Without love and attention, it dies, just like this blog.
Of course this was always intended to be, and has been, a specific and finite project.
The contents have been sent off to my potential publisher and so this blog can officially said to be archival only.
Does anyone stumble upon this collection of sadness and contemplation? Like the conifer I got from Shannon over Christmas that died in the early spring and was deposited in the backyard of my tiny apartment shortly thereafter.
Maybe. And just in case, in closing,
To answer the question that I wasn't sure was a question: wreckage has trumped reclamation.
A gift from the dog gods of Dawson. Delivered before a party at the well-funded Berton House;
Jeramy models the Goat Coat.
After a morning Americano at The Common, a drink that began with me reading a British officer's memoir of his time in The Sangin Valley and ended with some dude shoving past me for my vacated prime seat as I put on my windbreaker and gloves. In need of bars of Ivory and bananas I walked towards Dufferin Mall, up through Dufferin Grove park and across its thin layer of glazed snow/ice. Stewing over pushy hipsterati and his seat grab, wondered:
What happened to the guy who’d pick a fist-fight with a hobo?
(or bunny hop them as the slept on heat grates along Queen st.)
The guy who puked Rye and Coke into an occupied swimming pool and later, out of a car window.
Pissed on a small mountain of puffy Winter jackets at a house party in Esquimalt.
The guy who got angry not sad.
Where’d ya go? Where might I find you?
It was all I could do to keep myself from having a tiny explosive fit under the expanses of yellow isles and walls of No Frills. Coming close to kicking over a pile of no-name pancake mix is the level of lameness I have attained.
2 buildings from Dawson: a Generally typical single room dwelling and "The Pit" (open at 9am though only Canadian is on tap. It's better than Blue I suppose).
Another dusk run through High Park to melt off the day’s malaise in the oppressive, comforting humidity of mid August overgrowth. On a previous outing a fellow runner extolled as we crossed paths, “watch out for the toads!” such was the saturation level.
The air is just as thick this night, the light equally faint – the trails better understood by feel than sight. Approaching a rise, a voice calls out with a sharpness assumed to be the common call for an errant dog. Clearing the rise, ambient yellow light breaks intermittently through the burdened foliage. At first the effect is similar to catching sight of a luminous deep-sea jellyfish, its pulses bobbing into and out of view. Soon though, structured geometric forms begin to take shape and bind onto the growing voices.
Closing on and passing the twilight theatre that sits on the high ground to the south of the trail, actors, congested on an illuminated stage project their personae onto the audience but also out into the surrounding trails.
Sweat falls in oppressive pools down my spine and stomach.
One foot striking in front of the other.
One grizzled knee compressing a battered shin into an ankle,
a noticeable “click” emanating with each foot’s weathered turn pushing me forward at a pace too fast to fully enjoy the world.
Who are these people, presently defined by artifice and luminescence? Who am I to believe my own structured and collapsing existence is any more valid, any less fleeting or any less of a show?
