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What is all of this but narcissism anyway?  The rest of it remains.  See ya.

Mad Sewing Machine Skills

Poor focus, but no matter!  Made the headpiece from scratch.  Competence gogogo

Work in Progress. Feedback Appreciated

Like every other counter-culture nerd in his youth, I took a year off amidst my education. No clear direction, motivation and a total disbelief in the school system to suddenly grace me with a purpose like some light out of the sky sent me away, any place but here.
I decided I’d take that old poor excuse of a car and drive, to God knows where; hope to find whatever it was. My parents shrugged, be back before the next school year starts, Jon. It’ll be good for the boy, remember our trips?
My spiritual journey barely took me to the next province and instead of awe-filled inspirations of self-discovery and the wind in my hair, I found myself in a bar. The Joe Everybody of bars, with its identical patrons, busty bartenders and that sad fucking smell of the whole damn world, sticky floors, home again. Only now I have less gas. I figured I’d celebrate my journey with a drink, and I sat about morosely, knowing that I looked more morose than anyone else in that bar. Because I was still so young, brimming with life and purpose. All these other people here had already out-grown their chance, they were beyond saving. But me…I’ve got something, right?
11 o’ clock, they turn that shitty music on, the one that sends the vibrations up your spine and make you feel it in your organs. Fucking hell, can’t a guy get a drink in this damn place anymore without having his kidneys shaken out of his ass?
I stuck around anyway and watched the crowd file in, the girls in their skimpy modern-day loin cloths and fancy bras with their winter boots. I hated those boots, and the girls in them, and I hated that I wanted to stick it in all those pretty little things. I drank.
Then Kip came in. I didn’t know his name was Kip at the time. To be honest I’m still not sure if that’s his real name, anyway. Kip, walking into a bar full of young sexed women and men dancing and sweating and strutting, showing up at the bars every weekend only because everyone else was there. But this bastard walked into the bar wearing the ugliest damn wool sweater I had ever seen. A perfectly done-up bow-tie graced his bare neck, and added a humorous grace to him. He wore shorts that showed his skinny legs, and a pair of bright orange sneakers that were peeling up at the front. They were missing their laces, and the tongues of his shoes lolled about sadly.  Everyone stared at him. He didn’t give a shit, and they knew it, and he knew it, and it made everyone angry.
He hit the bar fast and bought a pitcher of the cheapest beer and sat down at a table, alone, with one glass. Then he drank. He drank with determined purpose, only drunkenness in sight. Suddenly I wasn’t the saddest fucking most morose fucker in the bar, and it was okay. I picked up my drink and stood next to his table.
“Can I sit here?”
He nodded only, didn’t look up at me, just poured more beer. I sat down in front of him as he brought the glass to his mouth and tipped it towards him. I watched him for some time, and he lagged a little as soon as the alcohol seeped into his veins. He looked up at me for a moment, bleary-eyed, then grinned.
“I’m going to dance. Wanna dance?” he stood up with his hand resting on the table, looking at me.
Well, why the fuck not? So we got up and headed to the dance floor. I shuffled and moved my arms a little, the way I danced in a million bars and the way a million guys like me danced in this bar. But when I looked over at my drunken bow-tied friend, I was forced to stop and watch. I was not the only one.
He was standing against one of the walls of the dance floor, and had his back pressed to it. He threw his hands over his head and felt the wall behind him, sliding down onto his haunches. Very thick rows of thin muscle flexed on his calves as he then began to gyrate his hips and slide back up the wall again. Kip danced in a way that awoken sexual desires in latent homosexuals and made insecure straight males angry. Every once in a while he would reach out randomly in an attempt to grab girls dancing near him, and they all moved away from him, making faces at each other. He would look sad for a moment, then continued to dance. I loved this guy, and everything he was.
He danced until the bar closed, and when it came time to leave he simply walked out of the bar and I ran to catch up with him.
“Hey, who…what, uh. Jesus I don’t even know where to start. What’s your name?”
He stared at me indifferently. “Well, my name, it is Kip, Jip, Quip. I’m whatever you want me to be, as long as it ends in ip. I like the finality of the noise. Don’t you?”
We walked along together alone in the dark streets, the cement slick with rain reflecting all those sad city lights.
“Well I’m Jon, and I’m kind of new around here, but not around for long, I hope…” He talked a little, but listened mostly, and I talked his damn ear off. I never said a word to anyone else about my secret desire to overthrow this system that trapped us all, afraid of the madness they’d find in me.
“I can’t do this man, I can’t sit around wasting my youth, you know?”
