Fiction Excerpt: Cloud Species

I've labelled myself a fiction writer in my bio - I've certainly mentioned my writing here and there - yet I have never posted any work on this blog. Why? Well, mainly for fear of publishing something which would contravene most lit journals' definition of "unpublished". How am I getting around this? Well, at least for now, I am providing an orphaned excerpt - I don't know what it belongs to, so please consider this a "work in progress". Well...maybe I do know what it belongs to, but I think it's safe to upload it, for now at least.)

Cloud Species (excerpt)

Something made the hedge in front of the porch shake, as if shook by a hand reaching out of the ground. I would've leaned forward to look closer, but I was exhausted from the previous night. There – it happened again. I could hear dry twigs cracking. The morning sun approached my feet on the floor of the porch, the volume of civilization rising slowly around me: coffee grinders, piano lessons, radios. Yet I couldn't see a soul. I was alone, focused on the hedge, curious what made it move. I didn't want the sun to touch me yet.

She left a newspaper behind but I didn't touch it. It was sitting in the sun. She must have been up earlier than me. Perhaps she'd been up all night until now? I didn't want her gifts and I didn't want the troubles of the world to make rain from the cloudy anger hanging in my head. I sat brooding in a Muskoka chair asking myself what exactly I'd expected to have happened the night before, instead of what did.

It was a robin. It ran out from the hedge onto the yard, took one look at me, head cocked to the side, momentarily frozen. It was hunting. It seemed more threatening than I could be, sitting staring at it helplessly, drinking coffee like it was an antidote for paralysis.

I asked myself why I'd gone to bed so early. Why before then I'd drank so much, so quickly. Why I'd bothered making the trip if I was so exhausted in the first place. I couldn't answer any of it. I wasn't allowing myself to. It was like staring at long division on a chalkboard: I could see the numbers but didn't want to understand where they came from.

The bird carried on with its sweep of the yard, unconcerned by my presence. The sunlight crept closer to my feet, my head was stuffed with thoughts, a jumble of unconnected ideas which became words scribbled over each other, my coffee cup was empty and I knew I'd have to creep up the stairs in order to get more. Past her, sleeping. Sleeping, I hoped, alone.

Conversations With Abandoned Chairs

I'm not sure why it hasn't occurred to me to post this here yet, but perhaps this gives an indication of how stretched my resources are at the moment. Over the last year, whenever I've come across an abandoned chair on the side of the road, I've taken a picture: a photo which does the abandoned chair justice. This has grown into a small collection of photos (with people submitting their own finds recently). I thought I would share. You can see the collection on my (ugh) Flickr site - just follow this link to see the set Conversations With Abandoned Chairs.

Cellphoto: Condo Fire

[Sent via BlackBerry]

The Hammer (pt. 1)

When I rented a car and went to Brantford/Onondaga to do some reminiscing and photo-taking, I knew that Hamilton was also, ultimately, on my to-do list.

The aim of these trips is not preconceived. This makes it doubly hard to explain to others (friends, strangers, and loved ones) what exactly the hell I'm planning to do. "Taking pictures and stuff." I'll say - that's certainly no lie, but of course there's more to it. The thing about Zen is this: the second you begin to describe it, it disappears. And so - Art & Zen being the same - there's always a scaffolding I build around my explanation for these trips. It's the same scaffolding I use when I go out writing, or to take photos locally: a vague (yet not untrue) reason which allows me to unspoil the inspiration (which itself needs to be vague) while preventing others from thinking I've lost my mind. I'm not uncomplicated.

Hamilton, being a place of the past for me, exists in patches of haze - this isn't to say I did a lot of drinking or drugs when it was a destination, and yet it seems that way: murky. Of course, a good chunk of that time is best forgotten now. The downtown seems more hollowed-out than it did before, with the exception of Gore Park which to this day reminds me what a good idea it is to have spacious downtown promenades.

It was a precursory destination. First, with an ill-fated relationship which spawned a series of bad decisions which I owe to naivety. I am not alone in stating that I owe many mistakes in my 20s to naivety. It all culminated in a brief tenancy at an old apartment building north of St. Joseph's hospital. In so many ways, it was one of the more excruciating periods in my life - I think the haze I mentioned previously is partially there to protect me from looking too closely at things like this.

