Megatron, motherfucker! He's back and this time he's a tank! A TANK! Boy I wish I could transform. I could be anything.

I'll tell ya, I am a developing a sickly parasitical relationship with the suckness that is the Transformers movie franchise. I think it was when I was watching the Blu-Ray a couple of weeks ago and thought to myself, 'you know, the design of the new Megatron isn't that bad,' that I realized I had a problem.

Speaking of problems, here's a fella can't get hired for shit, so he decided to go bananas on Craigslist. It's so filthy, internal security won't even let me open it on my work computer. (Which makes me wonder how they're gonna handle a post that starts with the words "Megatron motherfucker.")

Let me take a minute (once again) to wax Michael Giacchino's car. Any man who trots out John Williams' Lost World theme for the Oscar telecast deserves a bit of praise. I downloaded the 3 Lost season scores, and though I always liked the music on the show, I don't think I had a clear understanding of how freakishly well-laid-out it is until the "John saviour" theme got brought out rather subtly in one track at the tail end of season 1. This Giacchino dude really did map the whole thing out, huh? By the time you're into the mid-third season the thematic relationships are nothing short of mind-boggling (and oh so listenable). He must be one of six people in the world who actually knows what the frick the end of the story is. New Best Composer Ever?

"He walks among us, but he is not one of us." - Jack Shephard's tattoo

"An Eagle Cleaves the Emptiness" - Matthew Fox's tattoo

(...BUT WHICH IS THE REAL TATTOO...??)

I think about Lost, and (unrelatedly) life, a lot these days.

Posted by tederick at 11:51 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & megatron & miscellaneous crap & movies & scars
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I would totally get that tattooed. (Or, tattoed.)

Posted by tederick at 10:49 AM in photoblog & scars
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Here's the promised follow up pic, and I swear it's the very last time I shall devote valuable picspace to this exact thing (until I lose half the arm in a lightsabre fight in 2012), but she is a month plus a day old today, and oh my she's still just so damn beeeuoooteefull:

I know I make grandiloquent statements along these lines quite a lot, but this is the best thing I've done all summer. Hell, possibly best ever. This goes straight to the heart of me.

Today TJ and I were having an e-mail back-and-forth about whether or not girls are worth it. Here's where I stand:

Points for: 2
Points against: 38

But admittedly I'm biased, so feel free to argue. And I recently got all twiddly just from examining the scars on somebody's hands, so who freakin' knows what "worth it" even means. Meanwhilst, I was at the IGA this evening with my reusable shopping bags, and the woman behind me in the line said something about how it was so inconvenient to always have to remember to bring the bags along or whatever, and I said "Well, if saving the world were easy, everyone would be doing it." Which proves that a) I now officially talk like a comic book character, and b) I am one amazingly self-righteous little fucker, huh? Which is tempered nicely by something I said the other day while mulling the existence of god and whether or not such a being interferes in the day-to-day lives of humankind: "Ultimately, I could never respect a god who wastes time looking out for me." So clearly the kids are all right.

Lots to do tonight.

"[Shooting became] like the Bay of Pigs. Just hit the beach, get as many confirmed kills as possible, and move on." - David Fincher

Posted by tederick at 8:28 PM in miscellaneous crap & scars
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Time has ceased to make any kind of coherent sense. Last summer feels like ten years ago and stuff that I wrote on this very blog in the middle of July might as well have been in the middle of the winter. Everything is slippery and shiny. I blame the heat, which has worked as an accellerant on the stress, the weariness, the general why-am-I-hear-ness. Plus no sleep. I spent two hours last night hallucinating I was Spider-Man. (Ultimate Spider-Man, if you must know.) His life is no easier nor harder than mine. It's just different.

That tattoo idea is looking better and better. And speaking of which, I should really do an "after" pic of Sera to update you all cuz she is all healed up and very purdy. And the last time you saw her she was Dark Mark fresh and covered in blood. So it's sort of a different tale.

I am going to start working on my Hallowe'en costume today, and also go on an Avengers jag. These are my go-to "safe places."

"Wear some golf shoes, otherwise we'll never get out of this place alive. Impossible to walk in this muck. No footing at all." - Hunter S. Thompson

Posted by tederick at 8:44 AM in dreams & scars
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Also, and yes I know that I've been called up on to question this previously on the blog but once more With Feeling, how much fucking weight have I lost??? This is a major downside to not owning a scale. But here's how it went: About five months ago I went to buy jeans. I bought a 38 waist, as I have done every time I've bought jeans in the past, say, five years. When buying them, though, they were fairly tight on me, so I was like "I'm either going to have to go up to a 40, or lose weight."