He stopped in the street suddenly, then sat on a set of stairs leading to a glass door where the lights were off inside.
“So?” he replied, watching me expectantly. I was annoyed.
“What do you mean so? I want to change the whole system, I want to bring about redemption for the entire human race and escape this horrible cycle of money and greed. So what? So that’s it!” I replied, my arms in the air. He looked up at me with his mouth slightly open, then shrugged. I sighed and sat next to him.
“What’s the use? Why do I bother telling anybody if the whole world’s going to look at me through those red eyes and just say ‘So?’”
“Meant no offense, no, none.  But I didn’t ask anything of you,” he said matter-of-factly, looking at me not unkindly.
“I’m sorry. Sorry.” The truth is, I was feeling pretty childish. I had not told anyone, and for some reason I expected him to understand, or to disagree – I just thought he would react, this mad effigy of man.
We sat quietly together, and after a time, the rain slowed to a soft sprinkling – the kind of rain that somehow always finds itself in your eyes, too fine to be caught in your eyelashes. He held out his hands to catch the invisible mist of moisture. I stared at his hands as he did, and noticed his pinky sticking out at an odd angle. My eyes followed the length of the finger and found a rather gruesome scar at the base of it.
“What happened to your finger?” I asked, pointing at his right hand.
“A long story, a long story,” he muttered. Kip stood up and looked at me.
“I’m going. Do you want to be going too?”
“Where are you going?”
He sighed, then started to walk away. I followed.
“Wait, I have a car. I’ll give you a ride to wherever you’re going,” I offered, pulling the keys out of my pocket as if I could command it to appear with my remote.
“I’m going, not getting there. I had a car once, and I never got there. Every time I got somewhere I would have to go back, or go somewhere else, and it was just that. A car is meant to keep you afloat, never able to breathe in any one place for too long,” he nodded his head vigorously, eyes closed.
“You should go home. You’ve got promise written all over your soft unworried flesh, life and a car and probably parents who love you and hold you and worry sick about you,” and he continued to walk. He said all that and I knew it but I wouldn’t face it. His frankness made me angry, as if he had stamped his name on something private, my own suffering.  I kept up with him stubbornly.
“What’s that bullshit, man? You can’t be a few more years older than me. What about you, huh? You’re not homeless, why don’t you have to answer to you world? Why do you get to walk away?”
“Because I can,” he replied simply, his clipped pseudo-philosophy beginning to grate on me.
“Well I can too!”
He wheeled on me, and watched me, swaying slightly, still drunk.
“Okay then, let us go.  If you please, let us get going then, by your lead,” He stood there, then bowed deeply, stumbling for a moment.  I took a step back, then started walking towards my car.  We were both silent for the rest of the walk, and I had to stop to look over my shoulder to make sure he was still there. 
We got to my old car, and I muttered apologies while he just looked at me through his sad half-opened eyes.  I put the key in the ignition and let it hang there, the various keychains clicking against the wheel.
“So, where are you heading?”
“Mmm.  Lets go.  Lets gooo…west.  Yes, I think west is where it ends,” he said thoughtfully.  I pulled out onto the street and started heading west, whatever that meant.  We drove around the empty streets for a while, the yellow street lights, bright distorted yellow fireworks sprawled across the wet windshield.  He took turns furrowing his brows, then unknitting them and sitting back in satisfaction.  When he spotted the highway, he ordered me onto it.  Highway 17, and I’d never heard of it.  I started wondering how I would find my way back after I let him off.
“So how’d you get to the bar?  This place seems pretty far,” I finally broke the silence with my newfound legitimate excuse.
“the same way I end up everywhere else, I guess,” he said, then would no longer speak. 
We drove, and drove and drove and two hours later I was starting to wonder if he was simply fucking with me now.
“Kip, we’ve been driving clear hundred-twenty for 2 hours now,” I ventured, no longer asking questions but merely made my point, curtly. 
“It’s not far now, I promise, I can see it over the horizon somewhere, it’s there somewhere over theree-” he sung the last part, pressing himself up firmly against the dashboard.  I had attributed his madness from the earlier evening with all that external alcohol and music and smoke, but watching him sober up into the morning, I realized his insanity had little to do with his alcohol. 
The further we drove, the more the city fell away until it was us, the well-paved road, and all the grass and woods beneath our wheels and feet.  The morning was cool, and the wind blew into our windows and filled our heads with the smell of pre-emptive morning dew. 
