The past is a grotesque animal.

Emotions are stupid, and should be hated, but I've been having some lately.

It's getting unpleasant, for more than just me.

This is more than just a leitmotif.

If you don't want to read this emotional vomit, I'll forgive you unconditionally and hold no grudges, but accept no apologies. Just let it pass unspoken and forgotten.

Regardless, it's not about you. It's my navel and I'll gaze at it all I like.

So choose.

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OK. It's your own fault from here on in. This is the last time in this post that I really mean you.

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I used to work in a funeral home, a long time ago.

Some things you can't un-see.

Sometimes the images of dead children come back, vividly, often because of a particular scent.

I generally don't like to give or receive flowers since then.

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If your white terrier gets anxious when you tie it up outside of stores while you buy whatever overpriced shit you don't need, barks constantly, strains and lunges desperately every moment you're apart, it's pretty fucking cruel to leave it out here.

You're either ignorant of its suffering, or you're something of a monster. Possibly both.

I can't even see you to identify you, but I want to slap you to the ground.

If I thought I could make you understand, I might give it a try.

But I just don't have that much faith in you.

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Your knock-off Vespa might get good mileage, but keep it off the fucking sidewalk. A red light means you stop too. The Mazda 3 behind you didn't mount the curb, blow by me at 30 kph just to pull a u-turn and get ahead of the rest of the traffic, probably because he's not a dick. Or maybe he just didn't have room.

If I had raised my elbow, I could have had your teeth.

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White minivan: You're halfway into the intersection, against the red, less than a foot from hitting me. Don't look at me like I'm the slack-jawed idiot who nearly killed someone in front of a police station. Pay better fucking attention. At least your inappropriate rage makes me smirk. I can't hear you with my headphones in, and even if I could, we're both better off this way.

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More generally, if you don't signal your turn, I don't know that you're turning off here. Hence my crossing the ramp at the designated spot for doing so. I even have right of way in this instance. Don't honk. Willy sees you. Willy don't care.

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I have this idea for getting metal traffic signs made up, black on yellow and official-looking, to post around the city. They'll say "Motorists Use Your Fucking Signals."

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My walk to work includes such lovely sights as: an industrial gravel field with its sad barbed-wire fence slowly bending to the will of plant life and oxidation. A power transfer station and its geometrically perfect spider's web of high tension wires. A decrepit long-closed movie theatre with a broken sign, two empty storefronts and a defunct-looking driving school.

Or, depending on my route, I can pass up to three pornography stores, only one of which makes an attempt at witty signage. Sure, it fails ("Screw Harper and Obama/check out our stimulus packages") but it tries. It's also got a bright yellow banner boasting that it has the best private viewing rooms in Ontario.

Two things sadden me about this: that in order to make a boast like that means that someone has to be cleaning those viewing rooms, otherwise everywhere else is just that much worse. And that somewhere out there, it's someone's job to visit and rate the private pornography viewing rooms of Ontario. Slightly less picturesque than the bridges of Madison County.

More tits, though.

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Samuel Johnson called his "the black dog." Winston Churchill popularized Johnson's phrase and used to paint to keep his in check. Tennessee Williams found stability in his love, Frank Merlo, to balance out his own peaks and valleys. Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis weren't able to manage theirs especially well, to the benefit and loss of us all.

This isn't a list of people I compare myself to. I'm not a great artist or musician. I don't think it likely that I'll have a career in politics. And I know well enough my skill as a writer meagre in comparison.

It's just the common theme that I'm slowly getting to.

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I don't want to say that I get sick of people, or society, or civilization as a whole, but fuck it, I really do.

It begins with intolerance for strangers; just regular folk going about their lives, same as me. There are days when they irritate the hell out of me, and that happens to everyone now and again, but when it's consistent and constant and everything outside my door sounds like a cacophony of dumbly jabbering birds, I know it's me.

That I'm on my way down.

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When it first came about, I didn't even fight it. I love dogs, and welcomed it into my heart. "I'm a dog person," I said. "Let's wallow about on the floor with it." And the black dog nearly got the better of me. I managed to get help and get it under control. It was a pretty dark ride, although not as dark as some I know.