Today I fit into a 34 like a fucking glove. I apparently skipped 36 altogether and dropped 2 sizes without noticing.

If this sounds like gloating, I assure you it's not, it's balls-out stunned shock. Do I have a tapeworm? Is the stress destroying my once-fine physique? Have I become a leaner, harder man ruined by a world of sharp corners and dark alleys? Sweet googly pantsalot, how much me do I lose before I stop being me at all???

While we're on the subject, this week was the first time I was haphazard with my tattoo and its attendant scarring. In other words, I treated my left forearm like normal skin for the first time in the past three weeks, and it reacted accordingly. It's just part of the story now. Sweet.

Posted by tederick at 1:33 PM in miscellaneous crap & scars
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Whaddaya think, maybe this is the next tattoo right here:

cuz up is sure as fuck down these days. Besides I could get a whole street cred for upside-down tattoo art. It could be my "thing:" I only make sense when I'm standing on my head.

"You and I think about this sort of thing too much." - Daniel Cockburn

"Aye! He's onto it!" - Barbossa

Posted by tederick at 10:40 PM in pirates & poetical & scars
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Hangover. Harry Potter hangover. While I could not help but remark, last night, how nice it was to be reading anything that wasn't Harry Potter - there are other stories and characters and events in the world, oh my! - after my short respite I am now starting my second read on Deathly Hallows. Because otherwise, y'know, the DTs. Nonetheless I am feeling downright funky all over. It's like having the same dream two nights in a row. Plus I'm inexplicably exhausted. I think I'm not eating well enough or getting enough exercise or something. I felt so completely wiped and exhausted this afternoon that I came home from work early. It's not as much fun as it used to be, now that looking at porn has lost its appeal. Instead I'm cruising celebrity blogs, because I needed more reasons why I am better than Zach Braff.

Here are the recent non-Potter bullet points:

• Serenity Rose: gloriously healed!
• Mamo #90: the death of my headset!
• New Firefox tab handler: pissing me off.
• One minute movie shoot on Saturday: sunburny but excellent. I can still make it up as I go along, like a champ.
• Cottage plans for the weekend: trembling mightily.
• Yellow Wall: dominating first half of season; second half absences threaten the record.
• Urge to blog: virtually nonexistent. Additionally my blogTO contributions have all but dried up. Have I lost my perspicacity?

Posted by tederick at 4:16 PM in h-pot & podcastery & scars & sockey & tederick films
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OH MY GOD.

Must. Not. Scratch. Serenity.

This is driving me NUTS

Posted by tederick at 2:30 PM in scars
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Aaaaaaaaaaaaand my tat got blogged about by the artist himself. Not the tattoo artist, the art artist. And Mr. A dropped me a cordial e-mail on the subject, too. Sunshine and puppies over here, Internet.

Sera herself is a great scabby mess right now. And the scabs have started to come off so she looks a bit like she's disintegrating after having been turned to stone by Lord Voldemort. But the response has nonetheless been overwhelmingly positive all over town and continues to be so. I am having random "new tattoo?" conversations just as frequently as the random "which Potter are you on?" conversations that I've been having for the past month. Boy I talk to a lot of strangers about my life. (Just in case you thought that only happened in blog-form.) I wrote an extremely lengthy decompress on the subject of tattooing last night in my journal and, because I am a coy bitch, I shall not reiterate it here. Except to say that I'm fairly confident that this is the single best thing I've done for myself since 2003.

I had a late recording session last night for City Surf, so I booked today to work from home. Why commute when you can sleep right up until 8:30? Perfect day for it too; warm and sunny with a pleasant breeze. I ran a network line down to the living room, made tea, opened the windows, took meetings via telecommunicative devices, and generally enjoyed myself. And watched 7 episodes of E.R. while I worked, from back before the show sucked. I'm cool that way. You know, like when Ewan McGregor was on it that one time, or when Omar Epps jumped in front of the subway. I was in my second year of film school when season three of E.R. was on the air, and the show was the perfect metaphor for just how freaked out I was, all the time.

Hey guess what! Extreme Steve vol. 3 starts tomorry. I'm very excited.

Posted by tederick at 6:26 PM in blogsphere & j-o-b & scars & tv
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Restless, unfocused dreams last night - at one point I was trying Indiana Jones' hat on over and over again; at another, I was about to sit my OWLs at Hogwarts and was flying into a panic because I couldn't remember Wingardium Leviosa - which even I knew was ridiculous, given that it was the first thing we learned in first year. Then Cripps showed up and it all went to hell, possibly as a result of certain soccer-related conversations from the subway home last night. Oh patterns.

