neighbourhood

Early early Monday morning, even before Freya had started her nightly yowls, there was a huge crash from outside. A booming crash that rung out for a while. A loud crash that had my heart pounding and my limbs stiff. It sounded like it was in my house, but since I missed the first part of it, I wasn't sure. And there was nothing more after the echo died down. So I breathed some deep breaths and went back to sleep.

In the morning, I poked around the house a bit, but didn't find anything.

It was garbage night, I said to myself. It was windy. Probably someone's garbage can blew into someone's house.

My neighbour must have been waiting for me last night. Because as soon as I'd flipped open my mailbox, after trudging home through the late afternoon gloom and spitty sky, I heard a throat-clearing harrumph.

"Oh!" I jumped. "Hi! Sorry, didn't see you there."

"Hello. Sorry to scare you. I was wondering if you noticed this." And he pointed between our houses.

There's a narrow gap between our houses. The edges of our roofs almost touch. It's on the other side of my front porch, and it's just pavement and no light, so I never look down there.

I looked. Looked down where he was pointing. At the twisted metal of god knows-

"My brother," he said, "Heard a huge crash around 3 am on Monday"

"3:14," I mumbled. It's what Shelley's clock had said when we compared notes.

"And when I came out in the morning, I saw this. It's the eavestrough, the soffit and the fascia. All the way nearly to the back."

"Oh! The fascia." I nodded and pursed my lips like I knew what he was talking about. The furrow in my brow was genuine, however, because whatever those twisted bits were down there, they were long and they were varied.

"I wondered if you hadn't seen it."

"No. I forget about this side of the house sometimes."

My poor neighbour. He must think we are completely hapless. Our garden was a disaster. Our driveway is a disaster. I haven't once mowed the lawn: my neighbour always breaks early, about when I'm thinking it might be time in a week or two. The house falls apart and we don't notice.

My street is very strange tonight.

Sitting at the archipelago, I could hear a live band that sounded like Arcade Fire. Now, I assumed that the Arcade Fire was neither practicing on my street nor playing a show at the fairly small cafe at the end of my street. Gone are those days, which I actually remember reasonably well.

So I went out to inspect who exactly was playing where.

When I poked my head out, there were flashing lights and yellow tape. Did someone faint because of the syncopated rhythms and the heartfelt whoa-oh-ohs? I moseyed on down the street to find out.

When I got to the corner, there were about 10 fire vehicles and 5 cop cars blocking the block. Hazmat and Decon, mostly.

It may say something that my first thought was "They have a deconstruction van?"

Ponder that for an entertaining moment.

I tried to puzzle it out a bit. Seemed to involve the fast food chain on the corner. Though might have been something at the gas station. Not an accident: no one hurt, no yelling, no dented metal, broken glass, no pale faces or blood on the road.

On my way back home I stopped at the open window of a white city-owned pickup. There was a very shiny bald man in there watching the band across the street.

"So, uh. Hi? Excuse me?"

He turned his head to look at me. Cocked an eyebrow.

"Um, what's all this?" I jerked a thumb back over my shoulder.

"When I got here an hour ago, they said there was a corrosive package at the Pizza Pizza."

His lips twitched. My lips twitched. I wrapped my arms around my waist to keep in the giggles.

"Hazmat? At the Pizza Pizza?"

"Yep."

Maybe he was pinching his thigh to keep his in.

Did I mention something a day or two ago about being tired? I didn't know from tired. I'm tired enough now that when I lay down to have a nap this afternoon, I started having weird acid flashbacks from the one time I tried the stuff. During that come down, I couldn't close my eyes because when I did, all these patterns, some organic, some geometric, sometimes a meld of the two, would spin complicated whirligigs across the backs of my eyelids, sometimes in colour, sometimes not.

Trying to nap today was like coming down off a strong drug, though I will wait until I'm less frayed around the edges to write about which one.

After my attempted nap, after a short shift at venus envy, during which I really didn't do very much except stand around a little blurry-like and tell people it was Saturday, I hit the Hartman's. For days, what little of my brain wasn't devoted to thoroughly sinful thoughts of pants removal was devoted to kale. I was missing me some dark greens. And food not fried in oil and slathered in butter.

I knew the Hartman's might be difficult. I could feel that my patience was worn a little thin and that my irritation was about to poke through, and lord knows what may happen at the Hartman's.

