Festal time.

So many year's end lists are evaluative of things produced, ordered into bests and almost bests. I don't think I can do that (aside from saying that Andrew Bird's Break It Yourself is the best album), so I want to use some space here to point towards people I know who are doing amazing things. I find myself so often sitting in my home with a glass in my hand, marveling at the people I know and the creations they offer. I would like for so many more people to know who they are as well.

Musicians:

Lifestory:Monologue retired their band after many successful years, and following the release of their great album Drag Your White Fur, Make It Grey. I miss them already.

Nick Ferrio is an old friend who has played in a million great bands (including The Burning Hell), and he released his full-length country album this year. The man knows how to make a song, I'll say.

Drew Nelles and Derek Lappano have a new band called Debt. But before it, they had a band called Wind-Up People that I hardly found out about before it was over, and I wish I could have seen. Since I met them years ago, I have loved the music these two make.

Ryan Turner, one of my oldest friends, has been playing jazz around Guelph. When you get the chance, go have a look. He is an amazing musician, and I've been lucky to play in a band with him again this past year.

Spencer Burton's band Grey Kingdom released Light, I'll Call Your Name Out "Darkness" this year, and the album is great, particularly the bookend tracks. He's great.

Olenka & The Autumn Lovers are from London, and released their new album, Hard Times. I love the lyrics, and the music always feels good and warm. Like autumn lovers.

Hinindar belongs to my friends Steve Sloane and Jeff Woods, and they released their album Absalom this year. It's been the music I drive to late at night.

Steph Yates, who had previously played in Hinindar, now has a band called Esther Grey. She combines that grit of the garage with some really virtuosic songwriting.

Pchan is a musician and DJ (Wolfh34rt) in Toronto, and I can not believe I have yet to see him perform. When I can, I will.

Mike Contasti-Isaac's project The English Premiership is some studio wizardry. He writes for mood at atmosphere, and accomplishes these things very nicely.

My friends in Teenage Kicks are doing amazing things. They started a Singles Club to release music every month and they released a live album, all in addition to their album Be On My Side.

Writers:

Iris Hodgson writes Bossy Femme, a personal blog about all things good. She also includes important reflections on broader topics that interest her, like styling life, knitting, and a great dog.

Andrew T does everything, and very well. He creates a zine for his writing called Give Up, which you can go and get right away, and he pairs it with a monthly podcast.

Drew Nelles is the Editor-in-Chief of Maisonneuve, a quarterly magazine based in Montreal that you probably already read. The publication is always a great collection of articles on culture and politics. I have always known Drew to be someone who works very hard, and I am always so pleased to see his name on the masthead

I met Cameron Anstee at a conference in Ottawa, and have been excitedly and enviously following his press, Apt. 9, which publishes works of poetry.

My graduate program has created Song, and Sin where a collection of my classmates write about all kinds of things. The primary contributor right now is the eternal Dru Farro, and every day that passes is one that I regret not writing for it. To the new year.

Though I have only met her a few times so far, Misha Bower easily shows herself to be a wonderful person. And she published Music For Uninvited Guests, an excellent collection of short stories that includes a mixtape with songs by your favourite artists.

Photographers:

Cristina Naccarato is a good friend who has been photographing for years, though I have only known her for a little over one of them. She takes a lot of live performance photos, and she also works with Broken City Lab, an important creative collective in Windsor.

Jacklyn Barber takes photos of places and people and the things that furnish them, and there is always something wistful about them. In addition to her Flickr account, you can find her on the Gram.

Nicolette Hoang uses her photos in a really nice way, as a documentation of her surroundings and those she spends her time with. Her blog is a great thing to explore, and she is also on the Gram.

Derek O'Donnell is a good, old friend of mine who largely does portraiture. His manner of composition is great, for me at least, as someone who likes to learn through people's faces.

More:

My friend Jeremy Klaver, in addition to his move into artist management, is an integral part of London's music performance community. He organizes and promotes concerts for both local and touring musicians (and even helped me get my first start in the city, too).

