skonen_blades

I
There are three layers
The first layer is rushing
Like rapids over rocks
This layer is closest to the surface
Churning, changing, exploring and receding
The second layer is moving placidly
A slow, powerful river
This layer is deeper
Harder to course correct, slower to shift
And the last layer, the core
The core barely moves
Like the deepest, calm lake
The core is still
Unfathomable
The largest and the most unreachable
Barely conscious
Maybe the true self
I don’t know if it’s what’s left over
The distilled reality after experiences
Filter through the first two layers
Or if it’s the untouched rawness
That was there at the start
and will always barely be affected
By anything outside
Perhaps it’s both

II
I still feel her hands
The warm peace of her energy
Branching into me and staying
Fading like an afterimage
Inside

III
A lot of tension is kept in my forehead
A lot of tension is kept in my lower back
A lot of sex is kept caged in my heart
Just when I think I’m totally relaxed
I go a little deeper
And then when I am at my most relaxed
I go a little deeper
Making me feel like I am incapable of total relaxation
Like the most relaxed I’ve been is just scratching the surface
A lot of my life has been built around
Living with exhaustion
Living with regret
Living with tension
It’s a lot to unlearn

IV
I need to be kinder to myself
Not lazier
Not weaker
Not a liar
But kinder
Criticism is no longer a fuel for me
Carrying more weight is no longer inspiring
The fire is no longer a crucible I enjoy

V
I am not falling apart.
I am completing.
The clash and shedding
The falling away of certain scales
The gaining of some new limits
The loss of some old inhibitions
It’s not a descent or a climb
Or a molting with an end date
It’s just the ongoing rate of change
That only hurts when resisted
It feels like dilution
It feels like spreading
But I am not disappearing
I am only revealing
And ridding myself
Of what I no longer need
Smaller and lighter
Isn’t less



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The more clarity I achieve, the stupider I know I am. It’s not that there’s a door unlocking inside me or that I’m falling deeper and deeper through the levels of my own life. I don’t have visitations from flowery growths of suspense and handlings. I have sharp turns in well-lit tunnels that bring me to new chapters. I have ‘top-down’ moments where I feel as if I’m lifted up above my own life and for a few moments, I can see the whole shape of it, see it for what it really is. It’s in these moments where I feel super lucid but also like I’m dreaming hard. I see the track. I see where I am. I don’t see how long I’ve got but I feel like I get an accurate check on how I’m doing. It goes a lot deeper than any old report card.

I’m experiencing things that so many humans have experienced before yet I feel alone. I think that’s the fulcrum for the seesaw of humanity. I know Audrey is unique. I know Sonja is unique. I know I am unique. But I know that our struggles and delights with each other as a family would be familiar to any other family on the planet and to families before Christ. Will be familiar to families centuries from now, maybe. My joy at seeing my daughter laugh is mine and mine alone yet is it also a father’s joy, every father’s joy. I feel common and included all at the same time. I feel lonely and special all at the same time. This is the duality, I think, of existence.

Waves. Fire. Branches. Always repeating and never repeating. So too with humans.



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My consciousness is merely a fender on my brain. Much like my skull is a helmet. I see what I’ve been told I should see, I hear what I’ve been conditioned to hear, and I interpret the world as a tall white man living a life of comparative luxury in the first world.

It’s a straddle and no speakers about it. I have airplane lottery tickets dangling in the dozens around my neck, backstage passes from all the concerts I’ve ever wanted to go to. My eyes are twin modems and I see the world downloaded through my vision. My skin is a camera. My bones are made of glass and it’s only a butterfly wing away from reminding me how mortal I am. Diseased meat stretched around a filament of bone sticks and bone pegs.

I am a median. I am a traffic cone. I am yellow lines painted down the middle of basket-weaving courses funded by professional distractors. My voice, when unified with the rest of the voices, is powerful. My voice, when given the ability to change the opinions of many minds at a time, is powerful. That goes for all of us. Keep us down. Keep us segregated. Keep us entertained.

This is not news. This is what my eyes say to my brain all day. This is not news. I am on a ferris wheel and the ride is getting monotonous. I am not bored. I am not ungrateful. But I am worried at the gathering speed.

I need to remove my filters. I need to uncondition my hair and bequeath bare feet to my soul again. The gravity of time has me. The gravity of this planet has me. But I need to life up my mind. I need to light bulb higher. My thinker is gathering precepts and defaults. It’s accruing a mess of ‘knowledge’. It’s becoming glutted with facts, making it too smart to realize, making it too stuffed to think. My brain is a saturated sponge in need of a wringout or a drying.

I need a cleaning. And I need it soon.


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I am the chronic doorman lapchild that makes success as improbable as trout lice. I walk into the room like a greasy high five and people immediately want to wash their hands. They have their beard theory ready as I throw the net of my calendar out over the month, fishing for dates. I cut a fine figure dressed in my barbeque smock and carrying my pink axe. I feel like a Turkish jackalope. The sadness in my eyes is becoming permanent but I’m fighting it. I want to be mean, efficient, and ready to go but I end up being a ripoff artist with swollen, tattooed hands. I’m a bearded, poolside drink girl getting jug burn.