But it wasn't busy, so I sailed through, grabbed a big pile of chard instead of the pallid kale they had on offer, some garlic, some olives for snacking. There was only one woman in front of me at the 1 to 8 cash. Perfect.

Of course there's a but.

She couldn't find her money. She had it, of course, look, she'd just been to the ATM, here was the slip, see, she'd just been, and her cards out on the belt, and The Slip and another slip and rooting through one pocket and then another. I felt another thread snap.

But we've all been there, right? I've felt that panic prickling in before. So I took a deep breath, reminded myself that I was overtired and not reacting the way I normally would, and cut her the slack I hoped other people might cut me were I in her position.

And then she touched my chard.

She had plonked her purse down on the belt, where it was blocking the sensor that kept the belt from moving the next order forward. In the course of rooting through it, she kept lifting it up and putting it back down again.

My chard, being used as the order separator since the plastic one was missing, was creeping closer and closer to her purse. I kept moving it back, but then she lifted her purse for longer than I expected and with my reflexes even slower than my fairly slow norm, I missed the boat.

By rights, it is really more fair to say that my chard touched her purse and she brushed it away.

I pulled it back, but I also kept expecting that the other people who had control of this situation might 1) keep their damn purse on the belt if they didn't want strange chard touching it or 2) turn the damn belt off. But they didn't and they didn't, so I pulled the chard back and watched it creep forward until it touched her purse and she brushed it away like a mosquito.

When she showed the bank slip to the stoic cashier for the second time, but with a more frantic note in her voice, I decided that instead of thinking about taking her purse and shaking it out onto the floor, I should probably take my exhausted carcass and its greens to another line.

The wait was a bit longer, but totally worth it. I was next in line. The cashier rang in the olives and the garlic, and I rummaged around in my wallet through what had become a considerable amount of change for the bits that were useful in this country. The cashier went to open a plastic bag to put the garlic in, I went to say "Oh no, thank you, I don't nee-" and dropped my wallet, the change spilling out over the floor.

The other people in line watched me crouch on the floor and try to shovel the coins back in. Trying to be quick was making me clumsy, so I kept dropping them again. I heard the total of the bill waft over the belt. I looked up at the total. It was nearly 10 dollars, which seemed a little high. I looked up one line. Rhubarb. Not chard.

Another thread snapped.

"You charged me 8 dollars for rhubarb," I barked from my crouched position.

She looked down at me like I had just spoken to her in Sumerian. "What?"

I stood up, feeling bad for snapping at her. Not a Big Deal, I breathed. "It's not rhubarb, it's chard. It really does look like rhurbarb, I know, easy mistake," I back-pedalled. "But it's chard."

"It's what?"

"Swiss chard."

She looked at me blankly.

I tried to be helpful. "It's like kale," I said. "But umm. Not."

Apparently, this was not helpful. She held it aloft and waved it at the cashier next to her. "What's the code for this?"

I could feel the people behind me start to get tense.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said.

"It's chard," I said.

"It's what?" he asked.

I took another deep breath and hoped the people behind me were cutting me some slack.

I will start with the smallest ones first.

Around 1:30 this afternoon (1:35 to be more precise, though it turned to 1:36 while I was leaving the message) I called Jennifer to say, "I'm going to the bridgehead to write. I'll be leaving around 2:30, so if you're up for it, meet me there!"

Around 2:30 (at 2:24 to be precise, though it turned to 2:26 while we were making plans) Greg called to say, "We're going to the park, and the girls asked if you wanted to come." I'm sick, so I said "I'll wash my hands and make sure I don't really touch them." Which is impossible around 2 year olds as adorable as these two year olds.

As it turns out, the best way to take a picture of a two year old is to have the following conversation:
"Hey Rubes, do you mind if I take your picture?"
"NO!"
"Okay, I'm going to slow the swing down, and get my camera and be right back."
"KAY."
"Okey doke. Here we go. Who's super cutie?"
Well, the answer to that is pretty obvious, isn't it.

For most of our park time, Fiona and I hung out by the swings. By which I mean I listened to Fiona's incredibly entertaining running commentary "higher higher good swinging papa ruby hi ruby hi papa mama slow down fix hat higher megan nice swinging time frances birdies wire higher good swinging ronica burfday paul eamon john john john fun burfday" while I pushed her till my arm ached. She was killing me, she was so adorable.

I loooooove how many words they have.

