This journal is a churning mass of obsolescence; the stories are still all right, but the writer's on vacation, chasing Coyote down winding side streets far from here.

This is a better bet.

Newsflash: I like textiles! Also, I am developing a serious addiction to learning thoroughly excellent things that have no absolutely practical application in my life. In the spirit of these two things, I rolled out of bed bright and early on Saturday morning (managing to get one of my hands stuck in my bedframe in the process, but don't even bother asking about that) and trundled my way into Downtown Crazyville to visit Popfuel for a screenprinting lesson. In case you don't already know, Popfuel is a t-shirt and poster screenprinting studio headed up by the effervescently bunnylike fantasygoat, and it is rife with awesome. Rife.

However, I somehow managed to fail to capture the entire studio in a single photograph, so you'll have to try and figure out how it looks from the random shots contained herein.

( Adventures with all sorts of toxic stuff ensue! )

Feeling: artistic

Sometimes, when I wake up next to you in the very early morning - just after the sun has broken the horizon, long before you'll find yourself conscious - I take some half-dozing time to memorize you. Tempting as it is, and as much as my fingers twitch at the tactile memory of your almost unnervingly soft skin, I keep myself from reaching out; this is an exercise for mind and imagination alone.

Your back is a series of freckled constellations, a chain of crop circles dappled on flesh; you probably already know the basic pattern, but you don't see it as I do, curving around behind you and leaving just enough distance to avoid being a nuisance. There's a pair of small dots on the uppermost bit of your backbone, and they remind me of a chakra, capturing your most energetic thoughts and sending them streaming to your far corners. From there they spread out, quiet and seemingly at random, spiralling over muscle and across graceful flights of bone to form an infinite galaxy of spontaneous alignments. I fill them in from my subjectively objective position, warm and hidden in blankets: helixes and nebulae and cartoons and dreams.

Feeling: sad

I'm currently listening to Cats on Mars from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack on repeat. I can't quite explain why I'm doing this, unless it has to do with irritating myself into productivity, but in any case, I'm giving you a link so that I don't suffer alone. (Ba du ba, ba du ba, edeko, edeko...)

Yes, I've been missing; it took me a while to realize that the negativity/anxiety duo that likes to follow me around has been acting up again, but that is definitely the case. (At least it didn't take me gradually becoming too nervous-bellied to venture outside for groceries this time around.) It's partly contextual, but is more due to my wonky internal chemistry than anything else, since life is generally fine. I'm working on the situation, but I tend to prefer hermitage over treating others to this side of me. Anyway, that's all I want to write on that subject - suffice to say that I'm trying to resurface, possibly via hideous anime karaoke. I needed a break from the internet, and feel much better for having taken one... despite my eternal love of goatse.

Precious goatse, you remind me of what life is all about.

A few weeks ago, dreamstate7 and I got trapped in an alcove near the former Skydome during a surprise downpour; we spent almost two hours there, just barely tucked away from the elements alongside his motorcycle. We (well, okay, I) danced little jigs, sang, and waved to passing motorists, to largely positive effect. The expressions on people's faces reminded me of why I enjoy making a spectacle of myself, and the time melted away. Then, the following week, I went to an utterly fantastic Radiohead concert. During Fake Plastic Trees, the world faded into soft-focus and was overlaid with the grid that connects everything in existence, and I could feel the heartbeat of the guy tripping his ass off next to me. (Admittedly, he seemed to enjoy the show more than I did, what with the twitching and grabbing at air.)

There are lots of good moments, but is life really supposed to be a flow of monotony occasionally interrupted by flashes of glee? I refuse to buy into that; once I get myself well in hand, it's back to constant wonder and prancing for yours truly! :P Expect to see more occupying this space over the next little while... I miss my human-ish existence, despite how useful it has been to hole up in silence for so long.

Feeling: ba du ba

Kablammo!

Sorry, it must've been that bean I ate.

Boom.