Sara Froese owns All Sorts Press, a custom letterpress studio. The products she makes are versatile and all look lovely, including CD packaging, business cards, and posters.

Kelly Hardcastle-Jones has two radio shows: Pioneer Radio, which explores a new theme per episode, and Books For Breakfast, which, I think, describes itself in a better way than I could. She also had a sweet little baby this year.

The studio that has welcomed a couple of the musicians I mentioned above, both for shows and for recording, is the Sugar Shack, and it is run by Simon Larochette. With any luck, I will be working with him soon as well.

There are so many more that I know, and who I know I must be missing but whose importance is worth a spotlight, and I apologize for my slanting memory. So many more musicians, as well as painters and academics and more photographers and store owners, and people whose careers are to save lives or build homes. Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

--

To the new year.

Clarity in those moments.

At the museum, where the two were looking at paintings. They were passing through rooms, well-lit galleries where you can never actually see the source, the fixtures. The one, trying hard, stood in front of a painting, feet steady but leaning forth and then tilting, even though a few rooms back the other said, "That's not how you should look at paintings. You stand here, then you move here, and then here." The one stood before this painting, leaning and tilting in place, and passed over the figures and the colours. The shy flecks of white and pink coming bright when close to the canvas, and laying hidden when distant. This painting was filled with folds that bloomed as shard and sum together. The one saw how the painting sent along line and mood, to where particulars vanished for the whole. It was dazzling. It reached out from its frame, the mounted texture of painted face and brow, and looked upon a room where the two now circled back to each other in its corner. To the next painting, where the other said, "I don't like the colours." And the one said, "Neither do I."

Nostos / Algos

"But still, what I want to talk about is the rasp of moments that curl my hands. Don't look at me like you don't know, you feel it too. It's the press of your own history, it tightens your fingers together like wet knots.

[...]

But it comes from all the things that collect around you, too, in a table you shared, the notes you keep. The decor you prop about your house. A shirt with a button missing from being pulled open too quickly. It can live on in the whole of a city, it can be so large. There are things everywhere, but it can come from the smallest of them, too. That's what I'm really talking about. Once a thing has been shared, it does not become merely yours, not ever. Shirts and tables. Everything participates in the flowing accumulation of who you are, and nothing ebbs. All of it can be contained in a dish, you know. This dish, and you can break it, you can break it, break it
like this,
and this one too,
and this one,
and this one. You can break them all, okay, alright, but you can't get rid of anything, no matter how much you try to spit it out. This is such a fury, and isn't it funny how you can stand and watch yourself and your tight fists lose it just trying to unleash everything else. But still it all stays so close, and because of that it heightens, frenzied. You can't kick off who you have been. No matter the gloss you spread, who you have been with someone, it is there, in the sheets of your bed, on your walked streets, the films you have watched. It's in your outlook. No matter what, it spirals in and about.

[...]

Yes, that, maybe it is why people throw things away. Sweaters and glittering collections, pictures, letters. But doesn't that ignore the actual moments and the way they persist, the one right now and those ones coming? There is no such thing as forgetting. Not when you try to build your forgetting with such purpose. You can get rid of things, or you can break them, but there will always be your moments. They are always seeping, no matter the wish to refresh.

[...]

It does. It does. But when you learn enough, you learn you can allow it to meet you, because anyway it is coming at you, it's spinning about you, dust kicked up at every step. That's what's in the approach of a moment, you know, the steel of its weight and feel. It's always there, and what it requests--and what I think people recede from--is to allow it, to take it and turn it to warmth. When the moments live in you, you can live with them, and each could be a point of celebration, you know? No thing as forgetting, but there is a choice in the way a moment is recalled. When you have scars, you can think to when they came, or you can brush them over or deride them for what you feel to be a defect. But I love scars, the little ones on hands or as a fleck near someone's eye. They punctuate your skin, they're what give you your body. That's what we can talk about, the way it could be good. Someone said once that the past blooms because our emotions regarding a moment don't arrive until the moment has gone, or like that anyway. And, I think, with the reach of each moment into every other, they bloom and bloom again to become more and more real. Those moments, they are your deepest wealth, and they stay on."

