'Butterfly on a Wheel' / The Mission UK

Butterfly on a Wheel 

The Mission UK

W. G. Sebald talks about the invisible subject: that topic, that thing, we find so pressing, so permeating, that we never stop thinking about it (even when we're not thinking about it). We may not even be aware it exists -- but it does; it's constantly vibrating at the depths of us. We explore and talk around it, try to define it, craft our entire world around it. Our invisible subject, whatever it is, drives our decisions and our lives in ways that only make sense in retrospect.

My invisible subject, as far as I can figure, is passion.

It takes on various manifestations, and turns me on to various conversations. Creativity, friendship, education, literature and music itself ----- but behind it all there is this fucking necessity to define Passion. To feel Passionate. To be emPassioned at every moment. I know it's unrealistic, I don't care -- intellectually, emotionally, it all comes back to passion.

Relatedly.

Today I am thinking about love.

Attempts to define love inevitably fail. I try to show my gr. 9s this when I teach Romeo & Juliet -- which is not, incidentally, a love story -- but that's kind of the point. We create these comically idealistic representations and try to fit them under a comically small umbrella term: love. Even the qualifying terms we have are pathetically insufficient: platonic, romantic, familial. The Ancient Greeks tried slightly harder, but 6 types is just as inadequate. Current sexuality discourse is all up in queerplatonic relationships, trying to bridge or widen the gap between romantic and platonic as befits each individual case, but guys I think we're all missing the fucking point.

Love is infinite.

And when I say that, I don't mean ~my love for you is infinite~ though the fact that we try to spatially define love probably says a fair bit about our culture. How-ever. What I mean by love is infinite is that I feel a different, particular, kind of  overwhelming intensity for every person who means anything to me. For every interaction with any of these people. Ad infinitum. And I hesitate to call any of it love, proper, because I'm starting to think the term doesn't apply.

Here's my issue: we smile in kindergarten and we're told oh yeah that's 'happy' -- you feel happy. Point to the smiley face, learn your feelings, memorize those sociolinguistic codes. Ignore, or put aside, the fact that your experience of happiness is likely completely different from every other person's. This is true of every emotion, and you may not even have to compare yourself to someone else: when I miss my sister, I feel it in the base of my fingernails; when I miss my best friend, I feel it in the center of my torso. Why? Because they're different people, and I can't help but feel them differently.

I don't know where I can go with this. So much of this entire thing -- the invisible subject generally -- is inarticulable. But I am frustrated, I am done, with this idea that romantic love supersedes all else. I don't even think romantic love exists, at least not in the way we codify and delineate it. I think you choose a partner, if monogamy's your thing, and then: the feeling you get from them is a feeling you need. Differently, but not necessarily more intensely, than what you feel & need for & from other people.

My frustration stems from the fact that:

- when I say I love you it doesn't cover anything that I actually want to say.
I can't express, none of us can; so we grasp at metaphors, nicknames, lines of literature or songs that slip into our guts and spiral. They aren't enough. But these names, these metaphors, are all we have, and so we keep trying to twist our tongues around them, trying to get across how profoundly you matter, how constantly you are present, how deeply I feel.

- when I say I love you it isn't what I want to say at all.

And I only want metaphors, because trying to catch everyone under one blanket term is fucking damaging. Why is a first 'I love you' to a boyfriend more important than the first to a friend? Why are we forced to say it to family members we don't know when we don't actually feel it? Three words that don't mean anything at goddamn all if you're going to splay them around like that.

- I love you is all I ever want to say.

And if I say it, I mean it, I mean it profoundly: I do love you, because love fucking seethes in me; I am absolutely full of it. I want you to know that: that if I have told you I love you, I do, with every piece of my heart. But that scares people off, see; for so many, love is something to be rationed, to be delicately parceled out at an opportune moment. Sometimes it feels like people experience love with boundaries, limits. I do not experience this; I do not understand this. I love resolutely, completely, and quicker than limits would appreciate.

- when I say I love you there is always the worry it will be taken the wrong way.

Because it's not enough. As an expression, it's not enough. Three fucking words to express the grandest passions of the human experience?! Please. And I don't love you like that, trust me: I love you like flame, like ocean, like cells and supernovae. There is no place to put this feeling, no action to complete it: it is boundless within me, pulsing through every vein, but it stays there. And I say "I love you" to try to get it out, to hope you understand -- it's not physical, it's not typical, it's barely even emotional -- it's another category altogether, one I don't think we've defined. And whether you understand or not, I am rife with it. But that's all.

- love is not the right word.

It's just not. And I think that covers all of it: I don't feel love. Not how I'm told I should be feeling it. I feel explosion, violence, magic, thrumming fire, atoms splitting, time spiralling, cells rearranging. And for every person, it is unique, and certainly more intense for some. But: when I say I love you it is a bald lie and a vehement truth. Simultaneously. Every time.