Which is all by way of saying, I don't think my brain (or this blog) is going to be much good this week. I'm about a 65% walking Harry Potter repository right now. I'm going to be abjectly useless at work, for sure, and the blog skein might be a tad specific for the next whiles. So unless you're all keyed up to read about my latest Potter thoughts - which will be occasionally broken up by tattoo gushing or the virginity thing I'm writing for tomorrow - this is gonna be a dull week on the blog.

Hey, tattoo: going well, although Sera now resembles nothing so much as a dirty great hunk of scabby scabness. She's itchy, too. Damn itchy. Vitamin E barely keeping ahead of the irritation factor. But I am still very, very happy. Having now gone ahead and done this, I suppose I oughta provide a little information on the whys, but we'll save that for later.

Meantime, meet Serenity Rose.

We creamed the opposition in soccer last night, thanks once again to our substitute goaltender and some fine offensive player from... well... everyone. The only downside to the game (aside from tattoo concerns) was the Bug Storm. Yes, we played in a Bug Storm. We played in some kind of mass migration of tiny gnats that proceeded uninterrupted through the entirety of the first half of the game; literally millions of the damn things were all headed north in a languid, unbroken cavalcade across the flats. By halftime they were stuck to my arm like flypaper and getting under my contacts and god knows what all else. It was most discomfiting. But as for the Yellow Wall - which may soon have to be renamed Yellow Domination - we've got a hell of a team there, folks. It's nice to be in charge when everything's going well.

Posted by tederick at 8:46 AM in dreams & h-pot & scars & sockey
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OH MY GOD I LOVE HER SO MUCH. OH MY FUCKING GOD I AM SO HAPPY.

See? I toldja.

I am in love. That's all there is to it. I am in love with my own arm. In my humble opinion - which is, at this time, admittedly not too terribly humble - Lisa did a better job with the art than the original. The eyes, for example, are fucking phenomenal. I love the living shit out of the eyes. There's a smirky glint going on in the face that wasn't there before. And the shading on the face and on the clothes is, quite simply, not something I thought was possible with tattoo art. The blue in the hair pops. The definition on the pants (good pants) and shoes and arm bandages are all just tremendous. For a first tat, Lisa cranked this one out of the park and made herself a big ol' lifetime customer... because yeah, I have got to do this again.

Here's the last time you'll ever see my inner left arm un-Rosed:

I've sent a picture over to Heart Shaped Skull. Attitude of gratitude.

"No more virgin canvas," my friend Jacob said when we started this process. He's been my key adviser on this from the start. It was Jacob who pointed me towards Sinful Inflictions in lovely downtown Whitby Ontario, which is where he got his rather spectacular art done. I got hooked up with Lisa at my consultation a couple of months ago, and have been doing the thrill-of-dread waiting game ever since for my July 12 appointment.

Let's cut straight to the heart of this thing: getting a tattoo hurts, Internet! Didn't see that coming. And good fucking God, was it a turn-on. Didn't see that coming either. Jesus I'm licking my lips right now just thinking about it; I've got a full flush on. Mmmmmmmm tattoo.

When Lisa was doing the outline, it hurt a lot, but I was doing a pretty good job of managing it - occasional flashes to the river of fire on Mustafar, sure, but for the most part I was just giggling and chuckling and so forth. I realized today (and should have done long, long ago) that I have a weird sense of humour about pain. That's why I'm always cracking up when I fall over snowboarding or get hit in the head with a soccer ball: I just sort of find pain amusing. It bears elements of simplicity and focus that are quite useful.

So there I am giggling away and commenting that the pain is more irritating than painful, when she starts with the shading - and holy mother fuck, that's a whole other level of owie. So... I started picturing going down on various people. Yeah. Some people I have gone down on, some people I would like to go down on. It became a bit of a free for all but I kept at it because it was terrifically effective.

And then she starts the colouring and the white... and there is no longer a single thing I can do to be anywhere other than that fiery maelstrom of pain. I am right in there. My entire life has turned into an old, beaten up piece of film: there are unintentional speed-ups, and film white-outs, and bad splices cutting through the center of frame and even a burn-out or two. I just lived there for about ten minutes because there was nothing else I could do. But when that was done, it was done. And I was just so goddamn happy.

OK that's enough storytelling for one night. Gotta go buy Vitamin E.

GO GET A TATTOO, INTERNET. You'll be glad you did.

"I don't wanna die without any scars."