Scratch on walls somewhere.

That was the summer of rage. Months of swirling inconclusiveness spent dizzy and veering and hushed. It was a swell of days into which my body pushed. Rage, not as a buckling state of frantic and wild living, but leaping into bewilderment and its turns, keeping a lean against its hold. The delirious shout down during a long dive to pools that brim with the surprise of memory and the known folds of future. Draw it as a knot where rage is an activity that courses along the bends, always pushing, always pulling.

The long mess of those days were sketched as a heaving affirmation, one that would writhe within the cracks that cover oneself, and would make an account of living only as a series of affairs that seek to edge past a shadow. And that was a summer spent alone, sometimes, and sometimes not alone. I look now at the paint left by some voices here in this house, rings on my tables and ghost flecks on my couch. And a slow growing water stain on the ceiling in the corner of a room. These are the strands left to pick out now and tuck into a coming autumn. Some strange feet on my floors, steps that pressed sometimes once, sometimes enough to make paths that might still be soon swept over. All of these a rage in its moving parts. Phrased into the mold of skin and the tic of hands dragging through new and lengthening hair.

Rage is always with--it is always with whatever is its lack. It is a relation, and in spite of itself, in its burst and reach for reassurance, it is always only kept in relation. Its reach is a drag through vapor. It is where everything is a remains of possibility. Nothing else but the fleet of its moment, not fear nor regret, only the pine of its activity. Existence. And those were months of wooded quiet.

That was a summer which turned out a joyful rage and all its costs of aches in the morning and slow sips of recovery. Rage does not make you strange to yourself, I think, but it is yourself finding what is already there and strange within. It is a foamy realization and fulfillment of absence. You can clench its taste on your back teeth. And at its end, when the summer calms into the cool, it lets loose the swell. This summer I made kinds of music in hot rooms, drove past the night and drank into the sunrise, wrote passages in the breeze of a porch. I held a familiar fur, and I thought and threw. That was the summer, one which wanted nothing, except, and what did it get, but.

To harbour for the rest.

(I feel apology for my coffee grip.)

Himmel / Sehnsucht

Loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

Music in the park the other day, and when I was walking through a crowd of vendors I ran into someone I know. She introduced me to her twins, who each offered to slap my hand. And almost the very first thing they did was to share some of their watermelon slushie drinks. This is something which does not cease, it keeps in my thoughts.

I am unsure of the contours of sharing. This past weekend, and for the third time, some thieves climbed inside my car. My wallet was taken, along with the change in the console which all must have added up to twelve dollars. I try towards a political outlook that does not mind this, except for the task of replacing all my cards which would be of no use to anyone but me. When I've lost a winter hat or mittens, I consider it fine that someone who needs that thing will be able to make use of it. But I also had a fat old iPod that was taken, one that I've had for seven, maybe eight years. It's something I would use every day, a thing I have carried across continents and through my most exhaustive growths and losses and changes of circumstance. I have little worry about money, about accumulating belongings and the curious security that some deep furniture gives. Thievery is only a problem because of extra-material investments that people give to the objects that surround them, both in their want to have and their want to keep. But I would not have given away a thing that I carried in my pockets for so many years, and I wonder if that shapes me a thief. There is a song on that iPod with the lyrics "Things are looking up," which are loud and burst with the song's music. I have never known what the song is called. Someone I have known would shout its lyrics out loudly while we roamed about in their parents' van, and would tell me that they were only doing so for me. I knew, and said that I know, and I know, and I wonder now if I am a thief, not for taking but for wanting to keep.

I could not share what is behind that. It is something beyond, and suddenly an object that, when so invested, turns and shines as an idea. Now, these two new people shared with me their drink, they shared what they had to give, and maybe here that's all there is.

