Standing there on a chair.

The last time I was in a hospital was to kiss my brand new nephew, his soft hands curled while he started his world in a small maternity ward, lit with primary colours. The time before that was with Evan, where we spent the night in the waiting room. He lay on the floor, his body curled in a wish to fold in his pain. After about seven or eight hours, he was at last let into observance only a short while before the sun came up. I spent the night sitting still in a plastic chair until an unimaginably cheerful morning news program came on the television at four o'clock or so. I share a commonly held distaste for hospitals, with their wishful sterilization of the real parts of a person, the blood and abject leaks and breath. And there is always a clutter along every hallway, of carts and basins, and machines, poles of barely indentifiable occupations that sit beneath poor, pastel coloured landscape paintings. Somewhere in the anaesthetized bowels of a hospital, probably behind doors and doors, where paintings are no longer hung, lay my mother. I always think about what people must be thinking in hospitals. I wonder about the approach of despair that comes out of the pain of their bodies, of their awareness of something broken about themselves beneath their bandages or swimming within their mysterious flesh. I do not think that the stiff sanitary can keep away these thoughts when one closes their eyes.

Once again and innumerable times more.

The other day I was outside on the library steps, sitting with a coffee and the cold, and a young woman sat down beside me. She had dark, good eyes. Her boot laces were coming undone, and she pulled them loose next to me. I have a demon inside me, she said, as she pulled the ropes open. We know what you mean, I said. But she didn't get the joke. And I saw her then, and said, what does it feel like? She pushed her hair from her face and said with all her breath that it feels like something is always pulling her laces apart. I watched. I can tell that you know, she said without looking up, tucking her jeans into her boots. We send ourselves. The waves of hair fell over her face again, and she looked to me. Her mouth parted, but without saying anything she got up and walked without turning back. And I watched my fingers reddening in the cold air.

Devorans tempora.

A story of giants.

Here, to smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together it's fantastic. Or to draw: you know, you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it's a good line. Or when your hands are cold, you rub them together.

I have been inundating myself with films, because of course. There has been your Twin Peaks, my Days of Heaven, Eyes Wide Shut, Synecdoche, New York, and on, like Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas. They make threads that weave between. Some short while ago I was watching a television programme, or perhaps a movie, though actually not at all--but I remember watching, in myself, a line of thought about voice and suffocation that ran through and beyond this programme on the screen. Some images of a contentment that glares, one that keeps a steady demand of the depth and frequency of conversation with another person--a demand whose results are the inverse of depth and frequency. Surprised by the violence of casualness. There, it is absolute. The way that a person waits until the very end of a phone call to give their least, their meager apology to the greatest trouble. And all the time conducting a beastly happiness, a slanderous facade that works to sing all the louder when it realizes that its feet stand in acid and rot. I do not know what that might feel like to understand it, I do not think I could know. I do not know what it is like to eschew the account of all that is present, and to demand ignorance. I have been watching these films that are somehow all strung together, and I realized this morning, while watching one of them, that it is in the way that these people walk through their scenes. Their walks are among what has been peeled off, but still prodding and clenching the spot that is left there, true steps in decisions of honesty. I was thinking also of the violence in certain paradoxes, ones that offer an opportunity for conversation when, long before, the offering has already been made impossible and refused to be mutually overcome. Yeah, I thought. Yes, I said. Tonight I will watch Bottle Rocket.

I used to make long speeches to you after you left. I used to talk to you all the time, even though I was alone. I walked around for months talking to you.

Nothing with any certainty.

Things seen and heard this season:

-Two shoes on the sidewalk. Both the same kind of shoe, but both were left shoes, and both were the same size.

-An old man with a large pot belly, wearing only underpants, rollerblading past my house.

-"My leg's crooked, alright? My leg is uneven." From a woman walking around the corner, alone.

-"You don't want to be caught out in left-center field."

-Bus stop advertisement for real estate agent George Georgopoulous, email george@georgegeorge.com.

-On my first bus ride, a man who was denied a ride launching a ball of spit that hits the window beside my head.

-A recycling bin brimming with only discount brand lemon-lime plastic soda bottles.

-Another recycling bin with an enormous mirrorball balanced on top of it.

-A near victim to my own misplaced rage, a drunken undergraduate student who was pushed into me, recipient to my height and sharp words.

-Somewhere around fifty dogs chasing each other about a dog park on a late Sunday afternoon.

-Misty, a stranger, a drunken woman in a Team Canada warm-up suit, accosting me for my pants and then crawling under a table in an attempt to remove them.

-A million conversations about lost jobs and hard times.

-Late at night, a young man in his front kitchen window making a salad and a grilled cheese while I with my headphones stood and sang out quiet songs to wish a good meal.

-My own questionable voyeurism.

-"You look rich--are you rich?" and, "You've got pet hair on your face."

I would sell my martyr.

