A Eulogy, To One of the Only Things I Have Left From Back Then

When I was fifteen I was asked out by the captain of my high school’s football team.

I didn’t care much, didn’t kiss him even. Went red-faced nonetheless.

15 year old girls, we do things like this.

But I? I was in love.

My high school had a mezzanine in a library full of winding, yellowing dog-eared pages and the smell of text that’s lived longer than any of us within it. Who can honestly say that they don’t love that smell, want to suck it up into a jar and wear it every day, the smell of knowledge so much older and greater than oneself?

I couldn’t keep it then, and I can’t now. So I went there (every day), sat there, and put on Definitely Maybe. I still, some days, wish I had it in a bottle somewhere.

I still, some days, wish I had the sandwiches my mother lovingly made me that back then were carelessly, terribly thrown into garbage bins prior to entering that place.

15 year old girls, we do things like this. Was there any part of my head that wasn’t, in some way or another, sad and sick?

Probably not, but someone, something, else loved me anyways.

And so I put on my headphones, and put on Definitely Maybe.

Supersonic. That solo. Blew my mind and gave me heaven. Every. Single. Fucking Time. Fifteen years old, no place to go. It gave me everywhere to go then (and still, now).

Then, when I was nineteen, there was D’You Know What I Mean. Taking me through 06:17 train rides, had me standing purposeful and thin and in a black pea coat that looked exactly as I meant it to, as I wanted it to (and still, now).

She’s Electric when dancing in my childhood home’s backyard, in faded grey track shorts and frizzed out summer hair, reflecting Californian sun for the first time, electric under my skin and swinging a little white dog, dying, round ‘til neither of us could take another breath or breathe, breathe, breathe out and drown in the staccato joy of strums and sound.

Hey Now! was highway car trips through West Virginian mountains and Carolinian plains that had alligators in their ditches. Scared us all.

Morning Glory, and I’m calling home from neon sign lit South Beach payphones on calling cards with my brother holding the receiver while I talk into it, afraid of the spit that others have left on it, afraid of anyone finding the three stale menthols I’ve hidden in a CD case in my motel room drawer, as if I lived there and had made a life there for the four night stay.

Some Might Say, my first driving test. I failed.

Listen Up in a car, driving home from early morning dreams in coffee shop windows, knowing that I really, really don’t mind being on my own and feeling it so deep throughout my bones when he sang it, too.

And I can’t say what it was about that album, those songs, that took me everywhere I needed to go in my head, but it did. It did at fifteen, and it did at every year I’ve been in between.

And now, at twenty four years old, it’s all over and, in another sense, just beginning.

I don’t feel like anyone could really ever understand what it is that I feel for those songs because, in a certain sense, they can’t. They’ll never hear the sunrises and being still drunk at work with Champagne Supernova, they’ll never feel the 3 a.m. Yonge Street walks alone of Cast No Shadow, or smell that library, full of sagacity and future, with the whole glorious fifty one minutes of Definitely Maybe.

And then one day, the makers, they’re gone. Like everything, every moment, every one of us in time.

That’s okay, though. That part of me is too.

But if I ever need to go back? They know, and I know, where to find me.

Dear Yoko Ono

Dear Yoko Ono,

I like you.

You're strong.

And I think I understand you. Mostly.

Some afternoons I sit here in this very spot that I’m sitting in now and I watch you on my computer screen: burning it with all your clipped words of white-hot love. It helps me sometimes…I think.

It helps me think.

Either/Or.

And there you sit across from me in the screen, sitting the same way every time: being positive, elegant, generous and loving and all of the things that we all should be. We all should be…and yet none of us are. No one I know is. I try to be. I know I’m not.

But you! You are.

Even after the merciless and horrible things the universe has brought upon your tiny little head, still full of your shiny short hair at 73 years old, you are.

See, if I were you, Yoko, I don't think I'd ever be able to say I love you again.

And you! You do. You say it every day, to everyone and no one at all.

God, you’re so fucking strong, Yoko.

You make me entertain the thought that I, too, could maybe be as amazing as you are one day even though I’m admittedly selfish (and, quite simply, not as amazing; simply in that I never want to have to be). But I still entertain it. I let it loose up in my head, like hair that’s been confined from tight braids it’s been in for weeks, like a child who’s eaten nothing but Pixie Stix for days on end and runs up and down the block to burn it all off.

This kind of simplicity? It’s so nice to have sometimes.

I wonder, Yoko, if you too sometimes get sad or bored with yourself, and the feeling that you’re not actually very good at anything at all?

I try to be creative most days.

Most days I can't even tell if it's working or not.

Most days I think I could do anything at all and none of it would matter to anyone but me.

Or it could matter to everyone, but I think it would mean nothing to me either way.

What is being creative anyways? Just…creating? Well, I could create anything then. I could write you a letter, I could draw pictures of paper coffee cups piled up on desks with words like I’m so fucking sick of this scrawled over them, I could draw them over top of worse renderings of with tiny waists and long legs of extra-terrestrials spreading their fingers atop the open palms that face their audience in surrender, saying come in, I’m letting you in, have a fucking look and don’t fucking look at me and I could make a million dollars.

People make a million dollars making much stupider, much dirtier, much more inane things than these.

I wish my mind was clean.

I wish I could make a million dollars.

I wish I didn't wish to know everything all the time.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is…I feel like you must sometimes feel like I do, Yoko.

Do you?

You certainly never show it. I'm working on that, too, the not showing of it. Not letting it get in me in the first place is hard enough, but at least not letting it out...it's kind of like those affirmation things that you’re supposed to do when you’re depressed. Someone told me to do them when I thought I was depressed, but I don't think I really was. Just sad. I did them anyways.

So tell me Yoko, please, because I actually need to know whether or not it’s true.

Do you ever get sad? Do you ever go on your early evening walks and feel nothing but loose street gravel below the soles of your little feet, do you alternate between conversations and shapes and numbers in your head, do you find yourself unable to speak of it, not because you don’t want to but because you don’t know what your insides are made of, let alone what words to use?

I hope you do, Yoko. I hope you are sad sometimes. I hope you hate sometimes. I hope you’re just as confused and fucked and afraid as the rest of us.

But as much as I need to know that you’ve got bad on your insides too, Yoko, don’t worry. I know you don’t. It’s why I like you.

I am a golden god.

yep.

Played out (and still oh-so true)

"I always tell the girls: never take it seriously. If you never take it
seriously, you never get hurt. You never get hurt, you always have fun.

...And if you ever get lonely, you just go to the record store and visit
your friends."

Words from Almost Famous' Miss Penny Lane and the sky of unrelenting sunshine make all of this past week's nonsense feel pretty alright on this gorgeous Friday afternoon. And a photo of my favourite record store friend, of course, thrown in for good measure.