August 19, 2003
Forbidden Insect/Major Appliance Love
Our fridge - a large yellow 70s monstrosity - makes this weird chirping noise. Occasionally (well, far too often) the backyard crickets are drawn to this noise. Actually, aroused by its siren song. So they come into the house to have sex with my fridge.

Now, when a cricket is horny, it rubs its legs together to make this VERY FUCKING LOUD SOUND and I try to chase them out of the house - the course of true love ne'er did run smooth - but the crickets are undaunted by my attempts to chaperone and they return to their elaborate fridge-mating ritual time and again.

So the other night the adorable girl who's the better half of the tow-headed adoptably-boyish lad who lives upstairs comes down, knocks on the door. Turns out they have a pet frog, for whom she buys - oh yes - crickets. As groceries.

The frog's groceries have escaped, she warns us. About a dozen of the little fuckers.

So I don't know if the insect currently humping my largest appliance came in of its own volition, or was in fact DELIBERATELY IMPORTED TO TORMENT ME.

Holy jesus fuck on a cracker.

chirp chirp chirp goes my kitchen. Right beside my bedroom. Right beside my side of the bed, in fact. CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP goes the happy, fridge-copulating insect.

Now, I'm a pretty liberal, tolerant guy. I mean, I think if a midget wants to have sex with a german shephard, get a website and go for it. But I draw the line at the unloly perversion that is cricket-major appliance love.

However, in the spirit of Buddhist compassion, I do spare a thought for the poor sexually-frustrated cricket, humping away at a freon compressor in a vain search for love.

August 11, 2003
All of my summer happened in the last 28 days.

The lantern making party, followed by Luminara and its magics. The cold, parking the car in James Bay and walking, americano in hand, for the sunset. A glow ring around the stroller as we navigate through tiny, spontaneous carnivals.

That week, swimming in Elk Lake, and a few days later the Commonwealth pool - I get a slight whisper of childhood fear on seeing the 8 year old bravos leap from the 10 metre tower, so of course I have to throw myself off the thing. 40 is the new 30 after all.

The next Saturday, sailing Indispensable from Sidney to the Inner Harbour for the Splash, and the following night the concert itself - Harry Potter score for the children and 1812 with cannon and fireworks for the big kids.

Yesterday, the party for Liam's 7th birthday, spilled pop and crushed chips and hot dogs and pinatas and small hard plastics to step on.

This morning I was up early, and left a sleeping Z so I could sneak off with Xoe to the closest Starbucks. Later, Liam and I go to the park to practice his bike riding, which at first finds him reluctant and whining and of course later ecstatic and beaming with self-pride. We go to the Piola as a reward, drink Italian lemonade (well, a cap for me) and play chess - when I go to pay, Caroline declines to accept my below-minimum interac charge and says "catch me next time." I love that we still live in a world of family businesses that trust regular customers to remember, days from now, "oh yeah, I owe you a cappucino and a San Pellegrino".

July 22, 2003
This weekend, by virtue of a meeting Monday and a "too hot to walk to the office" turned into 3 days. Saturday we had about a dozen friends over for wine and Luminara lantern-making, Sunday a meeting with the Coppermoon teamd and dinner on the boat with the ancestors.

A little melancholy these days - Dog Days I suppose. But my dream of a few months ago, Victoria as stop-over before the big European tour, seems dissipating. I pictured myself in '05 making huge coin in a big-name agency.

What's emerging is something quieter, more soulful, and perhaps more important, but I do feel a sense of loss for this silly, vain and superficial fantasy. Sigh. I know, why don't I just get the fuck over myself?

Backaworkie for Jordie...

July 11, 2003
The camera, an HP 318, is back from the dead. For the most part, this means catching up on a backlog of baby pictures: Xoe in the bath, Xoe asleep, Xoe looking at the flash go off.

But it is also the return of my photographic mind, thinking in snapshots, unrehearsed, casually composed in the throw-away effortlessness that is digital photography.

This, then; the library - the children get out books of wizards, dragons, haunted houses. Z finds a ridiculous picture book on Dracula, annotated hilariously with a ball-point pen. The labryinth - around the corner, laid in river stones on the boulevard. I teach Liam to listen to his own, quiet magics as we pace its serpentine course.

And this, the Piola, one of the real treasures of the neighbourhood (as I suppose is the labrynth). Tile floors, comfy chairs, big real frothy cappucino - I take the boys her, one at a time, to play chess and try exotic pop (San Pellegrino). Today there are chocolate pawns. I love the buzz and noise and family chaos of this place, that I know the names of the servers and the excellent menu and that it's coffee reading shopping dining visiting.