And the year ends again.

Love breaks the wings of a butterfly on a wheel.

'Miss World' / Neverending White Lights

Miss World
 Neverending White Lights

I grew up in a forest. 

Acres and acres of trees stretching out from my backyard, I used to shout at the top of my lungs just to see if anyone would answer back. No one ever did. I mean we had neighbours, I’m sure they heard – but in my little girl brain, I was alone. And this forest, as far as I was concerned, was infinite.

My father cleared a winding path through the forest – skirting deep ravines, forking so I could jump over a creek and my sister could stay on solid ground (or vice versa). Vaguely, I remember him coming in from working on it – covered in dirt, sweat-soaked, exclaiming about some rock he’d just maneuvered out of the way. Dusk, the sun setting; the fresh, rich scent of beech trees filtering in on the breeze.

Vaguely, I remember this.

I turn thirty in two days. And my friends: the nostalgia is hitting hard.

Turning a new decade is two things: a) completely arbitrary and b) completely significant. Like, it doesn’t matter that we’ve been around for another ten years – I won’t change that much between the last day of being 29 and the first of being 30. In some ways, I haven’t changed that much since turning 20.

But in other ways, oh my fucking god, yes I have.

And the thought of marking it – of looking in the mirror and saying to myself okay, my girl, let’s reflect – is permeating. But how – how – do you even begin?

You go for a walk.

So today, I went for a walk.

It started with picking up sticks. It’s finally spring in Montreal, and we had a windy fucking winter, so the beech trees at my mom’s had a goddamn field season with cracking apart. So: time to clear the front lawn. 

Golden sunlight, warm air, t-shirt. Headphones. Naked trees – too early for buds just yet. And I hadn’t been in the forest in years I can’t even explain why I hadn’t I don’t know that there are words for why but my legs were going on their own

and I was walking.

I forgot the book I’m reading at home this weekend, so I was digging around my dad’s old bookshelf for something to accompany my coffee on Saturday morning. I pulled out Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, and in the introduction, there’s a comment about the immense mythic power present in nature. And fair the fuck enough. I’ve had a few seriously damn potent moments this past year looking up at the stars in remote locations (Otter Lake, central Vermont, Whitehorse). Nothing moves me like that, and it’s not about feeling small like people so often say when staring up at vast expanses of sky ----- it’s about feeling complete. Whole. Centered. Say what you will about the heliocentric model – our lives run on our own perspectives. We are the center of our respective universes; don’t for a second think that we’ve moved past that.

And you look up at the stars or you start out into the forest and baby, simultaneously, congruently, you are irrelevant and you are everything.

I have a lot of memories centered on my old house. Most of them, as with most of my memories more generally, I can’t express. I’ve described myself as someone who lives in poems, not stories – and I mean okay obviously I actually live for stories, but – if you looked into my brain, only poetry could make sense of it. I have no anecdotes. I am not linear.

But I tried to follow the path my dad, decades ago, carved through our forest. That, too, though, was a winding jumble. So: I wandered.

And childhood hit me, curious and precocious, hungry for more and desperate to experience beyond my means.

And high school hit me, endless in its ferocity, a girl who painted herself black and vibrated with bliss and rage in equal measure.

And cegep hit me, when I was so full of vitriol and education and joy inside that what people saw on the outside barely touched me. 

And university hit me, and stayed with me, awhile, as I paused to sit on the edge of a steep ravine.

It would be easy to describe 2008 as the turning point! the beginning of something new! when i started to come into my own! and yes it was all of those things but that cheapens it, as it cheapens any year that everything fucking changes. You can’t express that in words. There aren’t words. You barely realize it as you’re living it. You just grasp the railing as hard as you can, or let go, or you do both at the same time and fly while you crash. 

Ah, exactly: 2008 was flight and chaos.

In April, I was more than I’d ever been, because I’d returned to myself. And oh you’re rolling your eyes now; it’s cliche, isn’t it? But how do you describe it, honestly? Do you say this was April 2^nd, 2008 – perfect spring heat, one of the last classes of your undergrad, literally goddamn skipping down the street because your entire body was prisming with explosive light: you were home, again. Drinking a bottle of amaretto with grenadine and 7up, blasting Pink Floyd and Neverending White Lights and mashups of Umbrella, watching and reading and writing and dancing and falling in love until you couldn’t breathe –

And don’t you dare knock girls who take selfies, because this is exactly what I looked like, then, and thank god I have it to remember:

Flight and chaos. I was whole.

And in the forest today, I sat, saturated with memory. With everything I felt when I first listened to Miss World, to every song from April 2^nd, from afterwards, from that entire year, from every year I have lived, all of them to the best of my ability.

