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.