You are my mile highness. When you left without saying goodbye to me, I knew it was love. You’re a beautiful day in the poor part of town and your sunshine is fermenting my mind. When you walk across the room, the men’s heads track you like sunflowers. You are a radium rose shining brightly in the darkness. There have been too many classic rock songs, topless vampires, and all-day buffets in my boot ransom life. You are a reminder that aspirations are necessary.

Replace my collarbones with your wishbones. Show me that fingers have no sense of smell. Ignore my unpheromones and touch me. Let the identical twins of Trashy Outskirts and Dusty Suburbs become a smooth city under your hands. We can become the two-headed lama. I’ll be the moth. You be the big pink sea snail. Call me Misty Spoon. Sure, my pillows are stuffed with money but I still can’t sleep. Let’s let dreams rent out smiles for a while. Come closer.




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Radiohead. I don’t have the words but I have attempts.

I am reborn. He calls the tune. By reborn I mean baptized in the unending sheets of blood-temperature rain at the Thunderbird stadium. By ‘he’ I mean Thom Yorke. I am soaked to the bone. We, all twenty thousand of us, had fun. Not in spite of the rain, but because of it. It was quintessentially Vancouver.

My tears mixed with the slickness on my shining face, turned up to the gospel of a band that never even veered near to playing Creep. And the crowd was grateful for it. I felt myself experience moments of bliss. I was far from the only one crying openly. There were thousands of people. Thom Yorke was right there in front of me. It was raining steadily on the steaming, smiling crowd. It was intense.

I felt something similar when watching Sharon Jones and Dap Kings at the Commodore back in February. Like I was in the presence of true magic, true artistry, true legend. I tell people that if everything happens for a reason and that I came back to Vancouver to be close to my father while he died, then I also was pulled here so that I could see Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings in concert at the Commodore.

Not that I’m equating the two events in my life. But I’m glad in parts of my very soul for both experiences. That’s how amazing Sharon Jones and Dap Kings were in concert.

I felt that again tonight. The rain, the people I went with, the people I met there, all of it. I feel like it was the high-water mark in an already incredible summer.

A woman I was desperately in love with in a different city married someone else two weeks ago. This concert made up for it. That’s what I’m talking about.

On Saturday, I dressed as a zombie at noon and then as a rampaging space beast in a play that night.

On Sunday, a woman killed two giant crabs in my kitchen, cooked them, and then we pigged out on them and got good and drunk while slathering our fingers in garlic butter, crab meat and smiles. Afterwards, we watched The Princess Bride and Labyrinth.

On Monday, I read poetry to a packed house at Café Deux Soleils. Living legend Shane Koyczan was there. Afterwards, he shook my hand, called me by name, and said that I had done a good job. I practically floated home in a trance.

And now tonight. Radiohead in the rain for two hours of solid transcendence.

These are typical experiences in these hot months. This is only the latest batch of days in a summer that is threatening to be the best summer I have ever experienced in my short life.

I am grateful and stunned and filled with love.


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Such an amazing Saturday that I had to make a new LJ icon just for the occasion. Here is the story in pictures.

Housewarming, going away party, Megatron concert, Battlestar Galactica wrap party, Masquerade concert.

So on Thursday, I helped a friend of mine (the lovely and talented Kimmy Shimmy. She puts on a great show if you see her name on any of the things happening around town) in her burlesque performance. I was the 'angry customer' in the routine and she was the server. The food ends up having underwear in it. Horrified, I go to leave. In order to get me to stay at the restaurant, she takes off her clothes. In the end, I slip money into her garter belt.



And then on Friday, my good friend Sam and I ran in the Chip Wilson's Not Dead Memorial Mile. There were costume-themed waves that left every fifteen minutes. Rockstar, bride, businessman, and (you guessed it) an underwear wave. Those are little hot dogs on my briefs. I ran the mile in 10 minutes or so. Rumour has it that I had the smallest briefs there. It was uphill from Alma up to Blanca on 10th. I got a round of applause when I finished the race. I'm not dead!



All in all, not a bad couple of days. Pretty sweet in terms of putting myself out there in public. There'll be more pictures and hopefully video soon but there you go.

I’m a weasel in wolf’s clothing.
I’m a sheep that only counts on himself if he wants to go to sleep.
The first date goes great.
The second date goes horribly awry.
I throw myself high onto ledges so that I can pull myself up.
I’m almost aggressively alone.
I am the grand illusion of life, the cosmic self-aware gift, and I’m common.
As Shakespeare said, Man is a real piece of work.
I’m part of the wave that Coke told us to catch and here, years later,
I’m still surfing.
My personal trade deficit is four old VHS tapes and a dog collar.
I marvel at my own Gross National Product.
Am I the only person that misses the busy signal?
Drinks on coasters help me drink and coast while friends in bands I’ve never heard of tour the country.
I feel success leeching my youth out through my backbone.
I feel over-responsible and I don’t even have kids.
I’m wrapped like a Christmas present in bills and investments.
Open me up and change will spill out.
The beginning of the iceberg.
I’m what you get back after you pay for something.
I’m short-term goals stuffed under a mattress.
They say that some monitors use up more power on standby than they do when they’re turned on.