I walked home. Following the path as best I could.

Sat on the deck with the beech trees creaking and

I don’t know that it’s valuable to look back on what you expected for yourself as a child. I hope, anyway, that your naivete shifts – that different things matter. I certainly don’t think I expected the life I have now, at 30, as a little girl setting out on the forest path her father painstakingly laid.

I know I wanted to be a professor, and I’m not. But I teach high school and I love it, most days, and I get to talk about books that I love and never worry about them being valvulotomized. I can exclaim about a beautiful quotation and just that – not its significance, not write an irrelevant paper on it, just love that it is gorgeous and discuss the beauty of words.

I know I wanted to be a fancy lawyer living in Toronto, and I’m not. But I’ve had a series of beautiful apartments and beautiful roommates in Montreal, and the reasons that I wanted that life have faded with experience and time.

I know that I wanted to have a lot of friends, and I do, though they’re more spread out than I’d like – but they are diamonds, as I’ve said, and my younger self would be jealous.

I know that I expected my father to be here, and he’s not. But my mother is, and my sister, and my cousin, and my aunts and uncles, and they are worth a million fears and uncertainties and questions because they are boundlessly supportive, endlessly inspiring.

I know that I used to make the same wish on birthday candles, every time. And it was that something would always stop my heart – those exact words. Chosen carefully.

And while realistically, I am no more successful or flawed than any other 30-year-old ----

my heart skips beats, now more than ever.

I’ve made my bed, 
I’ll lie in it.

'Take Me Out' / Franz Ferdinand

Take Me Out

Franz Ferdinand

I have this theory that things resonate backwards.

Okay relax, science people, I know ---- time must move forward; entropy requires it have a one-way direction. But come on: you can't tell me there hasn't been a moment in your past so perfectly timed, so perfectly setting up something in the future, that it seemed goddamn fictional.

Foreshadowing -- real life foreshadowing -- except an author knows where it's going, knows that it's building. We non-fictional characters sit with our memories and say, "Huh, if only we'd known how important this was going to be later!"

But maybe, on some level, we do know.
Maybe the moment everything means most -- that pinnacle of emotion where you love something so desperately you can't breathe -- that moment: that moment resonates backwards and forwards through time, calling us to love what we love, even if it doesn't make sense at the time.
You could say it's the reverse, of course; that the initial love reverberates through our futures.

But I don't know.
Maybe time needs a direction, but I don't know that our experience of it does.

Some random afternoon in April 2008, I was sitting at a Starbucks on Ste-Catherine, studying for one of the last exams of my BA. It was nice out, I think; I might have been drinking tea. The specifics of memory fade after 8 years.

But I do remember that period of my life -- April & May, 2008 -- as where I would want to spend eternity. I can't describe why, or at least -- I could never explain it. Suffice to say I was 21, on the threshold of something immense, and I felt like the universe was prisming out of my heart. Everything changed, that year -- chief among them my relationships.

I've written about friendship and how it took me ages to figure out what the hell it actually was -- well, this was when it started. Birthdays, see, had never really been a huge deal for me. I liked marking the date with a few friends, but it'd been years since I'd had an actual party.

But of late, I'd been hanging out quite a bit with this girl Meg.

Now, to describe Meg would be equally impossible, so I'll just say this: she is the kind of person who matters. Profoundly. If you meet her, you know her -- she is larger than life, and if she's on your side, the room is yours.

So Meg and I'd been going dancing on Friday nights at a bar called Saph. Two floors: downstairs, a DJ who goes by Plastik Patrik spun alternative chaos; upstairs, goth and industrial. We'd dress in corsets and show up early, then own the dancefloor until 3am. More often than not, it was the two of us -- makeup going from flawless to melted, discovering or shouting out song after song, kicking our steel-toed boots and spinning in circles.

And there I sat, staring at my notes and wondering what the fuck I was going to do for my birthday in a couple weeks, and suddenly Take Me Out blared out my headphones and if I could explain anything in words I would, but -----------

I was overcome. My cells exploded.
I wanted to dance so badly.
It was all I wanted to do. At that moment, for my birthday, ever.

So I instantly texted Meg. Thinking of going to Saph for my birthday, would you be in?

Breath held. I needed her to say yes. I didn't care if anyone else could make it: if she was there, it'd be lightning.

And almost instantly, she answered. Fuck yeah!

My 22nd birthday was one of the best nights of my life.

Fast forward 8 years.

Saph has closed. Studying for finals is a distant nightmare. The friendships that were just budding back then have had time to solidify and spin across the country.

But Meg's still here, and she's still larger than life. Our friendship is, too. And we're both turning 30, her in March, me in April. You know what we should do for our 30th birthdays, one of us said, over drinks at 28, is host a dance party, like recreate Saph, and just lose our shit.

