Afflatus on a red red minibus full of mindplay:: 3:12am 30.11.05

Cellophane. After three cigarettes and one cup of white coco, I am thinking about cellophane. Who knew nicotine could be so trippy. There are countless hours of studying ahead of me and I still don’t know where to start. I have substituted food for the silent afterhours of useless staring into knots of scribbled black ink on Hilroy lined paper. I would like this mould of cellophane to understand, to resonate at the same level but it’s useless, it’s too much to ask, it’s senseless. I just want to feel your blinking neurons. Clear out the machine. There are dripping digits, wisping willows, slippery sunshine and your are there to catch me. I just want to feel blood rushing to the fingertips. Farting bells blinking from your bloody lips.

Silence. Giggles against the opposite wall. And the chaotic light shining from the desklamp makes me seek the stares of faceless strangers. You are there and I am here. And there is nothing like the vibrating pieces of mirror dancing between us. Silent retreat. You hear me. And I am stuck in a hole as the hole sucks the whole universe into pores that ooze hours-of-fucking sweat. At this moment, I hear nothing but the crackling noises of ingested calories morphing into fatty streaks, soon lining some inner walls, then smearing onto jiggly yellow rolls. Roll roll roll rotund rolling tonne. The masses dislike you. "We are getting impatient" armed with forks and knives,the masses want their medium.You say, "the medium is not the massage, let them eat cake". I ask now: what is the medium of the masses?

The breath of the morning, I keep forgetting.The smell of the warm summer air.

Dearest Jenny

Down with girls. It seems like they walk through life tinged with Pink Floyd and rock and roll and I seem to be stuck with the Beach Boys and other absurdities. I have given up on them many times before and I shall keep doing so. Dramatic statements with no actions to back them up are kind of my thing. I seek out advice from others but all they give me are suggestions of tugboats and arson. There is only one Dr. Love, but she is far away and lovingly foolish.

I wish I could run marathons. They seem to be therapeutic. Tearing up my insides and destroying my myosin is equivalent to several gallons of ambrosia. The gold kind. However I have settled for lazy bicycling in a dusty, damp gym, while everyone glances at the girl with the tight pants and bouncy hair. Her name is Ynes. No more self-pity. It’s time for dreams and hopes that make me laugh.

Let’s be neurosurgeons. I can operate on you and you on me. Tweak the frontal lobes and trim the temporal ones. Enhance creativity and inhibit inhibitions. We can dream up new colours every night. Green-purple salsa, blue-black tango, scented pink, literate rainbow. Colours that dance without partners, colours that smell and colours that write lymerics. However, you will have to be patient with me for you shall be much better than I.

Let’s travel the world seeking carnivals. Ferris wheels in Colombia are so much better. The poetic Colombian air sparkles with genius and the after effects of José Arcadio Buendía’s copious use of the philosophers stone. Also, we can throw fiery insults all the way to Buenos Aires, and scorch those multi-coloured houses with our western idiosyncrasies. We can use stilts to step over that giant Chinese wall, spitting on Mao and cheering for Sun Tzu. We can show up at executions and scream cries of hate for honest murderers, then tattoo existentialist genius all over our broken bodies. We can let Russian bulls chase us through St. Petersburg, then escape through giant vagina’s, plastic though they may be. History shall be kind to us for we shall make it. Now that I have dropped all the references I care to drop I shall try to spontaneously create.

It hasn’t snowed yet. Fuck global warming. Rain makes my hair curly and mat. Snow makes my soul straighten and shine. Kingston is full of garbage and students; we need snow to cover up them both. Then when spring comes we can discover the beautiful remains, like sea shells under a receding tide. I miss your rants on your blog, they are getting sporadically infrequent (redundancy is great), I wish I had more jenny in my days, jenny’s are better than ice cream and akin to pizza. I tried to create but I think I spontaneously failed.

On a serious note. My brother is spiraling into paranoia and it has me startled and troubled. He has seen doctors and receives prescriptions but he cannot take them because they would ruin him. University seems not be for him, even though he is the definition of a bourgeois intellectual. Please send wisdom. I shall see your dreams in mine, and look forward to singing along even though the words are above and beyond my simple subconscious.

