because i don't have anything else to say

but feel like i should be saying something, reassert my squatting rights, send up a flare... whatever.

and because the songs almost always come first.


james taylor - carolina in my mind

the best parts of lonely

my girl gave me an ipod carrying thingy so i could have some tunage when i run, since i've been complaining about how hard i find it to not think about running when i'm running if i don't have music to keep time. but my ankles are all messed up these days and i'm not sure when i'll get the chance to use my new accessory for its promised purpose.

so yesterday, i walked flanner to our new friend g's house. backtracked to the liquor store - the dundas/dovercourt one where the vintages section isn't half bad - plugged myself into my ipod and for about an hour, watched this small part of city unfold to a soundtrack.

i used to listen to music all the time when i travelled - walking, being in transit, being pretty much anywhere by myself. headphones kept the world at bay, deterred questions, awkward social interactions. images tagged to music - even now, i can catch a few bars of certain tunes and be brought back to a particular place in my head, an experience i had when out on my own out in the world. i don't remember why or when i stopped plugging in. maybe i began to think it was antisocial (it probably is). maybe i got tired of my music collection (i kind of am). or maybe i lost some of that intense passion, one i always associate with youth, that comes with mining the words of songs for that perfect line, the one that says everything for you. the tune that vibrates perfectly with each lovestruck, rage-filled, fuck you impulse that you thought made you lost to the world. turns out other people feel that shit too. maybe i stopped needing that community, or stopped making the space for it.

but i got to trip back into it yesterday afternoon on dundas street. men spilling out of sports bars, the smell of roti in the air, my feet sidestepping slick gobs of spit on grimy sidewalks, and me with my headphones on and my dog trotting alongside, and the comfort of being alone with my music in the world. it felt good.


the weakerthans - left and leaving

you are yourself the animal we hunt

i'm thinking about paths. about the grooves that get worn down among the ferns and vines on forest floors, about the scars left when we travel those paths we know by heart. and even if a path lies unused for centuries, somehow, at some time, the earth will bear traces of its existence.

in may, j and i went to head smashed in buffalo jump. it's a real place name - i should have written it with caps or hyphens to emphasize the proper-nameness of the phrase. anyway, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is a site on the plains of alberta where the aboriginal people of the area used to run buffalo herds off cliffs. they would run the herds, which were blinded by groupthink and besides, couldn't see very well even when they weren't, by laying cairns, masked with mud and branches, along an increasingly narrow path that ended in a freefall - skull against rock and a pile of broken beast. a terrifying, efficient death. an ingenious survival technique. they think the last time the jump was used was in the mid-1800s but that it had been used, at least intermittently, for over 5000 years before.

now there's an interpretive centre at the site - a fenced-off observation area, a map of old drive lanes, and pointers on the cairns. archaeologists have dug down into dirt ten metres deep to unearth remains of ancient buffalo, each of whose hooves ground the earth down on those drive lanes, shaped the path that millennia later, we can still make out. the earth reclaims so much, but not everything. walk a path long enough - or run it to death - and there's bound to be scars.


robbie robertson - broken arrow

prodigal

i would say "i'm baaaaack" and grin, if it wasn't such a tired story and so overdone. not to mention self-evident. suffice to say that sustaining is not the thing i'm best at in the world. but i am back, ass in seat, fingers at keyboard, resolving to be better at this, at keeping in touch. resolving to be better at showing up for so many things i've let slip away from me.

i'm just back from chicago - a subsidized trip since j had to be in town for the AGM of the journal she works for, and i could freeload on the cost of those very expensive sheraton sheets. but i feel a bit like i'm back, or that i've come home, in more ways than flying into pearson from o'hare, more ways than the comfort of the stair that creaks so reliably, the dripping faucet, the shape of the cat taking up way more than her fair share of our small double bed. i feel like i've begun stitching some disparate bits of my life back together again. like i'm starting on some path towards making whole.

