45

There is something beyond these walls, past these city streets which run empty at night, reflected streetlight on asphalt.

I can taste it in the air sometimes, in those quiet moments where the stillness seems almost holy, and you know that if understanding were to reach you, it would be now.

But it never does.

…

All the holes, scars, burns, inks and modifications i inflict upon myself are with purpose and meaning, to cultivate an aesthetic; to remember, to forget, to learn. They are not born of anger and hatred, of flashpoint emotion and a need to drown out pain.

But sometimes, in those moments, I wonder if I were to take steel to skin, if it really would stain red, or if I would expose something greater, something I cannot possibly know.

…

This illness, this weakness of flesh and spirit takes away what I need to keep myself complacent, what I need to ignore the hidden and muddle through life, concerning myself entirely too much with matters of circumstance.

The nights pass slowly, the protests of the skin screaming through the fatigue, just enough to prevent me from crossing that threshold to sleep.

or

The nights pass slowly, wrapped in dreamworlds where I can live days before I wake, lost in tortured scenarios of death and pain, leaving me grieved and tattered pieces of self to pick up and present to the world the next day.

These emotions and events are made no less real by the fact that I experience them outside of my waking life.

…

I have been here before.

The quality of air, the illness and insomnia, the chemically stained profoundness of the world.

I have been here before.

And when I was, I spent myself on bandaging others and peacekeeping, on moonlit walks through deserted streets, waiting for things to get better.

I will not wait for things to get ‘better’.

I will not lose this.

I will not lose myself.

…

There is something more.

Re:

My head is pounding and my legs are weak, so much so that I do not trust them to carry me much further, and my fingers seek out support when I walk, be it a handrail or cubicle wall.

Something about this environment/headspace drives me to write, but when I look over what it is I’ve written, only trite, uninspired words greet me.

…

The fire behind my eyes that makes the world double when I am not paying strict attention is casting a harsh edge on my vision, somehow making the florescent lighting even more cruel to the people I see.

I almost typed there the people I mutter ‘hello’ to — but it occurred to me that I didn’t say hello this morning, not to a single person.

In fact, I can’t say that I’ve ever seen anyone in this building before in my entire life.

If I left now, not a soul would notice. No-one here knows my name, my face, or why it is I come here.

No person would notice, but a mark would be left in some computer database in a place far, far away from here, and I would never be welcome within these walls again.

…

There is something more.

38

I should be in Toronto for the weekend, if all goes well. I’ll be in town for Resistor, which Leslie is DJing, which also looks to be a good night…

It’ll be odd, though. I haven’t been back to Toronto since I left in the middle of a messy breakup, and I imagine a lot of the city is going to feel like that relationship, like it’s 2000 again and I’m trying to juggle mine and everyone else’s life all at the same time, that everyone is counting on me to make sure everything is okay for them…

Or maybe I think too much.

…

In any case, Toronto would be good for me. There’s a lot of people I miss, there’s a lot of places I miss. Seeing them would be good for me. A party would be good for me.

I’ll probably be couch-hopping when I’m in town, although I have yet to find many couches for the occasion. All I need to do is get rid of two shifts at work.

Toronto, soon.

Music

The Future is Happening Already: Industrial Music, Dystopia and the Aesthetic of the Machine — A PhD thesis final draft from Karen Collins at the Institute of Popular Music.

A few words:

“This thesis represents the first comprehensive overview of a genre of Western popular music known as industrial. It asks the questions, ‘What is industrial music, who creates and listens to it and why: what does it mean to its producers and audience, and what do they believe in? How is the music mediated and disseminated? What does the music communicate, and how does it communicate this meaning?”

In exploring these questions, the thesis uses industrial to develop a methodological investigation into genre in general, asking what might be learned from a detailed interdisciplinary approach to the process of communication within the limits of a genre. Systematic methods involving a variety of approaches were undertaken. These methods included content analysis, hermeneutics, semiotics, an internet questionnaire, interviews, reception tests, a case study with Swedish industrial band Project-X, participation and participant observation in Canada and England from 1999 to 2002.

