what a bizarre weekend.

with not much more than a couple of miraculous and unexpected months of respite, i’ve been in sort of a constant state of punch-drunkedness for almost the past six months.  it’s seemed that this whole time has been a period of getting through one thing or another and except for that brief hiatus, never getting to just “be” anything.  being told by this person or that person that this or that had to happen before i could expect this or that consequence… all the while stubbornly insisting to myself that i knew how to handle these changes and that i would do so in my own way and in my own time.  grief is obviously a complicated and difficult process, and it’s highly personal and specialized as well.  (the grief that i’ve known is of such a shallow and miniscule proportion to the grief that so very very many have suffered in this world, but still, it is my own and should greater tragedy befall me, then i will deal with it as those others do then.)

but now, it’s gone.  well, obviously not gone entirely, but sublimated. i can pick it up and hold it and turn it over, like a coal that’s burned out, without fear that it can hurt or burn me.  remembering far back, all the other challenges that i’ve overcome, all of the other disappointments that i’ve caused or that have come upon me.  all the victories!  all the great things that i’ve done and that i’m still doing!  my head’s above water again and i can see where i’m heading and maybe even catch a whole breath of air. with a hair's breath of altitude, i've gained a little of the perspective that i'd lacked, like the sliver of sun over the horizon that changes night into day.

i’m hoping that i’ve finally learned a very valuable lesson for myself – that happiness comes from inside you.  no one can give it to you, and you can’t buy it or even earn it.  it’s something that you manufacture like blood and sweat – it just comes out of the function of life and living – but it’s still something that you need to exercise and nurture.  and that was my plan for the weekend starting friday night – to nurture my happiness and exercise and grow strong again.

and then i immediately succumbed to an impossibly swift flu.  friday night i was critically exhausted.  all day saturday, i was writhing and sweating in bed (and certainly not in any kind of enjoyable manner), and even sunday, i was weak and numb.  even so… looking after myself by consuming a strict ration of tea, chicken soup and neo-citrin, i was happy.

funny days.

- g

trance song of the day:  surrender, above & beyond pres. tranquility base (anjunabeats)

stop reading if you’ve seen this all before.  a man walks into a pinball machine.  he’s been inside it many times already and knows what to expect.  he looks around at the lights on the floor and on the walls, at the clear sky overhead and at the two-storey counter above his head garishly and embarassingly keeping score.  he’s now only dimly aware of the enormous silver boulder that rockets past him at mach three, corkscrewing vapour trails flashing around him as visible as beams of light in a cloudy room.  the harrowing din of bells and klaxons deafen and distract his every thought, pulling focus and shifting awareness, never letting him pay attention to where he is, but never actually impacting his train of thought.  an alarm goes off in the distance and he’s no longer there.

lions are in the distance.  they are noble and aloof, powerful and impossibly beautiful – perfect forms of life – but any second, they could become a terror beyond imagining.  there’s a crevasse, hidden beneath the snow, gaping and deep as the world.  an amino acid joins with the others to form the enzyme that will construct the maliciously faulty DNA that will cause the cancer that will not stop until it has consumed every available resource in its body and crush the life out its host.  there’s a golden idol on a pressure plate and a bag of sand in his hand; he’s trying to calculate the differential in density between quartz and gold, how much more sand than idol he needs to put in the bag, before all hell breaks loose, his hat still sitting squarely on his head.  just underfoot, two miles under the ground, the pressure builds in a seam of magma that has not seen the light of day in 500,000 years.  a chunk of ferric rock hurtles a billion miles away towards the earth, locked in a mathematically determined path towards our home to decimate all life on our planet a million years from now.  the lucky lottery number will come up against any hope or expectation that will completely destroy someone’s life.  the volume in the club goes up three levels and suddenly – suddenly – space at the bar opens and the dance floor is flooded with writhing, sweating, undulating bodies.  all the while, the lions continue their rest, waiting for their prey to become complacent.

