June 2010
1 post
I've been up to other things. →
A new season of Odd Fellows will start July 16th, 2010
May 2010
5 posts
40.
After breaking into his old office, Jackie went immediately for the top left hand drawer. He felt the underside of the table top about five inches back. After negotiating Todd’s relatively large forearm precariously through the desk drawer, he retrieved an envelope. After deftly wielding a letter-opener, he took out the envelope’s contents.
39.
Jackie and Todd awoke with a start. As Jackie arrested control of the body, he put a fresh set of clothes on and walked out into the Doctor’s kitchen.
The doctor and Carol were already awake, and finishing off their breakfasts. Jackie poured himself a shot of rye in a clean tumbler, threw it back and sat down at the table, placing the bottle and his glass down in front of him. As he reached...
38.
“What the hell did you do to me?!” Jackie exclaimed. In lieu of his own face, the features he had recognized as his own all his life, his brother Todd’s face stared back at him in the mirror.
“Well, it’s a complicated answer, Jackie.”
Jackie and Todd’s body jerked violently for a moment. Speaking in an exaggeratedly lower tone of voice, Todd...
37.
Jackie winced as he downed the glass of rye in one go.
“Well god-damn! Doc, what does it matter if somebody killed me? I’m alive now, aren’t I?”
“Perhaps, Herr Davidson, you should look in a mirror.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jackie, you’d better—” Carol started, before tears began to well up in her eyes....
36.
The trio stood in Klaussheimer’s kitchen, sipping coffee. Jackie had been issued a white terrycloth robe for modesty’s sake, and Carol began to explain the situtation.
“You see Jack, you’re supposed to be dead.”
“Correction, Carol. He is dead.”
“Well that’s just preposterous, doc, I can’t be dead. I’m standing right here in front...
April 2010
3 posts
35.
A figure emerged from the steam holding his head.
“God. Damnit! I need a drink!”
Doctor Klaussheimer threw his arms in the air and shouted “I have brought your husband back from the dead!”
“Impossible!” Carol nearly fell over in disbelief. “Jackie, is that really you?”
“Of course! Now why am I standing in this laboratory, without a stitch...
34.
The chamber opened with a hiss and a slow whine, and a figure emerged from the steam, which reminded her of the canister of liquid nitrogen her dermatologist used to remove a wart from her foot earlier that year.
“Doctor, what have you done?”
33.
Think of it as a lego set.
You have the baseplate. That’s like your body. No one can help you with this. This is what you have to build on. You can’t make Rock Island Refuge without it. This particular baseplate is 2552px4 — An important thing to realize is that all of these lego sets are kept meticulously catalogued, like they have their own genes and hereditary connotations,...
March 2010
7 posts
32.
Dealing
“Hello?”
“Hi Redd?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Tom, Karen’s friend?”
“Oh hey. What’s up?”
“I was wondering if I could swing by.”
“I’m out running around… but try me back in a couple hours?”
“Yeah no problem. Talk to you later.”
—
“Hello?”
“Hi...
31.
The back seat of the Escort is where I got a lot of thinking done. A cigarette hanging from my fingers, the keys in the ignition, and the tinny speakers playing back whatever was on the radio. I would sit there with a blue exercise book in my lap; ‘mon cahier’, I called it. I wrote intricate lists, numbered.
30.
Lewis takes off his shirt and shows me a scar he’s had for a few years. He got it when he was eighteen and drunk. The story involves a silo and a tractor, and really, that’s all you need to know.
I lift up the left leg of my sweats and show him the scar I got from when I was nine and wiped out on my bike. I repeat the process on my right leg, and then show him the two scars on my...
1 tag
29
2.
The first time I ever downloaded any Radiohead was the song Paranoid Android, for my friend Tom, who wanted it on a CD he wanted made. I liked it, but I thought it was too long.
Send your thoughts here.
1 tag
28
Preface.
It comes in with a comical bass guitar and crash. A playful challenge that erupts into a jam. The composition ends with West saying “Like that?”
The first time I heard this song I was 17. It was the year that we rang in with Allister, who was Scottish and could sell the idea of hashish and community to my ex-girlfriend, getting her to eventually join him in his native land....