Stomping my worn boots into deep puddles on the way home, I kept Bazan up loud and hummed him into the night while my fingers gripped inside my coat pockets. This is a strange place, it is, and I don't just mean this new town I've had to be living in. I mean this darn world. The whole of it. A kind of world where in this town, with a good person I have known for just some short weeks, I would close my evening with my hands circling his back while he cried against me for the pain of something he had lost and was somehow perpetually losing to other turns that could boast no similar kind of infinity. I had said less words than slow and thoughtful murmurs while I listened to him convince himself of some shuttered composure and then let his feelings loosen and shudder all over again, and alongside this I was thinking that my feelings knew his feelings very well, though as a knowledge and empathy that is kept in a simmer deep down. I told him that it is okay to work towards being okay and to not feel okay whatsoever all at once. The conversation, helped by the length of the walk that takes me to my house from his, made me give over to thinking about the phrase I had been hearing from some other places as well, being told that despite a most important circumstance, that "otherwise I am happy." It is something I do not think I can accept when hearing it, because there is no such thing as a happiness otherwise, a happiness that is excepting one or a few objects. Happiness is always only full. And there is a kind of defiance in such a phrase, so that just saying it gives its hidden truth away, that it is not full. That perhaps it is working so hard to chip off a cornerstone of one's very existence in the world, to knock away some part of them that shapes how they know to breathe. One can of course feel pleasure, perhaps drawn from some other circumstance or gained within one's own self. But pleasure, even deep pleasure, is still far apart from happiness if it is existing despite something else. A person can not call themselves happy if the path they are taking towards that happiness very purposefully leaves someone else in a heap. In this way, then, happiness is a social task. There is no way to feel it if you are disallowing another to feel it. So the objects that compose or oppose one's happiness extend beyond one's own self--it also exists out of the happiness you give to, or keep others from having. So neither can happiness be derived from the hurt of another. Not when one is making that hurt become, keeping it in becoming, not no matter how many turns you take.

Mackerel or herring / Hurled into the sea

Walking with this wide world, its raging spin, and the ways that others unimaginably spin and pinball forth and away along our sphere, can rack a person in their shoes. It can transform a person and their paradigm. The way that horizons are created and closed off can leave a person feeling embattled with futility. I have been writing a lot, and reading a bit. I thought it would be an exciting thing to study some languages and to learn some new words for thoughts. There are some that I have not been let to speak, though. But I remember a night some while ago, in a place that I used to live.

I was out on a night time walk, and found myself stepping through a block or two of sleeping street construction. Pylons were strewn everywhere, and the whole asphalt of the street had been ripped out and piled in rows along its sides. It felt like a parted sea of tarred black rock. I stood for a moment, grateful for the feel of dirt beneath my feet in the middle of a city. Then I thought, and I left myself there. I poured the ashes from my pipe, turning it upside down and tapping it lightly on the side. I moved forward, with slow steps down the middle of this sea floor, and as I walked, I drew from my pockets what I had in them, and let them drop. A receipt from some groceries, a bus transfer ticket. A dirty penny, and a clean nickel. Another receipt from the purchase of some delicious burgers. I pulled a thin layer of dirt over this trail to cover it, stamping them where they lay so that rivers of glimmering asphalt could soon spread over them. And as I started my walk over again I knew in my steps something certain, to know them as a place I will always be, and to leave a trail of signals, a line of buoys towards where I will always be.

The assembly of rhythms occupy the house.

In the fury of a youthful mood, I shared a conversation about dreams of future. We all asked each other about what we wanted to do and to be, wondering within whether the form of our ideal paths could be made into something lived and substantial. Each thought hard, negotiating in their minds the fought pull between things dreamed and restrictively realistic. And at my turn, I gave my answer. I have given it several times before to friendly smirks and prods, resulting from the swift recitation I was able to give. So by this occasion I had learned to pretend at hesitation and spontaneity in my answer, feigning a surprise at the development of my own wishes. It eases the reception when the delight of my first answer is to have two dogs (maybe more), a cat, and a horse, to live near some woods and meadows where I can ride through mornings while my seat and my eyes still higher than the cool sun at dawn and dusk. Among these souls, I would want to be a writer, enough to subsist in such a place. And if not that, then I would love to be a professor, where I would then also be reading as much as I am writing, but can actively relate my own ideas to a whole community of others on a basis that would be so brilliantly regular. And then, if neither of those things, then I would seek to own a cafe, with a lending library and a little shelf of board games. A cafe that would host knitting circles and philosophy reading groups, and invite art exhibitions and musical performances. And among all of those things, my days and my writing will be composed with thoughts of love. Those are all things that I can do, I think, and all of which would make me happy enough. To live in such circumstances, and to be among such furry souls, is now my youthful path to seek. When I think of them, I feel pleased at the simplicity by which they are thought, for my negotiation between a dream and my own steps can include all those with ease. All except for one--though one that is now beyond me.

Like a hood upon my mind.

I have a dog, and have had to save him on two occasions. Both of them were while he was swimming as a young boy. The first time, last summer, he came along with me and some friends to the Elora Quarry. It was a bright day of jumping cliffs and eating snacks and sandy feet. The Grand River flows along right beside the quarry, and while dogs were not allowed in the quarry water they could wade off the heat in their fur in the light brown of the river. The Grand looked lazy that day, and so we let Pascal hop out into the stream to nip at insects in the air and to catch sticks. But in the bright sun, flecks of light were tossed out across the surface. He swam out to them, further and further, and by the time he reached their place they would be gone, and new lights reflected on more distant ripples. Though the river looked calm, its current was strong and Pascal was pushed out with it, unable to swim upstream and back to us. He was drifting far up the river, toward a dam that was some ways downstream, helpless to fight the water. When we realized this, I dove after him with his leash roped around my shoulders and swam hard into the current and across the wide river to catch him. I was already tired when I reached him, and I clasped his leash onto his collar. In his panic, he thrashed against my chest, so that when I reached the opposite shore again my skin was a red-white patchwork. I had to tow him, but the current was much too strong. We climbed out onto the bank instead, and ran a long ways up the length of the bank so that on our second try across we would be more easily carried along with the current. When we stumbled out of the water, my chest burning inside and out, and Pascal's body shaking, we went home.