And as I said: you want Meg on your side, when you have an idea like that.

Because that's exactly what we fucking did.


We scouted locations. And we talked to Plastik Patrik. And we got decorations and food and art and games and we strolled into O Patro Vys on April 1st, right in between our respective 30th birthdays, and we set up the venue for our huge fucking dance party.


As seems to be the theme of this: there are no words for Friday night. If I tried, it would have to be a novel, or a string of violently ecstatic adjectives, some of which I've made up for the occasion. It was 70 people in a room dancing; it was dozens of heartfelt messages and embraces; it was people from every walk of our lives; it was screaming laughter and spinning in circles and losing our shit. It was electric, blissful, chaotic. It was firespun.

And there was a moment, around midnight -- surrounded by most of the people I love best in the entire world -- when the dancefloor was full. The air was crackling. And the opening chords of Take Me Out pressed out from the speakers.

 And Meg and I caught each other's eyes and, without words, grabbed hands, and ran up onstage.


And looked out at everyone we fucking adore.


And as that inimitable build-up starts around 0:40, we started stomping and raising our fists. With everyone on the dancefloor following our lead, exploding into a sea of hands and upturned faces.

And when the key changed, Meg and I linked arms and lost our shit. The two of us. All of us. Everyone we loved, there or absent -- everything we'd felt in our 30 years -- all of it. Chaos.

And it was absolutely fucking perfect.

So I have this theory that things resonate backwards.

'Thursday's Child' / David Bowie

Thursday's Child
David Bowie

Initially, I didn't want to say anything. Didn't want to mark this date. Didn't feel I had anything to add to the thousands of articulate, insightful tributes. And I don't have anything to add, or at least, nothing that hasn't been said.

But I am heartbroken.

And I am grieving.

And while so many people are experiencing this grief today -- that does not lessen mine.

A glass of red wine raised: I remember.

I remember May, lush and green; grade 5 rushing to its end, summer stretching endlessly in front of us. My father, in the habit of renting old movies to force upon us on Friday nights, brought home Labyrinth. Had he known he'd be forced to rent it again every weekend for the next six months -- I'm sure he would have...but he might've thought twice.

I knew, I still know, every line by heart. On a windowsill in my childhood bedroom -- even now -- are individual letters cut from seventeen to ransom-note a line from As the World Falls Down:  "We're choosing the path between the stars / I'll lead my love between the stars." That was my first favourite song, proper -- the first song I claimed as mine, the first song that clenched inextricably around my heart. I was 11. He had a nice voice. I had no idea.

I remember February, scribbling in notebooks, a sacred, rare newspaper clipping of an Earthling promo shot safely tucked inside: 13 and realizing what music could do. My journal must be incomprehensible: rambling crushings, oh god I am in love with him oh my god; rambling insight, this song is me this song is everything I've ever thought; rambling dreams. I rarely spoke, then, about how much I adored him. It was too potent, too much, to share -- I worried that no one would understand.


But he permeated everything.

I remember March, quietly melting under pale sunshine; my last year of high school. Riven, raw with adolescent intensity, I wanted to explode. There was a boy or there was a test or there was a Grave Injustice Being Done To Humanity -- I felt it all and nothing made it better.

And then spring began to crush winter, and I remembered him, as I always remember him in spring -- and I tied up our family phoneline downloading as much as I could. Spring 2003 is unassailable, in my heart: it vibrated through me, perfect and heartbreaking, and with a constant Bowie soundtrack. I heard Low and I carried it with me, safely in the core, the gut, of who I was: today, Subterraneans plays and I am in London, Ontario for a karate symposium, on the verge of possibility, curled under blankets on the hotel floor with my Discman, body on fire.

I cannot separate myself from this girl who furiously railed against everything but David Bowie: who desperately clung to the honesty and beauty in his words; who watched his music videos endlessly, riveted to his face, his terrible dancing; who knew somewhere in her blood that if she stopped listening, she would fall, and she would get lost.

That girl built herself on his voice.
I would be no one without it.

I remember December, snow and ice, standing outside the Bell Centre with my dad, waiting impatiently for the doors to open. My father, in music production, knew all the promoters in the city -- our seats were incredible. It wasn't that I was too young to go with a friend -- but, ten years almost to the day after a profounder grief than this --------- I was and am so happy that I went with him.

The crowd was everyone: my own thick black eyeliner; 70-year-old women with canes; baby boomers with beer guts; metalheads and dreadlocks and insurance suits and we all knew every fucking word. He sang and we were transported, we were universal, we were one goddamn person, all of us, December 13th in Montreal, as Bowie kicked off his Reality tour.

