Even In Your Lightest Day.

Tuesday night.

Get an old mirror back from the place I've left behind, get drunk and get to bed on time to wake up for work tomorrow morning.

And stare at myself in the old mirror, shrunken and sunken and older and as confused as ever. And listen.

Everything you are you have come so far, but did you bury your needs?
And you aren't that young.

Thanks, Darker My Love. I really needed that right now. Ugh.

Work.

I've been sitting at my desk absolutely blank-faced and cross-eyed for just over an hour now. Not moving. Seriously.

Moreover, I'm developing a somewhat borderline abusive relationship with Visine, Vicks Vapour Inhalers and smoke breaks just because I quite simply have nothing better to do with my time. I don't expect you to fully understand why I'm polluting myself with such activities, but I would like to state that if you were in this position right now you would most likely understand why a rather violent rush of chemical eucalyptus up your nose, eye drop tears streaming down your face and passive-aggressively pissing off your co-workers with the stench of your millionth B&H at 2:46 p.m. is better than nothing.

How is it possible that I'm able to go days on end, weeks even, without doing anything I actually care to do here? No wonder my mind wanders as it does and I'm sitting in front of this ridiculous screen typing these ridiculous words for anyone and no one in the world to read....

I'd say another coffee break is in order.

Acid House Killed Rock n' Roll

Things I Have Learned In January 2009

[various sources]

Mondays are the new Fridays for going out and getting absolutely shitwrecked (not only are they more fun, free drinks are also easier to come by).
Tuesday nights are the new Sunday nights for being domestic and well-behaved (while only partially drunk).
Black is the new neon to "everyone who matters" (in this stupid, pretentious, late-on-the-mark fucking city).
EVERYONE KNOWS EVERYONE and nothing is private (particularly when you still don't have a door on your room).
My family are the best friends I could ever ask for in the world (I have no snarky comment to add to this, it's quite simply just true).
Sleep and food are important things for living human beings to get (but you can, on average, go 36-48 hours without either and be fine...or at least seem like it as far as your colleagues are concerned).
Not working with your roommates is a really, really good thing (getting their discount at the places they work, on the other hand, is).
Craigslist missed connections is the most entertaining thing to be found on the internet (the more hostile the post the better).
And sadly acid house did kill rock n' roll (but thankfully it also gave us Primal Scream).

Saturday.

Waking up with the boy I like in my house (n.b. mom: I know you're most likely reading this, and you can rest assured that nothing of that sort happened) was categorically pleasant, as was our trek to a sit-down breakfast place a few blocks away on a bright, sunny, minus-fucking-nineteen-degrees-Celsius Toronto morning. Of course the brilliant idea of his to make our way over to this specific breakfast joint required that we had to wait in line for twenty minutes outside in the horrendous-fucking-minus-nineteen-degrees-Celsius weather to be seated...

But thankfully for such boy the bacon, eggs and toast were excellent. For had they not been, boy-I-like may have quickly and irreparably turned into boy-who-made-me-wait-in-the-cold-for-a-sub-par-breakfast.

Which he abandoned me halfway through, mind you. Waiting in the aforementioned treacherous line-up discussing the weather with a bunch of proletarian metropolitan well-to-do's meant that our strange, pseudo-date time of eating hangover homefries and cryptically flirting with one another was cut a bit shorter than initially planned. He had to go to work, which I could have and probably should have accompanied him to (I was, after all, merely nursing a third cup of coffee at that point), but I truly didn't mind being left on my own in a breakfast joint anyways...so I didn't.

In fact, I think it's safe to say that I don't understand or want to associated with anyone who does mind being left alone in a busy downtown breakfast spot run by charming French people with their thoughts and a recently updated iPod on a cold Saturday morning.

My half hour of solitude in such restaurant turned out to be so lovely that on my walk home I determined that it could be followed by none other than a trip to the bookstore in a similarly glorious state of being by myself. Even the rude shopgirl who curtly explained to my visibly-hungover ass that "some authors are more prone to theft" when I inquired as to why the Bukowski book I wanted was furtively hidden behind the counter couldn't bring me out of my I Love Being By Myself high. I didn't even respond to her in an equally bitchy fashion (which, might I add, is perhaps the second time this has ever happened without first undergoing duress from those around me) and instead thanked her so much for her assistance and politely paid up.

