Wish Thief

How to Get Rich Slow.

Fakiegrind's New Wilderness

Michael's dad came over today, looking for Tiger, aka Murphy Murcurio, the orange tabby. He was nowhere to be found (laying low under the bed, it turns out). I think we might be able to keep him, with visiting rights for Michael and company. The cat seems to like it here.

I showed Michael's dad the timberfly nest, and he said we should get rid of it, because the stings can be quite serious, apparently. Since the room is about to become a two year old boy's therapy space, this seemed like a good idea, though otherwise I would have been happy to let the insect be, despite the half-inch black stinger on the thing.

So I reluctantly took a penknife to the wasp's beautifully crafted nest. I wanted to preserve it in a glass jar, but it was quite brittle and came apart in pieces. Earlier in the day, I was watching the timberfly struggling to stuff something into its nest, but it was difficult to make out. The mystery was solved when the nest came apart and two little green spiders fell into the empty yogurt container I had positioned to catch any portions of the nest that might remain intact.



In the photo you can see attached to the larger spider what appears to be a small white larva, likely an insipid timberfly-to-be. It seemed that the spider was still alive--its legs were moving ever so slightly. I'm guessing that the mother timberfly paralyzed the spider, then attached her larva to it. The unwitting arachnid would thus remain fresh while the larva matured, and would likely provide a living food source. I'm guessing that the second spider was a back-up meal.

I'm sad that I ruined the reproductive strategy that the timberfly went through so much trouble to instigate. It would have been neat to see the whole process unfold. But then again, if I hadn't destroyed the nest, I would have never known about the spiders. So much drama going on right inside the windowsill! I remember these types of insects would scare the dickens out of me as a child as they hovered around the sewer grate at the end of our street, but now I think they're kind of cute...and fascinating.

Happy Canada Day

I'm proud to be a Canadian
so pass me another beer
-Dayglo Abortions

CBC is running down the top 50 Canadian songs of all time, but the Dayglos are not likely to make the list, despite their heroic anti-Regan, anti-hippie, anti-society stance. Too many antis, not enough uncles.

The Lakeport Beer factory is just down the street. Today all the government run beer stores are closed for the holiday, but the factory is still selling their "cheap honey lager". The Bease skateboard posse just passed the house on a beer run, a rare sighting in this neighbourhood.



It's not bad beer. I find if you mix it with some cran-raspberry juice, to make a kind of spritzer, it's quite palatable. Cheers!

Snippets

It's funny how you can go four months without thinking very much about someone--long enough to obsess voluminously over a blog--and then suddenly you can't get them out of your mind.

I have a new cat, an orange tabby. He's young. I've been feeding him for a couple of days. Normally our old grey cat chases away the strays, but this one has been allowed to stay for some reason. Yesterday, young Michael came over to see if I would go fishing with him. It turns the orange cat was living with Michael for a week or so, but escaped and has been hanging out in my back yard. I call him Murkey Murphy Murcurio, but the name Michael gave him is Tiger. I might get to keep him.

Some kind of wasp is making a home on the inside of my window sill. It's one of those long, black flying insects with a mean looking stinger. Her home looks like a rigatoni noodle made out of mud; it's a slender tube with an opening at one end. I had to close my window during the day today because I didn't want her finishing the nest and living in my room. It's an amazing structure though, and must have taken a couple days to build: trip by trip with a mouthful of mud each time.


"The poison of the honey bee is the artist's jealousy"
-actually, I think it's a timberfly

It won't be my room for very much longer. My housemate's autistic son needs the space for his therapy which begins on Monday. This means I'll either be sleeping in a tent in the yard, or on an air mattress on the floor. My record collection is safely packaged and stored away.

So many signs: a stray cat comes into my life; a wasp makes a nest in the room I have been living in but will soon be vacating. I got some free CDs in the mail the other day from CBC for a contest I entered a month ago. Among them: the new Beck, and the High Dials. Maybe I'll start my CD collection over from scratch. The heat wave is supposed to be abating soon. Record highs for June. This is part of the price that we, and future generations will be paying for cars, glorious cars.