Not in the features.

"This afternoon some woman, kind of old, was flirting with me. While she was talking, I was thinking, older women just don't seem to sweat the way that I do. We were standing in the middle of the sun, right where its rays point, and I was thinking, and I found myself with some kind of resolve about women like her, women who are a generation, two generations, beyond mine. I thought, all those young women out there, walking around in the summer, they don't deserve admiration the way that this woman does right here. Young women, they get leers that are violent, they get systemically pressed upon by young men, by all men, and they do not deserve that. But in a way they also do not deserve admiration for beauty simply because they are young, in the same sense of systemic violence, because sometimes a desire which simply admires also runs parallel to violent desires. Whatever honest admiration is, it is so often directed towards the same typifications that are directed towards those who have to endure the absurd forms of violence that are cast. And women like this one here who was talking with me, she is beautiful in a way that is excluded from those directions, you know. And it has nothing to do with who she is. But I know that even the way that I'm thinking about it right now doesn't reach the complexities, and is probably wrong and makes more of a mess, but I try and work through that. And I thought, maybe those small looks that one might give, getting off the bus or wandering through produce at the store, or being introduced to someone outside a library, those looks met between two people where one just thinks in a grocery store, bursting in an instant with their brains that you are a beautiful human being, and that for a second, this one second where for the only time in my life I see who you are, I don't care about the price of these avocados or anything, those looks should all go to the women who stopped getting them decades ago. And when I am waiting at the crosswalk next to an older woman who wants to cut her hair or do her god damn nails, or who stands in a way that knows her very own sexuality, I will want her to know that yes, she is beautiful, and let any structural definitions of beauty go to hell. I can't stand how so many movies are about youthful love, or about the taboo of relationships between characters with large gaps between their ages. This woman called herself an empty nester, and that's why she had two pets now, to feel less like one. And she was just beautiful in ways that the world does not let the word to be defined. It drives me crazy. Anyway, she told me that I looked like Robert Redford in one of his old movies, and I didn't even know what to say, I said probably I wouldn't be able to handle a gun in the same way that he is in those old ones, and it made me just want to tell her that yes, in the world, and even despite it, she is incredible."

High enough to lose.

And there is no promise to where wisdom comes from.

My next door neighbour is one of those thousands of people who walk about this city without a shirt. He works out. He is in high school, and I can not remember what his name is, though it is too late to ask again. But I do not think that he remembers mine either, because whenever he sees me he calls me "bro." Hey, what's up, bro. What's going on. Hey man, I say.The other afternoon he saw me leave my house on my bicycle to buy beers, and then saw how messy I was when I returned home. The store is three or four blocks away. Maybe I don't think that people should be walking along the sidewalk without a shirt, but maybe I realize that if anyone is going to do so, it should be someone like him and not me. 

What he seems to think of me is that I must be some smart person because I am always reading and writing on my front porch, sitting in the eye of a stormy spread of papers surrounding me. When inside, though, I am making snacks and watching films. What he does see, perhaps he connects it with a kind of wisdom I must have to share with him about the future. He asks me what I write about. I tell him that I write about questions, inked to understand how I have come to be who I am, to learn about decisions and the mix of personal and political histories and why anyone ever does anything. I tell him that I am writing things for school that are quietly about these things of my own, though for the sake of academics they are dressed in a way that is broadened into the political roles that literature has in history. He asks what my investments are in thinking so hard through everything, and tells me that he could never do that, to spend so much time with books and pens.

