lovely time at Jerome’s

In no particular order:

  1. his new rental is super easy to get to and I had to drive past Ralph and Ivy’s old place and that got me thinking about her. She has always been one of the people I had in mind when I wrote a homily for Beacon. I also had to drive by the John B Pub and that took me back. Many’s the time I sojourned there for the beer and the Blue Meenies, and often Jerome was there since he’s lived out that end of town for years.
  2. Nice little house on a freaking huge lot. Back deck is SQUAREDANCEABLE. Garage faces the alleyway and usually people come in through the back – the concrete walkway doesn’t even go to the street out the front.
  3. Jerome greets me with a big hug and makes me a cup of coffee (I think dang this is good coffee – had it with oat milk – and it turns out to be EXACTLY the same coffee that I taste tested to have the best price point for the coffee at our cafe back a decade ago.)
  4. We speak of many things. Obviously I spent some time moaning about Paul, and worrying about Mike (a dear mutual friend, you won’t believe it but Mike CALLED Jerome AS I WAS WALKING UP THE STEPS) but mostly we talked about ideas instead of people, because he is hyper smart and very broad of mind with lots and lots of interesting life experiences. We talked about suicide and the drug crisis, who we’ve lost. We talked about old friends.
  5. A decade ago I gave him a peyote seedling. (They’re legal now as plants or seeds, git bent if you’re going to bring stupid morality here.) It got stuck in windows with no light and bolted. It’s finally in a proper place to settle down. Now it looks like a three inch long peyote penis, sage green and crooked and skinny and so funny looking that I laughed for about thirty seconds like a cackling witch when I saw it. Honestly you’d laugh too but I didn’t bring a camera.
  6. He hauled out three new (and used ha) guitars, two of which were Seagulls, and you KNOW how I feel about Seagulls. I got off a couple of songs, Don’t You Weep and the Zero G song, which was fun. The second guitar he handed me was the one I wanted to steal though, sweetest sounding steel string I think I’ve ever held in my hands. Then he showed me new guitar tech which I now need to buy for all of my instruments, plus I need a couple of humidity readers. Then he showed me his grandmother’s violin. It is at least a hundred years old and looks amazing, so much darker than modern violins are finished it’s quite breathtaking. That felt like glimpsing a bit of family history so I got chills.
  7. Heard about his kids, and how lovely. Oldest wants to be a professional soccer player and hauls his own ass out of his warm bed to practice IN THE ROOM GIVEN OVER TO SOCCER in the basement. There’s a cushioned astroturf floor, a practice goal and – necessary for wind, I guess – a treadmill. Also told me about a thrilling match between a US team (in Seattle) that cheated (assaulting the goalie to the point he was taken to hospital – he was down on the ground and those badly coached adolescents KICKED HIM IN THE KISHKAS which only resulted in a yellow card WHAT THE FUCK REFS I mean seriously) that Jerome’s kid’s team managed to win despite the godforsaken adjudicating and the violence and pettiness of the other team. Like – as thrilling as the last world cup game in the retelling, I was on the edge of my seat.
  8. He gifted me something lovely and small and appropriate on the way out the door.
  9. I got to sit in Jerome’s sunny kitchen for most of it.

I really did feel restored. Lovely night of sleep and feeling much sounder about the universe.

All y’all have a good one, you’re good people and I’m glad you’re here.

Best

I went to my appointment. I have lost two kilos without noticing. I only lose weight when I’m stressed. My blood pressure is perfect. I got a flu shot (my arm feels like it’s falling off and I’m tired.) My sugars continue to come down. Nurse recommended CBT but apparently that doesn’t work with aneurotypicals with a justice bent and I was so happy to read on twitter reasons why my last exposure to it made me unreasonably angry and DIDN’T WORK …that was when I was still working for company x.

I love it when people dismiss your social justice yearnings as unrealistic or childish don’t you? or actively psychiatrize them. I won’t say more. Anyway, I don’t want CBT, I want talking therapy with someone more intelligent than me and I’ll just let you understand what a simp I am from that.

After the appointment which was reasonably on time, I drove over to see Keith at his place and picked up the stuff that mOm and pOp had given him to bring back to us in Vancouver.