( What do you usually do on Friday nights? )

Feeling: bouncy

She called me out of the blue in the middle of the evening, breathing hard into the phone like someone who'd been running. Her voice was pitched somewhere between frantic hope and beaten submission, and it only had to shape three words to tell me everything I needed to know:

( “It happened again.' )

I have seen the future and this is how it begins:
In chaos and riots, the screech of machines
No right and no wrong, and no in-between
Fall one by one, the queen to her fool
Dos dedos mis amigos - everything's cool

When the industrial noise sings in just the right key outside my window, I imagine it's the robots coming. It's a scene that springs to mind with no particular effort: They'll be bathed in clinical grey-white light produced by their LEDs, no mess and no excess. The fire will only come as a futile attempt at opposition, not stemming from any sort of mechanical violence, and soon enough it will swallowed by steel and polyurethane. Humanity will be crushed, or it will be assimilated - in either case, the future will dance on the hinged joints of simulacra. The blue of the sky and the green of dripping leaves will splash pixel-jagged across carapaces and flow down cooling vents, and the machines will sing as they traipse through the natural world without absorbing anything unnecessary.

I can't wait.

How anyone could see this as a dystopic vision is beyond me; precision is not the antithesis of creativity. What better way to discover a new perspective on the connectedness of things than through complete and permanent temporal dissociation? The life of a machine is that of a series of events, of cognition and of reaction, without the restraints of age and location. Information everywhere, symbolic meanings as rich and deep as one's processor can allow; it's the same thing we're dealing with now, but with better hardware and fewer wrinkles. Forgive me, but I don't think that I need to be organic to have a soul. If anything, I think my soul would much prefer a dwelling its former body hand-crafted. I will gladly hammer the metal for my own replacement when the time comes.

Alter me, upgrade and remove my parts; I have no interest in the medical, and nothing but interest in the future-metaphysical. Give me artificiality and the answers to a thousand questions in one useful suite. Which elements continue to exist once our flesh is peeled off and our organs dissected? That is the point beyond which Heaven is supposed to appear, if we are fortunate and righteous and willing to give up on earthly existence. Do the scientifically devout find the same experience if they go through the process without severing that last link to physicality? At which moment does the last fragment of humanity vanish, leaving only the eternal and the motherboard to which it is attached? If everything is clean and programmed into freedom, how will we mind?

Let me find out; I don't care if it goes wrong, really. Tear it all out, piece after piece after piece, until my spine transmits light down a fibreoptic column and my vision is a panorama of cleverly-rendered polygons. What's the worst that could happen? If we can agree that if a soul or an eternal form of the mind exists at all then it is a generally indestructible object, why not see where we can put it, how far we can take it without sending it back for recycling? Let everything be reduced to calculations and spectra, and let the world act on me as a whole rather than as a chain of subjective events for once. Let the robots dance as freely as their randomizers allow.

Don't worry. Everything's cool.

Feeling: enthralled

... if you need captions to find all the glee going on here, I just don't know what to tell you. (Yes, my hair is ridiculous right now. I am at peace with that.)

Muchos thanks to devilschestnut and her dynamic buddy for helping stephenmblundon and I make this happen. ;)

( Come see what we did on Sunday )

Feeling: accomplished

I dreamt that I was in some sort of red-and-black sanitorium/institution, wandering about in the company of a character who was simultaneously a mad scientist and a PhD supervisor. We ended up in a dim washroom, and I was holding a bottle of vitamins; he told me to take two hits of the pills marked "A+," and promised me a fantastic trip to enlightenment. Unfortunately, when I poured the pills into my palm - all shapes and sizes, a glorious rainbow of sketchy-looking medications in random combinations - I mistook the "A-" ones for what I was looking for, and the madman/advisor did not correct me. I tossed them down the hatch, and the world began to twist.

I ran back and forth down endlessly recursive hallways that never led anywhere except back through themselves, the walls stretching and bending in distressing ways. The madman/advisor was laughing somewhere nearby, but I was hardly aware of him; I just wanted to know what I had taken. I found my way to a computer, and began performing some desperate research, but I can't remember what I found - it was all too confused and uncontrolled, and didn't offer any information apart from collections of letters and numbers and molecular structures. I was not upset, per se, but there was a wrenching sense of sadness, a wish that I had paid more attention before making this leap. Then, as the colours dimmed and things began to make sense again, I returned to the pill bottle to find it empty and the madman missing.

