Inside the Lines

That was an interesting trip. This will be a scattered post.

First, it started with non-trip-related blog weirdness. I woke up early Saturday morning and checked my email. Lots of comments in my inbox - unusual, but kind of nice. Until I read them. So far, in the past week, anonymous commenters have told me that I’m a dud in relationships, that I’m ugly, and that the only reason a boy would want to flirt with me is if I’m the only knothole in a storm. Knothole? What?

I may be a sex fiend, but I certainly did not offer my knothole to [redacted] on Friday afternoon.

And, to clear this up, [redacted] is an excellent flirter. It feels nice to get that kind of careful attention. Not as nice as the equally careful, but very different attention from the GD. And I am not fooling myself that [redacted] gives me a special kind of careful attention. To be that good at flirting, he must be practicing regularly and with many women. Does this make me less attractive? No, it does not. Does this mean that I want to date [redacted]? No, it does not. Does this mean [redacted] wants to date me? Though I have not asked, I am fairly certain that no, it does not. Flirting without intent is very satisfying all on its own.

A 5 hour bus ride with Shelley was the perfect place to decompress about that. And I listened to Wolf Parade really loud.*

However, the early morning kerfuffle left me weirded out and shaken for most of the day. Toyed with quitting this blogging business. Got to the hostel and felt some relief. It was clean, it was on a quiet street. I wasn’t afraid to go into the bathroom in my bare feet. This, I thought, is looking up.

Next was my friend Rita’s performance-art performance. (Here’s a link to the 7a*11d festival, but the site kind of sucks.) It was amazing. Eerie, with light switches and sockets and pieces of drywall all moving around like little animals; with sticks and grasses and pine cones stuck on the wall; with doors and windows and blinds all opening and shutting of their own accord; with all of that movement also wired for sound, each keening or singing or speaking or whining. It was disquieting and overwhelming. And in the middle of it, Rita bludgeoned her way through a hollow wall, and leaned there, half in, half out of the wall, resting and asleep at the edge of the cacophony for about 30 minutes. It was uncanny. In the Freudian sense. I mean that as a huge compliment.

Dinner was delicious and I was looking forward to a loud punk show at an old Toronto haunt and meeting Jennifer. Got to Lee’s Palace and the Slits show was cancelled. Cancelled? Fuck. Wwell, I’d just have to give Jennifer a call on her cell and…. fuck me. I hadn’t written her cell number down. And I stubbornly cling to my luddite status by refusing to own a cell phone. I panicked and dragged my Toronto friends around with me, back to Futures (maybe she was there?), up into an internet café (definitely not there, but maybe i had her cell number in an email?), back to Lee’s Palace (maybe she was in line?), a frozen payphone call to Jennifer’s roommate in Ottawa, for whom I left several disjointed and increasingly frantic emails. Then I went back to the Internet café and emailed Jennifer (maybe she was panicked and at an internet café too?).

Took a deep breath. Decided that my last ditch attempt would be to go up to the door guy and say “Umm, so, have you seen a girl who looks kind of like me walking around here looking for a girl who looks kind of like her?” I left the internet café, walked towards Lee’s and the about-to-be-very confused door guy. And heard my name. There was Jennifer, waiting in line to ask the door guy to let her in to look for me. It was like the sun dawning.

We didn’t sleep so well, but she promised she’d blog that story.

Canzine was fine. I won’t be going again, that’s for sure. We sold 6 manners zines and I sold 3 chapbooks. Hardly worth the couple hundred dollars I spent to get there and back. But I did talk to Amber Goodwyn, who was really nice, and I’m going to try to write an erotic story to send to her.

And I did see the first girl I ever had a crush on. Winona. Oh, Winona. I met her in a second year humanities class and didn’t know what the fuck had hit me. 10 years later, I still find her so beautiful I can barely breathe when she’s standing next to me and I can feel all my organs liquefy.

We had a very odd conversation. 1) Turns out she’s going to library school in January. Which made me shout “No shit!” into her shocked face. 2) Turns out that she interviewed my ex-nasty for a retail job at a bookstore.

W: There was something a little. Off. About him.
M: (Biting back “Oh, you mean the fact that he’s a pathologically-lying crack-addicted alcoholic?”) Yeah, he’s an asshole.
W: It was kind of sad. He came off as unemployable.

That is kind of sad. As nasty as he was, as much as it seemed quite plausible that he’d died in a ditch, it is not nice to have confirmed that at 40 years old, he came off as too fucked up to get a job working the counter at a bookstore.

Anyway, we ate a great and huge dinner at Juice for Life on Bloor Street and Jennifer let me drive home, playing the excellent dj the whole way.

We ended the trip listening to Wolf Parade, each of us singing quietly along as we sped through the dark and the mist and I fought with the wind and the tired to keep us between the lines.

*I had broken up with My Fake Boyfriend Spencer Krug, what with the mustache and the smoking and the sulking, but that album is just so good. I may have to take him back. I’ll get my secretary to draft a memo.