Can I please just reflect on my Saturday as of late? I spent the day time cleaning. Spring cleaning perhaps, however, it only really felt like official Spring in spurts where the rest of the day was coloured with grey skies. Saturday night approached and I was without commitment. I did for a moment contemplate leaving my apartment but then this brilliant idea came over me. I drove to the 7-11, picked up a bag of Sour Cream & O, came back home, popped in Gladiator, and opened my 500 piece puzzle of the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal. It must be the Italian in me.

My dinner was chips and glasses of water. It was amazing. My guests were Marshall, Otis, and Gee’s cat Whiskey; who looks just like Otis but isn’t. I sat on a pillow on my floor for approx 2.5 hours hovering over my coffee table, desperately trying to finish the border before the movie was over.

I was six pieces short come the end of the movie but at that point had also reached my capacity and became unable to look at the pieces with any kind of uniqueness any longer and called it a night.

It reminded me of being a kid and playing games that stimulated the cortex. Games that required dexterity and precision. Once I’m finished with the Basilica, I’m onto another 500 piece of Times Square to warm up before the 700 pieces of Provence, then 1000 of Casa Loma. 

After this phase I think I’m going to go buy a couple model cars to build and paint. 

I can imagine how excited this must make you.

Only a day late with the Sunday Jam. Here we have:

Citizen Cope – Holdin’ On

This one’s really good for those lazy days. It might even be raining outside. Or, you might be feeling sad. Or maybe you’re just driving on a hot, summer afternoon on a long stretch of highway.

Otis makes sure the pieces don’t move.

Presenting Mister Whiskey.
These cats just love my bed.
Rightfully so, I say.

It was actually yesterday, but that’s besides the point.

You know when you go through phases of such severe frustration toward everything around you except for animals?

Don’t you?

Oh.

Okay anyway, that was me for a while. When I enter a state like that, the catalyst is usually associated with someone’s emotional turbulence of sorts and I can’t handle it when it catches me completely off guard. Especially when I’ve been carrying on like everything’s hunky dory. La la la.

I like to pretend that I live my life in a state of ignorance and/or bliss. It has to be pretend because the reality is so much the opposite. This method of denial has its advantages, however, a potential disadvantage is that it’s still denial. And, a life spent in denial is a life spent.

You can quote me on that, even if it doesn’t really make sense.

I got to the point where I actually wondered if there was some recent change in the earth’s surface magnetism. It was really the only way I could try to make sense of why many people around me were crumbling in their own kind of way and somehow it was coming down on me hard. It was really weird I must admit. I felt like I was in Michael Jackson’s Leave Me Alone video.

So then, I took a look at myself, and wondered if perhaps I had changed. Being the self-deprecating, over-analyzer that I am, I did in fact contemplate if perhaps it was me. Maybe I was giving off some kind of energy that was opposing. But then, one of these breakdowns was via instant messaging with someone I haven’t chatted with since December who is a distant acquaintance. At least I thought that was our understanding? Oh maybe the feeling wasn’t mutual. Damn these work dynamics.

Things should be ironed out by now and the reason I’m able to kind of carry on past this is by practicing another one of my deflective methods of coping and that’s pretending it didn’t happen. I have a tendency to sometimes be weighed down by all the complexities of humankind and just how heavy we can be. But, if I were to fixate on all the ways in which I am left stunned on a daily basis I’d probably sell everything I had to go live on an island in the Archipiélago and exist among turtles, albatrosses, sea lions, and iguanas. So? Pretend. La la la.

Lessons learned lately:

- Kenny’s always going to take my phone calls in the middle of the night
- It’s not nice to call Kenny in the middle of the night
- No matter what you do, you’re going to disappoint someone in some way or another
- A good, kind heart should make up for all the things that piss other people off about you
- Marshall likes tomato sauce
- It’s been way too long since I hit the road
- I am satisfying in a deeply unsatisfying way (figure that one out!)
- There really is nothing like Steely Dan’s Aja album on vinyl specifically. Fireplace = On. Lights = Off.
- Breathe.

Now you’re all…

Okay my darlings, it’s a little bit past ten o’clock and usually if I’m still typing in this state of exhaustion I am bound to tangentalize and read it again in the morning with regret wondering what kind of lousy drug I could say I was on to explain myself. Then again, I would never take drugs of the lousy kind.

See there I go. I’ll regret that.

Steely Dan – Aja - This album and I are the same age.

Some clever Steely Dan trivia pour vous:

It’s actually a fictional Japanese dildo that finds itself in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. An excerpt:

Mary is strapping on a rubber penis: “Steely Dan III from Yokohama,” she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room.

“Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don’t go giving me some kind of awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa…”

“When I was a transvestite, Liz in Chi used to work as an ex-terminator. Make advances to pretty boys for the thrill of being beaten as a man. Later I catch this one kid, overpower him with supersonic judo I learned from an old Lesbian Zen monk. I tie him up, strip off his clothes with a razor and fuck him with Steely Dan I. He is so relieved I don’t castrate him literaly he come all over my bedbug spray.”

“What happen to Steely Dan I?”

“He was torn in two by a bull dyke. Most terrific vaginal grip I ever experienced. She could cave in a lead pipe. It was one of her parlour tricks.”

“And Steely Day II?”

“Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Baboons-asshole. And don’t say ‘Wheeeeeee!’ this time.”

“Why not? It’s real boyish.”

Needless to say Burroughs wrote this while he was under the influence of something he liked to call “the sickness,” AKA drug addiction, where Naked Lunch “… means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

I mean, obviously.
Fantastic. I love authors when they’re high.

Burroughs and my buddy Kerouac were buds too. In fact, Burroughs credited Kerouac with suggesting the title “Naked Lunch” to him.

I’m writing you this letter in hopes of reaching out in apology for neglecting to listen to you this week. It’s been months since I ignored your needs and I fear that this time around it’s too late and I can already get the sense that you’ve shut down and are giving me the silent treatment in an effort to make me understand that I really shouldn’t be neglecting my responsibilities to you.

I know that it was foolish to stay up so late on Tuesday night and then to give us a false and very cheap sense of exhaustion by taking a Gravol and pretending that we’re tired for natural reasons. Then, it was irresponsible of me to have even taken that Gravol knowing that the alarm would be going off earlier than the usual 8 hours it takes for Gravol to leave the system.

Oh how I hurt you Wednesday morning by coercing wakefulness far too early and we encountered that nauseating feeling that comes from prematurely rising before the mind and body are physically prepared to even deal with such a concept. So then, as luck would have it, Wednesday turned into another day whereby night time brought on the kind of put me to bed now, you bitch pleading that largely went ignored except during the last ten minutes of The Last Station when I think I may have granted us 7.8 measly seconds of instant REM but then shook you awake with the velocity of a stifled sneeze. If it’s any consolation I did save us the embarrassment of being that “theatre sleeper” which I hope might count for something. In addition, you know you loved that movie so I’m sure that secretly you are glad I kept us awake for extra long just for the opportunity?

There was Thursday I might remind you. I did put us to bed at 9:45PM and we did have a good sleep that night but I know that the damage may have already been done because Friday felt like we were functioning at half capacity while dragging a hippopotamus behind us which was made ten times worse by the fact that we were sitting front line at work that day which also seems to have been the kind of day that my people were particularly hostile and hungry. 

We did also see the 2009 remake of the 1972 version of The House on the Left. Remember how we got that sick with fear and upset feeling? You like that feeling when you’re watching horror movies, don’t you? That was a nice time we shared together. Well, at least I thought it was.

Actually, come to think of it, it was excessive and predictable and the scenes at the end when the good people are trying to kill the bad people was so stupid because everyone knows if you’re going to choose between a plumber’s monkey wrench or a fire poker you’re going to go with the monkey wrench, no? When you go with the fire poker the bad guy is obviously going to grab it from the good guy and bend it in half with his massive strength thus rendering it useless and the bad guy lets out this thunderous grunt while the cowering good guy shuffles backward like a wounded crab trying to get away from a pelican. hahahaha That was so silly, eh? hahahahaha.

hahahaha (corner eye glance) hahahaha

hahahahaha hahahaha

ha ha ….. ha ha.

hm.

Well I guess that’s enough for now. It’s Saturday night and we’re tired but we’ve stayed in and that’s just for you because you’re worth it. What do you  say we put some eucalyptus oil in the diffuser, throw on some butter socks, and turn down the covers? Just me and you alone in the dark. 

Yours in eventual vindication,

- Andrea

Sorry for the delay, I’ve been dealing with the Olympics. Yes, the Olympics. They’re over now. Two days over and this city I call home is shrinking back down. Calming down. Coming down. I have no excuse to be out until the wee hours of the morning anymore and frankly I’m glad. I can go back to being the hermit I am deep down inside.

I’ve been challenged by the Universe again recently which came at a time when my energy levels were still very much thriving in the spirit of the city. There really wasn’t much energy to deal with one of the heaviest things I’ve ever had to deal with to this date. Someone I know left this earth very recently in a quick surrender to a life shrouded by inner turmoil, torment, and a deep sadness. It has been very upsetting to me in a way that is surprising me. It’s probably because I am such an emotional, deep, and sensitive person that I’m looking deeper into the reality than just accepting it for what it is. I think also what feels really strange for me is that when I look back at people who I’ve shared my life with, in love or in friendship, my memory of them comes along with the awareness that they are still around, I may even be seeing them tomorrow. It’s something you kind of take advantage of in that way. Remembering time spent with someone who is now gone under those circumstances feels like an incomplete thought process. It’s a different kind of memory.

