Category: Uncategorized

There are a few things in my life recently that have become something of a routine. Jeff, Chris and I have been going to Bon’s every Saturday and sometimes Sunday to eat breakfast for the past 2 or three months. i will please have the breakfast special with sausages, eggs over hard, brown toast and garlic on my pan fries. no coffee please. We stopped drinking coffee with our meals last week to try out the difference and much to our satisfaction we left feeling more human than if we had each thrown back ten cups of sketchy diner coffee. I’m not even kidding when I say ten cups.

It’s 8:22am on a Saturday. I’m awake. I took an early night last night, 12:30 bedtime. And this is actually sleeping in for me.

Got paid yesterday. It feels like Monopoly, getting handed seventeen 100 dollar bills. You lose your grasp on the value of money pretty fast. I remember buying pot when I was 17, I’d lay down 600 at a time for a quarter-pound, without even blinking.

Wow, this entry is so boring, I’m even bored writing it.

I asked her if she even reads my blog anymore. ya know, with all the nice things I say about her it’d be an alright side bennefit to have her think fondly of me for thinking fondly of her. What the fuck is that? The manipulation I’m capable of blindly inflicting on others sickens me. She told me she doesn’t read my bullshit anymore. She stopped reading my blog after I pasted pictures of my bloody arms up on here. It was then she realized that my blog might not be healthy for her to be exposed to and was probably a detriment. I commended her wisdom for staying clear from that which hurts her, in this case, my own words and images.

When I was talking to her I was overcome by a feeling of needy attachment and what i learned to call “love”, which was really codependence. It started out as giving a part of myself to another person to control. Here, take this part of me. You want to give me a part of you? How fucking cool! This must mean that we feel connected with one another and that we share a common bond, a common likeness of one another. By giving them a part of me I always gave them the power to make me complete or to make me incomplete. This time, when I was talking to her I realized this error in what I have done. I have done it again without even conciously thinking of it – I gave her a part of me. It was when we kissed. No, it was when we slept together. No, it was when I started talking to her again. No, it was when I became aware of her slowly more and more. It started with my own thoughts. It started when I gave her a part of my thoughts daily. Over time rematerializing in to action and multiplied by her reactions. I wasn’t a knowingly willing participant of this transaction. It just happened, but this time the precipitent I recognized. That feeling of incompletion, of dissapointment when she wasn’t controlling the part of me I gave her to my satisfaction. Thus breeds all sorts of manipulation. Give them the power to change you then manipulate them to control the outcome of your own emotions.

But is self-awareness enough? Can information alone bring about a natural reaction in myself to make change?

I’m not on an island. I’m at my computer again, so i have no excuse but to satisfy the haunting feeling telling me to write.

I got back from Galiano on Friday. We ditched out early cause we were all losing our minds on that island. The end of the third tour of duty. Without Carl, our crew seemed to lack direction and motivation to work. So we came back a day early. Good for me, cause I only really had one hand after my incident with the nail gun the day previous.

I slept with her last night. I hesitate writing this… cause I know every girl I’ve slept with in the last 6 months reads this blog. But what the hell… feeling like living on the edge. And it’s not like any of the girls I’ve slept with in the past siz months have been monogomous. Jealousy is a weird emotion. It’s taken a toll on me, and I’ve come to realize that hiding shit for fear of causing jealousy only makes the emotion more painful when inevitably the truth comes out.

Still though, isn’t denial great? To think you’re one with one person, and one person only. To feel total comfort with that person? Total trust, even for a moment? To wake up beside them without guilt? To not want to run away but to just kick off the external world and stay in bed all day? I only feel that with you. Fuck, why is that? Why is it that you are the only one that seems so perfect to me in all your blatent imperfection? I’m happy I feel free to write you honest poetry without fear of losing you. Cause I’ve lost you too many times to count and it seems we are always connected again. It was perfect.

My MOTU 828 broke. fucking bullshit. had it for less than three weeks and now i can’t fucking record anything. Ack. Fucking bullshit, I tell you.

So I’m in town till Thursday morning. On Thursday I’m going back to Galiano to pick up the tools and gear and bring it all back to Vancouver. That will mean the end of the Galiano jaunt.

My serenity has become dependant upon my work lately. Whenever I am at work I feel satisfied, useful, alive and connected to whatever the fuck ‘god’ has become. Money? Whenever I am not working I feel volatile, toxic, confused, anxious, stressed and chaotic. I’m gonna start meditating every day for half an hour. See what that does for me.

Listening to Lou Reed’s Berlin and Transformer.

Nothing’s meant to last forever.

