June 2010
20 posts
Elephant seals, which are smelly and quick and snoring. View from the pier in Santa Monica, where I ate crab. This morning there were deer right outside the cabin and then a large bird with a chick. Maybe they were pheasants, I don’t know. They looked like little dinosaurs. While driving there were more vultures and then I saw dolphin fins swimming through the water. In Santa Barbara was...
Horseback riding. View from Rocky Point Restaurant. Old Coast Road, which was described to me as not scary or curvy by the man at the photography shop, but he is a liar. It does not look like much in the pictures, but it is all gravel, sometimes with big dips, no barrier, one lane (but not one way), dropping straight down. They were the longest 12 miles I have ever had, driving 4...
WatchPeaceful protesters sing Canada’s national anthem, riot police respond with force.
What has happened in Toronto during the G20 is completely disgusting and terrifying. Waking civilians at 4am by entering their houses and pointing guns at their heads, random and unjustified arrests, mass arrests, taking advantage of secret laws to suspend rights, cops beating people, trampling people with...
I’m in a cabin at Glen Oaks, in the redwood forest in Big Sur, next to a river. It is maybe the best place I have ever stayed, better than Hotel Tremoille in Paris. I saw a waterfall, more fog than I knew was possible, a skunk, rabbits. On top of a cliff was a vulture that kept circling overhead, only 20 feet above us, maybe less. I had never seen one before, not so close, and...
I went to Pebble Beach and Point Lobos and up there you can see the doe walking around with its calf. It was so close. Earlier I had seen a family of deer standing in someone’s front yard. I saw so many otters and seals and a beach full of sea lions and rabbits and loads and loads of cormorants everywhere and pelicans and enormous birds of prey that look like small airplanes, they cast...
Pictures from the airplane today. I had dinner while watching two sea otters swimming on their backs. From the window in Chicago I could see the tower by the mall where I worked when I was 18 years old. America, you are pretty.
Look at me being handy.
I don’t know why a shiver of an earthquake is so exciting. There are packs of police everywhere on bicycles and every time I ride home I’m terrified of getting tickets for not doing some bike-related thing right since they seem so anxious to harass people for anything right now, handing out jaywalking tickets, fining people for not having bells on their bikes. I have to pack all my...
Tonight on the railpath. I walked up to the Junction and it is like a little frozen in time town, like a movie, some parts at least. The clouds looked like they might eat us. I haven’t smoked in 58 days.
This needs to be painted. This morning I went to the naked lady spa and sat in the sea salt bath until I was so happy I would have been okay to drown, then walked down Queen Street in rain so hard there were puddles up to my ankles.
where i am now, in my backyard.
Finally changes have started! White paint. Maybe when it is more finished I’ll find digital cameras aside from my iphone in a box and take better photographs. This looks terrible.
A few days ago Sarah Pinder gave me some of her zines (which I should really pay you for, Sarah) and I LOVE THEM. I am sometimes scared to ask to read people’s work because if I hate it it is very...
new best friend
This is the Swedish crown princess, Victoria, and her fiance, Daniel Westling. They are getting married on my birthday and my Swedish relatives sent me this commemorative box of chocolates for the occasion. From what I have gleaned from Swedish women’s magazines it is unusual because Daniel is not from nobility. He is also a personal trainer. Shocking.
This evening I went to The Good...
Jen and I walked around Queen West to order these chairs for my kitchen while Kevin organized a dinner party secretly and then this morning we went to She Said Boom to get Susan Choi and Anne Enright books and then Jen left in a taxi and I miss her. We lived together for only two months almost five years ago, but it feels as if she had always been there and now that she’s not it is awful....
Jen, my best friend who lives in Brooklyn, showed up at my house today as a surprise for my impending birthday and now I am full of grüner veltliner and whatever kind of sparkling wine they serve at Lakeview and many different kinds of animals that live in bodies of water and some that live on land and Louise is full of ecstasy seeing her.
Sam Cooke - Touch the Hem of His Garment
My new neighbours invited me to a barbecue on my second day here and it was so strange, like a movie. I have never known my neighbours beyond weather-related comments or the things you can hear through walls and ceilings. In the hundreds of times I saw my neighbour on Ossington over a period of two years I learned only that he smokes many cigarettes and likes warm, sunny days. In London the only...
There is a mating pair of Canada geese on the south side of Bloor. They have been trying to cross the street for at least two days, but they never can because there are too many cars. At every red light they make it one lane over and have to turn back when the cars come. They do it all day. While waiting they stand or lie down right next to each other, right in the middle of the sidewalk, staring...