We had a lovely short visit. Kids were in school or at their other other grandmother’s whose name is Christine; Paul was snoozing on the sofa in the LR. I came home and having performed two whole errands, including driving, I enslothed myself. Called Dave, and that was a lovely call. I’d gone looking for William S Burroughs Jr. on line and found David Ohle and from there found ‘Motorman’ his first novel and read to Dave 2 descriptions of the work which were so intriguing I decided I may actually purchase it.

15174

In an hour or so we’ll fetch groceries. Off to Lumosity to see about that brain of mine.

This afternoon I’ll be visiting Jeromie in his new homie.

 

ordinary day

In clinic appointment tomorrow.

Enjoying season 3 of Jack Ryan. It’s copaganda on a global scale, and still I like it because this season we have the Russians to kick again.

Started Season 3 of Farscape. The weirdness continues and we’ve lost/are losing one of my favourite characters. (Virginia Hey playing Zhaan. She had to quit the show because the makeup put her kidneys into failure.)

Twitter’s functionality and algorithms continue to circle the drain. They changed it so you can’t control what you see in your feed so it’s non stop stupid advertising and actively right wing propaganda. AND VERY OCCASIONALLY a social media flare sent up by a dear internet friend.

So I’m more on tumblr, which I enjoy, but I have to go roust the spambots every morning (BlockAndReport).

Just learned that all of Thandiwe Newton’s forays into parenting resulted in home births (besides a new generation of actors) (say nepo babies and I’ll whack you, I already explained nepotism in my Upsun books and I’m just going to tap the sign) and I’m quietly squeeing to myself.

Jeff brought dinner in last night from Earl’s. We do enjoy the blackened chicken.

Life proceeds; all is calm here. There’s a leftover pancake in the fridge from yesterday – I made strawberry blueberry pancakes. Texturally they put me in mind of a great poem from my youth, but Jeff and I had no difficulty with them.

Ginny made some donuts / she made them by the peck / one rolled out a window / and broke a horse’s neck

You know the feeling when you’re lying in bed like a slug and your brother’s emptying the dishwasher?

 

lovely day

In no particular order,

  1. Fetched Paul for a walk at Fraser Foreshore. It’s been what feels like months.
  2. Collected my bp meds and thank you Burnaby Square Pharmacy.
  3. Got two different chickadees to eat from my hand, twice. THEY RECOGNIZED ME AND STARTED BUZZING ME AND TWITTERING. It was only thirty seconds out of my life, but what a boost that was.
  4. NOBODY in the park. I could walk without a mask, but chose to wear one anyway.
  5. Back home for the rest of the bean chili, warmed with a piece of medium cheddar, and de-alcoholized beer.
  6. Off to Langley Farm Market for ingredients for smoothies. (Keith asked me to be more supervisory when Paul’s picking up food and specified items. I paid for it all since watching Paul use a bank card makes me so anxious I can feel my gut valves turning inside out.)
  7. I’m making smoothies too! Jeff and I consumed a banana strawberry blueberry smoothie for tea time yesterday. Note to household IMMEDIATELY RINSE the dishwasher can’t deal with the pectin.
  8. First episode of The Last of Us. I personally loved it. Anna Torv, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey? three big horses pulling in the same direction acting-wise? yass please. Filmed in Canada, too, Alberta.
  9. Sent off another thousand words to mOm on ‘Totally Boned.’
  10. Paul actually TOLD me that his gf Janice is coming this weekend, so I know not to call him. Has he told his housemates???? I’ve sent an email to check.

Jeff’s facebook post

Yesterday morning I spent a happy few minutes playing with a tiny jumping spider, who was exploring my computer displays. At first I just watched him walking around, gathering himself for a mighty leap, then vanishing and instantly reappearing a few centimeters away. Occasionally he would pause, turn to face me directly, and stare at me for a while. I waved at him, wondering how I would react if he waved back. He eventually wandered onto the display surface of one screen, and I noticed that he seemed to be reacting to movement on the screen. I moved the mouse pointer towards him, and he reacted immediately, turning to face it. He tracked its every movement as long as it was within a few centimeters. Every once in a while, he attacked, springing forward to grasp the pointer, then pausing with his forward legs splayed out. Much like a cat playing with a laser pointer. At one point I led him to the part of the screen where my music app shows a series of bars representing frequency bands. He stopped moving and seemed transfixed by the hectic motion of the bars. “…jumping spiders have been shown by experiment to be capable of learning, recognizing, and remembering colors, and adapting their hunting behavior accordingly.” (from Wikipedia.)

