meaning in the moving design

I got my fridge poetry set back recently. I missed its randomness, the effortless you can patch together meaning using words in ways they're not meant to be used. I'm a pretty veiled person, and fridge poetry is like this gutteral incoherent mess that bubbles up from my subconscious. A beautiful mess.

Usually my fridge poetry makes sense. However abstract, I can usually see where I'm going with something; I know what I'm trying to say to myself.

... This one escapes even me.

(I love how I take fridge poetry so goddamn seriously. I've tried so hard to write something funny with these things and I've failed every time.)

I almost failed art class in high school. I know, it's a pretty hard thing to do, impressively so even. The art teacher used to look over my shoulder and shake her head worryingly at my cartoonish mock-up of a fellow classmate. She took pity on me and gave me a C+ as a final grade. It was the lowest mark I ever got in school. Even today, it's hard to distinguish my drawings from a 7-year-old's. But once in a while, I slip out of self-consciousness (or get stoned) and decide to make something.
This is my mania contribution, although it's a little inexact. I could've opted to show you the 26 web links (and counting) of travel research I've collected for my upcoming trips around Taiwan and to the Philippines, Borneo, and Indonesia... but I thought this might be a liiittle more interesting. I have a horrible habit of always looking too far ahead or behind me, and as such, usually end up not watching my step and landing flat on my face. One day, thems smarty mcsmarterton physicists will build a space-time magic machine that will fix all that. yes.

dromomania - compulsive longing for travel

i just found this in the midst of sorting files... it was a poem I wrote for a Dada and Surrealism class. Actually, this isn't the poem, this is part of a paper I wrote to explain the poem. I ran out of things to say about the stupid poem so in the midst of some academic bullshitting, I started ranting about a midget and a goat... which has actually become a prevailing surrealist theme in my life. Even after all these years, I can still tell which parts are obviously contrived... I bet you can too. I don't know why I'm putting this up, I was just like "oh yeah! the midget and the goat! I remember that!". i think it's just an excuse to go on some rant about random order... so maybe you should skip the poem and go straight to the end part.

In more inopportune times, there would only be the goat to thank, but thankfully, it didn’t appear that sanity was bleeding. Horribly disfigured, perhaps, but in essence, I always presumed him to be anarchic in his depiction of the modern burlesque. For the more feeble-minded, an itinerary of degradation would be in order for the convalescence of dear Samson, whose little midget body has suffered the worst slings and arrows of insults. I never realized the extent of his pain- I was bleeding, after all. And it didn’t seem to matter that the clock was ticking backwards, or that the elevator failed to elevate me. Something was missing. It wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise, but I happened to be sitting at the time. So I grabbed the little midget by the arms (not realizing that the limbs had become autonomous to what was left of the body). I shook it violently and I said “I renounce sanity! Madness is real! To be mad is to be natural!” It was more than she could bear, but I was compelled to do it. For my own part, I had none. Someone had already taken the ferris wheel to the rodeo, had already drawn the superfluous nipple on the Venus, had already bit and barked at the Pope while he drove away in his golf cart. All I could do was applaud the fact that it was funny.

... it occurs to me that I've always loved writing this way. all equisite corpsy-like and autonomation styles. It's why I love fridge poetry too. it's so nice not to have to make sense. Or to make sense in a really nonsensical way. All my fridge poetry makes perfect sense, it just makes it's point via a dizzyingly circuitous path. Here's my theory:

Fridge Poetry is like Vipassina Meditation.
and furthermore...
Vipassina Meditation is like having a box over your head. (stay with me, here). You are confined by a very specific and somewhat arbitrary set of rules; you have very finite limits and you learn to function within the confines of these limitations, this box. You learn to be happy with a little. So that, when you remove the box, you can truly appreciate the space around you, and use it to its fullest potential.
Fridge Poetry is the same- you have a finite set of words, you learn how to use them wisely, in ways they are not intended to be used, but in the end, they work. They more than work. They say more things in the wrong places than they would if used conventionally.

Ipso facto ergo.... Anita knows how to make a beautiful mess of things.

The bus is rolling like a ship. I have my tunes turned up high and I am happy to stare out at my window-sized world, blissfully lobotomized. Neko Case is crooning in my ear, the sexiest song ever made, and you'll be in my arms tonight, there's no need to cry...

