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====================================================== 
CROPDUSTER -- Issue 4
Copyright 1994 by Steven Meece and Chris Woodill
======================================================

This is the ASCII version of the zine. It contains everything you would 
receive in the real zine except for pictures and the feel of authenticity. If
you would like to receive the paper edition, send $1.10 for the United States
or 86 cents for Canada to:

Cropduster 
79 O'Hara Avenue  
Toronto, Ontario 
M6K 2R3

All other inquiries should be directed to that office as well. The editors are
also available by international e-mail at:

ad522@freenet.carleton.ca (Steven Meece) 
cwoodill@epas.utoronto.ca (Chris Woodill)

Naturally permission is granted to distribute Cropduster in any way you would
like, but please leave it as it is so that others can see our mistakes as
well. If you have a problem, don't take it out on a text file: Tell us.

===============
FIRST WORDS
by Steven Meece
===============

Being without anything better to do, we present this. Why should we bother 
with made-up stories when there are so many real ones already going on? 
Non-fiction is much more compelling, because it deals with activity instead of
verbosity. Judge people not by what they say, but by what they do... Also, 
this issue will be a historical artifact in a few years, a snippet of social
history of life in 1993-4. 

We remain:

Cropduster
79 O'Hara Avenue
Toronto, Ont
M6K 2R3


===========
SECTION 1.1
===========

I had a semi long chat with a young daughter of the proletariat in the
Unicentre today, just outside Hugo's sub shop. We spoke about LePen and the
rest of them, and she sold me a copy of the _Socialist Worker, being an
International Socialist herself. I asked her if she was with the Communist
Party (they have stuck posters all over Carleton for the October congress in
Toronto) and she gave the old no no no, they're a bunch of Stalinists, and so
forth. She is fanatical anti-fascist. 

I just might show up for their little game and get involved with them. They
are having a bus to Montreal next week in protest of the appearance of LePen.
For $15 I can get a round trip to Montreal, create a ruckus, yell my head off,
and maybe get into a little fracas with members of the right wing. It might be
something to do. Asking Laurie to come with me would be pressing it, but
Michelle would probably be enchanted with the idea. Not because she cares too
much about politics, but a bus trip with a bunch of revolutionary Communists
to raise hell would appeal to her, simply because it would be another urban
guerrilla experience, which she claims to want to experience with her
extra-New Brunswick life.

It could also get me a girlfriend. There is precious little interaction in
class, I am much too timid to make any first moves (for fear of prosecution)
and there are few other clubs that I want to join.

A girlfriend is but a transitory addition to life, like a side order of French
fries. Steak and chips. I'd like egg sausage, chips and beans, and a tea,
please. It isn't the most important thing in the history of the universe.

I don't really want any of this, not yet at least. My desire to be an adult,
hold down a full time job, have a large income and an automobile has not yet
kicked in. I'm not yet prepped up to compete with you and Carlile. I sort of
feel like being a Communist scumbag, a greasy slimy piece of shit that hangs
around pool parlours.

I wish that I was a nobody and knew no-one, perhaps living in Yugoslavia. Then
I wouldn't have to worry about anyone but myself, and wouldn't have to become
anything other than what I was. 

Either that, or farm corn back in Kentucky, where I belong with all of my lost
kinfolk. I can certainly have faith in something as pre-modern as corn. Good
solid corn, good ground, pray for rain, wait for the harvest. I could get a
fiddle and jump around the fields singing and shouting Green corn, green corn,
green corn... Imagine that: From hillbilly to cityslicker and back again in
three generations. But how do you become a farmer? How does one farm? Perhaps
not farming, but at least something real. Rather than being a watered down
university professor, I would rather be a character out of a Faulkner short
story. And I am already creepy enough to be half way there, just fake a
Southern accent, and there you go.

People are becoming adults, and taking on the negative qualities of being a
world citizen in a shitty world. To think that the Carlile who wears fancy
shoes and has a slick yuppie boyfriend once embarrassed herself with this
greaseball, and was once even pregnant with our child, a miniature
Meece-Carlile. And now she is jetting to Ireland to study something as silly
and rich as herself (Celtic studies) and now I am trying to forget the fact
that I haven't eaten since yesterday.

Laurie is kind of a dope; like the bit about war being justifiable because it
teaches marksmanship. But everyone is like that! Sometimes I don't know if
there's anyone I could ever go out with for more than a few months. In the
words of Robbt Johnson, The day that you get weak for no good womens, that's
the day that you bound to fall. Believe it, my brother.

Message #5603 "Private Mail" 
Date: 29-Oct-91 14:50 
From: Chris Woodill 
To: Wolf Meece 
Subj: Re: Sunday night blues

I would just like to have a quiet romance for the next little while. Something
that doesn't have anything to do with marriage.

I was talking to Dad about Stacey the other day, and he said something
interesting. The dialogue went something like this;

G: Danielle seems nice. 
C: I really like her a lot. 
G: Just don't get married. 
C: No, I don't think I will. I have already been almost married. 
G: [this is the important part] The only way you could have been more married
was if you actually walked down the aisle.

Funk all that, we've got to get on with these. During part of L's suppertime
visit here, she gave the old "I'm not going to let you touch me," and so on.
It was all rather pukey, and I've heard it before. Of course I know that we
weren't going to hold hands and go kissy kissy, but it seemed rude for her to
say so, kind of like "I know you worship me, keep your hands to yourself bub."
But it gave me an opportunity to think wisely for once, and ask myself why I
even like her. After all, she's made it no secret that she doesn't give a damn
about poetry, religion, philosophy, music (pretty much), politix, or even
literature at large. So why? So why should I bother? What's so hot about
Laurie, besides her sexual potential? Quite honestly...

On occasions it's hard for me to genuinely like females. It always takes so
much effort to carve off the layers of bullshit and get to the real person.
Laurie Wein is definitely not the future, that I can assure you. It was
different, because even though I know we wouldn't make a good couple, and I
firmly believe it to be true, the way she said it the other night offended me
and gave me pause. Because if we don't have the compatibility to make it as a
BFGF, why do we appear to have what it takes to make it as "just friends"? And
what is the missing item? I could not share with her any of my poetry,
religion, philosophy, music (pretty much), politix, or even literature at
large, so why is she even a friend? Why do I like her, and what do I like
about her?

Now that I seriously ponder that question, there isn't much I can say in my
defense. She's moderately intelligent, in an Advanced-level way. She knows a
little, but not a lot. The thing I like about L the most is that she's there
and there isn't really anyone other than her.

I haven't talked to her since she left, which was almost two weeks ago. I'm
sure that I will eventually, but I know that it can't be the same anymore, at
least in my head, now that she's cast the door open for me. 

I was telling L about the first BBQ meet this summer, with your peer group and
me. I said that it consisted of Robin, the opera singer, Danielle, the
actress, you the analytical philosopher, and me, the religious poet. She
replied, "Sounds like a real fun time," and then smirked.

Elgin is the neighbourhood main street and is where you go for shopping. It is
the average inner city mixed-ethnic street, like Bathurst maybe, with small
grocery stores, specialty shops, poor people places, and so on. Unlike
Toronto, they don't bring the produce out onto the sidewalk. And unlike
Parkdale, the people don't wander the streets all night. This is an urban
middle class neighbourhood, some yuppies, but also families and old people,
and for some reason, a lot of stray cats. It isn't the corrupt sinful place
that Toronto is... it is so strange to hear people speaking of Toronto as if
it is someplace far far away. Ottawa people talk about Toronto the way they
talk about Winnipeg, someplace that you visited four years ago. I told my
Marxism prof about the Canadian Tribune BBS, and he said "You mean in
Toronto?" and I thought, well of course Toronto, where else? It's weird. It's
weird to think of TO as anyplace other than home.

Ottawa is a nice place, and I can feel myself becoming one of these people. I
suppose that I'd classify myself an Ottawan now, more or less. I am still
waiting for Taco Bell to discover this untapped marketplace. Perhaps a
telephone call to RJ is in order.

I feel somewhat pleasant because I feel like this apartment is mine; not
Hammerhead's, not Moses', and not my mom's. Of course it is only rented, but
beyond that, I can do what I want with it and in it. I can jerk off at any
time, sleep whenever, eat whatever and whenever I want, play the music I want
without headphones, without Uhhhhh, can you turn that down, and I can
generally be peaceful knowing that no-one is going to barge their way into my
room and piss me off with their presence. Anything is possible as long as I
stay within the bounds of the Criminal Code of Canada, good conduct of
Carleton University, and a living allowance of about $100 per month.

I've wanted this for such a long time. I remember the times (after my sister
went away to Trent) that my mom would go away to the Inter City Papers head
office in Montreal for a few days on semi-annual conferences. Most of the
times I really relished it; making myself food, leaving my clothes in the
livingroom, faking independence for three days. One time I made a midnight run
to the Food City in that strip plaza with Little Caesars, and nearly went nuts
with the pleasure of buying koolaid and pecan pies and Dr Pepper.

The rooming house contains an odd and opposite mix; mostly males, mostly
self-contained guys. Many of the people here remind me of an exchange student
from Turkey, a male Nergis. There is one guy down the hall who works on a road
gang; every day he leaves his work boots outside his door and they are caked
in chunks of pavement. There is a guy one floor down who appears to be an
Indian playboy. I live on the top floor, facing the street, by far the best
room in the complex, as well as the most expensive. I live in a turret with
two windows. I have my own little section of hallway, and a fire escape that
goes from my window to the ground. I used to sit out there (on my makeshift
balcony) and write at night, but now it is becoming a little too cold for
that. The rent is $420.

Across the street, at 188 Waverley, there is a higher-class apartment house.
All the people there look like Ottawa U students. (This is to say people like
Laura Pattison, Jennifer McColl, Matt Fenwick and so on. Carleton students
look like Brenno, Barnsie, me, and Steve Adsmundson). The interesting part
about that place was that they took a dead body out of it about two weeks ago.
Did I mention this? Yes. An unmarked van driven by two guys in business suits
pulled up, they took a gurney out of the back and went inside. Ten minutes
later they emerged with a body bag with lumps the shape of a human figure.
Three days later posted on the front door there was the sign Apartment for
Rent.

So that is my basic contemporary story; frying eggs, taking out the garbage,
riding my bike. It's quite good overall, although I know that it isn't making 
me "respectful" or "successful" and unlike you and Carlile, I'm not pumping 
fresh life into my resume or curriculum vitae. But I don't care too much about
those things anymore, I am busy working on the condition of my brain. I know 
you think that I am at a rock-bottom and have become a rat in a cage, but I 
believe that I've never really felt better about things for an extended amount
of time not based on having a really neat girlfriend. I don't feel gummy or 
stupid anymore. I feel like I'm doing things on my own, and no longer trapped 
in a juvenile rut. Of course, all humanity is trapped in a rut, but I feel good
inasmuch as the things that I can control are all proceeding fairly well. I 
could use a girlfriend, but that's not deathly necessary. As Furry Lewis once
said, "You didn't bring nothing in with you, and you aint gonna take nothing 
out with you either," and as John Mellencamp said, "an honest man's pillow is 
his peace of mind." So if a sound and untroubled sleep is the greatest thing 
that we can aspire to, I am successful in at least that area.

===========
SECTION 1.2
===========

Things here are fairly sedate, with a bunch of different things contributing
to a rat-race type of environment. I think that I am finally getting
wrinkles, and am starting to feel physically old. My eyes are getting baggy,
and I have less time for entertainment. I don't see D as much as I would
during the summer: perhaps this is the year where I might actually have to
work in school (I remember being told in grade five, as we all were, that this
year I would have to do more than just smile). 

I saw Danesi's daughter Daniella today. I had first told you about her in
first year, as she sat in the front of our intro semiotics class with prissy
hair and Benetton sweaters and Gucci shoes. Between then and now she got
married (I knew about this marriage in first year), and this summer she
supposedly had a miscarriage (Danesi told me this for no particular reason). 
The point is, when I saw her today, she had lost that innocence, that
prissiness that she had in first year. She looked real, rugged, and worn. It
was if she had finally been hardened. It was spooky, as I was thinking of the
people we idealize from the Hoodlands, ie. Fiona, Stacey, Krista, etc., and I
think to myself, "What has happened to Fiona in three years?" Neither of us
have had real contact with her. Is she as worn as Daniella, has the idealism
been sapped out of her in the same way? I think that Mandy has become like
Stacey, with practical problems like finding a job and a house and a boyfriend
(or girlfriend as the case may be), and she probably now has yeast infections
and haemorrhoids. This happens to everyone: even a house where swear words
are not allowed cannot protect one from the onslaught of maturity/old age. 

Is this why I still get labeled as 14? Do I still look that goofy? Do I
still look like I am cumming in my pants over _Playboy?

"What kind of bra do I wear? About as comfortable and economical as I can
get. Daisy Fresh...Sometimes I forget to even take it off...What kind of bra
do you wear?" 

Danielle is like Janis Jackson: Really rumpled and loud and obnoxious, but
with some life and a weird sense of class.

There is this girl in my semiotics class that is a total babe, to the point of
ridiculousness. She is like a super-model; a babe not in the natural way, but
in the artificial sense. Her name is Elessandra; this should say all. She
has the posture of someone out on the town, even when she is doing something
like turn the lights off when we are watching a film. She would be a whore if
she looked dingier, but because she wears Italian clothes and has good hair
she is a babe. 

What is the difference between a babe and whore? Nothing but clothes and
shampoo.

That is why one gets angry when you expose babes: All you find is a whore
underneath. All you find is nakedness. There is nothing to hide their
ordinariness. What one should do is not to create babeness: woman should not
be put on pedestals. It's degrading to both women but to men. All that occurs 
is that there is a larger fall, and so one is even more a whore than if she
were just plain. Plain people are better, because they stay that way under all
circumstances. That is real beauty, when someone still is beautiful when they
are sitting around the house in pajamas; when they aren't trying.

Danielle is like that: Stacey was definitely not. Stacey would think that
when she put on clothes, she would be putting on a new body, something that
would be acceptable to the public. Then she would go home and expose herself,
and accept the fact that she was fat and over-sexed. 

It is people like Fiona and Karen, who are generally insecure about their
outside appearance, who keep the fashion industry going. It is people who
need party clothes AND home clothes that make the fashion industry a billion
dollar industry. As for me, I buy about $100.00 worth of clothes a year,
usually in the form of jeans, socks, and shoes. You do the same thing: the
only things you buy are essentials. 

The world economy can't survive on essentials. If we all made just what we
needed, North American domination over the world would fall. The domination
over the world by the US and now in part, Japan, depends on us buying and
demanding more than we really need.