The second identity Hamilton had for me happened a few years later when, staying with relatives in Burlington while I studied at college, it became a "big city" to escape to. Toronto was bigger, of course, but it was too far to drive to just to have kicks. Hamilton was perfect and in the early 90s had a great nighttime scene in and around Hess Village. My hang-out was the Bauhaus Café, which sadly (though not surprisingly) no longer exists.

Walking around there now, it seems as if parts of it just gave up. People don't even want to advertise on billboards. To be fair, I shouldn't make any judgments without going there again, but on a Friday night - I'm afraid however that these judgments will only skew worse if I do.

Perhaps I have a better understanding of the haze now: it's there to protect my feelings, it's there to protect the city from the cold light of an unsympathetic audience.

Cahill's Probability: the inexplicable yet consistent > (greater-than) 50% chance that the label you attempt to read will be showing the French side.

Imagine walking into an empty room.

There is a baseball bat on the ground.
Sitting above it is a lead crystal vase atop a waist-height pedestal.
Written in large letters on the vase are the words: HIT ME.


(This is what enters my mind when I encounter self-righteousness.)

Honesty, After Dark

A continuous problem I have throughout the social media spectrum, the main culprits being Facebook and Twitter, is that - once you get to the point where you have your sister's husband as your "friend", once the guy you barely talked to in high-school is "following" you - you are no longer able to be, well, honest anymore. You cannot post as a status update "Gary is an asshole" without, ultimately, answering to Gary (or his pot-smoking live-in partner, or your co-workers who are largely idiots). You can't even be vague: "Some guy I know is being an asshole.". People will know who you're talking about - context leaves clues people can find. Gary will get mad and want answers.

Oh, you can be honest, alright. You can lay it on the table all you want, but with the inevitable consequence of offending people and getting in trouble for it. In other words, there's nowhere to hide online. This is why I wish there were Bizarro social media sites like, say, Facebook After Dark and Undercover Twitter. Places where you can say the things you really want to say about the people you're "friends" with, the people you "follow", without fear of recrimination. I think we would all be happier as a result.

You reading this, Gary?

(P.S. There is no "Gary", in case anyone is wondering. I don't really have co-workers either) - ed

Mobile: March 9, 2010 - Walking

Photo: March 10, 2010 @ 6:45am - Nassau & Spadina

Dreams

(Over on Ward Six, there was a post about dreams and the use of dreams in one's writing. This is my response/non-response to that post.)

Dreams, without exploding into a cavalcade of pet-theories, feed our experiences back to us as deconstructed information. Familiar objects and people are shuffled, perhaps not randomly, and re-proposed to us. As reality.

I am haunted by dreams still. Dreams I had when I was a child. Nightmares. Fantasies. No wonder. When you are growing up, the easel upon which your dreams are painted is like an IMAX screen: massive, all-encompassing, as close to real as it gets. As you get older, as you obtain experience, as your field of vision and reason begins to vibrate independently - in other words, as you become an individual - dreams cease to take centre stage. They exist and appear just as often as before, but for some reason their weight and impact is lessened.

And yet, a handful of times every year (it's so hard to pin-down because they disappear into the ether like clear helium balloons) I will have a dream which haunts me throughout the morning (if not the day). It is those dreams I try to write down. Some I make into short stories as realities. Some, I incorporate into long fiction as, well, dreams.

Dreams are language. They vex interpretation, yet I feel there is nothing arbitrary about their construct. I fancy: somewhere in our sleeping minds an architect awakens and sorts through our lives, our goals and fears, our friends and enemies, our passions and hatred. This architect then casts a mold: fluid, non-dimensional, mantic. And it is this we are exposed to in our vulnerable slumber.

We wake up and try, often in vain, to make sense of it. And yet I think the most sense we will ever make of our dreams is by not interpreting them at all but allowing them to stand on their own. Allow them to stand as imponderable totems, sculpted by a subconscious architect: haunting, monolithic riddles. They represent the need for non-linearity in our lives.