Of late, my web host Globat of several years has several times outraged me with forced opt-out automatic upgrades for garbage I don’t want or need, cleverly disguised as regular emails I would normally immediately delete. I never got screwed, but I refuse to continue subscribing to unscrupulous sales and marketing extortion tactics.

As a result, deepsicks and its many tentacles will be moving to a new host, with hope this weekend. I also hope it will be completed this weekend, but I suspect it may take more time than I’d like.

Thus, should you visit in the near future and find a 404 wasteland, never fear: d6 is in deep training, getting tough and terrible.

I’m also moving in the real world, a pleasant face on eviction because my neighborhood has not been gentrified enough. The notice said lady we said white and rich. My kickass apartment will be converted into a loft with a ratcheted rent, a racket, a ripoff. Fernwood, I barely knew ya. Probably just as well, I’m tired as hell of everything being described as “funky.”

For continuity’s sake—I don’t think I’ve said it explicitly here—yeah, I’m still living in Victoria. My four-month internship turned into a yearlong affair. I’ll be back in Van January ‘09 to finish my library degree. I’s a bit sore, seeing my friends graduate (I was supposed to be done this May myself) but I’m getting great work experience, punching out debt and oh I suppose, what’s the rush anyway.

Hello, internets. I’m backed up on images with words falling into other places, and that’s just fine. April was roaming the seaside in a new neighborhood, with a housesat decrepit cat in a temporary frame of mind, tromping around in Papa Bear’s purple Crocs and watching BBC’s Planet Earth in a pile of fever, blankets. Funny. Having been removed from routine, I can almost disconnect the depth of poor health, now on the mend before another unraveling, I guess, and I like this illusion of no delusion, danger, no damage there was no match to the near-death! with Canadian healthcare queues and questionable concern. With this errant corpse my mind calls home.

I’ll elaborate on this, I suppose, in fantastic morbid tones when the time is right—if and when I get some answers. In the meantime, hope the time stays wrong.

Last weekend I flew to St. Paul for Sam’s law school graduation: a short, surreal trip of family, fajitas, friends, GPS hijinks and hanging out with Dan and all awesomeness entailed therein including but not limited to the Bulgarian State Radio Choir at the Basilica and bun chay deliciousness on a bright sesquicentennial celebration day wandering around Frogtown taking pictures of fonts and nonsensical signs. He bought me a tin of tea and a set of crowbars. I introduced him to Vietnamese iced coffee and my family. We went to the fuckin’ mall, no apologies. I didn’t crash my dad’s car even once.

Laughing with the ones I love, for a few days I felt home. Then I returned to where all my stuff is.

But I have things to work on, oh yes I do. Projects and possibilities and taking advantage of myself when I feel like myself. I miss Minneapolis and I miss Vancouver. I’m going to miss everything, eventually. I’d be a fraud times fool to not enjoy it, this here right now then wrong there there, show my love show my teeth while I can. Am.

So look at some pictures while I duck behind this curtain, make reason pay attention, make certain nothing’s certain and accept it till the tension disappears. Things that happen are just things that happen. We are all just things that happen.

Walking home from the fake chicken store, I see a couple kids across the street, business-poised proud and hailing me over. Yippee, and hell yeah! Young entrepreneurs selling some flavors, lemon sour sugar sweet refreshment on an okay, so it’s a gray April day that doesn’t need ice-cold relief. But a brightening…? I’ll take it. I like to support the local economy, creativity and the confidence to get away with things. I always stop for Kool-Aid stands and Not Marked for Individual Retail Sale snackcakes and candy, cardboard counter boulevard black markets. Even if I’m in my car, I’ll pull over, preferably with an unnecessary U-y.

I used to be that kid. Rinsing cups in an ice cream pail and using them again, with a Band-Aid tin cashbox and chunky plastic camping thermos of liquid summer wired youth. Wishing the adult I would become would come around and humor me. Take me seriously. Give me money.

I can’t read the sign from across the street. The writing on the tagboard attached to the post is faint; what I can make out makes no sense. 25 cents of Worthe? “Hey, what are you guys selling?” “Water.” “Water?!” “Yeah, 25 cents a cup!” “You can’t sell water!” “But we don’t have anything.” I bound through traffic to inspect the sign and their sincerity, can’t tell if they’re joshing me, appreciate or are aware at all of the absurdity.

Plastic shamrock shot glasses are lined up on a picnic table. Tap water awaits in a 2-liter pop bottle. A large coffee can contains an impressive amount of change, and the youngsters try to sell me. “We put it in the fridge first, it’s really good” “It’s the best!” “We want to buy our mom a present.” I had taken them for friends, one of them not quite white, the other not quite black. I try to imagine what Mom looks like and can’t get past a sucked cigarette. Uneven light. A stuck story, I know, it’s hard to be the narrator. Generous to the just passing throughs.

I pick through my pockets for the coins I don’t want, cents spare from the yuppie grocery faux chicken patties to punch out my middle school cafeteria craving, and hand them to the giggly one, a shoulder-length androgyne even with the nail polish lets the other do most the talking but is quick to hop to, collect and count the money then select a pre-poured shot.

I hoist it high and drain it down, the water from the faucet and their fractured grins half holy crap it worked, we tricked her good! half understanding I would have to be in on it, complicit, for it to happen. Or, I’m an idiot. Suspending and embracing the farce.

I first meet Sophia Delza at Vancouver’s premier spiritual emporium, Banyen Books and Sound.

She is in the Used section, old and scarred, and I can’t stop staring at her. She is so beautiful. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Powerful, striking, graceful, wise. I pick her up with trembling hands, I put her down, I pick her up. I page through the poses—poise, expressions unchanged, she is poison. Smoke blown in my face. I carry her around the store like a secret possession but it’s she who owns me and it is too much. Put down. Picked up. A hundred dark eyes telling me, You will never become me. You will never become yourself.

It is not the way it has to be.
It is not the way it should be.
It is the way it is.
It is the way it is the way.

Ahem: My first foray into mutilated book art, using T’ai-Chi Ch’üan (Wu Style): Body and Mind in Harmony written by and starring said Sophia Delza. This project took approximately one million hours, a hundred thousand blades and too many cuts to count: this book drank my blood, yes it did. Enjoy.