It's not actually an orriginal idea...

... I just plagiarized something you don't recognize.

I spent some time rifling through my boxes in the basement looking for an old copy of Chart Magazine with Matthew Good on the cover. I didn't find the magazine, but did manage to find a whole bunch of very odd things in the mess of my former life. One was a sheet of paper with scribbled writing all over both sides. Normally I'm averse to finding these sorts of things because I have no idea what to expect out of it. I could have been on a streak that week and managed to write something of weight that I just never was able to do anything significant with, or I dribbled schlock and garbage out of my mouth and it stained the page beyond repair. this one is a mix. From a two liner that became the title for this post, to this attempt at comprehending my mental illness:

My brain doesn't like me. I'm not my chemical imbalance, but it's one of my defining characteristics. As for my brain, the rest of me is expendable as long as it can keep doing it's thing.

There's some rambling on the page about the nature of art, something really weird about ciphers and riddles, which I actually think I'll write out:

The cipher lies in the numbers and riddles. The patterns are the riddles and the numbers are yes and no: completely down 0 - 100 and the same for the stranger. Likewise wholeness is found from [0] to [1001] because grass is greener on the other side from the fence and (the words 'left' and 'right' are written overtop of each other here) again. This requires a reconciliation and amalgamation. 0 - 100 is too limited and the old must be abandoned and expanded. Zero is still 0.

There are number of points inside that piece where there are random letters in between lines and some letters are circled. I think the letters spell out the word "right" but I'm not certain of that. Something tickles my memory and says that this was part of some more complex visual piece. It's not in my portfolio, so I don't know what happened to the rest. To try and date this I can guess that it's going to be after September 2000 because of the references to "complete strangers" a phrase I didn't start using until after the Tegan and Sara concert where I snuck backstage. Two pieces on here use that word phrase, one which occupies the entire front and another titled Stalker.

Stalker
You don't know me
I'm a complete stranger
I saw you on the train yesterday
You never saw me looking at you
You don't know me
I know you
Or like to think I do

Complete Stranger
I'm a complete stranger
Standing in the distance I see everything
I'm a silent radar
Scratching chicken on paper in the dark
I'm dragging nothing in your bag of tricks
My bag of tricks is yellow and green
I'm colours foreign to your heart
We're old souls in bodies too young to die
We're the illegible pen marks on a cocktail napkin
We're the ideas hacked out of clay in between thoughts
We're the things you never see coming
We're the confusion over where the best prawns are served
We're sushi in the afternoon
We're a bag of cookies and a can of whipped cream at 2-am
We're dancing reindeer and Santa in Florida
We're the commercials they didn't show you
We're inflatable pool chairs in shark infested waters
We're one step ahead of ourselves
We're inspired
We're pawn to our muses
What are we again?
we adore you/we want to be you/we want wholeness/everything together as one piece of scrap metal/the junkyard tied to itself/forgotten and unseen/fully completely/people you don't know/taking count of everything/you have never known