currently listening to anne rice's "interview with the vampire"(mostly on the drive in to work and going back home). at first it was cool, then i started getting glimpses of some disturbing shit, until it became totally disturbing and a bit of a downer there for a while - almost an ordeal to get thru, and now its finally mostly back to interesting and exciting. i tried to think of the movie, which i had seen not long after it'd come out, and i realised that i actually dont really remember much at all from it, other than tome cruise, brad pitt, and kirsten dunst or whoever. and there was a fire. and lestat died. and they were in paris. and that's the part i'm just getting to now. maybe the disturbing shit was more disturbing to me because i kept thinking of Lily when they were talking about Claudia - it was just too close to home, when he nearly kills her. here's the excerpt:

"... And when I thought of this, I saw Babette's face contorted with
hatred when she had held the lantern waiting to light it, and I saw
Lestat in my mind and hated him, and I felt, yes, damned and this is
hell, and in that instant I had bent down and driven hard into her soft,
small neck and, hearing her tiny cry, whispered even as I felt the hot
blood on my lips, `It's only for a moment and there'll be no more
pain.' But she was locked to me, and I was soon incapable of saying
anything. For four years I had not savored a human; for four years I
hadn't really known; and now I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm,
and such a heart not the heart of a man or an animal, but the rapid, tenacious heart of the child, beating harder and harder, refusing to die, beating like a tiny fist beating on a door, crying, `I will not die, I will not die, I cannot die, I cannot die . . . .'
I think I rose to my feet still
locked to her, the heart pulling my heart faster with no hope of cease,
the rich blood rushing too fast for me, the room reeling, and then,
despite myself, I was staring over her bent head, her open mouth,
down through the gloom at the mother's face; and through the halfmast
lids. her eyes gleamed at me as if they were alive! I threw the
child down. She lay like a jointless doll."

the part in red probably hit me the hardest - almost made me cry. i was not expecting that.
it might not have had that effect on me had i read it. but the way the reader read it, embuing it with emotion... actually, that was probably a big part of it. it reminds me of the time we saw "moulin rouge", and somewhere along the line i accidentally turned on this option they had, which was something like an audio commentary of what was happening for the visually impaired. in the part when satine finally succumbs to her illness and falls to her doom - the way it was narrated, and then accompanying the cuts to the different characters from the show, watching in astonishment, and the big black dude's name was chocolat as it turned out, and it probably didnt help that i was on shrooms - the narrator was putting words to my feelings, crystallising them, making them explicit - i cried like i havent for a long time. and i've been afraid of watching the movie again, even though i thought it was deffinitely worth buying and bought it.

it seems almost banal or down right irreverent to go back to the vampire story, to their enchantment with paris, which immediately brought back memories of the movie "sabrina" (the remake) which we saw recently, and how many people seem to have fallen in love with Paris. and so now i wanna see it too. though for the longest time i thought it would be too stuffy, and sick of tourists.


i'm spent...

maybe i should start a list of pot names i at least "kinda" like - in the spirit of positivity and such like.

i remember there was a period of time during my "honeymoon" phase of smot pokage, when i'd often say "i love weed" when on the way "up". so guess thats a fond memory associated with the word weed. i call it pot i guess because most pot smokers call it that here. and i guess i kinda like "cheeba" despite its obscureness - kinda funky that way. "whacky tobaccy" is too wordy, but colourful enough to keep it around for occasional use in one's repertoire. just looking at a list of synonims and strand names - i like "power plant" - hilarious :)

not as hilarious as falling asleep at the comp. gotta go beddy.

got some fucken flu. as in flu en za.
dont wanna smoke pot so as not to make it harder for my throat, etc to heal. is having a couple shots better for my throat? 'cause thats what i'm doing. wish alcohol were illegal and not pot. i could vapourize pot - that would not hurt my throat. as far as i understand. dont like the word "pot" all that much. but it seems least of evils: 'weed' has the connotation of "undesirable plant", when it actually is quite desirable; 'marijuana' is so stigmatised, and a bit old fashioned; 'dope' is just totally old school and dorky; 'ganja' sounds all wrong from a caucasian - i know because i have a friend who says that; 'chronic' is too negative and smacks of dorky homie-ism; 'cheeba' is just too obscure; 'hemp' - industrial or new agey; 'herb' - just dorky; 'grass' - really old fashioned; not to mention dorky :) the list just goes on and on in unrelenting dorky fashion.

whatever.