He is graduating from high school, and is taking time away to figure out what he wants to do. He wants to know whether this is the right decision, or if he should be going to college like most others he knows will be doing. I tell him that sometimes it can be fine to wait for something you want. Or if you are unsure whether you want it, or whether it is an unconditional desire, find the side to which you are pulled. Other things you want may not stay, but your want may stay with them. And I stop, I take my drink, and I say, well like, anyway, the way they structure school makes it to be important only if you know what you want from it. If you are in school and do not know why, then it may be best to devote some time to other things, or to figuring out why college would be what you want. He listens yet. I tell him that some time away might be very good, to wait, to let some wish scratch up an ache. You can work and make plans, but then if you know what you want then you have to do it. He is young, and maybe these are important things for a person to hear, but I am unsure whether I know how to say them in a way I believe. I tell him the things he probably should hear, things that I am not always able to mean, at least in the sense that they should be a sprout from my own experience. But I tell him, and he receives it like a kind of pearl, impregnable. And I am thinking to myself how all the things I say have a doubled meaning.

He talks to me, and I tell him these things. He leaves, and when I go back into my house I forget it all.

But at night it is another thing.

There are these moments that make all kinds of quiet thought start up all together in a shatter. At three forty-two in the morning, while I was reading and writing, a call buzzed into my phone.The identification said "Blocked." The only person who ever calls me with a blocked identification is my mother, because she uses a pay-as-you-go plan. And my mother would not call me at that time, though she knows I would at least have been awake. I did not answer.

But then I wondered if it could have been her. If it were my mother she would call a second time, and while I was waiting for that phone call to repeat I wondered about the emergencies that could be happening right then in the night. There could not be many accidents available for invention, when they would always have been asleep for hours. But there could have been some other kind of accident, maybe with my brother or my sister or her family.

It didn't ring twice, and so I wondered about who else might have been calling me. Perhaps it was one I was with earlier in the night watching fireworks and lending bike locks, calling now to give a voice. Perhaps it was one who does not talk with me. It could have been one far from this city, walking home after some bottles just to say, I do not know. Dozens of faces flashed in possibility, people whose phone calls sent would abruptly rearrange my posture in all ways, but to which I would have listened. Night carves out the very real parts of a person. When numbers are dialed in the deep moments of the night, it is most often to say some things that should be heard.

Maybe it was a mistaken call. Maybe it was meant, but when I didn't answer that made the other person feel it was mistaken.

Like that is what I always say.

At a red light, I was in my car and singing, "The sun shines, leaves blow." The vehicle I pulled up next to was signalling to turn left. In it were a man and woman who I have not spoken to in a very long time. And when I noticed I stopped my car short. I was behind them enough that they could not see me. I wonder now if they would still have recognized me.

Some people are encased with fortune, where they spend their whole lives surrounded by a closeness shared with a few friends or family members or a lover. These are the ones that are cherished against all others they have met, while those others all pass along to gradually fade into the colour of past horizons. There are so many more people, countless ones, that have put their hands into your world, who have affected your days and decisions and your outlook, but whose direct participation in your history, their press upon the way your body shapes, becomes flattened out as you make new skin.

Most often the departures that occur between people are not coincident. The spirit of one still holds or builds while the other walks, perhaps down some path, perhaps in the midst of an enormous garden of trees between the mountains and the sea. Oppositely, maybe you are that figure that no longer occupies the moments of another, a statue landed among statues in the dark of an ocean. And now, you know, you have to learn to know that they do not spend any part of their days with any thought of their part of your history, or your part of theirs. All these figures in piles underwater, and by the time their decay floats upward they are specks without taste in your drink.

The last expression I shared with those two sitting beside me again, though in their own lane now, was a note placed at their door left shortly before dawn. It was a mixed thank you powdered with grievance, and tucked within the return of something borrowed.

They did not see me, I did not ask them to.

Given in its place.

Something amazing is how people can traverse the same spaces, but on completely separate planes of existence. This is a string of sunny afternoons, and I have been sitting on the porch with coffee, Pascal, and some books. And past my porch on this quiet street, a woman, tweaking, scurried along the sidewalk. She was sobbing into her cellphone and frantically twitching as if some ants were crawling all over her limbs. Separated by some number of feet were panic and peace.

