8.30.2005

Sweet Montreal tomorrow. And oh those endless streets will be conquered.
There will be museum and gallery exploring that will end in more last minute articles for Le Délit.

U2 promises to be the most over-achieving year of all. Resolution, yet again, to get over my pathetic low self-esteem issues.

And the memorable moments of Toronto August 2005 are...

Some 90 billion light years away from us there are quasars.
Chains wrapped around one thing and another
Broken one by one with the passage of time
Tequila Bookworm 490 Queen St. W.
Sleeping with the passing minutes.
Pool parties like we were teenagers.
A teenage-radiohead-crush more devastatingly beautiful than memories.
Visiting the old bio teacher and listening to his everlasting energy.



Coquelicot-Luca Patrone

8.23.2005

DSS :: JYW is to Weird :: Weirder

I love waking up at noon. I think I now have eye bags big enough to store mount everest. Sushi at Yorkville is still the best.
I was reminded of the following correspondance yesterday. I smiled.
I laughed when someone mistook my writing for that of an intimidating 6 feet tall east-european girl. I like irony. Most of the time.
It's good to have conversations in the same parks that evoke paperbagged alcohol from a few years back.

Oh, and I almost forgot to add: "You will regret not taking that brown-haired sexy-red-lipped sexpert's advice!!!!(She probably was a virgin in disguise anyways.)"

____________________
Sometime in June:

This summer promises to be empty and passionless, and for that I am sad. Everything I do is supposed to be geared toward alkenes, and polymerases, and electric fields, and three paragraphed essays that make a cookie cutter look like something out of Dali’s dopamine induced imagination. All I ever wanted was to laugh in the sun with chocolate falling all around and my fat little children squealing around my wife’s never ending legs. You spoke beautifully at my wedding, but it was in Chinese so I only understood the swear words.
Never forget to breathe. You were bored, so I have come up with a list of activities, you must do every one.

- Climb the Eiffel tower citing Baudelaire with each step.
- Never stop screaming
- Invent an 11th commandment
- Make vodka vice president of Russia
- Bring back Viking raids
- Tell a really powerfull wizard his magical sigils took like lucky charms

That should keep you busy for awhile, I’m not sure if you can do any of these in china, but they seem like a helpful non militant people so I would bet you can kick some ass into shape and get things done. I wonder if you still wear the black, and if it has melted you into some kind of jenny jelly, which I am sure would go well with sarcasm and laughter. I rarely speak to anyone from college anymore and somehow I am not so bothered by that as I am by the fact that we have locked a bat in our basement and are waiting to see how long it takes a bat to starve… so far it has been two days.

I must go and eat and run and do all the things I do to avoid work without feeling guilty. I shall miss you when you are in china discovering and exploring and walking, but I be happy when you come back and we share a drink and a song in Montreal.

David

________________________

David dearest,

Twenty two fourteen. That is the key to the universe. They all say 42. But I tell you it’s wrong. So I’m right.

I’ve grown senile over the years, David. I listen to too much music, write too much nonsense and watch too many dreams. The sane animals out there will say it’s unhealthy, but I’ve ceased to care. I like eating sunshine dust, smelling the petals of cloud and touching warm and fuzzy memories. And I also like apologizing for my randomness. Maybe I should stop apologizing and start living. But I’m haunted by a stupid little leprechaun who comes and stabs me in the back with an Arabian dagger incrusted of pink Mongolian diamonds whenever I want to break free.

Talks of weddings and boxed personalities scare me. I run away from feelings like a startled mare. I just want to curl up inside a corner of my sub-temporal sulcus or to die a supra sensitive death due to overdose of glutamate. But I digress.

There are bells running on my fingertips as Explosions radiate onto my cochlea. There is no more truths to be heard because only the heart of a Chinese adolescent girl once heeded them. But time has eaten truth alive and truth has set time on fire. There is no truth like time.

Montreal is the city of Gods. Each night, while fulfilling my duties as a social half-tequilaed street roamer, I feel the feathery embrace of misery taking shape inside of me like the image of a red-nosed polish drunk eating grapes with a prepubescent thespian concubine.

As you worry about dissecting some more academic essays, I sit here in front of my books and bones, and I wonder if I will ever be able to grasp reality again. I have married absurdity like a cheap whore who wishes she could say No as easily as France and the Netherlands.

China is my motherland. My mother has always hated me and wished I were never born. I am an undeserving child of 5000 years of history. Did you know that women were made first out of dust? Chinese creationist myths say so. I always knew it. Breasts are too beautiful to be made to simply complement. They were an original creation.

Too bad the Viking raids have been eaten by corpulent French queens called Marie-Antoinette, and that vodka is too transparent to be president of Russia. Too bad Moses will rape me if I invented an 11th commandment stating “Thou shall not rape”. You should also know that I’ve been bound to silence for two years now and that I have shamefully lost my lust for Baudelaire on a drunken night of lethargy.

Maybe someday I’ll meet a wizard.

Meanwhile, I need to sleep.

I will write more, but today, I’m too sad to write.

Good night Dearest David.

Ynès.

8.16.2005

In four days, the world will be intoxicated by my drunken renditions of Bohemian Rhapsody.
I apologize in advance to all torontonian 2 am. street walkers (and people trying to sleep), but even they must feel some kind of happiness for me. (Besides, Naz is much louder. Go blame her.:D)

In the meanwhile, I have been struck by a writer's block. Don't they just land at the very worst possible times?
Now, let's all hold my hand while I get through this ordeal. Until then, the cosmos may have to suffer a few more crappy poems.

