we got an Xmas tree. it's my first Xmas tree since 1992 and that one was about 1.5 ft tall and very spindley. This one is huge and full and smells so good in the house. made ornaments from dollar store stuff with little hooks hot glued to them. those plastic containers of animals are a real deal. got 25 ornaments out of each one. so the tree will be covered with little lions and elephants and such. gotta call the photolab and see if my pics are ready.
everything's going ok overall, no bad vibes with anybody, health improving at a steady rate. bronchitis and hangovers all done for the season. drank chocolate raspberry liquer with the cherry bombs in bella's backroom for cha cha's last evening in town. Poinsettia showed up which was a pleasant surprise, she's gonna cut my hair for me and if i get home to cape breton for the holidays we're gonna hang there. she made us all some spankin' Xmas cards. i didn't make any cards and feel like a dud.
got some miniatures in the works. little paintings that i might give away. not sure because i'm half thinking of having an all out show in march and selling these puppies off for coin. we'll see. gotta get serious with this art as my craft thing and earn an independent living. work was smooth as peaches last night but the crowd was thin and i made some seriously bangin' drink combos for my customers who rewarded me with the tiniest fractions of tips. johnny horseface put on a hell of an entertaining show. too bad everyone was outta town. hope he remembers he said he'd give me a discount on that paint i need.

just spent my last few hours with Aloni who is going to be alone-y. She's leaving tommorrow for her year long road trip and I gotta say, best to her and congrats on the foresight and forthwithness to do her thing. as completely unprepared as she is in terms of packing and good-bye visits, that gurl is ready to roll thunder. This is a lonelier town without her albeit a better world with her out in it.

I'm in my third week of attempting to get my burlesque photos developed. I carried them around for weeks forgetting to drop them off. When I finally did the lab called me to tell me pocessing was included at the location I had bought the film. The location being all the way on the other side of town. Today I finally picked them up and dropped them at the appropriate lab. Guffaw. Cerise Noir has the best photo I have ever seen of Cerry Pop. I'm going to paint it multiple times just to experience it over and over. I must ask her if she gives me license to do so.

THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE BLING
i chose to go into battle for the honour of a loved one, armed with misinformation, or lack of information, or not quite the right information. there i was with my sword of honour wielding over my head to fell the beast of unfairness and the truth, as the truth does, smacked me right across the face, knocked out my favorite teeth and sucked the wind right outta me sails. Here i am in wounded retreat, calling all armies. if i love you i will fight the idealogical fight for your honour. please arm me at the very least with the whole story lest i be standing alone at the enemy's gate with a broken and useless sword, disgraced and foolish and questioning your arsenal.
i hope the dance around that mulberry bush is worth the humiliation i feel at having asked for the truth and received this. pop goes the weasel.

I won't be able to make to the living room part of the blog party because I have to get some work done then I'll catch with everyone at the "afterparty" , donning my longjohns underneath my clothes....
oxygen is finding it's way back into my brain and I can actually sort one thing from another again...

"Baby did a bad bad thing."

"oh baby sweet baby if it's all the same, take the glory any day over the fame"

ok things are a bit gross right now. i drank a lot of white russians and beer last night at the staff party and got home sometime this morning...passed out for a bit and puked and puked and puked. I feel like hell and i look worse. Now I'm going down to the club to help put everything back in order for tonight. Man alive. My head is sonic booming.

i'm drunk at my staff party with aj and phillip from sworfight.org. tommorrow i'm adding claudette and phillip to my links.

Im trying to get rid of that ad banner at the top of the page. False advertising. It says "get rid of this ad here" lo and behold the url cannot be found.
Spent most of the morning cursing my bag of paint tubes. I wanna do this certain painting and am out of colors. $@%$. I keep coming back to the computer to keep from smoking all my cigarettes. I wanna save some for later. After cussing out my deficient bag of paints I went looking for my sense of humour. Smoked another cigarette. Thought about heading to the club to help with the set up for the Christmas party. Thought about the icy rain. Smoked. Made tea. Thought about writing music to my showtune. Drank tea. Started a new cup. Thought about writing some grant proposals. Wrote the cover letters for 5 grant proposals and started the text for all of them. Cussed, smoked, tea, rain, hungry...

