camus sketch

for what i'm told are as many as five people, some skit i wrote when i was a kid in college:

The Tragic and the Trivial
A Monologue

Hey Hey Hey, Al baby, Al maybe, uh no you’re Albrit, Albert, Al-Bert! Yea that’s ok kiddo I like your name, I’ve read all your titles, never got through the books though. What’s this? Oh yea? Well finish it then show it to me, what are you a slacker or somethin’? That’s ok kid I’ll just proof read it for ya. You never were too good at spelling.

“The only choice remaining is the time to die”. That’s brilliant kid, how did you come up with that one? Must have drew straws right? That’s how your buddy, that goofy guy with the glasses, John? Jean. Oh sorry, that’s how Jean Paul comes up with his titles. You two must be working off the same dustbin.
‘The time to die’, that’s beautiful, think you’ll get around to finishing the book, or should we call it done with the first sentence?
You must have done some real thinking to come up with that one, some real manly thinking huh? No drawing straws for this crew, you must have drew something really graphic and neolistic like stones with things etched in ‘em. Things like ‘the choice of when to get a haircut’; or ‘the choice of when to dine’. That must have been the original right? The choice of when to dine? Then you thought, naw, that doesn’t sound deep contemplative enough, I should change it to ‘the choice of when to diet’, no ‘the choice of when to die’!

Tray Magnifique? Tray Magnifuct. Al how many times do I gotta tell you to stop drinking when you write, it only gets you depressed. I read that book you buddy John wrote, ‘Nausea’, good title. If I didn’t know him I would have thought it was just a bad joke, but knowing him makes the joke just a teeny bit funnier. I don’t know why you hang out with him at all anyway. Does he have any redeeming qualities, besides getting people really depressed, a craft you seem to want to share with him.
I mean, it sure is a bummer, all the good bars having been destroyed by the war and all, and all the cool chicks having been raped by the nazis, but is it really necessary to glorify the fact that we intellectuals get the bottom rung of the babe scale? I guess truth doesn’t hurt enough right? You and old John Boy gotta broadcast it around the world. “The French are a bunch of losers” thus spake John And Al.

Why don’t you go back to limericks man, you had some pretty funny ones. I liked the one about the old guy and the rock, old man syphilis, sillyfoot? Symbiosis? Semiotic? Symbolic? Totally man, I really dug that one. What a moron man, pushing that stupid rock up the hill after it’s rolled down so many times. Give it up I say. Well, if he was in purgatory have him come over here and have a brewsky, might as well wait it out like the rest of us poor slobs.
You gonna get this round or are you waiting for a cheque from your publisher still? Do not give this man credit, he’s waiting for a cheque from his publisher. Wait on little fellar, I could picture the poor guy trying to proofread the thing, hope there’s no sharp objects present. Then again you guys aren’t really into objects, are you? It all ‘phenomenology of some feeling I had which can’t be confirmed or denied but some old Greek fag wrote about so must mean something’. Mysteries of the unknown- a redundancy to keep a bunch of joker’s heads up their collective asses for generations.
Why not phenomenology of a decent order of French toast? You know Albert, French toast, pain perdu. Malareusment mon pain est perdu. Je suis triste. Or how bout ‘phenomenology of a lap- dance’? That’s something everyone can enjoy. Oh I’m sure it has a happy ending, all your stuff seems to work itself out, but I don’t think anybody could live through the whole thing to get to this happy ending.
You should make it a chapter title, highlighted in bold letters, so when people open the book and see the stuff like you’ve got here on the first page...well you’ve only gotta see the first page man, I tell you it’s a one page masterpiece. You could leave all the rest of the pages blank and no one would ever get to them...
Oh I’m sorry, I’m not nauseating you or nothing am I? Oh yea that’s right, where you come from, I guess that’s a pretty good thing. I bet old Jean’s got a big trough set up in the living room for people to have nausea parties and puke their guts out at. I read one of his sentences once, while taking a dump, he’s worse than that kid Ferlingheti. Somebody should give him some punctuation for Christmas. Here I’ll make a little note, under ‘S’, Sardine, Jean Paul Sardine, crams more words in a sentence than a can of sardines, give him a few pages of commas, and periods. Especially periods.
Maybe I should give him a just one big period for Christmas, he could write a big book about it, call it “All and Everything”, no wait, Gurdjieff already did that one, how about “Being and Nothingness”? He’s working on it? You’re kidding. What a wild guess, what a wanker.
I’m sorry, I know you like the guy and everything, and I know he really attracts the babes so you’ve got to like at least what’s about him, but Al, really, suicide is better than trying to talk to the guy. It reminds me of how good it would be to be dead. ...
You’re leaving? Man it’s still early; you still never told me a limerick... that’s not a limerick. Hey come on no nasty stuff you owe me a limerick... you alright to drive? I don’t want you running into any brick walls or anything. That car of yours sucks. Here why don’t we change cars for the night?
Great... hey watch out the tires are kinda bare. Oh well too late. He’ll be fine; he’s a philosopher. Who’s getting the next pitcher? Me of course, sure, nobody else is here. That’s funny, the place was packed when I started talking. Deadbeats poets. Who needs ‘em? Not I.

