Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Traces / summer sketches (1)

There's no set rhythm to when the kink hits my hands. No warning. Typing one second and second two it's like a spider's having an epileptic fit over the keyboard. Always painful and sharp and sudden. Tingles afterwards, between tendon and bone, under knuckle and palm. Running cold water after the fit's done helps, as close to fucking freezing as possible. Running cold water and then a cigarette.

Cold water for jittery hands. Cancer cloud for jittery nerves.

~

I tried to keep a record this time, this summer and winter. Hardcopies and electronic. Scribbles on little notebooks, fragments on randomly named txt and rtf files. Sketches on graph paper and photographs of appropriate graffiti down by Toronto's graffiti corridors. 

Our first bad winter is almost six years in the wind. One lesson I've learned is to never keep complete records. Never keep complete logs.

The truest map is the territory itself. But the territory is playground to intelligences amorphous and apathetic and indifferent at best. Containing the territory is not....feasible. We tried the first time. I still don't know the price we paid.

For us, little mice scurrying between blades of grass, past predators winged and clawed and poison tongued, for us the best map is one kept in ideas and keys. Memory triggers, sense memories, fragments. Keys to doors and latches to windows, not the doors themselves. And never, never ever the mansions or the forest greens.

I'm not sure I'm explaining this right. I'm able to try to explain it at least....which means this is something I'm allowed to do. Hard to keep the rules in mind, sometimes.

~

This is turning into esoteric doublespeak when all I really needed to do was post a jpeg. The whys and wherefores matter, but here, the object of the discussion:


(the horns, sketch 5 of 17, original @ wall behind power station)


I've got one full SD card and two notebooks, from everything in summer. But half the images in the SD card are garbage. Took a backup snaps with the cameraphone (like this one) - grainy and low res and impossible to fucking read. Even with these the timestamps are garbled.

I'll go through the backups for now, and type up whatever's coherent and legible in the notebooks. Should keep me busy for the next few weeks or so. Analysis will have to be later...much later. I'll keep busy with this and I won't have to call Zoe and listen to her blank beautiful voice say no over and over again.

Maya doesn't know about this little side project, not yet. She won't like it, but I can't weather storms like her. I can't walk down the graffiti corridors alone, like her, live bait in tow. I'll record, just enough to remember. I'll re-learn the map, find a way to to survive the next winter. A place to hide, rest, and forget.

And then the story will loop. Over and over and over again.

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