And since then there's been more bright than dark, even the times when the edges have crept in, it's never been as bad as it was the first time around.

I know this black dog well, now.
I know what I'm doing, now.
I know myself, now.

But recently my black dog has been creeping back, barking loudly at inopportune times, and generally being a nuisance. In recent years I've been keeping him at bay mainly with exercise and a particular diet - an emphasis on fruit and veg without going vegetarian, which I tried but found my body wasn't fond of - and generally keeping something of a routine on that front. Back country camping trips in Northern Ontario also help a lot for my general well-being, both physically and mentally.

I've fallen out of that routine of late, almost fully, and even though I could claim extenuating circumstances, that's bullshit. There are things that I need to do in order to function fully, and I haven't been doing them, and I'm the only one with responsibility for doing them or not. So I need to start doing them again.

It's time for me to shoo the black dog away again, lest he bite someone.

Lest he bite you.

2140

When I moved into this neighbourhood 6 years ago, I never thought I would stay here this long. I fell in love with my apartment, not because everything was new, in fact there were a lot of “defaults” like single windows and badly insulated walls and ceilings. But at least I would have a terrace for the first time. It took me one ex and a half further to really settle myself into this place and consider it my own home. Yes okay, my upper neighbours are quite a psycho family with a yelling couple and yelling kids who sometimes drop their toys on my terrace and brake a thing or two. It makes my boyfriend going into a “French frenzy” when being awoken at 8 am by a mother going ballistic, but I tend to ignore it, if possible. Still... I love my place.

Once I had this Polish neighbour living across the street on the first floor, the same floor as me. I didn’t really have curtains at this time, so we could spy on each other and he actually did it much more often than me. His front windows were filled with plants, it looked like his own private rain forest inside. His wife was a funny woman, I guess she was around 60 years old, dressed very funky and with red dyed hair which looked rather orange because of dying her “possibly” grey hairs. Sometimes at night I would see the man coming home on his bike with a huge armoire (found on the street?) tied to the back. He once told me, with a smile, he regretted I bought curtains for my windows, because he would not be able to see inside anymore. And after some time they moved away, because there are too many foreigners living in the neighbourhood (his words…and he’s Polish).

It IS a very diversified neighbourhood, there are a lot of different ethnic groups living here and also rich and poor people living mixed-together in the same streets. My neighbour next door is from Moroccan origin and he owns the bakery on the main street. I think he will be very happy the day I get married, because I have the impression he feels a little bit sad watching a young woman living by herself having a boyfriend who after 2 years is still not living in her place. He can’t grasp the concept of having a LAT relationship. For him, a woman my age shouldn’t be taking care of herself. I tried to explain him I’m totally okay with it and that I’m happy, but it’s his culture of course. When it’s Christmas his business side shows up and he sells Christmas cakes in his Moroccan bakery. Although I’m sure it’s also out of respect for the different religions here, like one day during the Ramadan when I was in his bakery and it was time for them to start eating again, he offered me an almond stuffed date. This they give and eat themselves before eating the actual food.

And now today, the Ramadan has started again. In my main street you can find al different kinds of food at any hour of the day and night. Grilled fish, tahines, Vietnamese, fresh fruits, pizza, kebab, couscous, fries…It is food paradise, I swear! During the Ramadan it becomes food heaven. The bakeries sell all these special sweet things they eat during the whole month and they also make things they would never sell during the rest of the year. Like today, I bought this tuna wrap, the wrap itself looked like what I would call a Lebanese bread, but a little bit smaller. They stuffed it with tuna, olives, corn and something spicy, I would say harissa . So if you’re a food lover my advice is to spend the month of the Ramadan close by a Muslim neighbourhood. And don’t worry when you’re nearly broke, everything is cheaper here than anywhere else in my city.

