My Backyard...erg...

when my mother and father FINALLY came to see the house and kinda sat with me all awkward, my dad telling me to move the thermostat, and pulling up floor vents to look at the furness while my mother wandered through books and took an armful with her, and annie sat playing with the dogs, my father peered out the front window and said, 'oh you're really close to the lake, you know the water's gonna come up to your front yard eh?' to which i responded, 'i don't think so, it's been ok so far' the lake was quickly frozen this week, and this morning i woke around 4am to the sound of doors opening and closing. when i wandered downstairs the water was amazingly insane. it is literally up my front yard, and bulbous? (is that a word? i'm thinking jello and oil being whizzed around a tuperware container) it's just freaky and amazing crashing up onto my front lawn, the ice gone, and random weird shit floating by. and it's beyond windy, i took the dogs out and almost fell over walking them.

and this area is sooooooooo weird. apart from american bob next door and gay gay david a few down with the dalmations, there's no one. all the houses are pretty well boarded up, and this morning while struggling to walk the poor puppies, a cop car drives up and starts talking to me about the crazy weather and it's a cop so i have to talk and then i think that must suck, the only reason people talk back to cops is because they think they have to right?

and papa's been in and out of the hospital for weeks and everything's great, and he goes home, then he's back in and dying, then everything's great and he's going home, then he has a 'rough night' and it's just....siggghhhhh. i love watching his hands. i don't know what else to say beyond that, except that it sucks.

after my grandmother died, he was depressed and didn't leave the house for like 3 years. then he met jackie, his little gnome girlfriend and now he pratically lives there, they travel like crazy and are just so happy and in some ways it just doesn't seem fair or right for him to go now. it's weird but it's almost like he NOW has so much to do, so much i want him to do. which is probably a weird thing to think or say about a 74 year old man. i was talking to my uncle about papa and jackie in one of my more bitter moments and i said to him, and his wife, my aunt who's goofy and pessimistic and in defense of my grandfather a little i said that there are few people that find love like that EVER nevermind twice.

maybe that's it.

so

i've finished off two of the three curriculums for thursday, of which i am presenting most of. i am assured that writing curriculums pays good money but equally assured that they severly hurt my head in the same way that talking to drunk construction workers at fort erie bars hurt my head.

i've been listening to the nattering of cbc radio because that is my idea of a productive workspace. i was explaining to someone the other day that sometimes when i'm doing something really boring the only place i can possibly do it productively is at my bar. and there is no real reason for that except that everything going on in my brain is so freakin chaotic that in order to become settled up there i need chaos somewhere around me in which my brain can tap into subconsciously. so i put on cbc radio. and they natter and mutter and tell the same news story like 80 times an hour. sounds like canada has this thing on canada's ultimate commuter and i wrote in a said that my commute takes approximately 45 seconds to walk from upstairs to my office. i thought that was quite witty. in retrospect probably smart ass. i will never understand the difference between wit and smart ass. then they started mumbling about overfishing in freakin denmark or something and that gave me a rash so i had to turn it off and now all i hear is the wind wind wind opening and closing my front door.

and i'm feeling lonely in a weird way. it's that weird loneliness i always feel when i travel or when i'm just back from travelling, although 8 hours in another province i THOUGHT wouldn't constitute "travelling" but it did...when the houseguest is gone i feel great running around arms flung in solitude and then crumpled in anticipation of someone coming back so i can talk. to someone. in someways this whole work at home thing and the fact that i'm pretty geographically isolated is bringin back weird china feelings which inevitably ends up with me sleeping with someone i absolutely had no intention of.

