His smile crackles, a semi permanent halo. I watch him from the window as he jauntily walks to work, fizzing with the knowledge that I am lucky, so lucky, to have him in my life. As he turns to wave, vanishing behind a building, I smile back, and mock groom the fluffy ears of our shared white monster hat. I love him so much in this moment, as I am sure he loves me, and with that thought, he turns, pouncing from behind the corner with his hands up like paws, trying to surprise me, as if his backpack hadn't been poking past the bricks as he hid, the feet of a child who hasn't quite grasped the intricacies of being unseen.

-::-

Hundreds of free animated films now available through National Film Board's new iPhone app.

-::-
We're going to Montreal soon, for Michel's wedding to a very clever woman I'm not sure I've met and to visit with Lung and Christine and Dee. I've hit that place in my travel plans where the imminent departure date has begun to make me nervous. Do we know where we're staying? Where we're going? Does everyone know when we get there? Daft concerns, the sort of fretting that helps no one. If I don't know yet, I soon shall, so put a lid on it, will you brain? It's not a panic so much as a very low grade adrenaline hum, as my subcutaneous tissue tenses in anticipation, as if I'm about to run in a race, pounding the pavement to music playing slightly too loud but just under the edge of my hearing.

Last night:

Kamui: The guide claims Kamui is one of the best ninja movies ever made. If the guide, instead, claimed it was one of the most hilarious, it would have been right. So bad it was good, though we all could have done with less of the endless CG ocean and more with the goofy CG chop socky. Also, there is no conceivable reason for there to be that many CG animals in a live-action film. None. Especially in regards to the sharks.

Breathless: Domestic violence. More domestic violence. Horrible fathers. Blood. Violence. Blood. I should have remembered what it was about instead of thinking I was in for a ninja movie double-bill and skipped on the ticket and just gone home.

--::--

So Tony and I have been considering a weekend trip this October for our six month anniversary, which practically falls on Hallowe'en. We're juggling options back and forth the idea of either attending SteamCon or flying out to Philly for the weekend of Kyle and Trillian's nuptial party-thing. (Third so-far-facetious option, to hell with everyone, we're going to Vegas to watch some naughty Cirque Du Soliex and go on the outdoor rollercoaster.) So far, however, we've been caught in a loop of pros and cons for each plan.

It goes a little something like this:

SteamCon, which is local, will be stuffed with some of my favourite people, some I never get to see, some I've never had a chance to meet, in a setting that shows off just how completely great they truly are. There's a market full of costume, too, just in time for Hallowe'en, and an art show starring Myke & Beth, and Molly. It is, however, essentially sold out, which makes it a tricky fish to fry. Also, though it will be full of zer pretty, yeas, and I would like to think of Steampunk as an Art Movement more than anything else, it's essentially people getting together because they adorn themselves with little bits of clock, which I cannot help but feel is somehow akin to a preppy convention, (insert joke about Republican party here), or a giant goth picnic, where the only qualification required is that you wear black.

Philadelphia, on the other hand, is not only home to Kyle "freaking" Cassidy and Trillian "freaking" Stars-Cassidy, (and J.R. "365" Blackwell, whose birthday it is today, everyone go give her some warm wishes), it is also somewhere I've never been, which makes it intriguing, even though I could not for great heaps of money tell you where it is on a map. However, given that flights to Philly, though they just dropped in price, are still 7-8 hours (with layover included) each way, and that on top of my 8 hours of bus-ride to and from Seattle, it seems like it would be a ludicrous amount of travel to simply attend a house party, no matter how incredible the attendees, and then come right back. Also, we've no idea where to stay.

Me, I feel evenly about both options, though I am beginning to appreciate more and more the third, least realistic option, in which we run away together just us and the world, and spend a glitzy weekend in the falsest city this side of Dubai.

He dances for me as I leave, every time, out next to the bus as I sit inside, glued to the window, helpless but to smile. I breathe on the glass, trapped in my seat, and smear cartoon hearts in the resulting childish fog. I ADORE YOU, block letters, mirror formed, blowing kisses off my fingers, then holding my hands to my heart, messy with roughly mimed song lyrics. Bang, bang, my baby shot me dead. He runs alongside as the bus pulls out, skipping, swinging around if he can to stand on a street light like he's singing in the rain, while I wave an invisible hanky, eyes locked on each other until we are defeated by the bus turning away.

We are reduced to texting then, once our line of sight is broken, my travel undeniable fact, snippets of poetry 160 characters long. I type awkwardly, all clumsy thumbs, until my cellular gives out by Bellingham, (Bellingham being north enough to be Canada according to the phone company). You are the answer to Samson's riddle, I carefully type, arduously, letter by slow letter, the sweetness built inside my chest that coats my ribs in honey.

