This blog was a mass of spam

July 17, 2008

This is a trial blog post.

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This blog was a mass of spam

Over 5000 spam comments. Assholes.

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Fleur photo

July 18, 2008
fleur.jpg

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Cockluck Part 1

July 20, 2008
Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck" | Part 1 | Someone We Can Dream On

Part 1 | "Someone We Can Dream On"

Thursday, it was,Thursday September 6, and the year 2001, about eleven in the morning, when I read on kenlayne.com that the Reverend Tony Pierce had writ Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf's obituary. So it was Thursday September 6 when I drove -- the Mercedes, older than myself, that I inherited from uncle Caulk -- to the Elgin street courthouse -- when normally I would walk. The courthouse -- in case you ever must park in downtown Ottawa -- is extremely ugly, and has the cheapest indoor parking between the canal and Bank street.

The sky was half bright blue and half messy black clouds so I took my umbrella out of the trunk. I crossed Elgin at Laurier and walked up to where Laurier intersects the Sparks Street pedestrian mall, where my friend Bertram Brooker has the best view of Parliament Hill in the downtown -- you can barely see the new American Embassy with its ten foot thick walls and missile silos.

Bertram hadn't turned the neon sign on yet, but the front door, glass with a greeny bronze handle, was propped open to show another door of scuffed reddish hardwood with a brass handle set with a large oblong of frosted glass engraved with the name of the bar, which is 'COCKLUCK'. When all one's front walls are glass one's doors might as well be too. Through those doors were black tables on worn wooden floors, green padded chairs and grey plush couches, two pool tables, some pinball machines, a table-style Galaga arcade game, assorted teevees, and a small stage where the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy had played not once but twice.

Bertram was behind the bar taking apart his cash register with a screwdriver. He stood -- when he stood, he was sitting just then -- about six feet tall in his shoes, which were paper-bottomed sneakers -- had short straight dark brown hair, choppy and angular features like an underdone James Bond prototype, and eyes, well, his eyes. His eyes are very blue.

He wore a black t-shirt with 'COCKLUCK' printed in crisp 72 point white, and very black jeans.

"New pants?"

"Birthday present."

"They match the socks I got you. They from Judith?" His multifariously divorced sister.

"Sort of. Rideau Centre gift certificate good for pants or two pounds of Second Cup coffee."

"What's the cockluck?"

"Whiskey sour, three bucks."

"Give me three in one glass."

"Three whiskey sours would fill a thermos. Should I leave the bottle?"

"Actually, what I want, I need you to hire, I mean I need to hire you, to find somebody. I have her picture."

I took my wallet from my jacket -- wallet, worn olive green leather; jacket, silk navy blue pinstripe blazer, lightweight and comfortable -- and flipped through to the very back. I showed him her picture. "Do you need it, or can I keep it?"

"Give it to me and I'll scan it, and give it back to you. What's her name?"

Auntie Dynamite."

"When and where did you see her last?"

"Here in Ottawa, two... two and a half years ago. I got a letter from her last year but I didn't answer."

"Did you notice the postmark?"

"It didn't have one, or a return address."

"What is Hecuba to you, or you to Hecuba?"

"I need a drink before I can parse Shakespeare in the morning."

"It's nearly noon." He poured a whiskey sour. "What happened?"

"She..." I jerked my hands around. "I... Anyhow. She was seeing somebody, Mr. OneBallLessThanHitlerDemon, and I, we all thought, wasn't good enough for her, so at first she wasn't very interested, and the more we thought it was a bad idea the more she wanted to try it anyhow. The more she got in the more he clamped up and by the end he was a perfectly banal little thug, but instead of being, you know, supportive, when it was finally over with, I clamped up myself. After a while of that she went away."

"So you felt she'd gotten what was coming to her."

She was too much a witch for Demon, I thought then and I still think. Clothes always the same and she was always cool, a sharp little frosty cool at odds with the heat haze that hung around nearly everyone else. Too cold for comfort when what everyone seemed to want was air conditioning, not a meat locker -- even with white lacy meat hookers.

There's a mythological idea a powerful woman can't know real love without trading her power for a soul. When she cashes in her strength, she voids her amorality, which would otherwise destroy the relationship -- and vice versa. The Wicked Queen gives up her beauty for the chance to choke her rival; even Elaine of Astolat had to kill herself to get Lancelot's attention once he was done accidentally getting her pregnant. There's a real adrenaline kick when somebody pays too much for something, probably dating to the caveman days when everything had to be measured carefully to ensure survival through the winter, or when an overextension by a rival could mean one could grab him by his hair and slam him into the nearest river. Adrenaline propels like fuel shoots a rocket; it shot me straight away from Auntie. I couldn't deal with the price she was paying for what I perceived as inferior merchandise. She wanted him to play Sartre or Henry Miller -- even Robert Benchley -- not Dudley. She forgot that she beat men at their own game by learning their methods and combining them with her natural strengths. She regards herself as their equal where she is probably their superior; she has forgotten her Aristotle, that excellence is not a virtue but a habit...

