US$80 billion!

just 3 days from the planned election in iraq, another 80 B. has been requested by bush. for a grad total of oh, around $300 billion on this 'war on terror'. let's see - just $427 billion in the red this year. so the total US debt is somewhere around $7.6 trillion! but that's okay - sage congress has agreed that it must be limited to $8.18 trillion. (see for yourself how much the us owes abroad - eg- >$1 trillion to foreign banks - by downloading the US treasury dept's 'international financial statistics')

how, i wonder, do the struggling masses of our little world feel about this, as they scrape together from their meagre coffers what they can to service their debts to the rich?

As per Nader's people:

Today, Africa’s debt to the IMF and WB stands at over $300 billion...$15 billion is transferred yearly from the poorest countries in Africa and the world to the richest countries in the form of interest payments.

when is enough enough?

speaking of not adding up, how is it that iraq gets to pay for it's own reconstruction? (and who's gonna get paid?)

peace ?

if you get through this post, there's fine phono at the finish

and being a wednesday evening, i sit electrified by the hum of my heart and the flash of black and white in my mind's eye: chasing that ball keeps the air moving through me, and a smile beneath my brow.

awoke, bathed by my inferno, to the tighty-whitied figure of the newly minted master, and we hastily departed to enter the (blessed) cold that would lead us to goaty commie goodness. and then i sat, immersed in words about words, with tea that got cold, and my eyes surely bright, till the sun was high.

spoke (always a blur) to my crazy(est) friend - d, who will build a world, who taught me to give life and then a hot-oven death to yeast, who once made my heart beat a little faster. he's crossed back to the coast that made him, and i'm pleased to be anticipating a visit soon. these limestoned streets feel emptier without his big hair, wild eyes, and generous smile. and i'd like to tell him all about all sorts of things - he'll like the forays into ancient times, and the thunder of 5,000 years of the written world, and he'll indulge my half-cocked conjecture on the meaning of it all today.

spoke to the other crazy: sleepy, ice explorer, acrobat among cons(on)ants, who dazzles me with his love of life-close-to-death-worth-living. but he was tired: "bonne nuit."

and then when all i wanted was to speak to you (me?), another call, that i'd rather have left for the machine with the blinking red light. sometimes the faster blinking ("i'm full!") is more satisfying than the exchange of words. i'm probably being someone else - for why else would such a thing be true?

highly recommended by master bull: morning becomes eclectic, fine musical treats.

a sucker for punishment?

i am one of those people for whom silences are weightier than words. things unsaid posses a flavour much like iron - sharp, but lingering.

sensing the unsaid, feeling betrayed by censorship. i refuse to accuse, too proud to enquire aloud.

i can't ever accept that it's best not to know. sometimes it's just not possible.

it is now no longer monday,

but only just. and i am completely spent (nor very well hydrated, to boot!)

5 hours of interviewing/meetings after my day's adventures. and just yesterday i was wandering around thinking how glad i am to be involved in some concrete things to keep me from solely inhabiting a world of theory & conjecture. right now i'd take dreamy ephemera over do-able in a heartbeat.

sweet sleep, warm bed, dark world.

today is a day

for wearing nothing under your new black shawl. or under your favourite visor. or nothing but your boots. or nothing nothing punto.

i like spencer's views, and his naked world.

in freedom's cause

in four years i will be somewhere
else

in two and two years i will be something
new

in 48 months i can wish
for change

america, where are you going:
four more years?

bright light, long shadows

facing the lake
exhaling through
membranous fissures

for physicists:

my question to you, oh silent reader:

Is there such a thing as atomic memory? That is, imagine two like atoms, each having just experienced different arrivals (perhaps having passed through different electrical or gravitational fields, etc.). Now expose each to a 'same' experience. Might they, all things but for their past paths, respond differently to said stimulus?

this is important. gotta get an answer. a (limestown) beer for the answer?

earth clouds reach for
their sisters in the sky
rising from water

i faced the ice, head on.

we tore around the surface of the lake, sticks in hand, chasing a ball. we crashed into one another, and dissolved into puddles of laughter as the wind whipped the tears from our faces. broomball on a lake is something no-one should miss. frozen lakes inhabited by large numbers of people are wonderful - the creaking and cracking of the ice seems less frightening (when you'll all go down together); the desolate loneliness sublimates with populated warmth.

i discovered that i am getting old, but that i can still play well with folk a decade (!) younger.

and i got to visit perth.

splat

white bloom of salt
creeps up black leather boots
there they stand in the hall



the bamboo forest hoovered and rearranged to make tidy the space-that-ben-will-fill. i like fish. they don't say too much, and that's alright with me. always water-dancing (i should be so lucky!)

a pot of green tea at the ready. i should do a little work on reading-words-literacy and wealth-health, while i wait for the voices at the other end to speak.

exploring self (blogcredo?)

i've felt safe and smug in the certainty that by revealing only tidbits, guarding self via the veiled blogsona, i could preserve/protect myself from the irreversibility of exposure. but i shouldn't forget that the stories we don't tell are as revealing about us as those that we do.

in a fit of inspired self-discovery (actually, just curiosity), i took (yet another) personality test. today, i too am an INTP. maybe that's why i like 'consuming' all things tudor.