in chicago, i sat in a theatre at the old town folk music centre, in a room full of people trying hard to listen to the person inside of them who calls themselves a writer. i sat there with a white plastic table in front of me, a binder of looseleaf paper, a handful of pens, and tried to make stories happen. i sat there, with lynda barry at the front of the room - MARLYS! - all flesh and 3D and committed to pulling pictures out of each of the hopeful minds in front of her. one guy came all the way from florida, i heard him say when he checked in. it seems far to come, though maybe it seems far to come from canada too, since i had to travel with a passport, could shop at the duty free. and i sat there in that room, in that other city, in that other country, and tried to make some space for myself.

making space is no small feat. i knew this, of course, before i showed up there. but i came to know it more over the course of those days in chicago. i came to know it, not only from the writing, from the conjuring of images, from the hard work of shutting down the inner critic - but i came to know it too from sitting in that room next to my friend k. k who i haven't laid eyes on in seven years. k who, more than anyone i have ever known in the world, has helped me become aware of my own shape in the world. it's not always been pretty - we both know this well. it's not easy to confront the contours of self dripping with self-pity or pushed up against anger, making that face in the mirror so impossibly foreign, so unmistakeably you.

but we sat next to each other for two days. went for beer after. played pool, and it was exactly as i remember it being those years ago in buffalo. and it was easy on that first day. harder on the second. k said "it feels like we're moving too fast." i'm not sure i got what she meant, exactly. but to me it felt like a wish for more time. a wish for all of this to be more ordinary. less overdetermined.

but going away for a long time does that to a body. we make strange with each other, with ourselves in relation to the other. we thrill to the reunion, feel the stab of separation well before the plane is in the air again. and the question becomes, for me anyway, how to stay connected. how to keep the channel open. how to make the space to conjure those images, those stories, that love, this friendship.

and in that room, with k to my left and all these marked up quarter-perfect pages in front of me, lynda barry stood up and said simply, "don't try." and you know, i think she's probably right.


bright eyes - i must belong somewhere

potential disaster

pretty much every day for the past couple of months, i've come up against that bogeyman that's shadowed me for most of my life - my potential. it used to be friendly. it used to be that i liked when people noticed it, commented on how prominent it was, tripping along beside me - or, more like, in front of me. in truth, i feel like i was often preceded by my potential and the rest of me was the shuffling, crooked, nascent thing that had yet to catch up to the majestic spectre of Who I Could Become.

these days, potential is lagging behind. the problem is, i still feel so much like that unformed beast travelling in its wake. i keep trying to slow down, waiting for potential to overtake again. waiting for the moment when we might coincide. i'm beginning to realize that that might never happen. and that's more than a little bit disturbing.

even more unnerving, though, is that i've realized that potential has a toehold in the personal as well. when j and i were new, everything was potential. we could be anything and everything to each other. we made new promises, scratched out the lines of commitment in the blank blank slate of our glorious untapped future. three years later, i realize that now we have a history. whatever glory we're bound for doesn't live in potential, in that mysterious future us that we cast ourselves into when we were new. the here and now, baby. that's where it's at. of course, none of this is rocket science. common sense more like. a kind of naive stating of the obvious. but what hasn't been so obvious to me, until now, is that i can't keep living in the potential of who i could be in this relationship either. the "who i want to be when i'm with you" - or worse, the "who i am and have always intended to become" - doesn't hold water without some evidence of being leakfast in the present. i don't have the luxury of deferring my true and good self to another time or place. truth be told, i don't have the desire to defer it anymore. the downside to that, though, is that if i don't project that impossibly perfect me into that impossibly perfect future, i've kinda gotta be okay with the me that's sitting here in the present. and man, some days, it really isn't pretty...

*

this bit of poem is so out of context. a verse pulled from a longer piece. but i like it on its own, too, and think it maybe has something to say for me even so.

