I can't sleep. I did work out how to get my keyboard to stop doing that wacky accent thing (well what I'd call a work around not a fix but still it means I can type shit without it looking like a disaster in french class.) I'm over tired and grumpy but I can't bring my self to actually sleep. When this happens I generaly get pensive and overly self examining. Wondering how my life is going to work out and all that shit. How I'm going to sort things out and where I stand.

Right now I feel like I continue to be in limbo and I feel that there's a lot that I took for granted and thought I understood or I could trust and that I now realise I can't. My future is not something I can depend on nor can I shape or understand it. It feels like it's something that's going in too many directions for me to truly make any sense of and yet while it's going too many ways it's going nowhere. I'm the man being drawn and quartered. The horses are pulling my limbs to the four corners of the compas and it means that my body in reality is being pulled nowhere. It's holding against the strength of the horses but sooner or later a limb will snap and it will all come apart my viscera spread out in the courtyard for the crows to pick at.

I guess if I was a figure in Quadraphenia I'd be Jimmy astride Ace's scooter atop the cliffs of their challk whiteness gleaming in the sun and trying to make a decision. To ride the scooter off the cliff or to ride away. In the end I'm hoping I can make the same decision as he did. Ride the the scooter off, yes. But walk away. Afirming life on my own terms, but I've always been a co-dependant personality. When it wasn't my family it was my ex-wife. When it wasn't my ex-wife it was people who I used to call friends. And now, well I've burnt through too much and I have no one to really be dependant on but my self and I don't know how to do this. I don't know where to go or what to do or even what I want. I want peace and joy and a family and to be loved and well some times it just feels like that wont happen. Some times it does, some times I feel great and wonderful and happy and shit.

I guess right now the main thing is this is a lack of sleep talking, this is a mess that's made when you get maybe 4 hours a night for the week and then can't down cycle your body come the week end. I don't drink any more, I don't do drugs I never really did. I don't party but I'd love to dance. I think that would make me happy to be dancing, that's the one time I really felt free. I don't have a camera any more so I can't take pictures like I had been, I don't have the talent I wish I had when I would paint and draw, I know I'm a miserable writter. This is intillectual masterbation, any how, I'm going to try again to get some sleep. I'll wake in the morning with a darling fresh attitude, I'll sit on the balcony making sure the cats don't make a jump for it and read my pulp fiction. Maybe drag the laptop out and try and polish off that novel for my brother and some folks to work on with me. In reality I'll probably not but who knows, all I know is this is not going to work the way it is.

Some of you may know a bit about this already, when I was younger I'd visit my great grand mother and we'd drive over to the home and see my great grand father. I never saw him with his prostetic but my mother recently told me his nick name was "Iron Leg." This was because he lost his leg in the Great War, I think I was one of the last of the generation to meet him. My sister would have been far too little to remember (you can correct me) and my brother was a babe in arms if he was even born at that point.

When I did see him he was not quite there, senile dimentia was setting in and by the end it was a human vegetable. A lot of me came from those summer days as a six year old in my great grand mother's presence. I saw my first solar eclipse on her lawn, I ate cucumber sandwiches under the cold watchful eyes of murders of crows and conspiracies of ravens lining the roof top, the trees, and the surounding fence in her little Victoria bungalow, and I learnt respect. Respect of a generation that came before me and an appreciation of what they had to offer. I learnt the comfort of the railway clock ticking on the mantlepiece it's maticulous precision ticking away the time until our doom cogwheel universes and pendulem planets spinning away.

Today one of the three remaining Canadian veterans of The Great War died. He passed away at 107 (and those keeping score will realise that he enlisted early at 16.) This made me think of Iron Leg, the rest of my family and the generations that came before. There are those who don't even remember that there was a Great War they think of World War I as some prelude to World War II they are not aware of it's alien experience or that we even sent men and children to die on those fields. But that is a part of us and we forget that, people complain that Canada has no heritage, that is a lie. It has a heritage but we are arogant and forgetful and decide to not remember it. I am three generations in this country. My great grand parents came over from Britain and Ireland and Scotland. I am of Britania but I am of Canada and this is my home. This is who I am and what happened here is what makes me what I am.

I just find it sad that so many of us are unapreciative of what we have, what those who came before us gave up, and where we are going. Canada is a land of water, trees, and rock. It is raised up unto the sky and sunk deep down in to the earth. Our families have spilt blood to protect it and enrich it and make it whole. All I can hope is in time we learn to have pride in that, not in some disasociated "Well we're not American's" kind of sick anti-pride but a pride in the distinct culture which we are. A pride in what we've done not who we are not and above all a memory.

I'm often... "hard" on American culture. I'm typicaly Canadian in that regard, it's a resentment and it's been bred in to me by the culture I'm a part of and the influences in my life. I have to fight that at times but one thing I can appreciate about America is it's value it places on it's past. People still re-enact battles from the American Civil War, they still remember the dead and fallen in the Revolution, and they still idolize the Founding Fathers. In Canada it sadens me these things are foot notes and anecdotes that are passed on with little comment. How many really remember The Plains Of Abraham? Or the Upper Canada Revolution? Or know the difference between William Lyon Mackenzie King and Mackenzie King? How they are related? And in the end it comes down to family, because all of this is our family, our family of nationhood. In some regards we do have a lot to learn from America.

Last night I had the weirdest weirdest dream and I needed to get it down on paper before it faded in to the ash of memory. It started with my mother, brother, sister, and I taking a road trip. Strange but not too weird but definately strange. We were traveling across North America stopping in all sorts of places. I made them stop to view an acrobatic burlesque troupe and I was charmed by this redhead burlesque actress (I think the dames influenced that) . Any how, I headed upstairs above the highschool gym where the act takes place (I forgot to mention it takes place in a highschool.)