The results of the study show that, in reception tests, both fans of the music and those unfamiliar with the paramusical elements of the industrial genre have similar connotative responses. Nevertheless, the interpretation of those connotations differed, even to the point of being diametrical. The thesis uses the term ‘supplementary connotations’ for this additional level of meaning, suggesting that familiarity with a genre guides an audience towards a text’s deeper meanings and values. The research shows that industrial has specific signifiers which help to situate the music in a distinctly dystopian setting.

In exploring industrial, therefore, the thesis also introduces musical representations of dystopia and Hell; in particular, the use of mechanical motifs as a critique of rationalisation in the twentieth century. The thesis then suggests industrial music draws on this long tradition of apocalyptic notions to express in particular an alienation from, and critique of, late capitalism.”

Re:

It’s been a week without internet at home.

I find myself checking my mailbox on the outside of my house, and wondering why I haven’t received any letters from friends, or my daily report from e2 yet.

This story is made more depressing by the fact that it is true.

nova, once more

I am not yet recovered.

I cannot count the things that draw me to them, these things that radiate to make the sun touch them with envy.

So many things, so many of them just beyond my fingertips, things that almost seem possible, as though they’re about to happen, any moment now. It’s always been any moment now, any moment at all for the last seven years.

…

I need to go nova, lost in my own passions.

I need to find meaning again, silver within dusty concrete.

I need to remember what it was like to chase rainbows, too young to know what age was.

There are moments that I have not yet had that call me in my sleep, that pull part of me away from my waking self, leaving me only half-alive with a hunger that I have never known.

…

Any moment now, it’ll come together and make itself known.

Any moment now, it’ll fall through, leaving me where I’ve always been.

Any moment now, it’ll all become clear.

…

Any moment now.

22

If there is one thing I must accept, it is this:

Any of these problems, I have created. Any percieved difficulties or stresses, I am responsible for. Any pains, discomforts, or antagonistic situations are because of me, of my actions, of a blind eye I have turned or a concept I have been unable to grasp.

It is in my weakest moments that I learn to destroy, but even at my strongest I cannot undo the damage.

19

I had this dream once (in the way that you dream of things, not in the way you dream about things) that I would be able to find my own way, that I would be able to shape the world around me into something beautiful, a rogue aesthete in my own right, doing the work that others could or would not.

…

I wait for the thunderheads, the static on my skin and the smell of ozone. I work magic in an urban rain dance, splashing dirty puddle water on hurried pedestrians who crouch and dash from doorway to doorway, not realizing that they are already wet.

i think we should drive out to see stars tonight

In the Gemini constellation tonight, Venus and Jupiter will be only one degree apart. Look for it after sunset, near the hip of the left Gemini twin.

On June 17th, 2 BC, the two planets were zero degrees apart, and were by far the brightest object in the sky with the exception of the moon.

Tonight, you will be one degree away from witnessing the Star of Bethlehem.

11

I’ve been consistently finding myself at a loss for words, trying to take emotions of the last weeks, and trying to sample them down to simple ascii characters.

There is something cathartic in this, but also a feeling that not all has been said, that not all can be communicated in this medium. That somehow, a small glance given over a coffee would be more than enough to convey everything that I’m feeling — but not this text, these words.

…

When I was young, I was caught unawares by a total lunar eclipse. I was at a park surrounded by trees, and when the moon began to fade, and change colour, I climbed to the top of the playstructure to see what was happening, how someone could simply be turning the moon off.

After it went out, I swear that there was no light at all, only the most perfect velvet black around me. Blind, I found my way down to the earth, and wandered into the forest, to try and see if the whole world had just shut down, if everything was dark forever.

And when I thought perhaps it was going to be dark forever, there appeared a crescent of light in the sky, a beautiful ice blue, and on every leaf and branch and surface that could cast a shadow, there was a miniature blue moon, dancing with the wind.

I cannot put into words how I felt then. I cannot put into words how I feel now.