Sincerement and drunkenly

David Skogstad-Scotch-Lincoln-Churchill Stubbs

*****************************************
My dear David,

There are Djinns swirling and swarming around me demanding decisions when all I manage to spit out are indecisions.

I see you have once again given up on girls. But curves and short skirts will soon lull you back, dull your senses and suck the logic out of you. It’s one of the only certainties we’ll obtain from our brief existences. This, time and death. Down with certainties.

But if you’re quoting Pink Floyd for love advice, you’re heading down into some damned deep dark crater of the moon.

Hear for yourself: One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.

You are silly to listen to me. I relinquish my role as Dr. Love since all I have done was build rules on lies and fear. All I dare to opt for are lovers I don’t have to love, half-written characters, the Cyranos without the nose, the Twains without the wit. All that remains of the past are inches of a radiohead crush, ounces of a heroin addict and sprinkles of an (failed) artist to be. And I’m at it again, trying to create connections through differences like the foolish fool that I am. (And we all know I am moon-dust compared to King Lear’s fool). When bitter girls named Nazlee point out the realistic failure of such enterprise, I get infuriated and I throw in my rebuttal but after many hours of Morpheus, I can only realize the idiocy of giving wind some kind of solidity. Meanwhile, I will still touch pores as it dulls the neurons; the endless inquisitions and indecisions.

You are crazy. You and your silly neurosurgeon dream. If I put myself through any more years of schooling, I will cut myself into little pieces. It’s ludicrous how institutions geared towards learning make me hate learning so much when my lifelong passion is precisely learning. But such is life. Now don’t I sound like a middle aged fool that has plateau-ed like a bacteria culture? Such is life. Soon I will reach senescence and make even more nerdy science jokes. Except, then, I won’t realize I do. Ah, quelle vie…

I would love to travel the world again--- to sprinkle poetic genius in the air that I breathe and the light that I see. But the last true words I absorbed were Borges’, and that was a month ago. Since then, it’s been all about biochemical pathways, immunological assays, retroviral vector design and 3-D representations of MHC class I protein molecules. I still fondle words once in a while, but not enough to keep me composed and to shield off the intensely competitive atmosphere of my program. I believe I terrorize people with an overabundance of energy and my sporadic ramblings on all and nothing. But I have a dream that the weirdness is contagious. Soon, the whole world will be hyper, non-sensical and dance naked to 80’s LP records.

It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas here in Montreal. I still love the sound of freshly fallen snow packing underneath my shoes. And I still love snowflakes slowly melting on my oddly freckled Chinese cheeks. Kingston is full of garbage students and you should be here enjoying the silent collapse of condensed water. Here, in Montreal, the lights are shining.

Find yourself three wise men and a virgin.

The words are not flowing today my friend. And I realize they haven’t been in quite a while. The blog is drying, the mind is trying, but to no avail. I hope your brother feels better. Bourgeois intellectuals need time to recharge. How do I know that one. Beats me and a handful of sarcasm.

The ever so Ynès Jenny

"After a while, you just want to touch pores with someone."

Somehow, in between differences, you always catch surprising similarities.

It is always weird building a relationship with a complete stranger. Up until now, your lives run completely parallel to each other, a game versus time: the there, existence, yet here, non existent. Then collisions happen and you are thrown into another life and the lives of others; and suddenly you feel like a shy young girl in a tiny blue dress and a puny white apron sipping wine at a mad tea party.

It makes you realize that you are never running on a thin time line on your own. Everything happens at once, just not at the same place until it is the same place. En même temps. Clap your hands darling. C’est élémentaire, mes chers camarades.

Photo source: My Poor Marchettie Doll. By an artist on deviantart.com. I forgot her name though. Sorry!

I hate the possibility that you are out there somewhere, between torn pages and broken records. Beyond the emptiness and the emptiness belongs.

I hate that maybe it is the reason I can't entirely enjoy the pleasure of real flesh, the tender caresses of real bodies, the minutes and hours of real time.

I hate the possibility of never ending possibilities.

**********

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

Dark Pines Under Water- Gwendolyn MacEwen