Good/Bad/Ugly

Knit my dad's hat in under a day/watched Twilight while I started/had the ability to change the channel and didn't

Brain poisoning, or, I don't want to go and see the Olympic Torch.

Gettin' 'round, still.

Biking in -11; my eyelashes finally froze!

"Fighting the Good Fight" is exhausting.
Click the Sarah Jessica to just "let it go" in the public library.

In the morning he's got to work on his skulls, mapping their teeth and tails. He is a cartographer of bodies' bones' sounds through teeth. Take topographies of those bites you take of me, and of boys young, and of women with heads bound long, and of those sacred among all us fools.

We order them to order ourselves and make marks out of what pieces are missing. We are not those damn animals, we mark our bodies for bliss.

• between eyes
• what sockets the spine
• O', what halo! and the ivory inside it
• the jaw that cradles
  
• the length of legs
  
• digits detach
  
• what was in that grave, exactly?

Waiting for the bus downtown, with a guitar

$12.andsomechange!

Weekend fun.

Saturday: spent making cloth pads and listening to Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. Realizing that Patsy Cline is pathetic and I am sick of love songs and Fugazi is fine to sew to.

Je m'ouvri le front

From that zine from that notebook that I never printed.

Right now I figger that maybe I just need to get things out of me and into somewhere else so I can fill myself up with new things. It's worth a shot, at least.

Internet city

I made this thing so it seems like I am doing something. I am going to put things on this thing when they happen if they will exist on a computer. Mostly they won't right now. Maybe after Christmas, if my Grandma decides that she likes me as much as she likes my older sister. She might not.

I'm working on a cassette tape. I'm almost done. I am rushing.

Last night I got, "Oh, you're really into cassette tapes, aren't you?"

Ca$h Money

Yesterday I spent one month's rent on my face.

plucked from a message

i forgot to tell you. after you left when we were down by the river i walked back and went exploring a little. i found this old stone foundation that was filled with very old medical-looking bottles. the brown ones. clear ones, too, of all shapes and sizes.

i walked around there and then looked down and noticed a shoe. and then i picked up the shoe and realized that it was only a shoe sole. and then i looked around more and saw dozens of shoe soles, stuck in the mud. they were everywhere.

R.I.P.

Is it sinister to have a seance for your dead best childhood friend? I accidentally celebrated her birthday down by the river but didn't give her the time I meant to. I celebrated a new friend's birthday with plenty of calimocho, because, "I'm sorry, I'm trying to reconnect with the spirit of my dead best childhood friend downstairs," doesn't do much for you when everyone wonders how you spend all that time down there already.

What if she loved Ouija when I knew her?

Alex circa 2005

Impatient (im-pat-yent)

Klessa is the best.

everybody's cats

i have never dug a hole. my sister's cat got hit by a car on sunday. i did not dig a hole for it because it was dug in the park behind the house and she was laid in it before any of us knew.

1990

Sat'dy Night

YOU INHI HOW AREYOU
/
instead of doing my homework i took a few hours and made this thing. i can't tell if putting reverb or echo on the vocals be TRES COOL or SOOO CHEESY.

coral,

(the comma in the title is essential)

Setting the Scene

The library, "premier étage". Listening to 137 samples of two French words at a time to determine if they are the same word or different words. It is to train the ear, to learn the hot new (International Phonetic) Alphabet.

Gently mouthing "p ra" and "pr".

Last Night at The Kitschen

It's a little sad, yes.

Moving Woes pt. 67

Toddler roommates.

a funny idea in my brain right now, in the moment.

"HEY HAVAE YOU READ MY BLOG?"

Buffy

Side B of a mystery mixtape; one thing salvaged of eleven full black garbage bags.

Feeling Maternal Today

Because of:
a) chatting with a six year old without feeling foolish
b) a farm dog taking me as their favourite. Beautiful black thing, it was.
c) giving the horns to back-of-the-bus kids when they asked for a peace sign. They said, "That's good, too. Now go whooooooo." I stopped short of that part, but I can only do so much on my bike (I absolutely can yell, "HEY, WATCH IT," to a car that cuts me off and sound fucking tough, though).

re: Bee Conferences

If my life were a movie, right now.

The Civic Holiday: Making Paintbrushes Out of an Old Haircut.

sighing all the time

Back to de bees, back to de accordion, back to brown. Making a lot of plans in my head and writing some of them down as if that will make me do them, like "TO GO TO" (double underlined). I used to make a lot of lists.