The second was this past spring, at a dog park in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver. The park was a beach that lined the Pacific Ocean, and though the air was slowly beginning to warm, the water still had the frigidity of winter. We went there in the late morning, on a day that was cool and overcast. There was a good handful of other dogs there, and in Pascal's eagerness to play with them he would chase after the balls or sticks thrown for those others. In some kind of a flash, he dashed out into the ocean and started swimming. He was first swimming towards a thrown stick that was floating out, but an older and stronger dog was able to race him for it. While this dog turned back towards the shore to meet its owner and return the stick, Pascal kept on swimming. The pale glint of sun on the laps of the water urged him out much farther than he should go, far enough that when I called him he could no longer hear me. He was lost, with no sign of shore or direction, following the reflections as they disappeared before him. I threw off my coat and shirts, getting ready to follow him out. I almost forgot to take off my boots, but then kicked them away and slung his leash around my bare shoulders in the cold air. Pascal was being carried by the ebb, and the dog park was now some distance away. I dove into the water, and my chest immediately sucked into itself so that I could not breathe. I was surrounded by cold, choking on freezing salt water. But if I did not breathe, and if I did not swim, then I would be stuck out there myself, and would not have been saved. When cold and dark make circles of your vision, the only thing to do is to force yourself to breathe and to swim. When at last I got near to Pascal I called to him. Now he heard me, and weakly thrashed towards me. I leashed him, and I could see his fear, and now I wonder if he could see mine. The cold was tiring me, and I was afraid I would not be strong enough to make it back. When we reached the shallow, I cut my feet, still in their socks, and a thin strip down my left palm. My heavy pants were sopping down my body, down my waist and feet. In my fear, or perhaps as a way to try and keep cover over it, I felt some frustration towards Pascal. He was not a very strong swimmer, and I thought he might have been aware of that in himself. But I understand and wonder at his perseverance out there in the waters and the flickering lights. These occasions set off by glints and shimmers that are gone once you reach for them. Glimmers on the surface that fold away the very moment you gaze on their fortune.

Decayed teeth / Decayed ambitions

After some phone calls you stay sitting where you are, recounting it as it seeps in and changes the character of your mood and outlook. I knew that, with the way this one ended, it certainly would, though this time I decided to walk with it. So for the second time in the afternoon, the boy and I packed up for a long trudge through the neighbourhood with some Bazan in my ears. A few blocks from where I keep my belongings I came across a woman who immediately expressed her excitement at the sidewalk construction being done along the street adjacent to where we stood. We were at the corner of an old church built with stones the size of chairs. She had her hair cut in a bob and wore glasses with dark red frames. She reminded me of an old boss I had, a slightly maniacal woman who lacked the characteristic to see with varying perspectives. This woman told me that this kind of work was just fantastic to be happening, and that usually you have to get into the faces of city politicians in order to get anything done, and that she was someone who regularly does just that. I congratulated her on the difficult work that kind of activity presents, and I told her and encouraged that it is important, that grassroots political movements are sometimes much more effective and immediate for a community in need of results. She said that she was a Big Sister as well, to four girls, and that one of the elder sisters had found an exciting direction for herself by also becoming an activist, and that it seemed she was even starting to dress like this woman here. As she was telling me that, a girl with hair dyed bright purple walked past us, and behind her the woman raised her eyebrows, looked at me, and pulled her chin back into her neck. A friend of hers, she said next, told her that she should start running for a position here, but that she did not want to do that kind of work. She told me that if you want to make politicians do their job you have to get in their face, and if her meaning was not made then she stepped forward while she was talking, telling how to get under peoples' skin while almost rubbing noses with me. Her teeth were like the colour of mustard, the real kind of mustard, and one of her front teeth had a dark crack that travelled diagonally across it. This woman told me that the city has a policy of filling holes within 48 hours of being reported, but that the time it took to fill the one that broke her back took five and a half years. "You have very nice eyes, and nice teeth," she said with some kind of knowledge. "That will get you very far." Maybe it did.

In at the mouth / In at the eye

I can recall the uncanny number of times this summer that I have heard an old story about a shoot growing from a stump. I heard reflections on it read aloud after dinners, and I read it in several different books whose pages coloured with me in unfamiliar places under this summer's sun. I pluck leaves from trees and use them as bookmarks. I saw the story again while my nephew was baptized, told to little children while a preacher knelt by them in robes. In all of these accounts and in each of their contexts, the story talked of the shoot being a new plant. But this brand new shoot out of this stump should be seen as the very same. This new growth is the very same plant, its fervor and goodness climbing out of anything. There is a pause, but not an end.

A long while ago I was given a small cactus in a little brown plastic pot, wrapped in bright and red, metallic foil, and tucked in a paper bag. My gift giver overshadowed thoughtfulness with humility, but I accepted it with my whole heart. When I had the cactus at home, I sat it where I would always see it. It grew quite quickly, and I watched it stretch its stem up and out of the dirt around it, leaning bright green and a little crooked on my desk in the sun. But I did not know its proper care. I was excited at its quick growth, and in that excitement I gave it too much water. After some while it began to shrivel from top down, and its spines slowly flaked off. I learned about how to care for this, to cut off the top, and to add in some dry soil, possibly sand. I carefully cleaned off the little white tufts that grew along the ruts of its stem. I waited, and the cactus stood pale and hard. After a long passing, though, next to the scab that had puckered where I cut, the cactus continued growing. Its stem pushed up into a little bulb, with new spines flecked around it. I keep it where I see it. And it grows, and it grows.