the man is ambivalent.  the man is ignorant.  the man is discordant with the world around him.  he’s just ever so slightly out of phase.  the man is eloquent, to be sure.  the man is exuberant, if you take the time to speak to him.  the man is impossible to console or to placate or to distract if you were to try.  he annoys the lines of confluence around him and he pushes the bath water around him like a foetus thrashing unthinkingly in the womb.  the man is terrified, but he knows that he will prevail.  he’s been told the future, but he returns to thebes anyway, the loser.  the man is defiant.  the man is diffident.  he’s different than he was three months ago.  he’s undeniably unique, but he’s so comically predictable.

he’s hemingway in africa – unaffectedly carrying out an essential, archetypal function that is necessary and primeval, but which will never be again.  he’s a quantum particle, simultaneously occupying all points in an infinite dimensional hilbert space with indeterminate momentum or location.  he’s patrick, returning home to his family after his abduction and escape. he's camus on the beach.  he’s operating a tin-press in a siberian factory, wondering if his wife remembered to bring him vodka for when he returns home. he’s shakespeare in his study, racing towards his next deadline.  he’s the stock broker who’s just sunk $10 million into stock that has just tanked.  he’s einstein in his basement, washing his sweaters.  he’s mozart in his bedchamber, coughing blood into a handkerchief.  he’s leaving his lawyer’s office after reluctantly but determinedly signing the divorce papers.  he’s the fourteen year-old crack whore in the warehouse district, staring into the dark from within the shadows.  he’s the rockstar with the guitar solo, flashing and gleaming in the light and through the smoke and miasma  – 60,000 fans screaming for him to fuck his guitar harder.  he’s the new father, bathing his smiling, shining daughter.  he’s the man of steel, irrepressible cowlick dropping into his pleading eye, staring at the glowing green rock in front of him just before he passes into unconsciousness.  he’s just about to cum.

he walks down the corridor formed between the massive bumpers and into the darkness.  he’ll emerge once it’s his turn again.  once he finds that quarter or loonie in his pocket and decides that it’s time to try to play the game again.

i’m going to take some time off.  i’ve got things i need to do and figure out.  i’ve got to learn to love myself a little better, and a little less.  thanks, everyone, for everything.

- g

there’s been so much ink spilled about global warming, ecological footprints and exhaustion of fossil fuels, notably by yours truly. but there’s a competing consideration – i pay many hundreds of dollars a month for the possession of my honda civic, more for insurance, and still more for gasoline and maintenance (which would actually be an actual cost if i actually drove my car). as it is, my car sits in its premium parking space underground accumulating a thick crust of dust. it dawned on me this week that the dust-crust was actually a symptom of my reticence to embrace toronto.

i chose to live in my current neighbourhood of high park because it is ridiculously convenient and everything that i could possibly want is within a short to medium walk from my apartment. the benefit of this (apart from the aforementioned environmental concerns) is that i get to partake of a community with its own character and profile and style, which is something somewhat lacking (with a couple of notable exceptions) in my old home town of edmonton. however, it dawned on me that people drive all over this gigantic metropolis for all kinds of reasons, just like in edmonton (where this is a necessity due to the demise of all small retail businesses there). i also detected in myself a certain longing for shopping parks and outlet centres like the ones back home, so i decided it was time to trek out to see what i could find… to sort of “make myself feel at home” here by learning where to go to get stuff.

southwest of where i live is the city of mississauga, where many of my colleagues and some friends live, and where i knew the shopping was to be found. at mavis and britannia rd., i found perhaps the biggest collection of shopping parks and outlet stores that i’ve ever seen. by way of comparison, i’ve taken a snapshot from google earth of the south edmonton common shopping park – one of edmonton’s newest and largest retail districts, and site of the highest frequency of minor traffic accidents in the city (due to the lack of signal lights and the incomparable stupidity of edmonton drivers). i’ve also taken another snapshot of the site at mavis and britannia… the area in mississauga is over four times as big!!! they must have hundreds of gigantic shops that would take… well, days to go through! outlet stores for fashion, stationery, electronics, athletic supplies, whatever! enormous versions of little restaurants found in the core of toronto, and even a krispy kreme which i thought were all dead from this country (even though i can’t stand the things myself – it was a neat observation).