I'm on the East Coast highway. The road snakes up, down and sometimes through the mountains in dizzying hairpin turns before flattening out to hug the ocean. Beyond the guardrail, the earth just falls away, and I find myself staring down into the crevice of two massive cliffs, hundreds of meters high.

All along the coast, there are B&Bs and boutique hotels. and remnants of once-weres. scraped out cement towers, abandoned to the elements. a squatter's paradise. The zoning laws here are either non-existent or meant to ridicule the rich. Large, 3-storey mansions and industrial factories practically sit side by side, plumes of smoke kiss the sunlit balconies a throaty good morning.

Construction materials line the coast- blocks of cement cut out in strange shapes, abandoned on the shoreline. They're not ugly, just a little curious-looking. some look like push pins, some like letters spelling out a secret message. The ocean's Golden Voyager...

I scan the internet for a couch and I find one. I meet a South African man from Capetown. We share a 7-11 beer over talk about apartheid, rebellion, armed revolution, Castro, Palestine, Tibet. And I think to myself, yeah, this must be why we're all here. So we can sit around and talk about home in a way we can't when we're there. So we can hear all about the exotic corners of the world, with the familiarity, love and longing etched into the voice of the storyteller. so we can shake out all the gold in our lives as we marvel at someone else's stash, and collectively give thanks.

I'm back where I started. I've written this before. many years ago.

Ah, fridge poetry! How wise thou art!
This guy has been sitting idly on my wall for at least a year, maybe two. It wasn't true until 2007, methinks. I was idle shitless last year... time to stir the boat! Adventures ahoy!

I get bored working at the bookstore, most days it's pretty quiet. I spend most of my time reading and writing. Here are some tinkerings from the latter.

The Ammamobile
there's something in the way of bones
the slow motion creak of its movement, its meandering path
its curious tunnelling until finally, in a gruffly contented way
the bones set, and you resignedly take ownership of this design.
Creased by the furrowed brow of hard labour
Scored with the rings of the famiy tree
A matriarch's body is marked with the evidence of her living.

She is ninety-six years old. Her lips crust over with a blatant non-chalence to manners and pretense. Her body makes unapologetic gurgling noises. Gas passes through orifices hidden under layers of swaddling, wrapped around her as if the slap of global warming will send the artctic freeze over the Indian subcontinent any moment now. She is not a body, not even a face. She is a set of eyes looking sulkily at a table of feasts she is no longer equipped to digest. They have stationed her in the middle of the room, facing the remnants of a savoury meal, her grandkids and great grandkids and whosit's kids all circling her, running around and around the stoic Amma statue. The grown ones have left her at the mercy of the little ones, whom she knows, despite her useless ears, are no doubt making too much noise. Her pursed lips of disapproval are hidden beneath her layers, and she grows more incensed with every ignored and silent chastise. The only outward sign of her distress is the constant opening and closing of her lips, like she's sucking on an imaginary magic pop... and slits for eyes, of course. The slits of fury.
Now she is in motion, pushed along by fits of giggles and unseen hands, the little ones passing in out up down and through her vision in dizzying spells. And while the grown ones prostrate themselves next door, praying for her health and longevity, she sits starting at the line between two walls, everything dark, chaos doing summersaults behind her back. She is ninety-six years old and she has paid her dues. Boredom is a slow death.


