you had to be there

It was a remarkably mild + 4 degrees today, so I strapped some bells on the horse and rode him up through the deep snow into the woods where his bells' jiingle joined a tiny chorus of melting droplets, turning the towering fir trees enveloping our trail into a white green symphony reaching above the shadows to a grey sun.

Wait.

P.E.I. - aka 'the garden province' - has got an alpine ski team?

That's some kind of joke right?

We had ourselves a bit of a blizzard here overnight, and the world outside looks like it'd been poured over by an preternatural behemoth icing-power sifter. Every inch of every branch on every tree - covered. So I strapped on the snowshoes and hoofed it into the backyard in the glistening morning, while my brother made an equally impressive trek to the front driveway with a shovel.

There was a bit of a commotion coming from the birdfeeder, so I tramped toward it, my feet bounding in big astronaut strides.

A resident chipmunk was hanging out (literally) off the edge of one of the feeders - his dangling legs scrambling, his front paws knocking seeds down into a messy pile.

"Nice moves," I laughed, "hey, I think we're acquainted."

"Shaddup," the chipmunk snarled, "did you bring me that pack of smokes?"

"I didn't."

"Fucking bitch."

"I'm like a bazillion times bigger than you."

"Alright, huge fucking bitch."

The chipmunk says huge like Willem Dafoe's gay gay police detective character says it with his make-fun-of-the-beat-cop fake Jersey accent in Boondock Saints.. 'we have two bodies in the morgue that look like they've been serial-crushed by some h-uuuuge friggin' guy.' (If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's just a damn shame.)

"Yer fucked you know," I guffawed, "I bought my Dad a fancy squirrel baffler for Xmas."

"Whatever."

The chipmunk was really irritating until I showed him the pictures I took of him last summer, and then he was all like 'my ass looks fat,' but I could tell he liked them. Blah blah, to make a long story short - we talked a little more and made up, and then he asked to come down with me to Halifax for New Years because apparently he's a big Joel Plaskett fan and he's heard metro Halifax tree-estate interest rates are low. So for anyone who'll be in Halifax over the New Year and wants to see me and/or meet the chipmunk, go ahead and shoot me an e-mail or leave a commet and tell us where to find you. I can't promise anything, but if we can get the chipmunk drunk at the casino I'm pretty sure he'll like, try to bet nuts of something, and that would really be a riot.

Oh yeah, um he didn't have a name, so please address him as 'Thorax Garbage the Third' (I came up with it!), because he wants to sound like a bad motherfucker.

ssjl's photostream

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all, and don't let your Christmas hangovers make the baby Jesus cry.

Is 'timing' just 'fate' for the skeptical, or is 'fate' just 'timing' for the zealots?

forgotten things

I imagine I'm preaching to an already converted congregation when I say boy-skin smells sweet like sugar mixed with pine sap mixed with clay, and letting your nose linger deep into the nook between a boy's shoulder and his collarbone is sometimes better than sex.

I was suddenly reminded today as I pulled an old pair of familiar boxer shorts from my long-abandoned bureau and pressed them against me, holding them under my chin.

If I could go back and claim a nook, I'd plant my flag and never give it up.

I have to apologize for my blog being relatively sex-free over the past few months, but those insatiable qualities that led many of my friends to brand me a closet sexpot have inexplicably dulled in recent days.

It's not really like me to shirk a perfectly hot fuck, but I've been claming up since I moved to Toronto.

I'm soliciting for fires under my ass, literally.

Oh, and for the record, no one has actually guessed yet.

No cheating, just pick one.

no googling - scouts' honour

How well don't you know rural Canadian geography?

Guess in comments which of the following does not refer to a place in New Brunswick (first person to get it wins a wicked cool prize of my determining via snail mail):

• Nigadoo
  
• Beaver Dam
  
• Poodiac
  
• Burnt Church
  
• Ripples
  
• Magaguadavic
  
• Sassamaquoddy
  
• Pocologan
  
• Dumfries
  
• Nauwigewauk
  

on the stupefying surprise of seeing him again, even though I wanted to

The moment the distant couple down the hallway passed into my peripheral vision, I knew it was him. I knew it.

In that instant, the smallest instant, my body irresistibly but unhurriedly slowed and turned to actually see what I already knew.