I know exactly what that feels like.




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I was a busy guy. I went from party to party and popped my head in the door for minutes or hours at a time before having to go somewhere else. What can I say? I was popular. I had catch-phrases and witty retorts that people came to respect, look forward to, and admire. Lines like:

“That was my nickname in high school”

and

“That’s what SHE said!”

And the ever-popular:

“Your MOM!”

People generally acknowledged that the party hadn’t started until I arrived and that the party began a downhill slide after my departure.

Now, being the life of a party stretched a person pretty thin. I was needed at several social functions every night. I felt selfish, only giving a little bit of myself to most parties and none of myself to the parties who didn’t have the foresight to book me at least a week in advance. I knew that short of cloning, I was in a fix. I didn’t want people to hate me.

The stroke of genius smacked me in the face while walking through a video store. I was browsing through titles when, in my peripheral vision, I noticed a person standing beside me. I turned to him to ask him a question. It was a cardboard cutout of Bruce Willis from the latest Die Hard movie. Startled and embarrassed, I looked around to see if anyone had seen me. No one had.

There was a button in the center of his chest that had ‘press me’ written around it. I pressed it.

“Yippee Ki-Yay” said Bruce Willis. I pressed it again. “Welcome to the party, pal!” said Bruce Willis. Someone was waiting behind me to press the button. There were people watching and tittering.

A light bulb went on above my head. My problems were solved!

I called in some favours. I went to a recording studio. I went to a photographer. I went to a sign shop. Soon, I had six laminated cardboard Duncans with buttons in the center of their chests that one could press to get one of my three hilarious copyrighted taglines.

No one needed to go without a Duncan again! No longer would I only inject an hour or less of fun into a party. Now, the party could go as long as the host wanted if they had one of my cutouts. Initially, people were confused but soon they got into it.

Demand rose.

I opened up a toll free number and a website. I became a small-business success story. With a valid credit card number, the cardboard Duncans could be couriered to anywhere on the west coast within hours.

I became the life of every party. People would say something, stumble over to my cardboard double, and press the chest button to hear me say “Your MOM!” and everyone would laugh uproariously.

A lot. I was more popular ‘on paper’ than I was in real life.

Soon, my list of invites started to dwindle. My VIP passes shrank in number. Disturbingly, I was noticing a rise in my duplicate’s popularity but a decrease in my own personal popularity. It was flattering and alarming all at the same time.

Some of my duplicates were going to places I had never been. One even attended a party at Hugh Heffner’s mansion and showed up in Us weekly the following weekend.

Last week, I had a night where I had nothing to do.

It was the first time that had happened in over three years.

In a barely disguised panic, I went onto my database and looked up the address of one of my cardboard Duncan shipping recipients. It looked like a fun party. An end-of-the-year modeling school graduation party that had previously used my doppelganger for their Halloween and Christmas functions. I got dressed the same as my duplicate and went to the party in my new Porsche after canceling the delivery of the cardboard me.

I arrived. I stepped up the steps. I rang the doorbell and adjusted my tie. I was sweating. My face didn’t feel real.

A beautiful woman answered the door. Her smile faltered when she saw me. She even looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was behind me.

“Oh.” She said. Then a fake smile lit up her face. “Well, this is a surprise! Come on in! The real Duncan! Everyone will be thrilled!”

I entered.

“The Duncan’s here everyone!” she yelled. There was a rush of expensive shoes on marble to the foyer where I was standing.

It was the worst moment of my life.

I got to see a hundred well-dressed, beautiful faces rush forward with wide smiles, look at me with a confused expression as their smiles became quizzical, and then saw their eyes glaze and their smiles falter before fake smiles snapped into place.

They were dealing with the fact that their party was going to be just another party.

I was in hell.

People started looking for their keys and making lame apologies to the host ten minutes after I showed up.

All night, I tried to be funny. At the buffet table, someone mentioned that the éclairs had a ‘hint of nougat’. Beside them, I said “That was my nickname in high school!”

They didn’t laugh. I heard the woman whisper to her boyfriend, “It’s better when the other Duncan does it.”

I started drinking. I remember crying at one point. I remember a few people laughed at that.

My last memory of the night is ending up on the front steps, waiting for a taxi, while a drunk runner-up for Miss America kept pressing the center of my chest and looking confused.

I withdrew from the public eye. I put on weight.

I own the Duncan Empire now. My cutouts are all over the country. No socially active house is complete without one. They now have over sixty-five ‘zingers’ in eight languages and a wardrobe of over fifty outfits. I’m looking at expanding into international markets.

I am rich. I haven’t laughed in months. I am not myself lately.



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Hey everyone. I saw a poster of this in someone's apartment recently. You can see the original in my flickr account ->here<-. I tried to recreate it because I couldn't find it anywhere on google or anything. I think it's just a brilliant and hilarious idea. Here's my attempt to recreate it in photoshop using what little knowledge I have. I mean, it still looks screenprinted, just *badly* screenprinted. : )