untitled rant
Crackheads get a bad rap. They're just people with very visible addictions. Not like the rest of us, who fold our addictions neatly behind diplomatic smiles. Our brightly coloured abilities to chat and drink casually; attend dinner parties and complain about loved ones. Our emotional addictions hang from us nonchalently, if not proudly. Big fat gold star- we are connected. we are not alone.
There is no plastic seal with a crackhead. There is no politely nodding past their affliction. .. you can try but they will catch you. There is shame, sometimes just a feeling in the air, sometimes spoken in cryptic self-admonishments, but always with a look straight in the eyes... They know, I know. There is ackowledgement that they have wronged themselves; that they are putting you out although you can't explain how. This is the sober moment they turn against, make fire with their hands to forget. avoid mirrors and loaded conversation. i know, i know.... Don't ask.
Not today, today is payday. It's the first of the month and I don't have to worry about anything for the next 3 weeks. A few CDs will do for today. Maybe a book. The Spirituality section does not discern or judge. Christians sit with Wiccans, the Kaballah with the Koran. Rumi, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama share secret feasts between the pages, and always, always, they set a place for me.
Do you believe in the spirits? When I was young, my mother would wake me up and point to them. They were in the cobwebbed corners beside the gritted teeth of the rad. They were tumbling through the pipes under the kitchen sink. Mamma would take me on a tour of the spirits, in the dead of night. Sometimes, we would have to make emergency evacuations and sleep out on the fire escape. Mamma kept telling me not to be scared, but she wasn't very convincing, her voice rasped in shivers, her hand nervously petting my cheek. When i feel the smoke doing slow motion flips in my lungs, I go back to those nights with mamma, except memory now comes with that missing plug-in, and I can remember what I never saw. It's like someone's taken away that big black square that was always covering up what mamma was pointing at. Those beautiful women, their faces made of smoke. Their hair flowing in perfect silky spirals. And the man who looks like recycled pop cans, swinging a hatchet through the fog, slicing through the silky soft of their faces. Now pop can man is staring at me, with his dented metal smile and his hatchet dripping cloudy tears. I am under watch. and from within the haze I feel a hand brush my hair back and mamma's voice whispers "Don't be scared, honey. The spirits are here."

I travel a lot. And I've been to some pretty piss-poor countries, so I'm not really a stranger to, say, being chased by a flock of beggars. Having said that, I've never developed a strategy that jives with my conscience. While I was in India, I realized that, comparatively, Toronto's poor are so goddamn polite. They suffer quietly, and for the most part, we don't dig. We're happy to be cradled in our own ignorance; we learn how to look through people. Well... you know how in the first episode of Six Feet Under, how everyone wanted Ruth to stop crying at the funeral because it was embarrassing, and how Nate just stood up and told everyone to just let her be? To let her cry and scream and wail if that's what she felt? Well the neighborhood around the bookstore's kinda like that too. There's no quiet poverty here.

High Time...
Went to the No Frills for a lunch buy today. There was a native woman standing at the doors, screaming "Get Out! Get Out!!" She doesn't seem to be able to say anything else. It's clear that she's not high or drunk, just that she's mentally ill and has been left to fend for herself. There's nothing for anyone to be afraid of, save for the affront of acknowledging how pitiful the situation is. She pauses as people enter and exit, with an outstretched hand and an imploring look. When they look past her and walk around her, she resumes her screaming, "Get Out!! Get Out!!" She is like a lyrebird, or a recorder stuck on play. Repeating the last phrase captured; the last point of interaction she's had with anyone; the last thing anyone has bothered to say to her.
When I leave the supermarket, she's moved away from the doors. She's a little further up the street coming towards me, screaming "Get Out! Get Out!" She pauses on cue in front of me, her hand outstretched, gurgling sounds but not words, intonated in a "please". I hand her the orange in my pocket. She smiles- this wide, surprised, warm, beautiful smile. She says "Thank you" and continues on her way.

Low Time...
It's near close. A woman walks in shivering from the cold, her hands clasped in prostration. She says, "Please, I am poor. I would be really grateful if you could please spare a dollar". Her voice dangles desperately, holding back. She looks like she's afraid of me, she's trying so hard to tread lightly, she's ashamed to be bothering me. I hesitate, and she quickly bows to me, mumbles apologies and turns for the door. "Want an orange?" I blurt out. She reaches out to take it, bows profusely, backs out the door and proceeds to rip the orange apart, skin and all. Between mouthfuls, she yells "Thank you! God Bless You! Thank you! Thank you! THANK YOU!!"
I try to go back to my book as she stands by my window; as I'm showered with Thank Yous.
I feel terrible.

