please disregard the following as it is sure to be no longer relevant or timely; i’ve really dragged my ass on this one, and i can’t even begin to explain the laborious process that has brought me to this post. this is what i love about summertime–the endless hours that i can spend downloading new tracks, reading books, doing fun shit, so don’t blame me for not keeping up with my shit. if you don’t like it, start you own blog.

don’t ask me where i’ve been–i know that it’s been far too long, and i have few legitimate excuses to explain away my absence. i’m awkward and inconsistent, get used to it. this post began on friday, the 13th, although i doubt that the superstitions associated with that day have anything to do with my laziness (but i did really want to blame it all on some kind of uncontrollable bad luck, ahem). so, i’m here now, typing through my teeth, hitting ‘delete’ every three words or so, because my ego has mutated out of control and i feel scrutinized. this is performance anxiety, this is writer’s block–this sucks.

it is a perfect wednesday afternoon in the middle of july. my room is incredibly still, my belongings strewn around me in a chaotic order–i am resting. i was called off work today, partially because of my delirious head cold, and also because lunch shifts are notoriously slow. i’m drawing upon some kind of freakish energy reserves to keep myself going for the next few days: at least i have the ENTIRE weekend off.

my candle is burnt down on both ends, because apparently, one DOES need to sleep and eat in order to continue living without some kind of delirious, feverish head cold. i work, i play, i sleep. repeat. i miss the afternoons by myself, on this machine, typing away with actual verve, like i gave a shit. now, i’m just tired, and everything feels laborious. i don’t even watch tv or read, my body doesn’t have the wherewithall to keep my eyes open long enough once i get home. i can usually force myself to watch ten minutes of the sarah silverman program, which is honestly the funniest thing on tv, or well, since 30 rock, or weeds, or the andy milonakis show, but, anyways. if anyone has seen the aforementioned program already, they will understand my insane urge to down a bottle of orange cough syrup and go for a drive, or even a long walk. off of a short dock. upon review, however, i realize that all i need to do is learn how to be funny and have the comedy network pay me to make a hysterical farce of my life on television.

i feel UNKEMPT–i suppose that that is the most sensible word to describe it. it’s not necessarily a bad thing, i’m just absentminded and zany: it’s just like some of the yarn is loose and i’ve yet to work it into the steady knit and perl of routine. there’s always something a little, well, off.

i did manage to finally finish the us vs. john lennon a couple of days ago (well, now about a week and a half ago)–and i suppose that it was pretty good. i’m not into being one of those people that praise lennon as some kind of iconic, saintlike figure whom we should OBVIOUSLY love and respect at all turns, although i do respect what he inadvertantly caused while using his utterly ridiculous celebrity to spew misinformed ramblings to the public. the film does a good job of presenting the glorified image of lennon that we’re all so used to, but couples that with a really critical view of how the nixon administration used him as a scapegoat, and possibly a distraction. lennon was involved with the black panthers, bobby seale, and john sinclair–all people who were ‘under suspicion’. angela davis is even in it, commenting on that period of history, but her own experiences are only vaguely alluded to. i like it; at least give it a try, it’s better than that shit bob dylan doc.

and, speaking of documentaries, although i haven’t yet seen, or plan to see sicko any time soon, i’m really interested in manufacturing dissent, a 2007 indie doc that exposes a couple of incriminating facts about the famous whistleblower, made in a mock version of his invasive, exaggerated style. i’ve become disullusioned with moore in the past couple of years, and i want to check out the other side of the deal…well, sorta.

i’m back to double shift working alla time again–i lied my way into a three day weekend, and went along with gill and jesse to a plethora of cottages and houses throughout the strange, backwards land known as madoc, bloomfield, belleville, and picton. we went to this incredible beach on saturday called the sand banks or the sand dunes or something, but the place was literally just huge dunes of sand that backed onto a nice lake. we walked through it to find a prime tanning spot (yes, i did at least try to get some colour, AND i went in the lake), and spent the day just honest to goodness chilling. other highlights of my trip include 8.9% beer called
delirium tremens, breaking into gill’s archaic caprise classic, and, well, just some really pretty sunsets. nick drove me the final leg of the trip back home through some insane weather–the kind that makes it really evident that you live in the burbs, because well, it’s a result of that heat bubble that surrounds toronto. all of that pavement and those rooftops create heat that completely changes the weather in the surrounding towns. freak storms! skies that look like venus! rainbows! i’m tired.