Again, the I5 has been reduced to one lane. Traffic is dismal, almost at a standstill. My bus crawls down the freeway like a wounded animal. The driver pressing brakes that sound like whimpering, the engine growling into motion like soft, tired determination, frustration gritted teeth against a broken bone. An hour late leaving the station, another hour lost to this lag, I do not get home until four in the morning, my bag a part of me, my clothes glued on. I tear into my bed, shedding my day like worn through skin, but cannot find my sleep. The bed is too still, too empty. There are no wheels underneath, no swaying highway lines. My pillows are too many. I am a ghost.

Currently I'm in Seattle, tapping away in our new Capital Hill apartment while a nice university student scrubs out the kitchen cupboards for me so I can finally start unpacking. The last few days have been a tangled, righteous haze of putting things into boxes, putting boxes into boxes, sorting boxes, stacking boxes, boxes, boxes, boxes. Tony had barely made a dent in the work by the time I arrived on Friday night, so it was a swoop in and dash rescue, all hauling things around and making space for the hired Saturday movers, (who were accidentally paid twice), working hard until I couldn't anymore then getting up and doing it all over again. Taking time to just sit for awhile feels like a gift. Yesterday should have been my first day to rest, but there was painting to arrange and cleaning and furniture and figuring out what boxes go where and what's in them and boxes, boxes, boxes.

(And as I type this, he's finished.)

Not to say we haven't been having fun. Other things have been happening, lovely brief respites of love: Willow had us over for a social Sunday morning of waffles at her place with some friends a couple blocks away, and Rafael and Michelle came over yesterday to help me fetch a free Craigslist Queen mattress from up the street, followed by Alex, fresh off the plane from SF, who brought his second Tactical Corset prototype for us to play with, (which fit a charm, let me tell you), and we all went for a nice dinner at the Blue Bistro and a chummy midnight tour of Hackerbot.

Today we're back to boxes. Tony is working from home, which is nice, and tonight, after errands and chores and we've exhausted our usefulness, we're going to an Emilie Simon concert. Tomorrow we fly for SF.

I picked up my passport today. The pretty young man behind the counter had a chocolate coin festively tied around his neck with shining pink-yellow ribbon. When I asked about it, he explained he'd won an award in the office today, then slyly showed me a glimpse of a rather official looking document that stated OFFICE CLOWN. "That's a good thing to win for," I said. "The best," he replied, "sign here." And that was it. Everything's done. I can now legally leave the country.


Current travel dates

Vancouver to Calgary, June 19th - Calgary to Vancouver, June 22st

photograph Gavin and Rikki's most official wedding yet

Vancouver to Seattle, June 26th

pack, teasingly berate Tony for not

possibly move house (unlikely, see above note)

visit hackerbot labs w. Willow

Seattle to San Fransisco, July 1st - San Fransisco to Seattle, July 6th

attend PubSquat '09

visit...

friends .. like you?

NoiseBridge (shake fist at those attending Tor Camp in Seattle)

The Long Now Foundation

Paxton Gate

Musee Mechanique

??? (suggestions welcome)

Design Police
bring bad design to justice with printable Visual Enforcement Kits.
I've started to plan my trip down the coast for That Mike's gigs, calling people, asking who's going to be where, and trying to figure out how to get around.

I really like the idea of spending time out of town on Valentine's Day, though it means my friends in Seattle might mostly be "busy" elsewhere. Already I'm considering buying another pair of ridiculously skimpy panties to throw at him to celebrate. I've never had a pleasant Valentines. One of my better ones involved someone locking me out of the house in the rain. Last year Mike was in playing over in Australia for Valentines, and Stéphane had just died, so I instead of going out, I was effectively single, alone, and in mourning. The highlight of my day was when Ben Peek wrote me into an autobiographical story introduced by a large picture containing the word COCK.

So far things seem to be falling into place. Nick called last night to tell me his van survived the fire somehow unscathed and that he and Nicole want to come as a romantic trip of their own. (That word again.) If it all works out, we'll drive down to Portland on Thursday morning, love life there for a day, groovy down that night with Mike, drive up to Seattle, groovy with Mike some more, then spend the rest of the weekend drifting happily around Seattle like vacationing techno-hippies, and get back in time for my work on Monday morning. Depending on money, we might even make it down to his Wednesday night gig in Bend, which I find a delightful idea not least because I like the idea of a town named Bend. Seriously. You liked a place so much you decided to settle there, and that's what you come up with? Bend? I love you guys.