installed a new router on the computer, updated it, set it up, and got bit comet working again. downloading some audio books: golden compass, subtle knife, hp lovecraft's cthulu mythos books, interview with the vampire, tom sawyer, ender's game, some william s. burroughs, like naked lunch...

gotta go to sleep...

the things you remember...

the greek civil war ended in 1949, resulting in the flight of thousands of greek communists to eastern bloc countries. poland accepted around 13,000 of them. my dad's dad worked with some of them. one once said: "once, when i cut off this one priest's head, the blood poured so much!"
my grampa said: "that's not something to brag about."

that same grampa went to a juvenile political prisoners' jail when he was maybe 14, for participating in acts of vandalism against rural communist agitators - they flipped their cars onto their roofs, and generally tried to make life harder for them. in this jail, he was subjected to unusual punishment such as having his foreskin nailed to the questioner's table, then being slapped in the ass with a large ruler; and being pressed on at the sternum with a huge, old key, with his back against the wall, while being questioned about something trivial, until he'd pass out.

that same grampa turned into an abusive father, who'd come home drunk and look for trouble. when my dad was small, he learned to recognise when his dad went into this mad frenzy, and learned to run and hide under the bed. this tactic didnt work for him when he was maybe 15, when his father learned from a neighbour that my dad skipped school that day with some girl. my dad had to walk using a cane for several weeks afterwards.

that very same grampa was born in france, where his father was able to find work as a miner. however, his father decided to go back to poland, apparently largely because his mother was over-indulging in what sounds like absynthe.

my mom's dad somehow ended up in siberia during ww2 in a forced labour camp, working on the construction of a rilroad. he saw people getting shot for trying to stuff their mouth with some grass while working. i wonder how it got to this, but apparently him and a cousin of his were able to escape naked through the snow while being fired upon. my grampa remained loyal to his abusive cousin more than to his own wife and children, until his cousin died a few years ago. my gramma took him back. her eldest son-in-law got so mad at her for it that he's severed all contact with her.

that same gramma got caught at the wrong place at the wrong time during ww2, and got rounded up with a whole bunch of other random ppl to be taken to a nazi labour camp. lucky for her, these germans were "civilised" enough to hold them in a corral for the rest of the day to give their families a chance to realise that their family members were being taken away, and to bring them some clothes and food and say goodbye. during this clothes drop-off and goodbye, she casually crossed to the "free" people side, and just kept walking, and started running as soon as she neared a corner. she's sure some of the guards knew what she was up to, but let her get away anyways.

my friend romek's grampa was captured and tortured by nazis, and when they thought they'd killed him, they dumped him out back on a pile of bodies. he didnt dare twitch until it got dark, when he crawled to safety.

what a site

write. about something. without bitching? i donno...
the new job is not how i'd hoped it'd be. at times its good. but at times its stressful. different kind of stress though, when ur working for a friend. maybe this is just not the industry for me? but at this time, with 2 kids and a mortgage - a bit late to change. its apparent to me now that a higher "IQ" is not a great match against punctuality and efficiency. i used to think IQ was the true measure of a person. i'm still kinda stuck in that kinda thinking. how to change? maybe just press on with my way of being, and maybe one day i'll shine, and it wont be weird or annoying, but original and cool. but isnt the world littered with ppl who kept on being themselves to the max, but just didnt make it, and burnt out? but maybe i'm too "sensible" to be myself to the max, or better - the sensibility is too much a part of myself to really BE different like that.
Terence McKenna's life sounds like it was cool - sure, it started out with a geeky, awkward childhood, but then he was in college, experimenting with drugs, talking to interesting people, travelling abroad, doing more drugs, studying philosophies, theologies, cultures, taking full advantage of that whole free love thing that was going around then. and then he was back, growing and selling shrooms for a living, starting to write books, going on lecture circuits, doing more drugs, achieving para-messianic dimensions... before succumbing to a brain tumour...
is it better to live (seemingly) that fully but for a bit shorter?
"Take Five" is playing thru my head. i also heard today a tango-y (tangy?) instrumental version of "white rabbit" - funky. weird, but funky.
a lot, if not all interpersonal problems would be avoided if we all really understood and felt, what others mean. but instead we try to translate to one another what we think we think we mean. we dont even understand ourselves.

