Errata

If you (whoever you are) are a functioning human being reading this, then you're probably picking up on a gallimaufry of blunders and boners within these Posts, spelling- and grammar-wise. Just ignore those or whatever.

Sloppiness might be the only arena in which I might be able to challenge Steinbeck or Fitzgerald. I don't always type so good, and am likewise shitty when it comes to picking up on my lazy mistakes. All I have to say is: pay me and I'll try and do bitter. Sorry: better.

Journey Prizz (Sadness of the Swamps)

Things worked out well and a story I wrote called "Manning"--that the buds in PRISM published forever ago--was chosen as one (1) of the three (3) stories in the final running for this year's Journey Prize. The other story in the running can be read at the wicked-fucking-cool Joyland. Not to be a dick or nothing, but both of these stories can be found in a book I wrote that some other buds at Invisible Publishing published called The Cloaca.

Here's what the book looks like:

If you know (whoever you are) anything about anything, the JP is fairly fucking prestigious, and this is awesome to have happen. However...

It's kind of a sucky feeling to be separated from the other folks on the JP list. The list is stalwart and true and hopefully the anthology as it's released will act as a platform/spotlight for all the writers and magazines that stain the rag. In particular--and this is just because I somewhat know the fucker--not having Kris Bertin around to be in a dead heat with is disappointing. Though me and he turned out to live in the same city, I met him through his nominated story "Is Alive and Can Move," which was a real dick kicker of a story that PRISM also put out. It was the best story I'd read in a long-ish time, for reasons that it will describe better than I can. If it was up to me, he and me would be in a weird pie eating competition (while dressed in suits) that would decide a JP winner. But--as with most cogent disappointments in my life--this was not up to me, and nor should it be. Because I Drink.

Beyond professional awkwardness, this being shortlisted also means that I have to hang out in a room with mostly total strangers for a night while wearing a suit, and it might take a fair amount of aforementioned Drink to feel good about being corporeal during this whole to do.

All this snit aside, I'm serious: it's a realdeal honour to be all up in this Journey Thing. I'm for real seriously serious. Seriously.

EDIT: It's not lost on me how sarcastic this sounds, but hopefully, if you (whoever you are) read this blog, then you'll understand that I'm a bit of a weirdo chockablock with self-loathing. I'm at a loss to really express what an honour being a part of this is without getting caught in the mud pit of my own issues. Thanks for reading!

The Kingdom Of Reality

Not that anyone asked, but it's been a Saturday Day of Drinking and I find myself back at my desk working on a novel that no one cares about and have basically found the perfect hybrided example of tone that I've been striving to affect with this novel I've been hammering at that you didn't ask me about. And it goes like this:

A Real Good Mother And A Father

My pop turned 60 yesterday, by the way. Not too shabby.

Awesome Sauce

Short Storyist and all-around Sweet Person Rebecca Rosenblum has been, for the third time in her blogging life, compiling a sort of democratic list of 1000 Things We Like. Considering the title of the blog you're currently spinning your wheels with, I added my twenty cents. Here's my contribution:

499) Elderly women looking in trash cans
500) Elderly men standing and watching construction
501) When cats burp or fart
502) When you lock your bike to a pole and it falls down
503) Drunk kids eating pizza or Chinese food while staggering home, letting their trash fall behind them as they go
504) Those people whose whole week leads up to Karaoke Night and who are really good at Karaoke
505) Hearing about someone falling asleep on the toilet
506) When Bonnie Prince Billy makes reference in song to either his beard or stomach
507) When little kids fall down and don’t cry until someone asks if they’re okay
508) West Coast IPA
509) Watching anyone over fifteen learning how to skateboard
510) When firefighters set their practice house on fire
511) This friend I had who had a ghost in his house and would pee his pants (grey track pants) whenever he thought about it
512) Tracking lines on VHS
513) When you wait around all day for the mail that might have money for you in, and then you go out for afternoon beer and come home to find the money has come
514) Frank’s hot sauce on everything
515) Using “dickering” instead of “haggling”
516) Other people’s fear of clowns for some reason
517) Those promises you make to yourself when you’re going to sleep that tomorrow you’ll wake up and do all things you’ve been doing wrong the right way

Here's a bonus Liked Thing: When elderly people spit into trash cans.

