1.

So maybe this is the right place, the write place, the right space to write. The keyboard is

definitely not the right one, it is slightly filthy and the keys are resisting touch, you have

to push extra-hard when typing, when feeding your ideas to the machine. A woman with

a pissed-off face, three Japanese tourists in the back. A not-so-sunny day on Granville

Isle, stickiness, white cloud in the sky. July seventh or third, Vancouver Vancouver. A

man opens the lid of the grey recycling bin, it is actually blue but the lighting in the art

school library here makes it seem grey. Author feeds her words to the machine, this

machine. A vignette maybe, a poem maybe, one page of Times New Roman, double-

spaced, Point 12. Something borderline epic, borderline musical. We paint with words

here, someone coughs, short short hiccups of flam. The greenery in the sky, the

majesticness of the Ocean Factory. Her days have withered away in this art school, she

feels tinges of melodrama grapping her by the throat. A man in red and black comes in

with a small cup and a brush in it, something like an inkpot but not a inkpot. We have

some words here, two hundred and eight, to be precise. It is lunchtime, after-lunch

maybe. Author had a mille feuille in the quaint and overpriced place down in Yaletown,

that should do for lunch, that is how we clog up our arteries here. We will all die

eventually, anyways, anyhoo.

Yup, so this is her first vignette here, she is starting up a new genre, one-pagers that are

slightly poetic, slightly angsty. Slightly this and/or slightly that. Vignette, huh, vignettes,

huh. Pretty, deep, informal. Short songs that are informed by the bus ride over the bridge,

by the funny conversations that make the author’s day. Yup, something like that, ah,

something of that kind here. 317. Yup, 317 words it is it is it is it is. Make that 331, it

changes all the time. With each peck at the keyboard here.

2.

nyc, the songs of the meat packing district. Author sits down on one of the dark-green,

slightly wobbly chairs across from the apple store. At the corner of 14th and nineth. It is

pretty hot, way too hot, maybe. Two mta-officers are having lunch at the other table, all

dark-blue indifference. Two women in elfin dresses, with elfin hats. Tourists, non-

natives. They speak something Scandinavian, which does not really go with their Chinese

features. How many Japanese Vikings do you know? Anyhoo, they should be tourists, not

New York born and bred.