Pressed in organdy

Vines eating trees
Originally uploaded by amnesoid

Drumbeats call from across the sea.

I was a cool cat today, i was the coolest cat for forty miles. It is not the end of the world if [corporation] and Tim Miller part ways, i said. Chin up, boss. Richmond is just a city i happened to like a little, once upon a time, and it has an office of ours, but if it is not in the cards then i don't mind. But i am not going to new jersey and i am not staying here. I was the coolest cat for forty miles. I don't want for money or anything, i can even afford to be unemployed for awhile, maybe i can do some overseas volunteer work like i have wanted to do for a long time.

Something has been not quite right for me for quite a while. I want to leave very soon, but there is nowhere particularly that i really want to go. It is a weird feeling. I have been cooped within offices for three years and it is uncomfortable and unnatural. My alcoholism doesn't make the time pass as pleasurably as it used to. I left out these parts.

I get bent towards ideas i have. The latest idea is that the company is unrelenting on geography, so i get to finally leave and be free of the bonds of drawing a paycheck. But now my boss seems like he will try to relent to my preference, and then i will feel obligated to remain an employee, which is the root cause of all unhappiness.

I need to use my vacation days more often.

-

I have been down and out with flu. I used to call it "The Flu", but i think people here just say "i have flu", sort of like british people say "uh oh, i think i have to go to hospital."

THE flu allowed me to sleep for sixteen hours yesterday. I drank orange juice and chicken broth and lost five pounds, only five more to go to achieve all of my resolutions for 2008. !

I have been listening to Simon & Garfunkel over and over again. And over. The apartment is tidy and has bated breadth. I look at the futon and feel weak in the arms. Ohch.

I have been reading a book called "COLLAPSE". It is by Doctor Diamond and it is about how the human race ruins everything it touches, which i believe entirely, but i do it tenderly.

-

Everything is caked with salt, hopefully it snows like the dickens tomorrow.

Your friend,
-tim.

satellite telephotolens

ant arc tic a
Originally uploaded by amnesoid

Sick and cold and unglobed. Flat maps make polars places look so large, like my ceiling. My head aches so i take a pill my stomach burns so i take another i bet a mouthful of snow would fix it all, ten thousand years old and untouched by the Sun, Oh photons.

I will pack a seedling. I will whisper affirmations. Grow, little hero, right out the top of my backpacks, oh. I will crack the ground at the southern axis of the spinning wide world and i will be your father. You will die in three hours time, a trinity of that slow and knowing look.

Cryogenically, you will have a chance someday.

The definition of 'frozen' will be greener til then, goodnight my child.

Dwindles & reprimandishness

I have been traveling a lot, all for working. I flew into and out of Philadelphia, which once upon a time was the second-largest city in the British Empire. I flew into and out of Edmonton, which is dreary and depressing and staring into space like it has had crude oil contaminating its drinking water for a long, long time.

While i am away on my various travels, real estate agents show off my apartment to potential renters. They leave my lights on and leave business cards on my tables with old fat smiling white people pictured to the left and their names and information to the right. I collect the cards and put them into the papers to be recycled. I am ecofriendly.

Due to the influx of prospectors during my absences, it was necessary to evacuate Linus. Linus is a cat and even though we have never carried out a conversation he is one of my best friends. That a pet is one of my best friends means that the portion of my humanity which thrives on interconnectivity with the remainder of the human race has curled up and died in a moist and dark place, but Linus is a nice cat anyway. Linus is now timesharing on the old fambly homestead, watching birds from the windows without developing a crick in his neck, and probably enjoying a mojito, which is a drink that i thought had a little accent over one of the vowels but it does not.

Last night Tom and i were thinking of power animals for everyone, like ravens and bears and badgers and snakes, and we thought a long time about what my power animal would be and could not decide on anything, because Tom would not accept "homo sapien" as a power animal, even though i think that that is the one that fits me best.

I am power animalless. An anomaly. Ha. I think that i will make an executive decision and make my power animal a backpack. One that has a suitable number of pockets, as opposed to a ridiculous quantity of pockets.

You are supposed to have visions of your power animal in a dream, if you believe in that kind of shit. I am famous for never ever dreaming as far as i can tell. Except then last night i had a dream and i remembered fragments of it. It did not have any power animals, and had more to do with the mental tatters that give the only remaining evidence which might be able to prove that i was a romantic once upon a time, which kind of bummed me out. Why cannot my lucidity be more carefree like everyone else's?

