singin' da blooz... in many mellifluous keys, long runs of minor syllables, many of them containing the words "people" "today", "hole" "arms" and "alone". i wish I had a tape recorder handy at all times. quick, wipe from your mind all images of pink elephants! in order to prevent interpersonal manglings, I have resolved that I am not allowed to contemplate a relationship with anyone who is a part of a social group which I am a part of. no tabbers, no bongoheads, and no one a further degree away. naturally, with pondering forbidden, my mind is starting to fill of nothing but images of pink elephants. i am in the grip of a very subtle, a very slow but glacial freak-out, with the pressure of millions of millions of tons of ice behind it; I may not look distressed now but don't be surprised to wake up one morning to find my heart carving out valleys in montana current state of freak-out; my ex-girlfriend currently has my favorite song on her answering machine and I am heard to remark that it's been so long since I contemplated physical love that the thought of a naked woman is kinky. i get perhaps the strongest flash of eros, the love between men and boys, five minutes ago while watching and helping my dad root the drains, thrusting and pumping a hose between his knees. maybe there's a motive behind the stereotype of the plumber's sagging jeans. After you die, everything that you thought had gone away for good comes back and you have to learn how to walk in their presence all over again; it's heaven and hell all wrapped into one. Exhibit A: Magik Elvis and the Manitou Tabbing again, coming to tabmeets again. A boost from the oldschool but whispered wonderings as to why they left in the first place, why they came back, and how they've changed since. Exhibit B: Crowkeeper and Bast and Schtroumpf having disappeared for the better part of a year, finding them again under different circumstances and finding the same old problems complicating everything. rather, the same old problem; no one willing to make a move without audrey's approval, and audrey never being in a state to approve anything. Exhibit C: Ryder and Matthew Glick the man immortalized in my paen to the international cartel of cats refers to himself as a housecat of the state; on welfare. the choice of words, though, that is what I live for, that is what makes or breaks me. matthew glick asks if he woody and i will be a circle referred to in literary textbooks of the future, asks what influence we've had on each other. I tell him he has taught me a profound tolerance for all living things. They are both tickled to hear that tabnet is still around. Exhibit D: Grail stumbling across him on the living closet mailing list, it seems that university is a good way to get in contact with former modemers. lost but not forgotten. Exhibit E: Jenna and Tove and anna and agata and michelle and jessica and jeni and alison and all of the bongohead politics entailed, except now they're tab politics as well, and this is all my fault, (yes, rowan, you are utterly responsible for people having enjoyed each others company intensely for a few brief months, a crime beyond all possible punishment so you'll have to fabricate one in your own head) and I can't deal with it, but I can't get away from it without removing myself from every social group I'm in, I'm not even safe at poetry readings anymore because against all odds, after almost a year people I know are actually starting to come to them, and I contemplate hermitage seriously, the removal from everything familiar to somewhere to start over again and dedicate myself to a few long nights paying attention to what really matters: IRC and e-mail, sending brooke away from my bread of utmost crustiness and telling her that when I reach out for people the most is when I'm least able to deal with them, so perhaps she should go use the swings by herself. Exhibit F: anyone, on any street corner, at any bus stop, especially in the top of Benny's Bagels late at night; hey, Rowan. Wow, I feel incredibly bad because I haven't the slightest idea who you are. Feed me some hints, don't tell me your name but tell me how I know you, if you're a computer person, a writing person, someone from school perhaps... oh, you're a friend of John Metzger's? I went to school with him in grade 7, we RPG'd together (where are all of these gamers coming from? I thought that part of my life was buried and pinned beneath a 40-ton monument) at Altercon (Douglas College, blocks away from Beatle's house) and he does music now, and fantastic art, and I want to work with him, what is his name again? Oh, "Nathan." And I freak out. f r E E k ! ka - s p r 0 i n g I don't know anybody and nobody knows me, people know OF me and I am what they think I am, but no one knows who I am, _I_ don't know who I am and I'm doing right now exactly what I was doing a year ago, other people were places and doing other things, I'm doing the same nothing, except now I'm not even doing nothing with anybody else, I'm doing nothing in my little corner. It's not that you fall down a pit but more like you sit down and slowly things accrue, accumulate around you in a ring, papers falling down the path of least resistance and old forgotten essays, projects and poem concepts arranging themselves into bricks, hardened in the warm rays of apathy until opening your eyes one day and finding a 30-foot tower of someone else's life around you, daylight only entering between 11:45 and 12:15pm when the sun passes the opening at the top. i like to use the word anomie, now that I've found a label I like to apply it to myself because I feel that gives me a legitimate reason to display its symptoms, I think maybe that's why I lash out irrationally sometimes, or why I'm paralysed in other situations. maybe not, maybe I like an excuse to watch other people carpe their diems, maybe I like to play the role of the person who always ends up on the floor alone, not on the bed, not in the midst of the orgy at tillie's house; maybe I don't want to be loved but pitied, because love you only get from a handful of people while you can be pitied nonexclusively (though it does get tempered with a certain quantity of disgust)... thus the attention issue... nietzche said that pity was the greatest sin of modern man all in all i'm starting to act strangely in familiar situations and i don't know why so the urge to keep myself out of those situations is having a mighty conflict with my fundamental need for an audience. and maybe I'm going to have to find another concept to live in because i seem to be handling poorly the idiosyncracies of this one. ha, look how my parents play no role in this episode, no active role beyond a clogged drain but remove myself from them (this outburst arriving after having had a blessed weekend free from them... and most other life, with two populated exceptions of geekery and drunken debauchery) and see how little my complexes would improve. modern man will always find something to complain about; if I can't have a boyfriend at the party then I'm going to slit my wrists, that is, if I can make it all the way across the kitchen floor. "if I can't have a boyfriend at the party then I'm going to slit my wrists, that is, if I can make it all the way across the kitchen floor." <-- one more phrase which I feel encapsulates the experience of living in the modern age. There was another one I pointed out upon leaving Jeni's but it slips my memory. The Unabomber said, yes, great reference, probably gave my sociology teacher a sour stomach, that we have no more type B (met with medium effort) or type C needs (fulfilled with much effort), only type A (met with little effort)... the goals of a type B are now accomplished thanks to our industry and government and global exploitation by personal type A effort, while type C goals (having major impact on other people's lives) is now completely impossible no matter how much effort you put into it due to the same. I like investing lots of effort into something, into cataloguing graffiti, into archiving old software, into saving clumps of hair from past girlfriends and writing novels without the letter E in them. If I have to invest only a little effort I think it's not worth doing, I think that I only want to do big projects, but there are no more big projects, no more epic romances, only type A. Break me into a thousand pieces and I'd live a life of four-digit ecstacies, but in one lump that's all I am, a lump with nothing met, nothing accomplished but bruises and broken bones from the hero's attempts to fly with only one wing. needless to say, our operators are standing by. would you believe that this was intended to be a listing of jazz festival events? and oh yes, the knowledge that my words are being monitored as I write them is muchly comforting.