Sunday, February 24, 2013

I turned my left foot, then my right foot.



This is Mina Milk, who does a lot of ink drawings like this one, and also a lot of lesbian love scenes in the same style.

Removed my space bar today,with a deft flick of the towel from my head.
I've had some pretty interesting encounters at bus stops these past few days. I tell you stories in form of lists so that you might digest them nicely.

1- Today I was the most hangry a person could be. Sitting at the bus stop, waiting to get home and devour every scrap that I could pile into my hand. Sitting at the bus stop next to this woman in blue tinted shades with a pink wig over her full head of (brown) hair. Anyway the whole time I am glaring at the passing cyclists and she is muttering to herself about how many fucking cars are going by. And then she says, more coherently "Seven pounds eleven ounces at 4:20 in the morning Dec. 23 1968 the first word I ever said was shut up" She says this methodically, like she is testing her own sanity. And then the bus pulls up and we travel  one stop before she gets off.

2-Few days ago, sitting at the stop with a giant Renoir book on my lap, and about 6 others in my backpack and this smiling old man comes and sits beside me and starts asking me questions. Tells me that Renoir, near to his death wrote a letter to a friend that mourned the fact that he had never noticed black until then. And I replied that all the letters I had seen that he wrote were bugging his friends to give him money. And he said, did I know, close to the end, Renoir painted with brushes strapped to his wrists because his arthritis was so bad. And the bus pulled up and the enchantment ended. Like I was just another early twenties school girl lugging her books to school and he was just another old guy that lived in Oak Bay.

3- Few weeks ago, the streets were wet from rain. I was leaning against a wall, casual like, and this older man comes up and starts talking about how much his pussy cat hates the rain. And how much his pussy cat hates being turned out of this man's bed when the cleaning lady is changing the sheets.  And all the while he is pacing and looking up the street. And eventually he asks me if I am in school and what I am studying. And I tell him, and he looks pleased. He tells me how when he was a kid he was committed to an asylum because he was epileptic and they didn't teach any of the kids there because it was assumed that they were idiots. So he says he taught himself to read using paintings in books. And here he starts talking really fast at a low rhythm and I lose his words. He finishes by saying he got his bachelors, I think he said Harvard.
And the bus comes right after this so I never found out, really, how one teaches oneself to read through art.