Quote of the Day

"now THAT just made the whole day infinitely better..."

i'm just a whiny bitch. if i didnt whine so much, i 'd probably cease being a whiny bitch. but then i'd be some psycho that wrecks shit. and that doesnt help anyone, now does it. smot poking is frowned upon here, so i'm getting drunk, but i'm not liking it. whats making things worse is that i ran out of whiskey, so i mixed in some godawful polish potato vodka, and i'm starting to feel queasy. i'm probably gonna have a headache tomorrow. this sucks. i'm apparently not great with stress. i read a funny somewhere sometime to the effect of "being depressed is like being pissed off, but without the energy". sometimes i foray into the energy field. i probably straddle the fence most of the time. whatev. the terrible 2's havent even officially begun, and i've already had enough. this is not good. this is not right. my feet stick out of bed all night. thank you dr. seuss.
i cant keep living like this. this needs to change. i need some sorta drugs. legal, illegal, as long as it helps. its not like this all the time. but when it is it seems like it is. and when things are fine, the shit seems so distant. having a family is no walk in the park. for me, at any rate. having kids is hard work. i didnt understand that. speaking of parks - dealer from across "Crackhead Alley" is back after an extended absence. we were hoping he's been put away for a long while. so he's back, and the very next thing i notice is a cruiser with lights flashing and police tape attached to it, blocking off the exit from "Crackhead Alley" towards the park. turned out later that half the park was cordoned off. some old lady said she heard shots at night. funny coincidence with the dude coming back and the shooting.
ok, i'm falling asleep. gotta go.

i guess i should avoid blanket statements like " i hate weekends ", but there's certain things i dont like about weekends. on my 2 days off we still end up getting up early because of the kids. and there's shit to do thats piled up because we keep thinking we're gonna have time to get shit done on the weekend.
this is a post about nothing - so retarded. i'm just fucking grumpy. again. i need prozac. or some good weed. maybe both.
got a Blackberry Pearl as a hand-me-down from a guy whose place i'll sorta be taking at the new job. looks pretty cool so far. see if i can install the software for it without having the comp explode :)

a twist

patty cake, patty cake
got some hemp
lets all get baked as fast as we can
roll it, spark it, pass it 'round and see
how we'll get toasted with this great weed!
:)

havent posted in forever, and now is not the best of times, but whatev. a couple short things:

got a small buzz for half of yesterday from a vitamin B complex pill - weird. more pleasant than the Gingko stone, thats fo' sho'.

turns out outrageous comedian Louis de Funès was born in France, but his parents were from Seville. they just moved to France because their parents were opposed to their marriage.
here's a sample of his genius - the real shit starts ~40 seconds into it.
i first became aware of and intrigued by hallucinogens when i was a young boy, while watching a movie starring de Funès, where at some point de Funès' character ends up in some kinda hospital. while chilling in the hospital garden with many different patients, he somehow gets his meds mixed up with someone else's or something, and ends up dosing himself with some kinda hallucinogen. he doesnt seem to display any symptoms, until, to his utter surprise, he sees all the oranges fall off an orange tree, almost at once. followed by all the oranges jumping back up onto the tree! his jaw drops. all of a sudden he sees all the women in the garden walking around in their bikinis or naked. that's all i remember. i didnt know what was happening until my mom told me the pills he ate made him see that stuff. i was captivated by the idea.


turns out "Naked Lunch" was a bunch of manuscripts boiled down into a book long before it became a movie. they were written by William Burroughs while in Tangiers, and the drug use, homosexuality, writing, etc were all very much part of his life there - he just weirded them up a bit. having read about Burroughs has detracted from my fondness for the movie, which i'm yet to see sober and straight, but does provide some depth i guess. he has been quoted as saying: "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death...". Joan was his wife. the fucked up thing is, he was the one who shot her dead while playing a drunken game of William Tell in Mexico. Burroughs was a really fucked up guy. i was gonna say troubled, but i chose fucked up, because he was.

not only is the word "NO!" boogie's fave word, but yelling seems to be her favourite form of expression. this morning, i think i said to her something like "we're gonna changer ur diapie (diaper)" and she said "no diapie!" to which i asked "are you a little nazi?" to which she of course replied "no nazi!" ha! now that i think of it, when we were just visiting the inlaws during the weekend, we went to the beach, and boogie's nose was running, and she tried to wipe it with her sand-laden hand, ending up with a little sand moustachio, so i told her she's got a little hitler-moustache, but that it doesnt suit a little girl.
other things that sound funny at the time, but sound absolutely horrible, sick, insane and all that good stuff outside said time? something a friend of mine and i touched upon during a short conversation today - a parent yelling at their kid "when i smack you, your head will fall off with the lungs!" roughly translated, but you might get the picture.
or something like "if you dont stop that, mommy will kill herself." to which the dad adds "if mommy kills herself, then dad will commit suicide too. but first will kill you kids. it'll be a gory murder-suicide. then i'll choke myself with my own guts."
sounded funny at the time :)
ok, its super late, gats ta go

as if all this death wasnt enough...

