Q: Would the simultaneous viewing of Donnie Darko on two continents rattle the space-time/love-fear continuum?
From my father’s side – varicose veins (not yet) and ruddy skin (yet). From my mother’s side – cancer (not yet) and mysticism (??). There was a seer in the mix, somewhere back, and this isn’t just Eastern European hooey. Case in point: my cousin Joanne’s dream the night my Uncle Bill died was more than an uncanny parallel to the truth. My dream of my coworker’s child’s birth on Friday night – a boy, but more than this, said coworker’s panic over having to now learn how to throw properly. My mother had been in childhood training, perhaps practicing the evil eye in a broken mirror out back of the brick factory, or casting a plague upon a Serbian field.
"The Serbians, ach," my Uncle Pete had said, "they do no work. The Croatians do all the work and the Serbians take all the credit." I think he meant farming. I don’t think he meant war.
I’m reflecting on two things: the 5 year anniversary (today!) of having Lecky, and the potential of new love --not in my life, though stranger things have happened. See, the thing with both the dog and new love is this: I didn’t know what it would be like, as an adult, to have a dog. I just knew I wanted that in my life. There’s nothing I could have done to plan in advance – and by this I mean emotionally. I had everything in place, a bed, dishes, food, all in preparation for the event, but there’s no way I could have known how this would have impacted on my life until I just jumped blindly into the situation. I didn’t need genetic mysticism to tell me this. And I ended up with a rather excellent dog.
But you’d probably rather read more on the bit about new love, for that’s always more interesting than a dog. Except MY dog. Nevertheless, new love is afoot, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the outcome will blow all the continuums to pieces.
An appreciation for the Beat era made me remember this: when I was living in Montreal, my neighbour pal Andy was hired by Kerouac's former pianist to ghost-write his memoirs. While this sounded like a cool proposition at first, Andy never completed the book. The guy was a mess --- an old drunk in the classic rye style, he’d constantly miss appointments then get belligerent when Andy would try to impose a structure on the memoirs. Structure? Life has no structure! Whenever Andy would bring him to parties or readings, he'd grab all the girls' asses and would get away with it because he was an old guy and had known Neal Cassady. For a gaggle of English Lit MA students, this was akin to sugar-fixed children circling Dr. Teeth.
Logic was, if you couldn’t fuck with greatness, you could at least make-out with his piano player.
There were cherry bombs, of course, and squealers, exploding chrysanthemums, bottle rockets; nothing simple like lining a set of caps up against the curb and striking the black sulphurous dots with a sharp rock. No, not when East Van corner stores were involved, and drunken regalers, and wallets emptying out to unload the fireworks stock onto the street. Passing motorists and pedestrians, wary of the ricochet and deafening pitch, made their routes slowly up Commercial Drive, past the patio where Nicki and I toasted my uncle. It’s still a non-reality, my uncle’s death, and the look of absolute loss on my aunt’s face haunts me more than any of those on the Parade of Lost Souls on Saturday night. Friends, though, rise to the occasion: they email from distant points, they ask, they toast, they understand how my brain works:
Me: What is that guy carrying?
Nicki: A kid.
Me: No, looks like a giant tube of toothpaste or oil paint.
Nicki: Obviously we’re not looking at the same guy.
My new covetous body part: the male back. This after last night’s concert of Do Make Say Think at Richard’s, where I had the vantage from the upper balcony of the band’s left profile.
You know how there are these people who you date in your twenties, those people who, if you’d met them when you were mature enough, would have been otherwise perfect, but because of a lack of maturity on your own part, they just progress easily out of your life? The Boy with a Passsion for Birdwatching and Salmon Spawning was one of those. He was nice. He came from a good family. He kept a clean apartment above a corner store on Bay Street. He smelled always of freshly tumbled laundry. He had one of the best backs I’ve ever encountered.
It was a tangled web, not his back, but how I dealt with that semester of university. Freshly single from a long-term live-in relationship, I was surrounded by men who had been my boyfriends’ friends. And then they were my friends. And then I was single. There are the unspoken boundaries, the "we shouldn’ts" that arise from these situations, so for the most part, my guy friends remained as such. But then there are also the openings, like a hand reaching down from the rooftop to guide you up the ladder. So while dating The Boy with a Passion for Birdwatching and Salmon Spawning, my Guy Friend who was a History Major and I figured out that we were developing an attraction. I ended up breaking things off with TBWAPFBASS to be with my guy friend, who later ended up dating TBWAPFBASS’s sister. Because that’s Victoria, folks. No degrees of separation.
Watching the back of the guitarist/saxophonist from Do Make Say Think last night made me think of the birds, and the history, and how timing is everything . That’s all.
So I drop by Chapters on the way to my brother's place last night to buy Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which won the Booker Prize yesterday. I've read both Self and The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and, admittedly, I've developed one of those writerly crushes based solely on a handful of certain perfectly constructed sentences. I'm a sucker for the sentence, much moreso than plot or character, which is perhaps why I respect Ondaatje's writing so much while others rail against his fishy coldness. Crush factor #2: Martel resides in Montreal.
While I usually go for the little booksellers, I felt like reading the book last night and Chapters was open and en route, so I skulked in only to have my low expectations of the store lowered. I looked all over the main floor: on the HOT BOOKS table, on the NEW RELEASES table even though it's not a new release, on the CHAPTERS PICKS table. Nothing. I went upstairs and looked in the fiction section. Nothing. Nothing on the CANADIAN LITERATURE table. Nothing on the BOOKS BY AUTHORS WHOSE LAST NAMES SOUND LIKE CARTEL, or on the THESE BOOKS WON SOME PRIZES OR SOMETHING table. So I asked the check-out clerk: "I can't seem to find the Yann Martel book that won the Booker Prize today." Holy fuck, you'd think I just asked the guy to create life from the contents of an ashtray. The who? The what? Okay, I realize the guy is just working at Chapters because it's a paycheque, but I still find that disheartening. I mean, the Booker is not a minor thing in the literary world, and Chapters is not a small specialty shop. That's like walking into Blockbuster after the Oscars and saying "Do you have A Beautiful Mind?" and getting a blank stare from the clerk in return. (Note to self: add "Do you have a beautiful mind?" to list of killer pick-up lines, yow-za!).