I woke up knowing exactly what my mind meant, but not knowing what to do about it.

Feeling: cheerful

Tonight, the weather was perfect and the air was comforting, so I went for a walk. I started at St. George and Bloor, and ended up at Eglinton West station by way of Forest Hill. The route was beautiful and green, every block smelled delicious – alternating between incense, food being prepared, marijuana, and dryer sheets – and I was so melancholy-happy I could barely stand it. Whenever I go on these walks I end up with this conflicted emotion, free and magical and miserable, and I think I've finally figured it out:

( I am a small creature with an infinite hunger for a finite resource. )

Feeling: loving

You're walking down Bloor Street. Perhaps your hands are weighted by bags of groceries; perhaps your legs are burning with the satisfaction of knowing that they've been strolling away from your office for the past forty-five minutes. Whatever the case, you're a bit distracted, your mind flitting between minutiae but holding on to precious little of the scenery around you... when you hear it. It's a pulse, low and even and inviting, and it's coming from a smaller street to your left.

( You wind around with the curve of the sidewalk before any conscious thought makes its way into your mind, leaving the broad concrete and well-lit stores behind. )

Feeling: happy

Daaaaamn. Prodigy puts on a mighty fine show. Pity about the other fans, though.

I'm covered in bruises from the fists and elbows of drugged-up thrashers - one of my ankles took the entire weight of one particular moron who careened cheerfully into me - and this happened nowhere near the mosh pit. (I did punch one of them in the back of the head, though, so I feel pretty good about things.) It was a meaner crowd than at the Nine Inch Nails concert, but once I figured that out, it was okay; it's just a matter of dancing with one's elbows angled outward. :P

They played, among many other things, Their Law, No Good, Breathe, Hotride, Spitfire (performed by Keith, which was outstanding), Firestarter, Voodoo People, Poison, and Smack My Bitch Up. The performance was great, the lighting was intense, and I lost all track of my body at some point... which was probably for the best, given how it's looking today. Plus, at one point Maxim wandered through the crowd so close to us that I could almost touch him, which was titillating, to say the least. It was thoroughly worth being a bloodshot-eyed, hobbling zombie at work today!

"Sarah, what happened to you?"
"Several thousand angry men on drugs."
"... yeah, that's pretty cool, then... I guess..."

Feeling: bouncy

Here are some things that have happened over the past week:

Sunday: As we drove down a small side road in Oakville, seeking The Best Tim Horton's Ever, dreamstate7, stephenmblundon, and I were greeted by five young deer. They leapt across the street and bounded into the underbrush to our right, leaving us staring open-mouthed after them.

Wednesday: I was returning to work after my lunch break when I crossed paths with a main in the stairwell; he was coming down from the third floor while I was gunning for the second. I stopped dead in the middle of the staircase as he paused on the landing: tall, broad-shouldered, skin a wonderfully rich shade of blue-black, cradling in both hands a human-sized backbone attached to a pelvis. I tilted my head to the side like a perplexed dog, thought a moment, and said, 'I understand.' He flashed a brilliant smile and said, 'Wonderful day, isn't it?' We both began walking again, and as he passed me, he waved one hand in farewell, causing the vertebrae to dance. 'That is utterly fascinating,' I called over my shoulder.

Friday: As I walked to St. George station, I passed a huge crowd of dapper young men dressed like Victorian lords. They were all in black suits, with walking sticks and top hats aplenty, several men carrying lanterns and two more toting a large black-and-white painting between them. The painting was of an outdoor scene, but I had no idea what it was meant to be. I neared them as they passed the Yacht Club, and as I picked my way through their numbers - not a woman among them but me, I noticed - they began to pump their fists in the air and call out, "Where are your boats? WHERE ARE YOUR BOATS?!" I was tempted to follow them, but didn't want to leave dreamstate7 and klyk waiting at Yonge for too long, so I just bowed to a couple of the ringleaders and continued on. Just beyond the rear portion of the parade were some friendly young faux-gangster types, who looked at me and noted, "Fucking weird guys, huh? Notice how there were no girls? Bet they're all gay."


