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.