"girl you must have the gracefulness of a donkey"...my favourite words this week...

aside from "last crossing" by guy vanderheaeaeagheaehge, which i'm really loving the feel of, come from the silver hearts new album "dear stranger".

last real poet
'she said i'm the last real poet in town
and i'm leaving
and i'm sure to become somebody
somewhere else'

all for you
'you know evey man must work
and the day is long and cruel
see the blisters on my hands
i've worked the whole day through
but i'm not feeling any pain
cuz my hands are holding you
and when the day is done
i'm coming home to you'

whiskey blind
'girl you must have the gracefulness of a donkey
one dance with you and whole world's upside down
that's ok i still got the honky-tonky
still got enough beer to go for one more round
so hand me down that bottle
i've got a lot of trouble on my mind
before i'm seeing double
please take the keys
i'm going whiskey blind
and i can't stand to have you see me crying'

last days of chez nous
'you know i still love the way you sing
but i do believe that is the only thing
nothing ever came from trying to seperate sand from glue
we used to pick at hymns together
now its scabs
let's pack it up and get a tattoo
oh i know
that love don't last forever
even if you make it walk around in sunday clothes
and folks don't stay together
so they can keep smelling like a rose
i can play with you forever
and i'd never tire of the oo-wah-oo's
any song we sing together is a tonic
for the battles and the blues'

(there was even a zeugma in that last one. who can find it?)

the light on the lake when i step off the streetcar...

one of the things i love about the king streetcar is stepping off of it, coming home from work. my stop is along that stretch of king west where the street runs right along the rail lines beside the gardiner. the houses stop on the south side of the street just before my stop and the view of the lake opens right up, and the light at the end of the day on the lake is gorgeous. some days i can convince myself that i can see the other side it seems so clear. or maybe i can just see farther along the north western shore...see more than etobicoke and hamilton...i'm not sure what's past hamilton along there, but i could make it out tonight.
tonight there was a big freighter out on the lake too. first one i've seen this season, although i'm sure there have been plenty. it's kinda something. i don't know why though cuz those freighters aren't exactly pretty... oh well. i don't really need to understand it. the light was so amazing tonight too. and the colour it brought out of the sky and the lake...
i kinda wish i was the kind of person who would stop to look longer at the water, maybe go down to the shore and stare meditatively or something, setting myself on a rock or a log or leaning on a railing or a tree...
we went down one night last summer with a blanket and a bottle of wine. that was real nice. it's a puzzle why we don't do it more...
this past week has been a study of different colours and states of water on the lake, something i've taken to noting to myself i guess. even on the rainy gray days it was pretty. just different. hmm...

jesus was a zombie...

so we were watching "bones" tonight...it's not brilliant i admit, but it's reasonable i guess. good dinner tv. and tonight it was a little bit special. bones and booth were driving through new orleans, discussing the merits of voodoo as religion - booth skeptical, bones anthropologically engaged:

bones - there's nothing more outrageous about voodoo than catholicism
booth - yeah except for the zombies
bones - well jesus rose from the dead...

as a recovering catholic...that was special.

home from basketball...beers...tired...hmmm...

tuesday night. 11:30pm. i am home from basketball. and i am drinking...oops...finishing my first beer. an export if you're wondering. i got a soft spot for the export really...or at least some sorta pseudo-anti-bourgeois...yeah it's bullshit. i just kinda like it. so there you fancy pants's. or something...
basketball was pretty awesome tonight actually. i wasn't looking for my shot so much cuz i was seeing the court really well and i threw some wicked steve nash passes - mark got a full court bullet that he dropped in behind all the defenders, gary got a sweet little drop off down low, same with saman, and i posted up long enough for boyd to cut hard to the hoop and fed him a perfect bounce pass right in stride and right into his hands on the way up to the basket... not that i didn't hit my share of hot shots...i was finishing around the basket with _my left_ all night, and dropped this great shot while getting hit. it was pretty cool. you'll just have to trust me.
we had a really nice weekend all round. friday night brook and mark and i went to the raptors game - first time just the 3 of us got to hang out for a long time. and it was a lot of fun. the game was kinda silly but also a lot of fun. the beers after the game were totally great too. saturday night was dinner with sarah's mom who cooks a mean turkey. it was just really great. and sunday we went to cambridge to visit my mom. first though we saw my grandparents and it was maybe the best visit we've had in about a year. my nan's got a new doctor who has completely straightened out her meds...by taking most of them away or drastically reducing them. and she's so much more alert and present now. we had such a good visit with them. they gave us our wedding present already. a whole lot of money. much more than i ever expected. it was very touching. made my heart kinda swell up...
and it was a good visit with my family too.
oh boy...i thought i had so much to say but i'm winding down real fast. i think i'll have to leave something to talk about some other time. good night.

