August 6, 2004
Terranization

Spent the better part of the night looking at the future Mingus tour mobile and discussing it with the Chief Mechanical Officer from Zygote. He tried, one last time, to talk some sense into me, and steer me towards purchasing a standard sort of car or truck, but I was having none of that. Because this vehicle seems to be the final, crowning piece of the promotional puzzle, the thing that says, yes, I am probably insane, but I am deadly fucking serious about this whole thing and I don't fucking care if nobody else in the entire country is as deadly fucking serious as I am about this, it is going to happen. I have two thousand copies of one of the most obscene books ever written and I am going to drive ten thousand miles to sell them all. It is happening this fall, and it is happening to Canadian writing, whether anyone likes it or not, and you can either get on board the train, get the fuck out of the way or get run down in the street like a dog.

The biggest question at this point is still the name of the tour, and what to write on the vehicle. I think the biggest contenders at this point are:

Tourette's Subversion Tour
Tourette's Poetry Blitzkrieg
The Poetry Tour de Force

What do you think, fearless readers? Fuck, there's a lot of lightning tonight.

August 5, 2004
Letters to the Yangtze

Buddha's been gone for over a week now, and I miss her buttered ass, that warm body in the bed that sighed and sweated and pushed up against me in the night.

Thinking about women after the sun drops, knowing that inevitably I'll be knocking on Chloe's door in the early hours and inviting myself in and apologizing and not bothering about the consequences. The last time I saw her, the night ended when she tried to take my head off with a forty ounce bottle of vodka. I showed up an hour late and she was pretty snapped already and we yelled about it all for awhile, mostly about what a shitjacket I was and how I wasn't going to go to a baptism with her for one of her friends, and it sort of escalated and eventually she told me that I was the worst thing that had ever happened to her and I should go straight to hell. I pointed out that hell didn't exist, that it was just manufactured by nun-porking priests to keep the flock in line and anyone who still believed in hell was a point-blank moron. Maybe it was the smirk that did it, cause I'm always grinning when I'm bashing the church, but she got this crazy look in her eye like she didn't know what to do and suddenly grabbed the bottle off the counter and went for the decapitation.

I saw it coming and yelled out holy fuck and caught her at the forearm and pulled the bottle out of her hand and held onto her for a bit until she stopped frothing. It took some time and she tried to head butt me for awhile, which would have been amusing if it weren't so clear that she really wanted to break my nose. I'm still not sure if it was all the vodka that got her so angry, or that I kept ridiculing the church or that maybe she was just tired of me always showing up shitfaced and late.

Three times, she has tried to kill me. Once with the vodka bottle, once with a bottle of red wine and another time with a Thelonius Monk record, which almost took my fucking head off. But I sort of got a thing for crazy women, and it's been too long since the buddha left, so it's just a matter of time until I show up there again, down on my knees. I figure I'll make it another couple of days. Probably Friday night is when I'll break, especially if me and Gander hook up for a bit of rum, sodomy and the lash. I just can't get enough of a woman who likes to take the bottle with her to bed and appreciates the taste of wine funneled down a man's thighs.

August 4, 2004
Cherry poppin' xtravaganzee

Thought I'd hit out the raving poets on a tuesday and break myself in, reading like. The usual nerves lead to the usual seven or eight double gin and tonics and i wound up talking, at length, to some homeless lady on the way home, and sharing a smoke with her and bordering on telling her that if she didn't have anywhere to sleep, she could always sleep at my place.

