it's almost november for chrissake!

has it really been since august that i've not posted here? seems impossible that the time has cycled through so quickly and now here we are, almost at all hallow's and i've had nothing to say for myself.

weirder still that the thing that has me posting this morning is a dream i had last night, involving the seduction of a young boy. me seducing a kid. well, not a kid, exactly, more one of those boys from my bio class - these slim spiky-haired eighteen year olds. still more weird, the boy in question was asian, slight and reedy, with halting english. and he was afraid of snakes. but oddest of all: when j jumped frantically out of bed, having slept through her alarm clock, and shook me out of dreamworld, i was disappointed. i wanted to see where this thing would go, and i hadn't even gotten the poor guy's shirt off.

i won't even start asking what it means, but something in the dream i found sweet.

so of the quotidian: in a fit of boredom-induced googling, i found an old friend of mine who i haven't thought of in ages, and who, more than she knows, played a huge role in getting me to where i am today. or perhaps more accurately, who i am today. the first girl who ever held my hand, who ever in any way reciprocated that rampant crazy obsessive thing that falling in love can sometimes look like. she's in england now, with a husband and no kids, and a blog that is thankfully full of pictures. i haven't seen her since we were 19. she looks great. i debated sending her an email, posting a comment, but decided against it. might be the first time i've stopped for a minute and curbed the impulse to get in touch: what would we say to each other? what, after all these years, is there to say to each other? things ended badly. we stopped talking. or i stopped talking to her - i can't even remember why - i think it had something to do with my not being able to deal with what was starting to go on between us. but i suspect that my turning away from her was the first indication of my predilection for flight. at least that's how i think of it now that i'm trying to reform.

thanksgiving was lovely, thank you, though a little lonely. i think i posted a thanksgiving ramble last year and had much to say about nostalgia and fall and the like. it still to some degree applies, which makes me think it might be tagged to the weather rather than to any depth of feeling in me, but this year it was again just j and me, and another tofurkey. and i missed a community. i was wishing, i think, for that mythical circle of friends, of family, and found myself anxious about the possibility that this could be the new normal.

and i've started seeing an osteopath, which i think might be latin for body psychic. it was pretty cool - as j says, it's like they have eyes in their fingers. only got to the diagnostic part, where she told me of some oddities of posture - genetically, she said, i've inherited a pelvis that juts forward, a hip-first walk which i think might be what gets called my strut. and you thought it was all for show - it's in my bones man! what else. i've got a uterus that's tipped forward, and a hypermobile lumbar area (L3, 4, and 5 to be precise). but what convinced me to believe in her most was the way she laid her hands gently, so gently, on my temples and divined my sinus problems and allergies. that sealed it - as gratifying as it was to have all my other ills (the sore back, the stiff shoulders, the cricky wrists and finger joints) physically confirmed by someone else, it was her telling me what i hadn't revealed to her that made me an accolyte. i signed up, courtesy of maritime life.

and now off to work. today is lab test number 2 in bio. i've a feeling that nothing i studied actually took, so wish me luck.

soundtrack today: Woody Russell, Time to Go

blotter

about to tear july off my desk (as always, the requisite 2 week delay applies, my usual inability to let go) and i had a sudden memory of cleaning out my mother's office at her work the week after she died. her notes to herself of things to do three weeks hence. three weeks that never arrived. or did, without her. what happens to the consciousness in those always arrested plans? me and d. due to arrive for a visit a week and a half after her death. d. set to come in the night before me, my mother with a note to pick her up, with flight info. a note to pick me up the following morning. shorthand blotter scribbles noting vacation time for the visit that ended instead as bereavement leave.

it doesn't go away, this missing. this grief is not a wound, or a scar. it's something more like mercury - poisonous, beautiful, never solid, never stable...

rain, finally

i have a sneaking suspicion i've been overly optimistic about this new job of mine. i mean i like it better than my last one - don't get me wrong - but it's still sales. it's still trying to get people to notice us. it's still cold-calling and publicity and talking to authors who are way way smarter than me and often see the marketing of their damn books as beneath them. and then there's the money thing. there's the figuring out how to live on less money a month than just about all of my friends, and the arrogant part of me that thinks that just because i'm as smart than most of them, i should make as much (never mind, of course, that i don't WANT to do law and i've not the discipline or the personality for full time freelance). sigh. the maw of the house, too, stretching me at every turn and j and me incompatible on that front. she seemingly so much more comfortable with living on the edge of what we have, and spending into credit world. i've not, in the end, that much faith in us to make it back and can imagine us in a mountain of debt in a few years that we need a backhoe to get out of.