Spaces evaporate for a moment when your eyes meet another's. They melt into the one small place outlined by your faces, the point of your shoes, the occasional movement between a hand and an arm. And you can share in a conversation, where you speak and hear all the very same words as another, but the flow and drift of those words in your place may not be the same as the person with whom you're sharing them. One may be speaking with a nervous admiration while the other listens, deep and warm but tired. Everyone may take the same walk through streets, but through the objects that make up its place they will spot and think of their own losses or hopes, pasts and futures. In everything, and from everything, there is mood and history that are not a part of spaces and words, but which can always arrive out of those things. This is that separation which bears the kinds of loneliness or security that people feel about themselves. To know someone is to feel in the objects around you the ways of meaning that another would impress upon them or derive from them. But, then, to know is only to wonder--whether that one also sees you in those things too, where knowledge and imagination carry each other.

Water wed with wine and ghost.

Tonight I watched Thrice play, for probably the last time ever.

Nothing but this slow trek.

I write songs, but they arrive upon me in ways that don't feel like writing. I suppose my writing works in a similar way. I've started working on a new album this week, after being delayed by a hand injury coming from either a serious brawl or a window frame dropping on my fingers, followed by the demands of coursework, which were then followed by a period of doing nothing but sleeping and watching every film. Now, to start, I have been collecting all the song ideas I will use, separating them from the ideas that will be saved for the next one to be made later this year. But this collection is out of little voice memos I have left to myself. When I start a song, it arrives upon me, most often when I do not even have an instrument near by. It comes as fragments sometimes, but with a full sense of instrumentation and atmosphere. And I sing all these parts into my memos before I lose them again, my voice making up for lacking the lushness that sounds in my mind. This is how my stories come out as well. With these songs, though, as I listen back to them in the sun of my front porch, I hear all the things in the background that return me to those moments. Driving in my car towards home as the sun was setting orange this last autumn. My shower still springing after I skipped out of it. The crack of my parent's fireplace late at night after Christmas, while the good Jimmy Stewart despairs in the background through It's a Wonderful Life. Some birds, some dog, some engines. On one, I am walking the sidewalk, and I briefly run into someone I know, interrupt myself to say hello, then restart. Then I pass a group of elegantly graying women in hairspray and heels and pretend a conversation with someone at the other end. There is a kind of magic in the way a song can fall upon you, like how Michael felt "Billie Jean" drop on his dashboard while driving his car, but the real moments are in this string of days along which these songs have been lit.

The subtle electric fire.

Around all of this is the passing of seasons. While people speak and then don't speak, as eyes light and then dim, while all the world's souls swerve about each other and then retreat, there are the roots, the light, and the winds. Their movement, the way they change the world, blows about our dust, our skin shed. I have left my flecks of hope in pockets about my homes. There I have placed my fires. They are centers where I danced in the arms of those I knew. Here I have placed mine in the open air on a downtown street near buses and busy markets, but all those past sparks still know and flicker with my movements. Change is what makes the world the perpetual same. But on the end of each night, spent late with the moon until the birds start to wake up and greet each other, what happens to me is my one habit. I get up from my seat and let my dog out the door into the backyard, this prince who was our boy. While he is out, I clean my teeth, loosen my clothes, and pour some cold water. And when I am ready I open the door again, letting the night in on the squeak of hinges. I stand with it for a moment, or sometimes call out with a low whistle, and then listen to the bound and breath of that boy racing from the yard. His black fur in the night skips over every back step and inside. This is the one point around which each day swings, the quick and quiet gait of habit that comes at me through the darkness.

Sail with every wind.

Something of the house when I come back to it late this night. The windows, opened that afternoon to let in the warm, wild winds, are open still. Once the sun went, the currents filled in my absence with the pulse and breath of a new feel for the rug at my feet. The winds knew of my afternoon, and of the rending brightness that turned a corner towards me with birds in her arms. And now with the last drink, I stand inside the whirl of my living room as those beams of breeze, phantoms, build themselves around me. I think that they know more, and listen to look through that thought. Their hands still flicker, tumble about my collar, and the heat of my face slowly strikes a match with the cool of coffee-coloured strands and shapes of sweet dark that billow in. There is goodness out there, bustling and elegant, and it flows here in my home as I stand still to hold its spill upon my palms.

