Monthly Archives: March 2011

old habit

  • Rob: Sometimes it still hurts. You know how it is, man. It’s like, you wake up every day and it hurts a lit­tle bit less, and then you wake up one day and it does­n’t hurt at all. And the fun­ny thing is, is that, this is kin­da wierd, but it’s like, it’s like you almost miss that pain.
  • Mike: You miss the pain?
  • Rob: Yeah, for the same rea­son that you missed her… because you lived with it for so long.

—Swingers

I’m in my last days of high-school again. Pretty much this. Feeling like I have the rest of my life ahead of me with so much to look for­ward to, but only cause I’m try­ing to shed every­thing that hap­pened in the final dis­as­trous year.

I remem­ber writ­ing a lot back then in this black note­book. It was filled with all these ver­bal scrib­bles, short pas­sages of text, words, lyrics, emo­tions I could­n’t con­tain. My thoughts were a jum­ble, lost some­where between the pain and the love of how it made me feel alive.

That’s how I feel now. Old habits break hard.

About once every two years I uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly threw it out and bought a new one, because I hat­ed every­thing in it. I nev­er want­ed to think of myself as the per­son who wrote all the things in there. Sometimes I won­der if I’ll look back on these entries one day and think the same.

every red fucking light

it’s far too late to be doing this, but I know I’ll lose it if I don’t get it down right away.

cause the music. my god. you nev­er tru­ly feel it until this hap­pens. like it’s writ­ten for this moment, when the song isn’t over so you have to dance in the car for 0:34 cause you’re home already.

i was­n’t going to men­tion any­thing until there was some­thing worth men­tion­ing. then i excit­ed­ly spilled my guts to trol­ley over the grilled atlantic salmon.

things fell apart short­ly there­after.

i keep think­ing of how i would­n’t have changed a thing if i had to do it all over again, how any­thing done dif­fer­ent­ly would­n’t have made a dif­fer­ence any­way, but that’s nev­er much com­fort is it. these are also the nights i queue up only three songs to make sure I get out of the show­er in a time­ly man­ner.

aaron knew some­thing was wrong when i broke into a sweat and took off my coat. i lied cause it was his day and not mine, but all i want­ed to do was go home and drown myself in iso­la­tion and play until my fin­gers bled1.

i’ll always be caught in this flux. there is no arrival for me. the oscil­la­tion has always been the des­ti­na­tion, but the waves get a lit­tle calmer each time.

  1. he knows how bad i am at hid­ing things like this, how it always eats me up, and i feel ter­ri­ble cause i know how he always wants to take me away from that. [↩]

downtown condo

About a year ago I lever­aged the equi­ty in my cur­rent house to buy a down­town con­do. It’s under con­struc­tion now, due to be fin­ished in anoth­er two years. My orig­i­nal inten­tion was to rent it out or sell it (depend­ing on mar­ket con­di­tions around the time of clos­ing), but ever since I came back from Europe, I’ve been flirt­ing with the idea of mov­ing there myself and rent­ing out my house instead.

I’ve missed that feel­ing of con­nec­tion after walk­ing in cities that were bustling and full of life. There’s a cer­tain inti­ma­cy to urban liv­ing that I long for, where every­thing is with­in walk­ing dis­tance and peo­ple are all around. It does­n’t help that I work from home in a sleepy area in the east end, most­ly inhab­it­ed by retirees.

facade

27 storeys of glass and met­al.

It’s an extreme­ly tempt­ing propo­si­tion. I’d final­ly have a bal­cony and view from a cor­ner unit on the sixth floor, close enough to the ground to do some peo­ple watch­ing but far away enough to stay pri­vate; some­thing I’ve missed great­ly from my first years out of uni­ver­si­ty. I’d have big south-fac­ing win­dows to fill the place with light in the morn­ings. I’d be in the heart of down­town, just a block off Elgin, walk­ing dis­tance from the Rideau Centre, Byward mar­ket, and the NAC. I’d have access to the 4500 sq. ft. recre­ation cen­tre which includes an indoor swim­ming pool, a sauna, fit­ness facil­i­ties, a pri­vate lounge, and guest suites.

The con­do is also a lot more my style, as these are mod­ern, New York-inspired lofts (most of the suites tak­ing their names from NY neigh­bour­hoods and land­marks), each one with hard­wood floors, indi­vid­ual HVAC and stack­able washer/dryers, a flush European-style kitchen, and 24-hour concierge ser­vice. I get to pick out my colours and fin­ish­es soon, and I’m already plan­ning where I’d want to put my fur­ni­ture.

But I don’t know if I can give up the place I have now, due to the lux­u­ries afford­ed to me by the extra space: a spare room I can use as a pho­to and Tai Chi stu­dio, a giant clos­et, and least of all, a liv­ing room large enough to host inti­mate house shows or small gath­er­ings.

The Short Life of Leonard the Cat

The hard­est part was putting away his food bowls, and that ter­ri­ble sense of final­i­ty that he’d nev­er be eat­ing from them again.

Spending so much time at home meant Leonard was in my com­pa­ny for a large part of the day. I’m get­ting used to his absence, but I still miss the lit­tle guy.

I had a bunch of ran­dom footage and I nev­er knew what to do with it, includ­ing a few moments from the first time I let him out of quar­an­tine into the rest of the house. When he died I kept watch­ing the footage over and over again until it sort of pieced itself togeth­er into this small vignette of a kit­ty who lived with me for less than three months. I hope they were hap­py ones.