My toes were already slowly pivoting away when our eyes connected. The zap was instantaneous. His face was unmistakable. (I'm amazed how fast your brain's synapses relay the subtle beginnings of expressions to your face before you can conceal them.) His face said he felt what I felt - a sudden burning, an internal reflex that jerks and flexes involuntarily like a kneecap hit with a vinyl hammer. His face said he was on fire for all the wrong reasons.

If it had been a screenplay I would've known what to do next.

In a comedy my jaw would've dropped open in dumb disbelief, a passer-by would've knocked my oblivious-to-anything-but-him ass to the floor and then I would've righted myself impossibly fast, spinning away in total disarray.

If it had been a drama, the flurry around us would've faded to a crawling slow mo blur as the camera close-panned that brand of gut-wrenching emotion good actors can play just with the eyes for the briefest take before things sped up again.

In an indie sci-fi tragedy it would have been scene one, where he pulls a futuristic weapon and on closer inspection my character is a vampire.

In any film the moment would have passed in a few split-second frames, so quick you blink and it's gone.

In life I chose to look away before he had the chance. My eyes directed my brain, 'how it will feel if it's you who has to watch him look away?'

Hair-trigger reactions to the invisible magnetism emitting from us like electric currents in licks off the tips of our tiniest hair follicles.

Because we kissed once, and because we felt something.

The first look is the hardest. Now I just have to decide whether I want to see him again, or only be seen.

fight or flight

You can sail blue sky to Mexico, you can hop the pond to Bulgaria, or you can wing it north from Toronto - wherever the destination - 'tis the season for travel and if you're a traveler, you're probably flying.

Fly here if you fly laughing.

Read Michael Paterniti's The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy if you fly crying.

If you don't know whether to laugh or cry, don't fly at all.

so far from toronto

Everything you need to know about Moncton, the city I grew up in, can be summed up by the following exchange:

X: Hey, long time! How are ya?

Y: Not bad - how's Toronto?

X: Oh, shitty.

Y: Toronto sucks! Heh heh.

X: Yeah. How about you? Still doing...

Y: Yeah I'm still with (insert bar/landscaping/telemarketing co here).

X: How's that?

Y: Fucking sucks too. I'm thinking about moving out west [note: Y said exact same thing last year].

X: That's cool.

...

X: Cold out huh?

Y: Right Cold.

...

...

...

Y: Hey, bonfire at the Dobson Trail tonight - you should come - just drive out, and if there are cars then we're probably about a five minute walk in.

X: Sweet.

christmas shopping is hard

Strolling aimlessly through the stuffy people-packed shopping mall, my brother wishes he could just buy everyone what they really need: "I'd buy Dad a big-screen TV, you a job, your sister some coupons to see a psychologist, her daughter a life, and Mom - damn, I still don't know what Mom needs."

Walking around Toronto makes me so sallow I almost forget how sublime driving is - like prozac - I'm a girl in need of a steering wheel.

not the destination but the

I was searching for a way to start this... but the funny thing about an airport is that nothing about it can be described in such simple terms. Nothing in or about the airport is either the beginning or ending of anything, but instead, something so cyclical that it can't be contained in any linear way.

People never stop moving through security checks, gates, tunnels and terminals, and that boggles the mind just like the idea of a rocket ship blasting into infinity.

BLEEP! "Please spread your arms," bloop bloop bloop, "turn around please..." forever.

Fun notion.

Anthropologist-types like to say airports are the best place to observe human behavior, but I tend to think they're the worst -- human behavior changes in the airport -- people-watching in one is like getting a free trip to some flamboyant cinema.

Removed from the daily introverted shuffle, we start looking at one another, offering to help strangers with bags, run around like we're in comic books and even flip the fuck out, and then there are some people (and by people I mean myself) who just don't know how annoying they can be until they are that annoying (I reached my pinnacle when I slurped loudly on my drink and gurgled 'yes!' as I won desktop solitaire, and then there was that weird face I made inadvertently when they announced 'last boarding call for Cancun' over the PA).

I'm sitting at the bar having the worst caesar I've probably ever had. But hey, that's not my bartender's fault... I watched him put a lot of love into it. He even squeezed my lime himself.

The only other girl just left after peeling three labels off three bottles of Coors Light.

Wait, I'm lying, there is that Indian woman drinking apple juice.

And there's the girl on the bench across the barrier reading 'the 4-week ultimate body detox,' phew, say that one five times fast and ask yourself if you give a shit yet.

I'd love to stand up on my chair right now, yell out to everyone, 'yo, fess up, where are you all going? Why are you going?"

The bartender is smiling at me, like he's subconsciously heard my excited little pro-airport diatribe.

