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