Visit from Mike

/ the great Guilt Trip. more on that later.

He brought a bag of perfect mandarins and little oranges for new year.

We ordered from Fusioncore Japanese, the three of us, and watched some TV and hung out and talked. After Jeff went to bed Mike asked the my uke that he just restrung with very plangent strings and he played (in rapid succession) about ten tunes that I had no idea he knew on ukulele, all the way from Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out to Who’ll Stop the Rain. I mean, he only just BOUGHT a uke. He’s absolutely loving the instrument.

All in all a good day, even if I left a message for Paul and never followed up so I never got him out of the house. And slept more than I should. And didn’t pick up my inderal.

And after Mike handed the uke back I said, I have something unpleasant to say and I have to get it over with.

“I tried so hard to love the Blue Lava guitar you gave me. I tried playing it, playing with the cool electronics, compose on it. I couldn’t love it. I know usually when I get a new instrument the other instruments are mad and they are left alone while I have New Instrument Energy with My New Fave. But it never happened with this guitar. May I give it back to you?”

And he said thank you for telling me.

I knew where all the bits and bobbles were, and packed it up along with the Instant Pot insert and Bouillon he left her from New Years. I felt so relieved because Mike just didn’t take it the wrong way.

I am so fortunate in my friends.

everyone have a hellafine day. Wordle and Lumosity done, I’m in good shape today.

COVID data resource for Canadians.

14678 words

 

 

once again the furnace turned itself off

I got my metformin and learned because my pharmacist is a mensch that I’ll get my inderal today. I wanted to pick up treats at Timmy Ho’s and there were 14 countem 14 people in the lineup, so I picked up meat instead at Farm Town. FORGOT MY FRIKKING BANK CARD and my credit card was declined. (It’s variable, haven’t been able to figure out why.) So whoopsy doodle in the car. The car seems fine except that it’s idling at a bit higher clip than previously.

Finally Paul and I get to go for a walk! I’ll call him at some point this a.m. and we can find a mall to go walking in if it’s raining too hard for the great outdoors.

I’m in a good mood for whatever reason. Who knows why, it’s all super weird.

14,672. Finished with the phone scene, on to the cuddles

Car’s back

Paul insisted on paying for half of it. It was the rear O2 sensor. Parts and labour were well under $400 which was fair. Keith, because he is wonderful, took care of driving on the ‘picking up the car’ end. I am fortunate.

Suzanne is very much enjoying Lucky. Like many Russian Blue coloured cats, Lucky enjoys playing fetch.

I have to run off to the pharmacy this morning. I didn’t note that I was out of Metformin so I’m taking care of that as soon as it opens. In the meantime I think I’m going to make myself an eggie on toastie.

is this contentment

Just wanted to state that Jeff is a peerless housemate and my good fortune in this last decade plus of cohabitation CANNOT be overstated. He knows why I’m posting this now, but it need not be the business of the world.

The Echo is in at the krankenhaus, Paul is all wanting to drive again, and I’m going to tell him the same thing I did last time; Don’t. Unless your doctor okays it, no. The CT happened and we’ll know more when the film’s read. Keith picked us up after we dropped the car off. Keith is being such a dear one these days.

Then I got a return call from Tammy and we had a lovely phone call, chugging through the ever changing panoply of tasks and concerns. I am very happy she called.

Suzanne is here and the rugs are in to be washed.

I carried Kevin (the vacuum) downstairs. He is a very substantial minion and awkward. I wanted to be reminded.

I think it is possible that I am gestating a poem. Could be gas. Could be the samosa. Could be that Magpie (twitterfren’) was talking about how a poem ambushed them with a philosophical demand that (as they currently construe themselves) was antithetical to their wellbeing.