27
Standing at the west counter of the Coffee Cart on the mezzanine level of the Sears court, Samson desperately held down the plastic control valve on the “Arizona Sunrise” urn. He was hoping that despite the urn appearing to be empty, coffee would manifest itself magically into his cardboard cup. To no avail, he cringed as he read the other urn names, hoping to find something relatively...
26
“We don’t have a nametag for you yet,” Sarah said, handing a walkie talkie to the new hire.
It was a hot summer’s afternoon outside, but inside the mall, it was a constant, ever-present humming noise that kept all one hundred and forty shops and services at a cool twenty two celsius. The Old Navy, a looming eight thousand square foot behemoth lay anchored at the West Park...
February 2010
15 posts
25
Bertrand Van Der Meek was pouring himself a cup of coffee in the kitchenette in the mall Administrative offices as he mentally prepared for his 11:30 meeting with a representative from some ridiculous head shop chain hoping to lease unit T-28, a narrow block. The meeting wouldn’t take long, as it was just to establish that West Park Mall was not at all interested in Some-Clever-Stoner-Pun...
24
We were sitting in Jack’s sunroom drinking limoncello. Neither of us particularly enjoyed limoncello, but some hapless, pretentious up-and-coming so-and-so brought some last night.
Today the weather was cloudy and miserable. From inside, looking down on the river, we watched the snow melt as the rain fell, turning John’s half-acre waterfront backyard into a series of eroded wells,...
23
Waiting around for Nikolai is getting to be a pain in the ass these days.
Typically, I have to wait around the organic banana display for about twenty minutes before he notices me and comes over. He’ll ask me how much I need, and he’ll tell me to come back the next day.
He never weighs out in front of me, and he always gets sketchy whenever someone walks by who “looks like a...
22
“Tom,
Look, is this SERIOUSLY what you want to publish? You know we have a word cap, right??? You know we have staff editors that can and will butcher this down, but it won’t be what you want us to run. I mean, it’s a good article, but no one really gives a shit about Francis Graham right now. Maybe when his next book comes out, yeah, fine, we can run the full version of this,...
1 tag
21
“So basically,” he said, pulling himself out of the chair at the front of the room, “I think it comes down to a series of choices you have to make. Or if not you, then whoever the active agent inside your manuscript is. If you’re writing in third person, then you have to put on your mask, and figure out what you would do. It’s difficult.”
He walked over to the...
1 tag
20
“Looks like The Exchange pub is almost done.”
“I miss the Elephant and Castle. It seems more… regal.”
“I’m indifferent. We’re not in England, so I don’t really give a rat’s ass.”
“I’m somewhat of a Loyalist.”
—
“I’ve been thinking about reading The Stand.”
“Really?”
...
1 tag
19
“Have you always lived in the city?”
“This city in particular? Or in urban areas?”
“Well, urban areas. I know you lived out west for a while, and then you moved to Montreal for a while. All of your back catalogue takes place in pretty dense urban metropolises, and paints a pretty picture of ‘city life’, and I was wondering if this is because...
1 tag
18
Along Bank Street, there’s a cocoon.
This is because there is no such thing as a phoenix. Instead of a sports store rising from its own ashes, it starts as strange larvae— iron and cement. And then it goes into its cocoon, only to emerge months later as a fully finished giant glass façade with a Vietnamese restaurant adjacent, as though it had always been there.
Across the street,...
1 tag
17
“So what does it feel like today?”
“Picture the worst gas you’ve ever had in your life,” Jack says.
We’re sitting down for breakfast. I was having eggs that his on-call chef made for me when I said I wanted eggs. What I got was eggs, butter, ingredient x and a bunch of chives. Jack is having a Boost with a glass of orange juice. Jack says he only has the...
16
Things are changing a lot these days around town.
It seems that every year a new major condominium development comes in. In between the repurposed factories and old hotels, these weird glass structures pop up, with pharmacies on their ground floor.
Either pharmacies or coffee shops. But they’re rarely any of the friendlies like Starbucks or Bridgehead.
Always weird,...
2 tags
15
Catching the 95 East, or any bus, at Baseline Station is usually kind of a challenge. Typically, you’d get off whatever bus you happen to be on, and you have to— in one smooth motion— determine where you are on the platform, and where you have to stand to catch your connection, and how far you are from that spot.
I’m never in the best mood at Baseline Station. Typically...