... Albert Hofmann - the creator/discoverer of LSD died, almost a month ago. but at least I find consolation in that he's had a very full life - he was 102 years old. he was reportedly a great chemist, made big pharma lotsa money in "straight" drugs. in addition to discovering the psycho-active effects of LSD, he was also the first person to synthesize psilocybin - the psychoactive substance naturally found in "magic" psilocybe mushrooms.

an icon of a man. i'd like to try to honour him next "Bicycle Day" and go for a ride with the local heads. weird, this year's "Bicycle Day" was 10 days before his death. i wonder - had his death been slow, if he knew he was dying, would he have opted to go out accompanied by his "Problem Child", like Aldous Huxley ..?

i thought i'd be able to handle death a little better.
guy from work got gunned down outside a local bar. i'd been to that bar a few times before, with him and other guys from the company. i immediately thought of his poor wife, with their baby boy. he's a little older than Lily. i think her family lives in alberta. maybe she'll be moving back.
i just remembered a time he told me about how once, when he was in elementary school, he didnt get on his bus to school but decided to ride his bike to school or something. when he'd gotten to school turned out there'd been a suicide bomber on the bus.

no one knows how the fight started, but it quickly turned into a huge fight between 2 groups of people. i dont think they even know if it was a random shot or specifically for him.

it caught me totally by surprise. i suppose it hit relatively close to home, but i wouldnt have thought that it would have affected me quite this much. i've been stunned half the day - since i found out.

this brought right to the surface this story i heard just the other day, about how a friend of a friend went to a restaurant with his wife, and while they were dining, an asian guy got in this guy's face, so the guy asked if he wants to take it outside. when they went around the corner, followed by the asian guy's friends, the asian guy pulled out a gun... didnt matter how big my friend's friend was anymore - got pistol whipped and the shit kicked out of by the asian guys, and told not to contact the police or they'd kill him. he might have been followed home... he didnt call the police. i dont know what i'd have done. obviously i'd want revenge, and the fuckers confined so they couldnt do it to others. but i'd value the fact that i'm alive, and the safety of my family. but i think i'd still try, just would request help with relocating. what if the police didnt think it to be important enough to warrant that kind of expenditure?

songs with mentions of guns piss me off now.


a few weeks ago i saw a guy i havent seen in a couple years. he told me another story that shocked me. we kinda knew this guy named Al - he was maybe in his late 50's, very calm, quiet but pleasant, and he was the safety guy on a couple sites. on one of them, his then maybe 30 year old son was cutting something with a hand-held grinder, the sleeve of his shirt caught in it, and having the trigger blocked, it chewed up his arm pretty good. he could sometimes be a bit of a jerk, but when i heard about that, i kinda felt bad for him. but maybe 2 years later he was recovering well, working again, and somehow managed to adopt a more friendly disposition. a few years later, he got attacked on the street somewhere by a group of guys, and they beat him into a coma. and this is where a piece of fact is missing - the reason why police showed up on the doorstep of the comatose guy's dad's. maybe he tried to go after the fuckers that beat his son, maybe somebody complained. but the guy's dad told the cops that he's going to hurt himself if they dont leave. they left. apparently only then digging up information that he was the registered owner of several fire arms. apparently then they werent so keen on walking back in there, so they set up a goddam stand-off, calling him out through bull horns. he wasnt coming out. they wanted to wait him out. in the middle of the night they heard a gunshot. when they finally went inside in the morning they found he'd killed himself.
a few weeks later his son came out of his coma.

i talked to a friend today with whom i was hanging out last night - he said his sister's friend just died - she'd thought it'd be a good idea to try and run from the cops with 2 of her roommates, one of whom the police were actually coming up after, and do it by jumping from balcony to balcony - they were on the 5th floor. she slipped. the fall split her head in half, shattered her spine, but the doctors managed to keep her from dying. still, after evaluating the situation, they told the parents that there's no way she's gonna recover from that, and recommended pulling the plug. they will never forget that nod.