Flying Virgin Air felt like reaching into tomorrow. Intellectually I knew what sort of experience it was going to be, I'd read articles about the in flight interactive computers and seen shiny, smiling pictures of people enjoying the interior of the plane, but I didn't understand how, as an experience, it would be so comfortable and intuitive, yet subtly new.

I loved it. I loved the psychiatry precise Buddha Box ambient music, the violet lights softening the iPlane cigarette-white edges of the comfortably wide seats, the oddly flawless hand-set/computer-keyboard controller, the look&feel of the touch-screen design, and even the this-close-to-annoying mock trendy animation that explained what to do in event of a crash. Everything about the flight was a visceral reminder that we're already in the future and you would have crashed that flying car anyway. I felt like a target market perfectly catered to, coddled, even in business class, with a desire to do it again instilled in me immediately, a thousand times more powerful than any advertisement could.

Clicking the handset out of the armrest, I clicked through the computer system, poking at everything that was available. (No one else signed onto the seat-to-seat chat, unfortunately, but it was enough that the option was there.) Finding a Music section, I braced myself for a tedious, arduous list of tenaciously popular artists, only to be pleasantly surprised. I found jazz, indie, rock, pop, techno, classical, and opera - everything I listen to at home, alphabetically listed all the way to Frank Zappa. Satisfied, I leaned back and shrugged out of my shoes. My schizophrenic play-list was a lovely thing, (inspiring me to want a long, intimate dinner with whoever programmed Virgin Air's music selection), matched in beauty only by the ridiculously cotton pink dawn beginning to break so perfectly outside my airplane window.

Sliding exhausted out of Michelle's black miniature SUV, barely able to focus my eyes after a weekend spent almost entirely awake, I was a bone palace ballet wrestling with an over-sized suitcase and a faulty, tired memory. Trying to be cohesive was like making bets in a burning house.

A flash of David's fedora perched in the back of Robin's car before the pretend Sisters of Mercy concert, Michelle and I trying to see, no evidence of people on stage, just lights stabbing through fog, a whole bottle worth of smoke juice drowning them out. Could have been a CD. No one would have known. Dancing later, taking the motorcycle with Joseph, talking relationships in Chinatown, it wasn't there, I didn't have it. Relief. Still in the car, safe in Seattle, more safe than this trip.

I was expecting SeaTac to be a mad as rabbits, bruising gauntlet of security questions and TSA horror stories. Instead Virgin Air smiled, took my bag, gave me candy coloured boarding passes like cheerful paint chips, and sent me to the gate without once asking for a passport while Security ignored me past the usual Put Your Stuff Inna Box and Walk This Doorway As We Wave A Wand. It felt nothing short of miraculous, as if I'd stepped back in time somewhere between the front doors and putting my shoes back on. Instead of wasting an hour tediously answering meticulous questions about unessential details of my life, suddenly I was free, soothed, out of the epilepsy lights of the dance club, away from everyone who might want something from me, curled on the floor with Cloud9Dream, pressed tight against a wall of window, watching night planes taxi in. Time to breathe. I felt like I was entering a new age, like on the other side of my flight was a birthday I had somehow missed.

Does anyone have a place in San Francisco the three of us could bunk for Monday night?

I am grateful for the strangeness in my life. Yesterday I was out in the desert, dingy, busted up, covered in scrapes, bruises, and dirt, camping between an artillery testing range, salvation mountain, and a hard-knuckle death row prison, but I slept in Beverly Hills at an absent ex-lover's decadently art deco house, wrapped in a familiar yakuta, all soft beds, home baked pumpkin pie, and wonderful hospitality. (Odd to be living here in the space of his absence).

I've no idea what today will bring.

I'm out at the Salton Sea right now, writing from a Slab City art camp, listening to the American Astronaut soundtrack and the Tom Waits my ex played on, (favourites of the guy who owns this camp), a dog named X-Ray at my feet. "hey boys, hey boys, gotta message for you, about a thing called love.." It's spectacularly weird, just right past Salvation Mountain, all art cars, hubcaps and skulls hanging from trees, and solar power everything. If all of my camping was this comfortable, in a space like this, I might convert.

I'm getting a ride with Claire into L.A. on Friday evening, though I don't have a place to stay yet, while Lung and Natasha are driving in on Sunday morning.

We'll be in San Fran as of Monday.

Book about photobooths.
I haven't gone camping in so long that I'm certain I've forgotten to pack some obvious essential more useful even than a toothbrush but smaller than a sleeping bag. It doesn't help that between this trip and my last, I've already lost my duffel bag by "putting it in a safe place", leaving me to borrow David's much tinier one, that will not fit either my tripod or bed-roll. If I don't watch out, I'm going to get stuck with an uncomfortable, awkwardly packed backpack.