It will be tough if I ever leave this neighbourhood. I would surely miss my apartment as well, but mainly my street and the people living in my area. A lot would call this place dangerous. Someone once told me it’s the district which is the most polluted and has the youngest and biggest population for a district in Flanders. Yeah, it’s never quiet here, there’s always something happening. And in the summer, when walking outside, you can smell this whole palette of perfumes. Spicy, sweet, smoked, sometimes mixed with a blend of weed. This whole neighbourhood is an open-minded experience. And every time the media tries to scare you, telling you all the bad shit happening in the world, I look outside and I see it’s not that bad after all. It’s what they make of it, it’s what they want you to believe. It’s the bad shit they want you to see, they never tell you about all the good shit happening every minute of the day.And I’m a believer. Because I’ve seen it already.

And with this, I wish my neighbourhood “Ramadan Mabrouk”!

Rock & Roll Dinosaurs

So I've been thinking a lot about a dinosaur rock band. Not a dinosaur-rock band, where we play Eagles songs and reminisce about the '60s - which would be silly, since I'm not old enough to reminisce about the '60s. I'm talking about a rock band made up of dinosaurs.

The genesis of this is one of my newly-favourite t-shirts. And as much fun as a t-rex wailing on the drums in rock 'n roll ecstasy is, that's not how I'd structure my band. Oh no.

• Ankylosaurus on drums, because he's got a built-in bass pedal in that knobby tail of his. (Runner-up is a Pteranodon, because they've got the long arms to reach.)

• Triceratops on bass, because it looks like a lizard with rhythm, and also perhaps possesses funk which it could bring in and/or give us.

• Iguanodon on keyboards, because neither gets enough respect. Who's in a permanent state of thumbs up? This guy, that's who.

• Tyrannosaurus rex on guitar. Sure, he's got little arms, but he makes up for it with heart. And his big head. And I hate the high, wailing bullshit guitar-playing anyway. And he wants to play guitar and you want to tell him he can't? Not in this band you won't, and fuck you for trying.

• Velociraptor on lead vocals, because the Christian Slater-narrated Walking With Dinosaurs episode on them told me they had feathers and were fast and lithe, and dammit, I want a showman up front.

• This band doesn't have a cello, but they know a brachiosaurus who writes and plays the most haunting cello music you've ever heard, and sometimes they bring her into the studio.

You may ask "Why do you waste your time thinking about dinosaur rock bands?"

To which I'd respond "Why do you waste your time wearing pants and breathing air?"

Yes, I'm a sarcastic git. But it's also my roundabout way of saying that I'm a product of my culture and evolution.

My culture revels in absurdity and wallows in a wealth of unacknowledged irony. A liberal Canadian newspaper asking the question of whether or not it's appropriate that Michelle Obama got off of Air Force One wearing shorts. What the fuck? That's almost as inappropriate as asking why she wasn't in the kitchen, or if a woman who works can still be a good parent. It's not like she was wearing hot pants and go-go boots to a black-tie ball honouring... I don't know, something honourable. Nothing comes to mind because I don't really have any convictions. But you see what I mean, despite the fact that she's totally got the legs for hot pants. Point: they're just shorts, and she's still a person. Why is this a question, and why is it news?

My genetic hard wiring has me set down as a social ape who requires a certain amount of belonging within a larger community. Since that little community I like to call humanity is little weird, and I am not apart from my community, I too am a little weird. I just don't pretend that I'm not, and like to point it out as our most-shared characteristic now and then.

And so the result of all of this that I wear absurd t-shirts that make me laugh and help me shrug off the bizarre little circus that surrounds us on a daily basis. I can put up with most things if I'm wearing a little bit of entertainment. A little something that reminds me that I'm just as absurd as any of the other 6.7 billion apes in my extended family.

So then, my fellow Earthicans: who's in your dinosaur rock band?

Who we are and what this is.

Deadduck and Foo are young people from different continents, living in Canada and Belgium, who met up years ago at Guerrilla News Network. After some years of blogging on there and being fan of each other’s work, we decided to pool our strengths together and to start up this blog space. A space about everything and nothing, seen from different cultural and historical backgrounds. We hope you’ll enjoy our international torpor, and maybe share your own.

- dd and Foo