Dancing wisps

(the original draft of this, Fire and Smoke, was removed and reworked because I thought it sucked)

I have a paintball date for an old friend’s birthday. Between the rush of day end workers, I quietly sing a Josh Ritter tune to myself on the metro, “All that love, all those mistakes – what else can a poor man make?” past the St-Laurent panhandlers, the McGill hipsters, the impatient traffic, “I gave up a life of crime; I gave it to a friend of mine.“ I doubt they’re looking for a man singing in the streets, and if they are I doubt they know what to make of him.

Everyone is typically late. I pass the time with the four others who showed up on time in F.’s already overcrowded room, listening to rap music, talking about literature, what everyone else is studying, their undertakings, my undertakings: the book I’m writing, or plan to write, or imagine sometimes (exactly which doesn’t matter that much, the semantics are important only to other people). There’s a knock at the door, and then a short, thin girl that could be construed as attractive to a certain palate. I don’t pay any attention to what she says, but I’m aware she’s made a bitter sort of comment. I’ve no idea where he finds these women or why he keeps them around. This one’s cultural heritage is ambiguous at best – her skin’s fairly light, her facial structure could be anything from French to mixed Middle-Eastern. Immediately she takes command of the conversation, cutting off anyone else’s input, domineering F.’s attention with the tiny things she’s burning. Another friend talks of surgery, she says “don’t talk about things like that if you don’t want me to pass out” she says. I think you don’t look like you’re going to pass out. “So what we’re going to do is shoot each other? I’m a girl, you guys better not shoot me. Why haven’t we left yet? I’m here; we should just leave the others behind.” Any response to anything she says, conversational and uncritical, is shot down as unwelcome and hostile. Soon the dutiful group of men put their time into her hands, all of them figuring how they can help her. Her comments are tinged with resentment – they start out small and fan out into louder claims that provoke thunderous response from her audience. Soon the room is roaring with chaos, much like the contagious din of drunks.

Her behaviour is like an alarm that draws your attention to a fire: her eyes. I’m thinking a lot about those eyes, figuring how they fit into, and mar, her face. There are black bags that hang underneath them, underlining a kind of irreverent anger – a flash fire that destroys entire neighbourhoods and burns the countryside, something dangerous and uncontained is there and evident, mushroom clouds encased in blue glass marbles.

Walking to the station the pack has broken into smaller groups, some friends talk about television, while others tell inside jokes alienating any outsider, some listen intently to that girl’s dull and abrasive howls as if there were some wisdom to be found in her empty words. I drift along the edge of the sidewalk, tiptoeing along the curb underneath the lamplight, singing softly to myself. “Wolves oh wolves oh can’t you see, that ain’t no wolf can sing like me?”

The group is loud and singularly conscious on the metro. Other people shuffle uncomfortably in their seats.

Paintball is somehow less fun than I remembered it when I was 16. The heavy protective mask gives me claustrophobic anxiety – no peripheral vision, and choking on old air scented with my own sweat and fear. This arena is indoors, so every shot has a crisp pop and catches some feedback from the roof so it sounds like it’s being fired a few feet from your head. My loose fitting army fatigue let sand in to my clothing, my hair, my socks, my shoes, my underwear – I’m not really fond of being sweaty in the first place, and I’m less fond of the dirt sticking to my face. F. is totally into this, “Go go go go go!” he shouts at me, and I’m thinking Hey man, I’ve been listening to Bjork and Feist all week. Best of all, our queen, being the only outspoken one of us with any fluent French gets into an argument with another group who wanted to play with us. “Don’t worry about it; she’s just explaining to them that we don’t want to play with them.” A little camouflaged kid runs off wailing, the referees show up. “She’s doing this for us, it’s alright.” Ten games or so in, I’m tired and out of ammunition – a sigh of relief and finally.

I’m enjoying big lungfuls of fresh air in the waiting area when this girl comes out and sits beside me.

“Hey, is this F.’s camera? We should take a picture together!”

“Why?” This modern addiction to taking stills of meaningless moments whenever a shitty digital camera is around bothers me. I feel like I’m being reduced to the observation of a trivial moment – there’s something artlessly profane in the act, anyone can do it: transfigure any event or interaction into some memorabilia with presumed, often illusory, importance with the more blatant intent to publish. (Look at anyone’s Facebook page: here is me with somebody else, we were drunk, I don’t know this person, this is me with food hanging out of my mouth, here I’m looking unnatural – why were all these photographs taken? Why is it important that everyone sees them?)

Momentary silence, but because it’s beautiful, it’s fragile. “So,” she says, “if you had a carbon copy of yourself, would you sleep with it?”

“Sure – I’d fuck me in a minute.”

“You know that’s gay, right?”

“And?”

“So you’re gay?”

“No.”

“No, no, no! You’re trapped! You already admitted that you’d sleep with a carbon copy of yourself, who would be a different person, and a man! You’re gay!”

“It’s a human potential as I see it. I have no explicit desire to sleep with men, and can honestly say that I don’t feel any sexual attraction to them on any regular basis, however if there was a carbon copy of myself I could probably satisfy an intellectual curiosity with somebody who’d likely see things on the same page. The interesting question, I think, would be how would my clone be emotionally affected by the exchange? I mean, he would know that he’s a copy of me and as such, I don’t think could feel anything other than that he was used. Imagine the existential questions he’d have to ask himself!” I say, laughing.

“Um…” she notices someone else in our group exit the arena and pounces on him with the camera, “Let’s take sexy pictures!”

