I HATE PERFUME

Lucy wears a crisp clean perfume called M#2 Black March. Twigs and new leaves on a path through a birch forest, cold windy weather, the sound of someone friendly in a white clapboard house and dark trees rising beyond a deep green hillside. She gets these bottled aromatic dioramas from a little boutique off Whyte Ave, one of those shops with deep-set creamy doorways ribbed with crown moulding and dark glass and which sells thin purple leather belts and cardigans sewn with delicate epaulettes and white blowzy tops with crimpled tuxedo collars and also glass conch shells and pencil skirts and square-cut topaz rings, peridot, glamourine. Sometimes she wears a different scent called At The Beach 1966. The owner of the shop is a brisk business woman with honey-coloured hair falling smoothly over one eye and she imports these plain glass minikins from a perfumer out of Brooklyn or maybe he lives somewhere in Pennsylvania. His name, delightfully, is Christopher Brosius and he used to work for agencies and companies from Manhattan and London and Bangkok. The woman showed me a photograph of the perfumerie once, a small sweating brick front on a wide street in a deserted section of the city, a white sandwich board propped in front and stencilled with navy blue letters reading

I HATE PERFUME.
You smell good, I said. I can smell you from here. I wish there was a more elegant way to say that. Smell. You smell good. Sounds so harsh, doesn’t it?

That’s the Old English for you, she smiled. I think those old one syllable words are perfect. They mean what they mean. Sincere words. Not like you. Lucy rolled over and spread her arms wide on the bed, the late afternoon sunlight through the white lace curtains pooling across her dark hair and the white pillows.

Sincerely, you smell good, I said.

She smiled. Sincerely?

You know you do.

Sincerely?

Okay, sure, I said.

Sincerely, she said and laughed and flung her arms around me and pressed her face into the crook of my neck.

Sincerely, I said.

[photo source]

I GUESS WE'RE TUNING TO YOU

Not for me the weight of nine to fourteen songs cracking open the hour. Not for me sixty or seventy minutes with Led Zep out in the garage, lifting those old Shur Grip weights, rolling the heavy disks across the floor and bolting another fifteen pounds on the bar. Or, in my case, five pounds. Not for me the ritual of the album, the sitting on the couch in a silent house, evening drawing on or a low dazzle of afternoon sunlight, maybe a favourite drink on the table, dense and bubbling in a tall glass with a few thick-rinded slices of lime under the ice cubes. I look for gemstones, not piled treasure, the Koh-i-Noor and not some sloppy shipwreck off Sicily or Spain. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is perfect. Only moments matter.

"Corazon" + Bishop Allen Bishop Allen is a singles band. Like The Beatles and every other band on the side of pop music—as opposed to flat-out rock—Bishop Allen is concerned to make every second of a song cedar-scented with emotional impact. "Corazon" is my favourite of all their singles. The first time I heard this song I wanted to cry big fat salty stupid tears. Even now, when the lead singer unregretfully sings, "I guess we'll tune in to you," I can feel my heart turn around and put a hand on its forehead. I can't control my heart because I don't know my heart. Bishop Allen doesn't know this piano, either, but they sense the strings and the pulse in the abandoned beast, they sense the valuable heart's blood and great rusty worth of the discarded instrument, maybe not yet knowing what they sense. As the song progresses, the singer realizes he is not some noble hero swinging above Alphabet or Empire City, but an unknowing unknown victim, like the piano is an unknowing victim, and that he will have to relearn everything ever all over again and what he will learn will come from what he was rescuing.

For piano, of course, substitute girlfriend, boyfriend, old neighbour, angry teacher, anything at all that was ever important.

[photo source]

LUCILLE BLUTH, NOW CALLED

Tabitha Wilson, is back and spitting on 90210 and that might be enough to keep me watching. Probably not—but it makes me hope for the movie. BTW having Tilly and the Wall singing "Pot Kettle Black" on a mainstream soap is—worlds collide—inexplicable.

Little Pictures kills with "I Wish I Could Keep You" over on Fluxblog.

THE TIMES ARE WINTER, WATCH—

The apples on the tree are brighten ing and falling, the wind is rising after dark, the grass is green and rich and deep—so summer's lease hath all too short a date. Nothing like Damnation Alley, not yet, but soon, and here in Edmonton and across the province. Then the mercury will pinch down the glass along with the November rains, and finally like a lonely man falling, fall onto bare concrete ground. Then the wind will curl and snap through the skyscrapers which stand along the river like the squared unnatural mountains in a Lovecraft novella. Then the pretty girls will be wrapped in long well-cut wool coats, and the men will have knit black scarfs piled high up to their eyes. Then a lone bright window here and there after dark and perhaps the faint bass thump of a band canyoned away in the basement of the club on 102 Street will be the only indication that men and women live after dark. Still, in the long black doorway of winter, in the dark evenings coming quickly, one or two of us—and may I, along with the original philosopher, be among them—we shall discover that within us there lies an invincible summer.

NOT TO BE ESPECIALLY ENID BLYTON

about things, but there were five of us and we moved into a house for a year—flip open Five Run Away Together—that house with the golden door buried in the central hallway and the wonderful bond of unity. We were Bazum and Ben and Early and Aurora and myself. I say we were and not we are because I don’t believe I’m the same person, anymore. That Roland is dead forever. Certain things may be the same, of course, or hardly changed. I still, unfortunately, slur my esses slightly when I particularly wish to speak well. And Bazum has kept her critical sharp eye for other people in the room, and Aurora still embarrasses herself in front of horror films, and I talked to Ben on the phone the other day and he still likes to speak in catchphrases. Things happened, and other things didn’t happen, as is always the way, and this is how they did or did not come about, how circumstances gathered together like a fish and another fish and another, until there is a school of fish, a silver cloud of uncountable mackerel drawing in all other gleaming bodies. And the black shadows of ships cape overhead as we flicker below, our mouths widening in the dark and we dart in a different direction forever. And the part of me I know is changed by the parts of me that I did not know. But what do you want? What do you expect? Others were changed by themselves, also, and together we changed each other. Not always pleasantly.

THE GIRL IS A GOOD LOOKING

girl, she has sleek blonde hair and a snub nose, large lake-water eyes. Her dark jeans are cut very low and tight, and she wears a grey off-the-shoulder sweater over her flat French film-star breasts, and red or green or dull white slippers. Bare ankles, of course. Whether she wears any jewelry or not, a piercing in the nose, the lip, the ears, the navel, I never know, because I never cross the dusty summer pavement and speak to her, and she never crosses the cold spring road and talks to me. But we smoke cigarettes together, Player’s, Kools, and sit in the early morning or evening, or late at night, summer or snow falling or rain or a warm breeze, me on this side of the street on my wooden stairs, her on that side of the road on her concrete steps. I don't know anything about her, though, nothing else. She might be royalty, maybe, maybe a queen.