Month: December 2018

I can report FINALLLLLLLLY that Burnaby has opened homeless shelters.

There are warming centers, three of them, now open in Burnaby. There will be four shortly.

SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS

so disgusted it’s required and when are we going to do something about housing affordability

current count 4800

4400

I am stalled again, I have to watch some action movies, that always helps.

it’s a soft lustrous fabric with mohair in it

 

Zibeline, I love you and it’s all about you, all the honest things you are and all the wicked things you do, Zibeline the label says you must have special care, and if you’ll come into my life I follow instructions I swear

I could hear the song in my head instantly

emphasis is on the first syllable so you start off with a sort of cantering rhythm which I quite like.

Okay back to writing such gems as

“What’s the Army supposed to do about it? If they complain too loud, they’re exposed for wearing Dubé like a bug-eyed condom, and US citizens should get restless about renditions from the soil of century-long allies, even renditions of notorious shitheads such as yourself.”

Michel, I do so love you

Word count 4100 words – slid back from the high point because I realized I was being prolix and hacked a couple hundred words.

It is so lovely when your kids cook dinner for you.

I’ll be doing up a turkey for solstice. Seriously considering making Nanaimo bars for dessert and trying to make a tourtiere for the first time.

3500

 

Walked with Jeff in the not very much wind but plenty of rain at 5 am for coffee and SHNACKS at Tim Hortons.

I can’t seem to grind out any more right now so it’s time to watch tv for a while. Ok

 

later

back at it

You’re following a thread of one of your favourite twitter personalities and realize you have the perfect photograph already on your phone to accompany the thread.

Oh, you want to SEE the picture?

Alex was here a couple of days ago. He played Xenon. I talked about the astrophysics thing he watched but not that.

I’m drinking coffee. Time to go back to making Jesse’s life miserable.

In a few hours I’ll be off to breakfast at the home of an acquaintance – someone I met through @raincoaster.

In some ways the design of this new book will reflect Midnite Moving Co. – it will be a series of vignettes about Jesse and his -er- adventures in custody, interspersed with what’s happening in Vancouver – and in orbit.

In response to the inability of one of my twitterfolx to detect the difference between silicon and silicone I have come up with the following mnemonic.

Silicone is o so squiddy like what’s in a porn star’s tiddy;

silicon is tech and chips, and a valley full of drips

okay, I’m breathing again. I have officially shelved what I’ve written so far of HOTM. It is supposed to be more like a technothriller, detailing the pivot point where all of the competing interests in Sto:lo/Vancouver throw their weight and the city, after a season of starvation, begins to turn into something new.

so I’m gonna free form a little here

get my flow on as ’twere

And talk about the maelstrom of observation and wishing hard which made me pick Vancouver as the place to pin the starting point of a ‘forced green conversion’ on a major city. Cause that’s what ends up happening if you stop putting legal barriers in the place of people greening THEIR OWN SURROUNDINGS at the same time as the food supply tanks (the number of people living here tanks as well.) Can you imagine what public parks would look like if more of the trees and shrubs in them had to support people and wildlife with fruits and nuts?

I think if what I’m contemplating in my novel truly happened more than a million people would leave. It’s 2.5 million, give or take, so just under half. A disproportionate number would be under 15 – people would want their kids out of the city. WHICH MEANS that instantly every school district in every Canadian city over 100000 people would be jammed to the rafters with new kids. Vancouver’s troubles would explode out in all directions – back to China, where many would flee (leaving some behind to protect investments and businesses).

In the middle of the troubles, Amir the Syrian sez, “I don’t know why they complain about the things they do. There’s enough food, the buses mostly work and nobody’s bombing us.”

But people would leave. Western Washington would get about (rolls dice) holy shit 40000 people, mostly people with family ties but some IT professionals.

The Liberal MPs all skip town. The NDP MP’s all stay here, mostly to remind the Canadian government not to get all chummy with American plans to bomb the city ‘if necessary’. Since the POTUS decided to tweet about a hunnert times that this was definitely an option if American interests were not 100 percent protected. Yeah, go ahead and bomb those American interests, until something else distracts you, you gibbering remnant of a vile personality.

Canada would instantly have one of the world’s worst internal migrant issues. There literally would not be an available hotel room anywhere in Canada and this would have the dubious ability to simultaneously crash the tourist business while not generating much income from ancillary tourist spending, although I imagine drinking would skyrocket as well.

I knew that something so bizarre as what I wanted to have happen couldn’t happen without a miracle or money or aliens for chrissakes so I decided to make it all three but really what it’s about is me, all me, and my white guilt.

Recognizing this over the last couple of weeks has slowed my thought processes to a crawl. After the initial desire to fire up a butane torch and just immolate the entire oeuvre, which like suicide is an urge one needs to control as being animalistic in its immediacy, intensity and complete lack of reference to reason, or just fucking asinine since I’ve given a large chunk of my life to this and although I shouldn’t care under an egoistic and libertarian worldview of artistic production, there are at least a half a dozen other people in the world with skin in this too, and they’d be fuckin’ pissed at me for being dramatic.

I have three main choices as to what to do about it;

edit severely to try to minimize the damage, after paying some long-suffering Indigenous woman something resembling a decent wage to do a sensitivity read and please note as an aside that I’m cheesed I can find no one to help me, but *entirely unsurprised* because fuck it, it won’t be nearly as much fun to read as an Indigenous woman for pay as it was to write for free;

try to end run all that boring sensitivity read stuff, and I’m just having a panic attack thinking what a fucking Lena Dunham move that would be, like a pre apology apology? barf barf gag

Or I start my preface to Honey on the Moon with unflinching support of the return of Indigenous lands, and saying that foolish and trope-y and ignorant as my shit is, that is all the point that I’m trying to make with it. That I will undergo corrections and deletions as requested by whoever can make a good argument for them. That it’s an open universe to Black and Indigenous writers, and that canon isn’t even fixed IN UNIVERSE so I don’t see why I should be pissy about other people’s execution provided they go to the trouble of getting it edited.

Walked the Fraser Foreshore with Paul and went to Yianni’s for Greek afterward.

 

nom

With great sadness I am having to back away from writing a gender non-conforming relationship into the next book, mostly because I keep trying to reunify the couple and that’s not exactly what real life would look like in their case.

I am also working on an extremely cheesy Christmas fic. I’ve blocked it and now I’m trying to put together six parallel story lines. aaaaagh structure how I loathe theeeee from the back table in Beelzebub’s local I fart at theeeeeee

I have also started a social justice project which I’m not going to talk about until it’s done but it’s already 1/100th complete. It will be neither good nor bad, but it will eventually be finished. Ha ha it is now 1/50th complete.

Hung out with Mike earlier this weekend; he got this running

Needless to say him having a 240 heater in his apartment meant all kinds of grey boxes and large cables and running it through the (actually) 240 v for the stove.

Also, I got to sauna while looking out over a fourteen story view, please tell me how lucky I am.

This morning a small shopping expedition and a meal at IHOP.

Weather is fucking cold and clear, spent ages cleaning off Jeff’s car this am.

Made biscotti, ate them all. Must try again. Christmas cooking is hazardous.