It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a strip club. The co-workers of my first job, along with the president of the company, were the ones took me to my first. They made it a point to “initiate” me when they found out I had never been. I still look back on that memory fondly, because I was so young and green, and they wanted to get me over my inexperience.

But it was never something I did with any frequency. You always look at those guys, seating by themselves at the head of the table with a beer in hand, thinking, “Is this better than what you have at home?”

After all, strip clubs are never really about the girls. It’s about being out with your friends, when your parents think you’re at a movie¹. They’re like concerts. You could sit at home and listen to a CD with studio quality sound, but there’s something different about the atmosphere of a live experience.

It’s easy to grow past the appeal of strippers though. There’s no personality there. Even Playboy models have likes and dislikes. The furthest a strip club goes is by saying, “Here’s Porsche, and she used to be an airplane attendant”.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the female figure. But there’s no appeal in a stripper.

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1. Some of them had ringtones set for their home numbers, and just the ring would set off a round of teenage spite [↑]

Jeff! Sooo many gurls with _ _ _ hair at grad!! Too bad…. Hee… Don’t u just love all the flash movies on our site?!? I’m sure U love them soooooo much! U hafta get back into sc man!! We need more ppl to play with! Hmm… wut do u think of the cartoons on our site?? There suppose to be me and teresa, her hairs colored _ _ _!!!! Don’t get any wrong ideas, or else i’ll have to do a lot more photo editing!

I found this shout-out from an old website of a friend. He made it in the last year of high school, which was a long time ago, seeing as how it’s been ten years.

The blank word is red. Yep. I went through a looooooong red hair phase with the girls. Not that it’s really over, as red hair is still a preference, only more subdued. And “sc”, that stands for Starcraft, which was a big game with everyone in our clique. We would go home after school, sometimes to each other’s houses, and battle each other online. We’d even go so far as to create scenarios of different units facing off against each other to analyze how effective they were in different situations.

It’s strange to read these words, because I was never really popular in high school, and certainly not popular enough for someone to give me props. Actually, I was a loner (which is why I got along with John, who was another loner) until the very last year when I changed schools, and met people who were a little more like me, and less offensive.

I don’t know why I enjoy old memories like this, or why they affect me so much. Maybe because I’m an introvert. It’s said that introverts go back to memories for stimulation. I’ve always found a distinct pleasure in reminiscing about old times, when I may have been more damaged, but more innocent too. It’s like innocence is the only thing you have no control over losing. As you grow older, you learn more about how the world works, and a once naïve optimism is replaced with the cold, hard realities of life.

You think of how nice it would be to have the mind of a child again, when your biggest worry was what to wear and whether she likes you, but you can never go back.

Grandma appears to be suffering from memory loss. Although maybe suffering isn’t the right word, because she doesn’t even remember that she has memory loss.

She’ll ask us the same question several times in a row. Or she’ll introduce me to someone, even though we not only met two weeks ago, but I’ve taken pictures of them together and showed her. Yesterday, she looked at some nicely wrapped cakes, and after unwrapping one for her, she forgot she was hungry.

Sometimes she speaks in endless cycles because she forgot what she said 10 seconds ago: “I know how to pick real-estate. Look at this place…it’s in an upper-class neighbourhood. I bought it 40 years ago, and it was one of the first places with elevators. That’s because I knew how to pick real-estate. Look at this place…”

It makes me wonder what it must be like to live like this. John says I don’t forgive people because my memory is too good, especially when it comes to emotions and experiences, where I can relive things to the smallest detail.

In a way, we’re relieved she doesn’t remember anything. It may be the only the reason why she doesn’t know what’s going on with her illness.

And to be honest, I think I’d be better off this way too.

I want the view. The city lights beneath me, blinking in red and white, to remind me that life still goes on even as we’re unconscious of it.

I want to be in the café with Darren, talking about that which only we could understand about each other.

I want to be looking out the open window of my uncle’s apartment in Hong Kong, to hear the people talking, even through the night. I want to smell the age of the wood, the sterility of the concrete.

I want the strings to be playing just for me. To guide me, through layers of resolution after resolution.

I want to stay on the beachfront. To feel the cool, moist wind blowing through open curtains and doors, completely trusting of the world. To feel the darkness and quiet swallowing me whole.

I want to be rolled up in my sheets with her, pressed together on the couch, naked as we came, as the morning light begins to glow through the blinds.

I want to be downtown in the warmth of summer, with the energy of those around me as if the night would never end.

I want the rituals accorded to those who love and are loved in return.

I want to walk out of the theatre into the deafening night air, my mind racing and humbled from the performance.

