Radial Symmetry

My problem is that I am long winded. Writing a short blog post is hard for me, and feels a bit unsatisfying. Because also my problem is that I like details. I live for details. I live through them. Details take a long time to write down.

Let's just say that this weekend, I managed not to get so drunk I had to lie down on my kitchen floor in the middle of a date. Let's say that I loved sharing a bag of popcorn with J. and giggling through Julie and Julia. Shall we say that I loved too a green-whipped ride along Scott Street one way and then the other, with Mars having risen higher between them. Let us dwell for a moment on the look of pleased surprise on D.Jack's face when I made myself an Unexpected Megan.

Let's say that I had a great time in Kingston at a wonderful brilliant art show. Let us add that I loved drinking beer outside as part of a faggot sidewalk party. Let us commend the homophobe Kingstoners who shouted that at us for their obviously perceptive nature.

To paraphrase -
Meghan: Do you think you have a thing for musicians?
Megan: I've dated about 3 non-musicians since I was 16.

Maybe too let's say that I tried very hard not to be a pill about my travelling arrangements, but that I only half succeeded. We'll say that I learned a few things about how I need to travel if I'm going to a place where the trains and buses run infrequently out of a station that is inexplicably way the fuck up Chebucto. Let us repeat these four words: Chill The Fuck Out.

Let us also ponder Mae's loveliness, the Mae who said "Okay, you should take the train because we probably won't leave for noon and then you'll be stressed and we'll be rushing. And this way you don't have to make small talk."

Finally, let us say that there are beautiful things, and here is a morning that is a string of them: waking up in a gigantor bed with your best friend, with the craziest bedhead after spending a muggy night tossing and turning. Being in a house with a perfect circle iron grate in the upstairs floor that you can press your eye against to spy on the main floor. Making coffee and eating breakfast with special-bought soy milk and more friendly friends and a nice dog and a cat you buried your face in deliciously even though doing so made you sneeze three times. And let us say that the coffee was good coffee and that the windows were opened onto the densely-leaved backyard.

And we will say that string is sparkling.

The personal experience I have of crack use is second-hand and of thankfully short duration.

Way back in the way back, for 4 years, I dated someone addicted to alcohol. I'm not talking the kind of person who'd probably be very uncomfortable if they had to go for few days without a few beers. I am talking about a serious and pernicious addiction that worked in a brutal and not-quite-predictable cycle.

He couldn't manage school, kept getting fired, had a hard time finding a new job. When he was drunk it was a nightmare with both of us out of control. The time he spent sober I spent sick-stomached waiting for it all to start again. It made both of our lives a fucking mess, and it took me two years of breaking up, trying to be friends and then taking him back to get him out of my life once and for all. The final straw was finding him drunk in my apartment with a teenaged runaway who lived down the hall.

The penultimate straw was crack.*

When he told me about this new habit he'd picked up - in the bathroom of a bar where he was drunk was the going story - I was only moderately surprised. I already knew that something had been going on for a few months. We lived in the same rooming house, went into and out of each other's rooms at will. He was suddenly gone most of the time, reappearing for a few minutes here and there, barely stopping to talk, in and out, at random hours. The only thing I could imagine was that he was cheating; I couldn't track him down to talk about it.

One evening, wanting a book, expecting him gone. I unlocked, fast knocked, and opened his door. It caught hard a few inches in with the chain pulled taut. It was dark in the room. I heard bedclothes rustling. A shifting sigh. He came to the door and leaned his forehead on the frame. The rest of his gaunt face was shadowed.

I have something to tell you he said.

That it was drugs made sense to me.The Other Woman spectre had been looming further and further away. He'd cheated on me before** and hadn't acted anything like what was going on. This time too, he'd gone through all of his money and an awful lot of mine, always for "rent" or "prescriptions."

You wouldn't think I'd be relieved about crack, but I was. I'd been handling his current substance for years at that point. Fundamentally, I didn't feel like this was much different. The behaviour, yes, and the scariness factor, yes. But not the core truth of it. He was no more emotionally stable when he was using just one substance. I was no more able to hold us both afloat.

