d.jack

Warning: Extreme sappiness ahead.

Here in Ottawa we're rolling into the third annual Gaga Weekend. Last year's was an excellent time. So excellent, in fact, that I eschewed all the Westfest stuff - I was either at Gaga events or too tired out by them to head west at all.

There was rocking, there was rolling. It was the birthplace of Fashion Crimes Bingo. It also gave me a two day hangover I nursed with more beer.

It was crazy fun. I loved how DIY it was, I liked how well organized it was. I marvelled that they were able to merge those two things so successfully: that is one fine line to walk. I loved how many women were both on the stage and in the audience.*

Jennifer was my consistent companion, though Steve and I believe perhaps Mitch joined us Saturday for the big show, and d.jack was my date that night. Or, at any rate, I wrangled him home with me,** which is close enough to a date in my books.

So this week I've been making arrangements. Who's going to be at what show, when should we meet, should I bring my bingo card, etc. etc.

And then I thought, that's right, when I got there last year, to Yogi's, to the afternoon show, the matinee, if you will, d.jack was all happy to see me. And I thought, huh, that's right, this time last year, we had just started dating. And then I thought, jesus, this time last year. how did that happen so fast? when the winter seemed so long? And then I thought, how did that happen at all, that i'm dating someone for more than one year and am *happy*? And then I thought and *content*! And then I thought, holy shit. this really could not have turned out any better.

And then I stopped thinking because I didn't want to jinx it.

But then my heart got all swelled up anyhow and I wished he was there so I could wrap my arms all the way around him and squeeze him with the biggest squeeze ever and put my lips on his lips and breathe.

*Other weekend festivals will go nearly unmentioned. Though, to be fair, this year's line up was the most lady-tastic ever.
**And then wrangled him some more, lar lar.

Last Saturday night, Jennifer and I headed out to Wakefield to catch some of the HiFi reunion weekend at Kaffe 1870. I never made it to the HiFi – its glory days in Ottawa preceded my own – but I liked everyone on the bill. The Recoilers, Jim Bryson, Janice Hall – I may not have been at the HiFi, but I've seen all those people play elsewhere and liked 'em.

We got into the bar, which is a lovely little place. We got our beer and got settled. We stood around chatting lady chat, as we do, and I mentioned that d.jack had rescheduled his return from London so as to come back a day earlier.

I must have looked slightly sheepish when I said that, because her response was to laugh and say “Did you Elinor Dashwood again?” And my response was to also laugh and look more sheepish and admit that I had.

If you've read the book, it's in there too, but what’s burned in my brain is Emma Thompson’s face at the end of Ang Lee's version of Sense & Sensibility. There's that scene, where Edward tells Elinor that he did not get married to the woman he did not love but felt obliged to marry. Elinor, played by Thompson, has been restrainedly and impossibly in love with Edward for a very long time. When she finds out the news, she isn’t happy. She breaks.

It was going to be a surprise, his early return, and that is a very sweet idea, but it may well have killed me, just finding him in my house unexpectedly. But he couldn’t wait, was maybe unsure of how I’d take it, too, and spilled the beans over chat.

I looked at the screen dumbly for a moment.

I typed "really?" a bunch of times and then variations on "are you joking?" a bunch more.

I felt a big lump in my throat. I thought Honestly, Butcher. Am I really going to do this agai- and started honking out jagged sobs. It didn’t last very long, but it was a relief, even if I felt slightly foolish after.

Today? Today’s that one-day-earlier day. As I type, he’s just started the drive back to Ottawa. Back home. Back to his family, his friends. Back to me.

I can’t fucking wait.

One of the first things I do most mornings, after yoga, after putting the kettle on for coffee, after putting the bread in to toast, after feeding the wee cat, though sometimes before all those things, you never know, is to open my email. I could pretend that I'm not looking for an email from my lover first and foremost, but we'd all know I'd be lying.

Monday morning, there were a couple, maybe a few. Shortish notes, all of them. One of them was a recap of the fun the night before. The next was an email saying he'd just found out he didn't get a position in London he'd applied for.

Which meant, I knew, because we've been talking about it for weeks, that the 4 months we were going to have together in the same city had just magically stretched to 8.

You would think - and I expected - that when I got this email I would go into paroxysms of delight. That I might dance a happy dance around my house and maybe sing a tune or two of joy.

What I did instead was nothing. Exactly nothing. I, in fact, forgot about it. Completely. I archived the note in Gmail and erased its existence from my conscious memory.

It wasn't until hours later, when I was leaving work and the door clicked softly behind me, that I remembered. Something about the click, I think, or the colours on the street as I walked out, or a smell in the air. But it was suddenly there.

Remembered the way you remember one piece of a dream from the night before. I could see the email in my mind's eye, the shape of the words on the screen. Hyper-sharp in the centre, wavery around the edges.

