Why'd you have to go and make me feel old?

The other day I got an email from an old friend.

Besides the supreme surprise of the email being so eloquent and moving, I was struck dumb by how much one seemingly silly thing really meant to me. He sold his car.

Not just any car...the most beautiful behemouth machine that man has ever made...the '63 Chevy Impala. As the email went on, its writer getting increasingly more drunk, as he explained that the Impala was destined for some dillhole who wanted to put hydraulics and a continental kit on her smokin body. Blasphemy! My friend says he thinks he is doing something smart, something responsible for the first time in his life.

My relationship with Bruce consisted partly of late night phone calls and me yelling at him for being such a grease monkey polluter and getting scared for my safety when he and Chad did burnouts or went snow bank hunting in winter. Of course there was other stuff... There was the fact that he was the only person who would listen to me in high school. When it came to nasty rumours and me losing old friends that I had known since elementary school because of heresay, he was the only one who told me they were jerks, the only one who made me forget the Heathers for a while. I owe him any residual sanity I had left after high school. I'm not sure if he even knows that.

I hated most of his girlfriends, one strawberry blond hair flipping bimbo in particular from a local private school made my blood boil. I also never really got over the fact that I was never invited out to his cottage with him and the boyzzz (and I know it wasn't always boys). And even though Chad lent me probably every HotRod magazine published since 1982 I was still a million miles away from being mechanically helpful to that car. I never drove her, I never fulfilled any weird fantasies of his by washing his car in Daisy Dukes...But I love that car and I loved that boy.

I think we even sort of tried to "date" once which lasted about an hour because we fought like cats and dogs. We ended up laughing it off, saying we should leave well enough alone. The granola and the grease-monkey weren't meant for each other after all.

I wish I could say something to comfort him about his baby being gone. Apparently the dillhole is picking it up today and I am reticent to call him in case I say the wrong thing. I can't muster the words to explain how much that car, how much he meant to me. I'm not sure there are any words.

My mother's high school boyfriend had a '63 Chevy Impala. And if the slighlty creepy crush my mother had on Bruce could get any more nostalgic, it did when he'd pull up in that machine.

Alas, it is a time gone by and me and life are much changed entities now. But, in some sort of ghostly fashion, I will always remember that car.

And I will never forget that boy.

very superstitious

Maybe it's this time of year, maybe it's because I'm hicupping down the slope (and on to better things, kiddies!) of my depression again, but Christmas still makes me feel warm and gushy inside. I don't care who knows it. A woman actually smiled at me for no reason on the street today. And even though an ambulance was at the laundromat last week, probably to pick up the crackhead that sleeps in a chair while I wash my whites, I feel a little relief. Like I have to admit it's getting better.

Not that the holiday BUY BUY BUY frenzy on television and in the stores has me in the best of moods but with no money you kind of have to remove yourself from that nonsense.

I am not religious. I was raised by a self proclaimed Atheist and a man who is as close to Agnostic as I think any of us can get. This isn't about the little baby Jesus. But maybe, when people are winding down this time of year knowing they have some time off soon, maybe they decompress and get their heads out of their holes for a bit. Maybe they look around and smile at a stranger for no reason.

I bought a large red faux-velvet bow for the front door at the Dollarama today. Not sure why. Maybe to offset my reticence to accept that we are going to have an election in this country soon. That there is a possiblity (stranger things have happened)that Harper could run Canada. I don't know.

What I do know, what I want to say to anyone who's reading, is remember what's important. Remember your family and your friends. Remember that there are those that won't be getting a $149 Veloceraptor robot for Christmas.

That's all. Just remember, and give thanks. Peace.

love is a burning thing

“Bury this bone and take this pine cone,
Bury this bone, to gnaw on it later”
-Joanna Newsome



Let's not start off on a sappy note, shall we? I'm not in the mood.

What I want is to feel the words in my mouth like pebbles and be able to pick out which ones are right. Pick them out, one by one, covered in spit and place them here, so that I can explain. So that I can explain something I don't think I have ever been able to put into words.

If it were you, what would you do? Would you sit and croak and cry and feel sorry for yourself and everyone else who had the unconsciousness enough to approach you? Or would you pull up those bootstraps and put on a pretty face?

Make nicey-nice for the crowd?

I can't tell you what you would do, because I don't know how to answer the question myself.

It's a hard one.

What if love left your life? What if, even though you had the phantom of a memory of love in the back of your head but your skin felt like lead, like dirt, like poison...and you were afraid that even leaving the house would cause you to infect everything?

That just waking up could infect your beloved? The person that brought you this salvation from yourself...That just being in the world at all was what caused floods and earthquakes and tornadoes? Caused people to feel pain and caused people to feel hate? Would this be too much for you? Or would you flip the world the bird and be as strange and sick and harried as you want to?


This has been the state of me. I don't care anymore who reads this...(also I know it is just a handful of people anyway)

I am sick of keeping up appearances. I have the cinders inside me to start something good and bright and mine and everything I do is make steely weapons to keep the monsters away. This fucking depression is not going to get the better of me. Not this time.

So I don't want to get out of bed. So I wish the whole world would just melt into my background...I have important things to savour. I have love to savour, though it has been a tricky beast.

I want to write. But most people don't even know that about me. Why? Because I'm scared. Wimpy little child never wanting to start because she's afraid to fail. Fuck that! I keep saying that I want to write...but what stops me? Nothing...I stop myself...Because I think I'm not good enough or because my mother thinks I should go to secretarial school.. I am too easily defeated. WELL ENOUGH OF THAT.

Welcome, my pretties, to a new age. The only thing I have to thank is love.