(continuity note: I usually compose these around 2 in the morning, before I've gone to bed, so while I say things like "today," in terms of the tense, what you should really take it to mean is that I'm speaking of the day before. I refuse to acknowledge the changing of one day into the other until I've actually had some sleep... so for example, the events of the daily whine for Wednesday the 9th actually took place on Tuesday the 8th..)

The frustrating part about uncertainty is that someday everything will actually be made quite obvious, and all you can do is look back in the 20/20 vision of your retrospecs and wonder why you spent so many sleepless sexually frustrated nights with your mind on problems that eventually become pretty meaningless.

I'm glad that everyone I care about is asleep right now. It's late enough that I feel more or less comfortable in assuming that, and anyway, it makes me happy to imagine them all, curled up asleep in bed; maybe alone, maybe not. Hopefully the odd dream of me here and there. I like to think that sometimes people wake up thinking of me, and missing me -- lonely and needy and disappointed to know that the warm intimacy they found really is only a dream; a bubble that's been burst by waking.

I like to think I'm not the only one this happens to.

I should explain to the uninitiated that performance poetry differs from poetry in general by virtue of the manner with which it is read onstage. You could consider it spoken word, if that helps at all. Essentially you put extra energy and emphasis into the performance, which isn't necessarily bad, but to top it off you "perform" your poetry by raising and lowering your voice in a lilt as you see fit, perhaps singing when warranted, perhaps yelling, and your hands dance about, too. Occasionally you hold a word for awhile, like this:
we are .. GO-ing TO the SToooooooooOOOOORRRE.

It's not that this is an invalid way of performing, or inferior, but the danger is that the performance does more than accentuate the poem, but also limits it, and de-emphasizes it. You can be a horrible poet and gain some respectability for yourself by reading it performance style, just as you can be an excellent poet who becomes an excellent poet that reads performance style. Originality is an amazing quality, but then, originality in the writing itself far exceeds originality in its presentation.

But I'm an exceptionally judgmental person.

The ride in was something, though. I took an express bus downtown for no particularly good reason other than the fact that I was heading out reasonably early, and because high school kids don't ride the express buses, so I'm free of the bratty rabble... the only people I have to contend with are puffy-faced commuters, who probably react to me much the same way that I'll react to fresh-faced freaky punks when I'm forty-five -- that is, with the envy of the old, impotent, and balding.

I feel pretty comfortable stating that this was the worst bus in the fleet, though. All buses have these vent/escape hatch doors on the roof, but ours was rusty and dripping water onto the floor. And because I'm a big coolie, I always end up sulking in the back of the bus -- like all insufferably cool kids do -- right above the engine compartment. So it was when the bus started to pick up speed during the commute that I noticed the smoke pouring up from under my seat. I really felt it might be wise to get away from the noxious exhaust fumes, but somehow they were just singing to me, like the poppies that seduce Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and I couldn't be bothered to get up and get off the bus, or at least find a better seat.

By the time I wound up downtown, I'd fallen asleep a number of times, and while it may simply be a matter of physical exhaustion, it might also have been the result of a mild case of Carbon Monoxide poisoning. I seem to be coming down off of it pretty hard. I'm all achy. If anyone knows any of the symptoms associated with Carbon Monoxide poisoning (other than 'sleepiness..' I'm interested more in what happens if you survive it), send them to me, and just maybe I've got a lucrative lawsuit to pitch up against OC Transpo.

The real irony of today came later. I managed to just cobble together an essay, having spent almost the entire day making 'typy typy' in the lab. By 7:30 this evening, all looked well, when a dear friend (in the same class as I... working on the same essay... however, she had the reverse problem and had spent all her time cutting out page after page... by the time she printed it, she had over 20 single spaced pages!) timidly told me that both the laser printers were out of paper.
I sort of twitched, but only momentarily. Carleton was jam-packed with labs, and we could just go to another one to do the printing. But oh no... every laser printer on campus was out of order, or out of paper. I just wanted to eat my floppy disk (and almost did, save for the fact that I had to use it to hand in an electronic copy of my essay) in hungry resignation. The only consolation was that half the people in the lab were from my class too, and each and every one of them had been counting on the printers being operational. Misery loves company, and oh me oh my, but I'm one miserable bastard. My friend took great pleasure in sneaking up behind people just as they would begin to try printing and inform them that the printer was out of paper.. just to see their faces fall, like. I had to admire that.

Still, my ire is up. This would indeed be the time of year for everything to jam and break and run out of ink or toner or paper (half the photocopiers were out, too), since everyone has at least one essay to write up, and but for my lack of cannibalistic inclinations, I would have gobbled up the library assistant who made sympathetic noises, but cheerfully declared that she couldn't be of any help, because she didn't have the keys to open up the laser printer.

So now, understandably, I'm going to fall in love all over again with my bed, but before I do that, I'm going to caress my trusty Epson RX-80 printer -- I was six or seven when it was built -- and give it a big smooch, because it may be slow, and it may be noisy, but it's never seen a network, and it prints up anything I like without complaint.
I love my stuff.

On the bright side, my last minute essays rock.
Plan B: sleep with/bribe/beg professor for marks.
Plan C: turn to Satan.
Plan D: Maybe the fact that the essay is still warm and toasty from the laser printer will make it more pleasant and cuddly a paper to mark.

Bleah.