I couldn't remember if it was real or not.

It was, I ascertained after a few texts exchanged as I walked home from work. And I started leaking around the eyes, just a little.

All Monday night and all yesterday I felt bloated with tears, you know that feeling?, where you can feel them pressing against the inside of your skin all over everywhere and you feel puffy, about to burst.

This morning, I emailed Jennifer to tell her the good news and my weird reaction and I hit send and I started bawling. Gaspy-breathed, puffy-faced, snotty, red-eyed bawling.

It's the first time I've cried since he left.

When I fell in love with him, I did that fully conscious - and accepting - of the fact that he's based in two cities, an honest-to-goodness nomad travelling a worn path between two homes. So when I've felt sad or lonely this winter, I've mostly just pushed through it. "What can I do?" I thought. "Four months isn't a big deal," I thought. "Just x days till the next visit," I thought. "It'll go fast." I convinced myself.

When the subject of his plans in the fall came up, I said "I'm just going to work under the assumption that you'll be gone. That way I won't be disappointed." And I thought that was fine. I was steeled for it.

And now he's home in a couple of weeks, and now I don't have to brace myself for him leaving quickly after, and now, god, now I am crying.

The tearing feeling of saying goodbye once a month; the inability of skype to transmit smell; the camera right there by his chin where I might usually put a kiss; how he can still make me laugh till I snort over chat; the way I have been Holding It Together; the relief of not having to be this strong in the fall; the incredibly luxury of 8 months together.

It's just all a little much to take, all at once.

So you'd think I'd get that email telling me I'd have him here for more than two seasons and you'd think I'd leap up out of my seat and dance and sing. But I think it was more than my brain could handle. So the info got filed somewhere safe until I could start to process what those feelings might be.

I'm excited, fuck yes, and I can see the dancing and the singing on the horizon, but now, for right now, I believe I will have to lie on the floor and let those feelings feel their way through me.

I got home from London last night. I'd call it the boring London except that it seems a bit like magic-land to me.

It's a place where I don't have to work; where I nap; good food is abundant; the wine flows freely; where my body and psyche get blurry from physical and emotional satiation.

It might be nice to go back in the summer sometime, since on my two trips so far, it's been cold enough that we haven't done a ton of wandering and sitting outside. I just follow, and with my poor sense of direction my sense of the city is the same.

Though this trip wasn't icy cold like the last one, so we wandered to Wortley, had a cider, grabbed a coffee to go. We looked at the river near the brewery. We ate a couple of really good dinners. I drank more wine than I had in the past 4 weeks combined. We ate salmon with the Daubs and their three dogs; the pope sat at my feet as I picked the stuff I liked out of the salad bowl for dessert. People dropped by for visits at the Grad Club. We were the old people at CTO pointing out the names of Canadian bands almost popular 10 years ago until I stopped for a few minutes to dance to the Cure. We were the only people not working at Moon Over Marin and a third of the audience at the Richmond Tavern. We ate lunch with my first love. We watched crappy TV and ate snacks in bed. We kissed and grabbed and looked and cuddled and stroked and fucked and laughed.

And talked. Ohhhh and we talked. Desultory hungry conversation before the eggs came, confidences too loud after the bar. The ebb and flow over sidewalks and rivers and pints.

It's hard to say what the best part of the trip was. It was a blur, a lot of it. People, buildings, people, sun, the food, shadows, beer, wine, the faint smell of gas in our apartment. We stayed on the Upper East Side - a bit tonier in some ways, a bit rougher in others, than the East Village or Brooklyn's Park Slope, the neighbourhoods I've stayed in before.

We walked. We walked and walked. We walked so much my shin seized up and I was limping.

We saw the Met by mistake, we walked the MoMA till our eyes were too full of beautiful things to take in any more.

We cut through a glinting Central Park, blanketed with snow under a blazing sun. A warm spring sun. I tried to wash the taste of the worst breakfast ever out of my mouth with swigs of the worst tea-like substance ever bottled. I bought a smoothie to wash that away. We left the tea chilling in a snow bank near the building where John Lennon was shot, where Yoko Ono lives.

Seeing Yoko Ono perform Monday night - the eve of her 77th birthday - was surely one of the highlights.

She is bananas.

Not in the ululating way, which I far prefer to the lyrics she was singing. The first couple of songs I sat there, listening to what she was singing with my arms and legs folded up as many times as I could make them. I knew my body language was parlaying the fact that the lyrics were making me want to tear something up into tiny little bits. I could feel D.Jack noticing, and I kept trying to unwind my limbs and facial muscles so that at least one of us could have a good time without worrying that the other one wasn't.

But then finally, finally, the music took over. She ululated more and spoke less and the tension I had eased out of my body stayed out. And then Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon came on stage and they played skronky guitar while Yoko wailed about mulberries. And I loved it with everything.