“You can hear the sunrise, you know.  It’s like a..a discordant orchestra.  A thousand violins and their pitches, bobbing up and down relentlessly, whining and yawning,” he spoke, facing the window so I could barely make out his words. “Scratch…the strings, sharp, flat” then he swung around and stared at me, and the world went silent, as if he was commanding the orchestra through me.  “Chatter subsides, curtains – UP!” he swung his hands upward suddenly, and I twitched, startled in my seat  “And all the violins sing out in identical chorus, sounds swelling, swelling until it’s ready to explode” and it does – a bright light over the horizon breaks across the land, the light sharp and the shadows defined, darkened.  Kip bowed in his seat, a large smile distorting his face and his eyes closed.
I finally pulled over, then turned to him.  “You drive, Kip.  I’m exhausted, you’ve gotten some sleep.  If we get there, just leave me in the driveway and I’ll be out of your hair,” we switched seats, and he took the driver’s seat eagerly, both hands clutching the wheel till his knuckles went white.  I pretended to sleep with my head against the window, but watched him through my slitted eyes. 
I took this moment to assess this now-established real-in-the-flesh madman driving my car.  He was clearly a nervous creature, and totally unconcerned.  He was a million conflicts trapped in the poor constrains of a human body.  He was traditional and polite, holding doors and ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’, but so startlingly dismissive.  His face looked as if his inner personality projected itself against the screen of his skin, and he had no control nor wanted any over his appearance.  His hair was wiry and floated about his head as if his thoughts were electrical, a blond or brown.  He wore glasses that made a grim partnership with his bow-tie that now lay askew around his neck.  Every once in a while he’d lean far back into his seat and look so old and tired, humming sad old tunes.  Eventually I fell asleep to the soft lilting.
By the time I awoke, I was no longer surprised to discover we were still moving. What could I say? Hell, we could have driven a million miles and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference save all the little gages, measurements and numbers assuring me that we were beating the Earth’s rotation just a little bit. Kip was just crazy in his seat, his head and legs out of the windows or sunroof or anything like a damn caged animal.
“Look at all that wheat, Jon. Just imagine, I can light my goddamn cigarette and throw it out there and PAFF! It’s all fucking gone, just like that, a wild-fire like a fiery mane consuming all this…all this fucking WHEAT!”
Upon seeing me awake, we switched driver positions again. I drove, silent, and watched his charicature face press against the window wide-eyed, wishing I could be a part of him, that I could see that fire ripping across this country, burning it to the ground, with or without chance of rebirth. Either right now was fine by me.
Shortly thereafter, in the middle of nowhere- “Stop the car, Jon. Please could you kindly stop the carstopthecar-” he went on like this banging his hands against the dashboard. I pulled over and stopped the car on the soft shoulder. He got out of the car before it even stopped moving and stumbled a little. I got out after him and stood at the edge of the road, stretching. Looking left, and right, and all the same damn thing all around. A solitary black road I could see a million miles away because this land was really flat. Saskatchewan? Manitoba maybe? I turned around and saw Kip standing at the edge of the field looking over it. Kip suddenly climbed onto my car noisily, standing on the roof of my car, looking out into the field again.
“Look, look at all that! This is the end of the fucking world is what it is. This is where all truth comes to die, right here. The earth is flat, look at it!” he pointed across the field into the horizon. I looked.
“Yeah, it sure does look like that, eh? You can see so far around here, in all directions. It’s like you’re standing right in the middle of it all,” I added.
He turned on me and shook his head sadly. “Oh Jon, this ain’t no dream. This is the new truth, because the earth really is flat, and you just can’t see it through your sad eyes, but it’s not your fault, because they’re not your eyes,” He stood there with a hand shielding his face from the increasingly brighter morning sun. I looked around, tried to imagine the world was really flat. The sky was bright blue, and there were several cumulus clouds, those giant fluffy ones that make the sky seem so much larger and higher and further away, unreachable…
“Sir! Good sir Jon. You are now standing at the very edge of the world, for the first time I persume! The very end, the frontier, except you know now it really is the end! No unsure futures here, just the brick wall and then nothing. What do you have to say to everything that is no longer the earth?” he asked me, his features grave.
I looked into the fields, the skies, then at him.  Kip turned back to the field and closed his eyes.  I watched the wind about his wispy hair, and I saw now that he was part of it all, the wheat and his hair all gold in the sun. And it was just me now, in my city clothes, crappy car, my pathetic dreams to change a microcosm now a million miles away. What did Toronto or New York or any of it mean anyway out here? What could I say?