Closing Time (Death to Milk)

Up to now, we've been able to keep the muscle from the Dairy Farmer's of Canada at bay through a combination of clever cyber-dodging and timely interventions from the Pope of Fakiegrind. Early this morning, I awoke to the sound of cattle lowing, and looked out my window to see the lawn being placidly devoured by a small herd of Jersey cows. There was no note or letter in the mailbox, but the message was clear: the DFC is on to us. I'm worried that tomorrow night I might awake to find my bed surrounded by bags of radioactive milk quivering luridly in the moonlight, and I am reminded of the title of the Dead Milkmen's retrospective album, Death Rides a Pale Cow.



I'm afraid that all of these disturbing portents spell the end for Fakiegrind. I've enjoyed spilling my guts online with friends and strangers, and I want to thank all the Fakiegrind Agents who risked their sanity and reputations to be affiliated with the site. Thanks also to all the readers who were kind enough to leave comments and feedback, and thanks to the Powers that Be for the gifts of Skateboarding, Soybeans and Seretonin, without which this site wouldn't have been possible.

And don't drink milk! It's full of chemicals! Just ask all the three-armed "Milkman" babies they've hidden in a secret arctic colony. It's unnatural, immoral and disgusting!

We now return to our regularly scheduled propaganda.

Milk it does a body
Milk it does a body good
Drink it
Drink it
Drink it
Like good children should

Damn this Heat

The open wound that is Fakiegind has been festering for about four months now, though it seems like much longer. Lately I feel like I've been muttering into a void, and what's the fun in that? The heat really cranked itself up today. I'm stuck babysitting and have discovered that I don't like dealing with poo. Dr. Who was excellent tonight. I almost wept when Rose and the Doctor kissed. It was Christopher Eccleston's last show. He left because he didn't want to get typecast as a Timelord.

Maybe I should do the same. I don't want to get "Blogcast" as some kind of loser with no life apart from clicking away at the keyboard. I have record collecting. There are many fine thrift shops all within biking distance of Fakie Central. If I drop the blog, something else will come along. It always does. I could volunteer at the jail down the street teaching skateboard tricks to inmates.

The last stage in Zen Buddhism is called "The Prison Pass", and many don't make it through. Maybe nobody makes it through. But I will escape the black hole of Fakiedom. All it takes is hitting the "delete blog" button and Fakiegrind will stop troubling your browser, forever. That is, unless another Timelord comes along and resurrects the site from the digital ashes. How absurd that would be!

There are times when I wish that death was the ending of all things. Then I would know that no matter how bad life gets, there would be a final, blissful nullification, an impenetrable darkness, a sound and dreamless sleep. I might even be tempted to suicide, if I knew that this were the case. But I somehow doubt that it is. After all, we're here, aren't we? And who would have thought that something like human lives would evolve out of the great void of space? And if it happened once, it could happen again, and again--Neitzsche's eternal return eternally returning. So why bother with suicide? Maybe there is a way to find the rest I'm looking for even in the midst of life.

There is a flea that lives in a crack in the floorboards by the computer, and whenever I sit down to write it seems I get a bite. I have an itchy line of them across my ankle, the same one I sprained. Blogging, record collecting, skateboarding, consciousness itself is like a flea bite that constantly needs scratching. And then you're told that you'll be free from it when you cease desiring to be free. Well Screw You, wisdom of the east. And pass me the Calamine lotion.

The Second Coming?

Utter blasphemy.

The Hive

My housemate says that all of blogdom is contained on a couple Apple computers somewhere in California. It amazes me that each time I press the "publish" button, tiny circuits are being rearranged on the other side of the continent. Something about all those messages from all those people being stored in a couple of hard drives reminds me of the movie the Matrix. But it's all backwards--we're supposed to be breaking free of the hive!

No Comment

The site metre says that 75% of the traffic on Fakiegrind is first time views. This means that roughly one in four people who stumble upon the blog become return customers. At first I was encouraged by the steady climb of the counter bars, but now I reailze that it is largely just the background activity of radom souls knocking around in blogland. It's probably better that way. Do I really want an extensive audience for these odd chronicles? Comments trickle in slowly. There are many ways to interpret silence, all of them inadequate.

Fakiedreams

This blog is like the dream of a dead man. I would like to wake up but have forgotten how. Some kind of stubborn determination has driven me off into the fringes that I now inhabit. It doesn't seem like I'll ever make it back, but I'll keep you posted.

