Joanna Newsom Sucks, And Evan Parsons Owes Me Money.

I've just written a short biography on Vancouver filmmaker Evan Parsons.

See that? I even called him a filmmaker. How fancy is that? Oh, and by 'biography', I mean that I made some noises about his work habits at the Wee Book Inn, so be warned: the piece might lack a bit of Professionalism.

It's up on The Straw, so you should go read it and watch his movies, because he's good at what he does, even if what he does is shoot two minutes of footage and then attach some wanky music to it. It's ART, goddamn it.

Anyway. I'm kinda drunk offa something my wife calls a Crown Float, so I'm gonna find me some munchies and then stare at the TV for a while. I might even call it names, but only if I'm feelin' lucky.

Because I Really Should Be Documenting This Shit.

Random Stuff About The HILJ #45: when pretending to fly, she creeps around on her tiptoes with her hands held up like claws, flexing her fingers and hunching her shoulders and kinda sorta snuffling and snorting. She will do this for about five or six minutes straight, and yes, it IS the cutest thing you've ever seen, but please remember, she's also pretty much a two-year-old, which means that she's basically suffering from a lesser version of puberty (body changing and strange emotions developing that she cannot describe, etc.), which means that at any given moment this little angel will haul off and hit you with a chair, for no other reason than it occurred to her to do so.

Random Stuff About The HILJ #102: there are times when Hazel will pick up a crayon and start picking at it with her fingernail; when she does this, she gets this faraway look on her face, like she's in a trance, and she'll start placing each wax flake somewhere on my person, until I am literally festooned with constellations of orange and purple and green pieces of crayon. It's like she's a witch doctor or shaman or evangelical baptist or something, seeing visions of some impending doom, the likes of which can only be warded off by the mystical sigils she's creating with dust from the bones of the Great Beast Cray-Oh-Luh.

Yes, I have a rich inner life. Get off my back.

Have to go. Apparently the HILJ feels it would be better if everything that we have up on shelves would be happier strewn across the floor, and vice versa.

Lord Have Mercy.

So: somehow the good people at The Straw have seen fit to allow me access to their website, which means that I will be posting blurred pictures of rampaging genitalia and excerpts from diaries written by paranoid schizophrenics on a somewhat-daily basis over there.

I don't know what they think they're doing, but no good could possibly come from this.

Also: I have just recently purchased many components for my Experiments In Learning How Electronic Stuff Works, so expect a lot of smoke to be coming from our house in the next couple of weeks.

Now: go to sleep. You've still got chores to do in the morning, and I ain't calling you more than once before I dump a bucket o' water on your head.

You Meet The Nicest People On Friday Nights.

It wasn't the clunky high heels, nor the jeans that left too little to the imagination, nor the fact that their blouses seemed to consist of nothing but a handful of glitter and some scotch tape; no, it was the fact that these party girls had decided to squat and urinate in unison across the street from where I was waiting for my cab, just barely sequestering themselves behind the small dumpster that H&R Block has sitting in their parking lot. That's what screamed 'class' to me. I'm pretty sure they were holding hands while they did it, too, which strikes me as either very sweet or a tad weird, I can't decide.

Granted, I was the one who was staring at their roadside evacuations, so who am I to judge?

And that right there was really the only thing noteworthy about my evening, aside from the slightly-creepy guy in eyeliner who came in twenty minutes before we closed to get an apple juice and show off the motorized skateboard he'd just built, complete with handheld remote. I say slightly, because he comes in on a regular basis, but usually he seems catatonic; he'll buy his drink, sit down at a table and just stare - not at anyone or anything in particular, he'll just stare. According to Jeff, he also sometimes will just sit in his car and, well, stare. Apparently he once rolled down his window very slowly and asked one of the girls from The Coup in a deadpan voice, "Would you like to see my HAM radio?", at which point she came into Beano and asked us if we could call her a cab, because she was FREAKED OUT.

Which is too bad, because by all accounts, he's a nice guy, and god forbid I disparage anyone for showing an interest in DIY electronics; all I'm saying is that some social niceties are in order.

Anyway; this is me just rambling. Now I must go find coffee, because my darling daughter feels it's necessary to greet the day only three hours after I've just gone to bed. You'd think this would teach me to go to bed earlier, as her morning activities are really nothing new, but what can I say: I'm dum.

Hi, can I talk to you about our Lord's Plan for you in Heaven for a few hours?