I said nothing. I cried out, and let it all go. Oh how I yelled, at the top of my lungs, until I ran out of air, then I came again.  I screamed and the sound escaped all around, nothing to bounce back, only outwards.  On the brink of all this uncertainty, I had nothing left, no explanations.  And to my surprise, by the end of it, my eyes watered as I gasped for oxygen, and before I knew it I was sobbing.  I don’t know why, I’ll never know why.  Faced with something so human and inescapable consumed me and I was helpless.  Kip only wrapped his arm around me and I cried into his shoulder. 
“Poor child, but he’s heard it all before and better men before you have tried, Jonny boy,” he released me and sat on the edge of the field.
“There’s nothing left for us here, only severed figures and aimless wandering. False American Idols and false Canadian idols, wheezing and exhausted economies, stoic mothers too tired for words and child-rearing, no longer present, just sitting in old rocking chairs while the days consume her alive. We spent all our days rushing and dashing, faster and faster to our happiness, except now we’ve found the end and it’s just all wrong…”
We got back into the car and continued our way out west without a word. My burned CD with all my old music and greatest hits, if only to stave off the painful silence of what to say next, or if there really is anything left.
The late afternoon drew on until the sunset ran across the sky like a colour test on a movie theater screen, our world encased in that windshield.
“It’s -”
“SHH!” he hushed me angrily.
The painful deliberate silence was suddenly renewed, and I sat there, simply too tired to say anymore. I waited, and Kip only spoke once the sky was pitch black.
“I would like to formally apologize for rudely interrupting you. What is it that you were going to say?” He turned to me and smiled politely, oddly.
“I…uh I guess it’s not important now, it was just about the sunset,” I mumbled, wondering if we had both been on the same train of thought for a full hour.
“Then why say it? These transient things that will fade away like the sunset, but could never be so beautiful. Words, they’re our desperation, our last resort. Let us experience life together, yes? Jon, I am right here with you, and I feel you. You can feel me too. Let us only exchange these horrible guttural noises and sounds we call “words” when all else fails us, yes? Yes. Good.” he said, smiling and resting his head half-out of the car against the sill.
He lifted his right hand a little guiltily, and I saw him watch me out of the corner of his eye. “Okay, I’ll tell you about how I obtained this horrible, heinous injury that has left me with a wretched scar and a horrible disfigurement that keeps my pinky erect like some uptight Englishman whose had too much fuckin’ tea.”
He held it higher for dramatic effect.
“Several years ago, I was born to an old Eastern-European couple. We came here, and stayed here, and never really touched each other’s lives. My father died. So I left. Then I met a million people, and did a million different things, and I was just everywhere all the time. Then…then what? What was I….Hm. Oh. Yes. So one day I found myself alone in a room, I don’t know where. In the middle somewhere, or out east. Maybe west. Anyway, I found a hunting knife in a drawer in this room. So I put my finger on the counter like so-” and here he placed his pinky against the dashboard with the rest of the hand curled away from it – “and cut it off.”
We both looked at each other expectantly. Then he suddenly raised his eyebrows as if he had re-read what he had just said and realized he was missing the end of his story.
“Oh! And then I picked it up and called the hospital (with my other hand, you see) and I went there and they sewed it back on. The End.” He added the last part deliberately, pronouncing the words as if he had just read a child’s fairy tale to me.
“What? Why? What did that have to do with anything?”
“I dunno. You wanted a story and you’re so eager so I had to give you something, right?”
“But why??”
“Because you won’t, Jon, and neither will anyone else,” He responded sadly. He pulled a Harmonica out of his pocket and played a jazzy little tune, the soft bleeting filling the car for only a moment before escaping out the windows.
He directed me off the highway shortly after midnight, and we found ourselves at a pit stop, the one that sees a million trucks a day and never a single person willing to stay.
“This is it, Jonny. What a ride, right? Hey, go home. Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not out here. It’s not anywhere. It’s all gone, now, the wonder and newness of it all. We’re just a sorry generation now, left to trace our fingers over the crudely carved trees of our time, no more room for our lives. Time to burn the whole forest down, yeah? I think so Jon. It’s about that time again, I think, although maybe we’re ready for a little ice. What do we know of desire, anyway? What indeed Mr. Frost, ho hum…”
He closed my car door carefully and bent over to look into the window once more.
“Thanks for the ride, Jon. Now go home,” he said, turning and muttering, “fuckin’ poser kids…”
I made it home in time for the next school semester.

