Belatedness

first and foremost, happy birthday (belated) to our dear dear elf nafeesa...lil' sprite, I hope you had a great fun day and many many more for many many years to come. Now I know your birthday was friday, I tried calling but that damn robot woman keeps making me feel as if i've lost my mind (more so than the normal loss i've accumulated and come to terms with). Tell her I hate her. I'm glad I actually got to sing Happy Birthday on the phone to you yesterday, that rocked almost as hard as I rock on a daily basis. Which is an extraordinary amount, so consider yourself privileged to the utmost (multiplied by power of amazing) in terms of awesomeness from yours truly. Waljee you missed out on greatness. See what happens when you sleep? cousin of death kid!

Jay, thanks for the e-mail, and I'm glad y'all are still reading this thing when I send out notifications...makes this silly chap here feel like he matters an iota in this vast conflagration of iotas. I've kept up the running but sometimes my shins feel awful and my left knee hurts a bit though i've chalked it up once again to pains from under-use and now actual use my legs. I'm running through it but know that if it hurts bad enough i will stop. I also know that without sweat and pain nothing grand ever really gets achieved (even if it is the sweat and pain of others, as long as it is expended) so you push until you break then try again when all the king's men and king's horses gallop the fuck by and you realize you have to pick your damn self up.

cheery aren't I? yeah a real box of fucking sunshine is this Sarfesian mess.

actually i'm pretty happy but i reserve all rights to my cynicism, malaise and anti-establishmentering (and all my ensuing hypocrisy). If i didn't how would I exist as this version of myself on this specific plane of existence? Hell it's defined me for 26 years and by all indications will define me for the next 26. And I'm fine with that, have come to terms with the fact that I am as happy as my anger so long as i direct it appropriately. These things are intertwined dear friends, a pleasant saff is nothing more than swirling of dust wrapped in a figment of imagination.

I turn 27 soon. Big age. At least for me. 27 club and all that music that chemically altered the latent nuances in my body, which eventually shaped my perceptions of my singular and partnered existences. When I was stupidly young (rather than youngly stupid as now) I thought I would commit suicide on my 27th. Real dumb. Way to stay classy saff. But I really thought so, mostly because I was so absorbed in my own pity, self loathing and in a perverse way self infatuation. I wanted like hell to be Kurt, but mostly I just wanted to yell and be a centre of attention. In fairness when you are that young everything that seems insignificant in hindsight is so fucking momentous at such a transitory and precipitous age like 13 - 19. Every little hurt gets wildly overblown, every slight seems fall from eden transgression. Every nice thing though, every smile and every joy is magnified as well, and every happiness explodes from you in a charged unbridled mess of teenage conviction. So when I felt bad at one point I thought my death would make me somewhat triumphant over everything that bothered me, would vindicate me and would be heroic in some way.

See i told you it was real dumb. Understandable, but real dumb. I wouldn't change it but I understand it better now and knowing how much better life gets and how much harder you kinda wish you channeled that energy into something a little more worthy than self-pity. Things are much harder now but if it wasn't hard it would take the fun right out of living, something you completely miss out on when you are too young to see life past the weekend.

Tangent: Jay I have a question...since you run and play the foot, how do you deal with the shins and the knees and the soreness??? i know the icing but any other tips a seasoned pro can give would be appreciated muchly and greatly...and anyone else who has advice, i'm always listening....

to that tune as always i hope to write more but by the time i get home i just want to run and chill, read, eat and hang with the wiz...my eyes are fried from computering all day at work and blogging when i get home just is fatiguing to even think about...

i try at work but we've been busy of late with data entry that the processing centres have downloaded onto the "slower" offices. So yeah my eyes hurt and us being busy with data entry sucks not just for the fact that I have something mindless I have to do but because it means that the outside world sucks even more, people are losing their jobs like its the new pastime and seeing so much worry and so much hardship in such a prosperous place as this country is heavy on the heart at times. Which then forces my active little mind into thinking if it is this bad here what about other places and then I get more heartsick and the anger returns and i have to learn how to direct it properly like a cyclops optic blast otherwise i might do something or say something along the lines of an unforgivable curse. Christ this world is hard one sometimes but as always lucky is how i feel for the love I have and the love I get to give away. It is worth it all and no time like now to tell you all I love you all much and much and am blessed to be with you and by you whenever and forever. Thanks for the continued support, friendships and dialogues.

to those who asked, nerf and waldo are fine, they still rule but waljee has started to suck since he doesn't write anymore (nerf informs us that he is "tired" from school and busy as hell...boooooooo...no excuses, just drop a line every now and then and we cool. new deal waldo, blog once more and i'll link to you. aw fuck it i'll link anyway, but please out something up for the new year.

http://waljeesinkuwait.blogspot.com/

read to be up on the waljees and their version of the middle east. thanks nerf and waldo for keffiyeh's. We are wearing them with pride to show our support for our palestinian brothers and sisters.

on the last note here (but not the last piece this band will play), superbowl party at our place on the first of feb, a sunday. Please come over, drink eat, smoke, be merry and watch the cards (boooo) take on the steelers (louder boooo). Take care

peacelovefreedomjustice

-s

"this has been a belated message from the free city."