So it's 4:oo pm and I'm making a travesty of a drink known as a half-caf quarter-sweet vanilla almond milk latte with no foam for some fake-tan mall princess (because no one drinks actual coffee any more), when I look out the window towards the grassy knoll across the street where everyone goes to smoke and see a man depositing an honest-to-goodness couch onto the knoll, where he then sits and begins to smoke a joint very obviously and with many hand gestures to no one in particular; and just as Geoff and Jeff and Shanley and I are trying to figure out whether it's some sort of performative art exhibit or just a guy who wants a bit of nature in his living room, he then stands up, gathers all of the tree stumps that Geoff Hunter brought for all of the tired and huddled smokers to sit on when they're partaking of their habit, stacks them up into a big tower and then delivers the lamest jump-kick I've ever seen this side of Chuck Norris (who really doesn't deserve all the attention y'all've been heaping upon his retard-executing shoulders so y'all should just stop already), barely knocking his ersatz tree to the ground.

Before we can recover from witnessing this, however, he runs to his truck, picks up a football and proceeds to throw a rather limp pass directly towards the couch, where it bounces up into the air, forcing him to dive and catch his own fumble.

Then: he puts the football back in his truck, and spends the next ten minutes trying to get the couch back into the bed of his vehicle, at which point Geoff went out and just held his door open for him.

I have no explanation. I just felt that this scene needed to be shared. And that's my way of saying hey it's good to be back on the internet saying nothing at all.

What's new? Um. Well. Nothing, really. Still married to the classiest dame ever. Still raising the most awesome demon-child around. Still slinging caffeine for a living, only now I don't get paid for holidays, but I do get to yell at customers and co-workers alike as often as I please, so it evens out. Still writing about ice ages and radioactive insects and the many ways we allow other people to do our thinking for us - it's coming slowly, mind you, but at least it's coming.

That's about it. This is just me checking in, and oh wait hey here's some new music y'all should be listening to:

1. I would totally marry Ida Maria but only if my wife said it was okay. As it stands, I'm okay with just listening to her tell me how she likes me better when I'm naked.

2. Hey, look, Danger Mouse is doing yet another project, this time with Shins frontman James Mercer. Broken Bells certainly sounds a lot like the Shins, but with a little more atmosphere, and a little less reedy hipsterism. It's not jaw-dropping amazing, but it'll do until DM puts out his next hip-hop masterpiece with Jemini later on this year, and then you'll all be like, holy crap chris I totally understand why you like this guy now.

3. Big Business, Mind The Drift: meaty meaty meaty goodness.

4. Speaking of big and beefy: I got a chance to hear some early stuff from Bloated Bastards and it's truly remarkable and evil and good at the same time. It's Garrett and Dean from Summerlad, and it sounds like someone following you home on a dark night and punching you in the back of the head once and then leaving you alone wondering what the hell just happened.

I mean that in a good way. They used to have a Myspace thing going, but I can't seem to find it, so just have a little patience and then before long everyone'll be saying, "BB? Oh, yeah, I was into them for decades. I like their earlier stuff better, though, before they sold out..."

Update: Dean was nice enough to send me the link. Go and listen and eat a drumstick while you're at it.

5. If you're not listening to HEALTH yet, then I just don't know what to do with you.

Now I must go write about perverted cab drivers and the things they do in while waiting for fares. It's not pretty, but then neither am I, and I still made out okay.

A Whole Bunch of Apologies But Not Really.

So, um, we went ahead and did Christmas without y'all this year. Sorry; we just got tired of waiting, and, honestly, it's not like we've really talked in the last couple of months, I mean REALLY talked, y'know? So, why put this hypocritical burden on ourselves of pretending that we spent all this time searching for the perfect gifts for each other when really we were just scrambling about in a blind panic and that's why you got a novelty bar of soap for Christmas this year.

So, we're cool, right?

Kidding: I still love you all the same as the day I scraped you off the underside of the table and gave you names and pretended that I had real friends.

Although we DID go ahead and had Christmas last weekend; it's just that we're going away to the magical kingdom of Vancouverland to visit the grandparents this week, so we figgered it'd be easier to give the Little Miss a day of insanity here, as opposed to hauling all of her junk there and back again. Sorry if you didn't get the invite, but it was kind of a family affair, if you consider the guy living in your basement to be family.

(Which we do, because it's Bryn, and, well, Bryn is all kinds of awesome, even if he does walk around in his sweatpants all the time, carrying a knotted pair of jockey shorts in his hands while trying to teach my daughter how to talk like an Ewok. I swear to god, Bryn, the moment she utters the phrase 'Jub-jub' is the moment you find her soiled diapers inside of your pillow case.)

So, yes, Saturday morning we all gathered around our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree and watched while Hazel consumed her own body weight in sugar before stuffing herself into the toy oven that the Ladyfriend had spent all night previous constructing for her so that the Little Miss would have somewhere to put all the toy sushi that she recieved as a Chrsitmas gift, although now that I think about it, sushi's supposed to be raw so why would she need an oven to cook it in and now I should shut up because the Ladyfriend staying up until 2:00 in the goddamned morning building a kitchen out of cardboard for our daughter to play with is also seven shades of awesome and now here is where I breathe.