I think that things are somewhat different now in that I am finally beginning
to be able to live the fiction of being well kept: ie. not spoiled, but with
enough that one feels comfortably full. I am generally not emotionally,
psychologically, or materially hungry anymore. Or at least, that hunger is
lessened. It seems this is good for me and for the people around me, although
there is that pull back to your roots, no matter how shitty you are. It's like
in those movies where some black dude moves from the ghetto and goes to lala
land, and becomes criticized because he doesn't like the ghetto anymore. It's
the same problem we have in revising and changing our view on the whole
Woodlands thang: we don't want to feel like we have been disloyal. In fact,
all we are doing is changing our current view of what are now memories,
traditions, and old tales. Carlile, for all intents and purposes, is dead. 

That is an inherent problem with _Cropduster. It is a tool used by us to
resurrect the dead. However, all that will ever happen is a feeble response
from zombies: Stacey calling and yelling her mouth off, Fiona sending a bland
letter, etc. This is the question that we have to mull over with it, which
justifies or not the whole production and sending out of _Cropduster: Do people
like Stacey and Fiona think us regretfully dead in the same way that we do? 
If they do, then _Cropduster becomes something that will send them a message
of, "I haven't forgotten. Preserve the memories. Stay true to the Rag bag,
or whatever it was." However, if the people who we have sent it to are not
mournful, then what happens is just a re-killing. Stacey is a perfect example
of this: she gets angry because what she thinks she killed, ie. a different
view of the world that puts her in the negative, rears its ugly head. Of
course the response is aggression, for the purpose of something like Stacey's
phone call is to destroy that what has come against her. 

And perhaps we are doing the same thing ourselves with _Cropduster: killing
any protest and firming our own ideology surrounding the whole situation. In
other words, perhaps _Cropduster is like Stacey diary, a place for us to put
down on paper and thus solidify our position. 

Is _Cropduster inherently aggressive, war-like, fascist, or is it welcoming,
accommodating, friendly? I would think the former. The question is do we
care? And if we do, what should we do about it?

You sound like a battered wife, except there is no one beating you up except
your own memories.

Now I am not accusing you of anything, so lets not get into tirades of
accusations. I am not saying that I am any better either. But I do it
differently: I tend to wallow in my ideals and optimism while everything
around me crashes to pieces. Whichever way we do it, we are doing the same
thing: we are throwing away responsibility for our situation. Carlile does
it, so does Stacey (especially her), and so does Fiona. 

I think the reason why _Cropduster is so powerful is because of its accusatory
tone, because it accuses everyone we have met of being destructive assholes. 
I don't think the people at Bencard would be able to do that to anyone. That
is why we are different, not because we are more intelligent (look at Lloyd's
waste of a brain), but because we are still angry and caring and emotional and
fighting. We still are fighting, we are still trying to find something other
than the compromise of steak knives and government jobs.

People have sold out for the most part. I look at the professors around me, I
see them doing good work in bits, but only by compromising their entire
philosophy. In other words, for every new element that Prof. Smith creates in
his laboratory, he has to put up with the creation of three or four new bombs,
a new way to melt tires, and so on. This is true in the humanities as well:
for every piece on philosophy there are thousands of expositions of Hegel or
Marx or some other canon figure. I think the PhD thesis is the start of that
road, if not being started during undergrad or even before. The thesis is
your ticket in, your first compromise in an effort to become a part of
academic culture. It is bogus to think that people are doing independent,
radical work. It is as if a good business man could be an environmentalist. 
Its just contradictory. 

Academics, more than anybody, have been bought by manufacture of consent,
meaning they have bought into a manufactured radicalism, a sense of freedom
that doesn't really exist, a sense of individuality that is only permitted
through toeing the party line. I am not saying that others do not suffer from
this as well, but it is intelligent people who need the largest dose of it in
order to be swindled. How much freedom you have to promise to the average
man? The freedom to watch commercials, the freedom to go to football games,
the freedom to be a cog in someone else's wheel.

D and I are supposed to meet up on Thursday night, for a midnight rendez-vous
thing. I do not know if I will enjoy it: I do not know the criteria for
enjoyment anymore. I can't just speculate on how much sex I am going to get
and then say, well that qualifies as a good session (ugh, what an awful word).
We don't have sessions, or at least we should not. Do you know the feeling
that one gets where if each minute is not the ideal fantasy of BFGF life, then
one feels like one has failed somehow. Its as if we are not running at peak
efficiency. But of course I realize that efficiency is not the goal, nor is
finishing on time. Stacey and I were totally finished: she could give me an
orgasm and leave in about 15 minutes. I'm always pushing, she says, always
with a plan. I'm constantly planning, always calculating. 

I know you don't really care, but it is semi-important. I know the reason you
don't care, and in some ways I feel the same way: we've both heard it all
before. I have heard that whole, "Oh, let's just cuddle and be romantic"
before. Beware of anyone promising romance, because most people could never
interpret you well enough to be able to be your romantic ideal. 

Things don't make sense anymore. Things are not black and white, with good
guys and bad guys. There are no more enemies, nothing to propel you forward
except your own inertia, which over the years starts to diminish. Carlile has
a boyfriend that she seems at least semi-happy with, and actually seems like a
nice guy in the typical university intellectual way. I have met guys like
him: boring and smart, artistic and bourgeois. Another safety net in the
history of safe boyfriends.

Its about control, control of one's destiny, control over one's family, over
one's girlfriend/boyfriend. It is about the power to dictate what your life
may be, to be free to choose. That is what control is all about - to not be
accountable to anyone except for oneself. But I'm beginning to realize that
one cannot find control through confrontation, through stature, through raw
power. One must yield to oneself, or one will just become chained to an
asshole mentality. The only way to freedom is to openness, to be subversive. 
One can't destroy the system, rather, one must leave as it is in an effort to
use it to your advantage. That is what university is all about, using the
stature of the PhD to get someone else to listen to your bullshit. The same
goes for psychology, therapy, day-care, teaching, government, etc. It is a
way for people to use the system to put forward their own agenda. "And they all
get put in boxes, and they all come out the same..."

I don't know why, but I think that Pete Seeger is the purest music form. I
really like that whole style of one guy one guitar, just singing to the masses
in communion with them, having them singing along. I think that all those
guys, ie. Woody, Leadbelly, etc., were like that. Actually, that reminds me of
Barry Stilwell, who is, I suppose a modern Leadbelly in that he gets into
bar-room brawls while singing songs for the masses. He has a large scar
across his chest because of some knife fight that he got into, and his alcohol
problems are well known to everyone. He has been falling off the wagon
recently, much to the stress of everyone, including me. I don't mind parents,
but with Danielle's you have to be wary of them, for they are quite invasive. 
They do not have the sense of privacy that you are I might have: I think this
has to be from being performers and living in an apartment. The idea of
knocking on someone's bedroom door is very silly when you can hear all that is
going through the paper thin walls. 

There was this women on the bus who screamed out for no particular reason,
"Men in this country are god damn fucking assholes!" I guess she was having a
rough day. She didn't look particularly crazy, and she didn't open her mouth
after that (usually the crazy ones keep babbling all the way to the subway). 

I met up with Rupi today, who now has a beard.

Things are getting more and more stressful. My computer keeps breaking down
(Oh, how I love MS DOS), with conflicts all over the place. I have barely
enough energy to learn anything, and Dad keeps yammering on about "school
should be your first priority". It's a shitty day of a shitty week, and right
now I hate life.

I had another weird dream again, about some female in a wheelchair who was
kept in an institution, until she finally gets away at the end. I do not know
what this is all about, but perhaps it is me trying to escape the institution
of Gary and Karen. In the end the female (I don't know who it was, but the
dream was in first person so I guess it was me) is sick and has to wear a
shawl and stay in her wheelchair, but at least she is free to go where she
wants. 

I miss Danielle, and her father is home. She wants to shoot him. She has as
much rage against her father as Fiona had against the baseball bat guy or
Rachel had against the Digger. Or I suppose, as much as I have against my own
mother. The guy is just such a fuck-up, and a pitiful fuck-up at that. He is
not arrogant like Lloyd; rather, he is more like Martin, pitiful and lame. 

Daddy to the rescue: he supposedly got the computer up and running. 

False alarm: the scanner is still fucked up. 

This girl I am telling you about in my Italian class is more and more like JM
everyday. It is as if she walked into my class and sat down. She even has
many of the same physical attributes: big red hair, fattish figure and freckly
face. There is a lot of this at this institution, a lot of people trying to
"find themselves".

This university has a lot of money. I have noticed that in the cafeteria they
have put in a high definition big screen TV set, so that the catholics can
watch MuchMusic while they eat.

I am committing grievous sins. Not only am I having feasts with D during the
week, but I usually end up sleeping in, and thus, missing Italian the next
morning. I have been missing Tuesday classes because of my sexual exploits,
which I admit is not good. It's not as bad as it used to be: this is not so
much Stacey and I skipping to go fuck during the day, but not going to bed
until 1:30 and so not wanting to get up the next day. I usually do not want
to get up anyway, and sometimes I don't get up on Tuesday without any cause of
Danielle being there. 

I wrote that letter to Carlile. I do not know whether I will send it. I would
love to have her confidence again. That Peter guy is a total knob, a perfect 
Eaton Centre shopper. It would be pleasing to hear that Carlile still deep
down hated her boyfriend, and really just wanted to go home and masturbate.

I have lunch today with Karen Rothfels, if she remembers to show up. We
arranged to have lunch at Ned's a couple weeks ago, and she never showed, but
she said she would for this one. I am not holding my breath. Why do people
do this? Is it just bad manners, or genuine not caring? I am getting sick of
it, although now I do not brood about it anymore. I do not get angry or
anything: I just trust them less, and do not depend on them for anything.

I stand by my statement that you should consider Michelle. She is definitely
a babe in the woods, and she would take you up on many offers. I think the
problem is that you would have a lot of control, so you would have to control
yourself. Is this your problem? Can you handle it? If you can avoid being
a fuckup, then what is the big deal? You seem to think that your being a
tyrant is something that comes over you, like lust. It is to a certain
extent, but in some ways both of us are responsible. Because if we were not,
then we would be no better than Matt Fenwick. Are you saying that we are no
better? Perhaps that is true, but at least with people like Danielle and
Michelle we might be able to be honest about it. I think the problem for you
is not one of losing control and jumping on someone and making it stupid, but
rather, of being able to be honest about your asshole tendencies and make your
partner understand the problems. The problem is always one of communication,
and mutual intelligence. Are you afraid that she won't be ready for you
coming out and saying, "I'm sorry but I really want a blowjob right now and I
know you do not want to give me one, so I feel like an asshole..."? 

"Rock and Roll!!"

I do not think that you should try overly hard to find this tiresome hag that
you can conquer and make into a jewel. Sometimes you are allowed to have
something you're not supposed to. Sometimes you should go after the beach
blonde bomber, or the chick that is easy, or someone you would enjoy eating. 
Sometimes that is OK, and it seems that you have made yourself a whipping post
for the faults of your grade eleven past. You need to get rid of Fiona. You
need something new, something you can get excited about. You are wallowing
around on this issue, which although may only be a fraction of your potential
existence, comprises a lot of mental, emotional and sexual ego. 

Perhaps you are thinking that I am standing on this father figure pedestal,
giving you advice. At least I am not slipping you condoms. I do not mean to
be, although sometimes I know you like the benefits of having the father
figure, or playing the long lost son role. You need people you can count on,
that you can play with. Perhaps you are taking this Michelle thing too
seriously, or not seriously enough. Perhaps you should play in her sandbox,
and do nice things, and visit museums, and ride the bus, and listen to Deep
Breakfast, and kiss.


===========
SECTION 2.1
===========

More old tymes. The train trip to/from Ottawa is always a melancholy one,
since the route putters through the hometowns of three of my old flames: Cats
in Smith's Falls, Kristi in Kingston, and Kucman in Port Hopeless.

The most feeling one is Smiths Falls, because I know that in all likelihood,
Cats is still out in that town somewhere. 

Barring some unforeseen development, we will both have anthropology GFs in the
near future. It looks like it is going to happen, partially because she is
progressing forward too, giving out revelations, inviting me for dinner,
leaving messages on my machine. L never did any of that. I think it is going
to work. I hope it is going to work. It would be good, provided that it stays
at the proper level. It can't be overwhelming. This isn't to say that I don't
want anything to do with her, rather that if it gets too strong in a BFGF way,
she is liable to go overboard as I said before and send me flowers and talk
about "love" and whatever. I am sick to chit of this romance crap as
practiced by L, Stacey, and Brandie and want nothing to do with it. I don't
want to be revered and put on a pedestal for six months only to be dumped like
trash during the seventh. I would rather just receive respect now and forever.

We had a really good post-coital philosophical talk. Actually, I did almost
all of the talking. I cut up L and Brandie and Stacey for their belief in the
Bev Hills 902 style ultimate infallibility of their BFs. "I've met the coolest
guy... he's funny, smart, cute, sweet, sensitive..." and so on. If you think
you've found the perfect guy, you are deluded, because the last perfect guy
was a virgin who died on the cross. Sooner or later you will realise that he
isn't perfect, and can your relationship handle that piece of information? Of
course not. People like Stacey and L and Brandie declare that the search is
over three times each year. And then when they break up and end up hating each
other, they are completely confused... "I don't know what happened, all of the
sudden he wasn't the same Chris that I used to know..." and so on.

This came to mind when I was at their house the other week, and L was getting
all gussied up to go out on a "date" with a guy named Stacy. The guy showed
up wearing hiking boots, and I just had to shake my head and say "Oh man..."
They went out to see a film at the Bytowne - because he is appreciative of the
arts, you see. Not only this, but he is Mr Sensitive and Mr Caring-Concern. He
might have volunteered to mow her lawn or do the dishes. "He took out the
trash for me - he's such a nice guy!" Wake up! I was giving the guy the
eye, and he knew that I knew his number. He looked at me with dewy eyes hoping
that I wouldn't expose him. The movies and chivalry is an act of course. He
wants to funk her and stuff his prick in her mouth, but if he said that he'd
get the boot. What could cause these changes? Why can their "love" be changed
to "hate" so easily? Because their love was never honest in the first place.

Last Christmas the Military Man got out of bed at 5:30am to chauffeur L to the
airport for her flight back to Edmonton. This was before they were actually
going out. This summer he didn't even care enough about her to not go after
another chick while L was out of the time zone. Same Military Man both times,
just with different priorities. "He isn't the guy I used to know..." because
what you knew was a fake personality used to seduce you. Look at all the
marriages where the chick gets the crap kicked out of her - notice that he
waited until after she said yes to show his true self and give her a bust in
the chops. 

"Hi, my name's John. I'm five foot seven, and I like going to the movies,
talking, walking through High Park in the autumn, cats, and cleaning the
house. My box number is..."

"Hey you fucking fat ass..." 