Kool-Aid

Like a hummingbird
living on sugar water
stationary acrobatics
beats per minute
suspended
in bas relief
use the mind
like a river
not a camera
dissolution
of crystals
like octopus ink
the glass pitcher
turned red
in the sink
I'll sit and sip
and thumb
my mental flip-book
the re-animator
contaminator
peculiar flavour like
tasting a chalk drawing
the new day dawning
like food colouring
dissolving in the sky

Necromancer

My skateboard deck is almost worn out. I'm surprised it lasted this long, since it developed a deep crack along one side on my second outing: more flex to fend off shipwrecks, I guess. What's worse are the fissures no doubt developing in my skeletal system. On the one hand, I'm in better physical shape than I've been since my teens; on the other, I'm not sure that my joints can keep up with the stress put on them by my rippling new muscles.

At least the injuries are well distributed: sprained left ankle, bruised heel and overextended toe, but the right foot seems fine. My right wrist has been sore for months--it's the fall guy, and I should wear some sort of wrist guard. My knees are just plain tired, and I tweaked a hip a few weeks ago, but it seems to have healed.

When the weather gets hot, my joints swell and feel worse. If it cools off I might be good to go again. The nice thing about riding an almost dead board is you don't worry about wrecking it, so you can try new tricks without caring about all the new splinters you're producing. Having the tail worn down makes the board easier to flip as well, but landing is more difficult because there is less slab on which to land.

I've been more worried than ever about seriously injuring myself. Everywhere I go I see people with crutches, splints and casts, in wheelchairs, on electric scooters. Yesterday I came across a fellow who had fallen off his bike and, apparently, broken his knee. It was all misshapen and sticking out at a strange angle. Gone is the illusion of invulnerability of youth. Hello to the gradual dissolusion of middle age.

Part of me wants to quit now, while I'm ahead. But I know that if I'm destined for decripitude (or worse), it can happen any number of ways, so I might as well keep skating. That being said, lately I've been enjoying the down time time as much as the rolling around time. A short vacation is definitly in order, but I'll be back at it again eventually. Skating is a habit more persistent than zombie infestation; I could try burying my skateboard in the morning, but come evening I'd be out there with a shovel and an eldritch spell for raising the dead.

As Good as it Gets

It cooled off a little last night when the sun went down, but the air wasn't moving at all, so when the steel mills started pumping out their nighttime emissions--under cover of dark so as not to unduly alarm the populace--it just sat like a big, sooty pillow threatening to suffocate the the sick and weakly amongst north end residents. By ten o'clock my housemate and I couldn't take it anymore, so we drove up to the top of the Niagara Escarpment to find a nature trail where we could respire with impunity.

The trail was dark, with trees on either side blocking out any lights from the city, the branches interlacing overhead like a latticework through which the stars could be seen flickering across the expanses. At one point along the trail we thought we detected human voices, so we stopped, only to hear a chorus of bullfrogs sounding their deep meditative percolations into the gloaming stillness.

We passed under a hydro tower that looked like a huge grey insect entrapped in a web, and my housemate told me of some spiders she heard about on the radio who have two sets of genitalia. Because of the female spider's practice of devouring the male during copulation, this particular species is endowed with two sets of organs, to guard against coitus interruptus due to snacking.

When we were deep into the woods, the fireflies came out. Like phosphorescent skipping stones, or quantum particles tracked through space, they illuminated their own trajectories while navigating the dark. By this time, my housemate's son was crying; he likes city streets with lights and cars over natural settings, so we turned back and walked slowly through the cool, fragrant air, toward the day's residual heat that would still be radiating from the tarmac of the parking lot.

When we got back home, the pollution seemed to have dissipated some. I stayed up and watched a movie on TV while the cat circulated through the kitchen and then back out into the yard, keeping watch for the intrusion of strays onto his territory. Sitting there in late night anonymity, drinking purple Kool Aid and watching Mariel Hemmingway and Eric Roberts' superb acting in Star 80, I had the feeling that my life right now, despite all its ambiguities and anxieties, is about as good as it will ever get. The yellow mask of the moon beaming through the window agreed, and I went to bed with my lunar-powered mind chattering away to itself until late into the night, when exhaustion finally cut a deal with dream to concede to sleep.