I remember January, the week after my father died. Nothing made sense. Everything was too fucking surreal to process. I went from class to class, painstakingly taking notes, telling my friends but no one else. I felt numb, sick, quiet -- and I didn't even know I felt any of those things; I thought I was fine, man, all's good no worries death is part of life you just gotta deal ------------

And my headphones rarely left my ears.
I gripped reality by my goddamn fingernails, breathlessly, to 1. Outside.

There is no album more brilliant, none more emotional, in my eyes; nothing that brings me more intensely back to so many moments in my life. I have written essays about Outside; my personal email address is from one of the song titles; if you want to know why I listen to music or how I listen to music or what music I think is perfect I will shove this into your hands and say listen, listen, god, listen, and let it rip you apart -----

and it was all that kept me together.

I remember April, one birthday of many at a bar called Saphir, coming to a close. Last call. The ones who'd stood the test of cheap shots and young blood still dancing at my side. I had danced, we had all danced -- the night had been electric, vibrant. And the lights went up to Life on Mars?.

I was probably not barefoot but I feel barefoot in my memory, spinning with my makeup smeared across my face, shouting out the words and laughingly slow-dancing with Meg -- home. If not in place,

in soul.

I remember months and months. I remember years.

I remember searching for him, the thrill of the HMV hunt; the excitement when hearing a song on the radio and rushing to press 'record.' I remember endless dance parties with my friends and family, gushing vocal treatises on how deeply he affected the cultural fabric of what we know. I remember listening to hours... this Christmas, shocked at how different it sounded to my near-30-year-old ears: something's shifted, something's new, I am older. I am seeing his genius differently. And I know: there is so much more to see.

The world grieves today.
And there are really no words.



But thank you, David Jones, for being everything to me.
For all those years and more.

'Mine' / Phoebe Ryan

Mine

Phoebe Ryan

I don't desperately love this song, but I am starswept by the lyrics.

I found gold in the wreckage
Put it on a necklace
Keepin’ it cause I-I-I, I know that it’s mine
I wear it like a message
So I don’t forget it
Keepin’ it cause I-I-I, I know that it’s mine

I know that it’s mine no matter what I do
I know that it’s mine whether I win or lose
And even though my heart needs to take its time
I know that it’s mi-i-ine, I know that it’s mine.

As the year closes, I think everyone tries to find things to sum it up. What did you accomplish? Where did you go from where you were before? Did you shift out, pull up, fall in, explode forward? Backward? At all?


Every necklace I wear means something.
And this song encapsulates my year more profoundly than anything I could say.

'Babyface' / U2

Babyface

U2

U2, so says every hipster music blog ever, has fallen wayyyyy out of vogue. I've mentioned that longlasting rock bands have a few paths they can take to their second or third decade -- and as far as I'm concerned, U2 picked a really annoying, bland one. And don't get anyone who gives a shit about music started on their ridiculous Apple-marketing partnership. What the fuck, honestly? Start with those dumb iPod ads (I'M AT A PLACE CALLED VEEERRTIGOOO -- remember?? remember?? the black cutout shadow of Bono dancing?? GORGEOUS), then force-download an entire garbage album onto everyone's iPhones; GREAT JOB, GUYS. Dad-style marketing if there ever was. These guys have aged ridiculously.

BUT.

Did you know they did some really cool shit in the early 90s?

BECAUSE I DIDN'T. Not till this weekend.

I mean okay: 1991's Achtung Baby is absolutely solid (and have you heard that cover album released for the 20th anniversary? Garbage's take on Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses will BLOW YOUR DAMN MIND). But I'm a casual fan -- years ago, when I was downloading the discographies of every band I mildly enjoyed, I snagged theirs. Did I listen to it? No. I have a fuckton of Rolling Stones to get through, too. But Saturday, it was me and Zooropa, baby.

I used to write fiction a fair bit when I was younger -- I don't share my work, really, but I love writing. In the haze of personal goals I made last year, writing more kept coming to mind. So, 2015 has been the year I got back into writing. Of course, I like to make life exponentially more difficult than it has to be -- so heaven forbid I just, you know, write a story like a sane human being. Instead, I've started a series of vignettes -- one per month of the year 1993 -- with each based on a song released that year.

Consequently, I have all these albums from '93 floating around on my iPod. When the urge to write strikes, I'll give another one a go. Saturday, I was feeling it -- and Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy wasn't cutting it (great album, don't get me wrong, but I wanted something weirder). So: Zooropa. With a bit of a resigned eye roll.

And wouldn't you know it -- the album is fucking good. Despite claims to the contrary from the band (but you know, I'm clearly not putting too much stock in U2's opinions, here. DAD MARKETERS.).

The title track sets up this fantastic soundscape, to the point where it's almost a landscape -- visual, lush, neon and dark. I love when albums start off like this -- setting a defined mood for what's to come, even if it shifts in tone. The first track is like the emotional key of the album: you may slide away from it, but you're aching to get back, and you'll pull the content with you.