Details: 3″ Passlode framing spike from an air-powered nail gun shot through my pinkie finger on my left hand exiting through the finger nail. Lots of blood. Fractured bone. Antibiotics. Popped cherry.

Worked somewhere between 90 and 100 hours in the last 9 days. 9 days and today is my first day off. I truly never thought I had the capacity to commit to a job and show up week after week. Past girlfriends I always admired because it seems they always had full-time jobs. They always worked and I waited around everyday to see them. It was like a post-nuclear family role-reversal. But now I can hardly believe that I, the fuck-up am working as much as I am. I don’t mind it. Work takes up some good sizeable chunks of my day which I would otherwise squander away.

Listening to Lou Reed’s Berlin.

I have carpal tunnel syndrome. I hadn’t had any symptoms all week till this morning. I woke up because my hand/wrist on my right side was numb and throbbing. An hour after waking up it still is. Physical injuries and illnesses are so all-encompassing and demobilizing. It’s frustrating not being able to rely on my body. The first day on the island at work I came down with a horrible flu. Felt like I was gonna pass out, ached all over and swollen glands. 18 hours in bed, sweating it out.

I dreamed about you last night again. I dream about you in total more than anyone else in total, i think. It was one of the recurring themes in dreams involving you. It’s more about the feeling that I get being with you than anything we are doing or where we are. You and I are bestest friends, like I imagine we were in the beginning, like around that time when we went hiking in Manning Park, or the time we got drunk and went to the Folk Fest afterparty together. Companionship, you’re so beautiful. In my dreams you’re clean. We’re nice to each other. We’re comfortable with each other. Very comfortable. Nothing else in the world matters except for you. But I think that maybe these dreams mean nothing about you, but instead you are the personification of my ideal girlfriend in my dream, which I guess means that atleast physically, you are.

Since Jeff transpired photos of his messy desk I decided to document the current state of my own living mess.

sitting here with a bass between my knees. gratified. satisfied. put in a lot of hours this week at work. if you want a quantitative total it works out to 59 hours in the last 7 days. bling bling i guess. but more important to me is this feeling of usefulness and productivity. i haven’t felt depressed in ages. months.

just plugged in my phone. charging the deadness. checked my messages. i love the people in my life. i really, really do. i love that i have the choice to contact who i want to and that there is a reciprocity between us.

she called having a mental breakdown, by the sounds of it. she dropped her cell phone in her oatmeal a few days ago. so poetic. i’m the only phone number she knows by heart. i feel honored, come to think of it. even though the memory of my number over all others is probably nothing more than a coincidence. but yes, she was having a mental breakdown, on the message she left me. said she was near tears. said i was her only link to the outside world. told me she just needed to talk to me. She called at 8:05.

SHE called me! I was so happy to see one missed call from her place of work. She actually called me, and she left a message too. I wish i hadn’t automatically deleted it after listening to it or maybe I wouldn’t have to recite her call for future reference. She was just calling to say hi. To tell me that she misses me. She fucking misses me. can you believe it? her tone was casual. Like nothing ever happened. Like everything is right as rain. and it is, cause she called me. She called at 8:22. I called her back right away. She called me more than three hours ago but my phone was dead. She picked up the phone. we talked for a couple minutes, the how are you, how are you nonesense. she’s calling me back in twenty.

he called me to talk but got my answering machine. the message was long. a good 4 minutes. he called to tell me that he realized he is terrified of living. he used the word terrified. I don’;t think he mentioned any specific things he was terrified of but just referred to the scarryness of being alive especially now that he’s sober. nothing to dull the pain. nothing to hide the fear. but there is things. there is always something to dull the pain and hide the fear. it seems somedays that’s all i am looking for, is that next fix. that next dose of escape and numbness. or if nothing else a distraction. but what from? what is there to be afraid of? to hide from? to escape from? is our existence really that horrific or are these feelings void, figments of our imagination? no one is hunting us down. no one is too much to handle, too powerful to be cut out of our lives. nothing is too daunting. so then what is it? what is it that you are so terrified of? he called at 10:54.

I’m back from Galiano. Tired. Very tired. My hands seixed up this morning and were numb. It took more shovelling before they returned to normal. My muscles are all stiff and hard. I think that’s a sign that they are all getting bigger and the skin hasn’t stretched to compensate yet.

Within the next year I will either enroll in the training program to become a firefighter or I will join the Canadian army. What about that $10,000 training to become a webdesigner? I dunno. What about my career as an artist? I dunno. But I do know that today I want to be either a firefighter or a combat engineer. There are lots of not combat rolls in the military. It pays really well, the work is fun and exciting. You get to travel a lot, see the things that ordinary citizens can’t see, and you get to carry guns around. Firefighter or military.

