’s me in a log cabin just outside a lumber camp in northern Quebec. Tomorrow morning at 5 AM I’ll ramble Eastward and discover an abandoned Indian burial ground and there’s not much you and your iPod and your hemmed pants can do about that.
Speaking of an iPod, I bought one. Well, not a real one but a Shuffle. For years Steve Jobs did his little jig in front of me, and his punchline was “Only $600!” (CDN) and so I treated him like a homeless dupe asking me for a twenty-spot and then acting all indignant when he gets shot down. All that money for a damned music box? So I stayed there, arms folded and foot scornfully tapping away, until Stevey-O kept pulling new tricks out. He slyly put his arm around me, walked me to the corner, called me by my first name a lot. “Look, Nick, let me explain to you ‘convergence’, Nick. $400! Mini! Gold Mini! U-mother-scratching-2, Nick!” Tap tap tap. But that undying pigfucker eventually bargained me down to a mere Shuffle—sans accessories I should point out, where he’s still in the doghouse in a major way for the $40 armband—and I’m walking away feeling like I’ve done my good deed of the day, and then the Canada-hating devil has the nerve to take a month to ship the damned thing. I’ll get you for this, Jobber.
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A Normalized Version of Truth
I am, on today this day of rest, after watching the 1978 BBC documentary on Hunter S. Thompson, and reading a few chapters from Voltaire’s Bastards, inexplicably drawn towards open government projects. Vote-Smart.org, Govtrack, Hacking Congress, these sorts of things. Perhaps it is the contrarian nature of these my two influences—HSTs fuming about how Nixon represents the culmination of everything wrong with the American character, and Saul’s well-formulated excoriation of those who’ve perpetrated what Kevin would call “bureaucracide” throughout history—causing me to suffer a pique of rebellious outrage. I don’t care; it feels warm and righteous.
Canada, from what I can tell, does not yet have such a system. The LEGISINFO database is a start, as are the Federal Database of Public Servants, Elections Canada Online, and the Provincial and Territorial governments page. To their credit, the folks at GovCo have done an admirable job with their system. I have not been stymied in my search for specific pieces of legislation, or committee information, or meeting minutes, or what-have-you, though information about Senators’ voting history would be nice. I crave RDF and its associated ontological madness, and I yearn to mash normalized data into pointed commentaries.
Though my aims are pure, I cannot deny that on a deeper level my motivation is to impugn politicians both for sport and for spectacle. By the very act of working myself into a churning froth of anti-politcian sentiment, my desire to see the collective efforts these perverts (to borrow an HSTism) put together in one place is at an all-time high, even if they don’t amount to much. My stance on politicians must remain nonpartisan: distrust them all.
So off I go, wading through specs and tutorials, legislatures and handbooks, hoping to affirm that such a system is truly worth creating. After all, what good is a free government if all its secrets remain in the hands of politicians?
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Superlogical This, Superlogical That
I’ve often felt that reason and rationality are a great tyrrany, used to explain away the parts of the human psyche that can’t be explained by our behaviour. Ask an economist or a reader of The Economist: as Rational Actors, we ought to do this, so the fact that we don’t is just a quirk in the numbers, that pesky real world gumming up our laid-out plans. Part of our great discontentment lies in trying to cram everything into the spaces circumscribed by reason while having the primordial sense to know that it doesn’t work. We were not given the divine breath in order to be MBAs, lawmakers, and bureaucrats. I’m as tired of reason as I am of the concept of free-trade coffee. I’m trading it in for something else.
Say you’re a writer: you’re a vacuum, inhaling knowledge like it’s in the air around you. But today’s audience, they must first be met with logic and subject-predicate agreement before they can take in knowledge, so you off to a grammar school and learn the rules. But you forgot that your audience also has the intelligence of braised celery, so you take an axe to your syllable-count, because you’ll never sell otherwise. What’s this literary hoo-ha? Get to the point. If your thought cannot be expostulated in chopped-up and boiled-down English, you are basically shit. Say “basically” a lot too, sounds authoritative. People want chunky information of the easiest digestion, like a pill. Or a suppository. The thoughtful writer would even take it down to the reader’s house and shove it up their ass for them.
Here’s a rational fastball for you, and if we are all so bloody logical, answer me this: how come when you go to bed, you hug your pillow like it’s a living, breathing person? How come you surreptitiously press at that sore on your cheek to feel and revel in the pulse of pain? And how come you imagine your home getting robbed? I know you all do that one, especially you ground floor dwellers. Someone mentions off-hand the technique used to pick a lock, or shows you a twisted coat hanger, and your mind sets off. And why not your apartment? A nondescript building tucked away behind a hotel in downtown Montreal. Such a filthy little decoy! Oh, we’ll just tuck behind this hotel while diplomats file in and out because nobody would ever suspect us here…slip in under the camera. I’m off for work and my lock is jimmied clean open, my laptop’s gone, TV gone, silverware gone, fridge completely raided, CD tower flopped over onto a pile of its own discs, and I’m sitting at my cubicle thirty blocks away, not doing a god damned thing. I should go home, or call the superintendent. Duck out a little early and go home. When I walk up to my door it’ll still be open a crack…
You cannot be human without these thoughts. The rational mind tells us it’s wasted energy, you’ll never “meet” your goals that way. Look, I like reason, but it’s clear that it’s not enough to explain away the world. A coworker, same age as me, today told me I was stupid for taking a philosophy class in my spare time, because “What’s that gonna get [me]? Now, finance…”
Finance! What the. I like to think that there was once a time in human history when performing simple arithmetic operations repeatedly until you died was a form of torture. We’re becoming a nation of voluntary bean-counters. Then I drank an espresso and thought about HTML for a bit and it went away.
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