January 2, 2004
Resolutions for The Year of Mingus
1. I resolve that 2004 will be The Year of Mingus. It has to be. If it ain't, I'll be living in a box behind Dick Castrati's van about the same time next year.

2 . I resolve to take the one and only shot that I'll ever be able to afford in terms of time and money at making a living as a writer. That means becoming a published poet and that means selling Nunt like a crackwhore sells crack. It means a lot o work and it means the possibility of making a fool of myself on a national level, but I see no other way to fulfil this dream. For more on my obsession of the year, check the mission statement.I resolve to work as hard as possible to ensure that when the book launch comes around in September, I don't fuck it up and that somebody doesn't end up with 1500 copies sitting in their basement. That means holding unique readings, it means hand-mailing copies of the book out and it means unabashed media whoring. Cause at some point, a fucking poet in this country has got to make a living writing.

3 . I resolve to drink 10 % less. Gotta start somewhere.

4 . I resolve to tell the Folks that I write poems and articles that might make them wish I had starred in a home movie with Paris Hilton instead.

5 . I resolve to smoke 50% less.

6 . I resolve to do my part to ensure that George W. Bush and Goebbels and the rest of the USS don't get back into power. Cause if you thought George did whatever the fuck he wanted in the first four years, wait till he don't care about getting reelected. Come on Clark, or come on Dean.

7 . I resolve to fuck 66.7 % more in an effort to become 66.7% more sane.

8 . I resolve to put on the gasmask and the American flag diaper yet again when it is called for. I resolve not to be intimidated by police or lawyers.

Don't Vote Bush, Vote Nunt.

9. I resolve to masturbate 18% less.

10 . I resolve to finish that fucking movie. If you know what I'm talking about, you know what I'm talking about.

11 . I resolve to smoke more weed. This seems like an intelligent substitute for cigarettes and alcohol.

12. I resolve to change my appearance in order to properly reinforce what Tourette says. Truly, I'm far too pleasant looking to be a drunk psychotic Canuck poet.

13. I resolve to address my superiority complex, my doppleganger complex and my hidden underground bunker complex. I resolve to address vigourous egoism and break myself on the Promethean wheel.

14. I resolve to resolve the triage of Chloe, Colette & Nat. I resolve to break this resolution often and with heated passion. Six tits in hand is worth two brown bush.

15. I resolve to see LitSLAP to a decent cut and cut it into a decent trailer and take a shot at turning it into a real show.

16. I resolve to write a new book, or at least lay down the hard structure of a new book, entitled The Book of Enoch. Gonna need something to follow up the blistering success or mind-numbing failure of Nunt.

17. I resolve to keep on top of what Paul Martin is doing, judge him in an intelligent way and offer constructive criticism.

18. I resolve to realize that time is ticking away. People who do interesting and amazing things with their lives often have a single moment early in their lives that sets them on the path they want. I resolve to believe that I have found a path to that single moment and I resolve to follow it as far as it goes.

19. I resolve to write a haiku sephirot and use my words to seduce an engaged woman.

20 . I resolve to get some sort of religious edict issued against my work. Or at least a blistering critique that starts out something like ... "Mr. Tourette has done for poetry what planes did for the World Trade Centre..."

21. I resolve to do some incredibly stupid things, to risk pariah status, to put on a big fucking show, to bring something new to Canadian writing, to bust the year wide fucking open, to shrug a lot, to start more fights, to piss in more faces, fuck more love more hate more live harder make a name shame a name sleep less earn something for these bags under my eyes get rid of that ghost forever get smarter, get harder get farther. And then, have a laugh and a drink and a smoke with old friends when it all caves in and the world hooks this site up with 'spectacular failure' and make bigger plans, more ridiculous plans, and follow them through again.

2004. The year of Mingus. Like watching a car wreck before your eyes.

Yeah, that sounds fucking great


Janyaary 1, 2004
Lucky to Have Vision
After that kind of drunk, I am having a hard time talking and walking, let alone posting an intelligible thought to this site. With brilliant resolutions. And obsessions. Tomorrow. Happy day.