"I want you to find her so I can at least apologize."

"Did you look for her yourself?"

"At first. A bit. I asked around. She left town. She left the country I think. I don't know if she stayed away. Nobody's mentioned her being at their place. People mostly ask me if I've seen her."

"Could take a while then."

"That's okay," I said. "You know where I live."

He said he would start as soon as he found someone to manage the bar, in case he had to go out of town or further. He thought he would start by Monday at latest. We talked a bit about money and expenses and I wrote him a cheque, dated today, Thursday, September 6, 2001.

6>© Gabrielle Taylor 1998-2002
published by Shad Muegge
all rights reserved

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Cockluck Part 2

Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck" | Part 2 | Just Watch Me

Part 2 | "Just Watch Me"

The weekend was quiet -- no phone calls, no one dropping by -- a quiet fog. I fed myself all the drugs it takes to keep me going: drugs from Utah via one doctor, steroids from another, other pills I'd worked out on my own. I showered. I worked and threw the work away. The sun came in and went out. I walked to Blockbuster on Rideau Street and rented "Metroland", "Small Time Crooks" and "Everyone Says I Love You". Naked, I watched them, wrapped in a white duvet with yellow daisies on my hard narrow brushed steel futon couch. I drank mediocre red wine out of the bottle and ate pizza from Colonnade. As usual, I slept on the couch -- as usual when Fort's away. There's too much space in the bed when I'm alone and even both my fat fat cats -- Riesling and Offenbach -- were not enough. Auntie would advise me to fill it with a human presence; that's what she would do.

My guts clutched each other. That was what she would say to do -- and persuasively at that. She would completely disrupt the calm I'd cultivated over the last two years with Fort. They'd never met; he'd heard of her and she once of him. If he disliked her he wouldn't say -- it wasn't his style. If she disliked him and I made one slip, said one uncomplimentary thing without thinking, I could wake up in a vacuum fishing trawler bound for Japan with him reading a note saying I'd joined the World Wrestling Federation as a traveling continuity editor .

That situation was what I was paying Bertram to find.

Was I so unhappy?

Well, was I?

I stayed in for three solid days. When the phone rang Monday night -- when Bertram called saying he'd found her, that easily -- I still didn't have a damn idea what the hell was wrong.

"She's at a monastery near Quebec City."

"A monastery?"

"A co-ed monastery."

"They have co-ed monasteries?"

"God moves in mysterious ways."

"Can I go there? Do I need a permit?"

"They're expecting you."

"Does she know?"

"If they told her. I didn't see her myself. I can if you like."

"No! I'll be there tomorrow. I don't want her to..."

"Leave before you get there?"

"Yeah."

"She probably won't. She's been there about a year. They're... looking forward to seeing you. Half of them are convinced she's possessed -- which is why she went there, she demanded to be exorcised -- and half of them are convinced that she is, ah, what she says, "Saint Dynamite of the Last Stand."

"Maybe she's Saint Dynamite of the Last Standard and that's why it went bankrupt."

"Meckler said--"

"I know what Meckler said. Jumped up old-- Anyhow." We talked a little more about money and that was that. You can burn muffins as long as you want or you can go buy a new stove for a lot less than your time's worth.

So I set my G4 burning a CD of driving music and printed the map and the CD was done burning practically before the map was done printing. I put a bag of sandwiches and cans of Diet Coke in a yellow insulated nylon bag in the fridge. Partway through watching "Revenge of the Pink Panther" I fell asleep clutching the remote control.

I dreamed I was a jewel thief, at a house party for jewel thieving gangs, and my gang had fingered the house so everyone was going to be busted but us. My gang members were slipping outside one at a time. I was scuffing thick ivory pile carpet with pointy black patent leather high heeled shoes. My shoes had thin six-inch forked spikes extending from the eyelets. I was nervously talking to a matronly fence who somewhat resembled Margaret Thatcher. She seemed to suspect nothing; she talked about her nieces and nephews and wished she had children of her own, but with her work, you know. I excused myself and went outside to where I was supposed to meet the rest of my gang. The shoes were surprisingly good at gripping the soft, mucky hillside in the dark. I pulled myself carefully up the slope in the mid-evening darkness, hand over handing a nearly invisible steel cable, to where the others waited with a young Robert Redford... Was he Butch or Sundance? I couldn't remember.