1 tag
14
He had come in the door. Jason had let him in after he knocked on the door, but like, the way we were all supposed to knock if we left and had to come back. And Curtis was gone, so we thought it was Curt. But no, it was this guy. He was about six foot four, and had that weird thing bald guys do sometimes. You know, the male pattern baldness thing where he grows what little strip of hair he has...
1 tag
13
Ram sat in the steel folding chair along the long end of a folding table. In front of him were Officers Steven Busch and Robbie Bald, running the old good-cop bad-cop on him, and failing miserably.
Ram said with a smirk, “you’d best just leave me in here for a few hours, boys. I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not going to work.”
Busch raised his hand at...
1 tag
12
The buzzer sounded, and Ram shot up at his desk, out of a sound slumber.
He wiped the spittle from the side of his mouth, and in a smooth motion, ran a comb through his hair, threw said comb down into his upper right hand drawer, pushed the upper right hand drawer closed with his elbow, as he swooped his hand down, index finger first, on to the “talk” button on his intercom box, the...
1 tag
11
Johanna sometimes thinks that she’s not as sexy as Melody Nelson.
I always think that she’s crazy.
Not only is she sexier than Melody Nelson, she’s sexier than Serge Gainsbourg’s voice as he talks about the white underpants of a fifteen year old schoolgirl involved in a car accident.
“J’aperçus une roue de vélo à l’avant, Qui continuait de rouler en...
2 tags
10
I bought a package of thyme at the Isabella Street Loblaws. I haven’t got a clue what it is with the way they package it, but the black and white label with the perfect cadmium red PC logo— it’s eerily comforting, but at the same time, you know you’re probably getting ripped off.
I never go to the Isabella Street Loblaws; it deviates too much from my lateral movement up...
January 2010
10 posts
1 tag
9
The chair wobbled uneasily as he tipped it backwards.
“So,” he said as he turned towards me, “what else is new?”
I cleared my throat.
“Well, not a whole lot, to tell you the truth. My editor loved my notes from the conversation we had the other day. Especially when you talked about how much you like Ted Danson.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know....
1 tag
8
“Hi, John!”
She walked straight up to me and threw her drink in my face. The ice bounced off of my cheek and hit the floor. Whatever I had done, I probably deserved at least that.
“You’re going to need a heap of glue, when they all catch up with you, and they cut you up in two.”
7
“Why twelve?”
“Because I’m triskadecaphobic,” he said, finishing his fourteenth shot of Johnny Walker red. “And two lucky sevens makes fourteen. So I’m double lucky tonight, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose.”
He grinned, and I saw his teeth. The colour of pine flooring. His left canine was broken, and I fought hard not to shudder....
6
Jack and I were sitting on the front porch overlooking the rest of his parents’ property. He looked well, despite having being stabbed by a screwdriver, and his nose crushed by an overzealous security guard’s mag-lite a few days earlier. He was dressed in sort of a post-suicide-attempt look, which is about the best you could expect. He was wearing a light cotton button-up, left undone...
5
For those of you that don’t know what it’s like, try to think of all those thoughts you have — not just your dreams, your hopes, your passion — but every thought you have just passing through your head, in English, French, Spanish, Swahili, whatever language you think in. Try to think that for every solid thought you have, a voice, somewhere in the back, just one heckler.
...
4
My hat goes off to the ladies who,
at the end of the night, and after being unable to net a man, decide to try and arrange a three-way with the only two guys dancing together on the dance floor.
decide on a specific fashion detail to pull their whole outfit together.
can’t walk themselves out of the bar.
bring one of their friends over, so all of them can “have one hell of a...
3
We sit up in bed.
After.
We talk about things.
Now.
Then.
Soon.
We watch TV shows together.
We take turns lying awake and listening to traffic
pass
by
outside.
“…and watch things on VCRs with me, and talk about Big Love.”
2
I can’t wait for the summertime. I have a tradition of playing nothing but dub music on days over 40 degrees whenever I have to walk anywhere. Walking in the cold doesn’t have such a tradition.
Maybe I’ll try dub tomorrow, and see if that does anything for me.
“Fasta, selecta.”
1
Johanna and I live on the second floor of an old hotel. The heat never works the way we want it to, and we share a pair of sweatpants, a printer, and our optimism for each others’ work. We hear the next door neighbours come and go at all hours, laugh all night and fuck angrily through the walls.
“…and these Visions of Johanna, they keep me up, past the dawn.”