After that conversation through the gap, he went into an outpatient clinic specifically for crack users. To the supposed wonder and irritation of the whole group, he found it remarkably easy to stop doing crack. Though he was a liar of pathological proportions, this still rings true. The erratic behaviour stopped and we went back to the more predictable drinking cycle, at which I was at least fairly practiced. He didn't go through money quite so fast. But he was around a lot more.

It didn't take many more weeks of that before I got him gone entirely. So far in my life, doing that is the hardest thing I've had to do.

++

This post all started because of the house across the street. It's always been a bit scoundrelly, but I thought of the tenants sort of affectionately that way. If they were scoundrels and sometimes loud, they mostly kept to themselves and seemed smoothed over, fairly agreeable with anyone who wasn't themselves or their asshole of a landlord. I thought of them as Our Scoundrels.

New people moved in a few months ago, and Our Scoundrels moved out because of them. They and the people who come because of them are a jaggedy lot, spilling into the backyard across and up and down the street.

I found out just a few days ago that it's a crack house. Lots of us on the street are upset, not so much about what is going on but how disruptive it is to the tenor of the whole street. Me included.

All of that is what I sat down to write about, my concerns with what's happening, but with my own reactions as well. But what's above is what came out instead.

I hope to get to what's going on now over the next week or two.

*I know. You'd think that taking up crack on top of booze might have been last straw material. Apparently, my head loved that wall.
**Most notably while I was in the hospital after having tried to kill myself. I was bitter about it for a long time and now it just boggles my mind.

I've had a slight problem with a spammer from China admiring my information on Louis Vuitton bags. It seems to be a person, rather than a machine, judging from the stat patterns and the fact that they can get around the stuff in place to discourage machines.

So I've changed the permissions slightly. I'll be approving every comment from here on in.

Obviously, I won't be approving comments about Louis Vuitton bags.

But all the other comments, I love them! You'll just have to wait a few hours or so for your words to show up here.

By the time Mike finished his pre-class spiel, almost everyone in the room had sniffled or wiped away a tear or blinked their eyes at the ceiling. He talked about how Santosha Centretown started, how he'd started in yoga, what practising has done for him, how wonderful the current space was. The peacefulness particularly of the room we were in. How nice it was. How sad it was the space was closing.*

My very first class at Santosha was with Mike on November 27, 2007. I'd been doing yoga for about a year and a half (starting at Rama Lotus with the awesome Jamine), but Ashtanga was a new kind of yoga for me, which was the main reason for switching. I also wanted to do lunchtime classes in the hopes that they'd be smaller and that the before and after would be less stressful than it had been at Rama Lotus.

The first few ashtanga classes kicked my ass. But I loved them and knew I was hooked in pretty short order. I bought a cheapie unlimited pass and started going pretty regularly.

Three weeks after my first class, Eric dumped me.

I wasn't sure I was going to survive how much that break up hurt. It wasn't a wail of "I'll never be happy again!" It was wondering whether that much pain might physically stop my heart.

How did I survive? By going slightly off the rails and doing yoga 5 or 6 times a week most weeks.

At Santosha. In the small room full of light and green plants and kindness.

Where either people did not notice, or were kind enough to pretend not to notice, that I was crying through many of my postures, that I sometimes left class for several minutes, coming back from the bathroom with bloodshot eyes.

Dayby day, month by month, I got better. Physically, yes, more able to follow my breath, more of my hand on the floor each time I bent over. But mostly in my head and my heart. I breathed and I healed with the unknowing support of the teachers and the students. And the space. That room itself came to be a place where I could pay attention and soothe what needed soothing. To learn when to push myself and when to be kind.

I went often enough for enough months that people started to talk to me. Joke me up a little. I stopped taking my membership card because all the teachers and staff came to know me by name and would have me down before I could hand it over. I got to know people's names. Everyone seemed really nice.