I woke up early on Tuesday, loaded the Mercedes, and drove out listening to Eric Clapton and Adrian Belew and theJazz Butcher Conspiracy. It was a perfect day for a long drive, blue skied and crisp. All the trees along the highway were turning pink and orange.

Quebec is hilly and for one reason or another CBC Radio 2 doesn't have good reception there so I kept the driving CD on. About eight in the morning I stopped for gas in St-Remi-de-Napierville and stood before Pierre Trudeau's crypt like I'd been meaning to do since he died last year. When he died I stood outside Parliament Hill in the hours-long lineup in a little black dress to touch his flag-covered coffin. As a kid I thought Canadian politics were always going to be exciting, I didn't know he'd made them that way. I wanted to be there; I wanted to give myself up to a huge exciting country where my leader would wear bermuda shorts and swear at his opponents. I wanted to be where everything was magic and crazy and anything could be done -- abortion made legal, divorce made easy, metric imposed nationwide -- if there was a a reason and a will. But when I looked back at the wet grass, smudged dark with my footsteps, and over the crypt to the warming morning sky, I saw nothing but sky.

I drove past the four-lane highway to Jean Chretien's hometown and gave it the finger because there still wasn't a four lane highway to Ottawa, capital of Canada, but somehow the bucks were there to lay one in to a town of twenty thousand people. I drove past billboards advertising Quebec City as the nation's capital. As I drove I remembered Fred Lapides writing to Matt Welch that "the Left is filled with Guilt" and "the Right is filled with Rage" and as I burst into astonished infuriated tears and drove on, I thought with curious detachment that I'd never considered myself Right before.

© Gabrielle Taylor 1998-2002
published by Shad Muegge
all rights reserved


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Cockluck Part 4

July 23, 2008

Part 4 | "The Wind and the Bass"

I drove; Auntie fooled with the mp3 player. She made a sound like a snake in the brush and tossed the player down on the seat. "Got anything else?"

"Maybe in the glove box."

She rattled it. "Locked."

I unsnapped the car key from my key ring and tossed her the bundle. She snapped open the glove box and raked a handful of tapes into her lap. She snatched one up with a triumphant laugh. "Just what I wanted."

Harmonica and piano from the year I was born sieved out of the old German speakers. She'd put on Springsteen and she was happy about it. She rolled down the windows and unpinned her hair.

"Music gives me an amazing sense of moment," she said loudly over the wind and the bass. "I'm alive, I'm going somewhere new. Every time I hear this song I'll feel this night all over again. Music! How could the Taliban outlaw music!"

"They outlawed themselves if that's where bin Laden is. If he did it. Do you think--"

"No, I don't. I don't think anything. It's awful and it was bound to happen. If you're powerful people will try to pull you down, even if you're benevolent, and how benevolent the US is is open to debate. There're a million bin Ladens at a million typewriters and the only question was who was going to finish typing first."

"Do you think it was planned here?"

"Eh? In your car?"

"In Canada!"

"Oh. Probably not. Probably just based here. Probably the Americans'll invade or otherwise drive us home." She tapped her fingers on the open glove box. "You don't have any Joe Walsh in here. That's good. It'd contaminate. It'd send me to a blue California day going up to a house in the hills, in the chaparral, with a friend who's housesitting and we're going to drink tequila until the sun goes down and then watch Logan's Run in the dark. When I hear Life's Been Good I'm in the car pulling up to a long long stop light. I'm there as much as I'm here right now. So it's best that I'm here."

"I feel here," I said impatiently. "I feel here! Really here! Like I've been electrocuted into being here!"

"If you'd been electrocuted you wouldn't be here, dearest love."

"That's not what I mean. Don't you know?"

"No," she said. "I feel just like I always do."

I turned partway, so I could see her. "You're being obtuse. I feel real! I feel really here!"

"Sweetheart," Auntie said soberly, "you were always here."

"That's not what I mean!"

"You're right, I'm being obtuse. Watch the road, darling. Let's stop soon. I'm starving."

"We'll go into Quebec City."

She flipped through the rest of the tapes, setting some aside, and clattering the others back into the glove compartment. "This Joni Mitchell is also good," she said, dropping it into the box and snapping the compartment shut. "If I listened to it I might be lost in Georgetown in a huge bronze SUV, about to drive past the Jefferson Memorial, idling time before going to the Kennedy Center..."

"What about English Boy?" I snapped.

"Dearheart, what is wrong with you? Of course it makes me think of BallLessHitlerDemon. Why would you want to go putting such a nasty thought in my curly little head?"