This means that my friend has identified something interesting to me, of which I was not previously aware, in my poetry.

If you read David Dowker’s poems, and you should if you enjoy being bewildered in a very high-toned way, only to be poleaxed by a phrase which welds itself to your sensorium, you will not come across a single one that would require the modern day ‘scourge of both literature and the flow of ideas in virtual spaces’ by which I mean (and for the one person reading this who’ll enjoy it) the TRIGGER WARNING.

A content or trigger warning is the signed, finger-signed, audible or readable advisory that potentially painful, objectionable, psychologically harmful due to pre-existing conditions, or just plain offensive to contemporary acceptance of decency wat dat content is imminently inbound.

I think the poet has to consider the audience. If you want your poetry widely accessible, that means actually taking accessibility into consideration. Oh, one possibly probably almost certainly says, such a small part of the market.

fiendish grin

I am not marketable. Oh my offense is rank, it smells to heaven – that I have RSD and CAN’T FUCKING BEAR TO BE EDITED or even gently remonstrated with regarding usage. Of course if it’s dead wrong I don’t have a problem, but anything with wiggle room and a slice of daylight a photon wide and … I be the spiny puffer fish stuck in the throat of my own self-improvement. So I’ll never be a commercial author. I won’t improve as a poet. My best songwriting days are behind me anyway and I’m fine with that. When I have a back catalogue like what I’m sitting on… ?  just staying on top of my own top 40 compositions in terms of performance readiness is all I fucking need to do. Everyone who likes my tunes already has the sheet music or a recording and nobody else matters. When Tom Lehrer, one of the greatest song writers of the 20th C, PUBLICLY POSTED HIS ENTIRE CATALOGUE, I thought I don’t even need to say anything, I’ve been vindicated with the kind of vindication that counts, one artist heart sending up a flare to another while putting the audience first. WHO ELSE could respect his audience that much? Who is unbossed enough to do it? Of course he’s not a perfect human but it’s the single most amazing piece of direct cultural action by a white guy I’ve seen in fucking years, it’s amazing!

I used to think I’d have to die first, to be a successful author, but everything about modern publishing culture is done thanks to climate change; the industry is too busy doing an HR Giger style cannibalizing fetishistic blowjob on itself and offering its youngest workers to Moloch to have it sussed yet. Publishing is yet one more of the many things that won’t survive climate change. Books that haven’t already been digitized will disappear, burned for heat, burned in fascist and religious purges or repurposed as tp or recycled as paper for other purposes. Everything that survives will either be expensive or pirated, sometimes both depending on local bullies’ attitudes toward the arts. So yeah, I’m going to keep my dignity and not wade out into that swamp. Am I making a virtue of necessity? It’s neither virtue nor necessity. I just don’t want to get any on me when it’s a swamp I can’t win.

Having given ‘the market’ all the fcking consideration that it currently deserves, and probably to all of your minds much more than it deserved even before I wilfully dragged it out of its niche in the columbarium of western thought (barf gag), I return to the issue of the consideration of the audience. I will in future be providing content warnings for my poems. On the page, the CW will state “CW is at the bottom of the poem.” People can then choose to skip ahead or read the poem. CW are often for sexual abuse, self-harm, violence, eating disorders but since I hardly ever write poetry about that, it won’t be necessary. But sometimes I mention things like death and going to the hospital, and yes it would be good to either make the title the content warning or give sensitive people a heads up. I wrote a poem about a dying man called Tom in Hospital. So easy to do. I could have called it something else. But anyone walking up to the poem who just had a relative or friend die will know: I rilly don’t need to read this right now. Or I must read this right now. But at least they know!

I identified an artistic problem with the help of a friend. I identified a number of ways to solve it. I will take the rest of my musings on the subject off line, partly because I need to pee but also because I rilly want another samosa and a smoothie to go with.

a snail for pOp

photo credit Mary Harrsch of Pompeian bronze lamp decorated with a snail
cred Mary Harrsch

Got out for a walk yesterday – it wasn’t much but it broke the monotony. I went north and Jeff went south because he wanted a longer walk in the nicer park at the other end of the street. What a foolishly lucky pair we are to have someplace pleasant to walk so close.