Land to Light On
...
V vi

Light passes through me lightless, sound soundless,
smoking nowhere, groaning with sudden birds. Paper
dies, flesh melts, leaving stockings and their useless vanity
in graves, bodies lie still across foolish borders.
I'm going my way, going my way gleaning shade, burnt
meridians, dropping carets, flung latitudes, inattention,
screeching looks. I'm trying to put my tongue on dawns
now, I'm busy licking dusk away, tracking deep twittering
silences. You come to this, here's the marrow of it, not
moving, not standing, it's too much to hold up, what I
really want to say is, I don't want no fucking country, here
or there and all the way back, I don't like it, none of it,
easy as that. I'm giving up on land to light on, and why not,
I can't perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my
individual wrists.

- Dionne Brand


Barenaked Ladies - What A Good Boy

just to get the song out of my head

and because it's an oldie-but-goodie and because there's not nearly enough shane mcgowan in the world these days


the pogues - the broad majestic shannon (live)

you know it's summer when

i need a road trip. one of those ones like in the car ads. me, two or three good friends, a cooler, a tent. cityscape, country roads. big sky and mud and a kayak on top. i want to drive in 5th, the hum of the gearshift under the right hand, the windows open. i want a pile of cds to keep time - songs to sing along to, silly songs, sad songs, songs whose lyrics i've never known but manage to make up anyway. i want campfire nights in a place without mosquitos or smog alerts. i want afternoon swims and loons calling in the morning coffee hour. i want to eat doritos and winegums and have to stop to pee at truckstops. i want to miss the right exit and end up in some unexpected little town that sells homemade fudge and has a dimly lit bar with a 25 cent pool table. i want to plan to be back home in 2 days, but end up calling in sick for 5 more. i want to get away.

wanna come with?


modest mouse - dashboard

sold

when i was young, my grandparents used to come and visit from ottawa. maybe they came once a year, usually at christmastime, though i can't be entirely sure. i remember counting down the days until they left from about the time they arrived. they would fly into town into a house filled, or so it now seems, with my childhood anticipation. i loved my grandparents; my grandmother, especially. but thinking back, i wasn't so good at sustaining the pleasure of their company. i was always more concerned with endings than with beginnings. so when they touched down for the week-long-or-maybe-more visits, i enjoyed them for a day or so, then started thinking about how sad i would be once they left. when they finally did, i was, as i had expected, truly sad that they were gone, but also relieved that the waiting game was over. even then, i was queen of the long goodbye. you'd think i would have outgrown that with my baby fat. alas, i'm missing only the latter.

for a long time now, i've been scrapping with my mother's condo. it's been a bit like a prize-fighter, this property, full of legal left-hooks and uppercuts, and it's been refusing, almost valiantly, to go down for the count. but now it seems like we're in the final round and i'm the one that's going to claim the belt. eight and a quarter years later. i mean, i should touch wood there; god knows there's been enough twists and turns and hurdles to trip even the nimblest of souls (of which i am not one). but last night, my sister called with the news that we had two offers in on it. we took the higher. and i'll know for sure next tuesday if it all goes through.

i thought i would be relieved. after so many setbacks, after jumping through so many hoops - this is what it was all for. and yet i realized last night, as i looked for sleep to win out over grief, that the condo - as much i've cursed it, ignored it, imagined hungrily the day when it would be out of my hair - has been a kind of dam against the full swell of loss.

i suppose there was part of me that hung on to it as the backdrop to memory. if the set had not yet been torn down, maybe the show could still go on. access to the space, however hypothetical, gave me the cues to remember the lines. different scenes blocked to different floorboards, furniture, walls. my mother, alive, moving through the rooms, making noise, making dinner, making jokes, making arguments, making me feel at home.

when my grandparents came to newfoundland, i focussed so hard on the end of their visit, i lost track of their present company. for the past eight years, i've been focussing so much on the present, i forgot to look at the end. either way, the goodbye became longer than maybe it should have.

so here's to the end of this long goodbye. it's as bittersweet as i remember it.


