dec 19 06

it was my mom's birthday. my nieces and i started putting out the christmas presents. when we were halfway done, we realized it wasn't christmas, but only my mom's birthday, so we started putting them back. some of them were shaped like giant gingerbread men, and wrapped in the shape of gingerbread men. when i went back downstairs, my sister had taken the tree. everything. including all the ornaments, the little rug that goes under it, and everything. i asked her why she took it, and she said she just wanted it. my mom let her take it. i was so disappointed, because now for christmas, all the presents just had to sit on a bare patch of floor.

if i remember all my dreams,
the time when i was sleeping
hasn't just disappeared

thunder bay

oct 30 06

my parents and i were in the far north. everything was cold, cold. there wasn't any food left. i agreed that they could cook me and eat me. i saw a guy whose head had been cooked and i decided i didn't want them to cook me and eat me after all. i tried to get my parents to come with me and leave to try and find food, but it was really hard for them to walk because their legs were being cooked slowly, and their muscles didn't work anymore. it was really scary and sad.

oct 19 06

we were at a party at angelo s's. he gave lachie some acid and then lachie did coke. his skin turned grey and bags formed under his eyes and it made him look really old all of a sudden, and everyone was really concerned about him.

i got home from tour and my boss immediately called me in to work. when i got there there were three workers in red shirts putting price tags on everything, and there was a big black cash register. they were pinning things up on clotheslines, and cooking food. i couldn't believe how different the store was when i got back, i'd only been gone for a few weeks. i didn't know why my boss bought a new cash register.

sept 11

i was in a city that felt like st john's but seemed much bigger - though i think it was sydney, or at least halifax. i was with some people, getting ready for a night on the town.

i knew of a party that i was really looking forward to attending. it was melissa's going away party. this was going to be the last time i'd ever see her.
on the way to the party, i met up with her on the road. she had a bag of cheap jewelery and we laughed about it for a while, as we walked down taylor street.
she said she had something to show me before she left. her tone was flat, it was like she was using up the very last of her anger and disappointment and resentment, on the way to forgiveness. it was a tired sort of anger. i started to realize where we were headed - first brook, this place me and melissa used to hang out when we were younger. it made me feel remorseful and nostalgic. so nostalgic it was almost tangible.

i was looking through a book like a program, i found it in the bag with the cheap jewelery. it was filled with pictures, and as i turned the pages, the pictures became recognizable. i started to cry, and just then i looked up and we were there. i saw those same pictures in black and white - pictures of me and melissa in all of the memorable moments we've shared together - huge, billboard sized photos, ranged along the valley and lit with floodlights.

in the castle, being chased by the scary guy i came upon this dead end room.


i chose big.



uh oh. big seems to mean that everything (except me and my team) was really really big. plus we were in a department store / grocery store. (back then they didn't exist. hello foreshadowing.)



we were there for a really long time. that meant we had to raid the freezers for food. eventually we made a car out of a wire. or maybe we stole it from the mice. it was good for avoiding the giant humans. we didn't want to be squashed or turned into experiments.



we tried to escape through a ventilation grate. i don't know if we made it or not.

sept 3 06

kolin from the upstairs was a priest. i was hanging out with him, and he asked me if i wanted to do his sermon that night. i said "yeah, sure" before i thought about it. so the time rolls around, i was in jeans and a t-shirt and i realized i knew nothing about the bible / had nothing to say to these people. i started crying because i knew i just couldn't do it. i just imagined a church full of people sitting there waiting for a priest to come out, but no one would. but there was nothing i could do. i went down later, and kind of, snuck in the side door to see what had happened, and kolin was there and a girl was there playing the guitar, and he was talking to her in front of the congregation. it actually looked kind of fun, and i felt bad for making such a big scene. but he had found someone else, and didn't want me to do it after that because i was clearly crazy.

sept 1 06

i was with ian, we were waiting for a wedding to start. the groom hadn't shown up yet, and the wedding was going to start whenever he came. ian and i decided to go get something he'd forgotten in north sydney, and if we heard from the groom, we'd rush back over. so when we were in NS, of course the groom showed up. ian decided that to save time, he'd just drive straight across the harbour, over the thin, newly formed ice floes. all he had to do was drive really fast. we ended up underwater. somehow we were rescued by someone. i was very very angry with ian for recklessly endangering my life, and he was very indignant about my anger.

my favorite

august 9 06

i was in an attic, and came across a whole family of people who were supposed to have died long ago. they might have been ghosts, but i didn't know. they convinced me to let them fly the plane i was supposed to be flying. they seemed like they knew what they were doing. the mother crashed the plane into something big, maybe a bus. i was very upset and i started crying, because how could i explain to the police that i let a ghost fly my plane, and therefore it was the ghost, and not me, that was responsible for the deaths of all of those innocent people.