Geographically and more tangibly, i am in a strange forlorn holding pattern, spin spin spinning the globe and staring into it hotly until it stops and tells me where i will go when the winter is ending. But it is like the old saying, "a watched globe never boils."

I am bending my head around another escape. All of my will is channeled towards a departure from the Greater Hamilton Area. My boss had told me that geography was no issue, it did not matter to him, but for the past month it has become clearer that the employer desires my whereabouts to be in one of two places, which only seems reasonable from an employer's perspective. There are not many working people who even get to contemplate a discussion about living anywhere other than one place upon the planet Earth. So i understand this, but it is also true that there is no point in sacrificing one's precious time for places and circumstances that are not totally and completely fulfilling. It is an idealistic notion that individuals who are supporting families or maintaining a network of close relationships cannot afford, but i am not really involved in either of those things, and so i can afford to have my heads more in the clouds. To pursue quests of righteousness or whatever.

I think that my employer and i have now diverged a bit too much to be of much use to one another, after an eight year trajectory. Resignation is an allusion i've made forty times over the past six years, but i guess this is the first time that i have actually fixed a liquidation of my housing commitment and a paring down of my earthly possessions and come the end of March i will be without a residence and without a desperate need to be anywhere specifically, with no one relying on my productivity other than a rather large black and white cat.

My boss wanted to talk to me this weekend, but despite leaving messages with him i have heard nothing so far. It cannot be very awesome news if there needs to be a weekend discussion concerning my human resources situation.

Anyways, so. Scientific experiments have concluded that i am dwindling.

Dwindle, dwindle dwindle.

XXXI or XXXIIIIV

Yesterday i turned 31 years old for the first time. I considered the occasion to be the death of the possibility that i could ever be considered a role model, and so i decided to do some potsmoking for the first time in my dumb life.

In reality, i am known to succumb to peer pressure very easily. The twist is that i succumb to peer pressure with a 9-year delay. And so i just now succumbed to a peer pressure from november 1998. I am so feeble.

The potsmoking resulted in one of the least great times i have had in ages. It was too much like being drunk, except drunk while superimposed on a sine wave, which hiccups and turns into a cosine wave every 1.7 seconds or so. That makes it sound more interesting than it actually was.

I was unimpressed. Except the way that i found my inner dialog to be functioning, i was reiterating this fact to myself thusly:

"Hey, this is unimpressive."
"I am unimpressed."
" am unimpressed. I"
"am unimpressed. I "
"m unimpressed. I a"
" unimpressed. I am"
"unimpressed. I am "
"nimpressed. I am u"
"impressed. I am un"
"mpressed. I am uni"
"pressed. I am unim"

And so on.

To be honest, my inner dialog (which is the same entity which is writing this very sentence, and this very entry, and everything else i have ever wrote or talked to people about, etc.) is sort of an imposing fellow within my brain as it is. And suddenly i found that it had been amplified eversomuch more, which caused me to worry about my brain vessel and its ability to contain such an obnoxious run of echoed and back-tripping thought sentences. It was worrying.

This is maybe the reason that i started to have a six-hour-long panic attack. Luckily it was different enough from a normal panic attack so that i could sleep through large swaths of it. I decided that the proper environment for riding out the panic attack was as low to the ground as possible, just like any other panic attack. Standing in the kitchen was bad. Sitting on the couch was bad. The dining room floor was a good enough spot. I laid down.

I was thirstier than i've ever been in my life. I drank a lot of water, but my gums still felt way dry. That was weird. I was given some water and then i laid down on the dining room floor again. The panic attack was different from a normal panic attack because it did not have the hyperventilation. The panic attack was mostly contained within the head. Or maybe it wasn't, but i was only paying attention to the effects that were making themselves known above the neck.

Also, it seemed to be a panic attack which was superimposed on a sine wave and would turn into a cosine wave at unawares and ultimately it could not catch up to itself, and so it could never be a full-fledged panic attack. But it was still a weird and bad panic attack. Or perhaps it is just the type of panic attack that you have while your brain is occupied with the task of not functioning properly.

My friends did not think that i was reacting correctly, and i agreed, and so did my panic attack, which i will name "Jntembe", posthumously. They gave us a pillow and blankets and more water, and Jntembe and i kept the dining room floor company throughout the night.