I've told M that I am a sleazeball and a skummbag, so that she doesn't get 
shocked when she discovers that on her own. I've already used the word snatch 
in her presence. I am immoral, manipulative, horny as a toad, stingy, and a 
jackoff, a real jackoff. I'd want her to know that now.

As predicted, they are razzing her, and were silent/ignoring of me when I was
over there. They want to keep her in just the right pigeonhole, that of a cute
unassuming rural Christian girl from New Brunswick; i.e. what she was
September 1 1992. She has changed and grown up since then, but they're not
interested in hearing about that. So they crack double-entendre quasi-sex
jokes in order to humourously and subtly shame her into stopping doing what
she's doing. Michelle must be held back so that she does not challenge L's
position as dominant bitch of 1410 Kilburn. One of L's badges for her
dominance was her ability to have me dance attendance for her pleasure. So
while she had no intention of ever having sex with me, she, like Stacey, threw
out little alluring hints every little while in order to keep me at her front
door. 

She says that I am the only person who is "inside" of her in Ottawa, which is
to say, I-You. In her life there is me and a few old Brunswickers. It is
strange, but L and Lynn (the third roommate) are still Its. We spent some time
up in her room, and then went out for a midnight run for Pizza Pizza
(737-1111). It was chummy but not dopey, close but not clingy, intimate and
serious but not grilling or psychoanalytic. At the end of the evening at her
back door it was unknown whether we were going to kiss. We did, just a little
tongue, and I fiddled with her hair and neck a little bit.

Would masturbating to a GIF file be considered teledildonics?

The most amazing part of all of this is that I am just pretty pleased to be
here and to have all of this. Last night there was a sort of parinirvana as I
lay in bed in my pajamas, looking at the shadows of light cast on the ceiling,
listening to the rain pour off my turret and Len Cohen at a low volume. It is
very good that I can be this happy on $40 per week plus rent plus tuition.
This means that I only need an income of $7420 per year to be happy. I don't
specifically need to goto school.

But rent and tuition don't count as I never see it, touch it, and can do
nothing about it. In terms of what goes through my hands, it is $40 per week,
or $2080 per year. I wonder how people like Kenneth Augustus Barnes live -
what would you do with $190,000 per year? There aren't enough hours in the day
to spend that amount of cash, and so obviously they are wasting it on
frivolous things. In an old National Film Board documentary it was revealed
that I am currently living on 1/3rd of what a single male was rationed during
the war.

This means that all of this religion crap has really started to do some good
with me. Because I can be content with an annual income of $1500, at least for
now. I really am a single male, a bachelor in a bachelor apartment. I feel
like Kafka. I feel like a Communist. I am dirt poor! But I like it. I have
learned to make do without respect, honour, status, cable tv, Home Theatre, a
car, a job, CDs, grasp files, 69's, chiltoes, turkey subs, FTP, diet Coke, bus
rides, movies, 50c pinball, fancy food and meat of any kind, all while wearing
the same clothes since I was 14. Therefore I emerge with little money and a
lot of free time. I can take walks through the park, read, stay up as late as
I want every night, write letters all day, listen to _Spinal Tap. You can
either work the touchtones all day and spend a lot of cash, or philosophise
and sleep all day and use a little. I choose the latter.

Sometimes I think that the purpose of university is to turn everyone into
Pierre Berton. He is a liberal and is able to choke out a newspaper column on
every political / historical subject imaginable. He seems like an ideal
philosophy student. 

I think that if you want to reach people, you should do it in highschool, in
grade ten and eleven, where people are changing and open to new ideas. If you
teach U it will be feeding Hegelian TV dinners to a bunch of Chris Englers.

I don't follow in this great fascination with cybercrud that you do. It's
interesting, but it's just a game to me. It's just a diversion, just
something to do. I don't swallow the whole lifestyle element.

If you have the September issue of Toronto Computes, you'll see on page nine
the tale of Frank Lemiere, an old Apple II buddy of mine that I befriended in
the summer of 1988 and pirated with. He lives in the Beaches, and I spent a
couple of days that summer in has basement engrossed in duping _California
Games. He was arrested up for phone phreaking and playing around with long
distance trunks. 

I have known the computer underworld.

Reading your letter was very interesting. You're still the same in a lot of
ways. I get this picture of you as someone with a great fondness for the
things that you respect. You really look up to people / things / lifestyles /
ideals / careers. It's funny the way that you can jump right into the Internet
and FTP and Quicktime, because it represents a bit of something you admire and
if you can get into that, you can get into the real thing. That makes you a
little more closer to the faraway goal. I remember that you did the same thing
around the perimetre of Stacey.

The bit you wrote in _Cropduster #2 about sitting in the basement reading
sexuality textbooks or going to the mall to play Asteroids: It was the story
of a guy without much internal drive waiting to find something good to get
into. It's like you can't trust yourself on your own, and you need something
else to hold up to Whomever as a badge of proof of your worth. When you had
your first dollop with the tongues with Natalie you had found something to get
into and to express yourself through; GFs and peer groups. When that exploded
you were adrift for awhile, but after you moved to Parkdale and had your first
dinner with Gary and his colleagues, it happened again.

Some of the things are the same, and you're still writing to reassure that
you're a valuable part of an honourable whole. Danesi, Quadras, $200 teaching
jobs, multimedia contracts, conferences in Boston; the Four Seasons, regular
stroking of your lovely penis at 15, the King of Sex, sleepovers, "the search
is over", walks by the Credit, beating out me and Pete and the Treats guy.
They both mean the same thing: I have succeeded and come out on top. I am a
real person with valuable accomplishments and have worth. I can identify
myself with this group. This group and myself stand for the same things and we
can win together. That is why you were so frantic about losing Stacey to me,
because you wouldn't just lose a GF's blowjobbing and dates on movies, you
would lose a big part of the definition of you, and you wouldn't really know
what to strive for anymore. 

I remember one fad you went through a couple of years ago where every five
minutes you had to bring up the "two quo que argument," and how whatever we
were talking about at the time was a perfect example of it.

You wrote it yourself: "It is a million dollar industry, and the people who
are in the forefront started out in the same fashion that we are." The Million
Dollar Man in waiting. D is right when she says that you are always planning
and calculating.

I also think that you might have a homosexual Oedipus complex. The amount of
not-very veiled admiration for "Dad" is unusually high. You're supposed to
want to coozle up to mama and sneer at your dad, but you have it the other way
around.

It would be good if you went back to Newfoundland, because perhaps then you
would become more authentic and regionalised and less Gary-ish. Maybe you
would realise that it is a hamster wheel to try to set the world on fire
(because the world doesn't care) and that it is better to do things like play
the fiddle and love your children, something Gary hasn't cared about in a long
time and Karen never did. All you Newfies are the same though, you sell out
the Rock and come to Toronto and laugh at the savages.

Re: The Tiresome Hag thing. It isn't just whipping post and self-imposed
torture. It is mixed in with both my esteem and my altruism. First, because it
is easier to pick up a chick that other people have left behind. There is
simply less competition, and when you do capture her, you are more assured
that she will value you, and you do not have to beat back your opponents. Case 
in point, Julia: We were walking around Quincy Square in Boston and she picked 
up a guy right under my nose. We're walking along, and then she seems some hunky
character, goes up to him, and gives her phone number. I just stood there and
said "oh dear."

Sex is better that it is less important. It used to be so amazing, such a
great Pit deal. Now it is calmer and better. When M took her clothes off I
knew exactly what was under there. It didn't surprise me, and so I could do
better things. I could fuck or not fuck, I wasn't a wild panther loose. And I
believe that to be good.

===========
SECTION 2.2
===========

Things are fairly decent, relatively OK, moderately neeto. Danielle and I
are fine, as always, although events are fairly stressed at the moment. 
School is much less important this year, what with everything else going on. 
But at least it is becoming more interesting, and the courses are more my
choice. I saw Karen the other day, joined by her sister Claire, who I used to
know from Telepersonals. She is now pregnant, which surprised me as I always
assume that she was at least casually Lesbian. I think that she is one of
these real marginal people who drift from all categories, which is both good
and bad. The thing is that I can respect her, because it is obvious that she
really does live on the other side of the tracks, and doesn't just wear the
odd nose ring and John Lennon glasses. She is a real orphan, in the same way
that Jenny Harrison was a real orphan. They are both scuzzy, but you can
admire them, at least from a distance. 

If you can get to it there in Ottawa, go see _Like Water For Chocolate. It is
an extremely good movie, and would be a great movie to take Michelle. They
really get the mother figure right on, and when you see her, she really
reminds you of Marcia, with that, "I'll have you charged" type of gaze. 

The urge to write Carlile has diminished somewhat, and everytime I think about
it I get tired, not depressed or wistful. There is nothing more to write, no
more urge to connect with her. I guess it was just a passing phase, a little
dip in one's stability. It will probably come again, as it always does, but
it is nothing to be overly concerned about. It seems that my loyalty to my
present situation is clear: there appears to be little that is encouraging me
to open that box. This is true for the whole Woodlands stuff in general: I
have not looked at my letters in almost a year - they are finally becoming
history. 

I picked up your Winona Ryder gifs, and they are pretty shitty. There is
little to get a boner about. As well, G+K were inquiring about pornography on
the Internet, so I showed them my grasp files and we downloaded a GIF file for
them to peruse. They appear to have no idea about underground computer
culture at all: they are so used to things like Bitnet and lists that they do
not realize that the largest population of computer users are 13-19 year old
males. 

There is some guy in Karen's grad class who wants to do his PhD on S&M. He
wants to, get this, do participatory research. This is the same guy who did
his masters thesis on beastiality. 

I bought a chromatic harmonica today, at a pawn shop for 30 dollars. It's very
nice, and because it is chromatic I can play the black notes as well as the
white ones. This means that I can actually play anything, not just blow
in/blow out type harmonica chords.

I have come to the conclusion that I really hate my Italian classmates. They
are such highschool scabs, such keeners. The males remind me of John Jaques
and Brad Simms, and the girls of JM. Its terrifically horrible, and I end up
looking like this depressed unconscious idiot in the back of the classroom
because I am not high on life.

Things are not the same as they were, they are falling back into nihilistic
tendencies. There are few people who are not clambering for more power. We
were talking about this in M&E today, about how the Nazis would offer pure
power to the citizenry. This is the same here in many ways, especially in the
US. They promise labour power, and they promise Christians power, and they
promise the upper classes more power. This society is going to pot, and the
only thing that can be done about it is to either jump on the bandwagon or
subvert it. 

You cannot fight power with power; you cannot stop war by going to war. 
Ghandi was right.

I'm very sick of people who are in arts, especially in art history/criticism
and film theory. These people are literal dummies. They have no presence, no
form. They talk and talk, and us philosophers have to this garbage. It's not
that they are wrong or anything like that, they just don't say anything. For
example, we are doing this work on frame and boundaries in art, which is
interesting, but they spend about five minutes on conceptual work, and then they
spend 30-40 minutes telling stories, discussing examples, reading into art
works. Danielle gets even a worse case because she thinks she is missing
something. She believes that there is more there than the minimal thesis which
is produced. These people are so conceptually behind in terms of their
thinking skills. What's scary is that we are doing some extremely difficult
material, works that really demand a philosophical background of some sort, or
at least the ability to conceptualize and be theoretical. 

I had to watch Goddard's _Hail Mary on Friday. I started at three and I was to
meet Danielle at 4:45, so I asked the guy how long the movie was, and he
replied that it was 90 minutes in duration. This suited me fine: I figured I
could watch the film, rush down to King station, and pick up D. But such
turned out not to be the case. The film lasted over two hours, which made me
late. I was livid, not just because I was late (you know how angry I get
about that in itself), but also because the guy had given me a raw deal, and
because the movie was deadly boring. I was sitting through this movie saying
to myself, "I should just get up and leave in protest" but it took me two
hours to get up the nerve to do. I was trapped in a Goddard film for two
hours, making me late, because of my own insecurity. I was screaming when I
got out of there (at the two hour mark, I actually did walk out). The movie
itself was everything that I hate about film: slow-moving, inefficient and
unentertaining. I am so sick of these films based on scenic and photographic
tricks, which get tired when repeated over and over. I had to sit through
cuts between conversation and nature shots. As I was telling Danielle, I much
prefer art in that I can judge the value of the piece in about 15-20 seconds,
where because of the nature of the film being diachronic (across time), you
have to wait until the end to judge. Its like listening to someone who
stutters - you want to finish their sentences for them in order to speed up
the process.

Danielle is on her period. I have something very problematic with periods,
and it has become worse in recent years. I just feel really queasy about the
whole thing, and I look at her differently everything 28 days. It's weird,
because it's so Freudian, in the sense of people's problems with basic
function taboos. I do not know where this thing comes from, but it's there. 

I had a very interesting argument with this guy George in my M&E class today. 
We started out talking about atheism, and how he hates softish atheists who are
really semi-theological. I countered by saying that Christians were the same
way, and we got into a beautiful row about whether or not atheists were any
worse that Christians in terms of their ethical consistency. I was out to
prove that Christians are just as stupid as atheists, if not more so. It
ended up going for about two hours as the class was canceled, which was
refreshing. I really like these types of arguments, where you just test your
metal about something that is important and yet distant enough not to cause
inner crisis.

I talked to Rupinder today. He is busy taking uppers again, so that he
doesn't kill somebody (probably his father). He is a science student, which
means that he actually has to go to school and he has to be tested and
evaluated all the time, which for his condition is not good at all. I do not
know too much about it, but it seems pretty crazy. I think he is going to be
like my Dad or my Mom, a therapist who in the closet is drawing vaginas with
guns in them or penises flying through the air or something. Both my parents
are like that, and me too I suppose. Psychology is the last defense for nuts. 
It is a way to shed the problems of others while forgetting about one's own.

Carlile is going down the tubes. I was right all along it seems. She is not
as she appears, with her corporate exterior. Supposedly she is become a
lonely recluse, who sits in her room all day and doesn't talk to anybody. I
think that girl is steaming, and I think she is running away from it. You
know I think that if she actually had stayed in the Others she would have
stabbed us all. She is like that - dangerously depressed.

I remember that in grade nine she said that she was never happy, just somewhere
in the middle, kind of numb. Comfortably numb, I suppose, although that phrase
was not used at the time.

===========
SECTION 3.1
===========

It's hard to believe that people were once persecuted, jailed, exiled, killed
for philosophy. This was once on the outside of society, but now it is
society, as my prof in this class is 50ish, balding with a beard, has an
expensive watch and runs Windows on a 486. Nietzsche he aint. His successor
(the TA) cracks really unfunny jokes and names his dog after a Star Trek
character.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, analyze. There is too much explaining and
not enough doing in the world, too much hot air verbiage. Like I said about
the "round table of experts," they have on TV panel news shows: They will
analyze the information for you, as you are too dim to do it yourself, and
give you an opinion that you can take to the lunch table or water cooler the
next day. Why should I value someone else's opinion more than my own? Is it
because I'm not supposed to do anything but parrot them? I honestly do not see
the need for literary criticism or even analysis. Why bother? What would
really be the point in dissecting Abbey Road for neo-Marxist sentiments? It is
only done because the critics cannot produce art and would like to be paid
anyway. Those that can, do. You can analyze something like biology, but not
art.