Wink. wink.

but i was smart enough to take one last pull off the ass-end of a burnt out uranium cooker and walk home alone and stare in the mirror and tell myself that it was better off by myself than drilling an unwashed forty-five year old trollop. even if she did smell a bit like cedar and maybe i could have asked her to crawl on top of me and pretend she was the all-consuming mother earth and lay that grassy snatch on my face and let me breath moss until i passed out.

fcucking smart like that sometimes.

the reading itself was ok. read nunto 35 to shocked applause. met some good young fuckers with a bent on for good words and drank enough gin and smoked enough cigarettes to remind myself that hell yes, eventually, it will be better than long nights of writing women that don't write back and reading comics by neil gaiman to make me feel better and thinking that maybe i can get past rainer maria rilke and into somebody that wrote something in this century that made sense.

but i'm not all that hopeful

for we are perennially fucked up
and if anyone has to hear that from mingus
who is six times more prenially fucked up
than most

were all fucked from here to barbados

yup

if only austin clarke were the president of the world


and if that don't make no sense, i don't care none
cuase i'm good and drunk

and rum
sounds like the best idea there ever was

August 3, 2004
Afrika Corpse

Not too long ago, I read a graphic novel entitled 'Fax From Sarajevo', by Joe Kubert. It told the story of a man, Ervin Rustemagic, who was trapped inside the siege of Sarajevo with his family in the early '90s. He attempted to get them out for over a year, using a fax machine to keep in contact with his many friends beyond the former Yugoslavian border. Some of his contacts were only a couple hundred kilometres away, but it was nearly impossible to even reach the suburbs. When necessary, such a feat was performed in an old car with metal plating welded to the sides, the occupants covered in layers of old comic books, which functioned as body armour. Every time Rustemagic made the trip, he came under heavy automatic rifle fire, even with his son and daughter in the vehicle. His home was destroyed and many of his friends and colleagues slaughtered.

One of the striking things about the faxes he sent during that period is the frustration with the international community. After finishing the book, I realized that the language mirrored the dialogue from the Sudan situation.

In both cases, horror stories about rape and mass murder surface, and the inevitable response from the world at large is: economic sanctions. For example:

The US and UK originally proposed threatening Sudan with an arms embargo and sanctions. But they were forced to back off in the face of opposition from countries such as Russia, China, Pakistan, Algeria and Brazil.

Instead of "sanctions", the security council will consider unspecified "measures" if Sudan fails to comply by next month. The resolution was adopted by 13 votes to 0, with China and Pakistan abstaining. Ewen MacAskill, July 31, 2004 The Guardian

The Sudanese government was given 30 days to call off its proxy killers or face unspecified punitive "measures" - but, mark well, not formal sanctions, not military force and certainly not a regime-changing invasion. And that only if the UN deemed the government to have made insufficient progress by September. Simon Tisdall, August 3, 2004, The Guardian

It is difficult to tell exactly what is happening in the Sudan at this point, as the government is not letting many journalists into the country. Some feel that a declaration of 'genocide' is simply another US oil grab , while others believe it is a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Refugee accounts are typically horrifying

"They came at dawn, at 4am. They came on horses, donkeys, camels and Land Cruisers. They burnt the houses and killed the men and many of the male children. I don't know if my husband is alive or dead." Mrs Mousa, Guardian

Maybe it is genocide, maybe it isn't. If it is, sanctions certainly won't stop it, as Mr. Rustemagic can attest. Only heavy armour and UN troops will break up that shit. Hopefully, if it is a case of genocide, the international community and the Americans aren't too battle -weary to engage in a war with a mere humanitarian basis. It is interesting that the only western country to send troops (200 commandos in nearby Chad) anywhere near this mess is the oft-derided France, which was villainized by the Americans for 'uncourageously' opting out of the Iraq war. Meanwhile, the rest of us sit and wait to find out if, oh yes, it was genocide. And holy fuck, is it possible that we are really so incapable of learning a goddamned thing from history, even it was just ten years ago?

What would you say, Mr. Rustemagic, what would you say?

August 2, 2004
Mo Grenades

For those Americans who pop by regularly, this will make no sense. For those Canadians who celebrated their origins on Heritage Day by drinking six Warsteiners, three Guinness, four Beefeater G&Ts and about six different shots of anisette flavoured liquors from various European countries, then you understand why Mingus ain't writing much today. It's a holiday monday and I am going to spend it lying on my back. With my hand down my shorts. Thinking about women from Europe. And Africa. And the far east. Truly, it's a wonderful country we live in, this mosaic of ours.

For the difficult to impress, check out the latest entries in the Summer Tournament of MegaEvil. Brilliant.






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