so little to say, so much time

-ever since i 'died' the last time in 2003, i promised to stick around no matter what. my long dead baba came to me and let me know: 'the doorway you go through to the other side determines your afterlife. if you go through in chaos and grief, that's where you end up'. so here i've been the last decade. i don't mind anything, i don't want anything. i am alive, but my purpose has long ended. it's nice. it really is. life has never been so 'nice'.

-art strike, not like you'd notice. i used to burn with ideas, and i'd scribble them down on anything. i'd rip posters off posts and scribble my deep thoughts. but that was back when i thought life was somehow 'fair'. that if i had the best ideas they would somehow win. i spent half my life starving myself, suffering, wandering the streets like a madman, because i thought that my ideas were important. now i know that my best ideas can't compete with the worst ideas by someone with money behind them to present them in a flashy fashion. i thought, of course incorrectly, that i could bring a brilliant idea in on a scrap of paper and it would be greater than a terrible idea with a flashy presentation. i know better now. so now i don't starve and punish myself trying to create brilliant ideas. now i realize i'm a slave like my father before me. that my greatest aspiration would still make me a slave. so now i don't try to be clever for anyone but my wife, and sometimes my own amusement. i vaguely miss art, but it had nothing to offer me, so to hell with it.

-i sometimes follow politics but only like people follow sports, i don't believe we can make a difference any more than we could make our team win by buying merch and cheering. if anything, sports are less rigged than politics. sure the big market team has to make the playoffs, but politics is worse than the cfl- heck there's still 8 teams in the cfl. politics is a joke next to that- there's only two teams and it's still rigged.

-we're probably in something like the matrix, but it's impossible to see what. something is living off us. don't you think it's strange we spend so much time asleep? red pill, blue pill, i forget which pill was which, all i know is that the people who come closest to knowing self medicate.

-i ended this blog because no one reads it. i started this blog because i published a book. i thought writing might be better than performance because you wouldn't have to sell yourself as much, just write good work and cash the cheques. i was wrong, you have to sell yourself more because writing is inanimate. bad idea, oh well. it wasn't my first.

The Jazz Bunny.

