yeah that's me in the bottom left.

brian maurice died today.

brian maurice is a guy who lived at the washington whom i got to know very well over my tour of duty there. people who read this blog who knew brian know full well that he was one of the warmest, kindest and most back-you-up-till-death kinda bros you'd ever know.

we used to go for beers and talk. he'd talk about his days as a bank robber... maybe the stories were real, maybe they weren't but the dude did a lot of time in jail, so i'm assuming they were. they were fascinating stories. he made them sound downright heroic. maybe he wasn't a hero, but the stories were awesome.

over time it became clear as mud that he had few real friends. alot of his waking hours were spent laboring over the facts that 1. he was about to get a pardon for his past criminal activity, 2. his estranged family on vancouver island, and 3. the fact that he lived in a place where the easiest option is sinking back into a life of drugs and crime. it was a shitty world for such a good guy to be stuck in, he was surrounded by snakes who wanted to take him for whatever little he had and then forget about him.

we became good friends. he was happy to have a friend who didn't judge him for his fairly regular lapses into fact 3 (above) and took him seriously for his attempts to deal with facts 1 and 2 that he started calling me 'brother' and 'son' rather simultaneously. they were titles i took seriously and still do.

working in the downtown east side, you meet hundreds of people. some are generally good but can't get out of their cycles of bad shit; some folks are genuinely bad. however, some are genuinely good people who, while maybe they do bad things to themselves... would never do a bad thing to someone else. brian was the third. i doubt i'd be his friend if he wasn't.

he died peacefully in his sleep at St. Paul's hospital last night. cancer was the only thing besides his conscience that could possibly have kicked his ass.

goodnight brian. you are probably more able to come visit me now, so do.

so i received something that basically amounts to a reference letter...

I COULD HAVE PREDICTED THAT MIKE KORNITSKY WOULD BE THE FIRST OUTSIDE CONTRIBUTOR TO ANTE THE FUCK UP AND GIVE ME A FUNNY STORY.

here goes:

I was working the door at some private function at the aquarium last night. It was some social gathering of international delegates from some greenhouse gas conference. We had about 700 people to deal with.

Pretty much everybody was inside and one of the charter bus drivers came down to take a look at what was going on. As he approached the door a baby squirrel about the size of a small mouse with a big fuzzy tail started darting around his feet. I tried shooing the squirrel away and it took off climbing up my pant leg, along my back and then finally up to my head. The crazy little bugger just stayed perched on my shoulders chirping away and every so often scampering back and forth poking at my ears. I tried pulling it off and it freaked out. I didn't want to get bit or scratched by it so I just let it go about its business on my shouders much to the amusement of my co-workers. It stayed perched on my shoulder for a good 20 minutes!

It just hung out back on my shoulder just beyond where I could not see it and chirped awayin my ear as guests came in. We had fun watching some of them do a double takes when some of them noticed that there was a wild rodent sitting on my shoulder. Most of them were from Europe or Asia and were just plain baffled by this strange Canadian security guard greeting them with a squirrel dancing around on his shoulder. What was even better was the people who obviously saw it but seemingly blocked it out of their perceptions and kept on walking as it was just far too wierd of a scene to comprehend. I was calling other guards on my radio to come check it out and it eventually climbed back down just before somebody managed to round up a camera.
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yeah. mike is a friend of the animals. he's vegan! the squirrel knew it and felt extra-comfortable in mike's presence. can you imagine the stories? "honey, all the security guards in canada have furry sidekicks!!!"

i went on a date.

yeah, it was in itaewon. what did you expect?

this just in from the "I'M A BAD UNCLE" department...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CAMERON!

and to commemorate this wonderful day, even thought it's 2 days late, here's a picture of you with your pants down.

"have you ever really, really really really looooved a walrus?"

anyone want a gmail invite?

leave a comment if you do. i have six to offer.

having new music rules.

i have bitched to no end about the access to decent music here - i haven't bothered to buy a single cd here, since the selection tends towards the selection in an average mall.

therefore i've been downloading the living shit out of EVERYTHING. shit i've been missing out on.

list to date:
TERROR-'one with the underdogs'. not exactly 'lowest of the low' but still riff-tastic. even without todd jones on guitar.

CHAMPION-'promises kept'. how gay is it that one of your best mates has a band AND YOU HAVE TO DO DOWNLOAD HIS BAND'S CD? really gay.

BROTHER ALI-'champion' ep. about the best hiphop you could possibly get from a bald albino black guy.

PELICAN - 'australasia'. pretty much the instrumental equivalent of crazy horse doing bong hits with nomeansno and the melvins. sonic density.

RYAN ADAMS - 'rock and roll'. uh, good rock and roll.

HIGH ON FIRE - 'surrounded by thieves'. MATT PIKE FOR PRESIDENT!!! how awesome would it be to have a big, bearded, unabashed stoner in charge? who else can invent words like "RIFFIAN"?