Eyem watching yoo

Cool digital camera FX. Right?

You win some you lose some

But I got beer and a nectarine and I can feel my toes so I think I won.

As good a reason as any

"Because we love you more"

One by one with little glass tubes!

Currently contemplating the conspicuity of my overbite, the monstrous (grotesque, not grand) process of drawing bee blood, dying my hair blonde, and what do I want even?

"Say fuck you and don't give a shit about what anyone thinks because you're great."

"Say fuck you and don't give a shit about what anyone thinks because you're great."

This is the first thing I have recorded in a very long time. Sloppy. Too much? Not enough? Title based off of a topical conversation with the convenience store clerk, when he raised his eyebrows high in the middle as if with two tiny lengths of fishing wire and asked, "Why, on the TV, does no one cry for Michael Jackson?" His glassy eyes enough told me he'd lost faith in humanity. I responded with "I don't know, I didn't know him." I didn't; what else can I say?

didn't know him

Bear Survey 2009

"One year I had a young female bear and cub go through a fence that was working very well. I killed her she had no weight the poor thing was not getting near enough food."

DIY Home Improvement Projects

Bat-proofing:





This method of bat-proofing is so effective that the bat did not escape from the ceiling into my bedroom, but instead into the bedroom I had chosen as a refuge on the main floor (worried that a furry rabid flood of 700 would come spilling from the garbage bags after I heard them scratching up there I thought I might be safer elsewhere). It squirmed and then popped out from under a dresser, and then was swooping around the room while I panicked under my covers. I called for Suzanne who, in a leather jacket and with a broom in hand, saved me from the darn thing.

I am trying to remain calm.

hiding in the ceiling

If bats were really my spirit animal I think they'd try to stress me out less.

Ongoing project

Strengths:

• eating pancakes
• eating (generally)
• heavy sleeper
• tall
• drawing hands
• freckles
• drinking beers

Weaknesses:

• sense of direction
• tiny head
• loud sleeper
• memory
• mild adult acne
• monolingual
• poorly read

Also:

• the movement of matter and who or what is in me and who maybe has my skin sitting in their alveoli (from Latin alveolus, "little cavity"; the ones that look like microscopic grapes) or does it just pass right on through and out the nostrils again?
  
• the woman at the clinic remembered me, the rabies girl. i have less hair now and i had forgotten that already, the 'before'.
  
• sometimes my heart gets in such a fit about the impossibility of waking up early (see two previous lists) that i can't fall asleep.
• hey that's my blood.

damn americans

A little longing doesn't do very much at all except make yuh heartsick.



Poll question: can we be held accountable for our [in]actions while subconscious?

My coworker's neighbour

I saw the flies with my very own eyes that settled speckled on the lower-left side of the window. Facing their bellies was a man who must have been breaking down for two weeks on, like the car in his backyard except he was likely without the green flames racing up his side.

Back Home

I tried to write a song about matters of the heart but it ended up being about steak.

Things are movin' on, movin' on.

"Pretty Close" is nearing completion. What's holding us back from the final line up? A few too many fart jokes.

New Haircut

New pic

Trying to find the final scene of animated Charlotte's Web when hundreds of baby spiders come quivering from that silk sac and wisp away in the gentle wind with little white trails to pull them up. Trying to explain what that feels like to have happen in your body, because sometimes I feel that when I open my mouth those tiny spiders will waft out, so many of them, all sending sweet wishes in their breezy voices.

no more school no more excuses

Crazy Horse

Dad: Don't ever forget to sit back and laugh, it's all you can do and if you can't do that, well, you've got nothin'/Just remember to take it easy or the world will eat you up/Don't try to tell me that thirty loudmouth cyclists can make us redesign our whole highway and inconvenience two hundred thousand taxpaying motorists!
Mom: You are still a good person/He is an idiot/(making a sad face at me all the time)

Dad and I listened to Neil Young all the way home. It was very sweet.

THE TELEVISION IS TOO LOUD THE TELEVISION IS TOO LOUD CAN YYIOU PLEASE TURN IT DOWN.

Internet Conversations With a Sister Who Is Going Through Puberty

*Alexandra* says:
:P
Sarah says:
you like the chemical brothers?
*Alexandra* says:
yea! how did you know?
Sarah says:
because this song is by them, it says in the title.
*Alexandra* says:
ohh, i sent you the wrong link , it was a video of a cat attcking a baby

I'm going to put together a zine out of tiny snippets from my sketchbook that's seen me through since September. I took out the most serious parts, leaving some silly drawings and a bit of an impression that I am wasteful with paper to barf out into the world.