in other news. the puggles have FINALLY settled down and are napping pretty well through the storm. which is what puggles are supposed to do. beware wretchedone...two dogs are fun, but they're BAD together, and it takes them a long time to re-adjust to new places, new things, new people, and each other in the new places, new things etc. etc. like molly will want to sleep, cash will nudge nudge ear bite...it goes on ALL DAY until molly gets mad and bites back blah blah...this has gone on since i moved in here, but TODAY TODAY they're back to being good puggles. I will say, without rambling forever, during the move, i inadvertently changed their food, cash shed like a....i don't even have a simile for it? ummmmm...god i don't know...until he had little bald spots in his fur, with dark tear stains, molly looked like she weighed 10 pounds heavier, and they both ran around like kids at the mcdonalds playplace after the carbs and sugar and refreshing ability to eat with their shoes off in PUBLIC...i've changed them BACK and they're calm, not balding little puppies. so, don't buy puppy chow.

beware wretchedone of the unforeseen amount of food ONE MORE DOG costs you.

it's snowing so hard that i can't see the lake.

all the new people start today and have called all freaky because they're ALL stuck in traffic. i'm fly to montreal at 9am, sit in meetings all day, fly home at 5pm, and drive home from toronto through the snow, hung over this morning.

i hate snow.

OH!

Just gotta say...

When I was in Britain I LIVED off this stuff and LOVED IT...

As well the banana bread beer...

Why would someone go to a beer tasting event and NOT invite me? The queen of beer?

HMMMMPRH.

the waves are crashing up on my front lawn. the noise is generally calming but today is just making me antsy. friday ants. the little sister is coming to stay with me for the weekend. the amount of dog hair all over eludes me. my knuckles are red and cracking. i want to have apple trees.

two days ago, the dogs run away. i go outside. i can see two tails poking out of the side of my neighbours house. he has two guys working on some sort of weird doesn't go with the rest of the house frame and the dogs have decided not only that they are the mascots for the entire process, but that they too should be climbing ladders. they sit intently and watch the two of them work, one guy gets down off the ladder, scruffs Cash's head as he walks by, and I stand and watch, and think a little of my Dad who was always one of those guys, hardworking, the type of guy that would put down whatever tool his working man hands are grasping to climb down off a ladder and talk to a dog, and yet neither of them say a word to me.

so then, the dogs run, and the mysterious next door neighbour who i've never ever seen, but who's Escalade windows are ALWAYS open (ummm it's the middle of January? that's weird) is then playing with dogs, looks up at, it's early, i've just gotten up, and says

"Hey. Come here"

And I'm thinking, Jesus he's gonna tell me the dogs have shit on his lawn, or Molly's squeky noises wake him up or something, but nope, he's worried about Molly and the coyotes...and then says,

"I was watching you"

To which I said...

"Ohhhh?"

To which he said...

"No! Not like that. Well...a little bit like that"

And what I want to reflect on is the following:

1. I am 27 years old. What happens to men when they turn 40 that they suddenly look at me and think "Hey, I could hit that?" And this guy's like late 50's. I don't know a guy with that type of confidence in their like 20's or 30's (clearly). It's beyond me and frankly makes them look a little foolish. And I don't suffer fools kindly. Y'know.

2. To his credit, I love Americans. Who else can say "Hey COME HERE" to their neighbour. And this is why a lot of people DON'T like Americans, it's that kinda semantic loudness and frankness that makes people what? offended? Anyway I like it.

3. Why do his workers talk to my dogs but not me?

It's Friday.

These are the best I can do today.

Men are utterly beyond me.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen

always...i mean i always thought of poetry as something i wrote or was or did or read but rarely something tangible, a verb, something that happened, never was anything 'poetic', rarely was anything any one thing, any one moment, movement in time poetic...

but as i spend saturday afternoon dylan seeping out of speakers and into the kitchen, kneading dough and spreading cinnamon, the smell of fresh baked cookies and re-heated chilli, the puppies running around my feet making puppy feet noises on the floor and puppy chasing noises in the air, and the waves crashed and the house was warm and toasty and new and me and alone i cooked and baked and prepared for what? for it for being there for me...

and one split second when i glanced out the beach bay window and saw some sort of buoy float up and smash into the rocks, then back out again, then smash up again, and thinking hoping that the poor little thing would make it's florescent belly to the shore, i thought for a split second,

this is poetry.

