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.

learning relation, again, at 32

-----Original Message-----
From: ajk
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 10:08 AM
To: jjl
Subject: RE: all of this

i remember those leg pains. lying in bed, ache in the shins, smoothing the sole of my foot up and down on my sheets trying to stretch it out. but how to stretch out a pain in the bone? the usual remedies don't apply.

so yes, growing pains. this learning anew, reforming, reshaping. becoming. hard - despite the wonder of it - to shed old habits, old patterns. constant vigilance the price for the privilege of standing this one foot to the left, of seeing new perspective.

i'm believing in the work, though, and in the benefit of it all, the move towards wholeness. we can do this.

-----Original Message-----
From: jjl
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 9:53 AM
To: ajk
Subject: all of this

when i was a kid they called it growing pains. unexplicable leg aches or other mysterious forms of suffering. which i felt. and may be feeling now. growing pains. the ache of change. how the snake feels shedding its skin. how a newborn mammal gets squeezed so hard in the muscular grip and hard bone passage of its mother's body. Condensing oneself down into a tight shape, being pushed along by larger forces. a body has to take a lot of pressure to come into the world. so here's to that pressure. here's to coming into the world. we can do this

bloor street, lunchtime

girl, 15 or 16, crossing at a diagonal at bathurst and bloor. beeline through traffic, not looking for cars, for bikes. i stop short, tire at her heel. she doesn't notice, her gaze focused three feet away - a moving target. "Heffer!" she's yelling. horning, honking. "Heffer!" almost baritone. loud.

on the sidewalk, another girl turns. braids pulled tight back on her head, headphone cords dangling. immediately, she flinches. immediately, she's sorry. slow eye close. brow furrow. her spine straightens, she blinks quickly, armouring herself against the building onslaught.

"good you know your own name." beeline is on braid's shoulder now, at her ear. "fucking cow." she steams past. smug. braid walks on, adjusts her earphones. i can't tell, as her back moves away from me, if she looks bigger or smaller. she does, i think, look stiller. poised.

been down so long

needing a venting. sun is out this morning, hazy, despite the undercurrent of autumn chill. one of the last gasps of summer, i suppose, before cool begins in earnest. woke up this morning crotchety. called j., heard the shortness in my own voice and had no way of curbing it, no access to the root of it. "is it PMS?" she asks me. calm. cool. reassuring. i am not reassured. i am scared. tired of this dragging down, tired of the sinking in my abdomen, the weight of mood. when, how, does this go away? how to buck up, pick up, shape up?

and now, here i am, ass in seat at work. am feeling my head sliding closer and closer to the keyboard, my fingers slow. heavy-lidded. now there's a nice picture. you understand, of course, that i'm talking in symbols. i hope.

publish or perish

i'm at work. i should say i'm not working. clearly. but i'm here, body in chair, and that seems to count for something.

i work in publishing. an offshoot of the publishing world, really. periphery. what we call *scholarly* publishing. none of the glitz and glam of the trade world - the randomly housed, vintage-clad, penguin-suited trust-funded martini-swilling world that helen fielding pens. here it's all skimping and scrounging. mounting press releases that nobody reads. i sometimes comfort myself that i get paid better than some of my compatriots in that swisher world, but the sheer blandness of my job can get me down.

am contemplating a career change. or a shift. but what the hell to do? i'm a compulsive non-finisher of degrees, having only managed the BA, and that only because i didn't know yet that i didn't *have* to finish it. started a PhD, backed down, got lost, thot maybe it was on account of i leapfrogged over the MA that i bailed on the big DR, so went back to do that. guess what? 'taint done that either. i used to pin it on being part of the cohort cursed by being born in the early 70s, the aimless child of the not-quite-boomer generation. now i'm not too sure. i'm beginning to think that i'm just really freaking lazy. lately the thot of doing *this* - this WORK thing - for another 33 years sees me sliding into a trough of despair.