(whew.)

She also spent the previous two evenings making a fireplace out of construction paper so that we could have somewhere to hang our stockings.

Because I have apparently married Supermom. I am actually agog when I think about how much work the Ladyfriend put in to making Christmas special, not only for our daughter, but for everyone at the house. You rule, Supermom.

(This is not to say that my own mother is not Supermom as well, because she is, seeing as she had to not only raise me but also my brother (who is smelly) and my two sisters (who are not as smelly as they once were but when they were, whoooo boy!) as well as put up with my Dad, who I'm sure is where we all got our smelliness from - but for now, The Ladyfriend gets the title of Supermom, because she rocks harder than Dokken.)

(Who, when you really think about it, don't rock that hard at all, but whatever.)

So this is me saying, sorry if you missed it, but we had fun, and now we're going, and we won't be back until the new year, so stay outta my stuff. I've laid traps, so I'll know, so be good.

Things, or How I Spent The Last Six Months & Stuff

Right now, the Little Miss is distracted, as she is trying to stuff as many Christmas ornaments as possible into as many of her boots as possible, so I have a few moments to say: yes, I've been absent from my role of INTERNET WISDOM DISPENSER for some time now. I apologize. I am a Bad Internetter.

Still, there are reasons.

1. We gots married. Although I think I told y'all that one already. Only now it's offishul as we have Super Power Action Rings that were made out of alien bonedust and strange metals from radioactive meteors, granting us the ability to change our respective shapes into whichever form might best be required for our action-packed peril-fraught lives: "Form of: a diaper! Shape of: a wet wipe! Look out, Naked Baby, here we come!"

Rings are fun.

2. Beano got a facelift. Basically what happened was that we packed all of our cafe into a space that was about four feet by four feet, then served coffee out of it while crackheads dismantled the rest of the cafe with hammers and wheelbarrows and pneumatic drills. This lasted for about three weeks, which caused no small amount of dementia on our part, having to fit into the tiny space and serve people who'd look around and ask where the bathrooms were and why we weren't serving food - and I'm not lying about the crackheads, although they seemed to do more damage to themselves than they did to us. Also the fire department was called out at one point due to a cheesy smell eminating from the storm drain outside, where we may or may not have been dumping all of our excess water and gross milk during the warmest part of the summer. I admit nothing.

3. InFamous: okay, so you're stuck in the downtown core of The City, which has been quarantined by The Government due to some strange 'plague' that the TV's keep talking about, so it's pretty much a no-man's-land of ganags and violence and such, except you've also suffered a weird accident that's granted you the power to channel electricity and shock people and make lightning come out of your hands so you can decide whether or not it's best to save a bunch of people from the evil gangs that control the city or maybe it's best to just electrocute EVERYONE so that you can keep all the emergency supply drops for yourself and it's like being a superhero in Grand Theft Auto.

GAWD, this game is so fun.

4. Batman: Arkham Asylum: okay, basically you get to be Batman, so as cool as InFamous might be, THIS IS A GAME WHERE YOU ACTUALLY GET TO BE BATMAN.

So, y'know, you decide.

5. Fallout 3: Game Of The Year Edition: yes, I know I've already played the original version of this game, which essentially takes about six months for you to choose a name for your character, and really takes your entire lifetime in order for you to finish the storyline. This version, though, has aliens and radioactive hillbillies. I had no choice.

6. We went to Vancouver for about a week and I got to introduce my wife to the giant wall known as The Janzens. Or The Havilands. Or The Janzen/Havilands. Either way: I am probably the shortest of all the Janzen/Haviland males, so you can imagine how intimidating a Thanksgiving dinner with the majority of my uncles and cousins might seem.

To her credit, my wife showed no fear. To their credit, my uncles did not eat her (because, y'know, that's what giants do, right?)

7. Here is the big one: I am actually writing a book.

Not just pithy internet musings, or bitter rants about general assholishness of the world, but an honest-to-goodness, Real Life Novel. Josh Barsky (he of The Straw fame and other such literary affectations) has been standing over me with a lead pipe, beating me senseless every time he sees me without a pen in my hand scribbling furiosly into a notebook, and he's giving me a deadline, which I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be late for (March 1st, 2010), but the fact of the matter is that it's actually happening and I am being a Writer and ohmigod this is equal parts fun and exhausting.

Before any of you ask: it's about earthquakes and superviruses and nuclear war and massive floods, and, yes, it's about zombies, but it's also about trying to open a can of beans without using a can opener. So there. Hopefully this doesn't bomb.

Now I must go and fish tiny glass ornaments out of my daughter's nose, as apparently she feels that they fit better in there than in her boots. God forbid we actually hang them up on a tree or something. Merry something-or-other and a Happy mumble-mumble-mumble.