Category Archives: My Human Emotions

(365.25 * 30) + 3

When my father was 27 years old, he held the owner of a downtown Ottawa hotel (and his lawyers) hostage at gunpoint, and forced them to sign papers transferring ownership of the building to him.  When he was 28, he burned the 145-year-old building to the ground to collect a half-million dollars in insurance money. He was thirty when he was indicted.

I never wanted to be anything in particular by the time I was thirty (assuming, like all teenagers, that I would never make it there), but I knew exactly what I didn’t want to be.

…

Just over three years ago I wrote about getting fucked over by the people I lived with, and resolved not to waste my time and energy on people who don’t hold up their end of the social contract (my “no jerks” policy). It was tougher than I can find words for, and I had to cut out a lot of people in my life who I previously considered friends — and while there are still holes in my heart where people I’ve lost used to be, my quality of life changed overnight, and I haven’t looked back.

I’ve also tried a lot of things since then to address the problems I have that are internal rather than external: Neurotherapy, meds, drugs, Man’s Search For Meaning and a fleet of therapists — I even wrote a fucking album — but it’s like chewing tylenol while walking on glass, and I’ve come to understand why that is:

I’ve spent my entire life living a series of shared fortunes; I’ve always been responsible for other people’s welfare, and other people have always been responsible for mine.

I need to own my own happiness and security, and no one else’s. I realized this last year, and set a deadline of my thirtieth birthday to get there. And so I have made some big decisions and taken some drastic steps in the last six or seven months.

I’m moving out of the house I share with Leslie, Mike and Suzanne — a house I love, where I live with people I love — into an apartment of my own. A place where I’m not ever worried about wrecking other people’s lives, where I won’t ever have to stress about collective finances, where I’m never going to get a surprise $1000+ hydro bill (or several of them consecutively), and where I can know exactly, every month, just how much I need to spend on where I live. Where no one’s nose gets broken but mine if I fuck things up.

I need space to take inventory of my own wants and needs, so that I can triage and try to make sure they don’t reach crisis proportions again.

I’m going to take whatever time I need to get my head and heart straight so that I can be a better friend, partner, activist, lover.

So I can build something that I am proud to share with the people I love and trust.

SXSW PBP

I am safely returned from Austin! The conference was good, and the city was fantastic. The only other place in the states that I’ve enjoyed as much is Chicago. Maybe it’s because of all the extra people and chaos around the SXSW festival, but the amount of music and amazing food (two of my favourite things) was unbelievable.

Friday morning I discovered the wonder that is the breakfast taco at Cicso’s Restaurant Bakery! In the afternoon it was to the Museum of The Weird, and then to a (terrible!) laptop music battle. The idea was really cool: A dozen pair of musicians battle, each one gets exactly 3 minutes, crowd decides which ones move on to the next round. Unfortunately, the music was (seriously) horrible and (even more seriously) boring. I would love to sign up for next year and kick some ass.

Saturday morning was more delicious breakfast, and Saturday night was a party full of wonderful and weird entertainment. A lot of fun until the lineup for the washrooms became longer than the lineup to get in. Ended up at a place called The Jackalope, which is quite likely the most awesome bar in the world. Pulled pork quesadillas are like a sex party for your mouth.

Had lunch Sunday with the WordPress crew, and then a night drive to Driftwood, Texas, where we made a pilgrimage to the best barbeque in a day’s travel: The Salt Lick. I tried to take photos of it, but there was no way to capture the scale of the place. It’s two or three huge buildings, with a parking lot the size of Rideau Centre. Serious fucking food. (Also, serious fucking drinking: Driftwood is in a dry county, so it’s BYOB — there were families there who brought massive coolers-on-wheels full of beer and whiskey.)

Spent a beautiful Monday day walking around South Congress, which is what Queen Street West would have been if everyone there listened to psychobilly instead of post-punk.  In the evening was the EFF party, which reminded me of the Dark Carnivals, except with cooler vendors and less interesting visual artists. The headlining artist was Ian McLagan (formerly of the Faces [with Ronnie Wood, Kenny Jones, and Rod Stewart], aka The Modfather), and we snuck backstage to hang out with him for a few hours after the show, where he gave us many drinks and told us hilarious stories about Bob Dylan and Billy Bragg. Stopped by the Casino El Camino on the way back to the hotel for a delicious dirty cheeseburger (and to say hi to The Amazing Mr. Lifto) before calling it a night.