But one night every thousand years.

This morning started next to sleeping fur and half bottles, and under the sound of light rain and heavy feet of small children being yelled at by their mother. Their floor is a loud ceiling, so I turned up the rest of Badlands in bed. Now I sit in this back yard. I wonder who put this bench here, and who has sat on it before me. The sun is out now, and in the afternoon here you can feel the wet being lifted up out of the grass. With your eyes closed, you can tilt your head slowly back and then down, and watch the orange brown light change with the direction you face in the sun. I think, only to myself now, about how weird eyelids are. And I think about some weeks I held this spring, and of the long stretches of toil that bracket them. I think about the path of years that walked towards that time, watching hair grow long. All moments spiral off into infinity. I think of the marvellous weeks that will strike through every story I have yet to write. I think next that I should go pick up one of my leaky black pens, but I stay instead, to sip my coffee and watch this brilliant toddler carry and kick a fat green walnut.

Three parts / Seven parts

The loveliness of weddings is in part due to the audience in attendance, who have woken up that morning to enhance their beauty with trim suits and dresses. There is a signalling selflessness in the way they gather for two people. Everyone sending all of their happiness in one direction. And it lasts for the whole of the afternoon, through the ceremony and into the rest of the meticulously planned afternoon, while light music and energetic hosts help the day along. But then after dinner the speeches come, just after dinner, when people begin to lean back in their chairs, worn out with their contentedness. They slip off their shoes under the table, and they loosen their ties and leave their jackets to hang on the backs of their chairs. It is like taking off an armour of selflessness, where then passed all around are remembrances of the reasons why each person loves the two getting married, why the wedding is the perfect thing to have happened, and on. And almost as if because of everyone's loosening outfits, the speeches slink inside their seams, and their reflections turn upon themselves. And while they listen, fingering the stems of their wine glasses, everyone is wondering to themselves about love, about their love that is kept boxed. A beauty turned to ache, and then sending its meaning into a night covered with a blanket of dance.

To be thoroughly conversant.

A video tutorial series on how to stay standing.

Walk it out in search of shadow giants.


Take a swim with your dog. Wake up in the sun from that soaking dog as he protects you from bugs.


Watch your nephew see himself on the phone screen, and then give kisses.

This rusty car creaking along the highway.

So the other night a motorcyclist draws up from behind. His single, steady light does so gradually while I'm driving in the car towards home after wandering lonely inside the drowning noise of rubber on highway, and of wind sneaking through shuttling crevices. The blank noise of a car late at night has been written about, and has been sung about. All kinds of lines that welcome the way it smothers the incessant haunting of one's inability for understanding, or worse actually, the unnegotiable despair of having understanding. These combined with something lit in hand and something liquid under the seat, it's a convention.

The trouble, the truth, is that when you drive long enough, the dull pulse of fear that lay in those thoughts becomes amplified. You flail about in wonder at how a thing--something shared and held, something communed--can be made to vaporize, and how it does in a joyful white flash so that what you still have within you is as if a careful delusion. After a while all that a person sees is the cycling of their mind around images on fire, about an impossible confusion. But then a motorcyclist drew up, and once it was close it turned off its headlight. Now all that could be seen of it was a floating nickel in my tail lights, too near my car as it sailed along behind me. When that happens the first fear, the one that loudens in every crawling day, is suddenly flattened by the anxiety of whether you should speed up or slow down, and how quickly you should make either of those transitions. But then a few minutes later, because somehow this is how it is, they weave into each other. And mortality and fear become the same thing, these two vehicles in the dark.

Each other's magnitude and bond.

Out to meet you.

This one, this is one of those days. One where the yellow of wheat fields being cut folds into the air with the smell of forests. A cicada somewhere nearby wiggles its weightless ribs together. And even though you feel the weighty heat of the sun brightening your hair, you catch the spare, strange drop of rain on your arm. Within it all, your walking feet landing upon the open world, you feel you just don't know at all. And you can't tell whether it's coming from all that out there, or from all this in here. And then you feel another drop fall onto your swinging arm.

The stairs of his concepts.

They were the only two left on the bus. Everyone else had piled out as soon as the bus had pulled over at the small convenience store that leaned against the edge of the highway. A leftover smell of hot, uncomfortable passengers clouded the cabin where they no longer sat. He finished eating his melting chocolate bar and shuffled the narrow aisle to wash his hands at the back of the bus. She was sitting there, a large girl with headphones in her ears, stretched across that very last and longest row of seats. The door to the washroom was sticky and jammed at first, and he hit her with it when he finally pulled it open. He apologized to her. "It's okay," she said, but he was not sure that the girl had even heard what he said.