I recently started working for (yet another) used bookstore, this time in the East end of Toronto, at Gerrard and Parliament. Most people think everything east of the Don is too east, and so the East end remains a bit of a blank spot in the urban psyche. (I have a lot of friends that will contest that, so let me clarify that by "most people", I mean people who did not grow up in Toronto... myself included). Gerrard and Parliament is where Cabbagetown meets Regent Park. It's an interesting neighbourhood, a mishmash of gay yuppies and crackheads; organic fine food boutiques with 5 different types of maple syrup and old school diners where people order beer with their breakfasts. The class disparity has never been so blatant. I started working there this summer, and after my first day, I decided it was the fucking Twilight Zone, and that I loved it. I'll out myself here by saying that it's probably because I had a middle-class and largely priveleged upbringing in the suburbs, and while the burbs has it's share of crazy, it's really quite a different bag of crazy beans altogether.

I'm leaving the store soon, and am feeling a little nostalgic, so I thought I'd recount some stories. So here's how my first day went:

Morning
I have about 5 minutes before I have to open up the store, so I pop into a convenience store to grab a drink. There's a man hunched over the Lotto stand right at the entrance, and I squeeze in behind him to get through. I feel his back tense as I pass, and I become very aware that this man likes his space, needs his space and does not welcome my blatent invasion of his space. A few minutes later, as I'm opening the store, I hear "FUCK SHIT BITCH CUNT FUCK BITCH SHIT". I poke my head out to see space-needy guy standing at the corner, screaming his head off. He looks like a cross between George the Animal Steel and Sloth from The Goonies- bald with a somewhat misshapen head and maybe it's just my imagination, but he seemed to have pupils that dangled cartoonishly around his eyes, like loose springs.
"Good morning," I say to myself, and pray that he doesn't feel like shopping.

Afternoon
A man walks in, a little fidgety. Youngish, tall, blonde. He's got a mark on his face that I associate with drug use, but I try not to judge... or rather I judge, and then chastize myself for judging. He thumbs through the music section and pulls out a Johnny Cash biography.
"How much for this one?" he asks.
I show him the price. "10 bucks," I say.
He brightens. In fact he gets downright giddy. "10 bucks! That's exactly what I have!" he says. "I was gonna spend it on a hooker, but a book's much better, right?"
He hands me the crumpled bill, then looks at me earnestly. "How about a date?" he says.
I smile No and he walks out. Like hell I'm giving you a 2-for-1.

Evening
"Hi"
There's a girl standing in the doorway. She fingers the knob but makes no move to come in. She's got downs syndrome. It's hard to tell, but she looks young.
"Hello," I say.
"What's your name?"
I tell her.
"Where's Ron?"
"He's not here. He'll be in tomorrow"
"Where's the boy?" She holds up her hand to indicate someone at chin height. Andrew- the friend who I had taken over for at the store.
"He's gone. He left Toronto. He was my friend"
"Oh." She stares at me for a bit. Then says "My mom died"
... maybe I heard that one wrong.
"What?" I say.
"My mom. She's dead." Then she walks out.

Closing Time
Here's a snapshot of the store's layout: I am on display. In the window, directly below the OPEN sign, perched on a stool, fitted for public consumption. All that's really missing is a flashing red light about my head, and a price tag.
So, I've sat through a "colourful" 8-hour day, and I'm combing through the last pages of a book. [I should add that it's a hot summer day, so I'm dressed unusually girly- tank top and short skirt. I should also say, that because I'm sandwiched in the narrow space between the counter the book shelves behind me, because it's a little awkward and cramped, because I have bad circulation, I am also not exactly sitting in the most lady-like fashion]. From my stool perch, I can see the outdoor sidewalk traffic in my periphery. I see a bike roll by very slowly. I look out in time to catch a woman's eye as she rides past. She looks me straight in the eye, then turns, and looking straight ahead, she says, "Put some fucking clothes on".

Epilogue
Bald-headed springy-eyed man came in a few weeks later. He stood at the doorway with a huge guffah grin, waving frantically as he asked me how my day was. Not a fuck, bitch or shit outta him. That's right- never judge.
The girl with downs has come back too. She tried to steal one of the records from the dollar bin, but saw me watching, then duely informed me that her mother was dead before walking out.

What Regent Park lacks in amenities (there are few, besides streetcar access), it makes up for in character. Along Queen Street, antique shops and design studios sidle up to the Brother Joseph Dooley supportive housing complex, while down the street from Nelson Mandela Park Public School, there might be a sex worker plying her trade in a faux fur ensemble. Still, there needn’t be a Starbucks on every corner for a neighbourhood to be desirable.