When my Dad was a teenager he had a job working the ferris wheel at Coney Island. He grew part of his life in Brooklyn. It was normal in large families in Cape Breton to ship some of the kids out to relatives during dry times. Mom was shipped to Aunt Pinky, Dad was shipped to Aunties Viola, Miniver and Winnifred who all lived together in a brownstone in Brooklyn,NY. He grew up in Whitney Pier, home of the infamous tarponds. His grandfather Collie had a cherry orchard in South Bar, the beautiful oceanscape past the Pier. Collie was a boxing trainer and opened the first local training gym for boxers in his basement. He trained some future champions there. I loved the cherry orchard.
A week before Collie died i was sitting in the kitchen with my mom, my sister and our neighbor valerie having tea and listening to gossip. I was about 8. I went into this trance where all my vision went bright white and grandpa Collie was in the middle of this white holding out his hand to me. I wanted to take it. Next thing I knew mom and valerie were holding me on the floor and slapping my face. I could hear them in the distance saying "she's so pale"... they told me not to be afraid I had just passed out a little. i grabbed my mom and told her we had to go see grandpa. "tommorrow" she said. hmmm. that same year I started another waking dream that recurrent through my life. First time I had was in the schoolyard at lunchtime and the old man who watched over us, Mr. Wilson helped me up. I was in an underground series of cave's being led by soldiers of some sort. The walls were dripping and dark. I was the only one who could fit without crouching. They made me show ID cards to prove who I was and then I was allowed to enter the room where he was hanging by his neck and all of his flesh was gone. He had been skinned alive.
You'd think that this would be an awful scene for an 8 yr old to witness, but even in my perception then I knew this image wasn't violent. There was a different message. I've had this dream probably twenty times since then, the last time being 2 yrs. ago. It happens when I'm awake and lasts only a minute or two. The days following are always calm and peaceful in my soul.

a coupla old friends were down at the club the other night, not old to me to each other.... they were really happy to be spending time together. One of them is my friend, the other one I'm acquainted with. She's been away. He kept doing nice things for her. He looked after her little comforts like telling her she could leave her coat with me for safe keeping. I was really touched by the kindness and familiarity passing between them. It's these little things that keep us going.

lyrics to a song i'm writing ... it's a showtune for the next burlesque show

All night music starts at 2 am
he's a theif with a bad air to him
but he moves to the music and he's forgiven
she's a dreamer nobody believes in
but she starts a-swayin' to the music
and then she starts to sing
the whole world's a sucker for a beauty and a tramp
moving about the darkness stealing hearts and spare change
she's an indifferent sacrifice to a far smaller frame

portrait of a lady in a place like New Orleans
a buzzy headed lady if you know what I mean
they say she walks like religion
though her life is rife with sin
e'en the chaste ladies offer her a din of respect
for they word their lives so holy
but it's she who seems blessed
cause she hears a secret music
she's a dreamer and a tramp
she starts a-swayin' to the music and then she starts to sing....
some stories are endings all unto themselves
some glories are endless
some don't make a sound
you can keep your love letters
your cash and your things
Im gonna keep a-sining till I rest in the ground...

It's almost too cold to type. I can't turn on the heat yet because the monopoly of the Nove Scotia Power Company is going to eat me alive financially come February so I have to start saving my pennies now. Waiting for my man to appear on cable 10 on the Colored Children's Home telethon. Freezing in anticipation. As soon as he comes on I'm gonna start record on the VCR and head outside to warm up.
Some of the tunes I wish I had written:
your Song - Ray Charles
Wurlitzer Prize - Willie Nelson (?)
Fruits of my Labour - Lucinda Williams