which is not really fair of me to say. she certainly does adjust her expectations, even as i know she wants to be other. had a conversation with susan the last time we saw each other about this - the different relationships we (who grew up in financial comfort) have with money than our partners (who grew up with none). anyway. i'm fussy still at j, which is annoying me no end since she's being very kind to me, and since i spent so much time missing her while she was away only to .. what? be bitchy at her once she comes home? that's mature...

anyhow, it's friday and i should hightail it to work and do some invoicing for freelance work and put a plea into my old boss for some more, cause this life i'm leading is costing more than i make. and that makes me anxious. and irritable

as does the fact that i met d. for lunch yesterday. and we still get along, and it still smarts to see her.

a kinder gentler

just back from the jane siberry show at hugh's room. three words. oh my god.
it was truly wonderful.

i guess there are miracles

in the shapes of planes that come skidding to the ground, all smoke and fire, scorching the side of the highway, with all passengers walking away alive, and no one on the ground even scratched.

and so this morning, even as i know i'm going to be late for work and those cursed heat bugs are buzzing on the trees and signalling yet another boiling day in the smog, i'm gonna say a small prayer of thanks to whatever god or force or stroke of chance that lets things not turn out as bad as they might.

tonight to jane siberry at hugh's room, last night out late at the 3-day novel launch. met up with barbara, and then also a whole lot more of claire's friends - tom, iman, people i fear know of me only because of what's been said. but connected more with peter, who i like more and more every day. on the day he came in for his intern interview, he wore a tie, and glasses i haven't seen since. he sat on our low couch, knees to his chest, and was a little awkward. i remember being unsure of him, both paul and i slightly wary, but willing to be convinced. funny how quickly our first impressions can be discounted if we're open to it.

anyhow, the long and short of it is that i've become quickly very fond of peter, and protective. which is funny, cause i don't usually have a way of talking to the gay boys... maybe i'm learning.

colour theory

just back from the AGO with gabor and csopi. saw an exhibit on colour theory - mostly painters i don't know, with the exception of rothko, who of course everyone knows, and it's becoming a cliche to like him. i did see a few pieces i quite liked but since i haven't a head for names, i of course can't remember them. guess i'll never be an art historian.

our tenants just moved in today too. i think they'll be good - he's an oil painter, she's a puppetmaker (!) and massage therapist. weird to be sharing this new space so soon with people we know not at all, but it's a relief to have someone in the suite as the money situation is a little tight these days. am contemplating getting in touch with Peter to see if he can toss some work my way. the advantage of freelancing on the side, of course, is being able to write things off...

oops

it just occurs to me that the words to that bad song are actually "whatever i did, whatever i said, i didn't mean it." which changes everything. scratch that last post.

double take

6 or 7 years ago there was a very dumb song on the radio, the chorus of which ran something like this:

whatever i said, whatever i did, i'm sorry.

despite the fact that it seemed to me at the time to be some dumbass stereotypically male reaction to the girlfriend's anger, today i'm reading it a bit differently. maybe it was really about someone truly not understanding what went wrong, but wanting badly to make it right...

ha. life lessons in lite pop.

resolution xvii

awoke this morning to that fleeting resolve to *do* something more creative. to find some way to get past fear into something more constructive. part due to talking with j last night - her stories of the landscape of sage hill, the luxury of days spent writing, the discipline of sitting with a poem and making it work. in my head i've always entertained the fantasy of writing - of someday being able to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and coaxing out something beautiful. i think i'm beginning to understand that beauty, like everything else, requires practice to rein it in, make it coherent.

so there are tasks to finish. so what? the house will be here, always, always hungry for improvements, always willing to take more. i'm reading cunningham's specimen days at the moment, and quite liking it - there's some stuff in there about the hunger of the dead, of the animate in the inanimate. the dead are in the grass, in the machines. in my house?

the tasks that are more important should be this quiet growth, the building of faith and courage. the finishing of that cursed thesis, the practice of writing, the freedom of painting. light work. or lightening work maybe?

i know i've had these moments of resolve before, and as with so many things, played with it for a while and let it slide, only to pick it up again months, years, later with a commitment to do it right this time. i suspect this is a fatal flaw. i guess the goal for me should be to mend it.

and so off to another day at work, solo in the office today - fridays are my lone day. on the to do list today: writing back to noam chomsky and howard zinn. sometimes my job makes me laugh.

