Month: October 2007

On to other problems

Katie K has announced “I have solved my hair!”

She has joined the ranks of women who no longer dye their hair.  Also she has a decent haircut, which is more than I could say for me.

I am feeling very calm, although half an hour ago I was on the phone with daughter Katie and I wasn’t calm then.  She’s not enjoying breaking up with her boyfriend.  It’s been two days since she spoke with him.  I hope she gets to move back into her dad’s place on the 20th as planned.

My day yestidday

What a day
So this is how my day went yestidday, went. Up at 8 to make oatmeal and call lawyers. Get blown off a lot, no happy ending at this inn, etc. Completely forget the date with the videographer and get the independent legal advice instead from the first available lawyer down on Hastings (this to tie off last loose end on separation agreement), grab beers and finally get a proper bedside lamp. Come home and find annoyed message from videographer. Transportation “magically” occurs to the correct locale (thank you thank you); I then shoot my first Youtube video of me singing the Tapioca Song (please allow two weeks for delivery. Should be here for Halloween) in beautiful weather a la Ed Wood (permit??? We don’t need no steeenkeeng permit!) in a local park. While in prep mode for the video, lead hombre on the posse calls and demands my attendance for a meal. Grab mando and run like the hammers for the next appointment at the optician, during which I sign up for very expensive spectacles (I think I’m finally old enough to get verigray lenses and it’s the blessed progressive lenses for me now boys OMG BIFOCALS yes I am old now) and get drops put in my eyes which really make me very high – in a nasty chemically sort of way – but which allows the peeper inspecter to pronounce the eyeballs of acceptable health. I have had drops put in my eyes before but never with this result. The exam was a nightmare. I did get those free sunglasses, and did I need them. Then to a gorgeous Skytrain ride, followed by meeting up with the posse, followed by wandering around the Planetarium and enjoying being outdoors in stunning weather and finding an open unlocked public washroom in Vancouver (like the holy grail) and being on Sunset Beach at sunset while every romantic bone in my body demands to go dancing. And can’t. Then dinner at Phnom Penh, which was bloody amazing, although I could done without the sliced previously cooked and refrigerated chicken liver in the soup. Bleash. I put it to one side and doggedly kept eating. Split a Tartufo three ways for dessert. Then to a bathhouse on Hastings where we all got very clean and very sweaty, and then very clean again. The bathhouse is so unsleazy and nice that it restored my faith in humanity, and the guy running it was amazing, and I wandered back onto Hastings in an almost rapturous frame of mind. Then I got a lift to the Main Station. Took me ages to get home, the 145 bus was verkockt. Quite a day, hunh? I was supposed to crash early and who’da thunk it?  Lights out at midnight….

yesterday

For Can Con, and because it’s a great movie, and because after the Heavy Stuff I wanted a comedy, I watched the Barbarian Invasions with Jeff.  It is a great film.  I must see it again.  Also, I desired about ten times to correct the goddamned subtitles, because a couple of the times they lacked nuance and verve.
Hiking with Hunter S Thompson.

We dropped by Gadget House on the way out of Victoria, where I found out that my mother had a rubber glove full of ice in the fridge.  If you have a rubber glove full of water, tied off at the wrist, and you put it on a shelf in the freezer, once frozen it ends up looking like it has joints.  I wanted to take a picture of it, it was extremely disquieting.

Yesterday the dejunking was clothes and shoes.  It went very well; I acquired a really nifty pyjama set which is about as sexy as a hairball, but fits perfectly.

There is a LOLcats version of the Holy Bible. God is referred to throughout as “ceiling cat” (which should make any of you who know who ceiling cat is fall about laughing) and I read the first chapter of the Book of Job, which had me screaming with laughter so loud that Jeff was telling me to shut up because I was scaring the cats.  Or maybe that was another time. I do scream with laughter, it’s one of the many things about me which are childlike.

Good luck with that, Mr. Wisdom

I am sorry to report it, but you HAVE no rights left. 

All you have is the inherent laziness and slowness of bureaucracy to help you now, because your fellow citizens don’t even know what’s on the bill of rights.

In other news, European Parliament takes a cosmic whizz on Creationism.  Chances of this happening in the US and Canada.  Zip, Nada, Nix, Nyet, not a freakin’ chance.  This should be required reading for every goddamned politician on the planet.  The wording is bang on.  Please read it.

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature!!!

Here’s a pic of the dear old thing.

I don’t really fly my literary rag too often on these pages, but Doris Lessing had a big influence on what I think is important in literature.  She said things like “The way they teach literature is verkockt, and here’s why,” and “Read any book that comes in front of you and unless you’re being forced to read it for school, put it down if you don’t like it within a few pages.” And she blew off the top of my head with the Golden Notebook, and the Marriages Between Zones Three Four and Five, and Briefing for a Descent into Hell, and then Love, Again.

I dunno how Harold Bloom (the pompous arse) could trash her winning this award so hard.  Love Again was so AMAZING, the whole book rang like a gong in me, and I’ve reread it half a dozen times now because I keep finding new stuff in it.  He says that the Nobel Prize was for pure political correctness, and that’s bullshit.  It’s for a body of work that will stand for a long, long time.  People are still reading Kristin Lavransdottir… why not Shikasta, a hundred years from now?

When I stand at the entrance of a new book, I say, “Take me someplace I haven’t been.”  I’ve gotten that in multiplicity from Doris Lessing.