Un oubli de soi

Les larmes se taisent
Je n’en peux plus.
J’ai mal au cœur,
mais je me tais

parce que je ne connais que cela;

silence

et

oubli.


Converge- Jane Doe

8.12.2005


Rambo-Bad boys by Yoshitaka Amano

That year, I woke up with a rubber soul. I wrapped my feelings in aluminum foil and placed them neatly into pink Rubbermaid boxes. I froze them like a 38-year-old single female freezes her eggs, hoping that one day, they will be put to use.

I never understood why everything just became a giant blob of scar tissue. Technically speaking, there are always reasons for the comfortably numb; the usual cause and effect: a painful break up with the love of your life, death of a dear family member, an overdose of opiates. None of these applied. And even if there were reasons, I imagined that I had buried them under the Tree of Denial and forgotten about them.

It scared me that the only thing I could still feel that summer was fear. Fear that I was indifferent to dreams, my own death, a grown man’s tears.

Yesterday, I sat on a bench near that terribly rectangular reflecting pool behind the North York public library. The same bench I sat on nearly every day that year in an effort to avoid the desolate confines of the academic prison. On that seat, I have many memories with Orwell, Salinger, Malraux, Eliot, Rimbaud and some others. It was the same sunlight, the same breeze— and for once, in such a long while; time seemed to slow down just a little bit and the world around seemed to stop changing like a movie on fast forward. There was the beautiful illusion that the outside could still be static, a solid ground on which I could stand on rather than a jet plane that I can barely hold myself on to, carrying me god knows where. This made me realize how much I have changed inside. How I am able to be moved again (and perhaps too intensely) by the simple details of life.

8.11.2005

Wisdom from the Star:

Capricorn
: Significant progress will come once you simplify this illusion of complexity.

8.08.2005

Passage in progress postponed. More research needs to be done or I'd be raping the memory of Nanking. I'd never forgive myself.

Looking up some facts for my passage made me wonder: at what point do we start accepting something as truth? Do we need to go beyond the wikipedia search, news headlines, and words of someone we trust? Has it become like the proverbial three times makes a truth? Somewhere in between 3 and 12139 I suppose...---probably 42. (Why are all my conclusions lately somewhere in between? When a panda refuses to screw to save its species, you want immediate action, not compromise. It must be the lack of sleep making me so damn impatient these days. The jet lag has not yet set in and I still wake up at 3am each day. Yeah yeah.yeah. What a lame whiny excuse. fuck me. I'll use the same one explaining why I've been swearing so much since my return).

Damn it. I keep asking myself questions raised in Grade 12 IB Theory of knowledge. And I wonder if perhaps that class had been more to me than the usual cheap 20-minute-1000-word essay-right-before-class-spraying-bullshit-nearly-faster-than-I-can-type, or the pitiful attendance of 3 classes out of 46 (skipping, not marijuana, was my high school addiction), I’d have more fucking answers than I do now. But that’s another history all in itself.

Anyhow, reading my journal entries from China, I came across this one:

Nanjing July 2, 2005

I was on my toes, haggling for a pair of red fishnet stockings when a forty-year-old woman's raucous scream pierced through the cacophony of the busy street behind. There, a street width apart from me, hung a man, fingers tightly wrapped around the cold steel pole of a downtrodden building's construction grid.
And I stood there. Motionless. Waiting like a dumb wax statue. As the colours drained out of his gently convulsing body and as a purplish blue laced onto his trembling lips. And I stood there as he stared blankly ahead of him, straight at me it seemed then, while being electrocuted to death.
I stood there, behind zooming cars and the growing comotion, waiting for someone else to do something.

I didn't buy the fishnet stockings.

Thought I should at least share one event that had an immense impact on me.

News of a friend’s hasty marriage and another’s mind blowing orgy has made me contemplate del fact that the most liberating thing about my recent self is 7 seasons of Sex and the City. About Big. Long and (almost) uncut. This all topped by the nagging thoughts of X-fission, friction and how the fuck I’m going to fit 3 months worth of studying into 10 days.

God, I need to make myself cool again.

I wish the fat monk who stopped to tell me I had a “lucky” face is right. Now that I’m counting on getting lucky soon…

Acing the MCAT of course.

8.04.2005

Time has zoomed by like some clichéd scenes of a low-budget yet pretentious artsy film. Sitting solitary on an airport bench with a few red suitcases serving as protective shield, I drowned into oblivion in half-awake bliss. August 2. Plane in flames, mind on fire. No casualties. Just eight hours of waiting.

In my sleep marathon since my arrival, I sought to resume in one fateful sentence the gist of my journey. Now, a bit awake, I laugh at the silliness of it all.

In reality, perhaps things could be summed up, categorized, shelved and put away. But as always, when you feel about something, when things shake you, classifying thoughts and responses becomes as impossible as understanding jibberish induced by a few shots of vodka (a whopping one and a half in my case).

As ever, I am torn into polar perspectives and contradicting emotions. More than ever, the suffocating nomad solitude strangles my peace of mind. But I find that this time around, I feel a little bit more empowered by my rootlessness. Still lost. But grateful. Grateful to know that I am pivoting at the center of several cultures, a fucked up product of modern migration, and that, chance on my side, I will certainly circle the globe before I end up in a box. If no man-made nation is ever to be called mine; I am confidently able to call the entire world my home.