Then Tuesday a brief stop at Austin’s finest haberdashery, a bunch of hours on a couple of planes, stopped by Zaphods for the last few hours of the night, and (finally) home.

How was your week?

In the trenches

Just came back from PodCamp Toronto, where Audra and I gave a presentation on Social Media in the Public Service. It went over really well, and it’ll be up on SlideShare once the video/audio archives are up at PodCamp so I can stitch it all together.

I spent a fair amount of the trip feeling ill, and to my horror, I’ve realized that I always started feeling sick about twenty minutes after having a few cups of coffee. Caffeine is one of my most treasured addictions, and I don’t know how easily I would be able to function without it. I don’t think there has ever been a period in my life where I was caffeine-free.

…

I’d like to go back and spend some more time wandering the city once it warms up a bit. I think I’m slowly coming to terms with my relationship with Toronto. We’ll never be what we were, but I think we could learn how to be friends.

trying to break into an electric lightbulb

It has been a long winter, and I’m finding myself in places that I never thought I would be.

I don’t know exactly how I got here, and I don’t know exactly what comes next, but I’m happier and more optimistic about where things are going than I have been in years.

The next few months are going to be busy: finishing production on a friend’s album, releasing an Ad·ver·sary remix album, going to SXSW Interactive, preparing for Kinetik, and a half-dozen other Big Things — but I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Good riddance to 2008.

se7en th1ngs

Thanks to Mr. Dangerously, I am honour-bound to make this post.

The rules:

  1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

The things:

  1. Through little-to-no fault of my own, I spent a number of years under 24/7 police surveillance while growing up. To this day, I still expect to see unmarked vans when I look out the window, and to hear the telltale double-click when I pick up my phone. I imagine I always will.
  2. I think Walt Disney and Shigeru Miyamoto are two of the greatest surrealists who have ever worked, and should be spoken of in the same hushed and reverant tones reserved for Dalí and Ernst.
  3. I prefer A Silver Mt. Zion to Godspeed You Black Emperor. You want to fight about it?
  4. The first time (that I remember) seeing both my parents in the same room together, I was sixteen, and in a courtroom surrounded by a gauntlet of cameras and reporters.
  5. I got into rap before I got into electronic music, or any other music at all, and I’ve been trying to figure out what the first rap album I ever owned (and knew all the lyrics to) was. I think it was Walking with a Panther, Let’s Get It Started, or Banned in the USA.
  6. I emailed Douglas Adams out of the blue for girl advice when I was nineteen. In addition to being very friendly and extremely incisive, he is actually funnier when he’s not working than when he is.
  7. Musicians I have consciously attempted to rip off include (but are not limited to): Michael Gira, Trent Reznor, Nobuo Uematsu, STR, Paul Frankland, Nick Thériault, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

I am passing this albatross on to: 0utre, albedo_lens, unacquiesce, divine, essinem, mr_horse, and and last but not least, liquidab (who probably won’t do it anyway).

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Fucking Evening

I’ve been trying to find my centre. Winter is under my fingernails and on my lips, and I need to shake it loose before it gets to the bone.

More than anything else, what the season brings me is isolation. I end up so lost that simple things like touch, sharing a meal, or holding up my end of a conversation become overwhelmingly complicated, and leave me feeling sensitive and nervous.

I don’t know where I need to go to find what I used to have; all the signs are in another language, and all the maps are made of dust.

Promises, promises.

Spent a lot of today lost in my own head. Tried to shake it off and went down to the grand re-opening of the Mayfair Theatre, where the restored 35mm print of Metropolis was playing, with live music for the score.

The lineup was already at the end of the block by the time I got there, and after an hour in the cold we were told that no one else was getting in, they had been at capacity since 6PM or so.

Then everyone else in line left and we got in. (Standing room only, 124 minutes running time.)

Balcony at the Mayfair Theatre

Took a few photos on the way home, none of them really turned out well, sadly.

Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons

Would like to write more, but don’t have the words tonight.

Soon.

I hold these truths to be self-evident

A secret, filter-free:

Not only do I still find it unbelievable that Barack Obama won — and I mean literally unbelievable; as in it feels exactly like when I realize that I’m dreaming because something impossible has happened — but I actually start to tear up if I think about it too much.