The Purpose Unfolds

Earlier this evening.

Picture Update

A paper project I put together for my mother’s birthday.  Hell yeah that shit can fold!

Another angle.  The motherfucker’s stringed.  It took so goddamn long.  LET ME REVEL.

Our prime minister for a second term.  I believe he is either a robot or an escaped horror from a wax museum.  Either way, I voted for him because robots are awesome.

The changing of leaves is always a beautiful spectacle, but somehow seems so sterile in clear-cut suburbia.  Still beautiful in its own right though.

I have no explanation as to why I am posting this picture just yet, but wait and see.

To Bronze the Golden Rule

Discordant wails of solemn choir
His voice sounds out the final verse
Then the silence, no harp nor lyre
As man wields God upon the pyre
And burns his flesh, their pride perverse

The Word upon the tales of old
Primordial love that spawned the root
Promised to those in shepherd’s fold
The words, mere husks, shed to behold
The Truth which bears the sweetest fruit

The Golden Rule immortalized
In vivid image and metaphor
Lost in translation, ostentatious disguise
The flesh of the apple, petrified,
The precious seed trapped in its core

Twisted, tempered into jewelry and vice
Extracted metals from within
Now merely tools of one’s device
Till love and life will not suffice
And man’s salvation’s bound in sin

Singer’s lips now silver-plated
The Machine emits melodious tunes
The ancient out-dated tongues translated
The Mass repeats The Word, sedated
And all’s forgotten by hazy noons.

Poetic response to a Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken

RHYMES ARE FUN
The Path Well-Trodden

I found myself facing the Gate
The handles brass and brown with age
I pondered idly of its state
Despite inscriptions bold and great
Appeared to me, a fancy cage.

Beneath my feet I found a way,
it wound in curves and out of sight.
And so I found myself astray
my guardians watched with dismay
because I found the Way’s delight.

The stones were smooth, with use and wear
From countless ages found before
Their steps and all their weight to bear
No names for them, nor silent prayer
Until the path ends at a door.

Except this handle’s bright with use
A golden shine fit for a king.
The hinges worn, the door is loose
The faded script tells of a truce
A deal that wants only one Thing.

Are you in it? Are you WITH it?

I keep getting these images, urges to grab rails, to grip them until my muscles cramp – not to brace but out of anger, because I want to yell, to vomit out some sort of pure emotion, littered with pain and rawness and horrible offense.  Express something, EXPRESS!  Not in words.  The greater, the heavier the silence, the LOUDER.

I don’t see people because they are not here – I am ashamed that I did not recognize you.  But I wasn’t looking for you, I did not want to find you here, not here.  You were my balloon, the one I secretly let go on purpose for once, because you needed to escape, move onto something bigger, take the world and be my dream.

But you all keep coming down, You, all of you, my balloons, returned in unmarked envelopes, sad shreds of rubber, no explanations, no notes.

Great Over-heard Quotes

*A kid being a kid decides to let out an ear-piercing scream that sent a collective shiver through all the bodies in proximity*
“Jesus I think my ovaries just shriveled up and died.”

Yin Yang out the..yin..uhh..yang

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