"...pragmatic about the present, skeptical about the future, solipsistic about the past, and their preferred time and place are the interval and the intersection..."

these things are always funny to me. mais aussi intéréssant - to see how one matches, or doesn't match (or doesn't want to recognize that one matches) one's description.

and how exhilarating (and deflating?) to discover just how predictable even my eccentricities are! (see: "often drawn to dissonance"!!!!)

i slipped went boom

the world is a shimmery slick soon-to-be-glistening-under-the-lamplight kind of place. i slipped on the shear ice and landed on m'arm. someone kindly insisted on tenderly tensoring it up for me, and i was too touched to refuse. so here i sit, wondering what to do with this arm of mine when it's soccering time in less than two hours. maybe it'll be a fine excuse for thumping people with it when they get in my way.

meet my new adoptee, benyamin - stroke him real tender-like. he won't mind.

parkour of an urban adventure

oral

i think my mouth was feeling a bit sexy. and so i fed it:

a mangrus (citrussy mango). mangoes are the plant world's answer to steamy, passionate warm-blooded coupling. slippery, pungent-almost-funky. i always feel, as i wipe her juices from my chin, that i've done something a little naughty with my mango.

and then a firm-boiled egg. not hard, not soft, but hard enough to hold together when i popped the whole thing into my mouth, and soft enough to explode yellow goo onto my tongue-teeth-lips when my mouth closed around it.

and now i feel fantastic.

can you spot the mushroom?

here are birches
from the forest
where you live

squander

i plan to squander away the rest of this snow-filled day. warm in my too-warm bed, watching documentaries and films from the library. maybe i'll drink tea. maybe i'll finally finish that article i've half-written on needing to climb into bed with the enemy to get shit done in guyana. maybe i'll see if i can smash a little hole in the surface of the lake for to bury my 2 dearly departed. maybe i'll swing a little in my hammock. i like squander, and i'm off to a good start: i sat with roger and had tea and yoghurt and looked at pictures of his beautiful boyfriend and beautiful cousins. i've already played with make-up - stuff i'd found as i was procrasturbating in the cupboards yesterday - and surprised myself by actually enjoying it (!). i've tried taking a few pictures of myself (hard to do). i have a strong desire not put on any clothes at all today, but there are those fish to deal with. later. until then, i'll keep frolicking in the nude.

put the metal to the petal

ha. hahahah. haha. ha. ha.

done and done. like loosing my virginity. only this i get to keep.

when love feels over, remember air

your love is yours, just like breath. pumping in and out, but sometimes you barely notice.

sometimes you get to breathe with someone else's air inside (try it for really sometime - it's fun chanter à deux this way - impress all your friends with team-resonant-liplocked-lovesongs).

and sometimes the wind gets sucked out of you, and you're left alone, gasping.

just remember to breathe. your love is yours. and there is more.

did i happen to mention...

Desire
Where true Love burns Desire is Love's pure flame;
It is the reflex of our earthly frame,
That takes its meaning from the nobler part,
And but translates the language of the heart.

ah,stc. like dhlawrence's lusty ladies, i've always loved your words.

rebirths

so there's a camera in my life now. not that there haven't been before. but this time it'll all be different... this time things will work out. i can feel it.

and today i went out into the world, and tentatively pulled the trigger a few times. but i'm only ready to reveal little bits of the nest for now.



even if my fish are dying (damn), i feel inside that little pitty patter of excitement. today, for instance, i decided (unoriginal, but fun) that i should gather cameras and distribute a roll of film each to 20 other professional transformees that they might go out into the world and capture for us little bits of what it means to become somebody new. it's a funny thing, this rebirth. i'm afraid of killing her, though. the unprofessional. i know that birthrequiresdeathrequiresbirthrequiresdeath, but i don't like letting go of ephemeral things, like my pre-professional identity. ah, but these are words for another bloggy page.




tomorrow is une journée de liberté! and a very special adventure awaits me. put the metal to the petal, and a little taste of pain (no shame)...

the nest

lovin' lomo

family - it hardly seems fair

since i didn't choose them, i'm that much harder on them.

but did i ever choose a friend?

(yes. yes yes yes. no?)


maybe i'm just too canadian, preferring to define myself by what i am not (and fending off the accusations that i might be... like them - seems it's taking more than 2 years of solid indoctrination to accept my professional transformation...)

libations

sure do likes the drinkies. phew. it's a family thing, it seems.

and the giant libation that swept away half the world. what to make of this thing. maybe there's nothing to make of it at all.

but i can't help looking for significance. all i can find, though, is a surprising little knot of resignation, and some uncharacteristic pessimism: that the world will only see worse and worse. more people, and the globe in revolt, and no way out of misery for the masses. someone's idea of perspective.

tonight, on the bus, as is usually the way, blackness and speeding lights led to ponderings... i'd done some time at the big ol' mall in the heart of toronto this morning, and had needed to escape. having finally left the wormy-womb of the city, i could look back and shudder. what can possibly come of our globalizing drive to consume? imagine 10, 12, 15 billion people consuming even the small fraction of what we do that will be allowed. how how? but then i got to thinking (ha!) about what to do - how to redefine conceptions of hapiness, success, so that people might a) actually get there and b) do so without engendering the peril of the people. no answers, but at least a questions, and the sense of possibility, which is something to hang on to at the start of a new year.

(like our lovingly created piñata-effigy hung from his tree-bound cord as k-w's kiddies and growed-ups alike took their joyous whacks at the treasure-filled head of gwb - HAPPY NEW YEAR to all, and to all a good night!) - i'll try to find a picky-ture, i will!