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Michael considered fate at 23:37   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

It's amazing what a thin piece of cloth can really do.

I have this huge window in my bedroom that takes up just about the whole entire wall. In fact, I take that back - it does take up the entire wall. It's ginormous, but since it's south facing I get the morning sun which spells death to a vampire like me. There are all these little windows that run along the bottom which can be slid open and some days, with these little portholes opened up to the blustery winter weather, I'm burning up by 8am from the burning rays coming from the broiling yellow glob hanging low in the sky. When I first moved in it was August and it was even worse then, but I was sleeping down low on the floor so I could roll up to the wall underneath the sill and hide from the photons for awhile.. even if it was like a sauna in the room.

Eventually, though, I had to get some sort of curtain situation or I was going to die so I strolled up along St. Laurent and east down Mont Royal and scored a nice blue-dyed tapastry of sorts which would do the trick. I pulled the ladder out of the storage room, stuck the industrial staple gun in my pants, and up the rungs I went.

It's not perfect but it works. When I'm feeling brave I pull it back from both sides and jam the bottom of it in one of the little sliding windows so I can get some light in. The whole world, the Montreal skyline, and the barren blue sky becomes my fourth wall and I live in and among the other people of this city. But most of the time it stays closed and I can live in this tiny little bedroom world where the computers hum quietly at me, my clothes hang silently, waiting, and the table lamp throws a warm glow on the robins-egg blue walls.

And like my room, there are two worlds on either side of these eyes: the small cozy one on the inside and the "real" one out in front. As usual, it's the small and cozy one I tend to favour on my bad days but it's the world out there - in front of my eyes - that provides the real surprising and entertaining moments so I wander out there on a daily basis, each time an experiment in human nature. I'm a mad scientist.

When I spent a few weeks in September being retarded and making a birthday present for a girl it was a experiment in human nature because I'd never really done something like that before. Sure I'd gotten gifts for people before, even made gifts, but never with the same sort of furvor or necessity that I did this time around. Somehow it was something I had to do even though I knew deep down that it was a trifle bit useless. I'm in love with the world through the eyes of a girl who [sic] was still around the morning after. And that's what it was: Not that she was still around the morning after (it's usually me who runs away) - but that she was still in my brain the morning after; a special treat!

I've spent half a lifetime watching earth crumble in my hand and fall through my fingers, back to the ground, as it proves to be less solid than it seems and here it was: a chunk of mud that stuck together, a piece of soil that stuck together and formed a cohesive bond. It amazed me. Intrigued me.

So I made it a birthday present. Instead of trying to crumble it like I so often would, I somehow envisioned it in the little fantasy world in my head with a sprout sticking out of it, roots taking hold, hugging it together... in some sick rendition of earth day for lovers.

Well, you see what happens when you get overly emotional about these things. I'm having a bad year of it. It was about a year ago today that I last saw that little piece of soil, wrapped in baggy sweat pants curled up by the fire with the world balancing precariously on her shoulders and a car packed for the other end of the continent. Which makes it almost exactly a year and a half ago when I drove up Fore street in Portland Maine onto the Eastern Promenade, down to the public boat landing, onto the concrete ramp and pulled the parking brake. I left the car running with the headlights pointing down into the water and laid down in front of it, staring up at the midnight sky. It wasn't the first time I did that - sometimes after an interesting night you need to take a moment, a bit of reflection and meditation never hurt anyone - but this time around I made myself a promise: "When this one doesn't work out, you're heading to Grad school old buddy".

Maybe a bit melodramatic to make a decision to flip your world around like that all because of a girl but it wasn't really that at all. It was just a great excuse. I needed to do it and I needed to find a good deal with myself to get me there. A promise to keep. When I saw her, I knew I'd found my deal because there was no way life was going to work out that perfectly, so quickly: I was only 25 for christ sake!

So maybe it was a bit presumptuous of me to start filling out applications that fall but somewhere in the back of my mind I already knew the whole story, laid out in front of me fading off into the future. I knew, certainly, that by August I would be packing up my bags, throwing away old junk in my closets, performing a bit of a spring-cleaning of sorts, and heading off to some academic institution, somewhere, where I could immerse myself in such non-emotional tasks as optimizing compilers.

Everything washes away - some things quicker than others - but everything washes away. Laying on that concrete boat landing two Augusts ago I pretty much washed away myself. And ever since then? I've been living in this little cozy world behind the curtain with the robins-egg blue walls and the quiet humming computers. Every once in awhile I brave the weather and head out into the streets of Montreal, poking my head into a bar here and there, but I usually come up busted and broke. As if alcohol could erase a years worth of banging one's head on the wall. As if a "fun, social setting" could perk up a blues musician. As if.

It's been a rough year.