...so much is lost from the listening experience when we only listen to singles.

Anyway, I didn't like the title of the second track ('Babyface', really? ugh) and I was feeling 'Zooropa' for my January vignette, so despite it being catchy, I didn't listen closely -- moved to the excellent, droning 'Numb'; the fantastically '90s 'Lemon'; the heartrendingly melodic 'Stay'; and so on. I was excited, man; who knew U2 could pull something like this off?! Zooropa is weird, disjointed, and kind of brilliant.

But at 1am, writing away to 'Lemon' (come on: that image of a girl in a yellow dress on a grey day begs to be vignettified), I restarted the album and forgot to be irritated at 'Babyface's title and...fuck.

'Babyface' is a lot more than mildly catchy.

Just take a second, here, to appreciate this lyric:

Slow down, child /
Let me untie your lace

 Get out. Get out. Not okay. God.

It's also about the lullaby sounds & melody, and the plays at created narrative in the lyrics ("checking out every frame / I've got slow motion on my side") -- there's something deeply special happening in this song.

'Zooropa' is more my ultimate style. 'Stay' is more beautiful. 'Lemon' is probably smarter.

But 'Babyface' is a flash of magic.

I was too young in the early 90s to really experience it. The music that sprang up is something I'm honestly just now starting to appreciate in its full glory. Misplaced nostalgia: like, I wasn't listening to alt-rock or grunge when I was 7, but I get all ~music used to be~~~ about it. Particularly when it comes to all the creepy concept shit groups that had been around awhile were doing -- Zooropa, yes, and Bowie's 1. Outside (one of my all-time favourite albums), etc. There was a certain vibe to the early 90s that -- even though I don't actually remember it -- I find quite profoundly captured when you listen to those experimental cult classics.

U2 has undoubtedly lost some of their cachet (sometimes bands need to gracefully bow out). But there are treasures in their back catalogue, and Zooropa is one of them.

'Butterfly' / Grimes

Butterfly

Grimes

In elementary school, best friends are convenient. You sit beside someone who likes the same cartoon as you -- instant camaraderie. You're friends for life, man, this is it. You have sleepovers and talk till eleven, trade Pogs and fuzzy stickers, sometimes even let each other play as Barbie instead of Ken. Everything is perfect.

And then everything is drama.

You sat with someone else at lunch and didn't even look at me. I brought you back something from a family trip so you let me sit beside you during computer time. I didn't feel comfortable wearing a tank top and you rolled your eyes and found the cooler girls who wear makeup. You liked the Spice Girls and I thought you were too mainstream. The friendship falls apart -- it was nothing to begin with.

High school ain't much better. If you're not a cool kid or a nerd or an athlete, you get grouped with the outcasts, the people who don't fit in a social circle. Now: I made two of my very best friends in high school -- but that was not the norm. I drifted away from most of these people; we didn't have much in common, in the end.

You're supposed to make your best friends in college, in university.

But I don't think I knew what friendship was in university.

You could be anything out there
Butterflies flying in the air
Oh no / it came
Higher than an airplane

I used to be lonely.

It wasn't that I had no social contact ---- I don't know that I can describe it, though I know most of us have felt it: that crushing certainty that no one really gives a shit. Yeah, our family's on our side, but no one's choosing to stand beside us. Not invited to parties or deciding not to go to parties -- either way, I felt separate, and sad. None of my friends ever really asked me how I was -- or if they did, I assumed they didn't really care. I was a receptacle: what's wrong? do you need to vent? tell me everything. And, for the most part, they did.

I have always kept significant aspects of myself private -- it's a personality quirk, so I shouldn't fault my old friends for indulging it. But I thought, vainly, that they might want to know; that they might...but they never did. They never asked.


Friendship, though, has so little to do with what you say.


It took me, as I'm sure it takes most people, until my mid-twenties to understand what friendship could be -- that it isn't about mutual complaining or gossip; bribery; pictures plastered all over social media; constant contact. It's not even endless conversations or similar goals or shared interests. Friendship is fucking sacred, and it is rare, and when it's real, it is worth clinging to with every shred of you.


Friendship is nebulous as fuck, and much of it is inarticulable -- like the feelings you get being with the people who truly fucking get you, who've stood beside you through the wars and who are not afraid, will not stand down. But it's also being inspired, daily. It's feeling safe in conversation, in silence, in shared space. It's waking up with a roaring hangover and knowing no one will judge you for the bullshit you pulled the night before. It's genuine laughter seguing to genuine anger and back again. It makes you fucking fearless.

And it doesn't dissipate with distance.