I finally arrived back at The Very Strange Apartment I Share With Very Strange People at some point mid-afternoon only to find...
Broken glass in the kitchen? Check.
Clothing and jewelry that aren't mine strewn about my room in the aftermath of OneHellOfaFridayNight? Check.
Too many empty bottles to even think about throwing in one garbage bag? Check.
A phone beeping with text messages from boys I'd rather not respond to? Check.

$2.75 and a six minute streetcar ride later, I arrived at my safe haven (a.k.a. my mother's home which no one resides in on the weekends). It's not that I needed to escape...well yeah, actually, I think I kind of did. But anyways, thank fucking god for the safe haven. Everyone should be so blessed as to have such a thing.

So I proceeded to top off an already-glorious Saturday with listening to 'Open Heart Surgery' by the Brian Jonestown Massacre on repeat for two hours while staring out the window and timing the streetcars going by, and eating more Turtles than I thought humanly possible. Oh, and I eventually cracked open Portraits of a Wine-Stained Notebook. Which, naturally, merely led to writing (read: self-pityingly whining) in my very own wine-stained notebook about how, while I may be a drunk asshole, I will never be as good at being a drunk asshole as Charles Bukowski was.

Saturday was a brilliant day.

You said the brains I had went to my head.

My brother driving, me in the backseat, changing the radio station and hearing the opening chords of 'Don't Look Back in Anger'.
At night.
Away from 1503 forever.
Exactly what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it.
And shouting it out the window into a cold, dark, typical January cityscape. Packed up in between all of the cargo of broken hearts and empty apartments. Lungs filled with cigarette smoke, cold air and relief. Feeling it in a place inside my chest that I didn't know existed until that very moment.
Exalted.

And you ain't ever gonna burn my heart out.

Lists.

I’ve been revolving my day around lists.
Lists, lists, lists, ubiquitous
and organized
and productive
and goal-oriented
lists.

Remember to eat, they tell me.
Respond to e-mails.
Wake up early enough to have time to shower.
Figure out what to wear tomorrow.
Call your brother.
Wear winter boots.

And then.
Somewhere in there between the things I’m reminding myself of.
Affirming to myself that I need to do, of which I do not need to be reminded or affirmed.
Are the real ones.
In a lyric.
In a phrase.
In a telephone conversation.
On new paper in a new book.

Raspberries and coffee taste delicious together.

Become everything you said you never would be.

Enemy fire. Filling me blanks.

Again and again and again
through my useless, symmetrical head
these useless sentiments ring.
It’s been six days
and already
the lists and reminders
have marred and forever burdened one hundred and two
once clean, lined pages.

I have frostbite on my toes from the cold.
And frostbite in my hands from you.

Twentieth.

Warming feet in the tub
stained with hair dye from a new guy
who I live with.
Grey nightgowns, grey ashes into water
PSFT. Psft. pfst.
It’s a good noise we make.

I don’t even like you that much.
Nightclubbing. And listening to
English Girls Approximately
and The Drug’s Not Working
in a full bed at 4 a.m.

Smoking more cigarettes
with people I’ve met
mere hours and days before.

And I don’t even miss you.
Not one single bit.
But oh,
look at you
now.

Best I’ve ever seen.

History.

In the beginning of the last month of two thousand and eight I wrote...

And so it ends where it began. With December, with the Verve, with text messages cryptically and neither wanting to appear too eager. I don't want to dream away my life with my hometown and stealing my brother's hats, with friends on Queen Street and with writing words down but not knowing what they mean. I don't think I ever really wanted this. Falling into the last three years was so easy, far too easy, to do. In it, and in it and in it some more, I of course grew to love you and even convince myself that I wanted to. But I didn't want to, and don't still.

I don't know what's going to happen to my life now that I've done what I've done. But I'll live with it either way.

Perhaps here I will write about relationships, perhaps I will write about clothing and perhaps I will write about the fact that I enjoy going to work on Wednesdays more than any other day of the week because the Second Cup downstairs brews that delicious ambrosia-like stuff more commonly known as Caramelo. I don't know, and I refuse to try to figure it out. All I can ascertain in this very moment is that I will write about anything and everything that crosses and has crossed my mind since the moment I wrote the words above in a little dollar store notebook on the GO train, and I might write it here sometimes. It makes me feel better to do so. I don't know why.