aug 4 06

i was losing all my hair. my forehead was expanding, and my part was widening. i was upset. then i was on a starship, something like the death star from star wars. everything was going fine, until the people i was with figured out the malicious nature of our invitation to the star ship - our hosts ate people.

all of the food we'd been served was either people or it was plants grown from nutrients gotten from human bodies. we started wandering around, trying to act normal, while looking out for ways to escape. i passed by a giant ballroom, now dark, and thought it would be a great place to hide later.

somehow we made it to the surface of a planet and tried to escape. huge boulders were being shot into the sky and then exploding, raining shrapnel down upon us. shane was hit in the shoulder by a piece of the shrapnel. he was hurt by it, but it didn't do any serious harm. the rock was heavy but malleable, the chunk that hit him had an impression of his arm, even the grain of the fabric of his shirt. it was like metal clay. they weren't trying to kill us right away, just trying to frighten us and bludgeon us slowly to death.

july 1 2006
melissa had a baby and it got stolen. and then i put together a puzzle shaped like a giant clock.

july 9 2006
i was imprisoned on an island. with the help of strange mole-people, i escaped. trying to hide in the scrubby underbrush while wearing a bright red shirt was really difficult. and i had no where to escape to, since it was an island. the mole people were nice, though.

glenn and the sloth

may 22 2006

i was at the store and there were hundreds of people coming in and going out, and because of this, we ran out of something. my co-worker was a grumpy old woman. we left the store, and went to sackville. by the time i got to sackville i was no longer gone to get something for the store, but i was with a school group. i said to myself "well, i know my way around sackville, i don't need to stay with the group." but i totally got lost.

it was a huge place, and i went the wrong way and ended up on this big hill that was a park. there was litter everywhere, and it was damp and gross. i kept going, and found myself near the outskirts of town. i ended up finding donnie's dorm room, jack and kevin were there too. they were drunk and unhelpful, they wouldn't tell me how to find the rest of my group. they laughed at me because i got lost, which made me even more upset. i finally got in touch with the rest of tom fun (who were the group i was looking for by this point), and they gave me all sorts of confusing directions ("we'll be somewhere between 1618 and 1623 something street").

i went where they told me, and found myself in narrow narrow alleyways between tall bricky buildings. i went into a narrow hallway and the doors inside had numbers on them like they ones the boys told me to find. it ended up being a funeral or memorial service for a famous artist, or writer, or musician, who i'd never really heard of. ian was really upset that the guy died. there were tons of hippies there, all sad because this person died. they were mad at me for being late.

july 4 2005

there was this creature. it was bred from lions and panthers but raised by ducks. it looked like a fish, but it was vicious. i was with dave, climbing on crazy moss covered rocks, just to the right of kings road. we were looking for these creatures, as the waves broke on the rocks and splashed us with salty water. whenever we found one, it bit us. the rocks were very slippery, we had to be careful not to slip too close to the vicious creatures or into the harbour.

later, i am in music class. i don't know my class schedule or what our assigned projects are. val m. is in my class. the inbreds are there to teach a class. they want people to play songs with them. i don't get a chance to play a song with them, but albert plays 3 songs with them from their first album. i missed most of it because i was frantically trying to find my schedule.

i was in an airport, or film school (not sure which). i need to use the washroom, but they're all trick washrooms with no stalls. just toilets out in the open. i can't use them (obviously) and no one will tell me where the real washrooms are. everyone thinks this is funny.

august 2004

i was at my friend keith's house in south bar. he has one of those yards that is just a large lawn surrounded by trees. we were in his backyard and there were lots of us, all of our friends, but the mood was very sombre. i knew something was about to happen, but i couldn't say what. then, just at a certain time, we all went out into the yard and looked up. the sun was out, but it didn't hurt our eyes to look straight at it. as we watched, black spots appeared on its surface. they grew and grew, and eventually covered the whole sun. the world was in twilight. we went back inside, to wait.