He doesn't care where they're going anymore.

I do. I think airports are fabulous...

"You're kidding me? $8.50 for a caesar? What was that, a double?"

Theories. I have lots of them. I make up theories for everything. One of my favorites is the 'men with necklaces' theory: if a guy is wearing any sort of necklace, 9 times out of 10 he got it from a chick (and in that case, probably his girlfriend and odds are they're still together). I love that theory. I stand by it because it hits on a regular basis to the point that I would never even consider approaching a guy wearing a necklace (note: on the west coast, this theory goes all to shit).

Speaking of west coast. I got two out-of-the-blue 'hellos' from misplaced gone-west recreants of my past that I only simply ask after nowadays. 'Hey, it's me! (don't be freaked out that I got your e-mail mmm kay?)' -- the first from that longtime guy friend with the irrepressible long hair beaming in from Yellowknife. The second, a phone call, nearly knocked me off the chair because her voice on the phone was so surreally familiar. Even after all this time, I knew it was her just by her signature 'hi!'

I don't have phone relationships nowadays. People get my voicemail more often than not. When I was in my teens though, the phone was king. All of my friend's numbers were memorized. I could spend hours on one conversation with someone located just houses away... Come to think of it, I still have those numbers memorized. I'm sure if I called them now I'd just get the parents of said persons or, chances are, no one.

My two old friends reaching out and getting in touch with me -- the result of a series of tiny chaotic coincidences that led them to think of me.

And, the result of my December Theory.

December, the saddest most heavy-hearted month, is where most everyone falls perpetually into doldrums each year. It's the reason you always hear 'I don't know... it doesn't feel like Christmas yet.' That's because Christmas is happy-fun-time and what you're actually feeling is something more akin to despair.

Everyone I know feels it, is feeling it to some degree right this second. It's an empty-pit feeling, a no-reason-to-go-on feeling.

I don't have a theory as to why. Maybe it's in reflection on the closing of the year. Maybe it's because Christmas highlights all the have-nots in our lives. Or maybe it's even simpler - you're broke.

You can fight it. You can take off to Mexico, that's one way to fight it. However, if you're cash strapped (everyone), and if you can't go home to Mom and have her inject your system with the kind of food that numbs the pain, an alternate means is to gather those things close to you that ring true to some semblance of who and what you were the last time you remember December as consolingly warm.

Pull out that old gift, light the proverbial Christmas candle, roll around in the snow, hang up the ornament... call/e-mail your old buds.

Seriously, stop whining and do it.

I'm doing laundry and reading a book next to the dryer so I can smell musty pages + bounce sheets, then I'm carefully going to arrange outfits for Christmas parties and dinners, and then I'll pack it all up and board a plane to replace melancholy with welcome-home.

Did I ever tell you about my plane theory?

I bought another pair of boots.

I've gone boot crazy.

I wanted something to walk around the city in, to shirk the streetcar in, to claim shit-kicking as a profession in.

I found an old pair of Boulets at a local vintage spot. Someone used to love them. Every fiber of them has been touched by someone's admiration. Someone spread their toes in these and sang.

They're fat clunky dark leather cowboy boots with old character, and I've been trudging in them, trying to shake off their former lives and give them a new soul.

I wore them with the jacket, and as I clopped down Queen West past the movie shoot, past the museum and past blooming snapdragons, I caught a glimpse of myself in a glazed-over window.

I looked like a blast from my own past, when I used to read John Steinbeck and swear by Joan Baez.

Don't blame me for boho being back. I don't need fashion to dictate whether or not I look good in cowboy boots. I've been wearing them my whole life.

Boots. Writing about boots is petty and small. Give me a day some time to come up with something worthwhile.

I stopped going to the movies for the movie and started going for the popcorn a long time ago.

I forgot to ask the waitress where she was from.

Her accent was soft with clipped ends like somewhere south of Russia. It was Slavic like something I heard once asleep during mass in a Parisian church.

She leaned over me. It wasn't blush, but old fashioned rouge on her cheeks and lips, her blonde hair pulled back into a pinned pony tail and a white and red striped sailor top -- she looked like an ad for a '45 Monaco-bound yachting vacation.

It was the best Caesar I ever had. A perfect balance of horseradish, worcester and gin married to clamato. Some fans wouldn't believe me if they heard it, but I swear I couldn't have made it better.

"Thank-you. Thank-you for this," she's holding folded bills in her hand, dripping like water, it's the tip I left her.