There's more lead up than this, more politics, but I don't know them and I don't want to. All I know is that a few weeks ago, Elena mentioned that the studio would be moving, they had a new place on Elgin. And then two weeks ago, the notice went up. Closed August 1st. Reopening sometime in the fall.

It's like someone cut my mooring rope. I know it's just a place and that there are lots of nice places. And that there are lots of nice people. And that wherever I end up, I'll probably see lots of them again. And that whatever happens, it will be what it will be, and that will be okay.

After class today, I sat on the toilet, put my face in my hands and silently sobbed again. For the last time. And that made me cry harder.

I am one of those vascular white people who cannot hide their feelings. When I get angry, the blood blossoms in jagged petals over my chest and neck. When I cry even a little, the tears scrawl themselves in hot rough patches over my face. My nose swells and turns bright red. The rims of my eyes turn puffy pink.

When I came out of the bathroom, lots of people patted my arm and told me it was okay. I hung around a bit more, not wanting to leave, for it to be really over. E. said she'd see me at the store. Scott said that we'd all pop up in each other's lives again. Adele gave me a hug and said that now she'd have to have another party.

I know this community is contingent, that we will move into and out of each other's lives. Aside from yoga, I actually can't tell you how much we have in common, because I don't know: it's almost all we talk about. But they have helped me shape who I am becoming. Have helped me start healing old wounds just by breathing beside me. Have told me that I actually can do what I think I cannot.

Too, I know that a room is, in the end, just 6 flat surfaces and air. But oh. Losing a place you feel safe and a group of people who support you, it is a hard thing.

Is worth mourning.

*Moving apparently, and re-opening, though we don't know to where or when.

Really, all it takes is a nice email. Munira Ravji sent me one a couple of weeks ago, asking me to cover this band I'd never heard of: LAL. I'm not entirely sure how she found me, since I don't really do music journalism here, so much as I gush about shows that I love and bitchily trash those I don't.

But I've just popped their myspace page on, and you know, it's pretty nice. I'm enjoying it. The singer's got a good voice. The music is, indeed, "threaded together with dub poetry, soul, folk, roots, jazz and a definitive dance-floor aesthetic."

My guess it that it'd be by and large a laid back show, with some nice energetic pieces and a good vibe all around. Even if their album Deportation is puported to be "a personal treatise on migration and movement, a challenge to militarism, dangerous love, and the stories of those silenced by (il)legality."

That sounds way heavier than what is coming out of my speakers.

I don't know that it's so much my kind of music that I'll go myself. But still. It was a nice email and I like to help nice people. So go see them.

++
August 2, 2009
10 pm
Mercury Lounge w/ dj Rise Ashen
56 Byward Market
MySpace
++

PS. And no, it certainly doesn't hurt if you're emailing me about bands that have a very cute girl in them.

Well, Internet, I've been keeping a secret from you.

Okay, not so much a secret. Just private. It's going around, it seems.

Normally, I'd be spilling all over myself to tap tap tap you out all the news concerning this information. With selected details and careful gushing.

I have been dating.

It's true. There is a person I have been meeting on a regular basis. We go out, we get tipsy, we remove our pants. Not always necessarily in that order, and occasionally one of those elements is absent.

In and of itself, this is not particularly remarkable. I've dated a fair few people over the past few years. Most of them have morphed from lovers to good friends. Occasionally they've hip-scotched over that line, one way or 'tother.

Thing is, I blogged about them all, and while I don't think blogging had anything to do with anything at the bottom line, I am reminded of a saying I stole from Jennifer. Do what you've always done, get what you've always gotten.

While I am not going to complain about the getting of good friends, the word that I have for the feeling that I'm feeling about my dates with D.Jack is this one: protective.

Blogging dating puts on some pressure. It forces me to say something, to make decisions about what I'm feeling, to make borders of definitions. And make them public.

So I am doing what I have not always done. I am giving this one room to breathe.

This dream can't be said to be recurring, because it's not, in its details. All the same, though, I have it. Once a year maybe, sometimes twice, sometimes once every two, I have a dream where I'm pregnant. Or I've just given birth.

