It is my vocation to prognosticate, and poorly, and so it was, as it has often been, in my life.
I have nothing but the present. I turned the heat off in the room when I left this morning, and so instead of a benign warmth I have come to sleep in a pile of chilly bedclothes.
Tammy and I reviewed various portions of festive Vancouver, had one spectacular meal in the middle (and thank you Tammy, it was wonderful to eat Exactly the Same Food as You – that being my preference and it was a lovely lovely Christmas gift.) (Thanks also for my entrance fee. I found another ten in my pocket after you paid my way in and I felt fretful about it. Then I thought about the manuscript I owe you.) It was fun watching you drink a flight of beer. I think we walked about as much as we wanted to.
Tammy’s mother’s condo is beautiful and her mother’s boyfriend’s condo would have made Philip of blessed memory chortle as being the perfect little pied à terre, a cheerful airy bachelor apartment with a lot of art and a few cool books and not overstuffed. Eclectic. Representations of the nude female form were interesting and tasteful, although of course I’d pardon an original Vargas were man of seventy to hang one on his wall. Frezetta too okay whatevs, shut up, I can hear the male gaze lashcrack e’en now.
I do like wandering around Granville Island. I nearly bought a sugar skull lamp but was dissuaded by its flimsiness. I’m glad I didn’t.
Modern Christian Christmas music (ie FELONIOUS PAP) at the goddamned Winter Market. I assume they were performing in a tower to prevent Vancouverites in attendance from returning the auditory assault with a physical one.
I have slowly learned something. It’s enough to be able to walk around and look, with a friend, and not have a plan. I want to think I might enjoy wanting things. At the same time, I want fewer and fewer material things and more and more the troubling unquantifiables, whose existence in life stretches and contracts and reforms during crisis events (deaths, and other terminations) and longer term realizations that sneak up frequently but look different every time, like how you come to understand how old friends and siblings can be so important to your sense of self, your sense of interpersonal propriety, of who you are. Then you are completely forgetting that and going hunh! well holy shit, when you come across it from another angle.
I feel like Penelope but the loom is my brain and what’s woven is memory.
There’s something thoughtful and protoplasmic about family relationships in settler subcultures and first nations families percolating in my brain.
no waords tidday no dulcimer
This pic is from Deer Lake Park, January 3.