K.I. Press's Blog, page 26

And this song makes me smile.

And this song makes me smile.

Another excerpt from my very drafty novel

Well, then I was really depressed. I tried to become an alcoholic. Another thing that seems to work so well on TV, I mean, there are all these very funny, not funny, but charismatic characters who are alcoholics, even if they kill their families in the end or destroy their lives or the lives of others, they are good characters, often funny, often sad, certainly dramatic in a yelling and throwing chairs and falling over kind of way, sometimes they are even very witty. Like you, Clem. They both smiled. And I had this feeling that, this hope that everything would be better, would feel better, if only I were a drinker. When you are sad, you drink to drown your troubles, don't you? So I went on a campaign of drinking. I knew I'd have to move out of wine and into hard liquor if I really wanted this to work. So I went and got a bunch of blended whiskey – Clem made a yech face – and started with that. Well I hate whiskey, but I didn't know that yet at the time, it just seemed to be the thing you were supposed to drink if you were an alcoholic in a  movie. I drank a tumbler of the stuff every night for a week. Every night and every morning I felt ill, and while I was drinking, I just felt sadder. I quit after a week. There was just no making headway with it.

            What you didn't understand, said Clem, is that when you feel ill, you have to take that as a sign that you haven't drank enough yet, and eventually it becomes true. That's the trick to being an alcoholic.

            Is it, said Lucy, and downed her glass of wine like a poker player in an old western. They laughed like maniacs.

Here is the video I was looking for yesterday. Not as good as...

Here is the video I was looking for yesterday. Not as good as the recorded version, but still. And Alison Krauss in the bg.

I went to see Willie Nelson once. Sea of white heads. I almost...

I went to see Willie Nelson once. Sea of white heads. I almost passed out from the mellow. And look, I don't dig "new country" music, but Shania Twain's an awesome singer. There. I said it. I'm going to see if I can find her cover of Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors," which is pure awesomeness. (If you like this kind of thing.)

"'Please do not be alarmed,' it said, 'by anything you see or hear around you. You..."

"'Please do not be alarmed,' it said, 'by anything you see or hear around you. You are bound to feel some initial ill effects as you have been rescued from certain death at an improbability level of two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand to one against—possibly much higher. We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway. Thank you.'"

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I had the good fortune to meet Buffy Sainte-Marie when I got to...

I had the good fortune to meet Buffy Sainte-Marie when I got to act as her on-the-fly publicist for two days preceding an event. She is a tremendous, inspiring, incredible woman. I don't have the right adjectives.

She was playing at a fundraiser, and you could see some of the tables become visibly uncomfortable with her politics. 

Memories of spring. More chive flower porn.

Memories of spring. More chive flower porn.

Pete! Not much else to say, but I'll reiterate...

Pete! Not much else to say, but I'll reiterate what's been said so often about him: a life and an example to everyone about how to walk the walk and stand up for what you believe in.

My best photo from my pinhole phase. I made my own cameras, but...

My best photo from my pinhole phase. I made my own cameras, but this one was actually made by my friend Kim Solga, who had been doing it longer than me. It gave great results, so I kind of feel like Kim did all the work on this one. This is Grenadier Pond in High Park, Toronto, in winter. The photo was taken directly on paper.

"A lifelong city-dweller, you bring what you can to your crude shelter within the novel, trying to..."

"A lifelong city-dweller, you bring what you can to your crude shelter within the novel, trying to make for yourself a habitable space in the midst of this fearful desolation. Everything you build now is temporary, makeshift, constructed for survival and prone to collapse when the elements grow fierce. But this now is your space: here you can make a new beginning, discover an entire world and be recreated by it."

- Thomas Wharton, The Logogryph