I'm currently so full of spring that I may burst into a fiery torrent of daisies at any second. It's that time of year when every note of every song brings on visions of delightful springs past, and the air smells like potential energy condensed into wet earth and sleepy grass. I want to go romping, and probably will - today's practically summer weather, what with being over 10 C and all! It may sound weird, but transition seasons charge me with so much joy and love that I don't know what to do with myself. (Sometimes I wonder if people babble sweet words to each other just to vent this sort of pressure.) My body feels good, and is begging me for physical activity, while my mind is craving its own stimulation; I need to figure out a way to climb walls and read and write at the same time. :P

Feeling: awake

Greetings from Sarahsaur's new Linux box! Last week, I decided I'd get around to something I've been saying I was going to do for, oh, about the last six or seven years: install Linux on my desktop PC for maximum geekery, so as to make myself code more. I've used *nix environments before, but always command-line based, and pretty much always remotely, so this is a chance to develop some new skills. Amazingly, I actually got around to it this time, probably because it was an excuse to buy a big new hard drive, and I can't resist techy gadgets of even the most banal type.

The eventual plan is to train my brain in such a way that when I sit down here instead of pulling Ocelot onto my lap, waves of scientific prowess will begin to wash over me. "Ooooh, the Linux chair of power... wait, wait, it's coming to me... *a brilliant Python program ensues*" Currently, I'm just glad I managed to get SuSE 10 on here with a modicum of pain. (A modicum is a very small amount.)

Although I've got to say, using Firefox in this environment feels a lot like going to Shelbyville, since everything looks funny and slightly frightening. And I still can't figure out how to get jEdit on here, because evidently Linux users are supposed to know what the hell they're doing. But someday, that will be me!... that, or I'll end up a broken shell of an inept nerd, cowering under the desk like a poor user back in '91 met with the horror of "Abort, retry, fail?"

I had more to say, but I should probably be at work soon. The important thing is that I'm working on the geeky side of my brain again, which is soothing in a "Now no one will ever ask you to the prom!" sort of way.

Feeling: chipper

I've developed another crackpot theory. It goes like this: in the future, when globalization is an unstoppable force and has rolled the world into a big amalgamation of overlapping (though not necessarily comfortable) cultures and languages, the major development will not, in fact, be political or economic. Instead, it will be a massive excess of puns.

Think about it. The more basic a language, the less room for wordplay; if each symbol only has one referent, it's basically impossible to toy with it. As language grows and evolves, meanings begin to interact and interfere with each other, and people start thinking they're amazing for pointing out that you can make innumerable jokes using only the word "damp." So what do you think will happen when your average person knows five or six languages, including traditional terms for a dozen different cultures? Yeah. Ten billion people who feel powerful when they can string together fifteen related-unrelated terms to make a fart joke. That's way worse than the looming threat of Wal-Martization, in my opinion.

Anyway. I've been walking all over the place, which is encouraging a resurgance in random stranger hilarity, and am feeling pretty good about the universe. (There's something excellent about that feeling that says one's muscles are getting well-used and could really use a break; no break for you, little muscles! You're keeping me purposeful and maybe moving me into smaller jeans!) However, my mind is pretty obviously at loose ends, which is none too reassuring, since this sort of cranial leisure is doomed to end with me trying to calculate, to five significant digits, the unnatural curvature of my bad-posture-crooked spine. Or estimating the number of germs on the office dog who likes to sit under my desk and who we took for a walk today. Does anyone want to go out sometime soon, perhaps dancing, or perhaps to explore and natter incessently about ideas that don't really go anywhere? I have a great theory about globalization that I bet you haven't heard...

Feeling: geeky