…

More:
egyptian gods watching me behind glass, still and cold.
jessica kissing my cheek as I left, snowflakes everywhere.
the fog on the ottawa river reaching to a purple sky, tearing itself apart.
hearing leslie’s whispered secrets, unable to look away.
the outro of ‘2 rights make 1 wrong’, the first time.
stepping off a bus in edmonton after a three day ride, knowing amanda was there.
at christo’s mother’s cottage, making sacred space.
telling stories around the bonfire, every one of us friends.
knowing that i had come home.

Translating dreams into words, first in a series.

It was simple, really, what I had to do.

The only way to get out of the game was to bring others into it. I lied with a smile as I described what would be happening, and coaxed her into it with saccharine sweetness. I had no choice, I kept reminding myself. It was either this, or a lifetime of pain beyond anything I had ever known.

And when she realized what was happening, I did not flinch at her screams.

…

Scars.

I looked upon my collapsed chest with something akin to sadness, although I cannot say exactly what it was. The rings of scars that circled my torso were made insignificant by the bloodless gouges under my nipples.

This was only the beginning, I reminded myself. I had my whole life ahead of me.

How I feel…

I have wasted countless words trying to describe something that I know cannot be captured in text.

Listen:

When I saw these statues, thousands of years old, Anubis and Sehkmet and Ra and Bastet and Horus and Set and Osiris and Thoth — These small figures carved into crumbled stone, polished marbles and golds worshipped by an empire, I knew I was in the presence of something sacred, something holy.

Against the glass, motionless.

And the rock cried out, no hiding place.

I suppose that the buzzing in my head was just looking for a place to escape. It reminds me of a bird, caught between two glass doors, destroying itself in a terrified bid for freedom. It found it, last night, somewhere between the sober, frank discussions and the floods of self-doubt and fear.

At first I thought it had gotten into the walls, and I listened for it, a glass pressed up against my ear. It wasn’t there, though — but the more I listened, the more I knew it was nearby, somewhere close.

I think it’s in my clothes, now. I can feel it on me if I stay very still, something like a skin.

Deeper

I try and take the feelings away by absorbing myself in the mundane: cooking, cleaning, going for a walk, having a cigarette; but this only leaves me feeling hollow.

I fear to indulge myself in this, I fear to try and find any richness or beauty in it, where I would’ve abandoned myself when I was younger and wiser. Perhaps it is that I fear not living up to my own standards, or that I don’t think I can reach the stars anymore. I don’t think I can do what I need to, what is both necessary and appropriate.

I think it provokes something close to ‘rage’ in me, however little I understand of that feeling. I have to stop myself, and try and deal with the world for just a second just another second until it stops and calms and stops and stops and just fucking shuts up and

Then I am myself again.

…

There is a poem by Dennis Lee called Deeper. A quote would not be inappropriate:

Often at night, sometimes
out in the snow or going into the music, the hunch says,
“Deeper.”
I don’t know what it means.
Just, “Push it. Go further. Go deeper.”

I thought that this poem represented what I’ve been feeling, and although the poem still speaks to me in some ways, it isn’t what I thought it was. This is not a hunch I feel I should follow; it is a drive, something as primal as sex and somehow more complex, more jaded.

I could exhaust all the words I have ever known trying to capture its essence, to trap it in metaphor. The notion itself is so inadequate as to be laughable.

But still, I find myself typing.

…

I wonder if those around me have the patience or capacity to tolerate me, if I withdraw and soul search. If I settle into meditation, speaking only koans, or begin to act with excess, would they understand? Would they think that this was a choice I had; to feel, to think, to be forced to act on this?

Perhaps they would assume that I am choosing to exercise what I consider to be ‘freedoms’, when in fact I am finding myself with none. When I find myself forced into a path of action, without recourse.

Perhaps a worse fate would be to find myself in the thick of melodramatic prose.

…

Still, I am urged deeper, against all logic or emotion.

Beyond choice, desire, or rationale, it is my fear that if I do not go, I will lose myself in the effort of keeping my head above the water, and that would be the greater loss.

It is simply a question of whether I choose to prepare for it, and take a breath before diving, or find water tearing the air from my lungs.