Queen Pixelizabeth

A few days back Mary told me about this dream she had that for some reason I find really hilarious. I asked her if I could share it on here and she approved the request.

The scene begins in an alley way. Mary is setting up some kind of bake sale either for her mom or with her mom. Other people are joining in to help out and also provide their own delicious culinary creations. One of these people is her friend Graeme. Graeme has with him an aluminum pan, the flimsy kind you'd expect to see a huge pile of hot-dog wieners in at a large summer party. He sets down the tray and then proceeds to cut deeply into the tips of both thumbs letting the blood drain into the pan.

At the sight of this Mary begins to get concerned and tells Graeme "No, you can't do this here, you can do that." To which Graeme responds, "Wait watch, it's good."

Next Graeme begins to add the ingredients needed for a salsa, tomatoes, spices ect.

Mary again pleas for him to stop and appears to be getting very angry telling him, "No you can't serve that to people, you can't do that here. You can't feed people your own blood, it's not sanitary."

Apparently puzzled by this Graeme explains "It's a secret ingredient, just wait, I want people to guess what's in it."

After some more resistance on Mary's part Graeme eventually has a passerby take a chip and eat from the hemoglobin-salsa. His reaction is mixed and when asked by Graeme if he could guess at the secret ingredient he responds with "It tastes like tobacco."

This is of course answered in return by Graeme with, "Yeah... I smoke too much."

~

During the winter of 2003 I would regularly eat, sleep and socialize in the secured photography area of Fanshawe College. I shared my darkroom with two girls who would very rarely use it, especially not at 11:00 pm on a Friday night.

These were small light-tight rooms that contained individual color-enlargers. Color enlargers need absolute blackness so the process would involved setting the exposure, RGB values and the lenses and then doing the test strips in complete pitch black. After you had finished either your test strip or print exposure you would place the paper into a light resistant bag and the walk about 15 feet to where the processor was. Although we did have a black and white processor, you could still develop prints using the tray and tongs method if you so desired. Color, on the other hand, was a much more intensive process so we used the large processor for that. The prints were loaded into the front end in another light tight room. The smell of color photography, both the paper and the chemistry will stay with me forever.

As much fun as developing color prints was the real action zone was in the computer lab. This was where the big, globular eMacs were. They were light grey and had this weird bluey-green plastic trim. On regular occasions I would spend 20+ hours in there leaving only to urinate and get more French Vanillas and Chocolate Chip muffins from the school Tim Horton's. I was also partial to buying the packets of rice that you just pop into the microwave and then eat. They were new at the time and convenient as fuck.

The microwave was a bit of a hike through the school over where the Harvey's cafeteria was. It was one of those 7/11 style beasts that required only half the time of a normal microwave. In the dead of night we were still permitted to be in the school and I can remember vividly taking strolling breaks over to the silent food court with various pals who were also in the lab at 2:00 am on a Sunday morning.

Usually it was to accompany a photo-lady as the desolate academic wasteland was pretty spooky during the witching hour. At the time I had a surprisingly large number of friends in the program: Ail, Aurora, Cynthia, Kat, ex-wife, Erin and that tiny girl whose apartment I sublet but cannot for the life of me remember her name. That was on the female side. I also had some good male pals too: Adam, Craig and Wes mostly. Adam is really the only person I keep in touch with. These were the people who spent the most time at the school which is how I ended up befriending them. I was there pretty much any hour I wasn't sleeping, showering or killing ants at the shit-hole apartment.

In late January they had to shut down the school due to a severe snow-storm that was happening. I was in the school at the time and the 300 year old security guard had to come in and tell me to leave. He was nice about it but it meant that I had to make the 45 minute trek back to Ant-city through a blizzard. As usual I was improperly dressed having only a pair of ratty black All-Stars on my feet. I did have a proper winter coat, scarf, hat and gloves though so that made up for the damage to my tootsies.

The roughest part of the walk was the first 20 minutes which was through the middle of a vast, empty college parking lot and then up a long entrance road that lead to Fanshawe, The catholic high-school that looked like a shopping mall, and the school for the deaf.

Walking across the fields of asphalt in a storm was like being stuck in arctic. I would time my pace by counting the steps to each lamp-post. The lamp posts were really the only navigational tools I had at my disposal. I remember the yellowish glow that they would cast on the untouched drifts and watch the flakes falling through the illuminated cone of light. It often felt like I was the only person who got to experience these scenes. I normally never passed anyone on the long walk to campus and the blizzard was no exception.

The last stage of the parking lot section was a along straight walk up a tree-line road that led out to Cheapside. I then followed Cheapside up to Highbury and was then greeted with yet another long empty parking lot. This was where the Price Chopper and Zellers was located. It may have been K-mart. Anyway it was different from the other nearby grocery-department combo of Food Basics and Zellers (plus). Eventually I was greeted with Huron Street, which meant it was all suburbia laneways from there on. Along this section was a Giant Tiger where Danny and Haley would buy Icy Squares and Zero Bars from, a crappy movie theater, and the very last Biway I ever saw around.

This led to the long sidewalk-less road back up to the basement trash heap I called "basement trash heap". The whole experience I did often but it was really at it's best during a 3:00 am blizzard. I enjoyed that lifestyle. Time was arbitrary and the patterned day with a morning, noon, evening and night didn't matter. While everyone else enjoyed college via the bars on Richmond I was having a great time staring at lamp-posts in the middle of school parking lot in three feet of snow.

Kelly. That was her name.

Song of the day:
Why did I ever stop listening to Solex?