Dec

31

Remember Love: Raise the Roof!

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Tracey Thorn Raise the Roof

Happy New Year!
Wishing everyone a loving, healthy, bright, fulfilling 2009–
Tenderness, care, and the space to live fully, open, honest, and safe.
Remember: It’s never too late to raise the roof!
(What relationsham?!)
xoxoxo

IMAGE | ANS | No Time 4 Love | 2008 | Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop

Dec

29

Coupland d’Ă©tat | Part Five, Final Part

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Mike + Doug Starn fly away

“Yah lotta rain here, and I’m still not used to it,” was one of the last things Jonathan had written to me, when I asked him to no longer send me any e-mails. To cease contact entirely.

It had been a painful decision to make. One, with a never-ending memory.

A Polaroid from the dead. My unrecognizable self. And unlike Coupland, I just wasn’t interested in making a career out of misery.

It had been a standoff between my happiness and well-being.

I had stood a chance.

Among clear skies, reality, finally took hold.

Opening my side of the car door, helping me out of my seat, gathering my baggage from the trunk of the cab; I hugged Gord, goodbye.

IMAGE | Mike + Doug Starn | Attracted to Light L Ephemera 3 | 1996-2004 | 16″x16″| Toned silver print on Thai mulberry paper

Dec

24

Christmas Undressed

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Candy snowflake

Christmas is much like salad dressing,
Oil and vinegar need lots of messing.

Shaking, stirring, whipping to blend,
Family relationships willing to mend.

–It’s never perfect, and it’s never instant.
In fact, to grow close, it first becomes distant.–

And sometimes no damage can repair,
A relative’s lack of care.

The love-less feeling sticks to your throat,
For years and years, to get your goat.

What Christmas does, is remind you of a time,
When the lot of you, got along fine.

This is the picture through the frosty lens,
When in years past, each played pretend.

Since now the pretense isn’t sugar-coated.
Sincerity, not selfishness, has been out-voted.

And all the while, it sucks to discover,
Your cast ballot, never did matter.

So the high road is decorated with ornaments and lights,
Gin, Whisky, Cabs; Muscatels, and whites.

However, Read more

Dec

22

Coupland d’Ă©tat | Part Four

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Mike + Doug Starn Snowflake 1 and 2

Distance is a funny thing. It behaves much like time. It never changes and yet it always feels different, mutable, depending on your place in life. Mine, for the time being, remained seated between my protector and my provoker; feeling inexplicably closer to one, and entirely remote from the other. Two distances from a common vantage point. The stroke of midnight shifted my position.

“Happy New Year!” Jonathan’s parents gathered to the living room, making their way over shoes and bags, like two explorers finding solid footing on unpolished rocks in a rushing stream.

“Happy New Year!” Gord lent his hand to Jonathan’s mom, who pulled it in to her, giving Gord a long hug.

“Happy New Year,” I followed suit.

“It’s so good of you to come,” Ellen kissed Jonathan’s dad on both sides of the cheek. Jonathan turned to smile to his parents.

“Well we wouldn’t have if we knew this was your idea of a party,” Jonathan’s dad walked into a clearing in the living room, looking mischievously over to Jonathan’s mom. “Where is the music? The dancing?”

Jonathan quickly located some smooth jazz. A soundtrack to a motion picture. I couldn’t place it although it sounded familiar.

Before making his way to me, Ellen pulled Jonathan over to her side.

It had been a standoff. I had gone to sit down. Read more

Dec

16

Coupland d’Ă©tat | Part Three

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Mike + Doug Starn Snowflakes

I knew very little about Jonathan’s girlfriend, Ellen. She was divorced with three kids, working the embroidery machine at a textile manufacturer. She had met Jonathan at her old job where he had just been hired. An IT customer call centre. A place where people from all over the world were being paired up with one another.

During a coffee break, she had approached Jonathan with a problem, asking for his advice. He was flattered.

Later that day, he called me to tell me, no one had ever needed him before. Not even me.

It’s true. I had only wanted him.

Soon, he realized she shared his love for bikes.

Girlfriend in a coma.

I never stood a chance.

She was older than Jonathan, by about ten years.

Ten years.

There was that number again.

1020 Maple Hill Drive. The address of his parents condo. We were already here. Read more

Dec

8

Coupland d’Ă©tat | Part Two

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Mike + Doug Starn snowflake

Sometimes we’re at a wedding, invited guests of a friend. I examine my own awkwardness while scrutinizing his indifference after a faceless stranger has made our short introduction. Other times we’re at a funeral. I catch myself looking over to the pew where he sits; ashamed at myself for being more curious than compassionate for the dead.

Never had I imagined meeting him again at Christmas, where the past was buried under the table; cloaked with the niceties two people could muster around a family dinner.

Back at the hotel room where Gord and I were staying, I deflated. The evening had me feeling empty; stupid. A combination of exhaustion and nervousness caffeine is capable of achieving. What had I been thinking?

Douglas Coupland had been delaying, not deliberating. Generated ex had been more alive in my mind, than in real life. The relationship with myself had been tantamount to the one I always thought was about Jonathan.

I had been delaying deliberating, and unlike Douglas Coupland, I didn’t have rainy weather as an excuse. Read more

Dec

2

Coupland d’Ă©tat | Part One

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Leaf Mike + Doug Starn

Since the holidays can get out of hand, I decided instead of the usual essay-like blog posts, to offer up a little winter fiction. I’ll be posting only once a week for the month of December, just so you readers out there can get to tidying, cooking, baking, shopping, crafting, cavorting and much much more!

I should also have several well-wishing greetings interrupting the story flow, further along mid-month. Look out for it!

In the meantime, best to all for a joyous season, and a very luminous New Year. May the future be bright, and the relationsham? Well, may it be left in the past; boarded up in shoe boxes, in the recesses of closets, never to be opened! Enjoy!

“The rain definitely lets you think more about shit,” Jonathan had responded in an e-mail. Why this came to me as a surprise, I didn’t know. It did rain a lot in Vancouver, but Jonathan knew that when he returned home ten years ago.

It had been a standoff between me and his motorbike. I never stood a chance. Read more