unpatrioticRottenDoctorCommieRat's Journal

11:54pm: home is a valley i remember
"All of a sudden something breaks off sharply. The adventure is over, time resumes its daily routine. I turn; behind me, this beautiful melodious form sinks entirely into the past. It grows smaller, contracts as it declines, and now the end makes one with the beginning. Following this gold sport with my eyes I think I would accept- even if I had to risk death, lose a fortune, a friend- to live it all over again, in the same circumstances, from end to end. But an adventure never returns nor is prolonged."
Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea

my best-friend's boss buys us beer which we drink sitting on counters in the empty pizza shop.
but the days feel more quite. i have more clothing then one would ever need. tomorrow i will rise at 6am to work but something else is on the horizon.

i'm patient until the next adventure

12:59pm: Vancouver
Leaves are falling on my head in Gastown. They shuffle across cobblestone with the breeze and the jazz and litter the alleyways full of trees. I sit on steps and try and draw the lampposts which turn into abstract arachnid aliens. (My background has buildings and streets that ignore proportions and defy geometry.) But it's probably one of the best drawings I've ever done.

The islands trees that towered above me brought peace and calm but these soulful city streets capture serenity as well.
It's hard to be homesick when you're falling in love with a future memory.

10:21pm: the beautiful hippie boy says he doesn't believe in luck
This morning I was still in the Okanagan.

After the diving cliffs last night I said goodbye to a van full of friends, including the boy who escorted me across the country.

Now I'm again off the coast of mainland Canada except this time it's with the Pacific.

I've been coast to coast.

After exploring the island and Vancouver I'm going to make my way back east and leave another home behind me.

2:09pm: the 6am breakfast was beer we found
Fortune quotes from the morning after:
"Where are we?"
"Is this my blood?"
"What fireworks?"

We awoke in Honey's (le chien's) tent. Only I know how it came to be.

I should have listened to Rebecca when she gave me advice for last night's excursion in January.
She said I would need a) an extra pair of socks, b) something to write with, c)something to write on and a toothbrush.

I only had a small amount of paper on me and what I wrote last night in the forest is not legible today.

To recover we had a day off work. Free pancakes, coffee and oj at the church and then we went to the beach. Swimming in a lake in the Okanagan is far superior to the polluted Ottawa river.

But now I'm dead tired and thinking about booking a flight home. Last night into today makes me wonder if I should wait a bit more.


Yesterday's sunset was the most beautiful one I've ever seen. Under an umbrella...rain pouring and the party in the distance.

7:59am: tread lightly because of rattlesnakes and black widows
We left Toronto on the longest day of the year and quickly got swept up by life on the road again.

Sleep deprivation and the Rockies Mountains resulted in overwhelming sensations.

Got an email from Pete (the 1-wheeled) of St. Johns Newfoundland.

I made it the farthest east and then finally traveled west across Canada, falling in love with the landscape, poverty and other transients.

And I fall again. Weave in and out...my weary history.

Everything I stumble upon has been prophecy

I'm lost to Bob Dylan lyrics "I don't know when I'll be coming back again. It depends on how I'm feeling." (spanish boots of spanish leather)

My hands are stained with cherry juice.

I don't speak french. (All the Quebec kids on the farm speak french.) I don't speak Punjabi. (The East Indian family I work for picking cherries speaks Punjabi.)

The weed is great out here. I get stoned like I'm a kid again. But the intoxication is just another pleasure that augments, and doesn't eradicate, my confusion.

Its a short hitchhiking excursion to make it to the town of Oliver BC. I break from my isolation amongst mountains and language barriers and am glad to find decent tap water, and telephone and internet services.

This helps me still feel connected, though I'm certainly feeling the literal miles.

We are working hard for next to no money.

I'm dirty and callused, getting up at quarter to five every day in order to earn enough cash to survive. We need at least enough to see more of BC. But I'm feeling the need to flee. I always think "I don't want to be here" when I'm discontent. But here is anywhere.

Life can be awful lonesome and heartbreak hard.

The Buddhist temple in California that I applied to volunteer at refused me.

There is an extreme power in transience, (things stagnating in permanence) but that doesn't keep me from longing.

And so now I'm a little lost though stationary. I fear choosing going back to school in the fall. I don't want to do it just because I don't know what else to do with myself. It's been nearly 7 months since I've been home.

"Home is only a place saturated with an abundance of memory."
-Fortune

"Home is where the cat is." - Rebecca Macphee

My head is spinning from french, timezone jumping and an abundance of life.

But I'm mostly happy.

5:21pm: and we toasted with absinthe
I need to find a lost python in the city of Toronto. A reward sign was posted on a telephone pole near the subway station. I need 150 dollars.

Colin, be a dear and tell mom I did get to see the Thousand Islands.
We were lucky enough to do so hitchhiking. Our ride pulled off the highway and paid the tolls just so we could cross the bridge and back.

Now we're here.
We walked down to the beach a little after sunset when we arrived yesterday. We walked along the boardwalk and drank and smoked by Lake Ontario. We put on vinyl in the dining room and let Scott take over the kitchen.

We have yet another friend who is providing comfortable living quarters. (We're minus 1 hot-tub but plus 1 fellow coffee addict)

Friends who put you up are good to have.

I need to get to Mexico somehow for this reason.

This is the last known friend for miles. We may have to wait until Vancouver before we see another bed.
But we have camping supplies now.

I don't have money. But I realize money is only good for keeping you in cities. And I'd spend most of it on the plethora of exotic cinema here.

And I'm feeling relaxed. I'm feeling content.
Its summer and I love it, sunburns and all.

8:27am: greetings from Ottawa
There's nothing better than a ride at the beginning of your trip that takes you straight to your destination. Doorstop and all.