i just realised that i only found out about compay segundo because of a haunting melody i'd heard a couple times in a cuba commercial. i wanted to hear what the rest of this amazing snippet of acoustic guitar music sounded like. after many searches on winMX (waaaaay back, eh? :)) off and on for months and months, i finally found it by chance, downloading anything that said "cuba" in the title. The actual title was "Pobre Corazon"...
"Cubano Chant" turned out pretty cool too, even though obviously a very western, white-washed style - but its good music - i love how each instrument does its own version of the song, in turn. i think.

while walking thru walmart today, i noticed ash-trays for sale, and i wondered - if pot was legal here, or maybe "when" its legal here, will they sell cheap bongs and grinders from china and stuff? probably. i mean, they used to sell opium in the sears catalogue.

buddy came around with his elise today - nice :)
phx says she saw ppl rubber-necking as they passed. he asked me if i wanted to take it for a drive, but somehow i didnt feel like it was the right time or something, so i turned the offer down. hope it comes around again - preferably when "the time is right" :)

buddy bought a lotus elise today. just called to yell "yeeeee-haaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
cool :)
god speed montoyo! :D

Created by OnePlusYou

another one gone...

Just sold my Talon. always feels weird when they take away your car. but it had to go. it was getting on in years, and more and more things started getting buggered up in it. i was getting into deeper and deeper mechanics territory, and while every time it was a learning experience, every time was also a bit of an ordeal - not knowing, needing to read up and look at websites and forums, buying parts, buying tools i didnt know existed, and it always took sooooo looooooong. these 2 guys put a new arm in right there on the spot in like 15 minutes. it took me hours and hours to get all the shit off. mind you, it always seems harder to take shit apart in a car - shit is seized up, cant see a screw or bolt thats still holding it all together...
that was the first "good" car i bought with my own money. actually, it was the first one i bought with my own money, period. the previous one was bought with student loan money.
this car went with me to San Francisco, then almost to LA, then to Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, back home, then to Toronto... and then back again :) well, there were little excursions to Niagara Falls, Windsor, Detroit. got quite a few speeding tickets with it, including one that might still make me wanted in California :)
when i bought it in 2001, it had about 60K on it. 7 years later - it has 235K

fastest i've ever gone in it was 215 kms/hr (133 mi/hr for you 'mericans) - 215 was also its nominal horsepower.

...

i wrote the above like a month or 2 ago, then just saved it - to be edited and added to later. well, that never happened, and i'm not sure what i was thinking of adding to it, so here it goes.

Łukasz

you were born on january 27 - a month premature. i knew that a month early, especially these days, is not bad at all, but watching you suffer like that right from the get-go felt really shitty. they plopped you down on the scale, all naked and cold and screaming, then put you on some examining table, squirting antibiotic cream in between your puffy eyelids, repeatedly vaccuuming your nose, mouth, throat and lungs with this tube, to clear out as much fluid as possible, injecting you with all kinds of shit to help with this and that, hooking up the intravenous, cutting your heel and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing to get way too much of your very thick blood for tests. other babies get to rest a lot with their moms after they're born. not you, little guy. your mom was in the recovery room, drugged and vomiting and being pumped with other drugs that were supposed to help but only exacerbated it. finally they ran out of things to inject her with, and she stabilized.
what did it do to you, baby - being born to pain for hours, and then subsistence for weeks - almost no comfort of human contact, just machines: checking your heart-beat, your breathing, your blood oxygen saturation, keeping an elevated air pressure to your nose with extra blows of air when you're supposed to be breathing, machines dosing intravenous fluid with an added fat solution and electrolytes, and a tube taped to your little chin and going down into your tummy to make sure air bubbles come out easily. and a UV lamp on for 2 days straight to help get rid of your jaundice. people would come around every now and then, to stick an IV in a different hand, foot, thigh, both sides of your head, and all you got to show for it is a crappy mohawk and tracks and bruises everywhere.
the nurses said that you were doing pretty good for a premie, but there wasnt much to be rejoicing about. i felt fucked up, and all i did was look.
but sounds like you've been doing better and better - too bad we havent even been able to visit with you more often, but we've been sick, and we dont want to risk getting you sick. wonder if the nurses think we're shitty parents. fuck'em if they do - i think this is unfortunately the best course of action. maybe they know and understand. here at home we've all been going through a stomach flu, a cold, boogie's teething, and trying to let mommy heal from the c-section. your babcia has been helping with your sister, so that's been great. times like this you feel the value of being part of a community, a family, having someone to help you when you need it - its survival of the group, not survival of the fittest.