Inside the small, dim bus washroom, he washed his hands and looked at his face. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought about what other people must think about in the mirror. And if this is the same face that people saw when they looked at him. If they saw calm, or sadness, or interest, or wonder. Or if they saw something blank, or uninviting, or maybe abrasive. He wondered if, when people are looking in the mirror, they feel their heaving flow of moments. One telling him repeatedly how nice his teeth are. One teasing him about the holes in his socks and then offering him chocolates from a crammed pantry. If other people, when standing before themselves, might also feel their hearts constantly slowing out of a past that is so quickly shed--one that was magnified by the shared breaths of those who held it, but now deflates under only his own, and seems to have done so just moments after a departure. Just moments, maybe. Parts of one world made small, made forgotten by others'. Just moments, maybe, because those, their own, are replaced by others'. He wondered if people feel the weight of their future. If, with the unwavering and quiet observance of themselves that holds within it a curved, piercing expression, they feel their minds absolutely bursting from their skulls. If they feel anguish. A kind of agony that can not be chased. He looked at his teeth and his eyes, at the few summer freckles. He pushed hard for the sticky door to open, and it hit the girl again. He apologized, and they smiled at each other, and he went back to his seat. A few minutes later, the rest of the passengers migrated back up the bus steps in their wrinkled, stuffy clothes. As the bus pulled onto the highway, it filled with the smell of processed, powdered cheese and shrink-wrapped sandwiches.

The most insane dashboard I ever saw.

Watching Pascal watching me watching It's Complicated

Many a trip continues.

I am very pleased to encourage you to listen to the upcoming episode of the CFRU 93.3 program Pioneer Radio. The theme of the episode is Movement, and the generous hosts gave me the opportunity to read "Moving Still," a recent short story of mine, for the program. Pioneer Radio airs Mondays at 5 o'clock PM EST, and episodes are available for download at their website.

Stream CFRU radio here: http://www.cfru.ca.

Faster than sound.

With just thirty-one seconds on the count, Atlantis, the last space shuttle on its last trip, was delayed. Somewhere in all the millions of parts something was not as perfect as its design. Some piece, shaped by thousands of minds out of decades of discontent. Murmurs passed through radios into the air. They saw that it was not the shuttle itself, but the cap at the top of the pad that was not yet fully withdrawn for launch. This hood that balanced as a vent over the giant external fuel tank, the central part of a shuttle. The delay was not for Atlantis itself but for the structure that was built to send it along. On an unseen man's mark, the count continued down. And then the ship burst off into the big blue, millions of pounds at a mile a second.

Rumble, young man.

Walking around, I was thinking about this story I know. It is of this one, where a lone apple tree grew just off the edge of his property. The boy never knew it was an apple tree, though, not for a long time because it looked like any sort of small tree--until it suddenly grew a single piece of fruit late one summer. He saw it for its new seeds, and saw the future beauty of stretching, unordered fields. But with this first bearing, all he could think of was to give it to the girl. So he picked it, and she liked it very much, loved it in fact, particularly its fresh crunch because it had no bruises. She told him that she detested bruises. And she was apologetically dissatisfied about there being only one apple. Perhaps if they encouraged the tree, they thought, and talked to it, then it might bloom a few more blossoms. They stood together and he stared at the tree into the deep night, stared so hard that he did not realize the early morning sun arriving. He blinked into its brightening, and looked around to see that the girl had slipped off in the dark. He saw the path she made through the pressed, dewy grass. She had left.

But when he looked up into the morning he saw a tree standing heavy with bright fruit. He gathered a bushel of them, all of them he could find, for her. They were her apples. He followed her path, through forests and then fields and then mountains, and he brought them to her. He reached her at last, maybe because he should have or maybe because she let him. But somehow, by the time he brought them to her they were no good. Not only had they been jostled as he travelled, but one old rotter that had been forgotten to be chucked out was stinking in the bottom of her basket. He didn't see it when he packed, and didn't think it existed among so many new ones. It did, and she found it, and then found all the others rotten and bruised as well. He tried to show her two apples that were still good to share, but she wanted neither and turned. Detracted and embarrassed, he left too, was made to leave before he could show her that not every apple was ruined. All of them in the bushel were tumbled and scattered across the hard ground--but alone now and standing in the sun, he reached inside his collar. He had still kept one safe in his coat, for just in case.

But a chipped fragment.

"Your name is Rocky?" I said. He said, "That's what I said, yes." I smirked a bit, I think--probably something that appeared too shocking--and said, "That's funny. You know, I just met a raccoon yesterday." He didn't blink once, and asked, "What does that matter to me? What's funny about it?" Nevermind, I thought. I had no proper approach. I met this fellow the next day here, because it is the nature of the world to bring its own striking brand of twisted humour to one's feet, but only just as one begins to become confident of a kind of security. "So, do you need me to put you on the side of the road then?" This time he did blink. "Now, why would I need you to do that? Does it look like I want you to put me on the side of the road?" "Well, I just thought it might be a better way to deal with cars or trucks." His toes were long, sharp nails, like his beak. Every part of him looked harder with each moment. Even his tail looked sharp now. "I suppose it looks more like you could use a lift, since you're not even directed towards either ditch. Where are you headed?" But it was too late, and he didn't seem to be paying attention to me anymore.

Consonance / Vigilius.

"Barnaby?" I repeated after him. "That doesn't really sound like much of a name for a raccoon." He didn't look it, at least. This one was out on the road, on his own under the sun. He stared high up at me and murmured.

I thought about this video I had seen, of some man on a motorcycle stopping to carry a two-toed sloth that was crossing, and crossing, the road somewhere in Costa Rica. He took hold of its shoulders and when the sloth was lifted from the ground, all of its four legs stuck out straight and stiff until it was set back down again, safe on the other side.

This one came towards me now when I approached, surprising me. I had to scoop it up under its warm belly. But its fur was not soft as it looked, and its sharp toes tried to push off my light grasp. At first I put it back on the side of the road it seemed to have come from, but in the tall, thick grass of the ditch that must have offered no orientation. So I placed it further out, at the edge of the forest for distinction.