Except a ride at the beginning of your trip that takes you straight to your destination's doorstop AND:
-offers you smokes
-lets your play your cds and choose the radio stations
-buys you coffee and meals
-has a cat, chocolate chip cookies, and a device that heats and vibrates the passenger side seat, in the car

5:52am: it was never quite my intent to stay in nova scotia so long. (or to have traveled the farthest east you can possibly go in north america and stayed with circus bohemians for a week)
it had my intent to be heading west at this point. (the irony)
left the slanted city with its churches and its tulips for a boy, a book, and a cat in bed.
Staying in the country (in the fortune household) is lovely as the days are getting warmer. And there is profit to be made, poppies to plant and field parties to enjoy. but i look forward to that scrounging/sleeping in a tim hortons/ stealing peanut butter packets from an irvings/ kind of life.
reciting bob dylan lyrics on a roadside. awaiting traffic, ecstasy, and death in the same breath.
it was never my intent to ever write in live journal again.
but its nearly 6 am and everyone's asleep and i'm coming down from an adrenaline high.
i'm going to walk with the dawn in the city i love and have missed and submerge myself in chlorine.
and buy a calling card.
and tell my father i'm not coming home by the end of the month.

2:52am: Writing two entries in one night. God forbid I add livejournal to my ever-increasing list of habits.

An after midnight walk down Springarden is a good way to procrastinate. Better still is then writing about it. Every time I get the urge to delete this thing I think about having to actually start a paper.

I’m still enamoured with wearing my birkenstalks in leftover-wet weather despite the fact that I end up with the hems of my jeans soaked and pebbles and sand between my toes.

I borrowed a copy of the Bends and realized I need to listen to it over and over and over and over……
It’ll be my new Ziggy Stardust*.

I have the easiest paper to write in the world and the only thing preventing me from writing it is not writing it.
(believe me, that line of reasoning makes sense in my head)

I just want this week to start so I can enjoy it in a passive state- the benefit of being an audience member.) There is- Eternal Sunshine Monday, Triplets of Belville Tuesday, a Bergman and Passion of Joan Wednesday and Katie’s play on Thursday.
And then it will be the weekend and I’ll be another week closer to the rest of my life.

Blank pages are intimidating. I don’t want to leave this city just like I don’t want to write a paper. I know I have to but I’d rather curl up (foetal position style) in the moments of ease and certainty.
I sat on the steps outside Alex hall this evening and realized I was going to miss so much. There are fragmented moments I could construct in point-form (which would be quite humorous- especially with the insertion of quotes involving furry mammals) or I could write a novel. The grammar might not be stellar but there might be enough humanity in it to at least win the favor of the characters who would see themselves personified in the pages. It’s not that I’ll never see my friends again once this year vanishes, it’s just that I’ll never see them again in this setting. I’ll never see them FYP-frenzied, complaining about the confines of res and the disappointing nature of Sodexho food, while barely functioning in a sleep-deprived, drugified, frame of mind. I’ll never see hardened deserts wrapped in napkins on Scott’s windowsill alongside, now-unidentifiable, fruit. I’ll never roll out of bed and walk across the Quad to dalplex. I’ll never be this me in this moment again.

As American currency starts to look more and more foreign I realize what’s home to me. It’s not that I want an extension of life, I just want to put some of it on repeat for a while.

And I want to glue raisons to the wall.

I want to jump on my bed, smoke out the window and sing obscenely loud.

I want to have sushi in the Alex hall kitchen at 6am again.

I want more into-the-morning marathons of SFO, madlibs and conversation.

But I also want to win a cash prize in a cup of Tim Horton’s coffee and travel to anywhere and everywhere….

And I’m jealous of everyone who can sleep tomorrow. And I’m jealous of everyone who got to go home this weekend and drink beer with their little brother. And I’m jealous of anyone who is watching the sunrise or set in a tropic climate right now, not thinking about tomorrow.


---
*album I listened to in full (having first known only one or two hits from previously) but didn’t appreciate in the way that a good album (listen to, sing, and quote, obsessively) should be appreciated

5:40pm: This fickle weather demands we wade through endless puddles on city sidestreets. And so-
I awoke to sandy birkenstocks, last night's memories mostly in solid form, and negative 15 minutes to get to work on time.

Worthy of instant replay would be half jokingly stopping in a convenience store on the way back from Quinpool and asking for a device so that we could drink our merlot in the street. The foreign clerk didn't seem to understand but took the request seriously. He went in back after having us repeat what we wanted a few times, only to come out with a can full of screws.

And then today- I saw the morning sun at the start of my day.

Life in general form has become like finances, a precarious topic. It's a mesh of images. Like the side of the highway, late at night. No cars stopping. Trees full of crows.
...going to have a smoke in the rain at 5am before running off to the pool.
-waking up in time to go to tutorial but skipping it on a weekly basis for Bergman films.
-having a list of goals for the fraction of day remaining after sleep...a simple- get from point a to point b kind of life. But drowning in the simple letters.

Upon closer introspection though I realize that trading school for life has its merit. It makes me feel more sure about taking next year off, even though for the first time in my entire life there is no designated plan to follow through.

2:03am: I was again reading Borges over coffee in Scott’s room:
“My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself it must be that the soul
has some secret, sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.”

The plan was:

Crash till 10ish then allnightpaperwrite.

Instead:

I’m taking another stab at this livejournal thing. (Mainly because rhabhekkha suggested it,

And because one should always add activities to the list of ways to procrastinate…)

Some final thoughts on the waking nightlife- “If this world was sane, amphetamines would come lined in vending machines at every street corner.” – Mr. Fortune