The Jazz Bunny:
This story is a story of the greatest moment of someone’s life, and I didn’t even have to witness it. I wouldn’t want to witness the greatest moment in the ‘Jazz Bunny’s’ life. But I was there shortly after; I may have been the first to hear it. And here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the ‘Jazz Bunny’ story.
‘Mike, Mike, I just had the greatest experience of my life.’
‘Hi Darren.’
‘Hi Mike, how are you?’
‘I’m fine Darren. How’s about you?’
‘Um, I just had the greatest experience of my life.’
‘You don’t say?’
‘Really, I did.’
Winnipeg is not a very trendy place. Where we were standing at that moment was a place called Osborne Village, in the main circle by River and Osborne. As far as Winnipeg went, I was in a cultural Mecca. The emperor wore no clothes at River and Osborne. There’s nothing about Osborne Village that a tourist driving through would think would be a reason to stop, but for Winnepegers, this circle where the skids sold crack, was our Eiffel tower. I was at the foot of our Eiffel tower in front of a man brandishing a saxophone in a full-length bunny costume. I remained cool, and asked him to explain what was so amazing about his recent experience.
‘I was busking, right at this spot, an hour ago.’
‘Yes.’ Darren was the worst thing that ever happened to a saxophone since it’s invention by Adolf Sax one hundred and fifty years earlier. And that’s saying a lot. That he had created a character for himself; ‘The Jazz Bunny’ made it alright some how. You expected the worst sax of your life from ‘The Jazz Bunny’ and he delivered. This story couldn’t take place anywhere else; not even in Portland Oregon are they so strange, as strange as they are there. We ate and fucked our cousins in Winnipeg too, but our solitude is worse than Stalingrad. Portland is near California and its Californiacation as I’m told. Our solitude is Siberian in Winnipeg.
‘I was playing here just an hour ago, and a beautiful woman came up to me, a business woman, all in black.’ I could barely listen already, I was so envious. As I’d never been with a woman who had ever washed herself without taking it all the way, never mind the levels of cleanliness one would have to build, to be believable in a business suit with all it’s confirmations of status and hygiene. Not every mad woman with two or three hundred dollars can walk out of a store carrying a powersuit on their body. They must have been powersuit before they walked in there. Darren understood, I understand, women know this very well and agree, if with nothing else.
‘She stood and watched, this beautiful business woman, she really liked my act’. There he stood, this thirty year old horrible saxophone player with coke bottle glasses and a full length gray bunny costume, telling me a woman I would never be worthy of looking at had enjoyed his performance.
‘She put a five dollar bill in my case.’ This was back when they still had one and two dollar bills. That she bypassed these other denominations and went as far a five-dollar bill was incredible, I unconsciously touched my pocket to see if I even had a five-dollar bill.
‘And I thought that was it myself, and I would have been happy. I mean I don’t usually get such attention.’ Of course he didn’t get such attention from anyone for anything. Of course he was lucky the cops didn’t lock him up for depraved attention grabbing and aural rape, he was lucky he didn’t get that kind of attention. ‘But she stuck around. And then she wanted to buy me dinner. And I said sure thing.’ I was long gone. Repulsion and envy, he was such an embarrassing figure, and he was far more fortunate than me in that moment.
‘We went to ‘Carlos and Murphy’s’ (an Irish-Mexican pub still in operation) and she bought me a beer and chicken nachos.’
‘Not just regular nachos?’
‘Like I said, the greatest moment of my life. And not just a regular beer, a Carona!’
‘Not just a pint of Canadian?’
‘The greatest moment of my life.’
‘Well congratulations.’
‘Where are you going? There’s more.’
‘There can’t be. I’m stuffed with envy already.’
‘You haven’t heard the best part.’
‘Sure I have. Five dollars, beautiful woman, chicken nachos and a Carona, I got it, congratulations.’
‘She went down on me.’
‘What?’
‘At the table.’
‘In broad daylight?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was she insane?’
‘Who cares?’ pause.
‘She’s in a powersuit.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re in a bunny costume?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s performing oral sex.’
‘Yes.’
‘While you had chicken nachos and a Carona?’
‘Yes.’
‘That she paid for?’
‘Plus five dollars.’ Pause.
‘A beautiful woman in a powersuit went down on a geek with a saxaphone in a bunny costume in the middle of a busy restaurant in broad daylight while he ate chicken nachos and drank Carona.’
‘Yes!’
‘Go to hell.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘I know you are, that’s why you can go to hell.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s not just the greatest moment of your life, you the Jazz Bunny. That would be the greatest moment of anyone’s life. A millionaire couldn’t have a better greatest moment.’
‘I know.’ And he giggled like a thief.