Ain't love the sweetest thing

"Y'know, there's girls that are like 'Baby - I'd put ona clean shirt for you.' But this girl, damn, I shower."

An overheard conversation.

Procrastination I: Snow Forts

You can go on about the glory days for ages and everybody sits around, puffing up their chests, and telling a story thats just a little bit better than yours. It starts with the gentle snowfall and the feeling that there is no work to be done.
We were sitting around in our living room, clean for once. The TV displayed the twisted characters of a Nintendo game gone glitched, and left forgotten. Stuart was staying with us that night, and he joined in the general reveling in the past.
The first story was about a snowman gone wrong. The snow was piled too high for anybody to go to school, and the children were out playing it. They pushed a ball, which grew in size as if ploughed its way through the crisp new snow. This is where the term "snowballing" comes from. I only say that because people don't think about the expressions they use often, and although this one is obvious, not all of them are. Some people just don't know what a lot of these expressions we use mean. Stop and think about it next time you use one. The snowball that was supposed to be the bottom of a snowman was too big by the time they got it in position. It was almost as tall as the child that had rolled it. A gleam of inspiration shone in his eye, and with fervor he attacked the snow again. Soon there were two, three more snow balls of immence diameter beside the first. Other children joined in. A ring was made, and a mighty fortress remained from that day unto the spring.
At school, another boy started digging into a snowhill. His friends started digging into the other side. The teachers told them the dangers of collapsing tunnels, and the foolishness of what they were doing, and then that they were not permitted to continue their activity. Yet, the children were too stubborn to listen, and the tunnel was made. the bodies of many children worming their way through worn it smooth and gave it a hard shell. The plow would put new snow in the tunnel, but always the children found it again, scooping out the new ice, lenthening the tunnel, building offshoots, an entire entwork. The mound of ice was an anthill of activity, and the children scurried inside, safe from the reaching arms of adults who could not fit in to find them

[continued]

Cell Phone

Staurt was sitting down at a table in the hall, a few books spread infront of him, looking as if he was studying. I sat down across from him, but he was already engaged ina conversation on his cell phone. He waved at me, but continued to pay attention to the person on the other end of the line.
It's strange how people will pay attention to a telephone instead of the real person right infront of them. It's like telecommunications are more important than communications.
"Yeah, I can be right over," he was saying to the person on the other end of the line. "Fuck, wait, I just took my foot hings off."
A pause.
"You know, those things that you put on your feet."
A Pause.
"No, not socks, those foot things you put over them."
A short pause.
"Yeah, shoes. Give me a minute, I'll be right over."
Stuart bent over, put on his shoes, told me he'd be right back and then walked across teh hall to the cafeteria and met with a girl who was putting a cell phone into her purse. He handed her a peice of paper, then came back and sat down.
"Man, this thing's a pain int he ass" he said as he slammed his cell phone down on the table. He didn't turn it off.

I am my bicep

For a while I entertained notions of ging to the gym, in an effort to get out the house and do something active when I wasn't studying. Reading does not lend itself to a well maintained body after all. But, more than that, it was something to do. Residence life isn't all pomp and excitment, sometimes it gets downright dull and no amount of videogames can save you from that.
Stuart was in the changeroom looking as if he had just showered. "Frequent the gym, Stu?" I asked.
"Only to get clean. Second-best place to bathe on campus."
"The first being... ?"
"Generally one of a residence showers, if the residents understand how to clean a bath tub." He walked out whisteling. I couldn't help but notice he had hung his towel up inside a day-use locker. One that, in point of fact, never really seemed to be free.
I went to the gym off and on for a few weeks. I think the cardio machines were kind of fun, in their own way. I had no clue how to lift weights properly and probably did more damage than good. In short, my heart wasn't really in it.
One day, i arrived in the gym with my towel over my shoulder to see a man hop off a machine and promtly kiss his biceps, first right then left, with sharp motions.

I turned around, left the gym, and never went back.

Dinner II

Fish and Chips and Vinegar.

Pepper.
Pepper.
Pepper.
Salt.