Once I returned home I told my father about it, and he recommended I had not touched it. They are night time animals, and to see them out in the open like that during the day could very well mean it has rabies. Looking down at the remote control I held in my hand, my mother furrowed and said, "I sure hope you washed your hands."

Birds is falling.

I was telling the ones in my kitchen about the sign. In the heat of August (though perhaps in June while standing on a dock, or perhaps in a December long before while throwing snowballs at a stranger's--who was to become a future Regis--window) something that had bounced within me all along began to stumble forth from me but was still frothing at corners like a flow getting caught in a stream--now it stands tall and light, beaming a gold tint upon everything that is. "The glory," like what Steinbeck writes about. As soon as it became able to speak it was silenced, however, until I determined that it couldn't, that it should not.

Anyway, that isn't even what I was talking about in the kitchen. I was talking about that new determination and I was telling about the sign. It came to me while I was out on a walk with our boy late at night. I was thinking aloud to the trees and to the stars and their sky. They have become the runners-up in conversation since I still walk here, because I like to think of their shared importance, and of the idea that, when you think about it, they are all sharing with you and I our same whistling air.

I was thinking through this light, wondering to the snow on the toes of my boots whether I ought now to shield it. I looked up and asked the trees, too, who had been solemnly listening with that stillness they carry.

Two people were talking together about the dances they have shared. He said that he missed it, he missed dancing with her, perhaps veiling the deeper, more obvious thought that dancing with her held a highest inclusion among his happiest patches of moments. Yet, "I love dancing with you," he said. Those blurry, whirring moments of scuffing feet and squeezing hands, and how could you do anything else but smile at how sparkling it all is. That is how he always thought of them, as moments that he had always wanted to start and never wanted to end, and he felt a fuse cut short by the way that she recalled all of those dances, pointing to him with biting expression, "I always had to drag and force you to start because you never wanted to."

How reasonable would he have sounded though, I could not help but think, if he had mentioned that the greatness of those moments, sharing a dance, bore little comparison to the small beginnings in hesitancy that were due only to a few foreign voices shouting through his head. But those opening seconds of nervousness, of crossing fingers to catch a rhythm, had been there, even if only for seconds, and so by existing would be available to carry a greater emphasis than the loud and glimmering dance.

Past memories can be manipulated to suit. What I was telling in my kitchen, though, was that I had lost my keys. There were inches of new snow stretching across that long park, and every criss and cross my steps took felt like it was impossible. I could make no new landmarks for places I had not looked. But after long hours of looking, when I had decided to give up and walk back home I followed a thought that struck me and checked my car door. It was unlocked, and my keys were sitting on the passenger seat.

Then the very next night my car had been broken into, the small change and adapters and gadgets gone, but only then my keys were no longer on the passenger seat.

Wish key.

People go about it in different ways, it appears. Some of them drink their whiskey. Some people, they try to cut their hair, their nails, eyebrows, their eyelashes. They lay under the eyes of birds and bugs in the hot sun to burn out old cells. They cut their dog's nails, then their own toenails, and accidentally cut their finger on some thin paper. But when they get up again to look in the mirror, it is still there. It will still be there.

Miles to go.

I, in a fog, hear myself thinking about two things in the car this night: chocolate milk, and riding a steed at seven oncomers, pell-mell, pinching sweaty reins between my teeth. The whole of wide Ontario feels small, a midnight fog here making its own low ceiling and narrow walls. Two constant red lights above the road are glinting twins ahead of me, saying that they will never be reached. Now, while I look to the part of the world where vision and fog accost, I think to myself, What a jumble all of this is, isn't it? A ruckus, a fray. All of it, everything, all of us, it's just--and I want nothing but to sleep.

Timshel.

He lifted the breadbox and took out a tiny volume bound in leather, and the gold tooling was almost completely worn away—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in English translation.

Lee wiped his steel-rimmed spectacles on a dish towel. He opened the book and leafed through. And he smiled to himself, consciously searching for reassurance. He read slowly, moving his lips over the words.

“Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

“Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.” Lee glanced down the page. “Thou wilt die soon and thou are not yet simple nor free from perturbations, nor without suspicion of being hurt by external things, nor kindly disposed towards all; nor dost thou yet place wisdom only in acting justly.”

Lee looked up from the page, and he answered the book as he would answer one of his ancient relatives. “That is true,” he said. “It’s very hard. I’m sorry. But don’t forget that you also say, ‘Always run the short way and the short way is the natural’—don’t forget that.” He let the pages slip past his fingers to the fly leaf where was written with a broad carpenter’s pencil, “Sam’l Hamilton.”

Suddenly Lee felt good. He wondered whether Sam’l Hamilton had ever missed his book or known who stole it. It had seemed to Lee the only clean pure way was to steal it. And he still felt good about it. His fingers caressed the smooth leather of the binding as he took it back and slipped it under the breadbox. He said to himself, “But of course he knew who took it. Who else would have stolen Marcus Aurelius?” He went into the sitting room and pulled a chair near to the sleeping Adam.

Fear is proof.

Across the lane from the lawn bowling fields is a small building with pale siding, housing what I imagine to be lawn bowling balls kept within the world's most uncrackable safe. I pass this by every day on my walk to campus, but on this sunny day I rounded the far corner of the building to be stopped, face to face with seven or eight Canada geese who all too hurriedly flew off upon my intrusion. I turned to where they flew from and saw that on the side of the building was spraypainted, in two separate spots, "CARP" and "CK THE RICH." Suspicious.