People used to get drawn and quartered for possessing a copy of something by
Voltaire. Now, the establishment that once forbade it propagates it. The only
difference between then and now is that the establishmentarians all scream
that they are different, that they are not the same. Just let it go. "And
remember, a Jedi feels the Force flowing throughout him..." 

M and L went to a Lightfoot gig the other day. When they got out, L was full
of idol worship, and said that Mr. Foot was a God, and asked M is she thought
so too. M said that she thought not. Then L went nuts and told M she was
closed-minded, just because she didn't believe that Lightfoot was a divinity.

Two points to be made here:

a) Laurie gets her power from turning her opponents into straw men and making
her argument seem to be a truism. Who can argue in favour of closemindedness,
racism, sexism and so forth? Even the Reformers do not.

b) L's idol worship is pretty sad, and so are the people that idolise anyone.
The New Kids concerts were pretty pitiful, as well as the people still going
nuts over Jimbo Morrison 20 years after his death. People only worship idols
because they are too scared to become one themselves. Look at all Christians
and tell me if one of them has a pulse.

I have no faith in this society as being a particularly good place to spend
any amount of time in. I was watching Coronation St yesterday, and even this
working class scene seemed out of my league, too rich for my blood. That's all
I want to be, perhaps, a bloated Englishman digging in the garden outside of
my council flat, and then going in for tea and ginger snaps, Cornish pasty,
middle rashers and treacle & jam buddies served on a Ry-Krisp crackbread! Good
God! It is very distressing, trying to put together a life out here in the
colonies. I don't think that's an exorbitant thing to ask for, but it seems
out of my reach. The sex shop never called me back, and I was underqualified
to work at the cookie stand. Not much else left!

My Uncle Errol dropped out of highschool for a year and a half because he had
a job working fulltime at Canadian Pacific. Imagine that: Having your choice
of grade twelve, or $15,000 per year, which was a big sum in 1971. Back then
anyone could get that kind of job without even a highschool diploma, all they
had to do was work for it. Those days are long long gone. The simple
well-paying unionized blue-collar job is a relic of the past. I think that
perhaps the union has priced itself out of the country, or the capitalists
have realised that there are Malaysians that will work for peanuts. All the 
savings get passed onto the CEOs.

I think that your work ethic based on condemnation is from this era of
industrial relations. Back then there were jobs for the taking, and anyone who
wanted to work could work. The jobs were so plentiful that my Uncle Errol
dropped out of grade eleven and started hauling in the cash. Not because Glenn
got him the job, but because there was work out there for those that wanted
it, and he did. Back then only the eight year olds had to sell steak knives
and chocolate bars door to door, or lead ponies around by a chain at the CNE.
Yes, in that environment I too would condemn people who didn't have work,
because there was no excuse for it. But now I think the conditions are a
little different, and you should be a touch easier on me and the Newfies,
because it isn't our fault that our hands are idle. I suppose that I too would
be a gung-ho work ethic proponent if I was getting paid $12 per hour to work
at a record shop, or at the Leadbelly Museum, or anyplace in Russell Springs
Kentucky, or whatever. Take a look at my brother - $10.15 an hour to work for
the city of North York as a pool lifeguard. What does he do? Sit on a big
chair, stare at the babes in bikinis, and tell the kids not to run on the
deck. It's all about perspective. Anyone who is still conservative today ought
to be shot for heartlessness, insensitivity and tunnel vision.

This is the strangest part of life, when you are too old to be a part of your 
birth family, but too young to be a part of your marriage family. Going to
university as a pseudo-poor person in a foreign town does not help things
either. Because you don't have a home, or even roots in your community or
citizens. This is the arena of the one-night-stand, not in sex necessarily but
in general relationships and interaction. There are no real loyalties left.
Witness Laurie and Susan and what happened to them. I got to know S in a small
way last year, and she is a pleasant girl - Nurturing Tan (like Shanta and
Kucman) brown hair, a little slow, some spelling mistakes, but a good warm
person nonetheless. She was Laurie's grade nine buddy, and they came all the
way to Ottawa with high ideals. They had visions of living together in an
apartment downtown, being bohemian hip chicks, eating Japanese food and
burning candles. A lot like the way that we had our own idle fantasies about
the six of us getting our house and living in a hippie commune. Anyhow, they
came to Carleton, S for architecture and L for journalism, and their
relationship was stone cold dead within the first semester. It was dead by
Christmas.

That happens often. Actually it's the status quo around here. L and M were
supposed to be such fast friends, but that has turned out to be a farce as
well, and is yet another dead body. People are keeling over dead at a constant
rate. Gone are the days when Stacey and Carlile (or anyone for that matter)
was around every day for years and years.

Add to that a sputtering academic career, and you've got a serious case of the
creeps and a weird out. After you moved to Parkdale and the Kucman thing
finished, there were a few months of it in the Saug, but it wasn't entirely bad,
because I still had my home and my town, both of which I knew quite well. But 
now no-one has either, and I have to fend for myself in a lifeless city by 
paying my phone bill and buying groceries. I have Michelle, but that is all I 
have here, and so we both, in the words of Jimbo Morisson, "cling to cocks and
cunts of despair." She sleeps here like three nights per week, which is nice, 
but it still gets me to wondering why. I am used to having just one person in
the city (For instance Stacey in 1990), but the difference now is that I don't
even have enemies anymore, for the first time in years. 

It doesn't bother me all the time, but when it comes over me in a wave, it's
usually pretty gripping. Michelle has it too, as she clings to me, and gets
overly excited whenever she receives mail. Also she has begun to volunteer for
this oldster thing, probably to feel like she is doing something and not just
hanging around in Ontario and eating food. 

Michelle came over here Tuesday afternoon, with a pile of ITV lecture tapes
for us to watch. She stayed for a bit and it became a very domestic scene as
she helped me with my laundry and made dinner for us while I was putting away
the clothes. We ate, lay around in the sack together, she spent the night. In
the morning a drawn-out 69 and then she then caught the #5 bus to Billings 
Bridge (to transfer to #147 and her home) and I set off on my bike for Theology 
class.

It would have been a master stroke of parental deception and taken minute
planning and timing to pull that off only a couple of years ago. It would have
been a great death defying feat to get a weekday off school, get mom out of
the house for the evening, confuse Rachel's parents, have her come over for
the evening, stay the night, actually want to suck my dick, and then get up
and go home or to school at 11:30 the next morning. It would have been a
diabolical stunt that deserved to be recorded in the Deception Hall of Fame.
Really, it would have been a huge deal. If it went down at the Woodlands,
Lloyd would have excommunicated me forever, never wanting to dirty his hands
again with someone as immoral and evil as myself. 

But this year it kinda just happened. Age is a strange thing these days. I
don't think it's because I've changed and am somehow, magically "mature"
enough to handle a chack, but rather that it is socially acceptable for it to
happen now. You are no longer branded a slut if you come home from a night out
the next afternoon. At 15 yes, at 20, no. What is mine for free today would 
have got me 20 years in Kingston three months ago.

This came to me in the shower:

If one believes is pro-life, then they ought to also believe that anyone who 
has a miscarriage (spontaneous abortion) should be jailed for manslaughter.

Honestly. Because they believe that a fetus is a life, and that ending the
fetus is killing and murder. Murder just like it is out on the street. Ok then
- the law determines that accidental homicide, like automobile accidents, is
called manslaughter and requires 20 years in the pokey. Did you or did you not
kill the fetus? You deserve to do the time. 

Why has no-one argued for this? Because deep down, they know that the fetus
isn't a person. The same way that most make concessions about rape victims --
but if it's really a person then murder is murder, right?

This is actually not true, as the real meaning behind the pseudo-theological
story is that they just wanted more Roman Catholics. This is the real reason
that Jean Chretien's mom had 17 children. There are many examples of that,
where the Church make it seem as if their own goals are coming from the mouth
of God. Your famous line about not being able to goto Church if you have
crushed nuts or acne has to do with their desire for the health of future
Christians. They didn't want weirdos and people with bad genes to be the
founding generation.

Anyhow, you should get over your menstruation hangup, and fuck Danielle while
she's on her period. It isn't scary, and it's not really bloody, although you
wouldn't want to do cunnilingus.

This weekend we also went out to see a play as a couple, walked home hand in
hand, the whole cutsey thing, stopping at Kentucky Fried Chicken for a little
homefood. And I've done the whole BFGF thing, mailing her little sex poems,
giving her a shirt of mine, feeding her when we eat together, the whole
cliche. All funking huggy-huggy cuddle cuddle. I have sold out my bachelor
brothers and gone all the way into being a Deep Breakfast. I have let down the
bachelors by turning my back on them.

Even Tumbleweed doesn't walk the streets alone these days... and she's only 
ffsteen.

In other news, L is long gone, without much remorse or sentimentality on the
part of either party. The year started out fine, just as jocular as it was
when we had left. The first meeting here was a little nutty, but that happened
a few times last year as well. I specifically asked her what had changed after
today, and she replied that nothing had. That wasn't the thing that sealed my
fate. First of all, I got a GF that wasn't her, which was grounds for the cold
shoulder, but not expulsion. During the Stacey era, she disapproved of Karla
and later Sanja (and also had the nerve to chide me for caring more about by
GF Fiona than her - which she thought was yet another example of me ripping
her off), but didn't dump me for it. The thing that got me the pitch was that
it was Michelle who was the GF which was a little too close to home for her.
That was an act that could not be forgiven.

I realise now that we never had a friendship, or even a relationship. What we
had was a business agreement, a contract to perform. I gave her my loyalty,
attention, and praise, and in exchange I received the gift of her presence and
her voice, and a few glimpses of her female behind. I got to follow her
around, and she got the reassurance that I would do her if she ever gave me
the chance. Look at the way that Carlile always complained about Lloyd... but
notice that she always hauled him back when he started to stray. 

As much as the Tweety bird dodges and avoids the pursuit of Sylvester, the
bird always comes back again for more nonsense. Because the bird would not be
the bird if she did not have the cat in chase.

But even now, L still tries to hold onto whatever power she may have left. The
other day L was listening to M's phonecall with one of her NB friends, and in
doing so heard that we were having sex. She did the parental-moral trip thing,
telling M that she was too immature for sex, that she didn't know what she was
getting into, that it was all too adult and mysterious and powerful for her to
handle, and that I was just using her for sex. Laurie actually said "Michelle,
you don't understand that your relationship with him cannot be real. It cannot
be real because he worships me and not you, and is just using you for sex and
to get closer to me."

Word of honour -- this is actually what she said. This is what she has to
cling to in order to keep her Ottawa world intact. Even now, after I haven't
talked to her in over two months, she believes that I worship her and that
this is my latest method of gaining entry into her underware. She cannot
accept that she has lost her toy. Well, it serves her right. She should have
have picked me up when she had the chance. 

To answer questions:

If Carlile is indeed sitting alone in her res room, you should contact her.
She could be responsive, because res can do that to you.

I could worship Robin. She is ripe fruit hanging heavy on the vine. If I was
still a Toronto person, it would be an honour. Alas, what can I do? Perhaps
your should give her Viren's phone number.

I saw these two at the Peppermill (cafeteria) today, and it was so obvious
that they were BFGF. Not in their behaviour, but in the way they looked. They
almost looked like brother and sister. Look at you and Danielle, and look at
me and Michelle. It is too obvious. Michelle's father is a god-damn plumber!
This is why the proletariat stay proletarian; they mix and interbreed with
each other. It just happens that way. It was the same way with Rachel; they
lived in the Peel Non-Profit Housing Co-op in Erin Mills. Me and my
girlfriends from the council flats. 

You and Danielle are deadringers for BFGFs. But Danielle does not remind me so
much of Marcia; she is more like Jen. And while Rachel and my mom looked
embarrassingly similiar, Fiona was more like my sister. I think that aspect of
it all is under-represented. There is not the same conflict (Oedipus style)
with your sister, but in terms of influencing your view of the ideal female,
it is definitely there. 


===========
SECTION 3.2
===========

X-mas is closing fast, and I do not think I can really afford it. We are all
in debt, even though we have five computers. That is when you know you have
joined the middle class: when you have a credit card. Life is one of paying
bills, of trying to keep creditors off one's back.

I have not yet written to Carlilly, but I think I shall. I think I will do
it over X-mas, so that I have something do when I am in Belleville. One has
to be in the right state of semi-depression to do these things, to stoop so
low as to write to one's ex-semi-grade nine girlfriend. 

You sound happier, and you write less. As soon as you started having
Michelle, you wrote less emails, with less in each of them. I do not think it
is so much that getting blow jobs dulls the mind, but rather with someone like
Michelle you have much less to worry about. All you need now is a job, and
with Moses in the background you do not really have to worry about it.

Danielle seems to be getting worse, more apprehensive as she gets more
constrained by family, school, etc. I do not know what to do about it, except
move her out of the house. There is only one more year of this after this
year, then we can move. I do not like how her parents treat her, very much in
the same Big Bob Carlile, Carol Baldwin type of way, but combined with the
alcoholism. It's bad enough that they are considering going into family
therapy, and the big problem is that Barry keeps on falling off the wagon. This
is not good for Danielle - even if we moved to Montreal she would feel attached
to that whole cycle of neurosis. I was watching this John Bradshaw (you know
the inner child guy), on PBS, and it reminded me a lot of what Danielle's
family is like. They all have these buried inner children which continue to
plague them. Barry has his alcoholic parents, Lil has her dominating Catholic
family, and Danielle has Bar and Lil. This is not good, and she does not have
a way out like I did. I am still affected by Marcia, but at least I have a
temporary haven from her. I think we all need that. We all have to move out. 
Danielle is not able to do that, because there is no where to go. ("I got a
strong urge to fly, but I got no where to fly to, fly to, fly to...") 

There are a lot of chickies here, most of them with no features but good
Italian tradition. They have brown hair and hefty bosoms, and an ass off of
which you could eat. However, they are mostly boneheads, and they have really
shitty boyfriends. There is guy Joe who was in the sem-id-iotic thing last
year, and he has this gorgeous girlfriend that he does not deserve. I think
he wakes up everyday and asks himself how he has been so lucky. 

People are very dishonest with each other and themselves. I think this is a
fundamental problem; people are not willing to open themselves up to the
world. I include myself in this category, although I do not think I am as
ideological committed as some. I had enough of a good dose of Carlile beating
me over the head not to trying to put something forward. Carlile is a ball
crusher, and so is Stacey. One learns quickly that to act with ego, to be
oneself without care of others is going to get you killed.