more from "plowing the dark"

about william butler yeats
"...First of all you have to understand that the man was out of his fucking mind. Which is to say Irish. The country doesn't leave you much choice. He more or less had to look for another place to live.
--Mad Ireland hurt Yeats into poetry?
Yeah, actually... The man never found a place where he could put down and live in good conscience. A place where heart and head could sit at the same table. That was his Byzantium fantasy..."

this quote might be my favourite

"-Why is the math so hard?
--Which math?
-Perspective. Proportion. Depth
--Perspective? Perspective is easy. Just the visual cone turned inside out. Once the Italians got wind of Arab optics, the whole globe was up for grabs.
-Not that perspective, she said, harsh enough to surprise him. But he was alongside her in a flash. The most difficult man she knew was also among the smartest.
--Oh. Perspective. Knowing where you are?
She nodded. He scribbled with a number two pencil on a pad of blank canary legal paper. He drew her diagrams, space's irrefutable proof.
--If being alive were a single problem in long division - how to divide infinity by threescore and ten - we'd have a reasonable chance of solving existence. But the solution for seventy years misses catastrophically for thirty, because teh numerator is infinite. And those solutions, in turn, look nothing like the quotient for this year, this fiscal quarter, or today, let alone the next thirty minutes.
-We live between our next heartbeat and forever
--That's it. we are supposed to solve all the conflicting quotients at once. That is what makes...the math so hard."

that part about living between our next heartbeat and forever...i'd like to try to fit that into our wedding vows maybe...

so i've finished 'plowing the dark'... there's a lot going on in that book, and even though i wasn't thrilled with a couple parts it's still some heavy shit. definitely i recommend it, even if sarah didn't actually read it for class like she was supposed to...

small excerpt

"An architect, half German, at least by family tradition, a man for whom the whole human race was a perpetual source of stress, whose Moses complex led him through a lifelong quest for peace that started with biofeedback and wended its way through est, yoga, crystals, acupressure, acupuncture, shiatsu, Rolfing, Alexander technique, ... and finally Prozac, sat paralysed, reeling in the real-time feed issuing from his workstation screen. Now and then, condemned to to participate, teh architect cried out to no one in particular, 'Oh god. This can't be happening. I can't process this. What in the hell is all this supposed to mean? What do these people think they're doing?'
This man's disheveled cellmate, an American who'd made it through the last twenty years on force of habit alone, a man whose Cold War existence came down to little more than the private contrition of forward motion, at last had to answer: 'God only knows what they think they're doing. But they seem to hitting that concrete wall with sledgehammers.'"



-Simon I think you'd like this book. lots of programming humour. although i think adam and michelle and nicole and jeff and kendra and ....there are reasons why i think this book should appeal to lots of folks actually...

plowing the dark

yup that's what i'm reading...(by richard powers) it's part of one of sarah's courses and she didn't actually finish it.
actually i'm on my lunch break and i had to stop reading cuz tears streaming down your face at work is...well...no i don't really care about that so much...it's the broken (breaking?) heart that has me worried for my performance for the rest of the afternoon...phew...yes i really really do recommend it. the book i mean. with a (melo)dramatic/epic/courageous title like that? of course i'm interested. and it's kind of our story too even though it's not quite...the eighties and nineties as historical events ...made me realize how little of substance i knew/know about tiennamin (sp?) square and the fall of the berlin wall...and those are the events in the book i remember - unlike the escalation/deterioration of lebanon and the bombings... hmm...are there history books about the eighties and nineties yet?
whatever.
tomorrow is officially one month since i started this job. yesterday was one month since my last post... not connected.
the job and the people here are really amazing. i'm very lucky actually. i don't buy into that it'll all work out/it happened for a reason shit but it makes a good story...
could be i'm overly emotional lately (and today) cuz i'm overtired. that time change thing really sucks. and then i played basketball last night - 4 on 4 for 2 hours with no subs... fucking glorious. early on i posted up and got a pass right down the heart of the lane which i turned into a pretty little baby hook shot...boyd and i hooked up on some gorgeous give and go, pass and cut and pass and drain the wide open jumpers...i also totally crashed full speed into a wall...but at least i kept the ball in bounds...ok that's enough for one lunch time.
you're all in my thoughts as i read this book and write this post.