We were on a bus headed downtown to get ready for the reading... I was idly looking out the window, with my attention suddenly fixated upon the flashing lights of a police cruiser, pulled over on the side of the road in the midst of apprehending some miscreant or other. I usually quite loathe rubbernecking, so I wasn't paying too much attention, but certainly I was observant enough (for once) to see that the car being pulled over was from a driving school, complete with an especially tried instructor and a terrified student.

I know it's the oldest cliche in the world of soul-snatching clicky boxes, but God wouldn't you know how badly I wished I had my camera with me today. Never leave your cameras at home. Never. I love irony, so you can see why a picture of the good constables laying the law down on the epitome of conscientious driving would -- to me -- have been so very beautiful.

As our bus ride continued these two chappies came aboard and sat down a few seats in front of us. They were large and burly manly men, clad in flannel with a lot of hair in the Jamaican style that is so popular nowadays. This wasn't of particular importance or anything, but of course they started to talk in a loud and unavoidable manner (I love headphones. With a good set of headphones plugged into your trusty Walkman, you can ignore everything, and everyone, and all the pointless yammering they seem so compelled to partake in), and what was said was so very unpleasant.

They were talking about women, or girls, or however you want to put the term. They seem pretty interchangable these days, and I and all of my friends are of the age that neither seem quite appropriate.. neither boys, men, girls nor women are we. But anyway, they were talking about women, and nothing else... which on the surface should be fine. I mean, women are not at all objectionable people, and I find myself quite liking them; indeed, most of my closer friends are women, for it is precisely because of people like these that I really do dislike a lot of men.

It was a kind of sick back and forth, a comedy routine of sorts except that it was so very offensive. The first guy would talk about a woman they both knew, and his friend would dissect her, part by part. She would have a nice face but a horrible body, or a great body in spite of being ugly, or she'd be "beautiful," and then it would be the first idiot's turn to present a counterpoint, either defending aspects of her because of having slept with her, denying having ever slept with her, or talk about how much he wanted to sleep with her. Except that I think the word was "bang."

In total they ripped apart about twenty women in the space of a fifteen minute bus trip. The ones most heavily debased were the ones who seemed to actually mind this scrutiny, and evaluation, and condemnation.

And the funny thing is that if you asked them, they'd tell you just how much they really loved women, since after all these two idiots wanted to put their penises inside of them, at least the ones who made the cut.
But women are not what they actually love; they love breasts, and legs, and bottoms, and faces, and whatever other cuts of meat you like to consider. Actually, all that can be said is of how much they really hate women, and if my worst crime is being this whiny, emotional, hypersensitive creature in the face of such hate, then I am a fortunate man indeed.

If ever I become rich enough not to care, I'm going to buy a shop on a nice street downtown, and fill it with dollar store glassware. And for a fee of like $50 or something, people will be able to just stand in a room and yell as loud as they want, and smash as much glass as they can (one at a time, please), until the rage or frustration or teen angst or whatever it is has been purged.

But I saw the most evil thing in this store. They have these traps, for mice and insects, that are essentially just gluey pads. You put them down in out of the way places, with the idea being that whatever walks onto them can't free itself, and eventually dies, whether that be in the attempt to escape, from starvation or dehydration or ripping its own legs off. And I just thought, "I bet it's every small child's nightmare to toddle into the laundry room some morning, only to see a cute little mouse glued to the floor, squirming and squeaking its last. Ugh." I tend to think in terms of cartoon sound effects like "ugh" you see.

The package for the traps was the worst. On the face was this cartoon of the trap, and stuck to it was a little mouse, completely agonized and immobile, looking really dead (lacking only the cartoon "x x" to replace its cold dead eyes) and yet defeated, with a little tombstone that said "R.I.P" (for "rest in peace") popping up through the bottom of the trap. Beside the poor dead mouse was, I guess, its friend or wife or something, and it was stuck to the trap too, but it was standing upright and had its little paws to its eyes, and was crying wretchedly, because, well, wouldn't you? There you are, stuck on a trap with no hope, and to make the finality of your situation even more painfully clear, there's your sister or your boyfriend or best friend lying beside you from the same horrible death that awaits you.

So the overall message they were trying to get across with this trap was that " The mice that plague you will flee your home once they watch their loved ones die!" And I'm just not sure if this isn't a sign of larger and worse things. The instructions on the box suggest that all you need to do is dispose of the mice and the trap together, but it doesn't say at all how they're supposed to conveniently die (because it's non-toxic -- after all, you wouldn't your stupid white trash kids or your small white trash dog to suffer the same fate inadvertently and cause), so all you can really picture is the two or three days it takes for the rodent to give up on its futile thrashing and politely starve or dehydrate to death.

Pleasant. And yesterday my cousin was telling me how he used to take a can of WD-40 and a lighter and fry whatever got in the way, and I vowed that, whatever my sad and whiny lifestyle might cause me to reincarnate as, I'm staying away from garages.

And we talked tonight, she and I (a dear friend, a missed friend), and in a lot of ways I really am more unhappy than could be healthy, for later on it occurred to me with some slight optimism, that if my lung actually collapsed, that maybe she'd come and see me, when I was in the hospital.

But still, it's impolite to say you're anything other than "fine" when people ask.

Brought to you by Jolt Cola, with
the buzzing and mild irritation of
caffeine induced paranoia.

Onto the next week of Classic Drivel.

Back to Purple People Eater Town.