Million Dollar Question (and a $12.75 answer)

Why is it so hard to be the person that you want to be?

(I think the answer is whiskey, but that's a cop-out, innit?)

Disemboweling

The creation of alternative food systems can be an empowering initiative that allows for the de-linking for corporate, globalized food systems that are distinctively disempowering for lower-income urban communities (Wekerle 2007: 379)

Not in dictionary: disempowering
Suggestions: empowering, disemboweling, overpowering, distempering, exemplariness, aggrandizement

Therapy, or something, and the whole library thinks I am looking at Porn.

I wrote a (faux) letter to the assholes who think I have nice legs, who told me to, "Shut the fuck up, Bitch," from their car yesterday and sometimes I just wish that my heart or head would explode when I listen to certain beautiful songs that make me feel like something like that just might happen, just so everyone else would understand how beautiful they were, too, covered in guts or brains or little boney bits. I don't think they would get what I mean, though. They just don't understand.

Raspberry Jelly Dream II

I was shot, square in the forehead, with a gun, in the back seat of an old Buick or a New Sedan by its front passenger. I leaned over and died against the window.

I didn't really die, though. I woke up from what I had thought was dying and the people I were with were none too concerned. I asked to borrow a phone so I could call the police and the hospital myself, with a bullet lodged in my brain, but no one picked up. When I finally decided the situation was dire, I tried 9-1-1 and reception faded. We finally ended up at a pizza parlour video arcade. Stuck with no money and a friend preoccupied with The Claw I was stuck bleeding and with this bullet still lodged in my brain, still ready to kill me with the littlest jiggle in whatever lobe or whatehaveyou it had settled.

I woke up and and two new white hairs were found, long and wiry and all that shit about wisdom.

Where did the time go, God bless Google Images, etc.

leigh says:
hows all your work coming?
Sarah says:
currently learning how to play bridge over troubled water on accordion


(Academic failure.)

Delicious Recipes for you to Enjoy

Vegan Macaroni & 'Cheeze'

mmm

(photo courtesy of Lincoln Public Schools of Lincoln, Nebraska)

So what you do is you take some green beans, the frozen ones. You cook those up in some boiling water. Drain 'em real good, get 'em good and dry. Put them in a bowl and then put a big old glob of tahini on it, and then maybe some Bragg's and rice vinegar and heck while you're at it throw some miso in there, yeah! Now we're talking. Macaroni.

Stage III eczema support group happening in the front corner of the library, right now (I am a chronic eavesdropper).

a little prayer

MY LIBRARY FINES ARE AT $29.50, O' DEAR LORD PLEASE GUIDE ME TO THE LIBRARY ON TIME SO THAT I DO NOT FURTHER ACCRUE THESE SINS! PLEASE SHOW ME THE LIGHT THROUGH ON-LINE LIBRARY ACCOUNT SERVICES SO I DO NOT FALTER FURTHER AND PLUNGE INTO THE FIERY DEPTHS OF ACADEMIC PROBATION! O' LORD, TAKE ME OUT OF SCHOOL! I AM FINISH'D!

By Alexandra Ayton, age 7, maybe?

Nice Brood

Remember the tan, remember the bees. Somedaysomedaysomeday!

Oh, come on!

Aching legs and an insatiable appetite is how I remember growing feeling, and that is how I've felt all week.

SERIOUSLY?

How does it read without a rhythm?

How long do you figure it'll take to end up under fingernails, diggin' in the dirt? Dig out my hands, my dear. Put me under/in soft wood and please let my blood be. Say, "Rest in peas rest in peas rest in peas here, my dear." Dig out my barren skull, sucked dry by worms. Muck it up with sticks & feathers, string & shells, broken plates & tiny pieces.

He said: roll mine over a flimsy boat (we both were killed by a wolf). Drafting plans for each other, to tell our mothers what to do. He wants to be in the ocean, under electricity (an island of it).

How long do you figure it'll take to end up under fingernails, diggin' in the dirt? Dig out my heart, my dear.