I want to ride with John. To speak without thinking. To feel without caring. To confide without worrying.

I want this feeling to last forever.

Every song is a time stamp. A place in life, marked by the exact moment that it’s first heard. In this moment, your surroundings, circumstances, and emotions all become attached.

There’s a song for everything, from a single moment — like losing your virginity — to an entire year — like your last one in high school. Perhaps my childhood is such a blur because I never started listening to music until I was about 14; there was no anchor for my mind to associate with my experiences.

In preparation for my housewarming party, Trolley and I decided on a set of music to be played during the festivities. It was my idea to split the songs into two categories, day and night, to take us from the afternoon to the evening. We sat at his computer, and as we went through the list, I told him how to categorize each song. It seemed like such an arbitrary act to him, but for me, there was a distinguishing tone to each song that made it appropriate for a certain time of day.

Two examples:

The quintessential night, Bring Me the Disco King, by David Bowie, (featuring Maynard James Keenan & John Frusciante).

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And the quintessential day, Another Sunny Day by Belle & Sebastian.

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I wonder if I’m the only who can hear it, because of my experiences and when I heard these songs first, or whether the order of certain notes express a certain connotation of sun and moon.

The connotation then comes from this person’s experiences, your relationship with them, or both. You hear the song through their ears. It changes the notes, the chords, the core sound of what you’re listening to. From someone like Darren, a song is totally different than from Julie.

Music is thus another form of memory.

Eagle vs Shark is the new Postal Service.

The movie I can’t stop watching. The movie I can’t watch with anyone else.

Not because it’s painful in any way, but because it’s sacred. A movie where no one else would understand the way I see it. A reminder that I was adored once too, when someone loved me beyond limit or condition. (A memory that I need right now.)

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But I will leave you with this little song, if only for a short while. You need colours and candles in your room when you listen though, and an imagination will serve you well. Having a makeout partner and wearing a costume of your favourite animal is optional.

That is all you need to know, for this is all I can say.

Ever since Wordpress 2.5 added native tagging support, I’ve been going through my old entries and appropriately tagging each one. Recently, I arrived at the chunk of time where I started dating Louise.

It’s said that everyone has at least one relationship where you look back and ask yourself, “What the hell was I thinking?”. I never believed it until, four years later, I came across those old posts. The words were a stark reminder of how hard I tried to make it work, of how much I did for her, and how it was never good enough.

She would belittle my attempts to grow and improve, push me to the limits of my tolerance, and when I would speak up about how much it hurt me, she would justify it in saying that she would refuse to hide her opinions because couples should be “open”. I kept getting put down, over and over again.

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We used to have a code: I’d ask him “Hey Tom, you want to vandalize the graveyard tonight?”, this obscure line from an episode of Married…with Children.

If he responded with, “No, Jeff, that would be wrong” (the next line from the episode), that meant he’d agree to throw rocks into a little stream under an overpass during our grade 7 lunch break. When we were finished eating in the cafeteria, we’d walk to the stream with the remains of the hour, dressed in burgundy tie and pine blazer, heaving any appropriately sized rocks into the water. It was our goal to block the flow of the stream one day.

Sometimes we’d throw what was left of our lunches into the stream, and be rewarded with the glimpse of a solitary fish breaking the surface of the water and snatching a morsel.

By the time we returned to class, the sheen on my brogues would be replaced by a fine layer of dust from walking around in the gravel. I’d wear that dust proudly, because no one ever knew how it got there, a secret code between him and me.

Sometimes I check up on Tommy. Not that he knows. I wonder if we could be friends again. We lead two different lives, but that’s never stopped me from being friends with someone. Part of me is scared that he’s never changed, never grown out from the elementary school Tom I used to know — something all too common in my experience — and I’d just rather not know. It’s enough for me not to contact him.

But I still root for him, not because we used to be such good friends, but because I know that if he can make it, so can I.

When I was young, the only affection my parents ever showed for each other was occasionally (maybe five times ever) holding hands in the car. They never kissed, never hugged, never said “I love you”. Aside from sitting down to eat dinner, their lives were completely separate. They wouldn’t even sleep in the same room.

Now that I have a car, holding hands while driving has come to define a relationship for me. I leave my right hand on the shifter, tapping it to the beat of my music, but I always have this urge to hold someone’s hand, as if it’s some strange ideal I’ve never been able to experience.

John figured out that I don’t forgive people because my memory is too good.

And it’s true. Not only do I remember experiences, but emotions. It’s like I can relive every moment I’ve been hurt down to the smallest detail¹. The pain remains strong and salient, years after the incidents have passed.