Posted by tederick at 8:26 PM in scars
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Powers letter column this month: funniest thing I've read since I read Chris' future that one time. Everyone's trying to get a chance to guest-write the next lettercol so they're writing all kinds of weird, random shit (under 25 words). So I'm pimping my circ-scar for a shot at the gold. Canadian doctors = nefarious evil! Hey that woulda been way better if I'd come up with an anagram for Canadian doctors that was the equivalent of nefarious evil, but no such effort is in me.

Oh, also? That issue of Powers (#24) was the best one. Ever.

Those geniuses (geniuses!) at the Golden Compass movie's promotion department decided to ape the omnipop internet trope of surveys that tell you which superhero/blaxploitation character/bar of soap you are, and have created a Meet Your Daemon dealie. And so....

Surprisingly effective. I wasn't expecting to see a tiger staring at me, but the name is dead on, and yeah, I think I can buy a tiger. Lyra sure wasn't expecting a pine marten. Fuck, I had to look up "pine marten" on the internet! And there ain't no internet in Lyra's Oxford.

Secular humanists rock.

More storyboarding for Portrait of a Young Artist in My Bed tonight; I did it at Chapters while reading Daredevil (and working out a rather satanic if-I-ever-wrote-Daredevil arc while I was at it). I've really been slacking on the storyboarding on account of how I hate doing them, so I'm planning to crank things back up and get it done in the next few days or so. I'm through the end of scene 14 now. Having fun in spite of myself. One of my descriptions reads: "...drift inward at tail of scene to remove Serena's head and focus on Mark for amazement re: pop." And that is why I do what I do.

Drive shitcanned; Matt once again questions why Fox develops new television series at all. Also: cable's out; no Lost. Fuck TV.

Posted by tederick at 8:28 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & books & comix & scars & tederick films & tv
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When I was a kid I had a magic box. It looked like this. I never sold lemonade but on a couple of occasions I held impromptu magic shows on the front lawn at my parents' house armed only with the magic kit, a fridge box for a backstage, and a "crystal ball" that my father must have rescued from the rafters of the briniest dive of a tavern in all of New England.

I had completely forgotten about this thing. It was long since gone, scarred over in my memory and indistinguishable from all the other parts around it. It was reading Kavalier & Clay last month that finally brought that tiny shard loose of the tissue. Old memories tend to carry dust and spores, like the vaguest memory of what it was like to be that kid back then that would do that sort of thing. I notice that it's getting harder and harder to draw a straight line back through all of the things that have happened and arrive two decades prior at that kid and the way he looked at things and the world. I can get a sad-on pretty quickly these days just by thinking about the vast distances, the ages of time in which so many things have happened.

On Saturday Chris and I (still somewhat good Protestant boys deep down inside) will go get a Christmas tree for 3QF and make with the merry, but for the first time in my life I've ducked out of decking the halls at my parents' place, because it's just getting too hard for me to still be seated so squarely in the "kid" generation of my aging family. In any sane or rational version of the universe my parents, aunts, and uncles would have grandchildren to frame Christmas around, not a generation of twentysomething (and now thirtysomething) loners and misfits playing the same holiday routine we've been running since we were babies. It's not fair to anyone. Christmas is an increasingly dangerous time for me, not so much in the usual loneliness and depression factors that you read about in the papers, but because it makes me feel so incredibly delinquent. I want my own part of the tradition, now. My own closet in the back of the house where the presents are hidden which will blow the doors off the whole "Santa Claus" thing when the kids break in there and run amuck. My own misbegotten attempts to turn the tree outside into a beacon of Noma lights that can be seen with the naked eye by men standing on the Moon. My own sounds of the house at night after the kids have gone to bed but are still waiting up, genuinely listening to the blackness for the sounds of fat men traipsing on rooftops. Instead, I have this: these last few years and certainly the next several, a shallow, shadowy no-man's-land. I go to bed listening only to the sound of the world, and troubled by thick, uncomfortable thoughts.