Have I become shy? There are two instances that make me think so. In
Italian, I have the feeling that I am being coaxed all the time, like I am
some timid little kid. I do not fit in with the rest of them, as I have told
you, but the teacher likes me. The teacher tries to get me to speak up, and
is really supportive in that grade three, "It's okay, Jimmy, you can make a 
mistake" kind of way. And today, in Metaphysics and Epistemology, one of my big 
A+ type courses, I got accused of speaking too quietly. I was told repeatedly 
to speak up. What is happening? Am I finally losing the Lloydish
boisterousness?

But there are leftover problems, and although I am living the life of luxury,
of academic yuppiness, there is still that resentment, that hatred. This is
typical, and I do not know what can be done about it, probably nothing. Kare
and Gare think I should go into some kind of headshrinker, but I doubt that
will do alot. It seems that with all the therapy that they have had, all it
has done is helped them to put it aside, to get on with their lives so that
they can be more productive. This is not really my concern. I have never been
one to let my emotions influence my productivity. I get things done in the
crunch. I am not like Barry, who leaves his keys with strangers in a drunken
stupor. I would never let myself wallow enough to be irresponsible. 

It seems that your letter is being written by six different people, in
different cities. Two are being written in Mississauga, and the narrative is
one of Stacey doesn't matter, Steven was just this weird guy who really didn't
care in the end, and Chris and Lloyd were really just assholes. One is being
written at Bencard, and this one includes such things as I tried so
hard but no one else cared, it is not my fault, and I was just trying to make
everyone happy. Another is being written in Parkdale, and this one includes
statements like: there was nothing in the end, I got betrayed at every turn,
and everyone hates me. One is being written in London, and this one
includes things like: I never really was liked, nobody could understand, and
everyone had more than me. Lastly, there is one written in Ottawa, and that
one spouts things like I was the only one who cared, I was the only one who
could love, and I was deceived into believing that worthless people were
valuable.

Do you see what I am saying here? We mock Stacey for keeping to her story,
while doing the same things. We are all writing this narrative where we are
the victims, where we are the one's who got ripped off. Fiona definitely has
this: I think she entered into it with this in mind. Stacey is the most vocal,
which only reveals more pomposity that anything else. We are the most devious
about it, and the most fearful. We hide behind our letters, by getting
vengeance through laser printed pictures. And we are all finding our own ways
to escape, our own fantasy world where we are the righteous. For you it is
religion, for me language and philosophy and computers, for Carlile the Celts,
for Lloyd his phone-freaking, and so on. 

For me this is an old habit, and I have been aware of it for a long time. 
This is why it disturbs me in the sense that I don't really find much comfort
in it. I lived in Narnia for a long time, and that was not a solution to my
problems. I remember thinking about the same things we are now in grades six 
and seven, where I would look at the girls in my class and think what it would
be like to have control over them. Perhaps I was right for Stacey. 

The problem for me is that there is no way to remedy the situation. How I
can I say goodbye to Stacey? Remember we tried for months, and all it got was
more anger. I do not know that I could even now. I think I could with
Carlile, which is why I want to. After five years of being upset, I am
finally getting to the level that I can forgive her, and say goodbye. It's the
first time that I think of her as someone else that the person who went out
with Alex Tang. 

And I do not think it is because of lack of energy either. For obviously we
have energy to waste because we are all carrying this stuff, and writing
hundreds of pages on it, and feeling everyday. That requires energy, and lots
of it.

I am finding myself much more squeamish these days about sex. In one of your
posts you asked why we have not had sex yet, and I said that it was just
because I had not bothered to ask her. But I think there is something very
squeamish/shy in me that doesn't want to do it, in the same way that I do not
really want to turn anyone into a slut again. I guess I just don't want
another Stacey, where I come over for half an hour, get blown and then leave. 
She swallowed tonight, which made me feel really queer. It was different in
the sense that Danielle's pragmatism shows where Stacey just did it because I
wanted it. Danielle did because it would be "easier to clean up afterwards". 
This is typical of Danielle and her style: extremely unstylish, but very
practical. In many ways I like this better than the biting scratching,
virgins united in flesh, I want to eat you, type of Stacey approach.

There is something very odd it about though. There is always going to be
something kind of dirty about it. I do not know, but it seems that it is a
regression back to the days before Stacey, when kisses were OK and blow jobs
were not. Sticking it in is the same way. I do not really want to get into
condoms and the pill and staying home all day to fuck, etc. It's weird,
because in some ways I do not feel ravenous for sex. It's not something I want
more and more of, and feel OK with getting as much as I can. I do not feel so
much like that anymore. Perhaps it is because of everything that has gone on,
or perhaps it is because of some semi-conscious decision to reform myself, I
don't know. This is of course not some "I'm holier than thou" speech: I do
not really care about what other people in their bedrooms. It's more abnormal
on my part than normal, more unrighteous. It's wierd, because you would think
that by now I would have been over much of this, that I would have been less
squeemish. I think it relates to the general asshole tendencies I have in me,
both in bed and out. This was true in high school, but is still true today. 
There is little I can do about it except try to avoid getting into situations
where I am going to be insecure and egotistical. I perhaps perceive
intercourse to be that way, a cause of ego. I do not want to be Stacey's
boyfriend again, gloating over Lloyd because I am sticking it in. I know this
is foolish, because everyone is fucking. It is no big deal. There really is
no dilemma, or at least there should not be.


===========
SECTION 4.1
===========

Xmas is coming but it doesn't even feel like it at all. Ottawa is cold but dry
and not very snowy.

In talking with M, it has been revealed that I was the floor whipping boy, the
person that everyone wrote off as a weirdo and then despised for the rest of
the year. Just like the Hoodlands, they all hated me with varying degrees of
venom; a lot of it had to do with the big horror incident of me borrowing
Rick's bike for two hours in September. I wrote you about this one. It turns
out that the floor don, Rich Duphor, called in M to testify because she
supposedly knew me the best ("Well, who knows this guy?" ... "uh, I think
Michelle does...") and without my presence or knowledge they tried me in a
kangaroo court, pronouncing me guilty and to be detested forever. I brought
back the bike in one piece an hour later, so they couldn't do anything, but my
status was cemented in the eyes of people like the Military Man. I still can't
comprehend what it was about that incident that was so inflammatory.

Yeah, and by the way, during the weekend that you came up to Ottawa, my
roommate saw us sleeping together and then spent a few days of cafeteria
conversation telling everyone that would listen that his roommate was
homosexual, and brought up his homo boyfriend from the big fag town of Toronto
for a weekend of buttfuck bliss.

I don't think that I forget about people too easily. In fact, I hold on for
longer than I really should. I am always too kind to people and even during
all of last year I tried to be diplomatic and friendly to my floormates, even
though they would have gladly stuck a knife in my back. My resolution for 1994
is to only remember people who want to be remembered. Unfortunately this
includes Fiona. Krista is partially correct when she says that all of that
stuff is ancient history, and probably should be left for textbooks and not
real people. 

Some of it is good for a purely psychoanalytic basis. Situations become ancient
history, but psychology and people do not.

L is going back to Edmonton for good after this year, and I doubt
that she'll do it wringing her hands with regret over old Stevie Meecie. I
don't feel like I need to say goodbye to L or Stacey any more than I should
say goodbye to Bronco. But I think I'm going to send a hateful little letter
to L and get some of the bile out of my system. But I'm going to do it in
April, so that I don't have to see her afterwards. Of course the chances are
good that she'll rip it up or write me off as a jealous madman. I doubt she'll
actually consider any of the things I write. She never has before.

You seem to be misinterpreting my position. I'm not arguing that I never
cared, because of course I did. I ran around screaming my head off and going
nuts for months over the both of them. But was it love or was it something
else? It was love at times but not all the time. Even if it wasn't exactly
love all the time, it was there, mattered to me, and was very heavy and
powerful. It was important from my side of the fence, but not from hers
apparantly. I am not trying to hide from being a fool, because of course I
was. I was foolish to believe her and play around for as long as I did. The
only good part about the whole things are that they are over. I'm not
discounting everything from grade eight until graduation, but I am saying that
some of us were no better than the characters on BH90210 in terms of how we
treated and used each other. I will change my tune when either Stacey or
Laurie find me and say that they are sorry. Or if they find me and say
anything at all. It won't happen - because what can you say to an empty milk
carton?

I'm doubting that it was purely love due to my semantics of love. I can only
tell if love exists in retrospect. Love if it is real "never dies" or at least
can't be completely killed. It is immune to logic, moods or even if you are
still with them. The people that you love you do so "no matter what". Then I
love Fiona for sure, Carlile probably, and Sanja and Rachel perhaps, and Lisa
al-Habib has a fair chance.

I think that there is less to the human interaction than we peg. We make it
more of a big deal than it really is. Like those sex philosophers who rant for
pages about the psychology of sex, yet really it's just driving for orgasms.
Such is also the case with human interaction. In watching Beverley Hills 902
you can tell that none of them have memories that last beyond six weeks ago. 

When I look at M's photographs of floor people, I see a group of 19 and 20
year olds lollygagging around, doing cool and fun things, getting drunk and
going wild. But I don't actually see people, or feelings, or anything that
couldn't be done just as well by Frankenstein's monster, provided he could
hold a beer stein. You and I and precious few others are the only people who
are alive and actually doing something that matters. It's beautiful that we
are still writing and having dreams about those people because that means that
we are alive and that we have feelings and have actually noticed the world
going around us, and then people in it. Do you think Travis and Matty Fenwick
are doing the same? 

The arcade at Carleton has that _Clown Time pinball game, the one from the
Comrade X Memorial Arcade that goes "I could be sitting here all day!" and "My
grandmother throws better than you!" and "You got an arm like a wet rag." I
can get a replay early on in the day with some effort and some luck, and it
reminds me of the first half of 1992; playing a game or two of it after school
after I got off the route 44 from Streetsville. An arcade on Rideau St. has
_Splatterhouse, the one where you play the Jason figure and decapitate walking
lizards to (as usual) save your kidnapped girlfriend. The old Amusement Palace
where we went for two skins per hour has disappeared. So much for the concept
of flat-rate videogames. I guess the guy with no teeth has faded off into
another part of the ghetto. 

Life seems to be about amusement in one way or another. You certainly learn
this from watching television; life consists of amusement or working to earn
the cash to provide for amusement. Because if we weren't interested in being
amused, we would stay in bed all day and be fed from an intravenous drip line.
"With his poo poo, and pee pee, slipping out through a hose." 

Why does anyone do anything? Because it's interesting or fun, and the opposite
of interest is boredom. Video games, delicate tacos, silicon, university,
cunnilingus, doggy-style, tours of Europe. It is all about being amused, but
the problem is that it is based in time and never lasts very long. Or to quote
the words of Bob Dylan, the tragedy of our lives is that "the same thing that
I want today, I will want again tomorrow." Another videogame, another chilito,
another download, another suck. Another girlfriend when you figure that
nothing her cunt or mouth can do could possibly amuse you anymore. Lloyd
fucked Jayshri's cunt a dozen times, and then when the amusement level of sex
with Jayshri surpassed the embarrassment level of sex with Jayshri... "I don't
think we should be going out anymore, you bitch!"

Levels of amusement, maybe that's why it's tougher to be poor in Canada than
it is to be in Senegal... in Senegal you learn to be amused by less. I can
remember the days when I was blown out of my chair by _Raid over Moscow on the
Commodore 64. I experienced more amusement with that game than I do now with
Quicktime. The critical-mass needed for amusement has been upped. Hell, I
remember when I was hailed as a hero and Lothario of 8e when I felt Carlile's
left tit over her sweater.

Which is why it is tougher to be poor in Canada than it is in Senegal. In
Canada you know what you're missing and therefore you're unhappy. In Senegal
everyone is poor and you believe that amusement comes from playing Wari or
whatever. When we were playing Pong, we thought that it was great because we
didn't know that GIF files were lurking in the future. It was the most amazing
thing we had ever seen. You are amazed by the computer you have now, but it
will be humourous and quaint in ten years, just as the Vic-20 is today. It is
hard to believe that anyone was ever impressed by

10 PRINT "FUCK YOU IDIOT" 
20 GOTO 10

but it really blew them away at the time. They thought it was a big deal, just
as we think that grasp files are a big deal. But I am sure that when they make
_Look Who Won't Stop Talking Part Six (in which the furniture starts to
converse) it will be released on VHS, Laserdisc, and Quicktime.

In Canada, poor people see _Wolfenstein 3-D but get _Pong. In Senegal they see
_Pong and get _Pong. Who do you think is happier? This is another reason to keep
the multinationals out of third world countries. They never really saw
anything wrong with their bike until General Motors started running
advertisements.

===========
SECTION 4.2
===========

This is a letter that I will send in the next few days, so it should get to
you before Danielle and I get there in Ottawa. 

I am watching Clinton doing his throne speech (what is this called, I don't
remember), about his health care system, and welfare reform and so on. Its
very interesting to watch him, because he really is a brilliant politician. 
He is much more interesting than Bush, much more personable. There is much
more to him than any politician that I have seen, a combination of raw people
power and political ingenuity. And I also like what he is saying - for once I
think I can look at the United States and think of it not so much as a
superpower with nukes (although it still is), but as a country that starts
with working rural people who are trying to make it for themselves. It's
interesting hearing the guy, because everytime he opens his mouth he sounds
like he is speaking like George to Lennie, as if he is saying, "And we are 

	
going* to have the rabbits..."


It is extremely cold here, with warnings of freezing your ass off within 
minutes, with six car pile-ups on the QEW. I have to stay here until 5pm, to
pick up Jen from mentorship. She is doing the last year nerd thing, with
mentorship, three or four OAC's in which she gets 95%, and bunch of
girlfriends whom she gives Xmas and birthday presents.

Speaking of letter writing, the Carlile thing is done. I do not know whether
it is best to send, as the the zeal I felt in October has at least slightly
subsided. I just want to get it off my chest, but in some ways if I get no
response it will just make it worse. And if I do get a response, and we start
to talk again, there will be tonnes of complications. I do not see how I can
win by any of this, but something that goes back to about grade ten compels me
to do it. In some ways it's like Stacey; after I wrote that letter telling her
I was sick of her I felt that it was finally over, that I had finally stood up
and made peace with myself. It is the same way with Carlile but in the
opposite way, instead of proving that I can stand up for myself I have to
prove that I am not the asshole I was in grade nine. I think that is a big
problem for me... there are a lot of regrets about things and actions I took
when I was in junior middle school. I do not like the idea that there are
Lloyds out there telling their respective Jashries that there was this goofy
guy named Woodill who really was an annoying twerp. 