I don't have the baby. The baby is nowhere to be seen.

It's not a stress dream. I am not hunting high and low looking for the baby, worried that it is shrivelling up somewhere with a last mewl, I am not worried that I am a very bad person for letting that happen.

I am calmly thinking. Oh well. The baby will be alright.

Sometimes I find the baby. Sometimes I don't.

Two nights ago, the baby appeared. I had just finished thinking The baby will be alright when I looked down at my cupped hands and there was the baby. My baby was the tiniest swiss army knife, the size of two rice grains; oxblood, the silver corkscrew tucked in safe along the side.

I found the baby and I loved it.

Ohhhh, I loved this baby. Just like they said. You fall. In love. My tiniest swiss army knife baby.

Those of you who get me through their reader won't have seen what's in the sidebar. This is for you.

++House Band Reading Series++

Brendan McNally's smash hit series has another installment this Friday.

You want to be there. The last time I saw this, he fell flat on his face and I worried he'd broken his teeth again.

w/rob mclennan
& me

Friday, July 24, 2009
9:00pm - 11:00pm
Raw Sugar Cafe
692 Somerset Street West
$5/PWYC

Shelley and I had a great drifty night last night. We'd spent the week tossing around ideas of stuff to do. Dinner, of course, to start, then maybe a bike and a drink, or an art opening and a drink, maybe could we do some cat visiting too. And hey, let's bike by a couple of houses for sale, just to keep an eye out.

With none of it having to be done at any kind of specific time I drifted over around 6, we barbecued and ate salad, shot the shit, looked at the clock and headed out.

"Should we bike?" Shelley asked. With the rain ever threatening, I've been driving more than normal to places.

"Let's chance it," I said.

And we did, meandering along Ottawa's leafy side streets, wrapped in sweaters and hoodies in the autumnal July night. We looked at gardens and managed a path through construction, looked at art and talked to friends in the human humid ArtGuise space.

We sat on the front porch on Flora Street and made the world right over beer and a velvety cat, eavesdropping on the bike couriers next door, listening to the fat rain drops plop on the broad maple leaves above us.

Waited for the rain to stop and the mosquitos to get too bad, rolled home in the dark.

About 6 weeks ago, I lost my sunglasses.

It was shitty, because prescription sunglasses are expensive. But they were well and truly gone, and I am too old to be squinting my increasingly creasing face up into the sun. So I got new ones, and they're very cute. I picked them up, pronounced myself happy to the nice glasses lady, and went back outside to hop on my bike and head back home.

I put my helmet on my head, and the back doohickey pressed into the ends of the arms and nearly popped my expensive new glasses off my face and onto the ground. I fussed and fiddled and I managed to find a decent balance, but it didn't last long and I spent the 10 minute ride pushing my sunglasses uselessly up my face.

Not so happy, maybe.

I've been kind of making do since then, wearing glasses/no helmet mostly, occasionally trying both and getting too irritated every time.

Today was really a day for both, but I could not stomach the thought of worrying my glasses back up my nose every 30 seconds, or worse, having them fall off my face and having to buy new ones.

But it was bright, I was heading out on Shelley's fast bike and I was gonna be out for a while. I didn't want to miss it. The afternoon was perfect for me. Not too hot, just enough humidity to raise the fecund smells up out of the grass and off the river.

I weighed the pros and cons of no-helmet vs. no-glasses. Could I do no helmet? Yes, but. Could I do no glasses? I didn't actually know. In the end, I decided that I didn't really need to see all that well to bike for 45 minutes, and I would wear my cheapie sunglasses that fit better under my helmet.

Ahem.

Considering that I almost fell down the Primrose steps as I was carrying the bike down and then actually ran into someone (their fault, but I didn't see it coming) on the way back, I would say that it was a bad idea.

Not a terrible idea, since the worst thing that happened was that I cursed at an old lady, but goddamn, I almost really needed that helmet.