in this enormous area, this monument to consumerism, i had found a little piece of home, and i had also broken out of my self-imposed preconceptions about how life in toronto ought to be.

now, i recognize how shallow and fatuous an epiphany this is, and what a flimsy excuse for a weekend adventure this must seem. but the shopping thing is just an aspect of coming to terms with a much larger issue for me. there are times when i’ve not done a great job at being independent. i mean, when i was living in edmonton, the city where i was born and grew up, surrounded by friends and family and the familiar sights that i’d known for decades, it was easy to be independent and to not need anyone. i could go out, i could stay in, i could go to a club, or i could go to a movie alone – all these possibilities were well understood and choices were easy to make.

moving here has been a slow transition. i’ve tried in fits and spurts to acclimate to life here, and of course, there have been set backs, while i get perspective, develop associations and generally learn enough about the city to express some preference for this or that thing or place or really anything at all. originally, i had to depend on a single person or a small group of people to introduce me to new things or to new situations, and because of that fact, that person or group of people became tightly associated with almost everything that i’ve experienced here. since moving to high park, i’ve been spending more time focused on my fitness training, and on getting used to life in my little community, and maybe in the occasional extreme adventure, and i’ve not really figured out things like where to go to get “x” or where mimico is or… anything outside of my little bubble of experience. perhaps, i’ve even harboured the reluctance to really settle into toronto because then i could keep one foot headed to the airport to fly back to edmonton, which of course, is not really fair to my life here and now. so for this reason, this little adventure of figuring out my own frame of mind with respect to toronto has been really important. it’s really driven home that i need to start thinking and living like a torontonian, since that is what my drivers license and my ontario health card tell me that i am now.

i did other things this weekend that also contributed to the theme of living like a torontonian. i initiated my first imason after-work drink-up… which went rather well, considering half of the company is sick. a group of seven or eight of us hunkered down at what is becoming one of my favourite spots, alice fazooli’s, for some well-deserved drinks (martinis for me, more reasonable drinks for everyone else). it was great because the social aspect of imason is really amazing, and there are such varied and fascinating people there that conversations, even the bitch-sessions about work, are all so entertaining! the last few remaining alcoholics (obviously including myself) went to the fat belgian, to which we have been before and i’ve written about. so seven hours and a hundred dollars later, i had a thoroughly lovely evening with the co-workers and i was starting to really feel like i was settling in at imason.

after my trip to mississauga and my my first swim-bike-run workout this year (which totally kicked my ass), i went out with my buddy, jim, to the birthday party of a friend of his from college. we went to this chic place in little italy, “clerverly” called “li’ly resto-lounge”. this was a pretty good test of my torontoness for several reasons… most of jim’s friend’s friends are financial types – the kind that i would normally have huge reservations about hanging with for their masters-of-the-universe complexes. also, the place was pretty poshy and had some minor fashionista-pretense, which i can pretty much also do without. finally, it was full of well-dressed, but still remarkably identifiable “ginos” – i mean, this place was PACKED with ‘em. jim said it best – it was a freakin’ sausagefest in the basement dance club. so i guess that it was a treat to leave with the birthday girl and her equally gorgeous younger sister (in that we collectively added to the aggregate gino-frustration-quotient of the universe) for late-night chinese food. again, having a good time in a place like that, knowing no one but my buddy, not having to hang on to someone to look after me at a party – i really felt like i had finally come into something of my own in the big smoke. i guess after more than a year, it’s about freaking time.

sunday, the weather was beautiful and i had a great 10k run along lakeshore in the sun.

and i sent shonagh flowers. since she has been the best part of being a torontonian that i’ve yet encountered, she absolutely deserves flowers.... sigh.