I would resolve to quit drinking, but why start the year off with a big greazy lie.

Although I will resolve to only drink caesars OR rum and coke OR red wine from now on. These three liquor nights are getting to me.

December 31, 2003
Going Out Sexy
Inspired by a pair of crackpot co-workers who regularly take acid on the job and have sex with llamas, I took an inkblot test today. Amazing what such a test reveals about one's subconscious! Apparently, my subconcious mind is driven first and foremost by Sexuality. Shocking! Unbelievable! Donkey Punch!

Or, as the test said:

The world is a sexy place for you - your erotic self leads the way. Whether this is because you're presently in a great physical relationship or simply want one, you are much more aware of the sexual undertones in situations than most people.

This heightened focus, coupled with your vivid imagination, can make you more likely to have original - at times risqué - interpretations of things that other people might see as innocuous.

Your subconscious is telling you that you are very much alive, and have a great deal of passion to bring to life.

This is a great surprise. I find it difficult to believe that my focus, nay, my entire being is driven by sexuality. Could this be true? Distraught over the momentous ramifications that this might have for my daily life, I decided to rigourously examine some of my writings from the last year. I found that I did discuss matters of sexuality a fair bit and that the writing on the site did indeed favour certain words. For example, I found the following words were used more than once:

fuck: 630 uses
ass: 223 uses
cunt: 49 uses
cock: 59 uses
sex: 32 uses
hammer: 14 uses
flip her over: 8 uses
drill: 6 uses
porn: 6 uses
polygamist: 4 uses
donkey punch: 3 uses
masturbate: 0 uses

The results of the language test were an absolute shock to me. After the search results came in, I lay around my basement suite in a sort of pornographic stupour, feeling Catholic guilt creep in. Was I really such a Freudian bastard? Was I really so focussed on humping? Was I naught but a sexbeast of burden?

I decided to return to the search. I wanted to know what other words obsessed me. Surely sex didn't rule all my thoughts. What about the daily issues? What about god and America and George W? The results were interesting:

writing: 152 uses
America: 110 uses
death: 87 uses
god: 84 uses
drinking: 101 uses
religion: 7 uses
Bush: 52 uses


I wasn't sure whether or not I should be happy. There was more fuck in my writing than anything else, but there was more writing than cock or cunt. What did that mean? I flipped her over barely beat religion and god and death still didn't equal the ass on Nunt. America hammered the polygamist, the donkey punch, and just edged out drinking. Bush was a major factor, but really, that could just as easily have been a sexual thing. I decided to press on with the search in an attempt to humanize the results. Where, by god, were the people?

nat: 178 uses
chloe: 137 uses
colette: 39 uses
sweaty: 19 uses
marvin: 17 uses
Assman: 14 uses

And therein lay the answer. Numbers don't lie. Words do, but the numbers don't.

Whatever it does, this little test makes tomorrow's list quite an easy task. Every year on the first of January, I write out a list of current obsessions to go along with my list of resolutions. The list of obsessions seems to be a good exercise for writing, and it is always interesting to look back and compare. Ten years ago I was obsessed with God, Marriage, The Future, Immortality, Poetry, Love and Nat. And this past year, apparently, I have been obsessed by ass and fucking and writing and drinking and death and America and Chloe and Nat.

Many things have changed. Some things have not.

After some reflection on the old list, and with some trepidation, I searched for one last word. When the results came in, I found that I breathed a soft, involuntary sigh of relief. I mean, it wasn't any higher than fucking or writing, but thank christ it beat death and drinking.

love: 118 uses.

And so, a happy new year to all. It's gonna be a wild motherfucker.