The civil rights movement is extraordinarily inspirational to me (more than any other single event/person/process/etc), and seeing a black president just 40 years after Martin Luther King was murdered fills me with an emotion so unexpected and intense that I don’t have a name for it.

To be clear, this isn’t about politics. I’m not interested in what happens to taxes or guns or gas prices in the US. What moves me is to see a black American carry himself to the office of president through the power of oration, motivating a culture that has never trusted the establishment to participate in it instead of combating it.

I’m Canadian, but my grandfather was a black man born in Philly, and his family name — the same name I was born with — is the name of the white family from Virginia that owned his (and my) ancestors, not that many generations ago. Seeing things come full circle from slavery is a deeply personal and powerful experience.

We’re certainly not in Dr. King’s world yet, where a man is judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin; but we are one step closer to the brotherhood he dreamed of, and that moves me very nearly to tears every time I think about it.

…

I almost didn’t include any family history in this, because I feel like people will write me off as soon as they read it. It makes it easy to treat me as someone who’s just happy one of his own is on top (even though I’m not black), rather than a spectator who is ‘legitimately’ amazed by what a group of people have managed to accomplish in such a short amount of time.

November

Can I feel the days getting shorter? Is this just psychosomatism, or is it something closer to the soil? There is winter in my bones, and autumn on my skin.

I had dinner with one of my sisters, and this is likely contributing to how I’m feeling. Family always fucks me up this way. I don’t know how to be comfortable with where I come from.

It troubles me that I do my best work when I’m troubled. I spent all day designing for restraint (always restraint), and I created and deleted more in one day than I’ve done in the last year. I need to channel this, while it lasts.

There is something more here, and I need to find and follow it.

…

If you’re running in a fog too thick to see, you might as well close your eyes.

on the road to delphi

I can feel autumn wrapping around the city like a blanket, whispering about the winter to come.

I’m hoping to use this time now to get things done before the snow settles on the city. I know that once winter is here, I’m going to have a much harder time with everything, and I’m trying to turn that awareness into motivation: Finish building restraint. Finish producing Mike’s album. Gut and rebuild my bedroom. Get the Ad·ver·sary remix boxset done. Make more personal space.

I used to have limitless drive for these things, but I can’t sustain it anymore. I don’t think it’s age that’s weighing me down (although in frankness, I am terrified of turning 30 next spring), nevertheless it feels like something has crawled into my skin and hidden that energy from me.

Or, more likely, something about the way that I’m thinking and the things that I’m doing is feeding back.

…

By speaking this aloud I may very well be invoking it (or so Thelema would caution me), but I’m privately and extraordinarily concerned about attendance to next Tuesday’s show. The last month has been the quietest month at Zaphods that I can recall (on par with the doomed Mono No Aware show years ago), and if what is traditionally the biggest night of the year ends up being a dead show, not only will it be financially crippling but also a tremendous kick in the balls.

Next year would be the 15th annual Industrial Strength Halloween (would’ve been this year if Eugene hadn’t preempted last year’s party), and the idea was to go balls-to-the-wall all out for it, but if Tuesday has a weak showing then we may have to reexamine our expectations.

…with that said, if next Tuesday doesn’t have the attendance we’re looking for, it’s not the end of the world. We have a ton of new promo material on the way, we (finally) have management that supports us and has a free hand to help, we’re trying to rent a bus to ferry people to industrial night from Kanata after the NIN show in three weeks, and there’s more in the pipe. So even if, hypothetically, everyone who had ever been out on a Tuesday vanished tomorrow, we’re not dead in the water or anything along those lines

But it would be really fucking disappointing.

…

Maybe I need a pilgrimage.

semantic spaces

I sometimes think that I need to find a new place, somewhere I can weep and scream and fuck and bleed.

Not a real place, but a place like this — close enough to ‘real life’ to mean something, and distant enough from it to still allow for some level of honesty.

Because I don’t do those things here, anymore, and it’s starting to feel as though I never did.

Next

I’ve been coasting a lot lately. Waiting for work to be over, killing time until it’s time to sleep, counting the days until it’s the weekend… I’m not even doing anything interesting with this — I’m not spending my time reading great books or listening to great music, mostly I’m caught in the Livejournal Circle of Death, which involves me clicking listlessly on a dozen bookmarks (of which LJ is the first) over and over and over again, even if there’s nothing new.