----------------------------

there were these guys who kept stealing cars and putting them into my driveway, thinking it was all a great joke, and i wouldn't have the guts to stand up to them. i started threatening them with the cops, and i wrote down all the license plates.

i kept having these flash-forwards, into an alternate earth, where everything was dark, and there was water on the ground. built up on the surface of the place where i was, there were pillars of wood, with a trellis horizontally laid across them, covered in plants, vines. it was dark and creepy.

i was back in the present tense, talking to some people, marvelling at how quickly the tendrils of this one plant were growing around an old tin can.

then i was in the alternate world again, at the very end of things,. i heard a voice. it was coming from the plant. well, it was coming from the one bit of plant that wasn't rotten or dead. the water was a murky purplish brown, with debris floating in it. an eerie female voice was saying "i didn't understand. it's my nature to do this. why did it kill me? i didn't know i would bring ruin on everything. i'm sorry". and i saw a clump of the plants flying through the air really slowly, and finally it went into the water to drown itself.

i realized that the plant had taken over the world, shut out all the light, and tried to do what it was naturally inclined to do - that is, order all things for its optimum growing conditions, and force the extinction of all other species. something went wrong, and the effects of the changes were irreversible, and all life on earth would end soon.

we (the remaining humans) wandered off in a random direction, to try and find something that would keep us going a little longer, to postpone the inevitable.

september 13 02

did you ever have one of those dreams?
the moment your eyes open, it fades into nothing but a few blurry scenes?
and the whole rest of the day you're left fighting against the harsh realities you find waiting
and chasing that feeling
because even if you don't remember what happened
you know it was really, really good.

some time in 2004

i was in the mountains in peru. there was a lake - it was the most beautiful color of blue i've ever seen in my life.

i was on the amazing race. the competition was fierce, but for some reason, one of the challenges involved us being at a circus. i thought i could live my real life, and still compete in the race, so i booked a show at the circus for yellow. for some reason i was wearing a wedding dress. it was so hot out, and the wedding dress made everything worse. in order to win the amazing race i had to find a certain pop vendor and buy pop from them. the rest of the contestants made fun of me.

i was playing in fredericton, but the bar felt like stage 9 and the manhattan / paramount altogether. there was a crusty old lady working the bar. everything was made of wood and glass, and you had to climb a long flight of stairs up to a balcony thing to get in. we were so drunk that someone had spilled something down their shirt, and we had to sneak past the front desk or they'd know how drunk we were and not let us in. there were hippy guys everywhere and the worst girl singers in the world were playing the opening set. we were acting very conspicuous. i was worried about how our set would go since we were all so drunk.

long long ago,

the world was about to end. my family set up a bunker on the moon. there was enough food in there for the three of us for ten years. we moved into this tiny bunker. we realized that the ten years had passed and we were almost out of food. there was no way of getting more, becuase the earth was gone. i saw frost on the window, and a second moon, and the frost looked like an angel.

September 12 2003

we were at the ymca and in that room with all the machines there was some sort of competition going on. i knew one of the girls who was competing (i dunno, it was like basketball or something). so i was talking to her, and i noticed she had the curliest hair i've ever seen. melissa had to be home at ten, so we left. as soon as we got outside, melissa burst into tears and she was all mad at me for talking to that girl because the girl was stronger than melissa. so i had to make melissa feel better. after she was done crying, i called my mom to come get us. my mom showed up and drove us halfway home before we realized that melissa had taken her car to the Y. so my mom drove us back. we sat in the parking lot with my mom and had a cigarette. a bunch of guys in really weird costumes came out of the Y to the back parking lot where we were sitting in the car. here is a picture.


so, one of these strangely costumed guys approaches our car. he was talking ( i don't know to who, either a friend or to a cell phone ). he's talking about masturbating and getting laid, and he's cursing alot. he starts, like, putting his head inside the car window too, but he's not talking to us. then i realize it's kris p. melissa doesn't think it's him, but i yell "kris!" and he takes off his costume and starts talking to us.

so we get out of the car, because melissa starts freaking out because she had to be home by ten, and it was after ten. she kept blaming me for everything. so i was talking to kris and my mom was pulling away, and melissa was running to get in her car. a large black woman appears out of one of the cars and starts criticizing my mom's driving, yelling and cursing at her. i am wondering who this woman is, and i ask kris. turns out it is his mom. he warns me that she gets mad easily, so be careful.

meanwhile she is cursing at my mom. as my mom's green car finishes turning around and passes by where kris's mom is standing, she calls my mom a whore, and i hear my mom call HER a whore. so then the woman starts walking over towards us.

i introduce myself politely and suddenly she loves me. she thought i was so nice. she made me dance with her in the parking lot and she was hugging me and stuff. so then i went over to melissa who was sitting in the car, crying her eyes out. i looked at my watch because i was going to say "it's going to be ok, you're only 10 minutes late" or something, but then i realized that my watch was on backwards and i had been telling her the wrong time. it was only 9:15! so then she left me there, and i had to get my own drive home. but she wasn't mad.