Usually I don't bother saying thank-you when customers tip me - transaction's over - the most important show is the next show. Neither do I leave a tip and seek gratitude in return. But when she said it that way, with her gorgeous mouth and the way it sounded... I felt happier than I'd felt in days.

I'm going to wear my hair curly, and thank big tippers at the bar tonight.

sunny day, sweeping the clouds away

Sesame Street used to produce these big rectangular hardcover books back in the late seventies/early eighties called the Sesame Street 'Library' or 'Treasury.' If you remember the format of the show back then at all, you can imagine what the books looked like: a non-linear mash-up of stories, skits, quips, recipes, 'say it in Spanish' and novelties brought to you by a few letters and a featuring a lonely number. They were listed by volume number - I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me now that they correlated with an entire Sesame season or storyline.

I had the whole set.

My whole big rectangular Seasame Street book set is now an 'important reserve' collection in my old hometown elementary school.

One funny thing about the books were the random character profile pages.

It was like Cookie Monster on Lavalife; a candid photo, his likes and dislikes, favorite color, favorite saying... that shit was gold.

The character 'about me' pages are where I learned the phrase 'pet peeve' (I don't recall Cookie Monster's pet peeve, but I imagine his now pet peeve is having to sing those lame revamped 'C is for Cookie' lyrics: 'cookie is a sometimes snack').

When something bothers me, I still think Sesame Street. I'm starring on my own 'about me' page complete with smiling picture.

Riley

Likes: big dogs
Dislikes: celery
Favorite color: red
Favorite food: steak
Pet Peeve...

My pet peeve is rigid and it's been my pet peeve forever. My pet peeve is strangers telling me to smile. 'Smile, gorgeous!' 'Hey girl, can I get a smile?' 'Why don't you smile?'

Motherfuckers.

People I don't know telling me to smile enrages me. It's not like I'm walking around a la Oscar the Grouch.

Oh, did I mention my favorite saying, 'how about I kick your ass...?'

If I call you with nothing to say, will you talk so I don't have to?

notes on faith

I keep coming across these religious blogs where everyone is praying for each other and quoting psalms... I always scoff and move along. But I've decided I'm going to stop scoffing, because we do that, we just do it differently.

Beauty comes only in snippets here. I watch the passing of light across the floor before the curtains blow to cover the window. The things I used to make note of are like short harmonies, but I can't remember the tunes anymore.

Some days I find it so difficult to get out of bed.

Like right now, rubbing my forehead with a meditative palm, rolling over and tucking the sheets into the small of my back, pondering all the things I said I would do today... if only I would get up early.

I'm waiting for the thief that comes at midnight to set this bed on fire so I can wear charred sheets like a shroud and never go back.

I'm thinking about living on public transit. Buying a monthly pass, sticking it out and timing the roundtrips, studying people's faces - I want to sit upright and turn to face the camera as the film speeds up around me - watch the garbage get swept away again and again from under the seats as commuters file through so fast they're a colourful blur.

It's that time of year when I contemplate how inadequate life is, and lie so hard about enjoying the cold that I eventually convince myself it's true.

It's the time of year I switch to black beer, like I'm in mourning for something lost.

Canadian winter: the great depressant.

This long season doesn't leave a trace. It comes in suddenly like it's the End of Days, and blankets the whole world in a slow stillness. And we move through it at a crawl until it's just gone again, uncovering all the dead rotten things in frozen suspension. The thaw is the only evidence that winter ever was; that smell of last season's dogshit and dead leaves, and something stirring in the mud.

Until I can stop the moment and see all the loveliness I used to see, until I can pull myself out of this bed - force myself out of this cocoon of excuses, the only think I've managed to build solid since I came to Toronto - I'm laying here guessing at what it is I have to look forward to, and trying to remember what beauty it was I saw in that shard of cold light on my floor.

parties for better sleeping habits

Don't force yourself to go to sleep too early because you have nothing better to do. You just find yourself lying awake at 3 or 4 am, writing half-cocked comments on other peoples' blogs, trying to will yourself to get up and get that cup of water to wash away your acrid-salty mid-sleep mouth.

I'm wandering downstairs in my underwear, pulling the last few cubes out of the ice tray and filling a mason jar, doing the dishes and thinking about the Green Party of Canada.

I was at a Christmas gathering recently, sharing elbow room around the grazing table with the CBC Canada Now reporter who covers Queen's Park.

