ONE SECOND AT A TIME

I love Hunter S. Thompson. I discovered him at around 20 years of age and I loved his acid, drunken and pissed-off style. He wrote passionately about politics in Rolling Stone for many, many years. He had movies, with Johnny Depp playing him, made about him. How cool is that? How cool that he fucked the establishment and threw caution and personal safety to the wind? He was my hero and when I finished The Rum Diary, his first book, writen by a then twenty-two year old Thompson, I was awed and envious and aching for a tumbler of rum.

(I very nearly capitalised the word Rum, as if it were a person or a country...Does anyone out there know how telling that is?)

I love Huntter S, Thompson still but I have this pit in my stomach when I think that my hero, tough as nails boy-genious renegade, blew his brains out with a shot gun. He said he couldn't take the pain anymore. Most of the newspaper articles speculated that it was his long suffering with back pain from a surgery he had gotten years before. I know it was booze. And drugs. And years of being a drowning man.

I don't pity him. His ultimate naiveté was that he mistook his anger for cynicism...much hipper, much cooler than fear. Fear and Loathing, people. Think maybe he knew? His opus was Fear and Loathing. Then he went to hang out with Bikers.

Makes me think of some guys I went to CEGEP with, who used to talk about trying heroin. They made a plan on it, these rich kids who spent daddy's dough on Ectasy and raves. I was actually jealous of them too, I wanted to be cool like them and think that doing dangerous drugs was brave.



I ain't giving up my dream that easily. I will not end up living on a ranch alone in the middle of nowhere with a shotgun to my head...So to quote Cypress Hill... "I ain't goin out like that."

Bring on the fucking audition!

Free girl in Paris

Hello sports fans. It's been a weird morning. Just now, the girls at work started talking about American Idol.

Of course I watched it last night.

I am slowly starting to sprout Idol gills, I am living, breathing, feeling it everyday. The pit of my stomach is a torrent of waves, My Brain is permanently locked on THAT moment...the one coming. I will stand in front of judges and they get to tell me if I'm good or not. No pressure, right? Only been more than twenty years of dreams built up, singing myself to sleep, walking with a determined gait and thinking that someday, maybe...

This is getting cheesy. It's fear that's making me think this way. I have to try and remember what James Taylor's brother said (he's a teacher in performance at an American University and of course I can't remember his name...the drawbacks of having your brother be James Taylor, I guess)...He said performance fear can be quelled if you realise as a performer that you are there to ENTERTAIN OTHERS. Yah, course, it helps that you do it for yourself..artistic integrity and all that..but you can't forget the audience...They are the ones that matter. Your fear is personal...tied up in fear of being inadequate.

Frankly, the fear dissipates a little when I think of it this way. Just gotta go and let them tell me whether or not I should bother with this singing thing. I'll probably always do it...But I'd really like to know whether my dream is a sac of shit that I'm carrying around as a crutch...something else I can be angry at if I don't succeed. I hope not. That's all I can do. Hope and try and do my best.


You think this is bad folks...the Idol obsession has JUST begun...



(When should I tell the girls at work?)

Hats Off

At first you said, "It's just a hat", when you could tell I was upset on the phone. I was. I was standing on a frozen street corner half a block away from my kickboxing lesson, tears welling up in my eyes, my throat full of brambles, trying to explain that the metro employee wouldn't help me. He just gazed at me, eyes half-mast, as if I'd woken him from a nap and shoved a piece of paper at me through the half-moon window with a number on it for the Lost and Found.

I'd remembered. I had even some recollection of something; perhaps that same colour, that burgundy, that wine colour falling off my lap as I scrambled to get off the crowded metro car. I went to see the metro employee right away after.

I remembered.

"It's just a hat," you said a second time now sounding more annoyed at me, probably because you think I'm a child and crying compounds that.

The Winter Olympics are taking place in Turin, Italy and today I went shopping at The Bay ( a department store recently bought by an American company)to purchase a warm sheepskin hat with the word CANADA embroidered in red across the front. The tag lets me know a part of the money I'm spending goes to Canadian athletes.

You haven't taken the hat off. You said you might sleep in it. But then the hats were mistaken.

I honestly didn't associate the two hats - for one thing you hadn't worn the hat I'd lost for over a year. It was a forgotten hat. I just thought, since you kept commenting on how nice the hats were in The Bay commercials that maybe I'd get you one. Actually, no. When I left this afternoon to go to my kickboxing class I said I'd stop by The Bay for the new coffee machine we wanted and you said to buy you the hat. I was allowed to have my card today to pay for it because I have been a good girl. Because I have not run off with my paycheck to a bar - to drink and drown, to drink and drown...

I like the hat on you. It looks good - better than I thought it would. It looks nice on you and I tell you so. You say nothing.

We watch a movie after I've made a simple dinner and I cry because the movie is sad, it's about racism and perception and love and hate and tears and hope. You ask me why I'm crying because it's only a movie and you think I'm foolish.

I try and tell you a story about one of the actors when the movie is over and it comes out all wrong and jumbled because I can tell you're not listening. I am distracted by the fact that you never look at me, that the air is heavy with your waiting imaptiently for me to finish and I can't contiue, I fall over my words and then nothing comes out and you say "Uh huh." as if I've ordered a Happy Meal. I want to scream but I decide to storm off and go to bed leaving a "you're welcome for the hat" in the room behind me.

You are standing in front of me, five minutes later, arms crossed and weight on one leg, saying "Why did you buy me the hat, M? Why?". I try to figure out what you are getting at because I know you are trying to make a point but I'm not sure what it is...And then you spit it out.


"Feeling guilty about losing my hat!?"


All the air came out of me like I was stuck with a knitting needle. I hadn't felt guilty! I felt bad that I lost your hat of course - that's why I said I was sorry...But that new hat, the one you were ready to sleep in, was not bought out of guilt. Not at all.

You think you are right. You think it's a guilty hat, a guilty girlfriend. But you are wrong and I'll just sit here crying because you think so little of me. Poor little me.

That's why you didn't say thank you. You thought you were owed this hat. Somebody owed you...even if it was just a hat.