We drank a bottle of really good wine while eating tender noodles. We drank bubbly wine after. We walked up and down Broadway looking for J. And lo, I am here to give you these two tips:

1. there is no 1087 Broadway in Manhattan
2. always check what borough you're supposed to be in, since, maybe, perhaps, there is a club playing raucous riot grrrl covers in the deep depths of Brooklyn instead of pigeons cooing in the park that should rightfully be where the music is

We were tired a lot of the time, tried to fit in naps, or at least rests every day. I always forget how tiring it is just to see things. To soak up the reflection of all the light reflecting off all those buildings, the new faces, tones, voices, the cars, the honking, the honking. How the sheer masses of people in New York, particularly, make my head swim and my brain use up glucose faster than I can produce it.

The problem with stopping for a moment is that you realize how goddamn tired you are.

Possibly too tired to mop the floor.

I'm off to New York City tomorrow, another weekend date with D.Jack. We've been sort of planning this since, I dunno, November maybe?, and for serious planning it for a month.

But only about 15 minutes ago, when I was sweeping up the dirt from sweeping in preparation for mopping, bent down industriously trying to get the last bit of remaindirt, did I think "Holy fuck. This time tomorrow I'll be with D.Jack. In New York."

My body thrilled, a little tremble all through it.

But right now, I'm tired. I've spent the evening cleaning and packing, getting ready to come home to a clean house, which is something I love to do, even if it tires me out to rush it all in at the end because I inevitably fuck around and leave 80% of what I need to do till the night before.

I will interrupt this post to sing the praises of my iPhone. I got one a few weeks ago, after about two months of blithering about it. And pretty much immediately fell in love with it. After price, my main resistance was that I thought it might be more hype than anything else. It's not. It's a beautiful piece of machinery, beautifully and thoughtfully designed.

It is, as Steve pointed out, a bit heavy and bulky for a phone. It is, as I pointed out in return, very very small for a computer.

Which leads me back into the post. I think that I am not going to take my computer to New York.

Now, there are some of you out there that are gasping in shock at such a heretical though. There are others of you who don't understand why I would consider bringing it in the first place. Suffice it to say that I cannot remember the last time I went somewhere for more that 24 hours without bringing my computer with me.

I would say we had a symbiotic relationship except the computer would do fine without me.

The tug of anxiety that I'm feeling about leaving it behind - but what if? what if? - is actually the deciding factor.

Time to cut the cord there.

Or at least transfer it over to a smaller machine.

This year has been quite something. The big things that have happened have either been supremely excellent or heart-rendingly hard.

Hard or excellent, take your pick, it was a mostly unbloggable year Chez Butch.

Since not long after I started it, this blog became one of my main places for working internal shit out. We've all got that shit, I figure; most of it's not all that different from person to person. Maybe the details, but often not the reasons or root. And most of us feel terribly alone while we're trying to work it out. I wanted to feel less alone myself, and hoped that it would maybe make other people feel the same.

Which works fine if the emotional stuff you're working out are the increasingly weak aftershocks of things one or two decades old.

Peeling back the layers to get at the raw stuff means sharing the details. Without the context, it's just senseless wailing.

If the stuff you're dealing with is unfolding in real time, around you now, it isn't ghosts conjured by your messed up chemistry. It involves the details - and, more importantly, the feelings - of the lives of people you love. Who would, perhaps, choose not to share their lives with the internet.

And so, the hard stuff has been absolutely unbloggable.

It's all to do with family. I started 2009 with a lot of certainty as to what my life was going to look like in the near and distant future. That has shifted significantly and I have no real idea what my life will look like in 12 months, 5 years, a decade.

None of us do, not really, but I always liked to pretend. I clung to the visions I conjured up. I'm not sure that doing so was particularly good for me. This year I have been learning how to open up to what happens a bit better. That hasn't happened without a lot of crying.

The excellent stuff was both very much and only slightly more bloggable.

Chronologically last, I wrote a novel this year, which you've already heard more than enough about. It was a door slamming shut on one phase of my writing life. The next door is open, and I'm taking a breather before stepping through to take a look around at what's in the next room. It's exhilarating and a little terrifying.

Chronologically first, I fell in love. It crept up kind of slowly, which is an emotional first for me. I've tended to not so much fall in love with people as throw myself out of a plane at super high altitude without checking my parachute. I moved in with my band boy ex after we'd been dating for 6 months. Eric and I had our first four dates in four days.

The unspoken plan with D., at least back in May, was that we'd have a fun summer together, full of kisses and larfs, and then he'd head back to London and we would drift quietly and amicably back to being acquaintances. Except he didn't and we most definitely didn't. He stayed and I though that was excellent.

Normally I'd have been blogging it the whole way along, as I have with the other people I've dated in the past 4 or 5 years. This time, I wanted the space to feel all my feelings, to not pin them down or push them along the most narratable path. Those feelings continue to grow and I continue to want to give them free rein.