Dry awakeness.

Felt like it was arriving right just as I was leaving class, a flash freeze this past week that interrupted a few days of warmth. When it does, the wet from the couple days of thaw before gets caught, still hanging in the air as it frosts on us. Everyone walking with their shoulders bunched, hurrying home to whatever luck awaits them there.

People were walking quickly. They were bustling to resist the cold, with a slight lean and eyes leading along the ground about ten feet before them--all except for this one standing on the bridge. He stood straight, and he was round and motionless with hands tucked in khaki pants. He stood standing on the bridge ahead of me, not noticing the traffic or passersby, but looking onto the cold river below and at the sunset over the park trees, away in the distance and looking like the bright fade of watercolour. There is a long hill that runs downward on my walk back home, and the whole time I walked it I could see this person standing there, through the lengths of minutes, looking out to the frigid water.

He was watching the group of geese and ducks who had remained the whole winter and had formed some kind of a fraternity. All day they were sitting there, it seemed, every time I walked past them to campus or with our boy on a leash. As I got closer, the whole picture looked better--the unmoving smear of pink and purple against grey sky, hanging over the bridge and the icy river flow. I was just about caught up to the onlooker. But in a flash, the birds all decided to up and fly off down the river and into the sun. He watched this too, then slowly turned and walked away.

The consolation of life.

What else, but that after deciding to eat one million cookies, I run short by about a million less a couple dozen.

I then thought that I might clean out my old email drafts, and wondered whether I should now send them all to their originally intended recipients. Maybe like a slightly discomforting, ghostly revisiting of circumstances long past. There were three and four year old letters of advice to friends who were deeply lost in their troubles. But maybe like finding an old letter or to-do list in something you haven't worn since a couple winters ago. There were all kinds, but what I liked most was a long, long exchange about a Doggie. A silly experience of a radio show turned somehow injurious for my good friend Greg. A reply to the request for a water bottle. A whole-soul, half-sentenced response to being told I was brave three years ago, incomplete because of the inevitable limitations that are given to all-of-the-heart expressions when they are verbalized.

Twenty-nine email drafts that have accumulated over the last five years or so, residing in their incompleteness as accidental reminders of complete, bursting moments, and how all continues here, in this day.

If lookin' likin' move.

And the flowers are still standing.

Listening to my head today, and these are the films that crossed my mind in correlation with the scapes of my walk home from campus:

American Psycho
Good Will Hunting
Ghostbusters
No Country For Old Men
The Notebook
Uncle Buck
Blue Streak
You've Got Mail
The Hours
The Family Stone

Like the wind and the weather.

Some long while ago I was sitting on a bright front porch with someone I know, conversing and breathing in the sunlight. It was just past noon on a Saturday and Thanksgiving was coming up, so, as is the way things go, the conversation was guided toward tradition. I could not think of any family Thanksgiving traditions aside from the obligatory meals and wine. Nothing like afternoon sports games or gift exchanges, or any nights of song. We wondered together about starting some tradition, and how it could persist long enough to become one.

In the good, slow energy pent up in those mornings, the talk turned as it would, and when I leaned forward to stretch into its comfort I was reminded of the origins of bodily aches I no longer think of. Two of them: the first, a popping, snapping creak in my wrist and my shoulders. Years ago I worked at an auto parts plant, and the automatic lines were built for people much shorter than me. The second, a tightness that appears as it chooses throughout my back, gained from an accident in my car. It rolled down a ditch several times, and I was jostled along inside while it did, my shins crashing against the dashboard and my body swinging and straining into the seatbelt.

These things, lingering aches and pains, can be carried a long distance, long enough to know they are still carried even though it is forgotten what for--to cling to them so they remain long enough to integrate themselves into a habit of thought and motion, and to become a thing that you are so resolutely in disagreement with that it blots out all else, without being able to recall why. But I never think about these things. Once that sun got high enough, the warmth it lent was all else a person could need there. Porches are good for that.

The way by moonlight.

Bowling has been around for, I don't know, maybe a hundred years or so. And I rarely bowl, I haven't in almost a whole year, but for weeks now I find myself waking out of the most vivid dreams of bowling--pink silk, those bright shoe laces and tough boots, bliss, and that bowling alley music. If I could at all, I would perhaps like to have conspired that the encyclopedic dream interpretation of bowling might have been too closely developed in accordance with derivations of psychoanalysis that linked all to eroticism, the psychology and the sport both sharing an historically mutual period. Yet, you know, sometimes psychoanalysis is uncannily bowling turkeys.

But dreams are the most important, I'm sure of that. The things that might happen to you in a dream reveal a certain truth about yourself and your heart that you might otherwise not easily see when awake. The ones that enter into your dream, and especially the things they say to you in the dream, are the most significant--because their presence and their very distinct words are in a great sense your very own thoughts and feelings as well. And so they are shaped upon a rationale that is stronger and deeper than a positivistic line of thinking that you might make drawn when you are awake. Because anyone can reason out anything, really. But that in both dreams and wakefulness, city buses always seem to first be driving through eternity before arriving for you at their stop.

That noodle thing.

