I’ve been back for two days, and I’m still busy. I haven’t played a game of WC3 in over a week and a half. I think peo­ple would gen­er­ally be wor­ried about me if I told them this with­out let­ting them know that I didn’t have access to a decent com­puter. I can hon­estly say that the last two weeks have been the best trip home I’ve ever had.

I’ll never for­get dri­ving to the park to blaze with Darren and Chris or Jeff or Jerry. The park was always aban­doned at that time of night, sur­rounded by a field on one side, and a row of middle-class houses on the other. I always sus­pected that the peo­ple eat­ing din­ner with their blinds open knew that we were doing some­thing illicit when sparks would light up our faces in the black­ness of the field. Standing in the mid­dle of the play­ground, with its sand-covered tables or dual-sided slide con­trap­tions, made me feel com­fort­ably at peace. The area was devoid of traf­fic (and hence noise) and there was no light pol­lu­tion to dilute the glam­our of the glit­ter­ing sky.

Afterwards, get­ting hun­gry, we would drive to the McDonalds drive-through (since the reg­u­lar joint was closed at that time of night), and order an inor­di­nate amount of food. Eating would always con­sist of park­ing in a nearby lot, lit from long lamps that seemed to want to touch the sky, and rolling down the Civic’s win­dows. The wide, open space of the park­ing lot would rarely see any­one drive through, and we were left eat­ing com­fort­ably in silence (albeit with the hum of the A/C in the back­ground), when food never tasted so good.

We would hit the clos­est Timmies after­wards, need­ing cof­fee and some­how more food. The place was always empty, and from two to four in the morn­ing we were the only cus­tomers, get­ting two large teas and two cheese strudels please. I won­dered how much money could have been made by stay­ing open 24 hours a day, pay­ing the two employ­ees work­ing the night shift while see­ing us as the only cus­tomers, pur­chas­ing food but stay­ing well over the cour­tesy limit. I’ll never for­get how brightly lit the place was, with it’s lugubri­ous employee seem­ingly mop­ping the floor for an eter­nity while Chris and Darren chat­ted end­lessly about the more humourous aspects of their friends facial fea­tures. I would look out the win­dow and see cars pass by on the main road every so often, won­der­ing how I’ve missed such a good time my whole life.

Time spent with John was just as good. We watched Elizabeth (Geoffrey Rush and Fanny Ardent had the best parts), The Transporter (ter­ri­ble), The Good Thief (very good), Jackass Movie (just as good the sec­ond time), and Better Luck Tomorrow (very enjoy­able). We bought Timesplitters 2 for his PS2 and played quite a bit of co-operative cam­paign and switched to death­match when we felt the need to match testosterone.

He would give me a ride home every night which ended up tak­ing about an hour due to the DVP being closed for con­struc­tion. We rode along the dark city streets, lis­ten­ing to Air Supply and talked about any­thing from implanted human desires to how fucked up our rela­tion­ships have been to our future plans.

I real­ized that, as good a time as I was hav­ing at home, I still wouldn’t move back there. I’m com­fort­able here, and I’m able to much bet­ter appre­ci­ate the time I spend with my friends or fam­ily if it’s not too often. I have some­thing to look for­ward to.

Something that is rare.