 I started this post a few weeks ago, upon returning from a weekend in Toronto. Cause the problem, you see, with building an adult life in your home city is that most of your friends...don't. So: flung across the continent are people who have big chunks of my soul. They keep 'em safe, but I know I'm not complete unless all those parts are back together. Ah, friendship.

Two of my soulmates are in Toronto (which is not great, but better than, say, Vancouver. Or Whitehorse. Or Edinburgh. Or Nashua or San Diego or....). I visit when I can, which is less often than I'd like. When I got home from this particular trip, I instantly opened Blogger to start writing about how deeply and intensely I felt while I was there, while I was with them -- how profoundly they sparkle, how they fill gaps in my heart, how I would not be complete without either of them, without any of the absolute goddamn diamonds I am lucky enough to call friends.

And then this post sat for about three weeks because it is completely fucking inarticulable.


So I give up.

Are you looking for harmony?
There is harmony in everything.

I have more incredible, more brilliant, more vibrant, more intense and kinetic and inspirational and powerful friends than I could have hoped for when I sat at home biting my lip, wondering if I should go to that party (though admittedly -- some of them were at those parties. It takes time.).

And I blared this song as the plane took off Sunday night, staring down at Toronto blinking yellow and white, and it encapsulated everything I could say -- about my Toronto princesses; about any of my diamonds.

It starts as a bright song, a little cheesy, a little ridiculous. The verses are singsong joy, pulsing cheerfully. La la la.

But the choruses are riven. Hands in the air -- from bliss, from fear, from surrender, from sheer fortitude of emotion.


Friendship, huh.

Hold on to your diamonds.

'Past Lives' / BØRNS

Past Lives

BØRNS

There are two kinds of people in the world.

The first goes outside at 1am on a clear November night, crackling forest on all sides, headphones blaring Past Lives firmly clamped over her ears, breathes in the sky and the potential. Everything is starlit, literally and figuratively: the world is in place, is kinetic, is everything she was worried it couldn't be again. And as she throws her arms up and raises her eyes, a single shooting star flashes across the sky.

The SECOND person is well fucking aware that literally no one is going to believe this shooting star story, but the arm-throwing wasn't about that anyway ----- it was part of a chaotic, frenetic dance that no one can see because no one is supposed to see it; a dance inspired by a fuckton of history and even more possibility ------ but, excited by this cliche of a fucking moment, the dance gets wilder and she rolls her friggin ankle over and trips and slices open her toe on a stick.



Guys there are two kinds of people in the world and I am both of them. Sometimes in the space of one song.

yeah yeah my toe's fine DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT sigh. Poise and grace just ain't my thing.

'Take This Waltz' / Leonard Cohen

Take This Waltz

Leonard Cohen

Here's something they don't tell you when you're studying to be an English teacher:
Teaching media you personally love is fucking terrifying.

Okay picture it: you're standing in front of a bunch of generally apathetic teenagers, most of whom would rather be sleeping or on Snapchat. You hold, in your hands and your heart, something that definitively shaped you. They stare back at you blankly. Taking a deep breath, you press play or send or hand it out. The words are theirs, now. They're confused, they're bored, they're waiting for recess.
And now, vibrating with context and history and hope, you have to direct the discussion.

As a person, I am deeply defined by the media I love -- to the point where if you want to get to know me, I'd rather give you a song or a book than explain who I am. So as a teacher, I raaaarely bring stuff that has profoundly affected me into the classroom (unless I have a class that I know won't completely rip it apart and leave me raw and crying). There are, however, exceptions --- and Leonard Cohen is one of them.

Leonard Cohen has defined my literary and musical souls for as long as I can remember. Before Bowie, there was a low grumbling voice that barely hit any notes, expelling (because he never speaks) poetry. My father, a few years younger than Cohen, idolized him and grew up in his footsteps -- just a few neighbourhoods away from Westmount, where Cohen embodied (and, I'd argue, in many ways still embodies) the spirit of artistic Montreal. I was raised on Cohen. I knew the lyrics to Everybody Knows before I understand what any of it meant, would write down lines about taking Manhattan and then taking Berlin in my elementary school notebooks.

This is a fairly dangerous way to raise a little girl.

As she gets older, the lyrics will start to pierce and twist inside her. She'll realize that words hold volatile power; that they are, somehow, enough. She will become strange, and separate. And when she is old enough to start sincerely understanding what's behind formative explosions like Take This Waltz --- it will devastate her.

Take This Waltz shifts paradigms.