BLACK LABEL SOCIETY - 'the blessed hellride'. now even though zakk wylde is a shameless yarler, of the more testosterone-rific sort (http://endino.com/archive/yarl.html), he SLAYS on the guitar. i hear he hates gay men too. his "IRAQ SUCKS" shirt was always a hit too. we all have our guilty pleasures i guess. OZZY guests on a couple songs. it kinda forgives the hyper-jingoistic crap wylde spouts. i guess he's not all that bright.

KOOL KEITH-'dr. dooom' and 'diesel truckers'. kool keith is untouchable. "chemicals and usages, and gastric juiceses". shit, if it doesn't rhyme, just make up a word. "the UFOs fight the pros".

bittorrent kicks ass, korean internet connections don't really. it's taken me more than 48 hours to get 8 movies. that sucks.

i watched 'passion of christ' the other night and it's damned good. jesus gets his ass KICKED. that dude was way tough. mike ruppert's 'truth and lies of 9/11' is okay so far. what else... gorillas in the mist?

what's best is that i have an emir kusturica film coming in. i've only seen one of his films, 'underground' but apparently this one's in english and has johnny depp who always rules. 'underground' is all about the nazi occupation in the former yugoslavia... serbia i think. it's about these two resistance fighters who are basically gangsters and end up forming the yugoslavian communist party. it's hilarious. every time these two dudes get in a fight, there's a band playing... the main guy puts up his fists and then motions to the band... 'play faster' and throws down.

word. i have to get to work. access to culture is great even if it's on a 17" monitor.

I didn’t exactly promise to keep things nonviolent on this blog, but it seems my public has spoken. So funny story number two, with a reminder that I am STILL seeking submissions. This one comes courtesy of Owen… what was his last name? He was a dude from Cortes Island, good friend of Kim’s.

Owen was 18 or so and had a job building brick patios. Like many ‘first job’ jobs, it sucked a whole buffet of ass. Long hours, heavy lifting, fat asshole Dutch boss (I had a Dutch boss once. He was a prick. Therefore, all Dutch people suck. Except Auntie Helen). What would happen is that two guys would get dropped off at a house with bricks, tools and mortar, and would get picked up at the end of the day by the asshole Dutch boss whose knees didn’t bend because of some childhood injury. A dyke building accident perhaps.

So Owen and his buddy, two dudes who don’t really give a shit about anything because they’re 18 and don’t give a shit, sit in front of the house and gaze upon the daunting pile of bricks. The family who owns the house are on holiday, and these guys have been given two days to build a brick patio around one of those above-ground pools with the liner in it. Somehow it’s been sunken into the deck of the house, and is made to look like a real inground pool, only ghetto style because of the fact that it’s not real concrete.

Owen’s buddy pulls out a large bag of magic mushrooms and says “want to make the day go faaaaster?” or something. Owen says “yes”. The two of them eat a whole lot of mushrooms and spend the day playing in the pool, looking at certain objects for an inordinately long time, and lounging on patio furniture.

3 o’clock rolls around; the two boys start coming down off of their psychedelic daydream and realize that there’s still a huge pile of bricks in the front of the house, and if the asshole kneeless Dutch boss sees them, he’s going to know something’s amiss. So they decide “dude, if we just get the bricks in the backyard, they won’t want to walk back there, we’ll just get in the truck and go home”. We'll work twice as hard tomorrow, and get it done.

So they start up this brick brigade, ferrying the bricks into the backyard at 90 mph. The problem is that this yard is being landscaped, so the road from the front driveway is a series of planks of varying stability that do a big hairpin turn RIGHT BY THE POOL before reaching where the bricks were supposed to go. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

Yes you can. Of course a full load of bricks topples into the pool while Owen is trying to finish making it look like the job was done. What do you do? You have to jump in, do some amateur deep sea salvage, and pull the buggers out. They then finished the job late the next afternoon with help from another crew. No-one was the wiser.

Friday morning was when they had little impromptu meetings to discuss how the week went. They went over the work they did/had planned, and then, just as he was going to dismiss them, the Dutch guy pipes up and said “Okay, who dropped the bricks in the peeewl?” (this is the best approximation of a Dutch accent I can pull off).

Silence.

“Who dropped the bricks in the peeewl?”
Owen, knowing he had to do something, puts his hand up and admits his clumsiness. “It was me, Geert” (or whatever the dude’s name was).

“Ya, ya, I know, I saw the photos”.

He produces a stack of photos the next door neighbor took. The first is of Owen looking really bummed out and scared, hoisting two bricks from the chilly depths of Lake Dipshit.

The next is of Owen and his buddy playing in the pool, high as hell on mushrooms.

The next three or four are of the two of them lazing about on patio furniture, not doing shit.

Owen quit the next week.

i have a new computer.



it is beautiful.