Energy levels are bobbing about but I’m still doing better.

Suzanne comes today.

14320 words.

Lovely phone calls with both Mike and Keith yesterday. Talked to Mike about the stuff he left here after the meal since fo sho he didn’t mean to and it turned out of course he’d been looking for them. Keith cooked a meal for Peggy and famille at her place and that made me very happy to hear. Paul’s test was accomplished SO FAST that Keith says they were in and out of Burnaby Hospital in 20 minutes. I ain’t heard of such a thing in a lifetime of stooging around hospitals. Frankly amazed.

Jeff Beck has passed at 78 of bacterial meningitis. And if you want proof God checked out, Henry Kissinger is still alive (he’s 99 and I can only imagine how that monster smirked when he realized he’d outlived Elizabeth.)

things I ponder

Does Andrew Tate (gleefully known as ‘Taint’ among the ruder orchestral instruments of the great twitter symphony) have any clue at this point how much trouble he’s in, or does the fact he gets a full 30 days – at leeeeast – of pre-trial detention in a pokey in Bucharest give him enough time to percolate this through the miasma of misogyny that renders his brain impenetrable to softness and long term thinking? I pity his lawyer, I pity his co-conspirators, and while there was a rumour he was assaulted in prison he actually went to hospital so the authorities could testify what shape he was in when he was incarcerated. As it is he gets an hour a day outside his cell. Your booooogatti won’t save you now you verminous clownbag. You rape and exploit women and then sell your precious ideas about how to treat women as ‘entertainment’ for men who already hate women and want a rich celebrity to tell them that their fantasies can all come true. That women want to be raped and it’s their fault if you give in to your extremely normal masculine urges. You are one of the single most hateful excrescences of the New Misogyny. I hope you lose the ability to communicate.

Who gives a shit about nepo babies? Nepotism is how a social system under capitalism works because WE HAVEN’T INSTITUTED ANY SOCIAL, LEGAL OR CULTURAL TRADITIONS TO PREVENT IT! And one can argue that hereditary and traditional culture carriers in Indigenous nations are nepo babies, but just herding those words into an English sentence made me want to pop a gummy and lie down for a while. Cause it’s a racist thing to say. Yes, there was enough food on the west coast for some of the Indigenous nations to develop (deep breath) a class system (yeah, sorry, as long as you keep slaves YOU GOTTA CLASS SYSTEM and I’ll be interested to hear the opinion of someone closer to the research than I am) because there was surplus sufficient not only for culture in the making of things in the wintertime but surplus sufficient for people to sit around doing nothing but enjoying other people’s output while eating the last of the berries that were supposed to last until spring. AND YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DID? Potlatch. Here’s a cultural issue, here’s the cultural collective response. Also, re class, in most traditions slaves weren’t allowed to either host or guest. They had ten millennia at least to think about it. Capitalism scorns such a levelling. Some houses got together and threw joint potlatches, imagine what that might have been like, hundreds of attendees from up and down the coast….  The Jews got to think about inequality too. What did the Jews do? Debt forgiveness and baked-into-the-calendar manumission of slaves. Things get unequal, ya gotta reset the table, shake out the cloth, and make sure the dice aren’t loaded. In the meantime, generational wealth transfer is a thing, and some of it is …. IP. One has the right to keep family secrets my dears.

I am pondering with happiness the arrival of  series 3 of Miss Scarlet and the Duke. The first episode aired on PBS Masterpiece last Sunday but it’s not showing up in Duckie, the program Jeff uses to keep track of all this stuff. Whilst rooting around on the internet for that tidbit I also learned that there will be a series 2 of Miss Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries coming soon!

I am pondering trying to get back into the CRA website, but I have to enable javascript on Chrome first?? what

I am pondering the chili in the fridge. I consider eating it for lunch or dinner. If I’m not eating it for lunch, what am I eating for lunch?? I’m thinking EGGIES.

I am pondering phone calls and emails.

I pondered what info would be useful and put my eyeglass prescription in my online care sheet.