You know when you’re driving? Or you’re reading, cleaning… whatever… and you have music playing in the background but you’re focused on the moment and you might snap out of it and realise you can’t even place what the last three songs were? That’s kind of what this feels like right now. I’m existing very much in the moment, going about my life… work, friends, responsibilities… but there’s this continuation of thought that’s running in the distance.

No matter who it was, I find myself most upset by knowing that someone’s life was so unbearable they had to rid themselves of it. Death is so permanent. So then imagine for a moment what that heaviness must be like. Imagine just not being able to pull yourself out. We all deal with our feelings in different ways. Some of us can ignore them, maybe dismiss or diminish them, cover them up with other emotions. Some of us are just so damned consumed by them. Some of us are only limited to three or four basic emotions, where others have multi-dimensional ones that vary and fluctuate according to the situation. Some people feel their pain. Some people pretend it’s not there. Some people have no pain.

We really are such complex and fragile beings aren’t we?

In the midst of all this I had Franklin with me while his human parents were in Maui. While they were being evacuated from their hotel for tsunami safety, I’m coming home to new surprises of destruction including the box of baby food I had. Pablum and dog saliva seems to result in a glue-like residue that can really only be scraped off laminate flooring with hot water and a putty knife (sorry Sylvia, aw jeez). The pièce de résistance happened last night when Franklin tried to party with a skunk. Unfortunately, skunks don’t run away like squirrels and cats do, unfortunately still, when an animal presents a dog with their ass they will go nose deep. Luckily skunks will demonstrate a variety of self defense warning moves before actually bringing out the big guns, unlucky for Franklin he didn’t give a shit.

I learned a new thing last night. Actual skunk spray doesn’t smell like the skunk spray aroma we often smell when we can’t see the skunk. Actual skunk spray, to me, smells like a mixture of burning rubber, sulphur and rotting flesh floating in a soup of gasoline, sour milk, and vom. Needless to say I was quite upset at this predicament for several reasons: a) It was 11:00 at night. Groomers are sleeping. Grocery stores are closed b) My soap products consist of things that smell fruity and pretty. My soap products don’t include ingredients powerful enough to deodorize a skunky dog c) Poor Franklin basically made it home face down, ass up. He literally pushed his face along the pavement alternating sides the entire way home. In as much as I’m fairly certain I wanted to punt him into tomorrow this was very difficult for me to watch.

He eventually handed over control to yours truly and for the next hour or so he sat in my bathtub while I stayed by his soaking side rubbing various experimental, soapy scents all over his face and chest. I wiped the poor guy’s swollen eyes with a warm face cloth over and over again. He just looked so forlorn and pensive; like he kept living it over and over again in his mind.

In hindsight though we had a lot of fun together, like we always do. We took a two hour road trip up to Manning to spend the day at Randy’s getaway. We cuddled, played fetch, wrestled… (Oh, this is with Franklin by the way, not Randy). Franklin was a good distraction in a week where I really needed it.

Oh ya, Sherene and I finally made it out this past Sunday. She’s been here for a year working for Bell on the Olympic contract and we finally got in some good, honest play time. Too bad she’s leaving tomorrow. This makes me incredibly sad. We’ve been friends for 20 years and Sherene is like home to me so this is going to be a tough transition to not have her around anymore.

Okay so, I guess that’s about it for the majors. I’m hoping life slows down a bit now. I’m ready to spend some quality time in the arms of my sofa and some good movies for the next little while.

An apropos tune for Sunday Jammin’ on Tuesday:

The Kinks – Better Things

Everything’s going to be okay.

Check out that happy little guy in the back

Weeeee!

Eastgate Diner

That’s Dave in the back.

“Can we please trade benches soon? It’s cold being in the shade all the time.”

Party Time Begins

We did some posing that we thought was fit for a Sears catalogue

Granville’s still bumping at 1:00AM

Pwetty girl

Oh mmmm

Now’s the time for cool down. You know, you’re going to look at these photos and think we’re both plastered. I can’t speak for Sherene (ahem) but I wanted to make mention of this… The damn cover at that bar was $32! The coat check was $5! $37 dollars spent before I even set foot in the bar.

So this is me drunk on club soda and lime. Yes, the least they could do is give me free club soda. Gotta love Vancouver… and the Olympics in Vancouver.

Now you’re all: Okay wait, she’s not behaving this way because she’s drunk? She’s really weird.

Snuggles

Oops, careful