A group of 15 converges on the metro after the games – it’s just a mob, nothing else. We cram into the end of a single car, lazily tossed on the seats or standing around the pole. I drift further down the car away from the crowd. I find when I’m expected to be part of a mob, I become exceptionally self-conscious, the loss of individual responsibility weighs pretty heavily on me – I’m not in a position to defend myself against what the others are doing. The girl is shouting, “Pole dance for us F.!” everyone guffaws loudly. “I was out at sea for seven years,” a middle-aged woman stands up at the next stop and moves to the opposite end of the car, “I got your letter in Tangier”, a woman of about 28 comes in and sits near me, her eyes are swollen with sorrows, judging by what she’s wearing I think that she’s likely a bartender or at least works with that crowd “thought that I’d been on a boat”, chaos shrieks with excitement behind us, “until that single word you wrote”, the woman stares beyond her thigh contemplating something heavy, “that single word, it landlocked me”, they’ve just noticed I’m not with them, “it turned the mast to cedar tree”, I watch the woman get up and off, an elderly black man takes her place, “Sharp, we’ve lost Sharp! Did he get on?”, “and the wind to gravel roads” I haven’t really felt like I’ve been there all night, gaseous, formless “and the wind to gravel roads”, “Fuck, he’s going to be pissed. He knows where the restaurant is, right?” They leave the train in a large cluster which is easy for me to slip behind. There’s a bounce in my step when I follow them, softly singing, smoking and smoke.

…

In the UQAM foodcourt with a friend. A young woman with a pretty face, a 1990’s beauty, not really contemporary, nose-ring, and carefully defined features, comes up to us and speaks in French. She reminds me of my older sister about 10 years ago – something about her seems lost. When I was 10 I idolized my sister, she had beauty, intelligence, charisma, the ability to undertake exciting and creative endeavours with a cast of interesting and important people: musicians to businessmen. What I don’t think I saw at that age was how her assumed lust for life was really her fragile being swept up in a long current of circumstance, how everything that she did she expected to result in something stable or permanent, something that would root her in fertile soil. I don’t catch all of what this girl says. He says, “Ontario,” then more precisely, “Kitchener, Ontario” explaining its geographical relation to Toronto. She asks something to me, “Um, J’ai parlez anglais?” I stumble.

“Where are you from?”

“Kitchener, Ontario.”

She speaks to him some more, gives us both a forced, sad smile and drifts a little way from the table solemnly. She hovers around here, dropping in on people and then retreating back to the open floor, a flower seed being blown about a bed of concrete.

“She wants you to achieve your dreams,” he translates to me.

Thunder Birds and Wild Cats

Y’know, T-bone, the first time that I met you, really met you, you were raving about Quality. I don’t think I got what you meant – actually, I was under the impression that you understood it even less than I did. Chances are that was just a defense of sorts; see, Wynd was on the floor being Composition VIII, my book cases had become double-helix casings for pure spiritual and molecular information, and my sister had suddenly materialized in the house.

Sometime around then you said, “Sharp, I don’t really know you that well. Tell me about yourself.” I was looking for Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution. It wasn’t with my photograph albums. I was confused – about your question, but mostly about the whereabouts of that fucking game. “Uh, what do you mean?” And you said, “Like, I don’t know, just tell me about yourself?” This question and my inability to accurately answer it, you must understand, was entirely dependent on the Self; at the moment, I couldn’t perceive what that meant: what makes the Self? is it the total sum of a being’s experience after quantitative values have been attributed to thoughts, feelings and reactions to any given experience, divided, multiplied, added, subtracted, and graphed accordingly? I saw a parabola – no hablar parabola. I then thought, how can I possibly reduce the self to any set of circumstances outside of the present second? T-Bone, why did you ask me such a fucking impossible question? “I, uh, I don’t know how to answer that.” You’re quicker than I am, “Well Sharp, what do you like to do?”

“This. I like to do this.” Right then I had an affection for pronouns, what handy, all encompassing things to have when you mean everything.

Before that, that whole experience, months beforehand, you’d shown me an essay you wrote about pot. I think you thought I’d get it. I liked it. I was glad somebody wrote it. After that, that essay, and that whole experience, months after that, we were at a friend’s birthday party – the streamer, balloon kind. Evidently, I’d forgotten about it and was too stoned to function in his mom’s van when she picked me up, I was glad you were there. Of everybody, I was glad you were there. I thought you’d get it. We watched Spiderman 3: what the fuck was up with that? How did they get away with making such shit?

Months later yet, you were standing in my crowded one bedroom apartment and asked Wynd and I, or maybe it was rhetorical, “How come you guys are so chill?” I don’t know, T-Bone. Maybe I’m just confident that there’s no reason to be any other way. You’re pretty chill yourself – I like that.

Your latest song, “Shithole of a Town”. I like it. Your voice kind of reminds of me M. Ward. Hopefully that doesn’t make you cringe. I know you don’t mean to be depressing – you’re not. Really, that’s all I needed to get juiced this morning and go get my leaving papers from my former employers. They didn’t have them. That’s cool though; I was feeling pretty Zen (whatever that means). You know, you probably won’t need to stop smoking that shit once you get a real job. Who wants a real job? If anything you might have to cut down, save it for holidays or something, but you won’t have to quit. Quit what? Quit nothing. Maybe you’ve been in that shithole of a town for too long and need a change. I understand that, but I actually like it – there are, like, 12 genuine people there. That’s 12 more than most places I’ve been. But whatever, if you need to get out you’re welcome in my claustrophobic apartment any time. I can probably get you a room, and fill it with people that want to hear you sing. If not before this post, maybe afterwards. Yeah, they might be humourless detractors, but whatever – at least somebody reads my blog.

Without wax,
Sharp.

P.S. Everyone else should download this song. It’s pretty sick.