Klepto

It is the advent of increasingly more compact and digital recording formats that has damaged the music industry most. You can't copy an LP record, but tapes, CDs and now MP3 formats are easily reproduced, and it's the artists who suffer. This is what I told myself as I headed to the local record shop to trade in three more selections from my CD collection for fast cash. I don't like CDs, and I only have about five of them left, but the three I just sold were particular favourites, and I kinda wish I hadn't let them go. I have them transferred to cassette, but the mind still clings...

I needed money to feed my collecting habit. Over the years I've had numerous preoccupations, the most prominent of them being vintage toys and comic books. In childhood I collected stamps, bottle caps, marbles, stickers, license plate numbers, and ants. My friend and I had a game where we competed to claim the ant colonies we came across in the name of our personal insect armies. Since we didn't keep any formal record of whose ant colonies were whose, it was a somewhat chaotic game, full of disputes and disagreements.

Being nomadic these past few years has made it difficult to keep my collections intact (except for the ants, who take care of themselves). I've had to sell off many items, keeping a few token representations from each category of treasure. It's probably better that way; no need to multiply frivolity to excess. But something in the collector's mentality reaches towards an ever-receding horizon, a fantasy of completeness that agonizes over minor variations and trivial minutae.

LP records are the latest, and perhaps most excellent of my collections. Excellent because music, unlike G.I.Joes or Transformers, has a wide, humanistic appeal; because LPs contain the most acoustic information out of all the recording formats; because vinyl LPs are perhaps the best justification for why the dinosaurs had to die; because unlike comic books or fridge magnets, you can dance to them.

And they're going cheap! With the eight dollars I garnered from my three CD liquidation, I bought twelve records and a book about Stone Henge. I traded in Dr. Flavour's Christmas gift (which I dearly loved), but got a record of strange, psychedelic bagpipe jazz (the riff from one of the songs sounds like the theme to Star Wars, though the album predates the movie by some five years), some old Johnny Cash, Herbie Hancock, the Stones, Talking Heads and a very odd recording of Hungarian Wildlife Sounds.



Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't a very good trade. I'm addicted, it seems, to seeking out new sounds, and my compulsion--as in skateboarding--occasionally overrides more reasonable impulses. But while defunct CDs serve, at best, as coasters, I can always turn any dud records into attractive candy bowls.

Salty Dog

Another heat wave. Steeltown is hunkering down under a carpet of humidity and smog. I was silly enough to go skating yesterday, late afternoon, and must have got a touch of sunstroke. There was a kid with bleach blond spiked hair--he couldn't have been more than eight or nine--who kept following me around while I was trying to land a fingerflip. I was so distracted by my young shadow that I didn't even notice the one time that my feet actually made contact with the board--but it still counts! That's one more trick to scratch off the to-do list. There was a time in my youth when I could do the varial version of this trick, but I never learnt the straight ahead method.


AAARRRH! Ain't nobody makes me wear no pansy-ass bathing cap!

Thinking today of all the people I have met here. There was Crazy Dave, whom I skated with downtown under the stern gaze of Queen Victoria's tarnished statue. Dave claimed to be possessed by Satan, and underlined the fact by accidentally breaking my board in half. Then there was the young woman I almost ran over on my bike last week in an east end park. She was clearing some weeds out of a garden, and we started talking. It turns out I share the same name as her childhood teddy bear. I told her that I unknowingly named my own childhood companion--a stuffed lamb--after the Egyptian god of light. Her reply, that there were probably whole ancient societies that based their culture on the things children said, still kind of haunts me as beautiful fantasy.

And then there are all of the people in my neighbourhood. Over the past two years they have come to accept my housemate and myself, even though, along with my friend's autistic son, we make a strange trio. A lot of these people grew up here, and can tell you a great deal of local history if you take the time to sit down and talk. I feel like the north end has given me a glimpse of a way of life that humanity has shared for hundreds, even thousands of years, and is now coming to an end. For entire generations to live and die within a radius of a few city blocks may not seem very glamorous in today's global village, but it has been the human norm since the dawn of settled life.

Nature and upbringing have made me something of a nomad. I haven't really managed to assimilate myself to life in Steeltown, but I almost wish I did belong to these kind and generous, sometimes rough, but always down to earth people. I can only hope that with the sweeping changes that have already begun to make themselves felt, even here, the salt of the earth will yet retain something of their saltiness. I have a feeling that they will.

