Assorted thoughts

friday, april 28th, 2006

flowers for the dead.

i was in a flower shop yesterday. it was at the back of this building halfway along a road to nowhere. a front for money laundering if i ever saw one. but it did have lovely flowers. the florist lady said, "we just had a big funeral, so our stock is kaput. all the flowers are shipped in from holland. things like this don't grow here."

there were carnations, orchids, daisies, crocus things, purple flowers, and moss. i used to be afraid of moss when i was little. it was kind of weird. i think because it kind of lurks in corners, all squishy. but there with the flowers it looked nice.

the trapped-in flowers smelled alive, which is odd you know, because they're dead. once a flower is in a flower shop, it has already been cut and killed; all its false life and vitality stems from the water it's in. but i don't see flowers as dead, so much as living in the moment. they're there, and they're beautiful for a while. and i think that's wonderful.

oh, and there were lilies. huge, pure, trumpet-like white lilies. long, long ago, before i ever knew their meaning, lilies were always my favourite flower.

something else i was afraid of when i was little was my aunt's house in new jersey. you know, when you're small and you know that just beyond every corner is a monster waiting just for you, his bones crunched into a ready crouch, there's always a house that holds more terror than most. one that is a spirit house; it is practically alive with all the ghosts you conjure up in your imagination.

or spy on the stairs.

my aunt's house in new jersey is an old people's house. there are far too many doilies, and impractical cream coloured carpets, and porcelain figurine accidents just waiting to happen. it's a place so dull it should be safe, but i was convinced there was a monster and a ghost: a monster in the closets and the garage and the attic, and a ghost in the walls and the mirrors and on the stairs.

the monster was like all monsters. it was green, and hairy, and had bits of children stuck between its teeth. it hid in my aunt's old shoes (she hasn't cleaned her closets since the eighties), and at the witching hour while my family snored, it thumped across the attic. or it roared in the garage, banging trash cans together, battering the car. the monster was scary, an easy product of a bored, over active imagination with a too-long summer vacation. but i was more afraid of the ghost.

for the ghost lived in silence. it was there when i forgot to chatter questions or make noise, when i would catch a glimpse of a scatered movement in the mirror, out of the corner of my eye. it was there when the quiet roared at noontime, making me sit in the middle of a room, too scared to move. and worst it lived in the dark of night, where everything not blessed with light dissapeared. i was shut on the second floor because i could not go downstairs: the ghost was there, an indistinct being with a skeleton and two eyes, waiting for me, unsmiling. and beyond it, nothing. nothing at all.

to this day i'm still afraid of that stairwell. i won't even look at it in the dark. it's stupid, but sometimes these things stay with you. these things from when you were little.

thursday, april 20th, 2006

21 UN 56...
twenty-one UN fifty-six...
twainty wan yu-en piptyschicks...

hotels mean loudspeakers and jeweled turbans. they mean waiting impatiently on a pedsteadal of marble steps, glaring at the night lights. in delhi, they are brighter than the smokescreened sun, but these lights are colder, solitary, alone. soon enough the driver will come. the turbaned man (who may or may not actually be sikh) will bark and slam you into your rumbling juggernath of a vehicle, making room for richer and/or more indian guests. but at the end of it all, in his salute, there will be a hint of a smile. you know it's there. and that's why you know you're home.

tuesday, april 4th, 2006

who here besides me enjoys superstitions? not that i believe in them (necessarily), but i find superstitions interesting. i like learning about superstitions and old wives' tales from different cultures, all the quirks and nuances people used to take seriously in the past. i don't know why, i just find it really interesting. in a certain light, it's deplorable that those parts of culture and tradition have withered away, because they used to give soul to the stupider, or shall i say more mundane side of life. things like spilling salt or cutting your nails had meaning.

similarly, i find mythology and fairy tales quite intruiging. i hold two people directly responsible for this: gregory maguire and neil gaiman. seriously. those guys made me really want to be a writer. i think it's a real skill to be able to take stories and ideas that are old and comfortable, sometimes told for hundreds of years, and be able to turn it into something new. i love it.

time seems to slow down, and down, and down before i get to india. i'm going to stay with my best friend and it will be, incongruously, against reason, just like old times. sometimes we are so lucky as to have good friends like that. friends that you don't even properly miss, when you're apart, but more annoyed that they're not there with you and you have to wait to see them again. you don't miss them because you know they will always be there for you. it's hard to explain.

thursday, march 28th, 2006

la gueule du loup.

i recognize this time of year. it's a time when the wind changes direction, the trees seem to loom higher overhead, i burst out laughing for no reason, and jump when the telephone rings. the earth seems distant: especially at those twice a day nothing-times when i'm neither awake or asleep. almost as if something snatched me and is holding me far, far away. work and devotions slip through my grasp, hazy and static. dreams are made of ice lollies, silver bells, summers in the attic. something snatched me and holds me far, far away. tucked and grey, in the mouth of the wolf.

sunday, march 5th, 2006

salt and vinegar.

"Perhaps i am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful: the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty." --Oscar Wilde.

sighh. i love that quote. though it makes a lot more sense if you're familiar with the 100 pages of de profundis before it. so go out and read it before you start accusing me of being an emo kid. which i am, but that is really not the point.

i walked forty minutes this morning from and to my house in order to buy a pack of salt and vinegar crisps. the strong kind, the ones that shrink the inside of your mouth and draw tears from your eyes. there's nothing quite like a bag of good salt and vinegar crips. the taste is razor sharp.

in the old days, the ultimate punishment for a people was to have their fields sown with salt. the land would be cursed for generations: nothing would grow in it. the deserts of afghanistan are, in fact, almost completely manmade. kublai khan sowed most of it with salt hundreds of years ago in order to destroy the people. which is interesting, in retrospective. that is what i call bitter.

bitter. an insult like vinegar. in a strange sort of way, insults are a lost art. today people just curse each other out. true biting, cutting remarks are a thing of a past, in english anyway. i hear nobody does insults like the eastern europeans. for further reading, see ludmila's broken english by dbc pierre. there's something wonderful about how bitter it is, oddly.

friday, february 24th, 2006

crisis.

and no, i'm not talking about the coup d'etat. me and my mum were counting this afternoon, and seeing as this is my 9th attempted/successful coup, the novelty has kind of worn off and i watch all this with a sick sort of detatched amusement.

so crisis #34958374568962934: earlier today i watched the constant gardener. it was actually a really beautiful/painful movie, despite the fact that the camera movement really pissed me off (damn you, film class!). so there's this part in the movie (it's set in kenya) where the main character is bringing his wife home from the hospital, and she wants him to pull over and pick up a family she sees on the side of the road. she was talking to them while she was in the hospital and she knew that they were going to have to walk 40 km to their village. "these are people we can help now", she said, but the guy wouldn't give them a ride, he said he had to put his wife's health first.

he'd rather be part of aid agencies and government plans and push for widespread change rather than help a few people out for a few minutes.

but on the other hand, in i 3 huckabees there's this family who adopted an orphan from the darfur region, which is great and all, but they also own an SUV and waste a lot of plastic and with all their consuming support dictatorships that make orphans in the first place. so just because they helped out one person, should they not feel guilty for indirectly allowing thousands to continue suffering?

what good is saving one life when many, many others will be left unaided?

ahhh contradictions. if anybody actually read all that, i'm impressed. thanks and extra love for you. hands out coupons

hmm edward scissorhands is on tv. outside, dasma is heavy and lazy.