A Week in the Life
We all like autobio, right?
Wednesday
Snooky Tynes at the Poor Alex. Dude is a very short man with dreds down to his ankles who dresses like Colonel Sanders and performs like James Brown. Great, high-energy band plus freakish crowd equals a night in a David Lynch scene. Special props to the retired-Russian-mobster-looking-guy who turned out to be a ninth level blackbelt. Honorable mention to the “potato midget” and the swarming cougars.
Thursday
Work party for Spaceys launch. Cheeseball Montanas. I try to crash the Disney party with no luck. Oh well, at least I get a few wings n’ pints and a promotional gumby space alien. We watch the Spaceys and they look grreat. After that everything is vague. Brass Taps? Lucky Charms? Road flares? Something?
Good story: a recent film in which both lead actresses agree to do nude scenes, but they only shoot one with one of them. They CGI-enhance her breasts, natch. Then when international distributors see the film, they like it, but complain that there’s not enough nudity. So they go back and digitally remove a bra from the other girl and digitally animate her breasts. Innovative!
Friday
Patios. Then amazing Vietnamese food – laughing cow or something like that? Then, to the Horseshoe for White Cowbell Oklahoma once again. They do a great SARS-themed show (“put the SARS in your mouth pretty baby”) and figure out a SARS-related reason to hose down lots of women. I am standing next to women. I get wet.
Good story: at the MuchMusic Video Awards afterparty, B’s girlfriend complains about how Avril Lavigne’s hair is always obscuring her face. Rash B rushes up to Avril and tries to correct the hair. Avril barely notices. The next day, someone witnesses an Avril interview in which she is asked how she liked the show. She liked it fine, she says, but someone touched her hair and NO ONE. TOUCHES. HER HAIR. Et voila, under the hair, another asshole!
Saturday
Old mannishness sets in and I am unwilling and/or unable to clear the couch until much later than planned. I miss the dyke march but catch a hint of party at a friend from work’s place. Church street is exotic yet welcoming. New drink: coconut rum n’ gatorade – not entirely recommended.
Good story: fella drops acid for the first time, embarasess himself in front of his stripper girlfriend, and runs home to black out. Is awoken by his aunt, who asks why he buttered bread and wedged it into the sofa, into the fridge, and all over the house.
Sunday
Gay pride parade. For those unawares, as many as one million souls attend this annual bacchanalia in the streets of the T-dot. We view the parade from a cunningly perfect and thereby undisclosed location – highlights are the Gay Geeks, and the Prime Timers who perch upon a mock yacht and wave agedly. Waterguns are a running theme, and my ass is a popular target. There are numerous corporate and political floats, which lead many of my more experienced pride partners to later conclude it was one of the worst in recent memory. Post-parade we get it on in a beer garden, complete with select nudity, dancing, and childer frolicking in a wading pool. Before our beers are done a storm breaks and everyone gets drenched to the bone. Confused, we try to wait it out. A glorious moment when the sun breaks through in mid rain, early evening, backlight catches the edges of everything, my kingdom for a waterproof camera.
Can’t get the phrase “invitation to sexual touching” out of my head. I heard on the news that you can get arrested for it, if the invitee is a twelve year old, that is. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty good band name.
Monday
has a bit of everything. Lounging around, espresso shots, tacos at El Asador, the Hulk, barbequeing, margaritas, all-night dancing. Who do I think I am, Dean Martin?) It’s a big thing at the Guvernment and all in all it’s a little big for me. Main floor, for van-whomever, is so damn packed it takes twenty minutes to get to the bathroom and why do people even do this? In the upstairs room it’s Little Louie Vega, soul-house master extraordinaire, which basically means disco at best. I can get into it, but some of the tracks make me realize that in any other environment I would fire my shotgun at the speaker with no qualms and no hesitation. That, and the room is so hot my glasses steam up upon entry. That, and the entire club is a juice-pig meathead meat market of the highest order. So my scrawny ass is an outsider ass. But my dance moves are improving.
Tuesday
is Canada Day. While others mull their firework options, in the House of Sankey lounging reigns supreme. Three movies: Punch Drunk Love, The Kid Stays in the Picture, and The Hours, and I cry in each, strangely emotional. At night we talk about death. Her friend, my aunt, our fears for others who might succumb to cancers, drunk driving, death’s whole arsenal seemingly arrayed against our brightest and dearest.
I’m thinking if I did an album I’d spend months on the beats. Everything else would flow from it. First the beats in total darkness, then blinding light, and then the screaming starts. Live Birth: The Album.
Wednesday
means back to work, and I walk to it through what might be dawn on an alien planet. People are wheeling carts full of knick-knacks through suncracked Kensington market. People too old to die are massing like born-again zombies. Car alarms are ringing like it’s car alarm christmas.
Seems I’ve forgotten what I do at work, but I relearn quickly and check out promptly. I uncover a new route to my grandmother’s place, and while cycling I plot out a modern-day sex movie starring Hercules and someone called the Virginator. Plus ninjas, lots of ninjas.
Gently nodding off to a Jays game in a sweltering old age home, I rehash and evaluate: we’ve toured the city, we’ve toured the emotional landmarks, we’ve lived, we’ve learned, we’ve forgotten a touch more than we learned. And here, now, once again I revisit: we’ve recorded some things, we’ve left many more out. In many ways I write to remember but lacking the disposition to write every last thing, I hope only that the lost cadences will seep out through the cracks in my words many years from now, when my brain-in-a-jar seeks to relive the days when it threw its long-lost body around willy-nilly like a sick jackal in a tricked-out bumper car. Life was better now, brain, life was better now.