and thankfully, today there's lunch at markham and painting to end the week. and the heat has seemingly abated for a time and it's a perfect summer day outside. there are always morsels of grace to feed on, i guess, no matter how insatiable i feel.

over the hump and into the

a thursday morning that finally doesn't feel like swimming through smog. we'll see if that holds til noon.

am settling into this business of being solo in the house. putzing around with lists of tasks to accomplish - buy these shelves, paint this room, clean this floor, wrestle with the couch (which, incidentally, i finally managed to get into the apartment - after widening the downstairs door, took apart parts of the deck and pretty much forced it through j's office door). freakin' stuff. even as i resent the fact that i have it, i seem to be fairly adept at acquiring more.

been battling that familiar low grade depression thing lately - you know, the one that involves lying on the couch and staring at the pets, thinking you should read or at least do *something* that sort of counts as productive, but the only thing you can muster is to crack another beer and flip through the million and one channels on the digital television and end up watching infomercials for some amazing new tupperware system (we just got digital cable installed - it's nasty shit... to defend myself, i should mention that we only got it to sweeten the deal for our tenants. i was afraid nobody would rent the apartment, but in the end, these two very nice artist types did, and on my first ever showing. probably didn't have to throw in the cable and the internet but at least now we can write them off, kind of). soooooo i finally hauled my ass off to the gym yesterday and i think it helped. don't feel like calling it a day already, so that must mean something.

what the fuck is wrong with people?

a quick rant:
total spent in the past 3 years on replacing stolen bicycles and bike parts: $1253.27.

what is *with* that? and what does someone do with a shitty old cracked bike wheel anyhow? (this morning greets me with an empty set of struts, and sagging brake cables... people really do suck).

in other news, just back from hillside - a weekend away in the midst of sweltering ontario summer, lakeside, and browning, and listening to some really great tunes. run, don't walk, to get all of josh ritter's stuff. of course, i might be the last person on earth to know how great he is, since i've clearly been out of touch for the past few years. but i'm listening to him nonstop since coming back from hillside and it's making everything feel a little more sympatico.

j left this morning for saskatchewan - a two week flight to the plains. wide open skies, wide open land, wide open mind. the familiar growl of anxiety in the pit of my stomach that signals the shoring up of resources for so much time spent alone. how does this work again?

june sneaks up

today lunch, removed a few months from the schedule of lunches, these buoyant affairs, with free-flowing wine and chicken cut into perfect portions, and served always in that dish, that blue and white hand-glazed dish of csopi's, where the onions i painted once sat, and whose presence i have come to count on in these uplifted fridays. if we had a salon, it would surely be this.

gabor, my hungarian artist, with his easy laugh, and easier appreciation for the women in his life, gabor today showed us a picture he had painted, a nude. emily, he said, as he imagined her. gabor, who had scrawled out some tulips a few weeks back - tulips for spring, in vibrant pastels - a picture emily had loved, had wanted to buy - gabor points to the tulips behind the nude, proclaims them THERE but for the grace of emily's love. "i painted these tulips because emily loves them." and emily next to me, reddening quickly, said just as quickly, as g's eyes landed on her expectantly, said "i love the tulips, gabor."

and then, on the steps up back to the office, a man slouched, looking like the smell of booze, clutching a bag in his hand. i veer away despite myself, until i notice the bag. a book, i think, and am reassured. until i realize it's not a book, but porn.

cathy i'm lost, i said, though i knew she was sleeping

montreal, laurier ouest and avenue du parc. on this corner the PA, my old grocery store from my old life. julie asked me this morning if being here was a too-large reminder of d. i hadn't thought about it, had willed myself not to think about it. i'm wanting to stare through the ghosts of this city and see instead where it lives in me as home. i watched the city approach from dorval on, montreal by train - triplexes, factories. over the river, south of the market. the gentrification of rundown buildings - lofts with grand curtains behind facades that wear washed out advertisements for sugar, for machinery parts, for meat packers, like old denim. i'm home, i think, say silently to the ribbons of highway, the atwater tunnel, the urban playgrounds full of unattended children on a tuesday night. the cross on mount royal from this window - from the side, it's all scaffolding and naked and unlit in the rainy grey of this end of april morning.

i used to pass this corner every day on my way home from work. stop into the PA, me and d. and katie. we walked our bikes, or else it was winter, and we didn't have them at all. but we'd almost always break at the PA, for yogurt, cheese, veggie pate, and those improbably red tomatoes in the middle of february. that was before i moved to BC where the gregariousness of tomatoes is never improbable.