July 4, 2003
Like my metrosexual brethren, I'm defined by what I buy. Which is not to say that my for-here-grande-one-pump-mocha-americano makes me a Starbucks person, but rather the enterprising folks at Starbucks have, through diligent research, identified the way I look at the world and how I like my aesthetic and caffeine intake, and want to stand in the stream of money as it flows steadily away from me. Likewise the Gap, Aldo shoes, Bombay Sapphire, and Aveda.

This week's winner: Lululemon, by a Visa-crushing order of magnitude.

My first experience with Yoga was on what I laughingly refer to as my deathbed - the coma bed at Lions Gate Hospital in 1982. After a viral hand-grenade had detonated in my brain stem, and I had *seriously* freaked out my parents, my mind-body disconnect was at an all-time high.

My high-school drama teacher, Lloydd Burritt, who turns out is a famous composer, was early at my bedside, teaching me how to breathe. His almost daily visits were careful and patient instruction in Hatha and Raja Yoga, allowing my brain to slowly reconnect with my atrophying body. I think a large part of why I'm not still in that wheelchair is due to him. He apparently studied with Swami Vishnudevananda.

As the years have gone on, I've let the physical yoga lapse (but assimilated Raja so much into the way my brain works I don't even notice it anymore). But it's under the retail recoolification of Lululemon that's got me hankerin' for some stretchy, oxygenated, kundalini-wrigglin' Hatha.

Yes, I'm a bandwagon-hoppin' wannabe. And why the hell not? So the fuck WHAT if it's surfing next year and Tai Chi the year after that? Actually, hopefully it'll be surfing next month, but that remains to be seen based on a constantly-dodgy receivables situation. But anyway, what's wrong with trends that make you feel good about your body, make you sweat, get your hands dirty? If it takes messaging and branding and a spiffy outfit with a kick-ass logo to get people to live inside their flesh, well then dish me out somma dat - market-driven trend-whore that I am.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to change into my stretchy flat-seam pants (who wants seam rash?), unroll my mat, pop in my DVD, and find inner peace.

So there.

July 3, 2003
Last night I dreamt of a plane-crash in water, an interrogation of a much younger version of myself as Loki-the-trickster-god, and of being held captive by evangelical christians. Strange portents indeed.

Early this morning Xoe was talking in her sleep, little infant squeaks and purrs and chirps, with the occasional world-weary sigh.

As much as I love working out of the agency, with it's too-damn-sexy colour printers, and every Pantone book known to adkind, it's heartbreakingly difficult to leave Z and the baby every morning because I'm absolutely certain I'm going to miss her do something amazing.

Okay, I have copy to write...

July 2, 2003
Playboy vs. The Church of Satan
These are very similar brands, in a way - and I do think of them as brands. There's a frozen moment in my brandscape where these two institutions co-exist; it's one of ugly lamps and shag carpeting and shock value, Russ Meyer films and sex scandals and the word "naughty" in a pre-Benny Hill sort of way.

I equate these two largely because of the marketing genii behind them, Heff and Lavey, respectively. The both found a gold mine in the collective unconscious, tapping into the cherry-pop thrill of the big taboo. Both of these were kind of culturally *necessary* in their day. Hey, you *can* own your body / thought / morality / humor. For those born before the Revolution (pick one), their brains still gooey with sexism and guilt, smacking the pinata of Protestant Morality was entirely healthy. I almost resent the fact that I was born too late to be repressed, I missed out on all the hedonistic, iconoclastic FUN.

The bunny seems to have run its course though. Softer-core lad-mags (FHM, Maxim) have a hipper vibe, and apparently now that there's no pubic hair to see in the first place (anywhere), you miss nothing when the babes keep their g-strings on.

Playboy's iconography has been reincarnated as a mild-outlet for young teen girls, whose ownership of their budding sexuality has never been questioned. The bunny says "yeah, I'm 13 and sexy and commodified and powerful and screw you if you have a problem with that" while its rubbery applique adorns crop-top baby-tees and glitter-thongs.

There's still some kick left in ole Anton's territory though. An inverted pentagram, complete with goat, still turns heads in an ever-diminishing authentic punk-rock kinda way. It's almost refreshing. Of course, if you go to the CoS website and e-Commerce yourself a few enamel lapel pins ( I think of Mel Brooks as Yogurt in Space Balls - "Moichendising! Moichendising" ) I wonder how much you diminish that impact by invoking it? I saw pre-teens at the mall yesterday in "PornStar" tees, and another girl about 12 with "69" in athletic team numbers. The entropic composting of signal to noise.