Let’s go get in a fight!

If they call it “toothpaste,” then how come it doesn’t glue your mouth shut?

I am in one of “those moods.” This afternoon I was sitting on the couch, watching the news on TV and eating a bowl of leftover Chinese food. I went to fork up a big clump of rice and it ski-jumped over the side of the bowl and scattered all over me. I looked down and started to guffaw, and then I went, “Wait a minute, I’m covered in rice.”

And on my way down to the studio tonight, Jennifer got a flat tire. I thought, “Hey, my back tire’s flat! Look at that… b’dump, b’dump, b’dump. Ha ha ha ha.” And then I went, “Wait a minute, I’ve got a fuckin’ flat tire.”

Holy crap on a crap-pole, I’m going to be on TV. The people from Zed got in touch with me and asked if I wanted to be on the programme and I said “Hell yeah.” The taping was yesterday over at the CBC television building.

On the way in, they got some nice footage of my shopping cart full of gear. We also went over to the Commons and they filmed me carving it up in the skatebowl with the shopping cart. It was rad dude.

I had spoken to a woman in Vancouver, and she told me I would be getting paid for my appearance on Zed. I asked how much and she told me and I went “Holy shit on a shit-stick, it would be my honour to perform two songs on your show.” Television is the way to go my friends.

It took all afternoon and I had to do each song six times in a row for rehearsals, camera angles and so on. It was definitely an artificial performing situation but I had fun dancing around like a fool in front of a studio audience that consisted of seven or eight silent technicians.

Afterwards I was starving so I went out to Robie Food with the TV producer and my roommate Gerry. I bought enough Chinese food to feed six people. I ended the day with a tremendous sense of well-being, after having eaten more in one sitting than I’d probably eaten on the previous three days combined. (A lot of the time when I think I’m depressed or cranky, I’m actually hungry.)

I left that place with a doggy bag big enough to feed the Lithuanian army. If you want to solve the problem of world hunger, just give all the money to musicians. They’ll make sure that everyone gets fed.

I’d like to thank Queen Elizabeth II for buying dinner for me and my friends yesterday.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is a Crown corporation. That means I was working for the Queen yesterday. Now, let me be straight up about this. I am a Royalist. I love the Queen. The fact that the Queen was paying me so handsomely to be on TV only serves to prove to me that Her Majesty rewards her loyal subjects.

I realize that it’s not very fashionable for people my age to be into the Queen. But I can’t help it. She’s the Queen! They had an old portrait of the Queen at the studio, and I looked at it for a long time. We have one in our house as well–one of the famous old photographs by Yousuf Karsh. It hangs in a place of honour in our house, with a little bunny sceptre that we’ve taped on to the glass (okay, so this might be stretching royal protocol a little bit.)

If you’re Canadian, you’re used to seeing these old portraits everywhere–in schools and post offices and so on. I went looking on the internet for old photographs of the Queen, but they were surprisingly hard to find.

The thing that always strikes me about these classic portraits is the intensity of the colour blue. In the sashes, the robes and the medals–it is a shimmering, silvery royal blue that has the intensity of a radioactive cobalt magnet. But the bluest elements of these portraits are the Queen’s eyes. They always shine forth from the photographs and capture me in their imperial radiance.

Plus when the Queen was young she was quite the hottie. Even though her regal bearing would forbid it, I still like to imagine the teenaged Elizabeth telling Johnny Rotten to fuck right off.

Holy fuck on a fuck-node… God Save The Queen.

Here’s a picture of what the new A/V t-shirts look like (sexy American woman not included):

thanks and much love to miss b of the bazima chronicles

Monday afternoon I went down to the opening at the Anna Leonowens Gallery. Graeme Patterson has an amazing setup going on in the downstairs gallery this week. He’s doing claymation, and he has the whole gallery set up as an animation studio, with elaborate sets and everything.

His work blows my mind. It’s funny and entertaining, and yet I’ve never seen claymation with such a gritty atmosphere. I’d almost have to say it’s oddly realistic. I can’t imagine how many hours must have gone into constructing that city street set.

One of the characters is a little claymation guy who pushes around a little claymation shopping cart with a synthesizer on it. Hey! “That was inspired by you,” said Graeme. Except his little dude gets to push a shopping cart up the stairs, a skill I’ve never mastered.

I tried to persuade Graeme to let me give him a track for one of his pieces, but he said he’s really been getting into writing the music. The soundtrack fits the visuals really well. By all means, go down and check out the show for yourself this week.

My NASCAD dream girl was at the opening. She’s a hot little blonde with beautiful eyes and an impossible smile. I got talking to different people, and by the time I went looking for her, she was gone.

I saw her last week at the Marquee as well. And again, I got wrapped up in a conversation with a drunk friend. I finally excused myself to go find her and uhh, do whatever it is I do. But she had left.

The solution is obvious, I’m going to have to stop talking to people.

Tuesday night I went to hard rock open mic night in Hell’s Kitchen and bootlegged a couple of the bands with my minidisk. Here’s a sample of the Heelwalkers doing “US Marine.”

~Heelwalkers – U. S. Marine [900K mp3]

That’s the soundtrack to me checking out a really cute girl. Shaved head, leather jacket, combat boots… excuse me, but would you mind being 100% my type?

On my way out, I went up to the cute girl and introduced myself and told her she was really cute and rubbed her fuzzy skull. She gave me a hug and a big smile. At the back door of the club I thought, “Why the hell am I leaving?”