Lyrical, Unempirical

There are lots of catchy songs that I've heard a thousand times, but never known exactly what the lyrics are. For instance, the first line of REM's "What's the Frequency Kenneth" is purported to be:

What's the frequency Kenneth? Is your Benzedrine, Uh-huh?

But I always thought it was,

What's the frequency Kenneth? The shopping's a dream, Uh-huh.

My version seemed to make sense in a hip, ironic sort of way, and I still pretend that those are the true lyrics to the song. It's not like the authentic line makes any more sense (at least, not to me).

So here's my imaginary version of "Jumping Jack Flash" by the Stones (with help from D. Byrne):

I was born in a crossfire hurricane
in a house with the TV always on
But it's all right now, in fact it's a gas
yes it's all right--Grandmaster Flash
is so fast, fast, fast

In the town, it said street sweepers ahead
I fell down, and the skateboarders all fled
But it's all right now, in fact it's a gas
yes it's all right, cuz Grandmaster Flash
is so fast, fast, fast

I've been singing this song all day, feeling pretty cool biking around these Steeltown streets in the blazing heat, and pretending I have tattoos. Imagine a kissing contest in which McJagger and Billy Idol were the last two contestants left puckering. Who would win?

Fakie Tunes

The Fakiegrind Summer Music Review is ready and available in limited quantities for sendout. If you supply your name/pseudonym and address we'll try to get a copy out to you before the Dairy Farmers catch on.

The Spinoza

Time's running out for Fakiegrind. Fakie intelligence has it that the DFC is on to us, and closing fast. I don't know how many posts I'll be able to get out before they shut us down, but they will never be able to squelch the backwards looking spirit of the Unholy Rollers known as Fakiegrind Agents!

I can't sign off without promoting Flatlander's signature rotational innovation: the Spinoza. In leiu of photos that might be used as evidence against us on the Bovine Phoneline, I'll describe the move textually.

1. Get frontside G-turns wired (an extended spiral turn on the front wheels of the board).

2. Practice body varials (jumping 180 degrees with the body only, so that you change to fakie stance while the board continues rolling forward).

3. Combine the G-turn with the body varial: when the board is at about the 270 degree mark of the G-turn, execute a fast and stylish body varial, thus replacing your front foot on the nose with your back one--but keep the board in the G-turn, i.e. with the back wheels still off of the ground. With your footing thus transposed, you will be in a position to complete the last 180 degrees of the turn as a simple backside rotation.

It's actually a pretty simple trick, but looks impressive, even baffling, to the untrained observer. You can do it on a ramp or incline, if so inclined. This trick works equally well with plaid or stripes, but I recommend a good pair of comfortable sneakers. Stay old!

If I had a Shrink Ray...

Monkey 99

A big Thank You to Kill-Joy for sending the two skateboarding DVDs, Roll Forever and Boston Massascre. The former featured the usual ruffians, flipping down huge sets of stairs and sliding impossible handrails. It was simultaneously impressive and tedious. Someone could write an essay about landscapes being the true protagonists of most skateboarding videos; after you watch enough of them you get to know various elements of California architecture better than your own neighbourhood.

But I really enjoyed the Boston Massacre. There are some sequences in that video that take street skating back to its Natas and Mike Vallely roots. I especially liked that very tall, skinny Colin Fiske, but wondered why it was the other, shorter, fellow who had the nick-name "daddy long legs." I enjoyed watching him ollie onto, and ride right over a car; it's a move I've often thought about but never seen performed. The Montreal connection was nice too.

Just about every crazy trick I dreamed about as a kid but never thought would be possible has been performed by the latest generation of skaters. Riding over a car was one of the last feats on my list of things to see, and it only took a guy with exceptionally long legs to do it. There is some kind of hundredth monkey effect going on with skateboarders. Tricks that took me and my friends ages to perfect are now being learned in days and weeks by the younger skaters, and they take these moves to new levels by doing them down stairs, and in new, outlandish combinations and variations.

I like to think that without us oldsters breaking the ground, putting in the hours learning 180 ollies and kickflips, the current generation wouldn't be able to learn the tricks as fast and furiously as they do. I posit that there is a kind of collective skateboarding unconscious, a transpersonal repository for skateboard prowess to which we all contribute in the countless solitary hours spent in parking lots and laneways, and that this fount of energy is drawn upon by subsequent waves of skateboarders. But then, I like to think of all kinds of crazy things after a few dozen 360s on the old stuntwood.