Back From Normal

On some level, I can see how I've been struggling for a kind of normality in my life. There are people that have this, that have jobs and families that make them happy. They see the same faces every day, they have the same conversations over and over, and every day is so similar to the day before it. This is what normal is.

I've been fighting.

I'm not ready to be normal. I want to have peculiar conversations with peculiar people, in places that I've never known or been before. I want to hike into remote areas and listen to the volume of my own thoughts. I want to create a memory of a time without boundaries so that on the day when I do stop fighting - the day I give in to helpless normality - I will remember a time when it was my will to smile. Happiness did not come to me, I made it from nothing.

Everything must be created.

Directions

Trust me on this next bit, because yesterday I walked a long way through the snow and saw the symbolism with my own mind.

All our lives are like a deep winter. There are billions of us plodding through it with only a few different places to go. In most directions, the trails are well-used and the snow is packed down tight. This is where we go, these simple ways, with miles of untouched possibility all around us. You can go that way and nobody will stop you, but you'll never know where it leads, and how difficult the walk will be.

Some people take those directions.

The Winter Beast

There was a cold winter beast that lurked in the shadows behind the factory. Only one person had seen it, and so only one person was scared of it.

The others laughed. They asked him, where could it have come from, but your imagination!

It was true, the factory was far from anywhere. It was so remote that it hardly existed, buried deep in a frozen land. But still, the beast had come from somewhere, and one worker had seen it standing on the other side of the door. It was trying to get in.

It ran away, that time, but it came back. Often. Quietly.

And some time during the year, the winter beast got into the factory.

Only half of the good children got their toys that year.

Season's Greetings!

A Pleasant Fall

Looking up, there was an infinite fall of snowflakes, so light to be taken by the most innocent breeze. I caught one in my hand, once, and it disappeared immediately. It had no presence.

I was startled then by a small tree suddenly shaking itself free of the cold, and it left a large mess of snow right on the sidewalk. It all appeared so suddenly.

I've always been fascinated by finding coincidence between things. Things like anagrams and elevator numbers, streets and provinces, Playboy and birth months. I've even found interest in 3719 as a prime number. I followed the trail of fate avidly. I believed in these things like I used to believe in Santa Claus.

Until it began to snow.

Shadows

And this morning, as the sun spilled its way across the world, I faced it with a new warmth. Everything is ahead of me now.

A Mid-Afternoon Wish

I removed Josephine's heart today. It is sitting on a box in my closet, waiting to resume its pulse when the snow melts. It's been weeks since I've felt her purr beneath me. It won't be long now.

My apartment is now clean enough to eat off of. I never really understood that expression, to be truthful. It is clean but I don't have the urge to throw food all over it, dipping things in chocolate fondue to prove its cleanliness. The entire idea is absurd.

Tonight will be pleasant, I hope. I just can't stand the idea of parting in tears or in torment. I don't think I will enjoy the evening quite so much as I enjoyed the day, but I wish to.

Boxes

Everybody delights in asking me if I brought the weather with me when I moved here. I laugh like I know they're kidding, but not so hard that they suspect the truth. You see, for the past few nights I've been unwilling to sleep. Instead I sort through the boxes in my closet. There are three that contain Alberta weather; blistering sun, blistering snow, and blistering cold. I've only opened the snow so far as last night; but really, these people are asking for it.

So It Goes

It feels like Kurt Vonnegut is reaching across the table, forcing his novel upon me. I can hear him shouting, "Do you see? Do you see what I've done here!"

And I say, "Yes, you've repeated yourself."

"No, you nitwit," he says, rightfully condescending, "I've tricked you. Look again."

His father died in a hunting accident during the war. So it goes.

His wife died accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes.

The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly. There were special spikes where his eyes would be. There was a drain in the bottom to let out all the blood. So it goes.

He's taken three words and associated them with our greatest fear, but with complete ambivalence. The reader is taught to accept something horrific without sentiment, without remorse. That death is death, and there is absolutely no grace in it. Whether you die or are killed, whether alone or in thousands, by accident or intent; the result is always the same. You are dead.

"But the reader knows it's not true," I say to him. "We don't accept those horrors."

He smiles, nods. "Exactly my point. It's only in the reader that the emotional narrative is written."

I see it now, but as he backs away from the table, he repeats, "Do you see how I've tricked you?"

The Short Version

The old man was standing, hanging onto the rail with an exaggerated unbalance, while the girl sat in the seat next to the aisle. There were other seats all around them, all empty, but he'd been sitting in this particular seat every day for a year now, because he needed to see the street signs, and it wasn't his fault that he'd missed the earlier bus. Which is true, of course, but he explained all of this to her twice without even remotely catching her attention. People listen to some awfully loud music these days, he thought.

