Blog Six.

i/ve had an open sore on my foot for over a week. it scabs when i sleep, and i think it/s finally finished and then i put my shoes on and the scab reopens and coagulates to my sock, so i wind up reopening the sore, again, when i take off my socks and then it scabs over while i sleep. and there/s a bar in the countryside where i go alone and old people in cowboys hats sway slowly to glittering steel guitar and kids play outdated arcade games, and an old woman take my order at the bar and her husband shuffles over to my table with fish, chips and beer that looks like black coffee. there/s a man here that looks like he was in a fire and all of him was badly burned except his upper lip because he has blotchy pink skin that sags down his face like melted wax, and a closely trimmed moustache, but it/s only because he/s real old. he still has a nose, too, and a cowboy hat. a stranger asks me how i/m doing. much better, as it were. (what does it matter anymore that all my friends are dying and have abandoned me to the same?) i drive home hitting 100 clicks on snowdrift dirtroads listening to ryan adams, and appear without warning over a hill into fastfood bigbox suburban outskirts guelph. i drink another beer walking alone towards downtown, watch a garage-punk band open for a garage-pop band. james arrives with andrew. andrew leaves. another james arrives gropes me mutters something latently threatening to the first james then leaves. they/re roommates. the garage-pop band stops playing. me and james wait in a long cold lineup outside a bar, i piss in the alley. james runs up the fire escape, i walk in the back door, fuck the lineup, but still don/t have the two dollars necessary to go upstairs where james and andrew and everyone else is. i call andrew and he comes down and he pays for me. james and me run into kate/s sister and dance with her. a girl from my writing class recognizes me and talks to me on the dancefloor, james and meg make eyes to suggest i try to fuck her. i/m happy for once and couldn/t care less, i dance with my eyes closed. i apologize to a friend of a friend that last time i/d gotten down and drunk, had ranted at and probably insulted some too. she seems cool about it, says she thought i was depressed because we used to have a lab together and i was always nice then, so i invite her to our kegger. i spend the rest of the night wondering if she/ll actually come, and wake up still happy. cooper is happy for me to finally be over my funk. i pray it lasts until the kegger. i pray also the open sore closes by then too.

Blog Five.

it was one of those exams where you glance at the questions and you think, oh shit, i/m completely fucked for this one, but you start writing and it eventually gets to the point where suddenly all your frantic observations are coming together into a miraculously coherent utterance, until the last few pages when your ass is so blown out from extracting golden horseshoes that everything turns into a trembling mess of repetition and you/ve drank so much coffee it takes two hands to keep em from shaking and you/ve gotta piss something awful and to add that your stomach/s gurgling with some derelict cousin of diarrhea and you/re mysteriously famished in spite of that and between it all yer in such pain you can barely hold the pen, let alone steady, so you hand it in, and you piss your brains out, and think fuck it, its finally goddamned over, and you reach some bs state of inner peace reading henry miller on the bus ride home.

Blog Four.

i like to drive through the crummy old neighborhood where i used to live, listening to the allnite jazzstation with my seatbelt off and the windows down so i can feel the crispness of the autumn sky pushing in, partly to rinse the interior of my car of the reek of beer vomit, and partially to pretend i feel some intimate connection with these brokendown warehouses and bustedup churches and sad decayed homes, speeding down the backstreets and hitting every red in town and not caring for once, because tonight, except for the corner of elizabeth and duke, where the copcar/s sleeping, tonight it/s all mine.

Blog Three.

i danced with an elephant last night. a couple nights before that, i made peace with my dead grandmother in my dreams. i kissed her on the cheek and i told her i loved her, and meant it for once. but about the elephant. i was drunk, and sweating: winter jackets, flannel shirts and toques don't make for good barroom apparel on hot fall nights and it was so dark i couldn't see, so i just closed my eyes and grinned and danced. bumping into people and animals and amorphorous shapes, secretly pretending it was the beer and the beer alone causing me to crash into everyone that i could. but about the elephant: her trunk kept hitting me in the face, so i kept my eyes closed and grinned more. alex and mark tell me she was cute, which makes me regret doing nothing, but it was too dark for my eyes, which were mostly closed anyways. and when i placed my hand on her hip, she didn't notice through the thick fur of her costume but my hand still stayed there like it mattered. the band took a break, and i pushed my way out to the balcony and stripped off the jacket and flannel: let the coolness of the descending night absorb my sweat. one of us left after that.

Blog Two.

i realized a couple weeks back that i missed riding the bus. i mean, i've known for awhile that i've missed ridin' the greyhound long stretches through the day barreling through books and music and northeast ontario to arrive in frozen montreal, but i mean like the city bus. the sadness of the old ladies taking buses to kill their remaining hours to putter about grocery stores looking to stretch benuded pensions and still cooking for two and not even eating their own. the pretty girls who married young into ugliness and poverty. fat slow men with their dim small friends, laughing dumb at incoherent jokes to disappear at bus stops behind factories, churches and warehouses, all broken. the students that look down their noses, and the students that look down at their feet. i like to think sharing silent anonymous minutes in transit connects us somehow, like in ways bikeriding alone through cold quiet suburbs can't. but, then i ride the bus a bunch, and miss bikeriding slow, through cold and quiet suburbs.

Blog One.

my official entry into bloglandia. my right eye hurts. just got back from double pool night: billiards (beer) and a hot tub, and while the pools at the school appear well lit, i still can't see without my glasses in them. i saw a girl in a black bikini with a tattoo. the tattoo was a blur. her face was too. i can't see far at the pools. discussed how our new house and neighborhood are unsuited to keg parties, and how rude the police in guelph can be. etc.