But then I remembered: because it is the correct thing to do.

Tonight I’ll be performing live with Rotator on Radio Ballroom.

Radio Ballroom is North End Halifax pirate radio. I’m not sure what the range is, but it broadcasts from Fuller Terrace, around the corner from my house. It all goes down at 8PM. The frequency is 88.5FM.

I feel it first at the tips of my fingers. Then it starts moving up my right arm.

I’m lying on my back in bed and I cannot move.

Whatever it is, it feels like it has a lot of legs. Maybe it’s a spider.

I can’t even turn my head. But I force my eyeballs to move, force them to turn down and to the right. I exhale – I’d been holding my breath without realizing it.

It is a spider. And it is huge, and it’s crawling up my forearm.

My jaw tightens and I swallow. Even if I could move I don’t know if I would dare. My eyes are closed again and I feel the spider travelling up my bare biceps.

My right leg starts to shake a little bit. My arms are pinned at my sides. I am immobile as the spider brushes through the small hairs of my arm.

The spider stops at my shoulder. For a few seconds, I can’t feel anything at all. I start to wonder if the spider has crawled off me onto the pillow.

Then the spider starts moving around on my neck. Both of my legs are shaking now.

The spider makes its way up my neck. I feel one of the spider’s legs stroke my chin.

Two of the spider’s legs stroke against the bristles of my chin.

Oh my god there is a huge spider crawling on my cheek.

I hardly dare to breathe. I squeeze my lips shut for fear that it may crawl into my mouth. I’m sweating now and praying, please get this spider off my face.

I wince when I feel the spider’s legs touch my lips. It walks across my mouth and stops. I feel the weight of the spider on my upper lip, distributed evenly across its eight legs.

The spider, creature of alien geometry, has stopped at the tip of my nose.

My eyes are closed so tightly that they start tearing up. I don’t dare to swallow, or to move, or to breathe.

The spider fiddles around; it waves two of its legs around at the opening to my right nostril.

Suddenly the spider starts to force itself into my nose. I gasp and then hold my breath again. The spider wriggles inside my nose-hole. It pauses to brace itself, then pushes straight up my nostril.

This is impossible. The spider is too big to fit up my nose. And yet it moves, with a fury of activity. The spider scrunches together all eight of its legs and labours to propel itself up my nose towards my brain.

I’m sweating and I can’t move. My body feels like it’s going to explode. Every super-sensitive hair in my nostril registers horror at the presence of the insect.

The spider continues to struggle upwards, through moisture and goo, before it emerges in a warm, wet place.

Now I’m breathing hard through my mouth. I’m going to hyperventilate. I’m going to pass out and die. There is a spider inside my nasal cavity. I can feel its legs open out slightly. I can feel the spider’s body as it drags itself through the mucus inside my head.

A tiny drop of snot rolls down to the tip of my nose. I can’t even move to wipe it away. There is a spider crawling around inside me. I feel its legs. They scrabble against the moist bones of my skull as the spider travels from the right side of my face to the left.

What is it doing…. It’s scratching me. The spider’s legs are probing the back of my left eye.

My breath catches and I stare straight ahead, straight upwards at the ceiling.

The spider is slowly drawing itself against the back of my eyeball.

The spider splays itself out against the back of my left eye. Eight tiny legs dig into my eye from the inside.

I look at the wall and the ceiling. The spider is seeing through my eyeball.

I can feel it inside my head. The spider moves, it swings back and forth with the rotation of the orb. For a minute, the spider sees exactly what I see.

And then it bites me.

~ Snot Part Two:

Last night I dreamed I blew my nose, and when I looked into the tissue, there were little black spots in the goo. To my surprise I realized that some of them were moving.

I blew my nose again and a dozen fruit flies came out of my nose and flew around the room in a little cloud.

I could feel a crusty booger in one of my nostrils as well. It popped out of my nose and landed on the floor and separated into a pair of spiders.

The spiders scuttled across the rug on skinny red legs.

I started coughing and I coughed up a big piece of phlegm and when I spat it out, it was a slick wet black beetle. It ran around and around in circles at my feet.

I was thinking, “I can’t possibly be awake right now. This has to be a dream. But if it were a dream, I would be able to wake up, and I can’t wake up. That means I’m awake. This is all really happening.”

I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I had a piece of bread or something stuck between my teeth. I worked it out with my tongue and spat it out. It turned out to be a big centipede.

Bugs started pouring out of my head.

I was looking around, trying to figure out what to do. I noticed the bathtub was half-filled with water. There was a seagull sitting in there.

He was just floating there, looking around.

The seagull was the most disturbing aspect of the dream, for some reason.

~ Later on I dreamed that Motorhead were playing at the Marquee Club. I was thinking it would be cool to sing “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones, with Motorhead as my backing band.

So I went to go backstage, and when I got downstairs the bar turned into the Scotia Square food court. The cute crazy girl I kissed last night at the Marquee was sitting there. She had been sitting by herself for hours.

I should not have been there. Time invites a rewrite of these years. But history must be earned, and the first law is “Fire burns.” Laid out on the pavement like the story of my life. Memory misidentified. Blue lips barely move; I lean over to catch the last request. Yes. I will find her.

Spinoza – I Took The Dead Man’s Name [2.8 MB mp3]