The long version of the story includes more details about the ill-fated seance and subsequent exorcism, the stranger with the bleeding ears, and the entire incident between Timmins and his wife that resulted in rummaging through trash cans in the alley and inadvertently finding the ghost's necklace around the demonic ham. It was actually a very funny coincidence.

But this is the short version of the story, which is that the power had gone out and the old man's alarm clock did not go off.

"Such awfully loud music indeed," he muttered to himself.

Being Human

The nice thing about people is that sometimes they are so unexpectedly human. They do things that surprise you, taking you from frustration to grateful in a second. Last night, the taxi we'd hailed pulled up and a woman ran across the street and got in. The driver pointed towards us and she got out, giving us a sour look as she walked away.

On a business level, a fare is a fare; but this man went out of his way to be human to us. Sometimes this world doesn't seem so lost after all.

Monochrome

It has been a productive morning. I gave Josephine an oil change and a wash - since winter is going to be coming soon - did laundry, dishes, and tidied up my kitchen. In the afternoon, I will go somewhere to write, find a nice bottle of red wine for the evening, and then wait for tomorrow to arrive. It shouldn't take long, seconds don't tic away any slower than they have in the past.

Last night, I was asked if I saw the world as shades of gray. I thought about it for a moment and couldn't see anything but this. Sure, it would be so simple if it weren't; if our monochrome society could be black and white with nothing between. But this is not how it is. Good and evil are arbitrary. We define these shades with our choices. And so, I choose to see in gray, just as much as I choose to dream in colour.

Balancing Act

There is a man that I see nearly every day running in the park. He does chin-ups, acrobatics, martial arts; and then he walks on a fence. He balances across it, step by careful step, and stops half way every time.

Consider your life linearly. Between the time that you begin and the time that you finish, you will rest. You will see things all in their order, that one thing leads to another, that there is only one way across. Successes immediately follow failures, confidence follows doubt.

Take a moment to rest, but keep your balance, and don't stay long. You're one step away from something good.

Grinning Wildly

More than one thing made me smile yesterday. A dog outside the grocery store, carolers in the coffee shop, some numbers coming my way, an unexpected cheque from the government. I want nothing more in life than to be happy and wear this grin with permanence, but at the same time, being happy does less to stimulate my creativity than being miserable. If it came down to a choice, though, my creativity would be contrived. It's easier to fake.

Shaking, Sweating, Singing

I performed for my first time in front of an audience of strangers last night. It was a great deal more nerve-wracking than I expected, and I did make some irritating mistakes, but overall I think it went well. Watch the entire performance here. I would in particular like to thank the gracious audience for being so supportive to a first-timer!

My Friday as a Saturday

A friend of mine is going to be celebrating five years without consuming anything with limbs. One day I will know that feeling; I will feel that balance of conscience. I've only a few years to wait.

Today I did an enormous amount of cleaning after an enormous amount of procrastination. My kitchen resembles very closely how I'd imagined it a month ago. It has been a day of great personal productivity. I even hanged a monkey.

Don't worry, I never ate it.

All That Is Unwritten

As I read the next-to-last chapter of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, a thought occurred to me:

Tell them nothing and they will know everything.

The beauty of writing lies equally in what isn't written at all. The reader is given the unspoken responsibility of taking what is given and imagining the rest. In the chapter I read last night, three characters are walking to battle, and several unrelated paragraphs later, they are bleeding and worn and tired, and the battle is over.

In the hands of a brilliant reader, the best part of a story was never even in the book.

Regrowth

"In the time it would take nature to create a fully matured redwood," the scientist boasted, "Geneti-Corp can create thousands! This technology will change the world!"

The world was indifferent. Science was science these days, and life-changing technological advancements were as common-place as rain storms, and, for that matter, auto-evaporating layered rain suits. And even though Geneti-Corp was doubling their growth rate year after year, nobody seemed to notice. A tree is, after all, just a tree.

The first batches of young saplings were kept in North America, to replace forests that had been lost to fires. The next batches were shipped to South America and Africa, to replenish now completely dwindled Rain Forests. After that, they were sold to countries everywhere. Lumber shortages ceased to exist and paper supplies were abundant, even excessive.

There was a flaw in the design. An oversight, they said; a catastrophe, they should have said.

All over the world, these genetically modified trees were out of control; their height beyond the clouds, growing ever wider and thicker, and roots going deep into the soil, as deep as they were tall. They pushed their way out of the forest, took over cities, and cast the entire planet into shadow.

They could not be cut, they could not be burned, and they could not be stopped.

This is how mankind was lost. We simply ran out of room.