Yeah, for a little while.

This past weekend the Nephew's Basketball Association came to town for a provincial tournament. They were all eight or nine or ten, and it is strange seeing how good these small people can play. Their supporters are very enthusiastic.

(The blog compresses videos really terribly.)

Champs. My boy is #5.

Emblazoned.

There is a second gunman.

Winking in the dark.

"After that kind of night, that company, I was stopping off at the convenience store for a chocolate bar, because after all of it there is nothing else to want and to be had. What kind, well, it was a Caramilk, the best to take your time with, it's true. Well, there was a lineup at the store. Three people in a row were buying gum, and a woman was behind me picking up a bag of chips. She was in a jogging outfit, so maybe she was cheating on her regime, or maybe she was giving herself a gift. Either way, any person deserves that. I had to get to the market, and asked the store clerk if he knew where it was from here. He shrugged, but the woman with the chips told me, 'Keep down this street three blocks, turn left and keep going, you can't miss it.' 'Okay, thanks,' I said, 'Thank you. Your backpack is open, by the way.'"

An electrical gadget on the edge of the tub.

Yesterday did not appear the type where riots would later break out in some distant suburban neighbourhood by bored university students on an Irish holiday. I was reading on the porch in the sun, with all the drinks, and was listening to someone who I could not see while they played every song they knew on their acoustic guitar. A woman with the type and figure of Anjelica Huston, though with charred golden hair, strolled with her air around the corner. She wore black, with heavy earrings and makeup, had a wide black hat on, and she carried a colourful goblet with lightness. She asked, do I know where that guitar is coming from? And then stepped past me, beyond the corner of the house and into my backyard. When she came back, she asked me again, and then told me some things about myself. She took two sips from her goblet, turned, and drifted past the next house and into its backyard.

Some bantering grace.

These first days when the weather warms give shocks to a person's body, so that everyone in this city wanders with enthusiasm. And I took my boy pup out to get some ice cream. When on our way home along the sidewalk, two elders were rolling past each other on their scooters, and the old man tipped his hat at the woman, winked, and said, "Good afternoon, darling." And the old woman gave that confident little laugh that young girls first learn when they notice how capable they are of manipulating boys. She gave that laugh, and said, "Don't you get fresh, sir."

No less than the journey-work.

Back to the places I grew up, where my family still lives, and where I went to elementary and then high school, where I went to church, I think to what the community must have been like when my grandparents were young. The world has not changed much there, I know. These were young immigrants, a family of brothers who crossed an ocean to work their small farms together. What was it, in that long move, which made them choose this place over any other? Location has always felt to me like a most anxious opportunity. I think about how I am someone who sits still and thinks too much, while they in their activities spent their time in simple joy. An every day happiness in working a small farm with their brothers and their wives, young families with their children scurrying behind them across great yards, dogs chasing through burrs, all shielded from the coming history that would succeed them. There are parts of those lives that I have had in my own. The sun, and the stick of grass to the sweat of forearms beneath a loose cotton shirt. In my own life, I am already long past the years when those families took a name, when their farms were built and when they would take turns to wake and work at each brother's farm to gather the food they helped to grow. When I look at my hands I see the years in them, and in the way that my grandfather and his brothers would hold in their hard hands their young children, now the ones who come to me, now on my own arms, and in the way I feel the morning.

Made some marmalade.

Here is a story that is not true, not even a little bit.

I have been having conversations with someone lately, sometimes letter exchanges, about the loss of love. We are sharing our own thoughts about just what happened and hoping to give the other advice, each in our own situations, comparing and differing, sifting and seeking what we might offer the other. Because we have these messes, ones that we thought were not nearly so large as love, but that somehow the other half did not see enough to pass. Not the kinds of messes like cheating on a partner, but also not the kinds like "I hate the way you chew your food," not anything like that. Nothing like either of those things, but somehow, you know. The messes are torrents. And we have been attempting to aid each other in understanding how a mess has somehow initiated the kind of purposeful insensitivity you would not think possible in that other person, the kind that either freezes or just dissolves all else.