(You know sometimes the strangest memories crop up when eating. Or brushing your teeth. Grade four music class - singing songs out of begginer song books - not having theheart to tell the semi-retired old man that you don't know how to read music - mostly just making the music up as you go)

The Death of a Party

I was never a fan of hip-hop. Yet, I was never dismayed to hear it pumping out of a nearby house, mixed with the voices of people having fun on a thursday night. Because, y'know, you just can't wait for the weekend. And who has class on a friday anyway?
Oddly enough, all the laughing voices, all the singing and rowdy fun, it doesn't keep me up. I would never call in a noise complaint. But, the RAs still have to shut these rambunctious parties down at an hour past midnight, because (or so they claim) people are studying. I think this is a myth. There is no such thing as a studious undergraduate.
Like a cord being pulled, the party stopped at exactly one o'clock. In the middle of a sing along, bass rumbling through the ground, clinking glasses and ecstatic shouting, there was suddenly silence.
I wondered if somebody closed the door, or if the RAs had come.
Like a ghost calling out for retribution, my window humms a little, fuzzing out an echo of a beat that may or may not be a hip-hop song.
The party is over. The party's ghost lingers.

A Modest Proposal

His face was looking straight into the maw of an enormous text book. There was a slice of pizza frozen halfway to his mouth, and his guitar case was sitting at his feet, waiting. His face was adorned with a fair amount of stubble. “You know,” he tells me without looking up “I once proposed to a girl just because she had a locker beside mine.” He looks up and into my eyes. “That’s not weird, is it?”
This is the sort of thing you expect when you spend too much time with Stuart. I didn’t answer him, so he just looked back down at his book and took a bite of his pizza.
“It’s not like I was in love with her or anything,” he said to me eventually. “I just needed to feel something different. High school, you know, it was dragging on me. I asked in response to some question she asked the hall in general. I don’t think she even heard me, because she didn’t answer. Of course,” he says, suddenly looking pensive, “I suppose it could have been that she did hear and didn’t answer because she was embarrassed. I mean, I was being pretty sarcastic when I said it, all monotone and whatnot. Maybe she was into me and I was being inadvertently mean.” He shruged, then after a slight pause, turned back to his book and took another bite of pizza. In silence, he finished, then sighed, and looked up again. “Thanks for the breakfast.”
It was two o’clock in the afternoon. He stood up, stooped to pick up his guitar, and then was gone.

Our/Are

Its strange how higher education will remind you of little things you learned when you were in grade two. In grade two, I suffered from a self-invented form on number confusion. The morning of my first math test (ever) i despaired. I wailed to my mother that i didn't know the difference between six and nine, that I was sure to confuse them.

6

9

I spent the morning agonising, fearing that I would mix up the loops. Top, bottom, bottom, top, which was which, what value could each hold! Plsu, these twop nastly littel numsers only had one point each. Numbers are easy. Two has two points.

2

Top and bottom, see? Three's got three of them.

3

top, middle bottom.

4

tom bottom, left and right. Or, two on the top if you liek to draw your fours that way, bottom and the right side.

5

four corners, plus one more because it's five. But six, the wiley six, he had only one point, and he looked just like nine, only upside down. And, in my mind, I had no clue which was which.

What question nearly made me lose my shit when I was five years old? Six plus nine. What were the chances? It didn't matter that these two numbers could be eleuded - because, six plue, nine plus six, it didn't matter which was which, they were just symbols - combined they were fourteen!

I didn't get perfect.

But, more than that, I remember writing in my journal one day. The evidence of this still exists, in some dusty box up in an old garage, where my mother has hidden away all sorts of embarassing material should i ever bring a lover home - just in case; that was mom's policy, you never knew when you might need something again.
I was playing catch with my friends at recess. lacking anything else of note to discuss, and knowing that I was only allowed to write about the black knight fighting dragons twice a week (which usually turned into an excuse for me to make journal time into art class), i thought it would make make a find entry. I discussed how our ball was accidently tossed over the fence into the yard of a neihbouring apartment complex. It looked something liek this:

"Are bull gt Fentsid"

That day in class we had an assistant in to help the class. I didn't trust her. To put this into words may be difficult, but allow me my attempt: I was too young to recognise racism. I didn't know what it was, and I never questions skin colour. I saw people as tall/short, fat/skinny, adn that was about it. I didn't know what "foriegn" meant. But this teacher's assistant, her last name had two parts. It was like it was two names in one! That, I decided, was not to be trusted (notwithstanding the fact that my best friend's name held this same quality). When she kindly explained to me that "Are," although phonetically nearly acceptable wasn't the word I was looking for and rubbed it out for me (the sheer injustice! It was my journal and I was to write it as I liked!) replacing it with those letters "O U R" I took immediate offence. I waited patiently, glaring down at the offensive nearly written word, gleaming in a hand that wasn't my own, brazen on the page, waiting for her to move on to the next table. Glancing over my shoulder, sneakily, but with viscious contempt, I rubbed out the offending word myself, leaving a greasy dark stain across the page and penciled in as hard as i could

A

R

E

in big capital letters. It was ARE ball, than you very much, and would remain that way.

