pg 48

greetings from vancouver where today is the exact one year since i’ve been in this town and so it makes sense that i’m out back on a saturday morning after work, probably the ritual/regular series of events i’ve come to know the most since being here. friday work, saturday porch, and saturday bed. from here i can see.

most of the mountains are draped in cloud cover but from what i can see of them underneath the clouds it’s sunny over there in north vancouver today. i like the tree in the backyard of my neighbours to the left, just starting to bud now and then through them are the other trees lining e.14th’s alley in various stages of reawakening, some even whose leaves didn’t go anywhere-more needles really.

today i’ll go to the laundromat and then i’ll come home. i’ll hopefully write a letter. wait i kind of feel like doign that right now.

i do know you better than the rest but that doesn’t mean i’m no less frustrated by the way you handle things that make you sad.

their plan to write a story out of their scrabble moves imploded when tom put down the word they had all decided would never be used. it wasn’t his fault, he was new to their weekly game and hadn’t been properly orientated as there wasn’t time. he had shown up late having got lost trying to find the vault as it had come to be known (mainly because the quality of writing coming out of these scrabble stories necessitated none one ever read such trash and thus, it stayed ‘in the vault’. they were getting better though).

as far as sandwiches go hers is the best

elk isn’t just a good time remember

that eagle’s bald AND stupid

my tonsils appreciate me more than ever now that they live in a dumpster

the wisest thing about those teeth isn’t their sense of timing

grapes aren’t the best thing to leave in your socks after you’ve put them in there and then started walking. it doesn’t make sense if you leave it longer than a minute or two. well in my experience. maybe you’re different entirely. those first few steps feel good though don’t they? so good.

it wasn’t a day of hard labour though still tiring. amazing how a day without sleep can affect (effect?) a person even if that person has spent the day just sitting there and looking, writing, and listening. at various points they’ll walk out on you even though the rain doesn’t fall in a manner which can’t tell if you’re looking at it the right way or where that sandwich even went. did you put it down on the desk, did someone throw it out. are my tangerine oranges gone as well. really? come on. those were in a bag and everything and the bag’s gone too, i was going to use that bag to clean up my dog’s shit later on. i even thought about it earlier when i was buying it, to get a bag even though i had my backpack with me because i know we’re running out of grocery bags because el took three of them to school. fack. so you took it then. or threw it out, one of the two. i can’t see why you would even think to throw it out in the first place. perfectly good sandwich that you’re too much in a rush to care to work around it or, unthinkable, come back later. and this isn’t a class thing. i’m not saying because you’re the cleaner and i’m at a desk means that i’m thinking it’s endemic of all cleaners. just that i had it out. adn now it’s gone. or maybe that’s it. it is a class thing because that’s where my mind went first. fack.

our house on maddams st faces eastward so that it makes sense for me to wake up and swim around the light of the living room as there isn’t much else for me to do so why not that. we have a good living room with plants, and books, and wood that looks renowned. we have a giraffe that’s new (kat must’ve got it from somewhere) with painted yellow spots on its white wicker skin. i’ve put a lot of thought into determining what name fits best for this new friend but everything so far has felt forced so i’ve decided to leave it for a while. yesterday pondering our giraffe’s name i wondered after the process of naming your children and how long is too long to leave it nameless. i feel like i’ve heard it’s a fact that you can’t take your baby out of the hospital without first naming it. or how do you register a baby because there are things like home births and all of a sudden out in the world births. if you really wanted you could make a baby, birth a baby and then keep it a secret for life, tell it as it aged that friends and acquaintances were a luxury too steep for this secret person to afford, as payment for the bill of being birthed this child must use a different name each time or not use one at all. i will sometimes thank the biologies of kat and i for the decisions that they made for us, that our broken uterus and our low sperm count were to be irrefutable facts of our lives.

kat has a trouble with this and sometimes i do too but mostly appreciate that right now i have a new giraffe with which to fight the day alongside. in an hour i will get up off the brightly coloured carpet i’m now sitting on and open cupboards and drawers and fridges and ovens until i have a plate full of food in front of me. i will help my plants grow in the afternoon and i will take a nap and think (or think and then take a nap) after i garden. in our neighborhood the houses are only always split into smaller spaces so that while it’s only kat and i in here, below us are the postal worker and his friend the fancy men’s retail worker and both of their girlfriends who come and go but i can’t tell if they actually live there or just come and go frequently. i haven’t bothered to ask because of the time they asked me to walk less like an elephant and how whenever i start masturbating when kat’s at work they begin to laugh, almost like clockwork. i worry that i’m stroking vibrations down my body and through the thin floor that separates them from us.

-is that beet pickled?
-no
-why not?
-i’ve never known how to pickle anything
-not even when you were a kid?
-especially then.
-because you were so busy
-yes, because i was so busy

and then all of a sudden i missed everyone at once. i missed the room above the bedrooms, my little office, where i could stand a watch the lights of the town grow stronger and stronger before dimming into a pile of morning light that rendered the warmth of what just happened irrelevant. i can walk strongly home and i can stop and get a coffee from the woman who serves coffee more than i could tell but i never wanted to ask her anything besides if she had the time because of how her beauty cast a warmth that any common any lay person could see and trust in her face and in my face i grow tired just thinking about what i have to do when i must come down from my little office to serve breakfast to those who care but can’t show that they do. there’s a lightness to the morning, a vulnerability that shows what we’re doing and where we’re going in a room full of people who may not know which way is up when we all come together to find that this smattering of folks, one from here another from there are all fitting together into a puzzle of pleasant conversation that before it happened none of us knew was possible. remember how i would lock the door to the kitchen to ensure the knives weren’t used for anything but cutting butter and portioning out the rocks that we would buy at the cheapest grocery store in town because the budgets of everyone had been cut cut cut down, all by 5% that gave us all, those affected by 5% cuts, something to talk about when the truth of it all came out over coffee and tea and small snacks that our boss told us we had to figure out for ourselves how to get and wear the clothes that none of us would normally be comfortable in. and then the mayor showed up with her smile and her pocket telephone that everyone there could tell was important because of how often she kept checking it and how often we all had to readjust the silk shirts tucked into pants and the bunches of pantyhose that crept up closer the longer we all had to stand there like statues and wonder if when we got home the dog was already walked or if the woman we wanted to get to know better was alone for good or if her weekend was only actually a weekend. how much can you try to figure out from the point you start from and how much can you come to know if you just turn around, stop for a moment and open that book that we all thought was far too boring to read in one sitting (let alone ten). i miss you and i miss you and i miss my little midnight office and i miss being lonely in a town that wouldn’t let me be.

i can watch the teeth, i can watch your face
hear more and more about where this story is going but not be quite sure that you believe it all.
i could layer the whole of it but i don’t think that’s necessarily the point of the whole exercise. your teeth and mine look different because you take care and i don’t. i don’t take care to do anything but attend to the most basic and vile of my body’s call. i am at the phone, i am now waiting and beginning to think that all this waiting is for naught. i can find a way to make this better that doesn’t involve the wine glass sitting full beside me, a whole roster of grapes waiting patiently on the bench for their chance to get in the game.