"CBC might find themselves a bit shorthanded with this election coming down the pipes you think?" I threw this out there - the implicit translation was 'point me in the right direction.'

"Probably," he replied, "especially since for the most part things have worked out nicely after the lockout."

"Well, I don't know about you," (I started this ironic proclamation in an attempt to sound witty and fun in the kind of way that typically endears me to journalist-types I'm attempting to get to know) "but I'm going to do the same thing I did last time we had the election and just vote Green."

I manage to say this mouthful in between big gulps of a big red wine, but as soon as I heard it floating in the air, the wit seemed to drain out of it. It just sounded dumb, just as dumb as not voting at all.

CBC guy affirmed this casually.

"Well I don't know," he took a bite of shrimp and cream cheese topped Belgian Endive, "have you really looked at their platform? National Growth tax? Green shift tax? It's a bit of a mess. Canadians think if they vote green, they're voting for a set of keep-our-air-clean type principles, but there's more to it -- the party's plan is a little broader than that."

I just thought they were a bunch of pot smoking hippies who aspired to hug trees, eat granola and share bongs, and I thought they could use the vote a little more than the indulgent parties that have held power for too long. Granola eaters need a voice too.

"Well, whatever," I said, reaching over the grapes and slicing off a sliver of brie, "election or no, we're going to end up with the exact same minority government we've got right now." This deflated comment is more endearing -- I forgot that as Canadians, it's our birthright, no, our shared duty to complain.

"Got that right," says CBC guy, "it's just a question of balance. If the NDP could just push a little harder in Ontario..."

I could make a serious sport of throwing my vote away in January and vote Green (again), or I just could sit at home and think about voting. Sitting at home and thinking about voting is the least disappointing option. It's also apathetic and lazy.

The last time I really cared about an election was back in 1993. I watched the little blue and red bars edging up and down on the television. That vote was a culmination; after the recessions, the GST and Mulroney's scandals, Canadians were actually eager to cast ballots. That year saw Jean Chretien sweep the majority - a landslide vote that brought us to the position we're in now.

I was too young to vote. But my vote back then would've been naively easy... I would've rooted for the chick.

Nowadays, the New Democrats are nice in theory, and we'd get a laugh out of the Bloc Quebecois for, oh, a minute or two, but reality checks dictate it's time to choose (here we go again) the lesser of big bloated megalomaniac evils: the Liberals or the Conservatives.

Where's my government?

My government wouldn't keep me up this late at night.

Happiness is not things. But if happiness were things, my happy things are ocean waves, a warm horse, snow and the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Last Thursday in Russia a really hungry/angry gang of black squirrels attacked, mauled-to-death and ate a dog.

Apparently it's cause there weren't enough pinecones and the dog was really irritating.

vanity fair

I love glossy magazines.

Somehow, I aspire to them just a tad. Somehow if I can transform myself into a nonpareil of fashion and talent, I'll be untouchable like the perfect ink under the glossy sheen of a semi-laminated page. Turning the pages in a recent issue of Vanity Fair is like touching something more rich and more perfect than I'll ever be. That's the allure. That's the perfection that makes us consumers -- 'buy this magazine; see what the upper crust might spend on xmas gifts or what they wear on a daily basis, graze all of it with your fingertips, but never really touch it, only feel it through the hazy shiny barrier.'

Vanity Fair is a perfect caste-system allegory.

I took a cab home after I read Vanity Fair at Toronto's BCE place Richtree Marche.

"No, don't," I said lightly as the cabbie switched radio stations saying, "hey, this isn't you, I'll find you some good music..."

"No, it's good," I smiled in response.

Christmas music will always remind me of my mother.

Hauntingly so, I imagine.

She starts playing it in November and doesn't quit until well after new year's.

Funny thing: Mom is the ultimate example of someone who sought to close the gap between her fingers and the finery of those glossy magazine pages. The phrase "keeping up the Jones'" is really cemented in the social consciousness of a woman like her.

Where she's climbed from picking coal off streetsides to keep warm and a single orange at Christmas, to a beautiful house, a spending-spree life and the utmost admiration from children on her own - I think of these things I could want (things that are probably glossy fictitious ideals it's fun to fumble with but rarely ever good to base one's hopes on) - I think of these things as pointless.

They say you become the opposite, and yet the same, as your parents.

Still, Christmas music has the same effect on everyone... those songs will outlast wealth and happiness and go on to enrich whatever way it is people aspire to live long after she and I are gone.