While time may heal wounds for most, it doesn’t for me. I’m generally fine with this, since I believe that it should be actions and apologies that breed forgiveness, not time.

It’s only hard when I want to forgive someone, but I can’t.

1. This works with the other extreme too; for me, being happy is just as vivid. [↑]

I remember Christie once telling me that she always wanted to bring presents to someone’s house at Christmas. We were waiting at the train station to Toronto, our exams finished, doing exactly that. Carrying bags with a fondue set, maybe a candle holder, and other assorted miscellany for my parents who already had everything.

As a seventeen-year-old with an adorable baby-face, she was rarely taken seriously as a mature and responsible person. I could tell that having this holiday tradition was her way of feeling like an adult. Not the grocery shopping we would do, not the lingerie she would wear for me, or even the act of love itself, but a family to go to, gifts to give, a house to stay in, a little piece of maturity.

For me, it’s this car.

Not the bills. Not the house. Not the mortgage.

It’s being able to get anywhere. It’s feeling these keys in my pocket and knowing that they’re mine. It’s driving home after class when it’s dark out, blasting a night mix on the stereo. It’s even looking for a parking spot downtown on a Monday afternoon, or getting stuck in traffic.

It’s having all these things that I’ve never had before.

(I’ve been writing this in my head for four years. Four years and seven months, to be precise.)

So one last touch and then you’ll go
And we’ll pretend that it meant something so much more
But it was vile, and it was cheap
And you are beautiful but you don’t mean a thing to me

—Death Cab for Cutie, Tiny Vessels

I got this picture in New Jersey. It’s the most peculiar size for a photograph: 3 7/16 by 4 13/16 inches.

For some reason, I see it properly like this — landscape orientation, with the white stripe on the left — when it could just as well be rotated any other way. This is the bias I place on it. The way I view it.

It almost looks like a room with a wall in frame on the left, and the camera has metered for a flash off the wall, underexposing the rest of the picture. There are two smears in the blackness. Maybe an out-of-focus object, maybe a fingerprint on the lens.

I didn’t take the picture. Someone else did, thought it was bad, and was about to throw it out before I asked for it. Someone who took me for granted. Someone who’s world I lived in but for a week, in the midst of the intense summer humidity and coitus interruptus.

I’ve kept it in one of my notebooks since. The edges have turned yellow, and the corners blunt from handling.

Every time I look at it, I like to think that I see something in that grain and that noise. That something’s there; I just don’t see it because there isn’t enough light to expose it, but it exists nonetheless. Some photographic kōan, where I become that which I seek.

But I know there isn’t, the way I know it was nothing more than passing moment, a week forgotten, a life unchanged.

And I’ve been happily fooling myself ever since.

Ah, residence. The first year of university, the first year away from my parents, and my first year in Ottawa. Also, the year I was introduced to Fear Factory, Dream Theater, and Refused.

I found these old pictures while organizing my pictures folder. Boy, do they take me back.

Take a look at this photo, for example, where I strapped a pair of khakis to my head, and started head banging to Deftones — Shove It (My Own Summer). Why did I strap a pair of khakis to my head? Cause I didn’t have long hair. Why did Pita and I decide to do this one day? I have no idea.

Or how about these ones, where the girls agreed to give me red chunks, back when I was obviously in my Tool phase. Nadine mis-read the instructions, mixed the wrong chemicals, and it came out all sparse.

Highlights include:

• Failing Calculus 2 with Dave and Jarod. When we wrote the supplemental exam, it was five people total in the program who failed, three of whom were us. I guess I had the wrong study buddies. In the end, I was the only one who passed.
• Most of the guys on the floor getting sued for sexual harassment.
• Jarod and Jono’s rave room, lit with a blacklight and disco ball, which was somewhat famous around campus.
• Constant conflict between neighbors, me and Pita included, over the volume of music.
• Going to the gym with Dave, and having him spot me while I benched the bar. As in, the bar without weights. Afterwards, I would spot him while he benched 240. I don’t think I could have helped much.

Pita took these photos, got them printed, and scanned them. Dated ‘99. Sure they aren’t great. They’re dark. They’re grainy, taken with a cheap film camera. But they’re still unforgettable memories, and it gives them a certain dated style. Makes me wish I had a taken some pictures myself.

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In my book tonight, I was reminded of the time I was sitting on the floor of my room and you were lying on the bed when I felt the foundation shudder beneath me. I mapped the escape route in my head, thought of the coats cause it was the end of winter, and was about to grab your hand to lead us outside if the earth shook again, threatening to bury us in three stories of wood and concrete. I told you to be ready to run upstairs on my word. How I loved you then.

For in doing so, I reveal my vulnerability.