We had to dig out a lot of dirt. Took three of us 36 hours of digging to grade this foundation. By hand. No fucking back hoe. Just shovels. I daydream a lot when I’m shovelling. It’s monotonous. Tough on the back. You get out of breath fast. Four shovels and you need to take one to catch up. I daydream that I am in Vietnam, digging foxholes, that Charlie are in the bushes and that mortars are exploding all around. I imagine we are digging trenches in WWI. French only 100 yards away, I’m lucky to not be shot to the ground already. It’s tough work, shovelling. As I’m typing my fingers don’t feel like my own. My knuckles are stiff and ridgid, like i have arthritis. Every muscle in my hand feels as though it were beaten with a hammer.

Got a dragonfly from the Island. Big one, two and a half inches from eye to rudder. fonna build a little taxidermic box and leave it on her doorstep with a note. Hope she likes it. Hope it makes her hate me less and think of me.

I am so fucking exhausted right now. I really need a day off. Thank god I don’t work tomorrow. I leave Sunday for Galiano. Our crew is all going there to build a house. Should be about 4 or 5 days. We are gonna work long days, 10-12 hours. And i’m gonna get paid 20/hour under the table. I like money when it is given to me. Got paid today for the last two weeks work. That takes care of rent for the next couple of months.

Today’s contribution to my fatigue was that I worked on a the set of Stargate SG-1. Not construction, as per usual. My foreman gave me the day off seeing as how we’re gonna be working Sunday, but I got a call from IATSE Dispatch this morning and decided to follow the request. The request was for the lighting department, a lighting op. I’ve never been a lighting op before. My closest experience was being head of lighting and sound in high school. However I quickly realized that the complexity of the situation on a professional production stage is about 4000x more complicated than a high school production. I don’t like feeling unknowledgable regarding work. The feeling is draining. Feeling like tits on a bull. Having to ask “What can I do?” or “How do I do this?” after and during each task. I think maybe once (if) I have more experience as a lighting op, the job could be more fun. As it was, I hated almost every minute of it. I was up in my head all day. Lacking the companionship, understanding and teamwork that I am used to working with my construction crew. I also lacked the proper tools for the job. All the other lamp ops had their toolbelts with a crescent wrench, electrical tape, zap straps, Leatherman, sharpies etc. whereas I had only a pair of pliers that the Gaffer gave me at the beginning of the day. I was constantly wishing I had a certain tool that I didn’t have for a given task. Constantly asking for the other lamp op’s tools and having them scoff at my inadequacy. The other lamp ops weren’t particularly friendly or understanding of my situation, having never done this before. So I was left to be constantly mindful of my situation to avoid any freakouts. Kept telling myself “It’s alright, you don’t have to be amazingly competant today, you’re learning. Just pray, just pray for the strength to continue.” I was unaware of the work schedule. When I could take smoke breaks, when lunch was, that we were going to be working for 12 fucking hours. I felt like i was breaking some sort of protocol when I would go out every couple of hours for a smoke. Lunch was at 2pm, which by my strict standards of lunch at 12 everyday was so late that I had hunger pains. I seriously began to doubt my ability to stay on until 8pm after lunch. I quickly crafted a manipulative lie and told the Gaffer I had an appointment at 6pm to have dinner with my mom so i would have to leave early. He then proceded to completely embarrass me infront of every available crew member by telling them all that, “Nick’s gotta go home early boys. He came late and has to go home early… To his mommie’s house for dinner,” to which the rest of the crew from lighting, construction and painting let me know how much of a pussy I was. Whatever, I laughed it off on the outside and prayed the whole time on the inside.

There is a positive side to this kind of work. I make 23.25 an hour as a lamp op. 1.5x that when I work over 8 hours, which on a 12 hour/day schedule works out to 325/day. Plus 12.996% fringe pay on top of everything. So, if i worked a full week there I’d make $1836 a week. Holy shit that is a lot of money. Today I worked 7.5 hours and made 200 bucks. If I had known then that I would be making 1.5x my rate for the last 4 hours maybe I would have just hauled ass instead of making an excuse and leaving. The food at lunch was amazing. Prawns, ribs, meatballs, pasta salad, caesar salad, and for desert, apple pie and ice cream.

However, despite the amazing pay I think after a couple weeks in today’s mindset I would seriously consider the dope to cope with the spiritual agony that would result. As of now I still haven’t showered. I still haven’t eaten dinner. I am hungry and I am beating it back with cigarettes. I suppose I should make dinner now. There’s a band playing at the Lamplighter tonight that I would like to see. I should go to that. It’s friday night and I have a day off tomorrow. Thank god I have a day off.