at this corner, from julie's window: the red striped bus stop, traffic light, the croque en bol pet store, where i used to buy food for lady, treats for camille. the banque laurentienne, and across the street that upscale vietnamese restaurant, chez van. i've never seen anyone in there. and i've never been. i can't see it but i know the banque de montreal is kitty corner, its wheelchair access ramp strewn with bus commuters, though maybe not today, in the rain. under this building and in front, the starbucks. the only freestanding one in the city, or maybe only the first now. there was a protest to keep it out when it first opened 5 years ago, but now i notice that it's full of happy sipping people in familiar low light and cherry wood accents. the funny thing is that laudan used to work there, and she said that in the mornings, when it was new, the starbucks used to be a meeting joint to michael - the artist, the street man with the cart of animals - 2 dogs, a cat, some pigeons - and an assortment of other odd montreal characters. i learned that michael had an apartment. he just chose not to live there. i wonder if now that the starbucks has established itself, if they let those folk in any more. i like picturing that - a table full of well-lived-in people, the city staining their skin, animated and alive, boisterous, over grande lattes in the starbucks. if only it was that kind of place still.

accidental death and dismemberment

i can't believe i'm posting about mortgage insurance. actually, i'm NOT posting about mortgage insurance, i'm really posting about being aghast at the fact that i'm tempted to. reaching a point in my life when mortgage insurance is something i think about - devote way too much time to thinking about. the value of a life. the value of my life. of j.'s. and the impact on our joint investments... god. so much for being committed to slumming it.

i used to always think that growing up was for grown ups. that i'd be immune somehow, peter pan-ned in my early twenties. i wonder, now, if my dad felt like that. or my mom.

but she had life insurance, and a good thing she did, my life the richer in money for it. death has a way of growing you up but good.

a note on the wisdom of the cynic

Mercury Retrograde

I don't quite understand what makes the planets pull
us into believing that where they are makes history happen –
clocks stop and contracts go bad
and bank accounts drain with a stealth
that thieves should envy.
The astrologers know.
Or they say they do and the starstruck faithful
queue up in virtual space clamouring
for the next Freewill,
impatient for the month to trip into its neighbour
for the next installment of Susan Miller's uncanny.

It's a matter of blind faith you said, over coffee
and a donut, or a danish –
that bit of something you always ordered
to keep your tongue busy.
You were on your soap box that day,
in good form and on about the wisdom of the cynic,
your head back in laughter
or otherwise leaning forward, a question mark hanging invisibly
from the furrow of your disbelief
at my will to believe.
(We used to argue about that a lot –
the empirical, the spiritual –
and usually
you won, or I let you win
so I could watch the victory slide quietly
into your hips and know that by lunch,
we'd be on to something
else.)

I let you win that day,
or you thought you did,
and you got up to pay, all loose-hipped and winking
only to return, hand out for a tenner,
face flushed by the faux pas
of your insufficient funds.

there are about 5 things i'm trying to tell you

too long since i've written, anywhere, or anything. back in touch with k. who has her own blog - a true blog in the style of deft bloggers everywhere. that would not be me. but i'm self referential and narcissistic, so i'll make particular note of her bukowski entry of friday april 15. that would be me.

caught in the funk of april. my girl tells me that it's only the profound who suffer from depression, as if my depression were evidence of my Very Deep Thoughts. she's kind, but i think too generous. me on last night about my own superficiality, the constant soundbiting. my fraudulence. funny how these troughs always follow those smooth sailing moments of balance.

i was reading in the globe and mail on the weekend (a leah mclaren article no less - small digression: i used to hate her, but am hating her less. does this mean she's getting less annoying or have i become immune?) about the children of the boomers. Generation Fearless, she calls them. they would have that name - all bravado and look at me and self-confidence that will either bowl you over or bore you silly. i don't know that there's any in between. i have to wonder about my own ambition, that *i* fear *them.* too, my kneejerk cynicism and sense of being somehow wiser, superior, to this next crop of pretty young things.

j. on the election of benedict xvi: "wait a minute... the guy is 78 and he's GERMAN???? don't you think there must be something in that?" god knows i'm prickly about stereotyping, but it got me thinking. apparently, other people are thinking the same thing.

and in the realm of the mundane, i got a new job, starting may 24.

that's 5. seems enough for 7 o'clock on a wednesday morning.