This person asks me how I move forward. Moving forward is a well to draw. And I have a whole list of things to offer, a guide that I imagine a person could follow. I would suggest to stop making the kinds of meals you would love together. Big salads with hot, fried tofu, cheesy honey eggs, halibut. Certain chocolates. Do not make the kinds of foods that you know from them, it is as if eating your own sorrow. Do not listen to the pop songs you danced to at their house. More, do not pin their picture of a nose to the walls of your new house, or turn in your hands a note they left you when they visited your cafe years ago, nor every other note you have kept. And do not listen to your own thoughts when you are driving through the night, when what you feel in the air of the car is the way you would kiss their fingers when they were your passenger. But do not let your work sit, or decline your friends. Make yourself make things. Throw your soul back into the air.

Take your walks. These things looked a cinematic montage where a person would reorder themselves. A long while ago I read a book called Surprised By Joy, something that I took to out of the wake of the loss of my Great Uncle Herman. The context of the book is different from his death, of course, but the thoughts there gave me myself. They were not suggesting for one to remake the way they position themselves in the world, only to see what that world actually is in truth. And I let it try me again this time, but could find nothing. None of the things I thought were true, for it is that very truth, a kernel, carbon, pressed and magnetized and not something I have been able to approach any longer. I would not write these things though, not for a person who needs the opposite. Elsewhere than for this one whom I was having these exchanges with, I would write of the slow realization that, despite your insistence on the truth you saw, despite yourself, when you drag through your own sands, you see that every time you came between you and that person, that person put someone else between you and them. There is no advice to give when what is being forced upon you is the way that truth lacks in your world, no matter how you may perceive its conception. But I would not say this. Neither would I offer those items of optimism, that wholesome guide. Sometimes realism needs a magic in between. I would say, then, only if you really want to, make yourself breakfast for every meal, because why not. When you wake up in the dark, keep with your coffee and Cat Stevens while you watch out your window as the world grows grey with light. Listen, still.

A firm conclusion.

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No art to find the mind's.

Near the bus stop I wait at, about a block or two away, is a tall apartment rise being built. I was thinking, watching the people drive their cars past, wondering about all things. And I heard a shout call through the air--"Where's your hard hat?" I looked up to that building and saw one man standing atop it and large against the sky. And I thought, maybe he is talking to me.

Is silence not quenching.

Today, while out walking about the neighbourhood blocks, I approached a couple arguing loudly on the sidewalk ahead. I tried to step around them, but as I did the woman grabbed a package of cigarettes from the man and threw it at me. I caught it, but when I started to ask to give them back, she told me to shut up, and to tell her boyfriend to shut up too, why don't I. But I didn't do that, and instead I turned and kept walking. So, that has been my day.

You are still at Anthony's temptation.

Outside for a moment so that we can take a break from dancing, really dancing, and in the cold and close quiet of the street we are approached by a few young men who have also just exited. They ask, Hey, do you guys have some dru? We do not know what that is, but it turns out that it is weed, and we do not have any. They say, that's okay, but man, I just want some, and how's your nights going? Ours are great. And then she asks of them, or of the one still talking to us how his New Year's Eve was, and did he get to kiss his truest love? No, no way. He said, I'm too young for that. And on the walk back to the car I thought how absolutely opposite, while thinking over the last ten years of my own life, or really, even the last fifteen or something like that, and how absurd to be sure of yourself that you are too young for love. He said he was too young, and that he is young, he wants to live life. I thought of myself, and then thought, does he not ever think that he is actually missing life, is that not what life is? That has been mine, surely, it has been life. But then as the car went I thought, well, you know, maybe. Yeah, maybe.