skonen_blades

I love Granville Street
clubs on a Friday night. They
are a cure for hope.




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In France a French kiss is just called a kiss.

In China, Chinese food is just called food.

And here in my heart, your name means love.



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Everyone hates being little.

And we are all little.

We are all ants wishing to be whales.

But when you are little and you want to be bigger, you have to find something that makes you feel bigger.

For some, that comes from accomplishments. A trophy, a promotion, or even an encouraging word from your boss can go a long way towards making someone feel bigger.

For some, that comes from belonging to a community or organization with a goal. By belonging to a group of other little people achieving something big, a person can forget how small they are.

For some, that comes from love. To feel love to is to feel that illusion of bigness. That sense of being involved in something greater than the sum of its parts.

For some, it’s helping others. By shoring up the faults of other little people, you can bleed bigness into the world.

For some, it’s gaining a skill and using it. If you can build a bookshelf, fly a plane, fix a car, craft a bowl, or calculate an equation that allows us to move forward, you feel useful.

The problem with wanting to be big is that if you have no accomplishments to speak of, no real love in your life, no true skills, no organization to belong to, and no urge to help others, then the only way to feel big is to look down on other people.

It’s what enables people to kill others branded as inferior.

It’s why Alan Turing was pushed to suicide even though he enabled us to win WWII.

It allows people to dismiss the successes and lifetimes of hard work put in by women, homosexuals, people of other races, and transgendered people. They might have accomplished more than you but you can still look down your noses at them.

Everyone hates being little

And we are all little.



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1/30

And then the ghost of you arrives. I’ll be sitting in a coffee shop, hanging out in a bar with friends, even reading a book by myself at home. You’re not actually there, of course. You haven’t been here for six years. But there’s a feeling I get when I know that a person who really knew me would know how much fun I’m having and then it makes me sad because now I’m the only person who knows. It’s like remembering that one of the Beastie Boys is dead after rocking out to their music for a few minutes. But this isn’t about my sadness or the idea that I’m lonely. Because I’m not.

It’s just that when you breeze in, it’s unexpected. I’m happy to see you but I feel a little tainted that you’ve chosen such a good time to show up again. I miss you so much. I miss you to the point that I wish I’d never met you but only for a second. You cross my mind and I immediately remember how much better right now would be if you were actually there. It’s a stroke across my heart from a cold paintbrush.

And this is where I live. At this crossroads of memory and reality. A yearning for a past that was never as good as this present. I have plenty of people to share my life with but I want to share specific parts with you and that’s impossible now. It’s possible in the way that hopefully you’re in the universe somewhere or maybe heaven exists or whatever but not in this earthbound corporeal way that I’d like to happen.

So in the middle of telling a story or really enjoying the sound of the leaves outside, I’ll go silent and you’ll be there being silent with me. My other self. The mixture of what could have been and the helping hand I need more than ever. Your absence is more than a hole in my life, it’s a halving of it. Your departure turned me into a different person and that journey is still happening.

I’ll have so much to tell you when we reunite. Hopefully you’ll have a lot to tell me, too.



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Dance.

This is a dragon-tooth reminder about the value of hot jazz. Watch the fingers dance over bongo skins, saxophone valves, trumpet plungers, and piano keys. Feel those drum brushes on your skin as the dark room of improvised music turns you in the wind from hurricane to calm-day cornfield and back again. Let each tick and sharp turn of the musician’s unified timing cull your boredom with the now. Become the present and move with it.

Meet each solo with your hands up and your eyes closed. Feel the scarlet ribbons and blue nooses trip your hooves. Feel the very air around you reek of mistletoe as you slip from appreciation into full synesthesia. Smell the music and let your nerve endings listen. See the rise and fall of stabbed melody curtain in front of you around the ghosts of accordions and meat-cooking fires throwing shadows on cave walls while it rains outside.

Let your tongue trace headlights across the roof of your mouth and realize that blood tastes like batteries if you want it to, like legal-tender pennies to buy thoughts. Communicate in erotic semaphore to others on your page with eyelash sweeps, leg stretches, and barber-pole hair. Show the music how your clothes fit. Test the limits of the silly strings, the super strings that hold you. Become the drumroll. Become the present.

It’s not a trance, it’s a lack of trance. A vacation for as long as possible from the demands that society, rational thought, concern, and the fear of consequence squeeze from you daily. Let life flow into you, not out. This is the dimension-shattering, quantum continuum that people knew before language and will always know. Dance is what breaks the shackles and music is what drives dance. Dance is the most important component of humanity, the truest form of meditation, and the key to living.




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I’m a demon made of crayon with a bass-drum throat whispering the stars down to play with them in a one-piece orchestra. A four-person one-man band strung like popcorn on a string for the apocalypse. Three roads met in the wood and I stood in the middle of that intersection, feeling the last-stair impact of three journeys collide at my heart.

Ring a bell. Drop a hat.

If you don’t back your hunches, you become a hunchbank and if you don’t go with your guts, you’ll become gutless.

I am half-weathervane and half-scarecrow which is not to say that I’m useless. I’m just afraid of fire and ruled by the wind. I think that goes for all of us. Stuffed with a mixture of horse hair and dance floor. I can bounce back and bullets go through me. My bones are supple chalk reminders of why not to be confrontational.

I am bursting at the seams with lessons. They poke out from inside of me like the beaks of crows, like I’m shoplifting porcupines.

I’m a shepherd of corn with no real power but a lot of responsibility.