One of the things I bought at the wicked cool zine store in Portland was a book involving a small girl and a hootenanny. So on the way through the park after playing, Greg tipped up the stroller and said "Hey girls!" To which they replied "Hootenanny!"

Love it.

Further along, on the way to Bridgehead, we walked by the Oak, where a traditional Irish band was playing. We looked sideways at each other and kind of rolled our eyes. Then I got excited. "But but but! It's a HOOTENANNY!" Greg got excited too. He tipped back the stroller "Hey girls! What is it?" Perhaps is was a bit of post-park sleepiness or pre-cookie anticipation or a glaze of wonder in the face of a real live hootenanny, because they said a measured "Hootenanny," and looked away.

Off we trotted then, to Bridgehead, where there was not room for Greg and the girls, but was for me and my laptop. I snuggled myself in with a coffee, and tried not to be distracted by a woman who kept, in a annoyingly nasal and terribly loud voice, telling her son, who was playing some video game that he kept calling stupid, to be quiet.

Though her voice did allow me to overhear parts of an infuriating conversation. The woman, long-haired hippie aesthetic, her son astride her knee, nestling his back into her chest, was chatting with her also long-haired hippie friend, who had an adorably quiet young girl in his lap. Long-haired Woman said "Oh, and we were going to do his toes, purple I think - wasn't it, sweetie?"

Cool, I thought. Long-haired man also nodded his approval. The son mumbled something at his game.

"What was that, sweetie?"
He ducked his head a little lower and mumbled something else.
"Weird? You're weird? At school?" She started stroking the side of his head, obviously distressed.

And you know, they had me up to this point. -Fuck people! I thought. -Ah, kid, it'll get better, I thought. I'm a sucker for that. Going to school with a bunch of people who think you're weird is shitty. Knowing that they're right is even shittier.

She said "You're not weird! Of course you're not weird!"

And she lost me. I mean, I don't know what school that kid goes to, but I do know Ottawa, and chances are he doesn't go to a school where a significant proportion of the boys are contented pink-shirt-wearing vegan jews with purple-painted toenails. Just a guess.

So telling him that he doesn't know what he's experiencing on top of being the weird kid? Not exactly going to help give him the self-confidence he going to need to be a triumphant weird kid.

But easy for me, eh? We'll see what my reaction is if either Fiona or Ruby says that to me in 4 years.

In the middle part of my weekly food rounds (Bridgehead for soup/coffee/larfs with Michael and Adam, if I'm lucky enough to catch them; Herb & Spice for bulk, greens, eggs; Hartman's for the rest) I ran into Stephanie.

"So, what are you doing tonight?" she asked.
"Enh, staying home. I have a Pixies documentary to watch."

I felt slightly sheepish, because even though I think this is an entirely fine thing to accomplish with a Saturday night, it's not really, well, exciting. Unless you like the Pixies and don't feel like leaving your house. So I was pretty excited about it, but could see that from the outside, it might make me look, well, kind of boring. Like the kind of person who doesn't *do* things.

But seems her two band boy roommates are out of town touring a lot these days, and when they're gone, she, you know, finds herself at home alone, not going out. She seemed a bit sheepish, too, so we got to be a bit sheepish and also relieved to be sheepish together.

It's hibernating season, bright sun today be damned. I'm feeling slow in my words, in my body, my thoughts. I can only hope that after all this staying in and still there's something quick coming along.

Andrew Farrell was my upstairs neighbour for almost a year and a half. He is a genuine, warm, nice, funny, sweet guy. And a kick ass artist.

I've only been to one of his other shows: Still My Eyesore. It was mainly large oil paintings of the City Centre building, an ugly decrepit building near where we used to live. I've always loved it. And so has Andy, though I didn't know till I walked in that night; we had never discussed it.

I was overwhelmed when I saw the paintings. They were infused with the exact feeling I have for the City Centre. Protective pity. A steeliness and fuck you running through it. I cried.

His current show is called Massive Nights. The vernissage has already started as I write this, but is going till 10:30. If you get the chance, go tonight. If you don't get the chance, then you've got till January 15th to get your tuchis to ArtGuise.

I stole this jpg from the Facebook event. I hope that's okay. If someone doesn't like it, just let me know and I'll take it down.

So far, the hipsters are winning.

Sunday afternoon, after Eric and Steve and I finished our pancakes, and Steve's dad picked Steve up to take him sadly away from Ottawa, Eric helped me take the Hi Fi out to the curb.