If you’ve ever spent an afternoon circling your kitchen, opening and closing your fridge and cupboards even though the food hasn’t changed at all, you should know what I mean.

On the upside, it’s better than playing WoW.

…

The skin on several parts of my face appears to be falling off. This is troubling.

no news is news

I’ve been posting a lot lately, but I haven’t been saying anything. Anything I have been saying has been behind so many layers of filters and screens that it might as well not have been said at all.

I don’t have anything else to share about my music, or any new photos to post. I haven’t made any posts about neurofeedback because I haven’t been there lately. I don’t remember how to write about me, and I’m not going to write about work, because really, who would want to read that?

My head is heavy, and so many things feel like they’re going to be forever what they are today, and what they are today isn’t what I want.

98% of the people who were in my life five years ago aren’t anymore; and while that was my decision (or at least 98% of the time, it was), it’s painfully obvious that the people I’d like to spend my time with are so few in number that it’s very nearly impossible to get a handful of them in the same room at once, much less build a circle of friends or community with. I don’t have symbol or metaphor to express how completely, shockingly isolating that is.

I used to believe — used to know — that there was always an exit, a process to bring the things I needed close — even if it wasn’t obvious or easy. I don’t know how to feel that way anymore, and I don’t even know if there’s anything to do about it.

This isn’t what I want.

908

One of the weirdest things about this trip is the peek it gives on how I could have turned out.

I’m a bit of a celebrity here, because I’m the only one of Flint’s children who made it to his sister’s funeral (the big man himself was explicitly uninvited, and was smart enough to stay away).

Of course, no one here really knows me. They know a part of my story, or what I was like when I was eight or ten or fourteen. (One aunt refuses to refer to me by my name, she calls me “the genius” instead, like I’m from a different world.)

I’m asked a lot why I never moved back to montreal, why I’m not moving back now. There’s opportunity abound (this cousin just bought a fido store on a whim, that uncle runs a very successful new media firm, etc.) and it’s difficult to articulate my reasons in ways that make any sense to them.

The stories shared over drinks (congac that I could never afford, let alone appreciate) are equally alien: turning Bill Gates down for an opportunity to invest in Microsoft in ’73, trying to call a cab to a family-owned factory in the heart of Compton at 4AM, or paying off a hit on a brother to save their life (and then telling them years later how much they regretted it).

More to come as I get the chance to post it.

tbgo

I’m in Montreal for a funeral. It was for one of my aunts, someone who helped take care of me when I was young, after my dad kidnapped me. (I didn’t post about it before, because I didn’t want to advertise that the largest gathering of clan Kaya in twenty years would be in range of one well-placed grenade.)

This is the most involved that I’ve been with my father’s side of the family since those days, and it feels like I’m through the looking glass. Limos, private restaurants, multimillion dollar homes, arguments about who stole the will from who…

It’s all very surreal. I’ll try to take some photos.

40 Years Later – The Last Four Remember Dr. King

“…martyrdom also forced onto King’s dead body the face of a toothless tiger. His threat has been domesticated, his danger sweetened. His depressions and wounds have been turned into waves and smiles. There is little suffering recalled, only light and glory. King’s more challenging rhetoric has gone unemployed, left homeless in front of the Lincoln Memorial, blanketed in dream metaphors, feasting on leftovers of hope lite.

White Americans have long since forgotten just how much heat and hate the thought of King could whip up. They have absolved themselves of blame for producing, or failing to fight, the murderous passions that finally tracked King down in Memphis, Tenn. If one man held the gun, millions more propped him up and made it seem a good, even valiant idea. In exchange for collective guilt, whites have given King lesser victories, including a national holiday.

But blacks have not been innocent in the posthumous manipulations of King’s legacy. If many whites have undercut King by praising him to death, many blacks have hollowed his individuality through worship. The black reflex to protect King’s reputation from unprincipled attack is understandable. But the wish to worship him into perfection is misled; the desire to deify him is tragically misplaced. The scars of his humanity are what make his glorious achievements all the more remarkable.

Both extremes of white and black culture must be avoided. Many whites want him clawless; many blacks want him flawless. But we must keep him fully human, warts and all. In the end, King used the inevitability of a premature death to argue for social change and measure our commitment to truth. There is a lot to be learned in how King feared and faced death, and fought it too. What we make of his death may determine what we make of his legacy and our future.”