I gave him the title because he couldn't even begin to figure out how to spell Yann. Supposedly they had 2 copies in the fiction section. But they didn't. Am I so wrong in being so disappointed in Chapters for only even stocking 2 copies of a Booker-nominated novel, whether it won or not? So I took my purchased copy of Dr. Phil's Relationship Rescue and left in a huff.
I don’t know if this is a Canadian thing, or just purely a characteristic of Vancouverites, or perhaps something that may be limited to certain routes, but we’re exceptionally polite when it comes to bus drivers. What I mean is that we thank them when exiting the bus. On the ride down Cambie into the city center, the bus driver is thanked at every stop, not necessarily by every passenger, but there will be at least one person calling up gratitude from the back doors or tossing back a thanks as they exit the front.
This morning, I had the cutie Christopher Guest bus driver who neurotically taps his fingers on the side of his steering wheel like a bored kid on a Sunday drive with his parents. It was the tapping that made me see his fingers, and the fingers that made me look at his arms. His arms!! It was the kind of muscular display that says this guy can scale sheets of waterfall ice with his bare fingers, or jam out a two-hour Eddie Van Halen-esque guitar solo without breaking a sweat. He didn’t have the no-neck bulk of overtime in the gym or the veiny sinew of skinny-man musculature; no, these were quite possibly the most perfect arms I’ve set sight on for some time. For eight city blocks, I could not look away from those arms as he neurotically fiddled with his chair adjustments, tapped out a ditty on the coin collector, punched in his codes on the communication box.
So, yes, I thanked him when we reached my stop at Granville.
There will be a moment at a dear uncle's memorial when the crowd of cousins will part and you'll spot one of your best pals across the parking lot, and after that and the expressed concern from abroad and other places, you'll realize that it's okay for your friends to see you in pain.
There will be a moment in a hospital waiting room when the doctor will put his hand to his forehead and sigh. That’s when you will know everything has fallen apart.
It’s inevitable that someone will gruff at the selection, but what can I do? This is a tough go, there’s no question. See, it’s my aunt & uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary on the weekend, and folks are flying in from all corners of the Western provinces for the shindig. And, as families are wont to do, we’ve all been assigned little tasks so our collective efforts will ensure the evening flows smoothly from sobriety into absolute loadedness. Time past, I was the family photographer, but now that there’s an actual trained professional in the midst, I’ve thankfully handed over those reins. My assignment this year: curating the music for our inbred dancing festivities. Already, this task is overshadowed with guilt because a specific track has been requested by the honourees themselves, and I haven’t been able to find it. ("West, A Nest and You Dear" by the Banjo Kings – if you can find this, please ftp it on over). My one golden rule: no *#$&@#% chicken dance, macarena, or anything that requires any hand gesture other than signaling for another rye & coke from whichever cousin will be tending bar.
So I’ve made four cds in an attempt to satisfy an age group that spans from 2-77. The tracks begin with the hits of 1952 and segue down through the generations to finish with the hits of this week. It’s a catch-sock of ska, disco, polka, reggae, rock, hiphop, Scandinavian death metal, college café spoken word, foley tracks of pedestrians walking on plank sidewalks, and Gregorian chanting. Already I know people are going to complain that I put on the Inuit throat singing number that starts with "uuuuunggghhhh" rather than the one that goes "aahgaaahgnnnnn". Oh well, can’t please ‘em all.
Last night I crossed sixteen boundaries of conventional morality. Last night I mixed the lime with the coconut. Last night I messed with the time/space continuum, I bedamned long-standing rules of engagement, I smoke-umed the peace pipe of setting straight old business, because last night I answered the age-old question: what would it be like to make out with the younger brother of my best friend from highschool.
I had noticed it, but since a coworker noticed it yesterday too, it’s official. I’m in a good mood. It’s as if the flu shook out my bad mood mojo, and what with Mercury sliding back into the right direction, everything is looking, well, better. It could be the fact that I’ve stopped drinking coffee. It could be the fact that I didn’t have to have the "state of the union" discussion that I was stressing about on the relationship front – instead, he just sort of figured out that I’m too preoccupied with writing endeavors and just hanging out with my friends. It’s perhaps not fair to write about that here, seeing as how he reads the site from time to time, and I get accused of being cryptic in what it is that I’m trying to get across -- the truth is I think I jammed at the moment his friends referred to me as his "girlfriend".
I'm okay at dating. I'm better with it if they're friends to begin with. I'm crappy with short term relationships because I can't communicate well enough to get out of them. I just keep hoping maybe I'll get dumped and then I won't have to do any of the dirty work myself. I'm really good at long term relationships, especially the kind that take years to fizzle out into friendship. A pal in Montreal who shall go nameless is currently in an affair with, as he terms it, a "borrowed girlfriend". This seems suitable for the fickle Gemini -- no pressure, no commitment, just lots of guilt-driven sex.
Still, there’s a lightness right now to the day. In just the past three hours, I’ve flirted, seen a crazy man yelling "fuckfuckfuckfuck" (and somehow my dog knew he was crazy before he even started his rant), had the best omlette the city has to offer.
So how could I possibly remain in a bad mood after that?
