Filed under: a city called montreal, city called halifax, observations, thoughts about thoughts
i am at such a loss for a topic, which..four days and already out of ideas? wow.
tomorrow, when i make vegan doughnuts for the person and my roommates, i’ll follow feral geographer‘s suggestion and blog about food. but tonight? tonight i have nothing.
okay, no, that’s not entirely true.
when i lived in halifax, i became obsessed with j.d. salinger’s glass family, specifically seymour glass. i looked around all the used bookstores for “raise high the roofbeams carpenters”; “seymour, an introduction”; “franny and zooey”; and “nine stories.” it was my distraction, i guess, from the grey skies and my deteriorating relationship with weasel. it felt good to hunt the books down, especially going to j.w.d books on barrington, thumbing quietly through the big shelf of paperbacks for the moment when my fingers would pass over his name and i could find a book i didn’t have. it took me about five months to get copies of all the books (and of “catcher in the rye” which i hate but it felt necessary.) seymour was my favorite, tragic, character with buddy as a close second. i disliked zooey and toward franny felt resentful because she was so wishy washy- i preferred boo boo about whom much less information was known.
really, though, what i wanted to do was spend a week with the glass family in the most boring, quiet sense of things. i just wanted to eat breakfast with them and i wanted a stupid (albeit rare) note from seymour written on shirt cardboard about something ridiculously small but significant. finding mentions of the characters in the stories within “nine stories” was like passing a familiar face on the street in a city you have never before visited. i wanted that whole family so badly.
don’t get me wrong, i see the flaws with the characters and with j.d. salinger himself now, several years later when the blind worship and loneliness have worn off. i find a lot of salinger problematic, preachy and sort of lofty- i think there is more holden caufiled in all of salinger’s writing than i’d really like. but i still sort of have a soft spot for seymour and buddy.
recently, i’ve been reading first “nine stories” and now “raise high the roofbeams, carpenters and seymour: an introduction” bit by bit, mostly because it’s so wordy in some parts that the prose aggravates me (paticularly in “seymour: an introduction.”) i realize how much i like “raise high the roofbeams, carpenters.” how good it is to hear buddy’s narration again and how much, sometimes, i miss him.
(you can read it online here, apparently. i have to say, as a warning, it definitely feels like it was written in the 50s.)
and that is, really, all i could think to write about because i was wading through some of “seymour: an introduction” in the bath tonight and was reminded of my infatuation with seymour. i actually had a rat named seymour, a sleek, beautiful, sweet rat who died over a year ago…and the book reminds me of her, too, somehow.
Filed under: a city called vancouver, city called halifax, friends, observations, the island (home)
mrs. kim’s: when the weasel and i first moved in together, at ages seventeen (me) and eighteen (her), we shared a dark basement apartment, illegal, beneath mr. and mrs. kim’s house. two bedrooms, bathroom and a kitchen with three windows all about half a foot over our heads. it was dark most of the time, and our lights were flourescents, harsh in the 8-foot ceilings. i had headaches often, hating the flickering bright glare that dominated our rooms. at around the time we moved in, a man was breaking into apartments in the area to watch women sleep. i used to come home from work and check the apartment over, clutching an empty wine bottle at its neck, looking for him. although we lived there for four months, we saw mr. kim only once, when i came home for work to find him fixing our sink, having just wandered in without warning. when we left, mrs. kim stole my favorite sweater and a scarf and refused to give them back.
cogswell st.: the second halifax apartment was weasel’s boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-apartment. she kept it dark and it smelled like cat pee. on one wall was a charcoal mural of a cow’s skull and runes, though we never asked her their meaning. it was a one bedroom, cramped and a mistake emotionally, but cheaper and not mrs. kim’s, a distinction we felt was important. it was dually less and more inviting than our old place. one day as i reached down to pull my up underwear while sitting on the toilet, i saw tubular fungus stretching toward me from a moldy spot behind the basin. at that time, stupid enough to disrespect mushrooms, i killed it with spray stain-remover. it wasn’t a shit hole, it felt like a shit hole, but it was alright until our downstairs neighbour came back from vacation (we never could figure out where he would have gone on vacation.) this man hated us passionately and aggressively through the floorboards. we walked too heavily, spoke too loudly, were stupid fucking bitches he would kill at the first opportunity. he would show up outside our front door and scream. dude was huge, heavy muscly arms, long blonde hair like a viking, thick ring in his septum piercing. our landlord made jokes about his death threats and suggested we move out to avoid physical violence. i didn’t know what victim blaming was then, and since weasel and i were having problems, we broke our lease three months early in april and i flew back to the west coast.
the camper: my parents’ house was full of kids (homeless, kicked-out, visiting and both Side A and Side B) the spring i went back home (slightly heart-broken and definitely head-broken) so i moved into a camper-trailer on our neighbour’s land. i decked it out in pirate flags and the kids used to sneak over in the evening and smoke pot at the cramped fold-out table. my bed was inches from the ceiling and the ceiling was full of spiders, which are really the only bugs i have issues with (i don’t kill them.) i used to coccoon myself in a sheet pulled over a rattling old fan until it billowed out like a sail and i slipped into a blissful airy rest. the camper was stifling by the time i went to bed, the metal of its structure having baked everything into a warm haze, but it felt good to be out of the over-crowded house.
the bus: this always makes me sound cooler than i am. the second summer i spent back home on the island, i lived in a white bus on my parents’ land, again because the house was full of kids and my old bedroom had a couple living in it (notably, Side B and her boyfriend at the time.) my favorite home, i fit a single mattress into it and grew plants, kept my clothes in mesh shelves and my books on the built-in counters. my rats lived with me until it grew too hot for them, gnawing everything they could reach. the dog slept with me most of the time, but he was a collie and nervously stared out the windows, barking so frequently that i often wondered what was outside, despite my common sense. but it was beautiful while it lasted.
Filed under: city called halifax, friends, that weird feeling i like to call attraction
today i am remembering halifax and writing with my dear friend, the poet, in an upstairs cafe where sunlight is coming through a tall window and wrapping itself in my hair, through my shirt like water. and then she (the girl) came in and sat beside me and i felt my heart pull a little and all i can remember is the sunshine that filtered through my hair making it bright gold and through it i could see her (i was trying not to look)and we were suddenly in a group of friends, and i looked across at the poet and i think she saw how awkward i felt and smiled encouragingly. i drank my tea and offered the girl beside me a piece of my zucchini muffin, and the sunlight made it feel like our arms were touching, and i thought about her sitting there and felt a blush (or was it heat from the sun) spread across the tops of my cheeks.
and today i’m sitting at my desk (the outline for my english paper beside me like an insistant visitor) and the window is open but everything is grey outside, a cool wind is shaking trees up and down the street. and i am thinking about the hours i was warm in that cafe.