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Basketball-court halos hobble the ankles of streetcar villains that started out as heroes in their own narratives. Turtleneck mob bosses dictate the rules to a forgotten section of the population. Poverty is pulling pork off of human bones to make sandwiches. Too many people are on the wrong end of the current equation. Change has been coming for a very, very long time. Too long for most. Each violin case holds the body of an infant, every floating box on the river holds a lost home. The winters here are milder than the rest of Canada but I’m sure that doesn’t matter to those who make their homes outside.

The clock is unforgiving. Those who wax poetic about the wonder of nature have never felt it’s lack of mercy. We make our way here because we don’t fit in. And Christmas is coming soon.





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It was that day, that birthday, where you became a metaphor.

That night we were drinking and decided to go swimming in the ocean naked. There were six of us but only three of us were into it. Me, you, and another girlfriend of yours. I was the only man. You’d only do it if we did it, you said, so some of us did. Naked in the darkness on a rocky shore, we clambered stupidly into the dark water in the summer like we were sliding into night. Our pale bodies disappearing inch by inch, freckle by footstep, nether by waist, elbow by shoulder, into warm ink.

I’m not much a swimmer. I hung out in places where I could still touch the bottom even though there were treacherous rocks. Your other friend swam out a little further and came back quickly. Both of us happy with the courage we’d shown so far and drunk enough to be laughing at the fact we were naked instead of being awkward or embarrassed. The people still on the beach seemed to be cowards.

But you. Troubled. At home only during chaos and quite drunk, hard to employ and carrying a home life that I hated, possessing domineering parents and a broken compass where your heart was, announced you were going to swim out to touch a buoy. As you left us behind and went farther than any of us dared, we looked at each other in fear. Neither of us was capable of catching you and the people on the beach wouldn’t even come into the water.

We knew you had a competent history of swimming. We knew you loved the ocean. As you headed out towards the buoy, you went in the wrong direction. We had to yell to you to direct you in the right direction. Your eyesight isn’t good and your glasses were on the beach. You have to imagine the growing sense of worry we were tending.

We tried to cajole you into coming back to shore but the night air stole our words. You stayed out there, impossibly far in the night, a fleck of white in unending black, for nearly twenty minutes while we occasionally lost sight of you for seconds at a time with our hearts in our mouths.

You came back unscathed, undrowned, and calmer than I’d seen you in months. Your emergence from the water was like a rebirth. The moon shining off the curves of you as the other girl who’d come with us brought you a towel. You didn’t shiver, you didn’t speak. You smiled peacefully. The two of us had been back on the beach and dressed for a while.

You’re a creature of extremes trapped in this boring predictable world. I see now that only those troubled enough go the farthest. That the extremists are the ones who change the world. That the idea of running away can lead a person out into the night-time ocean while friends cross their fingers on the shore.

In that moment, I saw you as more than human. You became metaphor. And I’m so glad I know you. I got your back. I’m proud of you.



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Responsibility is the new black. The watchword that lets us know that even though we are men, we are still people. That even though I myself do no control the world, my brothers do. That even though I can lift the heavy things, I cannot push a relationship into starting. Finesse is something I need but possess only in spurts. We can leash the lightning and we can change the face of the planet but the inner journey of ourselves as males is what is important. The mannequins have come to life. The dress-wearers. The baby makers. They have sparkled into life and self-awareness in a way that causes us to see unicorns where before there were only ovens and dishwashers. And how does one talk to a unicorn?

This list of new directions is a treasure map with fresh ink. Those amongst us literate in pirate cannot read them. I know the past was hard and the future is going to be a trying place but it’s all for the better.




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Even death can be laughed at. Should be laughed at.

In 1478, George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, was executed by drowning in a barrel of wine at his own request. The ancient Celts would burn their leader after a four-year term and have a party. The leader’s body would be cremated and the ashes mixed into the wine.

Dissent is necessary. In a society gone dumb and afraid, in a society given over to fear, that is starting to tear itself apart, dissent is not necessarily dissent. It can be a voice of reason that it merely unrecognized.

The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for not cooperating with McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, warned the universities that fired him and thousands of other professors that these firings would destroy the country’s intellectual life.

“You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders,”

One theory about why antimatter exists was developed by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. Antimatter is just ordinary matter going backwards in time, he theorized, which would explain why antiparticles have an opposite charge, since if an electron is repelled while going forwards in time, then backwards in time this becomes attraction. This also explains why matter and antimatter annihilate. They don’t destroy each other; it is the same particle suddenly stopping and going back in time, just one particle going in an endless loop, forwards in time, then backwards, then forwards, and so on.

I believe that the reality television shows of this world, the Glenn Becks, the waves of ignorant programming feeding directly into our eyes from the boxes in our homes that spew out electrons, are intellectual antimatter units. They are arcing back from our stupid, stupid future. The echoes of where we will end up getting louder as we get closer to the source. The uncertainty principle says that this is not a certain future. We can change it. We are all probability waves.

All electrons in the universe have identical properties, an observation so obvious that it is generally ignored. John Wheeler suggested that maybe it was just one electron, constantly darting all over the universe, from the Big Bang to the end of time and back again.

Even though this idea involves backwards time travel, it can’t be used to send any information back in time. You cannot move a piece of antimatter to affect the past, since in moving it you only affect the past of the antimatter itself, that is, your future.

If we express enough love, enough intelligence, we can cancel out the antimatter of fear, the antimatter of a future given over to darkness. The particles of anger and ignorance that we could become will come backwards down the timeline and be cancelled out by our need to have smiles and to read. To think and to be calm. To laugh.

We are everywhere right now and we always will be. That is how our outlook affects reality. We can change everything.





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