In other news, Amy's moving out, which means there's going to be a two-bedroom apartment in my building available December 1st for $950/month. Third floor near Commercial Dr, between Venables and Hastings, better views than my apartment, laundry in the basement for a dollar, bike rack in the bottom floor vestibule. Pets aren't allowed, but we all have them anyway. Landlord is pleasantly neglectful, and tends to only come by for rent.

Man splendidly decorates basement with $10 worth of Sharpie.

I love that I can say either I'm borrowing a bedroll from a CSI novelist to go camping in the middle of a five-star desert dreamscape with an award winning photographer and a star-shiveringly good musician or that I'm borrowing a floppy foamy bed-thing out of Don's garage so I can go camping in the middle of an ecological disaster with one of the most filthy minded friends I have and a wee skinny girl I don't know as well as I should, and both statements are equally accurate and entirely true.

That said, I'm oddly terrified about my upcoming trip, and I sincerely do not know why.

It's confirmed. I'm going to California next week. Work gave me the alright, and Lung bought the ticket to Vegas today. (Where he and Natasha pick me up, then bring me to the Salton Sea). My flight leaves Seattle first thing Monday morning. Today after work I'm hopefully picking up a wee foam mattress from Don, getting laundry done, and packing as best I can. After that, it's a matter of working as many hours as I can until Friday evening, when David and I are catching a ride with my mother down to Seattle for Robin's Saturday house-party.

Rent will be tight this month, as will everything else, but the chance is too good to pass up. I swore, awhile ago, that I will never again say no to free travel, no matter what, and this is it, this is exactly the sort of thing I promised myself I would do, no matter how risky or fiscally chancy, because if the offer is solid, then the correct answer is always Yes.

The interior of BC is a funny place, a reclusive mix of unassailable nature speckled with tiny towns that call anywhere with a strip mall a city. The communities there aren't like the spindrift of settlements that line the coasts, they're far more stubbornly isolated. Trying to find a connection to the rest of the world proves difficult, and asking after the internet gets you Looks. I wonder at the youth of these places, why they stay, why so many don't wish to escape. There's so much planet to explore, and they could always come back later.

We held hands on the bus a lot our first day, as we travelled into unknown relationship territory, glad, fried, tired, and scared. As I said before, our trip back east was truly make or break. We would either come out of it with a lot of our problems fixed or we would come out of it as single people, ready to give up and go our own ways, understanding that we were just not that compatible.

Today we got up, and David made French toast for us while I processed pictures of our trip. Nicole came over, then my mother Vicki, then Ray, to share breakfast, to give presents, (I gave Vicki an orange keyhole scarf for her birthday), and paint the spare room. Our home is ours, and it is a social place, vibrant, with cozy pets and enough comfortable throw pillows for a small army of interior decorators to attack an encampment. (I have a bit of a problem, actually. I just can't say no to awesome little pillows.) We are a we, stronger for having been forced together with no escape, stronger for spending some days inescapably without any contact. Whatever uncertainty we had was blasted away by the proof of our survival. There are a lot of reasons we shouldn't be together, but not enough reasons or strong enough reasons to break us apart. Looking at him now, as he examines some of the terrifying things in the fridge that Karen left behind, while our friends are painting in the other room, helping our apartment become a home, and we all listen to my mad, wonderful ex-boy on the stereo sing and play an electrically wired cowboy boot, I'm glad he's here. I'm glad I found him, and I'm glad I found me.

Moonhead, by Andrew Broder:

did you hear the one about the day the moon fell to earth?
it had a crater exactly the size of a human head on it
and it landed on my head and now my head is the moon.
or the one about the day a thousand lives from now

when we return as a team of archeologists
and discover fossils of ourselves in a former life
on the day we spurned our nervous twitch
and found our yearn to hint at winter bliss.
on the day the stars sang the national anthem of sweaty disbelief,
of coelacanth teeth, to scream loud enough
to shatter the roof of a coral reef
and the shrapnel ground up into paint
for robin's egg colored dream and root beer float,
second hand flavored drool absorbers
and the words "hope" and "home" that sound the same,
smell the same as the day the doe caught a sad snowflake on her
tongue and melted it in an instant
and it tasted like the blackhole's wild-eyed longing for light,
whether from the starts that radiate
or the planets that reflect it or the eyes that reflect the reflection,
or the eyes looking into those eyes and seeing the reflection of the eyes,
which if all goes according to plan,
will outlast the universe itself.

..::..