Posted by tederick at 11:41 PM in dreams & poetical & scars
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I’ve come to bury the dead. I’ve gathered the stones, brought fire for my little plastic rocket. The sun is setting on the first day of the world. Now for the first time I can feel the past fall finally behind me, equal in my mindfulness to the present and the future. The tendrils of my thoughts stretch outwards, stretch sideways. I can see father than I have before. I can see myself, and the feeling is new - or at least, I haven’t felt it in a long while. I’m me again. Or more accurately I’m the new me, the one brought by great change, made in cataclysm - a whole new person both new and the same with all the scars and cracks and breaks and tears and blood and long, weary muscles. The same eyes a different colour. My blood is finally now neither to vein-bustingly thick nor thought-drainingliny thin. Just right: red, and rich, and soaking the soil. I rather thought I’d hate being this new me (having been so personally satisfied with the last one), but now it doesn’t seem so bad. I’m graver a bit, I think, and more amused and more curious, and rather surprisingly more powerful; I broke the bonds of my own inner molecules when I wrestled the Great Eye, and I suppose not surprisingly the energy released has been fairly vivid. Who knew nothingness held such hidden juice, but I might have guessed. I’ve been forced forward against my will, but there have been rewards. And now with the birth pain finally receding - the great cracks in the earth rock growing still, the tremors fading - I can look around and breathe the fresh air. The sky is the grey non-colour, just before dawn. I can smell the spring hidden in the mists, beneath the slate green muck.

I think I shall go for a walk.

“Love. You can know all the math in the ‘Verse, but take a boat in the air you don’t love, she ain’t keepin’ up just as sure as the turning of worlds. Love keeps her up when she ought to fall down, tells ya she’s hurtin’ ‘fore she keens, makes her a home.” - Captain Malcolm Reynolds

Posted by tederick at 6:56 PM in blood & poetical & scars
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You begin to feel like a patched-together verison of yourself - like on Six Feet Under when Claire was making those faggy art pieces by ripping up photographs and then gluing them back together. Only you're made up of a whole bunch of different photographs of you from all throughout your life, and they don't match together particularly well. You're two-dimensional, and strange looking, and when you move, you move weird. But all the pieces that are supposed to be there are there, if only because they're supposed to be. You're not sure they represent you any more, or if they're just shreds of a picture you took of yourself a long time ago.

I went back to yoga today for the first time in about six weeks; for some reason, no matter how I try, I always end up giving December a clean miss for absolutely no good reason and then coming back to it in the new year. At one point during the relaxation I caught myself thinking about the ex-X and noticed that I could actually feel my body realigning itself into tightness and pain, my breathing getting shorter and harder, until I cleared my mind and stepped past it. Something similar happened at work this week; it was about 2:30 in the afternoon and I went to the washroom, and on the way back I noticed that my body was hunched forward and closed inward, and my breathing was shallow and vapid. I stretched back and opened up and took what felt like my first deep breath in several hours. I've spent so much time lately being hyper-aware of my mind and my heart; it seems like I've completely forgotten my poor body. Today my arms felt like long ropes of scar tissue; my blood was as thin as rainwater.

At this time of year I become unusually obsessed with the view out of subway windows when they emerge from the tunnels. I pay close attention to what my eyes are doing as they continually adjust and reframe the passing action outside the car into a flurry of impressions. I'm looking at buying a digital camera in a little while and when I do, I might try to put some of this into images, if I could figure out some way to avoid the soot-stained subway windows mucking up every shot. Prying the doors open, maybe, or riding on the tops of the cars.

This life is rated PG-13 for disaster-related peril and violence, nudity, sensuality, and brief language.

Posted by tederick at 4:32 PM in poetical & scars
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Tonight I was with April at the Second Cup at Yonge and Charles, talking about web sites and art. I had just finished telling her that for whatever reason - cosmic vortex, ungainly neighbourhood pressure, who knows - that particular spot is a very strange coffee shop and always has been; weird stuff frequently happens there. I was talking rather loudly on another topic, when a woman called out to me from clear across the room - "You're Jewish, I can tell. The Force is with us, man." I was wearing a Star Wars t-shirt (because when am I ever not?) so I replied "Well, you're half right, I am a Jedi, but I am not a Jew." She said that she hadn't noticed the shirt but "just knew," and insisted that I sounded Jewish and that therefore there had to be some part of me that was Jewish.

Still carrying this conversation across the entire room and quite loudly, I good-naturedly assured her that she'd got it wrong, and that there really was no Jewish in my family. She told me that by "part" she had meant my penis. Shoulda seen that coming.

I really don't think my penis is Jewish, circumcision scar or no, nor do I think that circumcision in general would automatically indoctrinate him into the tribe. If anything I'd say he's even more of an atheist than I am, because when he says "there is no God," he means it. He is not part of a chosen people; he may well be the Chosen One, but that just brings us straight back to Jedi. Anyways I didn't explain this to the Second Cup woman; she was already out the door like she'd found the Messiah and boy, I would love it if that were true. Satisfied that my original point had been proven, April and I went back to talking about web sites and art.

Posted by tederick at 11:12 PM in jedi antics & scars & sex (theoretical)
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