December 30, 2003
Democracy in Action
There are few places on the planet that are more fucked up than good old Serbia. In the last few days Serbians elected political parties openly headed by men who are on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity, including Slobodan Milosevic. Remember him? Well, he just won a seat in the new Serbian parliament. Yup. He's a duly elected official of the Serbian people. The fact that he may have some difficulties showing up in parliament because he may be locked away for the rest of his life seems to have no bearing on the voting populace. What can you do? Read the article, I suppose, and try to understand why people would elect someone that is almost certainly going to be convicted of attempted genocide.

All is not lost, of course. There are four democratic parties who could form a coalition and keep the Nationalists in the minority, but it will be a real struggle to make that happen. The alternative, if they fail, is a majority party run from a prison cell by a 'warmongering clown' who seems to base his political strategies on Hitler's Mein Kampf. Vojislav Seselj is currently sitting in the Hague for allegedly directing ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia. Apparently, the things he learned from Hitler's treatise include [as quoted from the Guardian]:

[ v]iolence as a means of political struggle and the preference for the big lie.Always exaggerate, make the lies as whopping and as lurid as possible, repeat ad nauseam. The dirt, or at least some of it, will stick.

Big lies and big violence. Is this a surprise? Has this changed significantly from the time of Hitler to the time of GW Bush? Don't we expect lies out of our politicians? Don't we accept it, even from the ones we love? Especially from the ones we love? There are plenty of people out there who love Bush, who love Slobodan, who love Ralph and who love Saddam. We hear what these leaders say, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, and like a pack of stupid animals, we listen and we learn and we accept it as truth. The same thing happens to us as children, when we sit in church and pay attention to which level of hell we'll go to for which sin, no matter how ridiculous the whole thing really seems.

This feeds into my new theory. The majority of humans are no better than dogs. We are no smarter, we have no further-reaching vision, we are easily trained, easily broken and we have no independent thought apart from our masters. Is there anything that makes us unique besides our opposable thumbs and our ability to communicate through a spoken language? Maybe our fear of death and our manufactured gods that protect us from that fear?

Is there anything that makes humans better than dogs? I'd love to know.

--- --- ---

pack of baying hounds
pursue the striped fox
they will not eat

--- --- ---


December 29, 2003
Extremists
A fellow at the IHT wrote an article about the three brands of extremists he thought were endangering world peace. He mentioned the fundamentalist Muslim organizations like al Qaeda, the ultraorthodox Israeli Zionists and the far right neo-con Christians in America. Click here for article.

The common link between these three groups is their fanatical belief in their religion of birth. It's quite apparent that the most dangerous warmongers on the planet are vehement Jews, Muslims or Christians.

I don't know why I am bringing this up. I am angry at the masses and their spectacularly stupid religions and I am unfocussed in thought ever since I saw Nat in the book store. Christmas has been a clusterfuck of absent gestures and sickness and meals with ghosts of the recently deceased.

I spent an hour in the mall with Chloe yesterday. She was returning something. By the end of it, I was so disgusted with the smell and the jostling and the look of nervous youth that I nearly punched a woman in the face when she cut in front of me. A woman. She was carrying shopping bags and was dragging her kid on a leash. She didn't see me. She was just one of many. She knocked my book out of my hand, and stepped on it. Her feet left mud on the cover.

She was wearing a cross and she was fat and her breath stunk of cigarette smoke. I bent to pick the book up and her leash snapped against my face. She noticed and apologized. She thought about offering to replace the book, but didn't. She said she was sorry, and she waited for me to accept her apology, and let her move on. I wanted to cave in her sweating brow with the spine of the book. I stopped for a moment, let the feeling wash over me and I looked her in the eye.

I said, "It is fine. Most people are no smarter than dogs. They are trained as infants, and as they become adults, they continue to do what they were trained to do by their parents. We have no foresight, no far reaching vision as a species. And your child will be as myopic and as clumsy as you are. Carry on, then, my blundering believer."

She stumbled away, her lips sneering, looking at me the way people do when the homeless ask them for change. There is no happy ending or moral to this story.

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