It's very hard to say, because I really feel like I have come along way in a
lot of ways, but I also feel that in some sense I am still the same. I was
talking to this girl in Metaphysics and Epistemology class, and it was
friendly. It was very different than what was a few years ago in that I
really did not feel like having any ulterior motives, background fantasies and
such, ie. Farah. I don't really have a whole lot of desire for that sort
of thing, mainly because I do not see the point. In the end, I learned that
Farah was a mirage, and that the only reason that she meant anything to anyone
was because I really had hope for her. I am not saying that she is fake. I
think the hope was well-placed, but it just didn't produce any results in the
end. Perhaps Lloyd was right: Maybe I do just look at the bottom line. But
than again, what else is there? I do not like this idea that love is a
journey, and that the end is no where in sight. What is the point of a
journey if it is not going anywhere, if there is no vision, if there is no
hope for anything working out? See I do not think it is a journey, but rather
a point at which there is a stability. The only times when Carlile and I were
really good together, and when I thought I was "in love" with her was when
there was a certain level of stability. I could call her and we would talk, we
would go out together, we would swim together, etc. That in itself is the
goal, the stability created. But this is no journey, no adventure. This is
also why I don't go for the idea of romance: I do not see the point of tension
when it is artificial. It's like Stacey: "Let's not sleep together until we
can't stand it anymore". 

For me, I never get to the point where I "just can't stand it anymore." I get
to a point where I just give up and don't care.

I cannot afford to do single things, to have a single mentality. Why? 
Because I am not single. I can't think like a single person, like someone on
the prowl. There is no point in preying on people, or saving them as you like
to think. We cannot hope to save the world, and in fact, they don't really
want us anyway. All that happens is that in our attempts to save the world we
destroy ourselves in false martyrdom, we become victims of the Staceys,
Carliles and Farahs of this world.

I'm so full my tummy aches
How sad it must end
But I'm glad I've a friend
Sharing cups and cakes with me
And cakes with me...

I just want to return to a peaceful home, to a family, to something that can
be called loving. I do not want to be big and powerful, at least not
emotionally. There is no joy in having to beat someone out for a girlfriend. 
It's a fairly hollow triumph. 

Have you ever noticed that Sue Johanson has the same sense of humour that
Barnes does? Sue is the biggest pro-pill person in the world, every time some
girl gets on she instantly puts them on the pill. She also is a big user of
KY - every person gets a complimentary tube. Dominic and Marie (French
people) use it, and Gare and Kare use it. I never thought about it much, but I
guess there are lot of either really dry 40 year olds or a lot of people
greasing themselves up.

Have you ever heard these adverts for the Family channel? I think that the
Family channel is a conservative propaganda machine, the last bastion of family
values. The ads feature these inane kids, the same type who appear in
antismoking ads, who are shouting for joy "Family Channel! Family Channel!
Yay-ay!" because they get to watch _Winnie the Pooh or _Burns and Allen. "Do
what is right for you. Don't do drugs." Its the same here. "Fun for the
whole family," a dictation of "classic" television and over-edited Disney
cartoons. What these people want is censorship in a bag, a nice way to get
regulated by people like the CRTC and Tipper Gore. Karen has this friend
Linda Weigal who only lets her kids watch the Family channel and such things,
and the last time she was here she was braggin how her kid had regulated
himself so that even if she wasn't there, he would not watch the evil channels
(like Global?). It was so fuckin' scary, I was just watching with disbelief. 
She is an Albertan in the most freaky sense, totally Reform. This is to whom
the Family channel relates, to people who want to clean up the crime in our
streets by blowing the criminals brains out, by giving the police bigger guns.
 

===========
SECTION 5.1
===========

Of course, if I was back in residence, I really would be a demon. Res is a
place where the spirit of highschool, or perhaps junior highschool, lives and
thrives. The sad part about the UNB prof is that what he said about university
residence is for the most part true. That place really is a glorified
cathouse. The motto of Housing & Food Services of Carleton might as well be
"You need a place to spend the night and we provided it. You need sex, we
provided the girls!" But I digress.

It would have been interesting for a little while, however. I remember last
year that I tried to show off Chandra. I had a sly grin everytime that
Hammerhead came in on her and I, because he had previously admitted a Suzanne
Hastie type lust for her. There was one time, after one of our long late night
chats, that the fire alarm went off at about 5am. It was in the winter, so
instead of going outside everyone crowded in the tunnels and the mailroom. I
happened upon Chandra there, in the midst of everyone but sitting down against
the wall. She was bleary eyed and dazed. She said "Good morning sunshine" to
me, and I sat down next to her and gave her one earphone of my walkman, and we
listened to Bruce Cockburn. It was so nice. It was like I was giving her my
music to act as a protection from Coco and Gunner - I was taking her away from
the floor dicks, and they could all see this.

And behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God
descending as a dove and coming upon him. A voice from the heavens said, "This
is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

Oh well. These chicks come and go. At least I hope they do. "Chandra" was such
a beautiful name though. I even enjoy typing it. Why do I always fall in love
in the spring? Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do... I guess we
differ in that I do have a single mentality. I always have a roving eye,
scoping out the chacks, wondering if so-and-so has it together or is a lost
soul. It's difficult to ignore the pale-faced big-bottomed Body Shoppe
vegetarians with names like Martha, Wendy and Shannon. I like the stability
side of having a GF, but I can't forget that there are new experiences, new
things to learn. If I wanted stability I could have stayed with Carlile.

I know I can't save the world but I can make a difference in their lives in
the way that Viren or Derek never could. Listening to Jen muse about all these
BFs, you realise just how shitty males are in relationships. They just don't
care. Honestly, they don't. What was the product of the L-Military Man union?
Nothing more than sexual gratification. Neither of them learned one damn
thing. 

Your letters from JM are very interesting, because they show a female coming
out from under her winter coat and learning to be herself. You can almost see
her mind expanding more with each letter. She wasn't able to handle it, but
most chicks are. I've done that a few times and I love to see it happen.

I'm not doing it for ego: To beat out Dogbone. I don't think that they
necessarily worship us, or maybe even care. Maybe they don't deserve it or
understand why. (M never does: She's incessantly asking me why I put up with
her & her crap. She expects me to trash her as everyone else has.) I don't
know. But I do know that they want what we can give. How else could guys as
awkward, geeky, ugly and inept as we are have so much snatch in so few years? 

A few nights ago she woke up during the night, cooed my name, and then reached
out for me. She didn't feel anything, so she moved over and tried again with
the same results. She kept on doing this until she fell out of bed. Turns out
that I wasn't there. It has come to the point that she expects me to be
sleeping with her. Talk about marriage.

I am watching _Faith-20 and the preacher is praising Xianity because it takes
away your free will. He says that Weight Watchers takes away your freedom to
get fat, and Xianity is Morality Watchers that takes away your freedom to sin.

The scary part is that I could do his job. I already speak like him. "And the
thing about diets is this: You just aren't allowed to, that's all there is to
it, you just aren't allowed, it's very simple..." You and your numb skull and
your hard-on. They are so hung up on families and family togetherness. Spend
Time With my Family! Families are like big dicks: Everyone wants and talks
about them, no-one has them. 

Packaged morality. There is one diet ad where the model says "The next time
you see me there'll be even less of me!" as if that is the greatest thing in
the world. Talk about not-too-well-hidden self-hatred.

I am seriously considering jobs as a preacher or a pornographer.

I admire Glenn Tilsonn for one thing, his dedication to his music. By aligning
himself with that heavy metal suicide stuff, he totally shot all his chances
with any kind of normal female. In grade nine he had to decide, "Am I going to
buy this Bleeding Brain Matter cassette, or am I ever going to have a
girlfriend?" He chose the latter. I can appreciate his commitment to it,
because his sacrifice for his music was any kind of respectable adolescence. 

He followed Rachel around for a good time, in a typical lost-dog Lloyd
fashion. I felt kind of embarrassed and ashamed when I waltzed in from
nowhere, and in the span of three weeks had her bra off. He had been trying
without success for years.

On the transit bus out of Port Credit during our night school shared
experience (Feb to May 1992) he told me that he wanted to start a band with
Jimbo for a short time. Another thing I remember about those Port Credit
nights is hearing the arrival of Glenn to class. You would hear him all the
way down the hall, the sound of crashing heavy metal guitars and machine gun
drumming at 140 dBs played through 1 cm headphones. Then the music would snap
off, and Glenn appeared in the doorway with a glazed expression.

What happened to him? 

Gimme some money.

I have had a few talks with M about music, and most of it seems to be going
over her head. She doesn't connect with it on the glandular level, and so
anything I can say just doesn't stick with her. She can't understand how music
that you just hear (instead of create) can mean so much. I tell her that you
don't have to be a priest to be religious.

Most people are like her. Sometimes it's hard to believe the kind of shit that
will sell 14 million units. I recently took a look at the chart from the back
of a 1989 _Rolling stone, and about 70% of that music is now garbaged,
closeted, in 99c bins, or for sale at the St Vincent de Paul. Does anyone want
to give "She Drives Me Crazy" another spin? How about the "Ghostbusters II"
soundtrack? I never hear too much about Martinka anymore.

Barnes is like that. She has almost as many cassettes as I do, but the
majority of them are by Tiffany, the Nelsons, Right Said Fred, and Tommy Page
and haven't seen the inside of a cassette player since the 80s.

The turd keeps piling up, old turd replaced by new turd. But people are shitty
and their musical tastes are in line with that. Shitty and rich, so they can
afford to buy crappy music. I am thinking of a Kenneth Barnes type driving one
of his Benzez with a Michael Bolton CD in the player, Kenneth getting in touch
with his sensitive side by hearing Mike scream out ballads. 

CD-I as the latest catalyst for family togetherness. Happiness at the other
end of a remote control. The commercials show the Land family of dad mom and
the kids happily crowded around the television, cheering and smiling and
laughing over Carmen Sandiego. They used to market the Atari 2600 with the
exact same tactics, but it wasn't enough to put family councellors out of
business. But who knows, this might be just the thing. You can solve Marcia's
demagoguery, Anita's thesis hesitation, cw's homosexual Oedipus complex, Jen's
ulcers, Brandon's Devil worship and Coby's diseases with the purchase of a
$700 CD-I by Philips.

I am glad that you have hesitations over the Carlile letter, because that is
the probable course of action. As we both know from experience, when people
are presented with a letter that is out of the ordinary that may hold new
challenges, 95% of the population decides to do nothing 95% of the time. Do
you remember that letter that I wrote to Karla in June of 1992? Neither do I,
because I never heard a peep from her afterwards. For about three weeks after
you drop the letter off, you will be jumpy when the mail comes and have a hole
in your chest cavity. It will become apparant that nothing is coming, and you
will sink back into the standard Carlile feelings. Six months later you will
have another Ned's encounter, and you will start to feel it again. Case in
point: I have heard zippo hippo flippo from the either of them in reply to my
reply to their _Cropduster comments.

Nevertheless, your efforts have my blessings and support.

Do you think you'll be the guy to make the queen of the angels sigh? People
are sluggish in general. If you really want to find out the truth about
Carlile, the way to do it is to corner her and stick it between her eyes. This
puttering around isn't going to go very far. You'll find that this is true
when Carlile does nothing in response to your letter. 

If you want to change someone's long-held opinions of you, one letter, no
matter what you put inside of it, isn't going to do the work. Letters, words
and stamps are cheap, and anyone could pass for anything when it's in writing.
Live flesh always presents a more convincing argument, and it puts you in a
better position, because you get instantaneous feedback and reaction. I know
Carlile, and she's always been fairly gutsy when it comes to these things.
Tiptoeing around is no good.

When/if you get a reparte with her, please casually ask her about me, because
I would like to know. I still don't know what happened after grade eight, how
the pig-doorstep thing went over with her, and so on. I would doubt that she
thinks of me as a demonic devil figure, although she may say that she does to
Rupe or maybe even you. She could claim this, but it certainly isn't how she's
since acted with me. We went through a period of bitterness (most of grade
nine) in which she once spat at me, and the music class stories, and some
other things. But after that it sort of warmed up again. In grade ten, after a
few weeks of letter exchanging, she invited me to her house so that she could
'tutor' me in math, also known as renting videos. Later she heard about Fiona,
screamed at me the day after the gig, and we were apart for another stretch. 

But then interestingly enough we came out of that again. Near the end of Dr
Maloney's class we started talking again, and one sunny day in May we went to
the Links enriched conference together. It was like your bowling trip with D
and the rest: Just me along with Karla, Farah, and Carlile. (That day I met
Wowbagger in person for the first time, quite by accident. He was an enriched
kid at Meadowvale. I pointed Carlile out to him and we guffawed.) We spent the
day together, and the four of us dined at Burger King there. All of this is to
say that if she thinks of me as satanic, she never acted that way to my face.

Carlile was actually very soft on me after grade nine. She may tell Andrew
Ryder and all these guys about what an immoral villan I was, but when we were
actually together in the same room at the same time, there was nothing but
smiles and warm friendliness.

Which may prove that I am not the Christ that I speak of, but actually the
Evil One himself. Because internally she wanted to hate me, but every time she
came near she fell under my spell and could not resist. It would be
interesting if you could ask her. But I know what she will say.

Carlile may or may not look upon me as Periole. I wouldn't be very surprised
if she did, because I am used to being despised. The man you love to hate...
You know the way that JM sees you? Many many others see me in that light. 
Scores of people, including my grandmother and most of my cousins, see me as 
an obscene character that ought to be crushed underfoot like a cockroach.

Black man'll give you a dollar and won't think it strange 
White man'll give you a dollar and want 95c change

 - Blind Willie McTell

Don't get too heavily involved with CIL@T and disability technology, for fear
that you will start living someone else's life instead of your own. 

I was listening to the CBC the other day, and they had a reading from the
latest-hip Canadian writer. Being Canadian was a tip off to how shitty it
would be. There was one line in it, delivered in some kind of gripping ultra
serious gutteral voice that stuck with me: "The thick and misty night was
blacker than a dog's throat." Blacker than a dog's throat? What the fuck is
that? I turned the dial immediately in disgust. I imagine that Stacey would
perhaps enjoyed it. There's nothing intrinsically better about reading than
anything else. It matters greatly what you choose to read. This dog's throat
shit is an example of the kind of crap that our society and this country
especially is based upon.

Just take a look at the news. Some days it is hard to determine which news is
real. For awhile last month, _Channel 6 News and _A Current Affair were the same
shows: 1) Figure Skating Attack 2) Severed Penis Attack 3) Michael Jackson
Attack 4) Commercial break. There was no difference between the "legitmate"
news and the "sleaze" news. It's almost as if they would tune in the news to
see if they were laid off today. If they weren't, they would breathe a sigh of
relief and then check out the latest titbit of good vs evil with Geoff
Gillollie and his famous billy stick.