"I don't know. I feel responsible."

"Responsible? For what?"

"For introducing you to him."

"Oh, don't be ridiculous. You want to poke me with a stick. You want to see if I can take it. I can take it. I can take anything he can throw at me. An infection lasts until cleaned or killed and that's that. That's that. He's nothing to me anymore!"

I drove faster and said nothing.

"That aside, who knew he was such a piece of shit?"

"I knew him before. I should have known."

"Known what? That if you introduced me to him that I'd want to fuck him? Do you feel responsible for me fucking him? I did that all by myself -- with some help from him, I suppose, though I must say not as much as I would have liked. Did you know that the British are the most adulterous people in Europe?"

"They do feed cows to sheep."

"I fucked him, and I fucked him in relatively bad faith, and he was a piece of shit, and I was unexpectedly upset about him being a piece of shit. I never should have been there in the first place."

Auntie laughed like an ice machine and ejected the Springsteen tape. "Ah, Jazz Butcher Conspiracy," she said, and started yelling the names of South American countries out the window with Pat Fish. She yelled, "the Devil is my Friend reminds me of driving in Los Angeles to a Dodger game where the Expos shortstop will hit a grand slam in the second inning and the entire stadium will howl for the person that caught the ball to throw it back."

"I used to hate Springsteen," I yelled back. "I thought he was just another overrated electric folk rocker. I didn't start paying attention until this year. I was listening to internet radio and Born to Runcame on and I thought it sounded familiar -- then I remembered some email I sent to Ken Layne at Tabloid< years ago and he misquoted Born to Run. At the time I thought he was just romancing."

"So what about it?"

"My father listened to Bruce Springsteen. He'd have Springsteen on while he was working on his trucks, either the truck he died in, or the antique International he was rebuilding. He was crushed to death in his truck on a logging road trying not to hit an SUV that never announced it was there. When I heard Born to Run on radio.sonicnet I remembered Ken Layne misquoting it on Tabloid but then I knew that wasn't all and I remembered hearing Born to Run out of Dad's big baby blue truck. That was the first time I heard that song in almost twenty years. It's hard to go twenty years without hearing a song that popular but I did it. I think it killed me on pop culture for good. It was too risky. There was too much chance of something infecting me."


© Gabrielle Taylor 1998-2002
published by Shad Muegge
all rights reserved


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Cockluck Part 5

Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck" | Part 5 | "They Always Said He Would Be Nothing But A Fish Head"

Part 5 | "They Always Said He Would Be Nothing But A Fish Head"

After a while I said:

"Imagine what it must be like to be Bruce Springsteen. Or Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan or David Bowie -- or Pavarotti, or Maria Callas. You hear someone you really like and you call over one of your people and say 'John, I like Adrian Belew, go get him so we can make an album' and John says 'Ulright' and goes and gets you the Adrian Belew and you make an album with that sells at least enough to make it worthwhile even if it turned out to be a drag."

"Freedom needs upkeep," Auntie said. "A few years ago an old couple won the Powerball jackpot, millions of dollars, and when asked what they were going to do with the money, the man said he thought he'd finish renovating the patio."

I pulled off at the Wok N Rolland parked a skinny lot with cracked white lines. I got my emergency coat from the trunk: a tatty puffy blue ski shell. "Don't look at it like that," I said. "Iggy Pop once sweated on this jacket."

She pulled it over her dress. "I look like a Victorian gangsta rapper."

The Wok N Roll smelled of deep fried shrimp, potatoes, onions and pastry, and cooking meat. The walls glittered with signed pics of famous Chinese pop stars: Lennon Shen, McCartney Park, Harrison Shen and Starr Shing with their bowl haircuts and sober black suits; a fuzzy haired guitar-clutcher signed Hendrix Chen; the chameleonesque and androgynous Star Spoon Bowie. Queening over the lot was an oversized colour poster, generously signed, of famed Chinese blues chanteuse Holiday Bing Qing.

We picked a table by the window overlooking the buckled street. I laid my cellphone face down by my newsprint placemat indecipherably covered in tiny blue ads. The waitress pointed to it and said "cancer stick".

"Did you want to call anybody and tell them you're out, Auntie?"

"It's not like I was in prison. Although, wait, yes, excuse me." She took my phone and went outside.

I ordered a small salad and a glass of water, and for her, a cheeseburger and a Coke.

"What were you doing there?"

"Making a date."

"In the monastery?"

"Oh, that. Waiting to see if the world would end at the end of the millennium."

"Did it?"

She shrugged. "Maybe."