I've taken to calling bloggers bloogers. Just a childish giggle thing.
Some of my plants are dying because it's too cold in here. My goldfish plant and my coffee bush are near toast. I bought some healthy helpful fertilizer for 'em and am keeping my fingers crossed. My great-aunt Pinky calls fingers- findus and sugar- hoogey Her real name is Dorothy but she's been called Pinky ever since she was in her early twenties because she was THE fashion seamstress in the high class metropolis of Sydney Cape Breton. She's still very stylish. She always wears those cigarette skirts and sweater sets. Very sexy even in her 80's. I consider her a great role model. She's one of those independent 40's women that give you that feeling of smoky romance and intrigue. Plus her laugh sounds like maniacal bells. You just know she's been there, done that and is thrilled to hell about it. She's my gramma's younger sister. My mom is very close to her.
She was married to Jimmy who used to tell us he was a spy in world war 2. He did have a lot of strange and exotic items around his house. I was most intrigued by his stuffed alligator and his extensive pipe collection. Going to their house was like diving into a black and white Hollywood movie. Pinky kept these big steamer trunks of all of her old clothes. My childhood friend Heather and I used to spend hours decking ourselves out in them at Christmas visits. There were lots of Eisenhower era tweeds and tonnes of pink stuff, crinolines and lacey things and the like. Years later in high school my boy next door Carlo introduced me to the gal who would become his most beloved high school sweetheart and friend for life who turned out to be Heather from my dress up days in Pinky's basement. I thought that was cool. Two people from different parts of my childhood falling in love. Heather used to sing in a rock band in highschool. She and Carlo would perform in all these variety shows that I would make posters for and work on the backline of. They were the THE couple. Carlo was disappointed in me for breaking up with his good friend Eugene in junior high. Eugene and Carlo were versions of each other. They were those boys who developed your sexual attraction during puberty. They both had these muscley yet lithe bodies and dark peach fuzz and a certain way of moving their hips that made being 13 a very nice place. Carlo had Italian brown skin and dark eyes and Eugene was creamy with blue eyes and the thickest eyelashes. They both wore tight levi's and leather bomber jackets and had curly hair and reminded the girls of the boys in the S.E. Hinton book The Outsiders who we were all in love with. I don't know why I broke up with Eugene. I loved him and thought he was beautiful and he was seriously enjoyable company. We moved in such small and close groups those days. Our whole worlds evolved around each other. Carlo's hands were all calloused from guitar strings. Eugene's hands were calloused from lobster fishing. I can't love a man without calloused hands. Peter Gabriel has a line in an old genesis song about never trusting a man with smooth hands or something like that. Lamb Lies Down on Broadway era. I know what happened to Carlo but I don't know whatever happened to Eugene. He didn't stay in school and we lost touch. he probably became a fisherman like his Dad, married a sweet and pretty girl and decks his halls every Christmas, heavily steeped in family and friends.
I recently made a trip home to Sydney River with Heather to say good-bye to Carlo. We laughed and cried over old photographs and memories. Carlo's father got us tipsy on wine he and Carlo had made last summer and gave us roses. Carlo's father's wine guided many of our high school experiences. We had this crab apple orchard up behind our house where we all gathered on weekends for pot and booze and mushrooms and making out. It was a long standing tradition for kids from our neighborhood. Every weekend this one guy Jason would yell "cops" and we'd all take off down the cowpaths and end up having to walk home from Tobin's farm. It was annoying because you never knew if he was crying wolf or not but on the good side magic mushrooms grew in Tobin's field.
Sometimes we'd go down to the Sydney River dam near the steel plant pumphouse. That was the best place to skate or ski doo in the winter. The older kids were always there so it was a bit of a graduation for us to start hanging there.
In '94 I made my exodus back to Sydney River after a stint out west. Carlo called on me my first night home and we went over to his dad's place for some sentimental journey on that wine trip. He wasn't sure which bottles were ready so we grabbed two of the ones he thought were right and drank 'em out of the bottle listening to music and talking it all over. Within an hour we were both puking our guts up in a rather violent way. We had picked the wrong bottles and the yeast was rising right in our guts. After the purging was over we laid down and in our weary states disclosed the trials and tribulations of our respective lives. Got sentimental for a time and place where we were all hopes and dreams. Wondered if we were ever going to get close to what we had imagined for ourselves. I held onto him for my life that night. I was surprised his belly was so soft. In all my years of knowing him I was 24 before I touched his belly. The warmth of that softness endeared me to him forever, again.
Carlo formed my ideas of loving a man. We always talked to each other about our lovers and loves. He was the sounding board for my heart from 9 yrs old until November of this year. Now I have to trust myself without his advice and perspective.
My mom always wanted us to fall in love. We had love already so we didn't need to do that. I wouldn't have replaced that love with romance for anything. His dad teases all us girls that we were a bad influence on his son.
Carlo did all these things as an adult that made a lot of people know him or want to know him. Made his life into something to be shared. That was very Carlo of him.
I used to get frustrated with him for directing my life and calling me on everything until I was older and realized how good it was to have someone getting your back and paying attention to your possibilities. It was a sorrowful experience when his mind started eating him alive. It was worse when the meds stole his spirit from him. But he took it back in the best way he could find. Took that spirit right back into his own control. It was very Carlo of him. Damn it. I'll never get over it.

it's freezing in halifax and I'm hungry. saw my favorite blooger at the grocery shop earlier today where she was buying supplies for cookies that you don't have to bake. smart stuff. just getting off of work. young fellas under the influence beating the crap out of each other on the way out of the club. made no $$. the club was as cold as the outdoors and I've got an internal chill that only two things can fix. food and the fella watching the end of the movie. off to the fridge i go. I'm compiling a list of songs I wish I wrote and am surprised to find that I'm kinda square. I listen to wierd music but when it comes to what I imagine to be creative ownership of great stuff, I'm just square.