It is not until love is lost, that you begin to think in love language, in love speak.

Almost without meaning, plastered on Valentine’s Day paraphernalia, greeting cards, futile pop songs, I love New York…did she love him more than New York? Really?
At what point does a word, does a phrase lose all meaning and become merely a word you say at the appropriate time? Not knowing if you should wait for the other person to say it, or take a chance and say it first. Becoming infatuated with the three word eight letter phrase. Measured in cuts and losses, loves lost, loves gained. It becomes a transaction, an expectation. It becomes a word without meaning, a modus operandi. A mere signifier. The decorous arrangement of differential elements, the messy dialectics of being in love. A massive hug endured from someone you hardly know, while you gasp and struggle over their shoulder.

Once love is gone in a way impossible to reclaim, your thoughts are consumed with love speak. You see teenagers on buses holding hands and groping, new parents in the grocery store buying remarkable amounts of baby wipes in convenient take as you go packages, old people holding hands, middle aged couples, tired of each other and comfortable, university kids in coffee shops, intensely delving into Derrida, ten year olds stealing untested pecks on the cheek, none of these make you cynical, sneering, or mocking; none of these force your ocular displeasure the other way; none of these displays of love are significant. You no longer desire to be like that, no longer yearn for that style of love. Instead, you take short reflective glances with a slight smirk, your thoughts filled with semi-sentimental language licks, and you go back fleetingly to your book about a lonely, disengaged writer, or the completion of a grocery list containing ingredients necessary to keep one adult, and two dogs alive, because that is what there is. Because that is all there ever is. Because that is.

Because if the word means nothing, then nothing is ever lost, is it?

And this is stolen from wretchedwant but is the funniest thing I've seen forever. When the guys ass comes out and he starts smashing the stove...I don't know why, I was crying it was so funny...

Wretchedwant has accussed moi of hitting bars and making roomfuls of friends.

This I tell you is not entirely true.

Although, the curse of being a happy happy loud drunk is that quite often I wake up in the morning with about 18 sms's from people I ummmmm don't quite remember giving my number to (READ Viking) annnnnnnnd then these 18 people hang around for about 3 weeks, obsessively because I am supposedly SO FUN and wacky and then after week 3 of watching me walk my dogs, organize my Auster titles alphabetically and by degree of self loathing, buy insane amounts of 100% fruit juice, and lay morosely on the couch reading insane amount of Sarah Waters books, they do something I term "fuckin insane" and don't go away until I tell them to.

On New Years I was the designated driver, as a good way to begin the not drinking so much 2008 which has been surprisingly easy given the new house which is a whole other story. ANYWAY and I just didn't feel like drinking so it was good and after 4 glasses of coke (who knew?) I was just as hyper, shooting off confetti at midnight and making people visibly uncomfortable with my sweet dance moves as I am when I drink.

I don't know what the point of that slight digression was...

But, I do feel a bit guilty about the locked in syndrome remark, although I can see it being quite witty and wretchedwant doing that cute little head down laugh with the little clasping of hands that she does when I say something completely insane, irrelevant or just rude to the big guy at the end of the bar I just met...but I feel equally as guilty for taking her out to find "her bar" and probably leaving with 2 other my bars.

However, you do have Viking, who is a lot of fun and did say we're both trips and fuck the guy's name's VIKING and he slid us into Hutch's as fast as I was sliding beers off the bar.

In other news, the house freakin ROCKS god I love it, the dogs love, I can cook, I clean, I wander, turn the thermostat up, turn it down, run upstairs, run down...

I bought a case of beer and it's in my FRIDGE.

I bought stir fry stuff and can make enough for leftovers.

I love my fridge.

I love that I can pick to shower upstairs or down.

2008 is gonna freakin ROCK.

I hope.

Cross eyed and finger tied.