fleetwood mac - landslide

digging deep

i know i'm being less than regular with this blogging thing of late. somehow it seems harder to make the time to do it at this time of year - the earth warming up, birds clearing their vocal chords, summer breezes.

i've been out back, clearing the yard of a truckload of overgrown "native plants" (aka weeds). so far i've taken out almost 10 yard bags worth of stuff and 2 (diseased) trees. it makes a body feel good to shake off the evidence of neglect in such a tangible way. the problem i'm having, though, is that it's decidedly harder to weed the stuff inside. my own emotional backyard is proving rockier ground to till.

it started, i suppose, with the waitlist thing i posted on a couple of weeks back. the public side of not making good (and god knows the need to achieve is a thing i've struggled with for most of my life and that battle shows no sign of resolving itself anytime soon. the irony is that in waiting to resolve it, i seem to be achieving exactly nothing). then there was the family visit. my dad and sister in town for the may long weekend. the old patterns re-enacted: more of the same desire to make good, only desperately so. more failure, only less public. there's the pressing issue of the plan B. now that plan A seems less and less a possibility, what to make of the Future? in the park today, jane and mary making commiserating noises about the feeling of not knowing. the transience of the feeling-good-today, the blindsiding force of the not-so-much-now.

and it troubles me, too, that on some days, my plan B seems to reside in a notion of children. what would it be like to have kids? would that bestow some purpose to this rather bleak landscape i've been contemplating? and isn't that exactly the wrong reason to bring new life into the world? i've always said it was. god forbid that i should trip into that now.

35 is a funny age. it's a bit of a threshold really - biological clock winding down, approaching the time when more than half of your life has likely been lived. living up to one's potential starts to become a bit of a joke, and deferral seems just downright stupid. and yet. what to do when you've been stuck in the notion of potential too long? i remember having a brief conversation with my cog sci buddy wendy about this right before the exam last month. there was a time when it seemed principled to reject the conventional trappings of ambition and success. when rejecting expectations seemed a valiant thing to do. i can't remember why that was anymore, and what i thought was so bloody noble about that position. and i'm hoping it's not too late to turn some of that around.

i weeded the backyard wholesale, with a spade. efficient as it was, there's something kind of violent about ripping away so mercilessly at all those roots. it's a shame that planting new growth involves so much death.


dave matthews band - digging a ditch

phil, i hardly knew you

i remember when i interviewed to volunteer in palliative care, i thought that what i wanted/needed/felt compelled to do was to bear witness. see a life through. sit with. be with. stand by. i remember being asked what i thought it would be like, and tentatively imagining the way small comforts could mean something so much bigger at the end of a life. i thought about the stories that needed to be told, or the silent being-with that might lessen the fear that must always, somehow, accompany the closing in of the inevitable. i thought mostly that the significance of the work there lay in being of service to the dying.

of course, i had a personal stake. for me there was the death of my own mother to contend with - that i missed it, that i was not able to sit with for her, that i missed the long goodbye. i figured that spending time in palliative care might stand in for some of that, allow me a proxy with which i could exorcise some of that impotent love/grief/care that i've carried around for a good number of years now.

and this is going to sound trite, but what i hadn't envisioned - and i mean really envisioned - was how changed i become in doing it. how those small comforts and conversations with the dying become part of *me*, part of my ongoing memories. the dying die, and with them go the only other witnesses to those moments, which in the grand narratives of their lives play no role at all. but i've got memories now, laid out in a small shrine to the scraps of lives that i've been given by people i know hardly at all.

so thank you, ursula, who never did get that nail moved out of hospital room wall. and thank you, joan, who was so concerned about disturbing her roommate with her 2 am near-death experience which came only days before the real one. and thank you, phil, who showed me his wounds with something close to pride, who could talk a blue streak through the morphine, who asked me sheepishly a few weeks ago to be his date for his daughter's july wedding, and who died two months short of it. i had thought you had more time. i'm sorry i didn't get a chance to say goodbye.


dylan - knockin' on heaven's door