I walk through the door and every person in the school is a John Hughes Stereotype. The well meaning teacher, the nerd, the pretty girl, the bevy of variations of rejects. I look down and I'm dressed like Ducky. It's really REALLY strange. Now all these people while they don't look exactly like the actors who played them they look close enough, for example the smooth talker looked a lot like Matthew Broderick, the tach looked a lot like Judge Rhinhold (not in a Hughes film but moved in those circles,) pretty boy looked a lot like the dude from Pretty In Pink who I hate, artsey reject, pretty girl, and the rejects tomboy friend all looked close enough that they reminded me of the actors who were in Some Kind Of Wonderful but not quite, just always a little off. Of course there was the villian dude from Pretty In Pink whom I got in a fight with. Remember I'm Ducky here.

Any how in walks the redhead from the show and the Pretty In Pink music starts up. And it looks like some one I knew but not, sorta like Molly Ringwald but mixed with other people. Very strange. I run downstairs and send my sister up and for some reason it turned in to a Nancey Drew mystery. Any how I think the floor was magic and changed to represent a person's fantasies or something. Then I tried to get my family to go to the Chicago Museme of art and I was going to try and phone people I knew in Chicago after I got their phone numbers off the internet but that all went sideways and then I woke up. Any how, very strange dream.

Found what I was looking for with a google search. I was trying to find a name to an Irish Folk Song, tracked it down. Eventualy I got sleep but you know, between the show tonight, the move tommorow and the move of my apartment next week this is going to be a trying week. And I want to sleep with my girl friend and it's going to be almost a week before I can see her. This is most annoying. Sex, NOW! :-P

I'm still awake dredging the LJ history trying to find a question that was answered by some one on here years ago. I'm tired and I'm coming apart at the seams. I've not slept properly in ages. I'm falling asleep while walking, while working, while talking. I'm just not feeling particularly good. *sigh* It could always be worse, gotta keep telling my self that. I move in less then two weeks and that will help with the financial situation a bit. Fuck. Gotta TRY and sleep just so tired I'm not tired.

I just saw Running With Scissors and am... shell shocked. It was an incredible and powerful movie. I'm just in awe. That could have been me, not that my mother is a loon or my father is a distant alchoholic as neither is true. But that could have been anyone of us. The fine line between sanity and insanity, lost and found.

I'm not trying to be overly dramatic as far as familial distress I could have done a lot worse but it amazes me what I saw reflected there. And really it could have been any family, I think in that moment in the seventies we all share something... I don't know I guess I'm just feeling a little weird lately. My heart seems a little on the delicate side and I miss my family. I am so greatful and will always be. Some times you just want hamburger helper...

That answers that, was talking to Erin yesterday about CBGBs and we had thought it wasn't closed well it wasn't but it does soon. Sunday it shuts the doors and shutters the blinds. Fuck. I never got to go. There's talk of it moving to Nevada going to Las Vegas. I fraknly kind of think that's fine and good but it wont be CBGBs it'll be something new but it wont be the club I wanted to go to quite desperately for the last few years. Always "next time, next time." Or "soon, soon." Fuck it just proves you wait and you lose. I'm kinda bummed out. It's an institution, why can't one of these stars that go on and on about the place buy out the building? I mean some of these fuckers are rolling in Dosh. Ah well time moves on there will be others. It's just really fucking depressing and I'll never be able to wear a CBGBs shirt now. :-(

Oh my oh my god. I am kinda in shock. I don't fucking know what's going to happen but that was a direction that I'm holding the arm chair going sweet god no! Not that it's bad it's that it's so dark and so bleak that... god. I'm kinda sick from this show. Like it was so powerful. We are in for a long and very ugly ride.

wow potentialy the best day of my ligfe so far given that I've been married and thought I was going to be a dad that's saying a lot. It was amazing. Right now I'm kinda crying not sad tears but happy tears. Thank you for every one of you who showed you are the best, thanks for those who tried to come out and trhanks to E. and S. for well fucking so much. I love you all I'm the =happiest in ages. The dames rock you all rock and life rocks. I'm good I'm soo very very good. Life love peac and happiness that is my life right now.

ps. I ate boob cake and ate cupcakes out of breasts. I am content.

Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, transgenders, sans genders and freak babies. October the 1st 2006 Matthew Christopher Roche Ardill Esquire will be turning all of 32 years of our lord old. You all in the four corners of the earth are invited to come join Mister Matthew at The Gladstone to celebrate. He will be there performing as well as DJing, he will be cast in the role of Albert Einstien in the "Einstien Explains It All" flashback show of the Shameless dames. Come see him feign a terrible Austrian accent, woo gorgeous ladies, and generaly letch it up. Afterwards stick around for music dancing and buy him drinks. If you can't afford drinks and don't feel like dancing that's okay too, just show up and enjoy. The show runs from 9pm to aproximately 11pm, there is karaoke across the hall and Matt will be assuming the personae of dj badtz matthew from 11pm for a little bit. Come to your one and only chance to see Matthew with a mustach a real one, just like the porn stars have. Remark on his amazing similarity to Ron Jeremy or if you want to be nice maybe some obscure 70s porn star with a massive schlong, it's his birthday be nice to him. Any how, come on out you know you wanna. The door for the burlesque show is 12 bucks (10 bucks if you can tell me you are coming and I'll get reservations for you.) If you just want to show for the dancing and the drinks that's free. :-)

Later,
Matt