In conclusion, i do not know what all of the hubbub is about. I did not consider potsmoking to be very much fun at all, and actually much closer to the opposite of fun. Although i know that it is all due to my backwards and feeble brain vessel. It probably also did not help that i had introduced nothing much more strange than alcohol into my always under-prepared physiology for more than thirty years, and then allofasudden i decided to introduce three monstrous bong hits to it over the course of ten minutes. Awww yeah!(?)

Even nineteen hours later i can still sense a bit of a discontinuity in the way my inner dialog is accustomed to functioning, which is disconcerting. It is true that i have a history of brain feebleness and an illogical subservience to head chemistries. Including depressions, including panic attacks, including bouts with ridiculous levels of anxiety. I hope that i have not triggered a hatch which was doing its best to contain demonns of mental illness. A la Syd Barrett. Oh, to wreck oneself like Syd Barrett. That would be sort of bad. But maybe i am worrying too much. Mostly i am just very very weary and want to sleep for a week.

Happy Birthday To ME!

Maybe marijuana should remain illegal after all, because as far as i'm concerned it seems to be a fucking jackass.

Worst of all, a completely innocent and 90% full two-liter bottle of tonic water was sacrificed in order to assemble the smoking contraption. Today i mourn all of the gin & tonics who never had the chance to exist.

Anyways, we can strike that shit off of the list, i guess.

Continuation of 03-September 1999 Entry

and then the chorus goes:

FIVE YEARS
STUCK ON MY EYES
FIVE YEARS
WHAT A SURPRISE
FIVE YEARS
MY BRAIN HURTS A LOT
FIVE YEARS
THAT'S ALL WE GOT

-

yours,
-deciduous ephemerals in textss

Northwest Territories License Plates

Northwest Territories license plates are in the shapes of bears.

-

No, Iamin Calgary again.

Vines eating trees

Vines eating trees
Originally uploaded by amnesoid

Hello journal,

It is 2008, hurrah. Last year i was hurrahing in the new year through the wilds of Patagonia, amidst a succession of experiences which are as close to 'religious' as i am able to really get anymore. I used to have more religiousish experiences more often, but mostly those had to do with rocknroll or girls probably, so maybe it is better now that they are far less frequent but more often about topographies of the planet, and hysteria of Our Universe.

But i digresseth, because i have not even had a religiousish experience in a long time.

Here is a photograph of The Weeds. The Weeds is what we used to call the rural overgrowth surrounding the childhood home. It is true that it was weedy, but it did have quite a few trees which may have been forgettable but at least they were respectable. There were not many vines back then. There were a few patches of vines that formed glorious parapets and earthen cathedrals, but they were prominent only because they pulled themselves up on prominent trees. And as the impressed toddler emperor of my domain, i allowed them to stay and thrive.

Twenty years later they have taken over completely, and the trees are barely alive, and they are being pulled down, sure as decades. It is probably wholly symbolic.

I do not know for what, yet.

The future has come and gone and left me a failed and exiled emperor with acne scars, and i am beginning to suspect that the vines are an invasive species. I briefly consider calling upon warriors and mercenaries of arbory, who would take a moment to grieve before torching everything, burning it all down to spite the vines.

Don't fortresses evolve into a barren patch of land.

Evolve, devolve, indeed.

-

HUMAN RESOURCES is the name of a department within a company which handles the logistics of the worker bees and carpenter ants. My particular HUMAN RESOURCES is putting the push on me, like the stereotypical sheriff in the western movie. They want me to submit to my two-year-old verbal pledge which had to do with permanently relocating to a mystical place called "Trenton, New Jersey, United States of America." My immediate boss is Canadian and wants me to become a Canadian and stay in Canada. I do not want to do either of those things, and so now is my opportunity to do neither.

Nobody has asked nicely.

My Canadian work visa expires on March 28, 2008. Oh, America in the Spring.

I have called my landlord on the telephone. I have not talked to him since before losing touch with my emperorship in the wilds of Patagonia. Since then he has only known me as a monthly check within a stamped envelope. I told him that if he needs sixty days worth of notice for the vacating of his premises, well then now he has sixty days of notice for the vacating of his premises.

I will be moving someplace in fifty-nine days, i wish i knew where.

Journal, could you use a sofa and a bookshelf and a microwave oven? Lately i don't have the desire to own much.

Yf,
-tim.