because i know you love her

and i love this one, too.

on closure

it's been a strange sort of week, or at least a strange sort of weekend. thought about posting this sooner, but wanted to sit with it for a couple of days, think on its significance. way back in october 05 i had tracked down someone from my past and written about it. linked to her blog. noted, i thought in passing, that we had nothing to say to each other, that the past was ancient history, questioned the wisdom of getting in touch. so i didn't get in touch. in fact, i didn't come back to this blog for over a year. and shortly after i had written, she found me (courtesy of the bits and pieces of ourselves we unknowingly shed over the internet - a scent trail? the forensic traces of cyberworld), left a comment. made an entry about it on her own corner of the universe. and i didn't see it until she had traveled the world and come back. until i had jumped my own ship and was making a go of swimming to shore. or out to sea. i'm afraid i'm a bit lacking in direction. but that's not the story.

the story is that i finally saw the comment and wasn't sure what to do with it. how to make amends, where that 19-year-old me, and that 19-year-old her, fit in the story of who i have become. and what would it mean to reach out? what would there be to say apart from hello how are you and i'm sorry and i'm different now i swear? what's the measure of across the ocean and 15 years in a friendship that lived for a few months in that time of so much becoming? as i wrote back when i first tracked her down, what, now after all these years, would there be to say to each other?

but on a whim, or in a fit of self-confidence, or maybe desire to connect, a couple of weeks after i had seen the comment, i sent her an email. wanted to say, at least, that i saw that she had been here. and she wrote back, with a lot of kindness and a lot of honesty. and i wrote back to that. and i don't know if we'll keep corresponding, but i think it kind of doesn't matter anymore, though if this chance collision strikes up a friendship with two people who used to know each other, so much the better. but what mattered, i realize, is not what there was to say to each other. it was that we said anything at all. there's some closure in that, and some small weight that comes off, and some sense that in this big opaque world, you never know what might happen. so if we never connect again, i wish you happiness. and i thank you for writing. it's been a good surprise.


Everything's Okay

And the sun with spin on it now, with hover. Lower over
the light industrial west end, shot back by windowed towers
of the Big Three, it blinds you coming

and going, something smart with your name on it. Spring
walks all over us on sharp heels. Spring chants its way
through the playoffs. Things, being things,

have never been better. Here on the grid, you have reason
to appreciate urban planning more than anything
your parents ever taught you, as Lake Ontario sleeps

with its freighted eye open under sky like a smoker's
bedclothes. Say Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus
until you mean it, say Roncesvalles until you buy that bit

about beauty in ugliness, under oath as you are to living
for the moment, uncut, blow by blow. A woman sings
karaoke in a third floor flat, while below, an engine grinds,

trying to turn over. Behind café glass, a man leans
to his companion as though he loves her. You believe one idea,
and then another. That is, in the instant, at the time.

-- Karen Solie


---------------------
box: gould - goldberg variations

you asked for it

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness
comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Rumi

You had wanted me to post something happy. Or happier. I don't know if this counts. But you have to admit, it has some hope in it...

would someone please

disabuse me of my jennifer aniston crush?

it's kinda embarassing. and the fact that this story makes me disproportionately happy is a little worrisome. maybe i'll just blame it on this low-grade depression and leave it at that. guess i shouldn't knock the fact that something is actually making me happy....

come to my window

so this is the colour of the sky in my world today. is this what they call the bleak midwinter? feels like it. and i'm annoyed with myself for letting it go so long, for being so dragged down. today on the subway i felt like crying only because the tracks seemed so damn close to the imagination. this is not the way i meant to become. thank god tomorrow is another day.

home renovations

the image of scaffolding has always appealed to me. skeletons on the outside to shore up skeletons on the inside. i used to think of scaffolding as support - but i'm wondering now if it's not a way of getting around the walls. a way of scaling when knocking them down just won't do.

yesterday i met with anna and we talked a lot about my neat and tidy compartments. the challenge of living a life within the confines of some very thick walls. and as she was talking, as she was telling back to me my stories of stoic restraint, i had this image of mike holmes swinging a sledgehammer, tearing down drywall, making open space. i need a way to access that space. i need my own sledgehammer. because this scaffolding i've constructed isn't doing the trick. or i've been misusing it. misunderstanding it. maybe it's all gotta come down. and then let's see what happens.

-----------
box: yo yo ma, bach's cello suites

monday morning, freezing rain

'nuff said.

okay i have a problem

i'm wondering if there's a term for this aimless internet wandering i get stuck in, to the detriment of ALL productivity and any profound thought... viz, my current, and seemingly lasting obsession with go fug yourself, wikipedia, cbc.ca, yahoo entertainment, the globeandmail.com, and - and this is truly embarassing - people.com. my mother did not give birth to me for this. i blame rss feeds and the easy way gmail fixes me with them.

it puts me in mind of buffalo - a stoner moment, for sure. jessica campbell had come to visit me. i had pot, which i smoked only occasionally, and, truth be told, never really enjoyed all that much. we sat on my futon in that creaky old apartment on richmond ave - the one with all the centipedes and the grey lo-pile carpet that got pockmarked with the remains of k's cigarettes, and which i later painstakingly repaired with crazy glue and carefully shorn carpet graft obtained from less visible corners of the apartment so as to get that precious damage deposit back in full - and watched kids in the hall reruns. i got ridiculously high. and ridiculously paranoid, convinced i was going to be stuck in stoner world for the rest of my life. and poor jess, who was being sweet and kind and who never really has been my friend, though we've both been earnest in our showing up for the label, didn't really know what to do. what's the parallel? being stuck in stoner world. only now i'm not stoned. i'm just stuck online in some ridiculously mundane mobius strip of non-entertainment and meaningless gathering of trivia that i will never ever use. it's a damn good thing i don't have a job at the moment, since i would have to get fired for getting nothing done.

okay back to the surf. surely someone must have posted something new in the last 5 minutes.

--------------
box: tom waits, orphans. all 3 discs, but in keeping with the truth of my moribund musical tastes, it's the bawlers that get me.

bedside table: the wars by timothy findley, two girls fat and thin by mary gaitskill. course reading in artificial intelligence.

just watched: shattered glass (hayden christensen, peter sarsgaard) about the downfall of steven glass; capturing the friedmans. liked 'em both. and i never thought i would say this - but i'm actually grateful to blockbuster. for some reason, they're stocking some damn good films in my neighbourhood outlet (sorry e. i know this drives you mental).

and i had thought they for sure would have disabled me

okay. so back to this blogging thing. i never have been very good at sustaining. see that last post. (am thankful for the comment, which i just saw today - over a year later. talk about not being with the program). i haven't written yet, just so you know (though i imagine after over a year, you'd hardly be sending a thought this way), not because i don't want to. there's something in me that wants to get it right. that wants to make it right. and until i can either figure that out, or let it lie, or just plain stop angsting over it, it's best for both of us if i keep myself small and quiet. but btw, i love that you use the word mawkish. it's a good one.

there's wind where i am. big gusting skylight shaking wind in the midst of a snowless winter. the dog oblivious at my feet, and me as lost as i ever was, googling in a half-hearted sort of way, and thinking of where you are today. and all the other you's in my life. the yous that left. the yous i ran off. the yous who just disappeared or changed into something else. those yous. and, for that matter, those mes.

procrastination is the worst kind of purgatory - self-inflicted. how to figure out which world to have a foot in?

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?