It was a sad day. It was broken, so it never did anything except hold up my typewriters, but what a job it did of that, in its warm cherrywood splendour.

I kept the typewriters. Except for the Underwood I was babysitting for Jennifer. That one I sent back to her house with the gold desk of wonder, which is currently making her bedroom look fabulous.

Anyroad. We set the hi fi down on the grass near the sidewalk, where it looked even better against the green green grass. Eric wondered aloud if it would just end up at the dump. "Not a chance," I said. Emphatically.

No longer than 13 minutes later, I heard the tell-tale scrape of two cherrywood legs on concrete. It was the man who plays guitar with a mug on the stump of his arm. According to my ex, he is the only true blues man in Ottawa. The Only True Blues Man often sits on the corner at the end of my street, singing and playing and asking for change. I was a little alarmed at him trying to drag this thing along, but he seemed to be making a pretty good go of it, so I left him alone and went back to working at my new computer table.*

The scraping sound stopped, and I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. The Only True Blues Man had gone across the street, grabbed a drawer from an abandoned night table and was putting the drawer under the feet that were scraping.

Correction, foot.

I got up and moved a little closer. The drawer was only under one foot, and not useful enough. He abandoned that and disappeared from view. And reappeared. With my blue box.

Fuck that, I thought, I'm not dragging my ass down to the Glebe Home Hardware and dragging both my ass and a new blue box back. Not even for the Only True Blues Man and really definitely not for a fucking broken hi fi.

I stomped out there, down to the sidewalk and said "That's my recycling bin."

Unfortunately, besides "no, sorry, have a good day," those are the first words I have spoken to him. That doesn't seem right.

"Okay, man, I'm just going to take this around the corner. I'll bring the box right back."

Having just replaced my black box, I was having none of that. "You're taking it where?"

"Just to the corner."

"Well I'll just help you then. There's no point in dragging it if we can just carry it."

He eyed me suspiciously. "You sure you can carry this thing?"

I squinched my face up. "Uh, yeah. I carried it out here."

"By yourself?"

"No, of course not. But if we're just taking it to the corner, I'm fine, swear to god."

We picked it up and took it not even to the corner, but to the driveway of my house, less than 20 feet up the sidewalk. He scootched it into the cedar hedge. Asked me if it worked. He was crestfallen when I said no, but quickly recovered and looked crafty, looked up from under his eyebrows at me. "Ah," and here he pointed a finger at the sky. "Tubes."

Indeed. That lead to what felt like a overly long conversation about tube electronics and component stereos. Turns out he's an old electronics guy and is pretty confident he can fix this thing and sell it. His plan is to have his son pick it up (in 4 days, when said son gets back from the bush), and have it taken to the son's house in Kanata, where the Only Real Blues Man will work his tubular magic.

Of course, this plan involved me covering it up and putting a sign on it. Which I did not agree to do. Garbage picking is a dog-eat-dog world, in my estimation. Prime garbage goes to the person who not only spots, but permanently moves, the piece in question. It took me days to recover from rescuing my new computer table. With aching shoulders and bruised hipbones in mind, I probably lacked the sympathy I should have felt.

On my way home today, I noticed the hi fi was still scootched into a cedar hedge, but a cedar hedge in the yard belonging to the hipster boys up the road. I don't like them. Jennifer doesn't like them either. They have a life-sized plastic deer on their 2nd floor balcony, looking down at the street. I find this gratingly ironic, and it startles Jennifer every morning when she is not quite fully awake, but out and walking Shy Dog.

We only had this conversation about how we mutually hated the deer but for different reasons because we were sitting on her porch chatting and working on the outline to our Ladyfest workshop on Saturday, and ended up having to yell at each other because the pod of hipster boys was rolling up and down the road and doing almost-fancy tricks on their skateboards. We successfully channelled our old lady selves.

Since the hipster boys have gone out of their way to displease me, what with their too-obvious ironical tendencies and loud skateboarding ways,** and since the Only True Blues Man saw it first, I hope he wins the Hi Fi Wars. They outnumber him quite significantly, but I think he's probably tougher than all of them combined.

*More on that later.
**Though they did let Ruby skateboard one night, and that was entirely pleasing. So okay, I take it back. I still hate the skateboarding when I'm trying to have a peaceful gossip on my front porch and by god, I hate that deer more than anything else on this street, but I don't don't like them.