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
Friday, September 07, 2007
Thursday, September 06, 2007
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
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
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
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
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
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