"So when it didn't end, why did you stay there?"

"It was good enough for Leonard Cohen."

"That was a Buddhist monastery."

"The Buddha doesn't have a monopoly."

Our orders arrived. Auntie ended up with a deep-fried cheeseburger and a litre of Coke.

"These restauranteurs are very traditionalist," Auntie said, swallowing half her shake and attacking her fries with chopsticks. I washed my salad with the water as we listened to the soulful, mournful jazz licks of Corea Chicku.

"Were you happy in there?"

"If I have freedom in my love and in my soul am free, angels alone that soar above enjoy such liberty, babe. How about you?"

"What about..."

"HitlerDemon? It's been ten times as long as I was actually afflicted with him."

"Why didn't you call?"

"Nothing to say. Maybe I had something worth saying -- if I was someone else."

She hunched down in my ski shell and glared balefully out the window until her sundae arrived.

"But enough about me," she said, licking the inside of her ice cream glass. "What are you doing?"

"Consulting. Technical writing. I got a grant to do a book."

"Oh? What kind of book?"

"Intellectual property research."

"I thought you were writing the Great Canadian Novel."

I bobbed my chin vaguely.

"Well? What happened?"

"I kept getting partway in and losing interest."

"That happens to all writers. Alfred Bester--"

"Bester was creating the cyberpunk genre -- sixty years ago. He had all the space he wanted. Now it's all autovoyeurism."

"Which is good enough for Woody Allen?"

"Woody Allen is a brilliant autovoyeur. I'm just a Christmas cracker. I feel insecure in the language. I don't feel like I know what I'm talking about."

"Nobody is secure in language anymore. Not since we stopped forcing Latin on preschoolers."

"I do feel that way. I do feel like most of the big names have no style. That authors are not required to develop economy and style because it would cut page counts and page counts sell. John Brunner and Ron Goulart and Robert Sheckley turned out dozens of novels under 300 pages and I enjoy those more than 600 pages of James Ellroy. Not that I don't like Ellroy -- I'd just like him more if his books were in better shape. Him and Sara Paretsky and Larry Elmore and... They're soft! I'm not saying I'm any better, but they've been doing it a lot longer... You know what I'm saying?"

Auntie brushed a stray french fry off my coat. "I didn't read much at the monastery. Let's get the bill and get out of here."

"You get the bill from her. I have to go to the ladies' room."

One stall had a coat draped over the door and I heard voices. I pressed at the other, which was also locked. I leaned against the white tile wall and checked myself out in the mirror. Not bad. Been worse. Exercise routines were starting to show even if my body needed a lot more work. My waist definitely curved in.

The door to the handicapped stall opened. A hawk-nosed woman with soft, plump silver curls and wet brown eyes held the door open for me. I reflexively said, "thank you" as I walked by. When I was finished in the stall I realized the people next door were out and the silver haired lady was also in the one meter by two meter space for entry and hand-washing. I thought of leaving without washing my hands.

I waited. The outer door closed. I came out to find two old ladies peering anxiously at the sink, which was full of bubbles. "These drains are so slow," said the newest old lady. She ran water into the basin and splashed over the bubbles. "I don't know why they make them so slow." She dried the counter with a brown paper towel. The original old lady made disapproving noises while applying a stumpy cranberry lipstick.

Eventually I was allowed to the sink, where I washed my hands with unusual care under their matronly stares. "Here you go," said the original old lady, handing me two pieces of paper towel."

"Thanks. I hate the air blower."

"So do we. Do you need another paper?"

"No, thank you." I handed her the used paper towel and exited.

"Where the hell were you?" Auntie said. "I thought you left without me."

© Gabrielle Taylor 1998-2002
published by Shad Muegge
all rights reserved


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Cockluck Part 6

Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck" | Part 6 | Postmodern Declaration

Part 6 | Postmodern Declaration

"Hi Fort, it's me..."

"...?"

"Oh I'm sorry, I always forget the time difference. I usually just, you know, type to people in other countries. Not phone."

"..."

"I was worried. I know you're nowhere near New York or DC but... I miss you so much. I like that shirt. When are you coming home?"

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Cockluck Part 7

Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck" | Part 7 | The Correct Attitude

Part 7 | The Correct Attitude

When one lives alone, as I have been since Fort went to Casablanca, one is immediately aware of another person in one's space. It was just as disorienting as thinking about the day before. It had the hyperreal quality of a sickness dream. I was not here; I was not here. I was still stuck in a dream where I was typing the same thing over and over but could never read the words. In the dream there was someone behind me; sometimes I was taking dictation and sometimes I was correcting an incompetent. I was not here; I was not here.

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