2010 might also be nigh unbloggable. It's hard to say. The stuff that started this year will still be playing out through the next.

We'll see how much I want to write about it.

I did something today that should be making me really happy but is leaving me feeling more mixed: I booked tickets to go to London, Ontario at the end of January.

Why, you may well be asking, should anyone be happy about buying tickets to anywhere in Ontario at the end of January?

The answer, of course, is love. I'll be flying to that fair city in the dead of fracking winter to visit D.Jack. And when I get there, you can be very certain that I'm going to be very happy about the getting there.

But the going that precedes the getting? Oh, not so happy about that, not at all.

I've been putting off buying the tickets and putting off buying the tickets. Tomorrow maybe, or I'll just wait for [issathing]. My hesitancy was throwing me off a bit.

Why wasn't I on booking that visit like white on rice?

It hit me this evening, not so long ago. Because it's also making me sad. I think one could properly say that today I have been moping. I pulled it together for a coffee with Steve, but other than that, I have been Eeyoring around the house and all along my route of chores.

Of course, it's fine. It's only for a few months, and now we have plans to see each other in January and in February. It's not like I'm lacking for stuff to do of an evening and the internet - our main method of communication, even when we live close - is always right there.

Notwithstanding: I'll miss him, and sorely.

Though the fact that he is in my life to miss? Some happiness in and of itself, right there.

Steve mailed a few days ago and mentioned that I sounded kind of wan. I just wanted to take a moment to rectify that, in case others of you out there are thinking the same thing.

My life is a bit strange right now.

On the one hand, there's all this stuff I have to do. My work is putting on a conference starting this weekend. If you or your work has ever put on a conference, you know that it's a lot of details based on a lot of people who change those details on a seemingly regular basis in a way that is very difficult and frustrating to track. It is super stressful.

I've also got two writing assignments due in early November, which means getting them done by the 31st. Also super stressful, though more fun and satisfying.

And then, Halloween, though fun, is ill-timed this year. Apparently my work doesn't get that Halloween is the GAY XMAS and so I have to have a good costume and go to a party full of cute girls in their costumes. (A word of advice? If you are over 30, you should avoid American Apparel during the week leading up to Halloween.) So it will be a quiet and not drunken GAY XMAS for me. That, oddly for GAY XMAS perhaps, ends with me picking up my man-beau at another party. Because apparently Halloween is also INDIE ROCK XMAS.

This leads me to the other hand.

I have to tell you, and no one is more surprised than I am, that this dating business seems to be going remarkably well. I am, dare I say it, happy. If I were still the gushing kind, I might even have added some superlatives to that. Suffice it to say that I leave my office after a hairy day of "What the fuck now?" and on the short walk home, I find myself looking up at the grey sky and smiling for no good reason.

You know, it's just really nice to feel like that. I'm grateful for it.

What a Friday!

The excellence started before midnight, actually, but carried over into the wee hours. The nervous making email I sent off a few days ago was an email to D.Jack, in which I laid out what was going on in my head and heart. I thought there was a decent chance it would be well received, but there was enough doubt that I did not get very much sleep. The decent chance, I'm more than happy to report, was much much better than that.

Which means I did not get very much sleep.

When you do not get very much sleep, 6.30 am rolls around even faster than normal. But I hauled myself into the shower, got dressed up in my office drag and headed off to the wrap-up meeting for a work project. I met my boss there and drank too much coffee and fruit that tasted of onion. All went well, so I was glad about that, not to mention being in a too-tired dreamy happy good mood to start. As we were cleaning up, my boss got the call.

The letter of understanding was in from our funder. I had a job.

Not that I was ever without one, but my last day was rolling around with alarming speed, and the thing about a house is that it's expensive. And also, if you have been looking for a job in Ottawa in the last little while, you will know that there's not a shit ton out there.

On the way back from the meeting, we hit the LCBO and the bakery. When everyone who was away assembled again, we gathered in the board room and called the people whose last days had already come and gone. None of them were home, but we left happy cheering messages for them.

That, I will tell you, is already a fucking good day. I am lucky to report that there's more.

At around 6 pm, I headed off to the airport to pick up one Chris from Winnipeg. Chris and I have been friends now for 10 years. One decade! We met in the third week of library school, and spent nearly every damn spare minute we had together for about 20 months. Since then, we've visited back and forth, though she has been far more back than I have been forth.

On her way here, she was sitting beside this bear hunter guy, and they got talking about far away friends and keeping in touch and he said "How long does it take you to get used to seeing each other again?" And she said "No time."

It's true, every time we see each other, it's like she just walked the four blocks up North Street from Gottingen to pop in. Though usually an hour or so in, one of us almost always says "It's so strange that it's so normal! It's so great!"

And we are always right.