- g

adventure cost:
gas (+ carwash) for the month of feb-mar: $39.77
flowers for shonagh: $60.37
borat + the big lebowski dvds from gigantic future shop: $47.86
dinner at the “excellent cantoniese restaurant” on spadina at 5am: $61.59
lotto 6/49 ticket (which again, didn’t win): $5.00

i’m reminded of these stories.  two heroes from a time long long past.  perhaps it’s because 300 opens this weekend and the old greek stories are still fascinating and relevant today.  perhaps because there are so few good words that start with “o” in my native language (that do not either have the prefix “over-”  or that are “orgasm”).  but mostly i think that it is because they are heroes, and for whatever reason, i need heroes in my mind by which to compare myself (a fact that i will try and work out in upcoming sessions of therapy).

odysseus is of course the hero of the odyssey.  the wisest and most clever of the greeks of homer, he devised the strategy of the trojan horse that turned the fate of an entire war, and his epic adventure was the archetype of all great journeys and adventures for thousands of years.  this year’s pre-occupation with discovery and personal exploration must certainly take into account the influence of this formative figure for me.

odysseus would not have had half of the success or glory that he enjoyed had it not been for the intervention of critical female influences in his life.  pallas athene was continually watching over him, making his hair curlier, his armour shinier, and his spear sharper than anyone else around him.  his devoted wife, penelope, to whom he continually sought to return for decades during the trojan war and his journey home (except when he was otherwise engaged by other women with whom he was “compelled” to divert himself) was another legendary figure that gave his character some kind of grounding (as flimsy as it seems in today’s ADD perspective).  calypso, with whom he spends seven years forgetful of who and what he is… so very many lessons to be learned.  as i find myself on my own “epic journey” of a sorts away from my kingdom and the place of my birth, i wonder at the way in which we all venture forth into the unknown to seek our way back to ourselves.  perhaps this is the meaning and the essence of life – to travel outside of ourselves in order to learn who we really are.

another greek fella who had problems with women was orpheus.  an artsy fellow even by thracian standards, he was a musician who dearly loved his wife, eurydice, and with a cool name like that, who wouldn’t!?  orpheus pined and pined and wallowed in melancholy for… well, for a LONG time so as to bum out even the gods of mount olympus.  the gods agreed to allow him passage to the underworld to rescue his lost love, but his excitement, his selfishness, and his doubt perhaps fueled by his preoccupation with his own suffering, caused him to break the solemn promise that enabled his journey, and he damned his love and himself to their inevitable fates.  in spite of his unique and heroic efforts, he vanquished himself in his sole mission – to rescue his love from perdition.

i absolutely love the classics! time and time again, they prove to me as i hope that they prove to everyone that the old stories are still the best.  they survive and retain their relevance because they are timeless lessons that never lose their value or meaning, even though our world is so very very VERY different than the worlds in which they were conceived.  they are the essential distillation of human experience – the grand champions over the test of time.  every reading of these texts, even every glance at their wisdom, sheds new light on the human condition and on the reader’s own world.  their impact has been incalculable, even as generations and generations have stumbled into exactly the same kind of mistakes as the heroes that they describe.

i’ve been moaning a lot lately because i’ve lost something that is precious to me.  i’ve heard myself say that every moment in one’s life is disconnected from each preceding one by free will. each moment that we live, we choose to go forward with some plan or expectation that we might have for our present and future, and every single moment, we are confronted with an infinite number of alternative ways of being.  our choice to remain in the throes of inertia, or to try and break free of the gravitational pull of our own personalities and histories is a personal one, and one that can be revisited every single second of our lives.

for myself, and as little as it might be apparent to those with whom i have history, i am continually seeking  to find a better way to be, but i am as trapped as anyone by the source of my identity and my longing to remain the individual who i want to be… and so i seem to have revolved like the earth around the sun, speeding along at a ridiculous pace, but never escaping the predetermined path of my journey.  it’s a maddening realization to think that i’ve travelled so far and achieved so much and have won so many challenges and passed so much time, but achieved so little change in so long a time – wondering all the while what difference any of this struggle has made (other than to my two cats, who seem increasingly aware of my importance as they get older and needier!).

i have lost something very very precious to me.  i don’t know if i will ever be able to get it back.  every moment, i ask myself that question.  i am getting to the point where i can embark on the next part of my journey, hopefully a little wiser and a little better to face the next set of challenges.  this last challenge will remain unique in my experience though – because i will always be looking behind my shoulder for this part of me that i somehow let fall away from me (because that worked so well for orpheus!).

read more books.  the paper kind.

- g