Bibliophilia 2008

This will serve as a record of what books/literature i engaged myself to read in 2008. Emily suggested cataloguing a list and i think its a good idea to see what I have and haven't read, see how productive my reading was on a given year, show trends and interests, see what I re-read in a given year and for the sake of pride and motivation to continue to read and propagate that as leisure for myself. I think it would serve as a nice personal examination of my mindsets and ideas and eventually might serve as some sort of self-serving statement of a life lived reading and in pursuit of words.

So without further ado (and hopefully forgiveness for any and all pretension) here was 2008 (in no chronological order).

(SS = short story works, P = poetry collection, GN = Graphic Novel, CS = Comic Strip Collection* = Repeat Read )

1. The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald *
2. Preacher Vol 1 - Garth Ennis (GN) *
3. Preacher Vol 2 - Garth Ennis (GN) *
4. Preacher Vol 3 - Garth Ennis (GN) *
5. Preacher Vol 4 - Garth Ennis (GN) *
6. The Gunny Sack - M.G. Visanji
7. For Whom The Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
8. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
9. Northern Lights/Golden Compass - Phillip Pullman
10. The Subtle Knife - Phillip Pullman
11. The Amber Spyglass - Phillip Pullman
12. V - Thomas Pynchon
13. Leaf Storm - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (SS)
14. Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - Mordecai Richler
15. The Street - Mordecai Richler (SS)
16. Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy - Leo Tolstoy (SS)
17. Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman (P)
18. A New Earth - Eckhart Tolle
19. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
20. Demian - Hermann Hesse
21. Desperation - Stephen King *
22. The Regulators - Stephen King *
23. Animal Farm - George Orwell *
24. 1984 - George Orwell *
25. Collected Short Works of Nikolai Gogol - Nikolai Gogol (SS)
26. The Communist Manifesto - Lenin/Marx *
27. Oil! - Upton Sinclair
28. Hard Times - Charles Dickens
29. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie *
30. Shame - Salman Rushdie
31. The Boondocks Vol.2 - Aaron McGruder (CS)
32. Where Hope Takes Root, Speeches of Aga Khan IV - The Aga Khan
33. Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
34. Musicophillia - Oliver Sachs
35. The Bhagavad Gita - Sacred Scripture, so authorship might be some variation of God
36. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
37. Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut (SS)
38. Trumpets Sound No More - John Redfern
39. Walden and Other Writings - Henry David Thoreau
40. The Prophet - Khalil Gibran
41. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche - Friedrich Nietzsche
42. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
43. Bonjour Tristesse (english translation) - Françoise Sagan
44. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

peacelovefreedomjustice

-s

"This has been a statement bearing witness to a year spent in the FreeCity"

So now the gregorian new year is upon us and aside from the health issues, personally 2008 was a good year. Passed the first year of marriage (yeah that was quick), went to montreal twice, started hobbying around as a soul stealer and got back to my reading ways and finished about 25 books since february which other than grade school and required university reading was a personal best.

So the new year, well I was sick on the eve of until the NFL playoffs started on saturday (i swear it was a coincidence). Leafs beat the Sens on Saturday night and Canada made our little apartment go loco on saturday night. The colts lost so I wasn't too happy about that but the Iggles won on saturday so i cheered up pretty quickly. I was sad to miss the new years party at Heather's, i was really looking forward to seeing some people I haven't seen in some time, but I'm glad my wife represented LP304 (what what) at the gathering. Heather, Jason and Nam, I hope to see you guys soon, if at the latest during this year's Superbowl festivities at CasaHash Feb 1 2009.

Lots of things to look forward to during this new year. Mostly looking at ways of self-improvement through exercise and running (up to 20 mins non-stop on the treadmill at 5.0 speed, so i'm thrilled about that). Also improving my meals, and control of willpower and my tendency to self-destruct by smoking, laziness, significant anger at insignificant events, chocolate binging, television over consumption and late nights without a purpose (mostly from television over consumption).

I've got the opening two sentences down (in my head) for that elusive novel I keep promising myself and the universe I'm going to write one day, so that is a start and better than no start at all. I'm not sharing it yet because I believe I will jinx myself and cause thereby causing a violent reversal of new years promises by actively enabling my aforementioned tendency to self-destruct.

Other than that plans for the new year include going to ottawa and to montreal (again) taking some time off in February, trying to watch some more movies and to Emily's great happiness getting a cat in this new year (ONLY ONE DAMNIT OR I RENEG ON THIS AGREEMENT).

So with that short message relayed, thanks all for your support, friendship, love and most tolerance in the past year and I hope we sustain our ties in this new year. Happy new year everyone and hope to see or speak to y'all soon.

p.s. waljee and nerf we have tried calling your damn number and some robot woman tells us it is out of service after about 3 rings. What's up? How are you guys? You is the volatile Mid-East? Things ok? Drop a line, let us know and Waljee goddamnit update the blog, it's been awhile. No excuses, only effort kid. Please let us know how you are and if you went to Paris for deedar, how that was (well mostly how paris was at this time of year).

peacelovefreedomjustice (one love to palestine, it breaks my heart)

-s

"this has been a transmission from the freecity."