>From a book called _Changing Bodies Changing Lives, part of my research for my
fuck essay:

Wendy Sanford: I am co author of The New Our Bodies Ourselves and serve as
campus minister at a commuter college in downtown Boston. My eighteen-year-old
son is now well past the stage of being embarrassed that his mother writes
about sex. I dedicate my part of this wonderful book to him - may he enjoy his
sexuality, grow in love, and protect himself from AIDS!

I would have loved to have a mother like that. She sounds like Marcia. My mother
has always been very hush-hush about it. She isn't a prude, because she does
screw, but by her covering up of it she has tried to teach me to be ashamed of
sex, like it was dirty or something. She would never tell me to enjoy my
sexuality, even if I was married. She never walked around naked and I was
never Best Bod at age eleven. A real St Augustine thing. I used to be ashamed
of my body, and convinved that sex was oh-so-naughty and forbidden. The
strange part was that I was able to fuck them, but up until Kucman in late
1991 I always ran and hid and covered my private parts in all other
situations. That was my mother's doing because she taught me that nakedness
was something to be frightened of.

Obviously you know much more about growing up under Marcia than I do, so
you're perfectly justified in feeling however you do about her. She is a bitch
though. She got mad at me twice, both times for something I didn't do. Once
was when the Gumby Gangers were sleeping in the trailer and she dropped by and
found it a mess. We all got chewed out. The second time was when I supposedly
trampled her flowerbed. But I like the sex aspects of Marc, and the peacenik
stuff. At least from this anti-Xmas card you can tell that she has a brain,
and that she is thinking about things.


===========
SECTION 5.2
===========

The latest religious harangue is a song recorded by Bobby "Don't Worry be
Happy" McFerrin of _The Lord is my Shepherd which has changed all the he's to
she's. People are up in arms because they cannot take the idea that mother is
God. 

People are quirky this way: they think psychoanalysis is bunk, and yet they
display such gender problems. I think gender should be eliminated altogether.
I have no real reason to feel male, except for the member dangling between my
legs, and the fact that I prefer breasts to chest hair. 

It has been interesting to watch these females travel from first year to
third and fourth. In the same way that we noticed the difference between the
look of grade eight to grade twelve, I have noticed the same here. They have
gone from being wide-eyed orientation folks to really haggard looking
survivors of "the system". It's remarkable how physical a difference it makes:
Bad hair, baggy eyes, fatigue, and so on. It seems to bring the most
beautiful first year goddesses to their knees. There is several girls like
that in my soiree group, who are about 19 and have never experienced life. 
There is this one girl Danusha, and she acts like the ideal Carlile figure,
driving me through an immense tizzy. But I will see her in a couple years and
she will look like Danielle. There will be little left to be conquered,
little innocence to be sheltered. This is why the whole scene is kind of
tragic. The dreams of these enriched drama students will be shattered as they
realize that skits about gay lumberjacks won't get them through life anymore. 

Although things seem to be getting better, what with a good job, girlfriend,
house, etc. the depressions are getting worse. I frequently finding myself in
a daze of pseudo-boredom/suicidal tendencies. I am still constantly running,
constantly trying to find something to do that will excite me. Life as it is
just doesn't instill anything in me anymore. I think that it is perhaps
because of too much white noise. If I sit in a park and try to enjoy the
scene as it is, the noise of twenty years of history comes through, screaming
out "Carlile" and "Marcia" and "Stacey" and "Dr. Maloney". It seems that I
can only rest when there is enough distraction to block out all those voices
in my head, all those regrets. I sit in this cafeteria, with a walkman
screaming into my head, and the computer turned, or I play video games, so
that I don't have to stop and remember. I am seriously thinking of going into
therapy, generally because I don't want to end up dead sometime in the future,
or get myself arrested my writing the names of farm animals on somone's
driveway. I can survive for now, but one crisis could shatter the whole
stability. If I became poor, or got a really bad grade, or lost Danielle, or
someone died, it would teeter the whole thing out of control...

My father announced that the Woodill's have regained the title of most
dysfunctional family from the Perryman/Comries. My Aunt Linda's (Gary's
younger sister) husband killed himself, and they found out that he had been
sexually abusing her two kids for the past ten years. 

The Ottawa thing was good: You were very well behaved. What is interesting
that you both had the same fears, that you were going to embarrass me. I
don't think it was too bad an arrangement, although Danielle was not to happy
about the landlady problems. I think you should bring Michelle here, so that
we can have a sleep over or something of that nature. My parents are probably
splitting in August for Regina, so I will have the house to myself. 

I had to go to this cast-party with Danielle on the weekend, and it seems that
I had a close- encounter with real Generation X people. These guys were total
beer guzzlers, and this one chick kept making lewd comments about being fucked
and being sucked - at one time she was talking getting sperm caught between
her teeth. Their record collection was embarrassing: the total sum of all the
greatest hits records of the last twenty or thirty years. This is what is
thought of as Gen X., and there really are a lot of people like this. They
all have two bit jobs, and they spend all their money on booze. They are like
Matt Fenwicks who have grown up and moved out of their parents house.

We are definitely not this. We are not anything, a complete enigma it seems. 
This is not to say that we are great rebels, or non-conformists: we are just
nerds who have to be different because they can't be anything other than that.

On the tube is this early video by Mr. T, a rap about doing the right thing,
as he goes through this wearhouse and beats the crap out of some drug dealers
("Hey there, Mr. Dealer..."). He punches them out, and everyone cheers. He
does not even sing: he just shouts in that classic "I'm gonna get you sucka"
grunt. 

Things with Carlile are pretty much a dead matter now. It seems that the
letter was delivered about a week or two ago, and I have yet to hear anything
from it. Such is what I expected: I did not really have a lot of faith in
Carlile's responsibility. 

In Metaphysics and Epistemology, we spend a lot of time talking about the idea
of respondeo, which means to commit. The idea is that we respond to the world
by giving it a chance, by allowing it to presence in us. In order to do this
one has to be respons-able, that is able to commit to a world that may be
scary, angry, hateful, etc. Carlile lacks responsibility: she lacks the
ability to communicate with the world. Perhaps we all do: we all seem to have
gone underground, creating our own little cults that will worship us. Each of
us now has our world of pals: Carlile has Andrew Ryder and Peter, you have
Michelle, I have Danielle and Robin and Micheline and Deb, etc. And with each
circle, we have control again. 

I was over at Micheline's the other day and I really realized how much there
was a sense of control. There was absolutely no way that I could get booted
out of the group, no way that I could beat out by the competition, or shut
down by a Dobson or a Viren. Perhaps it is because there is no power
hierarchy, but rather, a certain balance. However, it is obvious that Deb is
an outsider. I am too, but I fit a new role, so I am more easily accepted. 
They don't need another giggly girl: Deb has no unique role, no quality that
can enhance the group dynamic. I do in that I am male, and I am not a slumber
party buddy. And because I am the only in that position, I don't have to
compete for anyone's attention. 

What I also resent is that these people cannot be tried for their crimes. 
When you and I are at least attempting to reconcile the shittiness of the past
and improving, it seems that Carlile is just driving it under the rug and
moving on, as is Stacey and Fiona and Krista. It seems that this is typical,
and although I don't want to be obsessive or full of some victim mentality, I
think that we have to acknowledge that we have all been hurtful. We really
have been extremely mean, and we are all guilt of exhorbatent crimes. We
would be less guilty if we were just Matty Fenwicks, taking chicks here and
there. But we were far worse, because we perverted something, we betrayed
peoples trusts, and we destroyed people's innocence in a way much more
damaging than the traditional virginity-taking. 

You need to take care of your girlfriend. If you don't, she is going to be
another Fiona.


===========
SECTION 6.1
===========

How many times have I tried to tell you son that your problem is that you
never stop running? You can't even sit still in Taco Bell for more than ten
minutes without getting restless, like some kind of eight year old. If you
can't find peace in simple things, you are never going to be very religious
and you are going to have to be a yuppie in order to feed your habit.

You have a real love/hate relationship with your father figures - Carlile,
Gary, Danesi, et al. 

Strange that you are the one who is having mental problems - it always used to
be me doing crazee things. If Dr Maloney and Carlile are chasing you, it may
be beneficial for you to get out of town. Coming to Ottawa has changed things
- you no longer feel like you are under a microscope when you eat your New
York Fries at the mall, because there's no-one there to condemn you. I walk
around town knowing that I am almost completely free, that there isn't anyone
in this city waiting to seek revenge. Most importantly, it has put up an iron
curtain between that life and this one. When I am back in Toronto I become a
Saug boy once again, and hang around Yonge St arcades, but when I am in
Ottawa it is as if that stuff never happened at all. I can sit in a park and
not be bothered, because the ghost of Carlile and Stacey can't reach me here
in Eastern Ontario. The only instance where the worlds cross over is on the
floppy discs that contain my diary files from 1988, and from a few parts of
Ottawa U and the public gallery at Parliament, where the ghost of Carlile
still lives behind the pillars. A few times it has come out and I have seen it
- thrown back into the field trip that we took to Ottawa when we were together
in grade eight. But most of the time it isn't around.

It may help you to split town for a few years - maybe goto Fort Qu'Appelle.

The exclusive stinginess of Gare/Kare is not new. Remember the summer of 1992
and the Everfresh incident? When I was working for him and living at the
house, Gare made a big deal of showing me the kitchen, where everything was,
and how I could eat anything/everything I saw. He made a big deal of his
generosity. Then I started drinking Karen's mineral water spritzer things, and
they took them away and hid them upstairs so that I wouldn't be able to get at
them anymore.

It reminds me of the high water point of the Others, and also how when we
actually got together all we did was create a fascist state. As has been
pointed out many times, that is the only purpose of the feminists. They want
the power - in the most literal sense, "they want to be the bosses", and
they'll use anything that can get them there, be it sex, merit, affirmative
action, or anything else. There is a big name feminist (Bell Hooks) coming to
speak at Carleton, and the name of her lecture is Ending Dominance. She
intends to scrap male dominance. I don't think she's a communist, so she wants
to replace it with female dominance.

Fine. But the question is this - will they be any more responsible with the
power than the males were? Exhibit A is Margaret Thatcher. Exhibit B is Kim
Campbell. Missile envy can be experienced by females too.

But if you see the handout, you will notice that they are advertising that
campus Foot Patrol will be available for members of the audience. This means
that females who are too paranoid to be out on the street at dusk can have
security guards escort them to their car. Why did they offer this for this
lecture, and not for anything else? Because many lesbian feminists have been
sexually assaulted, and are subsequently so afraid of males that they feel
more secure with it. And these people are feminist scholars? They understand
the gender situation? Not a chance. Can you expect rational analysis of the
male identity from someone who is too scared to go outside after suppertime
because some male might get her? That's like someone from the KKK calling
themselves an expert on race! I empathise with their position, and I'm not
belittling it, but I don't think that their writings should be taken seriously
as scholarship. Have you seen Andrea Dworkin? She is the one who belives that
all heterosexual sex is rape. She weighs about 300 pounds.

All this clap-trap about feminism on a crusade to liberate all women. What an
affront to good taste. Ah yes, Karen Anderson the self-sacrificing martyr.
What a bunch of shit. I was at the St Vincent de Paul yesterday, with all the
Hintonburg low-lifes buying used 1982 era Jordache jeans for $3, and so on.
Some Coby looking girl was walking a baby, and the backyards had lines of
underware and towels flapping in the breeze. All these people with their
unattractiveness, unfashionability, and poverty. Many people smoked, used
vulgar language, were racist and generally not very appealing. On Somerset St
as I biked past there was a bleach-blonde whore with a paunch, a cigarette,
and spandex tights sitting on the kerb.

This is the triumphant proletariat that the communists rally around, and the
'oppressed' that the political correctors ballyhoo. Strange, I didn't see any
PC crusaders hanging around Hintonburg: They must have been someplace else
that afternoon. Then again, the Hintonburgers didn't seem to be too interested
with their liberators: Everyone who went to the Bell Hooks lecture looked more
like Karen behind the wheel of the Saab. Hintonburg dinges they were not. They
were so convinced of their ethical high-standing and piousness. 

Karen supports feminism because it is the only thing that she could use to
launch herself from full professor into faculty chair. She spends over $2300
per year making her cunt look fancy, and $7 on a tube of K-Y to make it wet,
and what does that have to do with the scum of our own cities? These womyn
don't give a rat's ass for anything other than the status of themselves and
their friends and I wish they would give up this martyric pretension. Feminism
is taken so seriously. The people do not care. Feminism is cocktail party
conversation for the aristocracy. They do not have respondeo to the people
they claim to help.

Gary and Karen really do make me uncomfortable, which is why I get so ANSI
when they are around. The whole hypocricy of it makes me angry. When I think
of education, it stirs up the Meece blood in me. All the Meece education
reformers, and Leonard Ephraim with his hopes for bringing education to the
hillbillies, would not be pleased to see what has become of higher education.
It's wrecked as far as I can see, and now almost all professors give me the
creeps: I'm not pally wally with them as you are. Karen reminds me of a
grown-up Laurie or Honorable Member from Warnes, with their egoistic
self-image equally inflated. 

Look at Nietzche, too. Another phony, another paper-m?che Mephistopheles. 

At Frankfurt, on his way to the front, he saw a troop of cavalry passing with
magnificent clatter and display through a town; there and then, he says, came
the perception, the vision, out of which was to grow his entire philosophy. "I
felt for the first time that the strongest and highest Will to Life does not
find expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a Will to War, a
Will to Power, a Will to Overpower!" Bad eyesight conveniently disqualified
him from active soldiering, and he had to be content as a stretcher-bearer;
and though he saw horrors enough, he never knew the actual brutality of those
battle-fields which his timid soul was later to idealise with all the
imaginative intensity of inexperience. Even for nursing he was too sensitively
delicate; the sight of blood made him ill; he fell sick, and was sent home in
ruins. Ever afterward he had the nerves of a Shelley and the stomach of a
Carlyle; the soul of a girl under the armour of a warrior.

Will Durant, _The Story of Phil, 1926.

Nietzsche was an old man with the clap, a retired university professor who had
his request for marriage turned down by Louise Salome, yet fancied himself a
Dionysus worshipper and a killer. Another Johnny Reb, another Glenn Tilson who
worked at a pharmacy in a uniform in order to get the dough to buy heavy metal
suicide cassettes. 

Richard Wagner believed he had discovered the cause of the young Nietzsche's 
frequent headaches, poor eyesight and prostrations to lie in 'excessive 
masturbation', which he communicated to Nietzsche's doctor. When he learned 
what Wagner had done, he flew into a rage and declared he would never forgive
what he termed 'this affront to my person'.

from the Intro to _Ecce Homo. I look at the adult world and see that they
really do not know what they are doing. They are not 'advanced' or anything
like that. They have cash and stuff, but they are not superior to me. Marcia
is as nutty as a fruitcake. Her marriage lasts four years, and she switches
jobs, homes, and cities all too easily.