Toronto winter is all about confinement, guerrison mentality, mass hibernation. It's also the only 4 months out of the year that I am particularly intimate with the TTC. And though I miss my sunshine, hate spending the money and become almost savagely misanthropic, there is something about mass transit that is so quintessentially Toronto, and I kind of love it in a weird way.
Goodbye Toronto! Here is a mishmash of some TTC memories:

On the streetcar. There are several conversations happening, in seven different languages, none of them english. this is normal. this is toronto. outside the station, a hindi lady is haggling with a girl guide for discount cookies. inside the collector's booth, the TTC attendant looks bitterly claustophobic. the chimes sounds and someone always gets indecently stuck between the doors. There is a cluster of Japanese ESL students, speaking English shyly, quietly, but not once reverting back to the shared mother tongue. amidst the slumped bodies, the blank looks, the awake-but-not-awake glaze, in the deafening silence of everyone's cumulative 8-hour work day, there is always a kid, sometimes adding to the melancholic chord of the day with screams and wails; sometimes breaking out into songs sung out of tune, substituting real words for words she thinks are real.

across the Gateway stand on the Bloor northbound platform, up against the wall with the giant tinted window through which you can see (through which you're probably not supposed to see) a room full of monitors televising supposed delinquent, indeed possibly terroristic activities; next to the photo booth, a group of deaf-mutes gather everyday. Even in the clutter of rush hour, they are loud and boisterous, the slap of their hands sounds out their emphatic conversations.
On the opposite corner, girls wearing t-shirts no one bothers to read hand out ribbons to absent-minded passerbyers, with the surprisingly effective pitch "want a ribbon?" Imagine their surprise when they go home and realize they have complicitly lent their support to the "rights for rabid children" campaign.

out the subway doors (push agains the strange wind vacuum/temporary porthole to the netherworld). Past the condo construction, beneath the scaffolding, past the old folks home, past the old folks in their wheelchairs taking themelves for a walk, tentative steps of autonomy. let's do the length of the building before going back through the doors and relenting to the smothering of nurses. sometimes there is a baseball game on in the park. the hill is littered with lawnchairs and rowdy parents. say hi to the old chinese lady at the corner store, who tries to sell me a stale chocolate bar, (or perhaps an umbrella?) who can only get away with chasing me down the street because she knows I speak her language so in some abstract way, we are family.
Through the front door. If it's dark, I take 3 tentative paces and kick for the first step. If it's a full moon, the stairwell is lit by the skylight up top, and I crank my head to stare up at the ol guy, and sing a song I made up a long time ago: Hello moon, we're down here. Home.

how do people start these things?

ok. by way of introduction, I will now list off various idiosyncrasies I had as a kid, and/or things that I inexplicably still hold true to this day:

• I always had to wait until the toilet stopped tinkling before I brushed my teeth, for fear that the water pipes would get mixed up and I would accidentally be brushing with pee water

• I refused to call anyone on the hour or the half hour, because I didn't want anyone to think I had waited until exactly 9-0-0 to call them. Later, I tried not to call anyone on the :15s and :45s either. Still later, any minute that directly touched any of the untouchables were also out, lest someone's clock be set a minute ahead or behind mine. Calling people became a tricky and cautious exercise. As you can see, I spent a lot of time thinking about this....

• I used to think that my parents had planted a one-way mirror in the bathroom and were actually spying on me during my long long hours in there. This thought would usually occur to me while I noticed that I was talking to myself, and would make me stop in mid-sentence and look self-consciously in the mirror

• In high school, i took lots of naps. I would always sleep with my keys in my pockets. Not because it was comfortable, but almost specificaly because it was not. I was always about 5 degrees away from absolute comfort, being able to drift off into unconsciousness. and I think I planned it that way

• If you are waiting for a bus or a streetcar and one passes in the opposite direction, this means that either a) your bus or streetcar will arrive very soon b) your bus or streetcar has just passed you, and you're in for a long wait

• If you know what you want to do, you should do it. If you know what you are afraid to do, you should do that too
  

• I like this idea that we are more truthful when we use language abstractly. That, by being inexact we are actually saying more, or at least saying it more truthfully. communication through metaphor. I don't like getting to the point. I think running around it is way more interesting.