From the top corner of the movie theatre, the mixture of subtle irony and overt, secretly shared enjoyment of an unreasonably large cineplex is best held. There is no other way but with buckets of sodies and popcorn. Way in the back was perhaps the only place, though, because the theatre was filled. All that stadium seating, conditioned air and buttered popcorn, sold out to what in that dim light at least sounded to be about a million unseen middle-aged women. And us, too, everyone come to see that movie with Alec and ol' Steve in it, and Meryl doing her usual. I insist that movie is magic. It split the moments between an absolute happiness of circumstance, the clowning film, and an overwhelmed laugh at all those women down in the rows below, bursting their seams at Meryl's sexual misadventures. Everyone cackling in the dark.

When it alteration finds.

[...] What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me
[...]

The sight of the stars.

Must be a need in a person.

Beneath those penants I was telling a story. I never knew where the penants had first come from, now hanging onto that part of the low basement ceiling. It is easy to imagine a golden 1950s varsity championship, with fans all frantically waving their cloth triangles.

But I was doing what I often did when talking and thinking at once, and looking up at the blemishes on the ceiling. There were stains from water pipes and curious gashes and marks from I always imagined what. Or that remnant glow-in-the-dark ink on the wall.

I was telling about a quiet place I had visited called the Sacra Santa. It was small, tucked adjacently to a much more attractable building across some square, and so it did not gain many visitors. It took me a long time to find it through the old winding streets. But I wanted to, and I must have passed along the cobbled stone several times before I found the way.

It was a chapel, and inside was only a long set of high steps, twenty-eight of them. And every step was made of marble several thousands of years ago in Jerusalem, though they were now wrapped beneath encasing steps of hard oak that was warped inwards from the pressure of those who have climbed them. Once inside, no words were allowed to be spoken. They say those steps were the ones that Christ climbed towards his judgement. The blood from his whipping was said to have dripped from him onto what must have been that characteristic of warm softness that rock takes on in sunlight. Wherever that blood had fallen, there were small holes carved out of the oak for one to see as they climbed

But to climb those steps now, one may only do so on their knees. There were a few others there, and I watched for some moments. The movement of each looked pained, and all took pauses to rest upon each broad step and summon what strength and prayers were left in making that climb. I did the same. I didn't know anything, did not understand the relevance of penance and judgement to prayerful reflection, but I could feel all the things that were within me. For every one of those twenty-eight steps, my knees burning, I gave the same prayers, each the same but growing more earnest the higher I climbed. I felt the silent pain in the few others around me be reflected in my own as my knees and my spine grew an increasing ache. To believe that an entire marble staircase had travelled from Jerusalem to Rome may be difficult or easy, depending upon how you consider the historical economics of Catholicism. But that does not matter when you reach the top of the steps. I think about spirituality and the steps of that chapel now, and how it was only most important that the prayers I felt at each instance along the way came to me on their own. Because they came on their own, they lit up my soul with a truth that led me back to tell this quiet story in that basement room.

So there were no glittering rooms beyond the top step. Other than pretty frescoes, once your wordless and aching body reaches the top, you exit the chapel with only that complete experience of self. And if I had reached with my hands and shared what those repeated prayers were then, while looking towards those penants and along the curve of light from the lamp, I would have said that I was glimpsing their complete reality. And if I were to tell of them now, they will have always stayed the same.

You say I'll get tongue cancer. You smoke too.

I take my late night walks through the parks and woods that stretch along York Road from the covered bridge to the Lionsgate pool. Yesterday I had mine planned out to carry one of those Wellington Imperial Russian Stouts along with me, along with a cigar, to stand and sift through the snow while I watched our boy trot around, bounding somewhere and then back to me to check in.

There is usually no one about the area when it is dark. But while I walked and sipped from the can of beer, I noticed that the young man had disappeared. I turned to see him scampering with a little Italian mastiff, and tucked the open can into my coat pocket just as the owner appeared from out of the bushes, and I don't really know why she was in there. "Hi-i," she said, with that throaty, drawn out pronunciation that drifts up and then downwards again. "Now since our dogs are playing, we have to talk to each other," she said, apologetically. "I'm Jacie." I returned her greeting, and she said, "Now we have to talk about our dogs, since that's what people do." And we did, of course. It's what people do. Her dog is two years old.

I asked her if she lived in town and what she did. "I'm a brewmaster," she said, and in my thoughts some hasty reasoning pointed towards that slow slur in her speech. I told her that is an excellent title, and asked which company she worked for. "For Sleeman--well, I'm not one yet, but maybe in five years I will be. I'm working towards it." I was listening too closely now, but I remembered, too, my own tremendous discretion that I was the one who was trying hard to keep the open drink in my pocket from either spilling or being noticed. Except she threw her hands out next, saying, "It's all so secretive you know, the recipes and all that kind of stuff," and her hand knocked against the can to make that recognizable tinny ping and the liquid jostle. I coughed.

"Anyway, it's good. Yeah. I'm Jacie, by the way, we already introduced ourselves." She forgot and remembered this a few more times while we walked, back towards the covered bridge, and she talked about her dog. And as her direction split towards her car, she said, "You know, dog owners have to talk to each other, it's just the thing, even if they're not nice," and I said yes, that's a part of it all, though sometimes it's fine. "Anyway, I'm Jacie, but we said all that before. Have a good walk home to wherever you're going." I started home again and pulled the drink from my pocket.

Been hoping that you'd drop in.

"To make a Christmas best," says my Great Uncle Herman, "it is up to you to decide. The entire purpose of the season is joy. It has nothing to do with gifts or food, but with giving thanks and praise to life and to those in your life. That's Christmas. To love."

I recall what was in this moment, how the one who I was thinking of in this conversation several years ago is still there now. And, you know, now there is nothing else but that.