once i was visiting a friend in new westminster. new westminster is one of the oldest of the colonised places here. it is about an hour by transit to that place where she used to live with the person that used to be her husband. how she ended up there is a very interesting story, but it is her story and i hope she tells it some day. so we were visiting and her husband wasn't home. he was working. we talked. we talked and talked. she was reading a lot about budhism. she would go to meditations and she would tell me the stuff that she studied. she talked about this meditation practice called tong glen. i don't know how it is spelled, but that's how it sounded to me. as i may or may not have indicated i am fairly deaf and i lip read a lot and don't hear things very well in noisy, dimly lit bars. my friend elizabeth, after meeting my mom, commented that my mom didn't hear very well. i agreed. "that's probably why you speak the way you do." she meant that i announciate in an exaggerated way, but i had forgotten that i did that and felt freekish for about five seconds before i realised that was the least of my worries.

anyway. so my friend told me that tong glen is where you concentrate on your breathing. you breath in bad and you breathe out good. you transform things in that imperceptible hiccup between intake and exhilation of breath. budhists and maybe my friend will tell me that's totally wrong or not exactly right, but that's how i understood it. maybe they mean breathe in suffering and exhale wellness, tomato, tomawto. so she had to go off to work in the morning and i got up so i could leave with her because her husband had come home at seven in the morning at which time he gave her a hard time about me being there. seeing as we'd been up till three talking it was less easy to take than normal i suppose. so i get on the skytrain at new west station and sit down and in front of me is a saturday night reveller. there is puke in his hair and his clothes reek of urine and beer. he is nodding off and jerking up and so i practice this tong glen thing and breathe in bad and breathe out good. and i figure i'm doing it for him, like blowing all this good luck air around him so, once he's out of the agony of the hangover, i'm sure he's not sober enough to have yet, he'll have a better time of it.

i read somewhere that pisces have fairy dust and that they can sprinkle it on other people. i know that's ridiculous, but when i tell people that and then mime like i'm sprinkling fairy dust on them you should see them glow. just their smiles, but wow. that's my religion, luck. my way of making suckers feel good.

so friday night i get on the bus to find some music. there is kirt. he panhandles outside of the food co-op and when i first met him a friend told me he had a crush on me. i don't think he still does, but we talk and sometimes i'll read him some of the poetry i'm reading at the time. george faludy or jim carroll or something. he sells me stuff like the cordless phone i have that barely works or the really great stockings from the sixties he found or the cotton sheets i use for love making. he needs a bath tonight and some fresh laundry. i sit down and we talk about the pasta place. he's got a meal. noodles and tomato sauce and ground beef. he's going home. everything outside looks orange because it's dark and it has been raining and the lights are orange and they reflect against everything in the rain. this is the bus down hastings and we pass the steak house, the one with the show business lights, but the lights are out and i can't think why, but it was good friday and maybe the place was closed.

the lights outside of the astoria are on though and this is kirt's stop. i tell him i used to live near here. he gets off the bus. we lived four blocks away on union street. i was studying hungarian from tapes and there must be a hotel in budapest called the astoria because there is a part on the tapes where it asks "where are you staying? Hol lakik?" and the reply is "I am staying at the Astoria Hotel. Az Astori‡ban lakom." i told my roommates this as we were going there for beers one time. one of them laughed.

the place beside the union gospel mission thrift store is undergoing renovations and there are four stories of scafolding. other than that i notice how people move. one woman wears tight jeans and she looks like she's going to meet someone. one man waits by the payphone in front of the convienience store i bought the ingredients for my first meal from when i moved into that house on union street. i had pasta with an alfredo sauce. it was rainy and dark and i was coming home from the bookstore, but i nearly took the wrong bus, because i had moved from the place i had been living for three and a half years the day before. i didn't know what i would do because it was too cold to sit in my room and read and i didn't know the people i was living with, but if i cooked something it would give me an excuse to be in the kitchen and maybe someone else would be around.

so i get off the bus at granville and robson and i go to the granville book company. i find a book of the screenplay of ghost world and read all the stuff in it that isn't the screenplay. there is some stuff about crumb's daughter who did the cartoons for the film. there is some elaboration about coon's chicken and what was real history and what was faked for the movie. i have to shift my ass off the stairs where i'm sitting reading because someone wants to walk up them.

i go put the book back and there is martin's friend. i sometimes ask her her name, but i always forget it so this time i don't bother. we've ran into each other at a few airports. and just today i saw her and told her about the plumbing problems in my house. she and her sweety were going to see a beautiful mind. i told her i had read that he was bisexual and in an open relationship with his wife but that that hadn't made it into the film. but i was fooling with the bead on my earing and it fell out. i found it on the carpet, but it had broken and i couldn't put it back in the earing. they were looking at wallpaper. i thought it was a magazine about wallpaper, but they said it was a magazine about superficial surface things. "so you could take the pages of the magazine and paste them to your wall," i say. they agree. there is something on the cover about paper folding. they are interested in paper folding, but martin's friend says there is nothing on the inside about paper folding. i tell them about the place on main street near powell. the place where there are hundreds and hundreds of orgami mobiles. that they should go see it. someone else has told them about it and they think now that that they must check it out.

i say goodbye to them. i am heading to the sugar refinery.

one of the wonderful things about storytelling is that immediate demands take over. the plumbing problem is this: i don't have a toilet and i don't have a shower. it has been okay for me since i've been staying at my sweety's place, but it is much better to write at my place. i have been peeing in my compost bucket and dumping it in the garden, and burning lots of incense because the walls are mildewing with all the water that ran out of the tub and the toilet when we were first discovering the problem on wednesday. but now i have to shit and it is making me feel primarily like i have to shit, but also like i have to burp, that really full feeling and i can't hold it much longer, because i really don't have a problem shitting. so i will have to walk the four blocks to my sweety's place with a full bowel, avail myself of her toilet and finish the story later.