Our children are future
Are children our future

Really, it's all the same to me.

Dinner I

Bacon. Bacon. Bacon.

Egg. Egg.

Bagel
(toasted).

Stuart

I think I first met stuart at a frosh party. He was there, with us wild eyed new students, but he was calm. He had always been there, and would always remain. Or so it seemed to somebody so unfamilair with the terrain. I think everybody was alittle bit overwhealmed by the scene they had suddenly just been thrust into. Blocks of townhouses, named by letters and perhaps not unsignificantly recalling prisons through this recollection were our grounds that evening. Pure freedom for some, no authority but the RAs, sasheying their way around campus and turning a blind eye to underage drinking. The attraction to underage drinking is strange. Your average seventten year old hasn't really developed a palate for beer, and hastily chugs (or, in some more daring cases, funnels) beers at an alarming rate. Flavour was never the perogative, only mindless blind intoxication, and getting there at an accelrated rate only proves you are more hardcore. But honestly, what is the point? Later on that night as you sponge your own vomit off your face you can ask yourself if you're having fun, and maybe in the morning you'll put ona clean shirt, take a shower and eat a greasy fast food hamburgar in an attempt to makeyourself feel better and somehow convince yourself that yes; yes, in the end, the expeirience of the night before was amusing. To a point. APoint you can't remember.
Tell me the logic of spending twenty dollars to not remember puking on yourself. Keeping in mind that to a careful undergraduate, twenty dollars is nearly a months worth of food.
Irregardless, at this point, no lessons had been learned, and nobody really wanted to learn them. School, for that night, wasn't about learning. It was about knowing. It was about knowing the names of as many people around you as possible, so you could rebuild a social framework from the ground up - fnding new friends in a foreign land, latching on to those you thought would last. What i think everybody forgot was that this land was foreign to all of us. we were all alone (paridoxically enough) together, and not one of us had more than a few friends whom we had brought with us. Perhaps even those people were unfortunate, because they had those old friends to fall back on - perhaps they were the ones that would have no social success that evening.
But, alas, it wasn't that way. I stood there, quite alone in the crowd, talking to noone, drawing no attention to myself holding a half drained beer and no knowing where the costruction site was.
I don't even know where stuart came from. he sidled out of nowhere and stood beside me. He lifted his glass bottle to my own and introduced himself. "Stuart Dent"
"You're kidding, right?"
"Unfortunetly, no."
Other people joined the conversation, if you wanted to call it that. I was waved in the gate, and took up the barren landscape, imagining the beautiful structure of glass and steel that was waiting, just outside existence. The minds eye saw it glimmer.
Thats what stuart did. He was there, then he was gone.

Lager Auger

Imagine that somebody is holding an auger at yuor stomache, turning it slowly.

You now know what it feels like to wake up after one too many lagers.

Harvest Moon

Every time I go to a coffee house, somebody goes onstage with their guitar, and, invariably, they clear their throat, shuffle their feet nervously, peek shyly out at the audience from under their bowed head say "This is, uh, this is a Neil Young cover."
We are then, as an audience, are subject to a mediochre rendition of Harvest Moon.
Why is it that every bedroom folk singer who creeps out of the woodwork sings this exact song? What is it about Neil Young's Harvest Moon that is so attractive to so many budding guitarists?
Its probably some unspoken cultural right of passage for folk singers. They have become a secret soceity, shifting away from from their former prominance like the Knights Templar shifted, like how masons stop being creepy once they get old, and turn into smiling old men in funny red hats and small cars. Shriners. Really, when does the secrecy and mysticism of the Masons drift to an organisation that brings a circus to town every year?
In short: Secret soceities are ineffable because they are inpenatrable. I can never understand why every ametuer folk singer must sing Harvest Moon, yet it still happens. This is probably why the audience wasn't shocked when Stuart did it, too.

Start, set, go!

For some reason I have once again signed up for Nanowrimo. And, again, I'm not sure I'll have the time to do it. Alas, post-modernism bee is in my bonnet. This year's novel, a first person account telling the story of a man who lives in the school he attends. Illegally, of course. But it's not him narrating, rather, somebody else.

My dream: a series of disjointed chapters (think Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America) that ell the story of university life with an absurd twist.

Also, chapters that do things like this:

[Title] Dinner

Handful of honey nut cheerios. Cruch cruch cruch. Swig of milk. Swish. Handful of honey nut cheerios. Swig of milk. Cruch crunch swish crurch crunch crunch swish swich.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Peanut butter and banana sandwhich.