Lung is talking about bussing me down to Las Vegas to meet with him and Natasha somewhere near the end of November, and then traveling with them to the Salton Sea, finally to pick up the letter Kyle left there for me sometime last year. As November closes around me and the sun drowns in fallen leaves and crowns itself in flash flood puddles that mirror the endless gray sky, it feels less like a blessing and more like a fairytale already told, like somehow I missed it between one blink and the next, as if these places never really exist, but only hover over pages of books and mimic the careless sheen of photographs, haunting our collective conscious in a waking haze of forgotten days as long as winter dusk.

Out there is the storm, strangely calmed, another twist in the river, another chapter of life. Here is a pool of known days, painting, adjusting, David job hunting, tinkering with very little, watching a movie at home every two days. I've said yes. Of course I've said yes. I've missed Lung, his crackling humour, sharing our puzzle-piece twin set of anger and frustrations. There is no other answer. Now it rests on my workplace, if they will let me leave for a week, to work away for five days. If it all works out, I'll bus down to Seattle after work on the 21st for Robin's party on the 22nd, then catch a bus to Vegas from there on the 23rd. My fingers are crossed, my fingers and my heart and my bones and breath. My hope is an elephant living deep inside the cage of my chest, pressing against my skin, forged out of a cello's long humming strokes of sound, invisible until an answer arrives.

Until then, I won't know myself. I'll be a string of notes without direction, as crazy eyed inside as unexpected blood on the hands, a tight rope walker with her lover on the other side and a den full of sharp toothed, hungry lions below.

Meanwhile, Antony and I are e-mailing back and forth, a piano falling from the sky. There's nothing quite like home. Apparently he arrived in Montreal just over a week after I left, and he'll be there until half-way through December, far after I would return from the south. Tag, you're it. Unexpected, how life plays these games of just missed, all the way through, both directions. If he sends me his address, I'm going to try and make sure he gets another palm tree, to keep in touch.

Some times I am lucky and an entire week can go by without missing his laugh. I wonder, occasionally, that I am so changed within since we met. Given all that is fixed, will I ever want to be able to walk away again?

bOINGbOING: Tales from the Underground Economy

Stayed up late last night talking to a friend down by Savannah. Once I found where he was on Google maps, the soft hint of an accent he's always had clicked perfectly into place. Deepest, darkest Georgia. I don't know very much about it, past what I've read in books like Midnight In The Garden Of Good and Evil, but the little red arrow put him directly in the middle of pretty much nothing. Marloe. There was a named road nearby. A road. Singular. One.

I was worried when he went, moving from Seattle, a reasonably sized city, to the far out edge, vaguely near only a college town, even though he's a perfectly capable human being. He seems to be finding his niche down there, though. Staying with family, driving the long drive into town once a week. I don't know how he does it. When he went into the DMV to renew his license, he asked where the nearest cash machine was. They told him, down the street, right at the next lights, left at the next street, there's a place right there. Which sound like reasonable direction until you discover that those lights were two miles away.

I can't even imagine. I rely on being in a city. Every time I lived somewhere isolated, by distance, time, and/or money, I cracked around the edges. Depression set in, and endless baking. (Beware if I'm ever making continual batches of cookies. It's my cry for help.) Getting out was like taking a breath, as monumental as the discovery of a new continent. Moving back to Vancouver saved me every time, though at least one relationship didn't survive. I didn't feel alive when I was trapped, or sane or healthy or reasonable. My entire world had become the two rooms I lived in, became my perpetual anger at escapism, became awful and vapid and hell.

Funny, going to bed considering that, when my recent trip back east has left me feeling saved again, but this time from Vancouver.

Los Angeles bans new fast food restaurants in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

Video: dinosaur on the loose in the L.A. Museum of Natural History.

It seems I left a shoe behind in Winnipeg. At first I thought, no, it must be here somewhere, but I have over-turned my entire apartment and I am still missing one shoe.

And now it's raining. And all I have are sandals.

Bah.

Until I double-checked our tickets tonight to see exactly when our stop-overs are, David and I had mistaken our departure for Friday morning, not tomorrow morning.

Lucky thing I checked. Sort of.

Now, very suddenly, we only have seven hours to pack and get to the bus station...




Also, for the record, our stop-overs are:

Calgary, Sept 18, 10:45 pm
Regina, Sept 19, 10:30 am
Winnipeg, Sept 19, 9:40 pm
Thunder Bay, Sept 20, 7:55 am
Sudbury, Sept 20, 11:50 pm
Ottawa, Sept 21, 7:05 am

We arrive in Montreal Sept 21, at 10:20 am.

Got friends any of those places, send them down to the bus-station.