i’ve made tentative deals to return to shuter street in september, into a place a few doors down. i get kitty at least one night a week, but that can be negotiated. i’m excited, but i’m nervous–i gotta get out and stay out there this time.

this has taken me approximately three weeks to compose. i hate it–let’s get consistent.

i really don’t know how these things start. usually, a few words will fall into a certain order and i’ll think it’s cute and run with it. well, today, my beautiful people, byueyights has been brought to you by ‘the acronimical b’, and by gillian leigh orton, who doesn’t have a single b in her whole name, that bitch. so, she spits out this little phrase and i start to organize what i’m going to burb out on this page, all according to the letter b–it’s the dumbest idea, but somehow today it works: birthdays, bier markt, busts, and brunettes.

i’ll start at the beginning: i spent the weekend in the city, and celebrated jesse’s birthday while i was there. i haven’t been able to make it out for a long while now, and it’s been bumming me out, so i wanted to make sure that i did it right this time. we started the night at the condo with the new talib kweli record (which froms the sounds of it i absolutely love, but can’t really tell because my bittorent it on the fritz) before moving around the corner to the bier markt. now, the last time i went to the bier markt it did not go well: it was pushy and crowded with yuppie twentysomething dudes in striped, collared shirts lurking around to a bad ac/dc cover band–you know exactly what i’m talking about. although the general yuppiness of the place wasn’t gone, at least the band didn’t suck this time, and i drank MUCH better beer (HUGE cans of fosters!). after approximately forty minutes of awkwardly dancing and fighting about who had to wear what shoes with lyndsay because i over esmitated my ability to walk in a pair of gillian’s tortuous heels, i retired to a sleepy cab ride back with kavi.

in keeping with this now rather boring ‘b’ theme, i threw ‘busts’ on the list in reference to this article that i read on the star’s site this morning. i sort of just passed over it, until i read this article from cbc.ca, which has since been shortened considerably, and no longer contains a most interesting graphic. either way, i considered both to be prime examples of typical, conservative fear mongering, until i started talking about it to one of my co-workers this evening. actually, it was mostly us just bashing the ‘law’ for punishing people for mundane things like speeding and downloading movies and dumb shit like that, BUT, what business does the UN even have investigating this kind of shit? okay, so we’re smoking more pot and getting busted more–doesn’t that sort of level it all out? it’s really evident that i’m talking around this issue, but basically, don’t let the man keep you down, and all that shit.

oh, and having brown hair means that 43% of people now take me more seriously, according to a UN sanctioned study. brrapppp.

bed time. i apologize for my incoherence.

i’ve been meaning to post something alone the lines of, “blogging is boring when it’s done on a shitty computer; no further posts until the macbook arrives. godspeed until that glorious day, for some time now. however, today is THE DAY and it’s here. i’ve been checking that stupid package tracking thing on fed ex’s website like a 16-year-old checks their myspace account (oooh, what an outdated reference, fuck you) since i ordered it last week–it seems as though this marvelous machine has been through shanghai, anchkorage, nashville, and finally to ‘yyz’. today (now yesterday, and even the day before), i arrived home from a lovely early morning tea and chat with gillian, and promptly got my butt into the shower and some clothes, all the while taking my sweet time. i proceeded to make preparations for a light noontime meal, when i saw a box sitting on the stove. my fucking mac was in the house for an entire hour, according to my father who neglected to inform me that it was in the kitchen, although he saw me come home as he was napping on the couch at the time, AND I HAD NO IDEA. let me tell you, i would still have been bedheaded and gross if i had known that it was here already when i got home. i grabbed the box off the stove calmed walked into the living room, and pretended to open the box like a robot. i’m just trying to be real damn careful with this–it’s my baby that i have to come home early too now.