(but I mean literally, that last part)

Penny Pincher

It is still a good idea to not buy a textbook if it is available on GoogleBooks. OK, so maybe a page or two or twenty are "not available for this preview" here or there, but I can more or less imagine what goes on in those voids, I think. Having an imagination is important and so is $60 to spend on 50.

Multiple Choice

1. Things you may have dreamt:
a) You hope it was a dream
b) You hope it was not a dream

2. We are all built from:
a) Blood
b) Soil

Barf!

I remember shamefully recording this in first year university, slumped in half over the tiny tiny little built in pin prick of a microphone on my laptop with headphones, on low, cautious and continually looking over my shoulder should my roommate come back. She always came back.

And so I don't want to say, "I don't know why I'm putting this here," because I've been so frustrated with the common preface, "I don't know, but...", but...
Just sayin'. I've got new ones and old ones and sweet ones and bad ones. Just 'cause?

This song is cute and silly and frustratingly girly but that is OK. I will deal with it.

What a trip.

It's O.K. to take some time.

An Anthem (at least the first verse).



Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to problems that upset you. Don't you know everything's alright? Yes, everything's fine. We want you to sleep well tonight. Let the world turn without you tonight. If we try, we'll get by so forget all about us tonight. Everything's all right, yes. Everything's all right, yes.

Spicy New Business Venture

re: Sleeping (again) and On Being a Prophet

And this morning, I swear, I could have heard someone say, "... the Mormon verification of global failure," but I guess that was in my head, too, because I repeated it aloud for my own verification through more heavy sleep and no one knew what I was talking about.

re: Sleeping

Three fourths asleep (I daren't say one half) and mumbling, "'tis a noble pursuit to attempt to unravel the mysteries of the universe."
Maybe my head and my body are so disconnected because I have been searching so much through my sleep lately. That must be a tiring thing, though I couldn't say for sure because I, without fail, forget what happens in my night (every night). Luckily, I have a reporter who sleeps lightly. I am a log because I am, in fact, a great philosopher, right?

two-thousand-fine: theory/practice

YOU WILL GO AND YOU WILL HAVE A GOOD TIME.

From the notebook. The one with a broken spine due to water damage.

A Comprehensive List of Things I Did Upon Returning to My Bedroom (circa 1999-2006) At Approximately 2:20 am, 20 December 2008. It Was A Saturday.
a) fondle two large Ziploc baggies of old buttons, keychains, keys, set down atop one medium-sized white cabinet, that largely do not (or did not) belong to me.
b) gently eye the orange corduroy jacket swaying (though it may look like it's tanning, if it weren't for being manufactured cotton) on the back of my door. The door itself is painted in psychedelic swirls of black on white, done by the previous tenant- presumably as part of some wild and raging drug trip- though my older sister did inscribe "SARAH ROX" (1999) in faint glittery baby-blue gel pen lettering along one swirl's edge.
c) try on two burgundy winter coats:
i) the first has a white faux-fur lined body. It is missing a head and any shape through its middle, and mysterious primary-coloured paint has hardened on one small spot of the faux-fur.
ii) the second is egg-shaped, in fact, and massive and short (riding above my hips a bit). It belonged to my dad through the 1980s-'90s, when he lived in Thunder Bay, was in university, married, and had children. They don't make them like they used to, you know?
d) shift closet-gazing upward to the top shelf (where Puffalump, my emerald [but maybe lighter? A mix of emerald and spring, perhaps?] green prom dress and elementary school t-shirt live. Souvenirs, mostly. The shirt is white with similar psychedelic swirls to the door, green this time, and the front is printed with this:
[image of a knight standing in front of an inverted triangle, "NICHOLAS WILSON" written across the top. It is green and yellow. Black and white need not be mentioned.]

I put the shirt on, regardless of being entirely outdated by now*, take off my jeans for the first time this whole week and get into bed. It feels like a hotel bed with crisp sheets and some polyester-blend coverlet in brown and robin's egg. There are enourmous decorative pillows, olive and aubergine, and I am peeling off my socks with my feet. This room is tidy and highly decorated and it's not mine anymore, really, but at least my Electone still is in the corner**.

*The Nicholas Wilson Knights were re-mascotted the Nicholas Wilson Wolves (defeating the Nicholas Wilson Whales in student votes by only a hair) in 1997 after the Kights were deemed a mascot too vicious and terrifying.
**Editor's note: The Electone was later used in a thrilling rendition of "Away in a Manger" 0n 24 December, 2008, by Alexandra Ayton and Sarah Ayton.