Midnight Jolt Run

There are days in which the endless insanity rolling through my mind spills out onto the sidewalk and people around me are suckered into asking me:  Chris…what the fuck?  Well, to help explain some of that fuck, allow me to introduce:

A List of Personal Memes: Part 1

“Marple” – Definition:  The colour of the sky in the old 1970′s Spiderman Cartoon.  Reasoning:  The animation director, Ralph Bakshi, invented this colour after injecting liquid LSD under both his eyelids, snorting the ground up ivory of a woolly mammoth’s tusk, and forcibly swallowing seven litres of uncooked fortune-cookie dough one terrible evening.  The resulting vomit was used in many of the background shots as paint.  When asked why he coined the colour “Marple” Ralph said that it was the sound the vomit made as it ejected itself from his mouth and landed on the tile of the restroom  in a downtown Toronto police station. Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas Markham had a habit of completing circuits.

When he was nine years old, he fell from his tree-house and became momentarily suspended between two high-voltage wires running from the alley to an electrical transformer.  The jolt had been enough to stop his heart for almost a minute, and his mother’s CPR practice had been the thing that saved him after those terrifying fifty two seconds.  He never told his mom that it was more interesting than it was scary.

In High School he became known as the Mad Scientist.  Undeniably brilliant, (and terrifyingly fearless) he would often tinker with electric motors while they still ran, slap patch cables together with the wires hanging out of his mouth, and had been on the receiving end of no less than three lightning strikes.  None of these accidents, experiments or coincidences were fatal, of course, and despite the grey hairs on his parents and teacher’s heads, he always shrugged the events off as “not that big” or “safe enough”.

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There’s a lot of talk about Big Government in the media these days.  Health care, war, education, economic protection, and of course, how all of it is either good or bad.  I’ve heard the word ‘communist‘ used more readily and fluently (and fraudulently) than any year post Cold-War Cool-Off, the ideas of Socialism, Democracy, Capitalism and Freedom hacked to pieces and represented by all sides of every debate, and have seen irony of ironies as people argue, protest and wage rage-fuelled wars against the very ideas they claim to uphold.  What a load of epic bullshit.  And while it is easy to pick on the Right Wingers of the World right now due to the collapse of the economic stability they crave as a reason to toss off the shackles of oppressive rule (imagined or otherwise), this is something we are all guilty of doing. Of complaining about.  At one time or another, we have all bitched about someone with authority getting in our business, and we think it would be better if they didn’t.  Well, I’m sorry people, but as a collective species, right and left, up or down, vertical or horizontal, none of us have any fucking right to complain, because we all need our babysitter.

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I read some good shit from the White House yesterday.  Ahh, to be a political speech writer…

loved or hated, at least you get a solid paycheck and someone else’s neck on the chopping block when the book burners and critics come calling.  Cherry jobs like that don’t just come along every day, and you certainly don’t get to them by writing about Snape and Dumbledor’s backstage sex romps or debating Twilight VS Hellsing!  Hell no!

The message that the great Super-Obama, his underlings and his team of fanfiction.net forbidden writers have come up with is a good one, nonetheless:  Don’t give up, do your best, and use the Education System to your full advantage, because you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you end up as a Wal Mart Greeter at the age of thirty.

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-     For the last couple weeks of Summer, (this being a relative term in Calgary) I have been pleasantly surprised by how many times I have been proved wrong.  One example in particular was that out of the several hundred homeless people that I’ve passed in these warm, moderate months, I’ve only ever had one ask me for a bus ticket or some change.  My error is in thinking that same old line I’m sure plenty of us use when we’re out walking about and see some poor old scruffy soul.

Oh, God, another beggar.  He’d better not ask me for anything.

Of course, when the poor souls (or maybe just more enlightened souls who don’t give a crap about what I consider to be important in society) just mind their own business or smile and nod politely, my first thought is to think the next one probably will instead of hey, maybe I’m being a dickwad. Read the rest of this entry »

A Manifesto in 3 Parts:  I Kill Giants.

Oh Lord, give me a Sword.

I remember very vividly the night that God listened to my very first, honest to Jesus Joltloving Christ prayer.  I wish I could say it was a dark and stormy night, but in reality, the only dark and stormy were in my heart, and the night was the third most beautiful winter night I have ever experienced.

The second most beautiful was a night I drove down to the graveyard and said hello to some old ghosts.

The most beautiful night was when SkitZ, Hooze and I went out and lay under the pin-needle array of the northern lights that seemed to rain down in a surreal hologram.  Read the rest of this entry »

1. Publish.  = Unfortunately started, but not yet quite there.  I have a killer couple of stories ready, including one I’d like to start sending to some magazines and publishers around town.  Who knows…
2. See what 200 km/h fees like. = 4:37am June 21, 204km/h.  Fucking terrifying, but undeniably amazing.
3. Get my new coat = Found a custom leather shop that will do it, now I just need to design it…
4. Class 6 licence. = Proud ‘rider since October 08.
5. Read all of the Dark Tower. = Finished earlier this month.  Loved it, thought the ending was great (some people don’t for some reason) and even managed to score copies of the comics and side-stories to enjoy along the way.
6. Put at least 500 km on my bike. = While I’m certain I meant my mountain bike, the weather has been far too nasty this year to do so.  Instead, I will lie and say I meant my new motorcycle, which I have put on almost 2000 km on. 
7. Flamell Cross tattoo = Yes, thanks to my wonderful sister, and it is PERFECT.
8. Dull my sword. = Sadly, not much opportunity here, though I have managed to damage a few of the fittings.
9. Sort out the last 2 years of internet downloads and trash the crap I’ve collected. = The ongoing saga continues.
10. 10 more goals for 2010

1. Get back to my ideal weight and keep it off all winter
2. Build a shed and deck, or at the very least stairs and a parking pad.
3. Read a book a month
4. Write in this Blog every week
5. Teach my son a new word every week once he learns to talk
6. Road Trip to Vegas with whoever wants to come along.  Motorcycles required.
7. Update Studio Shinnyo and remake the OWW.
8. Publish, Publish Publish!
9. Learn basic ASL
10. Plot 10 more scurvy things to do in the 2011 era

Can’t wait. 

I have signed up on Twitter, though I honestly don’t know why.

It’s a strange trend these days.  People text instead of e-mail, they e-mail instead of write, and they write instead of discuss.  There’s a huge inverted food-chain happening with our thoughts, dreams and ideas, where the simple, quick and relatively meaningless flotsam and jetsam streaming from your brainmeats gets first priority and top marks, while the hard work, deep thinking and heavy meanings take back seat and wait for lightning to hit or lotteries to be won.

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“Come…dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg…dry your eyes…”

I’ve often said that the greatest thing I’ve ever done was to mash my fingers against the keys of an old Microsoft keyboard. To write about the epic and sometimes petty worlds created by my sleep-deprived brain and wonderful, sugar-sweet friendships.

Other times, my greatest moments include saying things like ‘I Do’, or ‘Amen’. In all these things, however, it is the act of creation that ties them together.

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Finally, as promised, here are a few pics of the new house.  More as we go!