Continuing on in the tradition of self-aggrandizing, I realise what it is that
I am -- an anti-missionary. I come into some site, set up camp, and go about
de-Christianising the natives. A curious part about me is that I seem to
manoeuver myself into the most beautiful postions. I do things with people
that "friends" never do. L has admitted that last year she was closer to me
than she was to the Military Man, her boyfriend - in terms of knowledge of her
soul, etc. 

Partially we have both earned our titles, and partially it was a hand-out
because there was no-one else that wanted it. I believe that this is good for
us, but especially for you, because it keeps you from becoming a shit again.
The azimuth of this happened at the Perryperson picnic in the summer of 1990.
The photograph you have captures it perfectly: The bare-chested male with a
shit-eating grin and Robert Plant hair, holding his concubine at his hip who
smiles approvingly. Talk about Dionysus. I don't really have that problem,
probably because I never cared that Lloyd was out after me. I have become an
asshole with my girlfriends, but not because someone else was after them.

The difference between Fiona and Michelle is that most of the time I don't get
sick of Michelle after I see her. I used to have to space out the times that I
saw Fi, because too much of her shit would drag me down. In the summer I would
sneak away for more than a week before I went back to renew my status. In the
summer Fiona was about 80% hassle and 20% niceness. 

M is the opposite, 80% niceness and 20% hassle. I miss her when she isn't
around and when I sleep alone, and sometimes I will bike up the gut-wrenching
Kilburn Avenue hill just to hang around with her for two hours in the
afternoon. We have conflicts from time to time but the difference here is that
we care enough to solve them and so do. With Fiona and Carlile it wasn't
important that we had difficulties, because I didn't give a rat's ass to solve
them: By the time the difficulties grew enough to threaten the relationship
with Carlile I didn't want it to continue, and with Fiona I cared more for
Stacey's state of mind than for hers. I was like Pinky gazing at the
television while Fiona hovered around me and said "Are you feeling OK?"

Pornos and videogames. You have a point, but if it were true, uncorrupted
young people would start on _Donkey Kong and work their way up to _Mortal Kombat
as they got bored. Porno and videogames are artificial sensation, and people
always seek the most sensational. Little kids start with _Mortal Kombat, and
they would start with porno tapes if they could get their hands on them. They
start with Kombat, they don't even bother trying out _Snowballs first. We
always go for what is most exciting, but not because what we already have gets
boring. We don't know it is substandard until we are told that it is.
Cavepeople pounded rocks, and they found it amazing. They did that all their
lives and never got tired. If you gave a Caveperson a game of Galaga, he would
find it amazing and play it all the while. 

Your line we increasingly need more reward to get the same high is not true. I
think we are conditioned to believe this to fall into the hands of the
computer manufacturers and pornographers. No-one thought that CGA was all that
bad until EGA came onto the scene. Everybody loved _Summer Games and I think
that what made them tired of it was the existence of _Summer Games II. They
seek the best, whatever it is at that time, be it _Spy Hunter or _Virtual
Fighter. Of course the best keeps receding beyond their grasp. These new
PowerPCs are amazing, but they cause me a bit of dismay because I know they
will be garbage in a few years. This is a game where you can't win, unless you
lock yourself in a bubble. I remember in 1987 when the 386 chip came out,
the computer magazines said that it was targeted for the high-powered techie
user, and that the average joe would not "need" the extra power afforded by
it. There was no "need" for the average user to have more than his 640k 286
system. I think this is true, and that we are all patsies. Why am I tired of
this Classic II? Because I have seen more impressive machines at a lower
price. If I had not seen better, my satisfaction would still be complete.
Actually, if we had not seen better we would still be using a pen and paper...

We all have our own dumb ways of wasting time. You work to liberate wheelchair
dudes, I sleep and play the silver ball, and my girlfriend apparantly has
become addicted to soap operas, _Days of our lives to be specific, which is
causing me a great deal of bother. We are always arguing about it. She claims
that she knows it is all phantasy and not real, she says it is a placebo to
help carry her through the afternoons that she shares with her distasteful
roommates.

But it is this that I object to the most, her using soap operas to escape.
Escapism is not the best thing in the world. To paraphrase Marx: Soaps are the
opiate of the masses. She is deluding herself. Soaps are without social
merit, and you learn nothing for them. They are pure manipulation. There is no
reason for soap operas to exist other than to support themselves by getting
you to tune in tomorrrow. The biggest issue you will see on soap operas is
whether Luke is the father of Melissa's baby, or how long Victoria can keep
Stone hostage in a cage in her livingroom.

Look at Carlile's thing about wanting to cut my dick off. Jayshri heard that
and was not shocked. Why? Because Carlile knows that she can use my name
forever without being disproved or even challenged. I am just a General Tyrant
figure now, your average Hitler type. Fifty years later everyone is still
talking about the Nazis, but no one challenges what they do. Even the modern
day Nazis don't dare side with Adolf and state that the Holocaust was a good
thing, they just insist that it didn't happen. Hitler, Attilla the Hun, Tojo,
Saddam Hussain, Judas Iscariot, the Sheriff of NOTT, Steven Meece... who cares
about the dif anymore? 

Judging from the fact most of them have not even tried in the least to contact
me since, they aren't waiting for me to say anything new. Take someone like
Farah - did she ever really care about me? Did we ever talk about important
things? Never once - not in 1990 and certainly not in 1994. Unlike you, Stacey
does not leave messages on my machine and get jealous of my current GF. I
don't run into Carlile at the Peppermill on campus. Fiona has turned my "let's
talk" offers down three times. 

I don't look upon them as my old friends of which I was seperated from for
unnatural reasons - I see them as people who feigned friendship and then
dumped me. If you think this is victim mythology fakery, you should have had
to live my life for those months. If there is anyone I guiltily miss, or sigh
about, it is the girls I met in Streetsville - Sanja, Lisa & Genievi?ve,
Dorothy, Rachel. It is hard for me to have any genuine remorse for Carlilly,
Fiona, or Stacey. Like I said last time - I will apologise to any of them if
they actually care enough to track me down and ask me. Guess what: My mailbox
this morning was empty.


===========
SECTION 6.2
===========

Things around here are crazy, and father is going nuts on this multimedia
business. Now he has people who are thinking of giving him money for this
wild idea, and he has major sugar plums and apple dumplings dancing in his
head. You can almost see the glow of glee that surrounds him as he
continually thinks of the potential millions he is going to make off of
Woodill Corp. And you think I am going to see any of it? Good luck. The
only way I will anything is if both Kar and Gar die. I will get a small
allowance, small enough so that it won't impinge on their right to go to
France and blow ten thousand dollars. This is how it is now, and how it will
always be. Even with the rhetoric of "Oh, we have tried to support you, blah
blah blah" it really comes to peanuts, and money allocated only after the
wines and dines have been payed for. 

Karen spends more on underware every year than I spend on tuition.

This is typical of everyone in my family. This sense of false generosity, of
being so giving while meanwhile hoarding thousands of dollars is quite
disgusting. My grandfather is supposedly this great generous man but
meanwhile he is like Lloyd's Dad; after saving half his income every year for
the past forty five years he has massed a small fortune. And do I see any of
it? Do I see even enough to cover basic expenses? No seree.

What I resent is that people around here are so critical of the fact that we
don't save, that we are not taking care of ourselves, when our income is less
than one tenth of what there's is. It is difficult to do anything but tread
water when your income is less than ten thousand dollars. 

I know this is blithering, and I know you are an even greater martyr than I. 
I would rather have my own place though than have good food, because I am not
even eating the food here these days anyway. I usually don't spend too much
time at home anymore, kind of like at Marcia's. I basically just use it as a
free bed.

Speaking of Marcia, she called me yesterday because of some dream she had. 
She dreamt that we were all on the CN Tower (my mother is scared of heights),
and there were amusement park rides. Jen and I were in these planes that went
round and round, and up and down, and we were kids. Well I fell out, and she
said that I had this expression of fatality, as I could not do anything about
it. I did not tell her but it seemed obvious what this meant to me. 
Especially considering the fact that I was falling out as a kid, not as an
adult.

My mother is getting nuttier as the days go by. She is now officially the
head preacher for MCC Lake Simcoe, and thinks she is going to make a video
on the history of MCC (she actually thinks the task is easier than writing a
paper/book). Somehow I don't think it will turn out to well. But at least
she is out of my hair, although she got pissed off because we forgot her
birthday. Her birthday was the last of my priorities, and I have no time for
relatives.

I think more about Carlile than I do about my own mother. Perhaps that is why
she is so important, as a substitute. I have had substitute mothers since I
can remember: Carol, Barb, your mom, grandma, etc. I don't really have one
now (Lil is almost as scary as my mother). I was at Robin's house the other
day, watching videos, and Robin's mom walks in about midnight. She was
rip-roaring mad because we were there, and because Micheline was parked in her
parking space (they live in an apartment on Davisville). It was like when
Marcia walked in on us at 7:30 in the morning and started screaming because
the place was a mess. Well this was the same thing, except that there was no
mess, and we were not even doing anything. She did not scream at us (I would
have really shut her up if she had), but she did the kind of Big Bobbie type
thing where she made it plain that we were not welcome, and we knew that Robin
was going to get it afterwards. 

I am so sick of people like that: My parents are shitty, but at least they are
not rude to my guests. They tolerate you, and you don't even give them the
time of day. They would never abuse either me or Jen's friends. It is a
shitty thing to do because it is a war with pawns, as the friends can't do
anything except take off. I don't see what was the big deal either, all we
were doing was watching television. I think it is the same thing that Marcia
has: This is my space, and I want absolute control over everything and
everyone that goes in or out of it. You can tell that Robin is flighty. She
has the same type of nervousness that Jen has, a kind of obsessive neatness
and uptightness. With Robin it would be so easy to crack her because she
desperately wants to escape, where my sister still feels some value in the
power that she gets from being a 95% kid. Robin doesn't really have that, and
just wants to relax. All she needs is some ballsy male to take her parents
on, in the same way that you did with Carlile. All she needs is some
boyfriend that will bring her out after hours, will keep her from going home.

I was reading this book on pornography yesterday and I realized that video
games are much like pornography in that the only thing that keeps one going is
the contextual and visual rewards. Because video games are just a bunch of
controls: A few button movements here, and in the end they are fairly boring. 
This is why people don't play space invaders anymore; not because there is any
real difference between space invaders and Bart Simpson, but because they
have become bored with a black and white reward system. In other words, the
only reason why we keep playing something that we have been winning for years
is because the rewards become better. And the tolerance level is getting
higher and higher: We increasingly need more reward to get the same high. 
This is why you see mortal combat II with killings and maimings, while only a
year ago they were just punching each other out. The same is true with
pornography: While thirty years ago a boob was good enough to cause craziness,
now it is something to be seen on ordinary television. And it is going to get
worse as the mediums come together, as pornography, entertainment, television,
etc. become one and the same thing. The new pornography CD's are nothing:
they are merely AVI files on a disk. But when you get real interactivity, you
will see a transformation of the industry. 

My sister thinks she is going to go across Canada, and get this, is going to
talk to people across the country and write about it. I think she is a lot
like your sister, stupid, yet with that pompous sense of wanderlust. Hell, if
someone wanted to pay me to travel, I would do it. But I don't like the idea
of having to be so obsessive about it.

I had a dream about Danielle and I having a baby. It was really odd, and we
called it Kate Elizabeth. 

I also had this dream the other day that I met Sarah McLachlan and she turned
out to be a real bitch.

I think you should watch out for Michelle. Especially considering when the
summer comes around, both of you are going to be much more fiesty. This could
be good; there are lots more things in the summer to do with your girl, ie. go
to the ex, etc. than in the winter, but there is also more time on your hands,
and more strain in a way. You should really bring her here to Toronto for a
couple weeks; we could show her around, take her out, she could come over,
etc. I think it would be really cool and your mom would adore her. So would
Moses: She has that immediate sense of comfort that parents really like. I
think it would be tragic if you spent the summer apart in that you would end
up falling back, getting bored, angry, etc. It would be like stalling just as
things got good, and than you would have to pick it back up in September.

Have you thought more about moving in with her? I think you should; it would
force you to grow up and be responsible. In the same way that living on your
own has made you responsible for yourself, living with her would make you
responsible for the people around you. And that, friend, is what you need. 
You need someone to force you to not be so insular and pigheaded when it comes
to other people. I think you would really change and become much more
comfortable with others as you would not be such an orphan.

Plus, it would be a coup in that you would be the first. There is nobody that
we know of that has done such a thing.

I think that I am doing okay, but I am not sure. I went through a bad stretch
of general depression, and now I seem to be out of it. I have talked to
Danielle about going to a shrink, and she is thinking of doing so over the
summer, and I might do the same thing if I feel depressed again. I don't
know, because it seems to come and go as different stress levels go up and
down. Right now I just want to get finished, and I have only a week and a
half of school left. I have a lot to write still, but I seem to have a handle
on it. All the big things are finished: I have no more italian tests, no more
speaking gigs, just writing in my corner. And after writing a few papers I
will be finished. 

Do you sometimes feel like we are back in the 19th century, writing back to
each other like school comrades in Europe? I do. People really don't do this
you know, the idea of two men writing each other for no particular reason is
completely foreign, even faggy, to the average male. 

By the way, you got a letter from Julia Pratter. I am including it with this
letter. Not much has changed it seems.

Speaking of which, I was watching Vicki! today and Ms. Pratt from _Sassy was on
talking about sassy gals and guys, and cool language. She seems to be a total
bimbo. Candace Cameron (the teeny chick on Full House, Kirks sister) was also
on as a celebrity teen, and the two of them sounded like a pair of gabby
girls. I think we are right on about those mags. Ms. Pratt was actually
defending the sassy guy/gal as a good thing because it was not a beauty
contest, but based on who was really cool. In other words, it's not okay to be
just a beautiful bimbo (because you might get fucked), but you have to a
beautiful puritan who will never get laid because they are too brainy. That
is what these sassy chicks are, the epitomy of teases.

It is absolutely beautiful here.


===========
SECTION 7.1
===========

Right now I am writing at 1:15 in the morning after getting back from
Michelle's place for a weekend of ITV watching. Tonight she decided to order
us a special package deal from Pizza Pizza: She paid. So I ended
up with a free medium pizza with green pepper, pepperoni, garlic & oregano,
and extra thick crust, as well as two cans of Coke, and a Sara Lee cheesecake
thingy. I got all of this for nuthin', just for being me and just for being
her boyfriend.

Life is tolerable sometimes.


--
"We can't prevent every incident, but the message is out in the community
that if you want to be violent, we'll hit you hard."
				-- Yves Ducharme, mayor of Hull, Quebec