so anyways, this post is a couple weeks in the making, and i’ve got the time, and devotion to pressing these keys, thoroughly enjoying the way that the newness and maciness of them feel. i have two options to work with at this point; i can either start with a cute list of things i’ve made note to write about and risk sounding contrived now that most of these things have been beat to death not only by me in person to my friends, but by a portion of the mainstream media, OR i can start with a diatribe of sorts that i scribbled on napkins and pay stubs while on a smoke break at work. i guess i can sorta do both–ahem.

living in the ’burbs, and working the jobs that I do, i’ve become convinced that there are only two types (along with a sort of overlapping category) of people in these parts: the morbidly obese and the downright rude, entitled, and usually, cheap.  all offenses aside, it’s true–i’m constantly confronted by lazy, stupid people who are looking to save a buck and get a deal at any turn–oh, and then stinge me on the tip, thanks.  they’ll analyze their bills, bitch about our prices, and then peal off in their luxury suvs to return to their houses, identical to the next and the next and the next for a rousing family night of ‘must see tv’. 

now, normally, i would hate to make such sweeping generalizations and consider such logic to be overtly…flawed, to put it nicely, but it’s just that i see it everywhere.  people consume until they don’t fit in our chairs, and even still, they look panicked as though they’re not consuming enough, or consuming it quickly enough.  they don’t know what they need, which is usually far less than they already have, let alone what they want, but they sure as hell want something, anything, as long as it keeps them up with whoever the current drone master is.  this is a wayward and utterly misled people all united, in whispers, by one common thread–the fear of anything that seems ‘foreign’ or doesn’t adhere to a strict code of vaguely Victorian morality, all the while underlined by a judeo-christian ’sensibility’. the slightest hint of queerness or even an accent will lead to jeers from the aforementionted, and people usually expect me, probably due to my skin colour and my ‘impressionable’ age to blindly join them in their hateful discrimination. i’m not every other little blond chick with a sense of entitlement from a background of relative privilege, so please do not assume that i am one, thanks. i guess that being afraid of literally everything and everyone is one way to feel safe, because if you block it all out, it can’t scare you, and it certainly can’t cause you harm, not that it would. we double bolt our front doors, and set our alarm systems to lynch ‘cos ain’t no black man that has been smeared across the nightly news (with great help from the fear-mongering known as mainstream media) is gonna get in this house while we’re sleeping and steal our precious blond children–and that’s just the mildest of things i’ve heard. assumptions are made, and the white middle class is once again proctected, if not glorified, time and again. and trust me, they’ll believe anything as long as if favours them.

friday was the national day of aboriginal action–if you want to analyze just how this fear and hatred is nutured in our society, you need not look any further than recent news stories such as this, particularily regarding any potential blockades that were anticipated. it’s funny how white people react to having ‘their’ land, the land that they feel entitled to, the land that really belongs to no one after all, interrupted by the truth: the true histories and realities of colonization and contemporary native existence in this country.

the point is, i’m suffocating out here, and i don’t even know if it’s specifically waterdown and burlington that’s driving me nuts. i feel like i’m up against the monolithic walls of white, male, heterosexist and racist patriarchy with my legs spread, being searched as an infidel, an imposter, who is just as bad as ‘the enemy’. i feel powerless–you’ve gotta understand what it feels like to be told that you’re wrong and that it’s hopeless alla time. you start to believe it.

before i peace out, i wanna make sure that each and every one of you will take three seconds and to lauryn hill’s new track from some pengiun movie. now that i know it’s not actually from any new record, i’m not as impressed, and i even doubt she’s really ‘back’ like everyone keeps saying, because it’s only one song and a short tour, and even that isn’t going so well–i don’t want to get my hopes up. at least the spice girls are really coming back…oh wait, nevermind.

oh my, there’s so much more: tony blair is dunzorz, u20 world cup, camping trips. none of this is coherent; neither am i. goodnight.