A translation of a Federico Garcia Lorca surrealist poem, and a professed thank you note to Lorca from Cohen -- this song is too much to process, the first few (many) times you hear it. Musically, I am sure it's the reason I now love 3/4 (waltz) time; lyrically, I'm sure it's from where much of my literary aesthetic derives. I can't even decide on one lyric to post; all of them shatter me ---- but I guess for the interest of enticement:

And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook
With the photographs there and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross

I don't know that my father ever particularly loved this song -- but I vividly remember when I started loving it. It was one of the first instances I was aware that the music was mine, as opposed to chosen by my parents ------ I wasn't allowed to use the CD player until I got to high school (my dad was Very Into Sound Equipment) -- and I would always ask him to play me this song. It was my Leonard Cohen, it was viciously gorgeous, and it has never disappointed me.

My English classes are admittedly chaotic, but there are a few things I know with certainty -- and one is that, before you graduate high school in Montreal, you must have experienced Leonard Cohen. There are no two ways about this. His words are essential.

So every year I teach grade 11, I put on emotional armour, hope the kids won't laugh -- and press play. Sometimes they can't handle it, sometimes they just don't care -- but there's always at least one student I'm teaching for, one adolescent who reminds me of my little goth girl self, years ago; another person willing to open up their figurative veins and let in Cohen's quietly violent brilliance.

Or at least, the hope that there is...is enough.

'Tongue Tied' / Hollins Steele

 

    Tongue Tied Hollins Steele

Almost exactly ten years ago, Norton anthologies in hand, I started my first degree ----- and I moved out.*

We take it for granted nowadays, but remember? Holding the key in your hand, eyes lighting up as you walked the perimeter, sitting in the middle of an empty room and really realizing: this is your space. You go, princess: you watch TV till 4am. You negotiate the noise level with your neighbours. You organize those cereal boxes. You answer to no one.

19 and blazing: it was 2005 and I was ready to fucking dance.

So of course I went home every weekend.


AHEM AHEM a few items of backstory:

1. My family (nuclear, extended, all of it) is unequivocally perfect.
2. My childhood home, in Rigaud, is literal forested paradise. If you have visited you know what I mean.
3. In August '05, my parents had just rescued a dog we eventually named Freyja, and I really liked her. I also practiced/taught karate on Saturday mornings in the next town over from Rigaud -- so it made sense to be there on weekends,
but 4. When I moved out, I took the family PC with me.
WAIT GUYS, CAN WE DO AN EARLY-2000s PAUSE AND REMEMBER WHEN THERE WERE FAMILY COMPUTERS?! oh my god
anyway I took it with me ~~for school.
so 5. My dad got a MiniMac.
6. External hard drives weren't compatible with both PCs and Macs (are they now? who knows). There was no highspeed, either: we're talking dial. up.
7. When I went home on Friday nights, I stayed up way later than I am decade-later capable ---- but
8. there was literally. one. song. to listen to on the shiny new family MiniMac.

And it was Hollins Steele's Tongue Tied.


And I listened to that song over. and over. and over.

I get bored quickly.

You wouldn't necessarily know it to look at me: I've been at the same job for six years (but the classes change every fall); I've lived in the same city for ten (but the city changes every day). But when things stay the same too long, I get restless; frustrated. I'll change the seating arrangement in my classroom; cancel all my plans and go wandering around the city; book a flight and spend ten days alone. I'm an introvert -- my shifts often happen internally, but they're always happening.

And lemme tell you: listening to the same song for more than a week is rarely something of which I'm capable.

So what was it about this song? I mean realistically speaking I could have transferred files or downloaded something else. But I didn't. I listened to this endlessly. And I can say oh it was the lyrics or oh it was the electropop (formative, to be sure), but none of that really captures it, does it? We listen to the songs we respond to in a moment. And oh my god: my fall of 2005 is absolutely, beyond doubt, contained in Tongue Tied.

Sometimes songs inextricably wind themselves around a particular feeling I had in the moment I loved them. Not happy, or sad; not memories, or at least not exclusively -- something more experiential, less articulable, something of its own particular quality. When I listen to the old songs, I am back there. It's as if I shift into the experiential state of the person I used to be -- like my cells refigure themselves to her, and I am living through her eyes.

For a moment.

While I listen.

I found an old mix from fall 2005 the other day; put it on in my car; blared Tongue Tied when it came on. Still a Montreal resident -- but driving, out of school, a young 'professional,' older than I ever pictured myself at that age. I am nothing like what I imagined I'd be. But when this song plays, I am every version of the self I used to be.

 I've been out of Rigaud for ten years now. I'm on my 6th roommate; a gem, incidentally (there were roomie-overlaps...I'm really not that horrible to live with, I promise). There have been some vibrant, explosive nights -- some of which I'm sure will be described in later entries -- and some lonely, broken ones.

They are all -- in their emotion, their history, their glory and misery -- contained in songs to come.

The video I posted is live; different from the song I know: which is, really, in keeping with all these changes. But if you'd like the exact version I listened to, ad infinitum, ten years ago: here. It's worth it.

*With endless thanks to my parents for supporting my English Lit education. <3