2007, Rue De Villeneuve

I wonder how I come across as a roommate—or simply as a person to any other person. Sarcasm, complaint, and Simpsons quotation is my small talk, and I can only keep up that chatter for a few minutes before it becomes physically uncomfortable and I need to go. Now, if someone wants to stop and talk about their relationship with their father, I'm all “Hold that thought and I’ll be right back with some beer,” but otherwise I, as a roommate, tend to carry on to my room, closing the door behind me. I never understood roommates who leave their doors open.

We were three guys living in a cheap apartment that would have fit five or six. We had our corners we went to, so there were great jags of undecorated, unused space that someone might try to comfify with a show poster or chair he found on the roadside, but in the year I was in that place it never felt like any of us ever really moved in. The spoken word poet (is that essentially a sarcastic string of words, or do I need to add inflection?) who had been theretofore occupying the place was constantly threatening to come back, and whenever she visited Montreal treated the place as if she were paying rent, so I think we were all living in borrowed rooms.

The men I lived with in what would be my last apartment in Montreal were fine fellows, friendly and strange in their own ways. But the cocktail of my social inelegance, an early work day, and burgeoning anxiety about my worth as a writer stymied any sturdy bond. I could slag my personality failings far beyond your willingness to read about them, so there was my work schedule: I was due at the brewery for 06h00 and would get home at 14h00, at which point I shut myself back in my room, drank a few free beers, and napped until 18h00ish. Those few hours of being up and about with my roommates could hardly be described as lucid.

Because I couldn’t rely on myself to function after a real day’s work, I began to rely on writing pre-work. With a determination I still can't account for, I’d fall out of bed at 03h00 and manage a few words before catching the first metro. My bedroom was the smallest, so I lucked out and landed a small room off the kitchen that I made into an office. The floor sloped and my rolling chair always to flee the desk. For those keeping track, it was under these conditions that I wrote “The Shrew’s Dilemma” and “Unburdened Things” and absolutely did not write a novel.

I read somewhere that Buckminster Fuller slept only four hours at a time as a way to combat the jetlag problems that came with his constant travel. I don’t recommend these dymaxion habits. My time in this last apartment are hazy as hell. How much this has to do with queer sleep and accessibility of free beer I’ll have to hash out with my maker whenever that time comes.

One pellucid memory jutting out from the hoppy fog that was that year involves my roommate Chris. This is one of the most ebullient kids I’ve met, indefatigably chipper and witty as all get out. Chris’ catchphrase was “Strong.” It was his affirmation, his approval. Any idea you had or any situation you described that Chris agreed with would get a grinning nod and a definitive “That’s strong.” One morning, I got up at my regular 03h00 start time and found Chris on the couch in one of the three barely furnished common rooms playing a baseball video game, a bottle of tequila next to him on the table. He explained that he was killing time while he waited to hear from a girl. He was playing the Homerun Derby section of the game, which involves you being pitched at and hitting homeruns. He didn’t want to be in the middle of a game when the girl phoned. Let’s say I said “Strong.” I left him hitting dingers and just beginning to sip from the tequila at 05h15 and when I got back from work at 14h30, Chris was still on the couch, hitting dingers, the bottle nearly empty. Chris hadn’t heard from the girl, hadn’t slept, hadn’t stopped playing, and had been having the time of his life.

I don’t remember what it was I did on my last night in Montreal—probably it included Dieu du Ciel—but I do remember walking home and being approached by a friendly Tabby. When I bent down to pet him, the thing sort of climbed into my arms and us two gingers snuggled in the middle of the street for a spell. “I bet I could just steal this cat if I wanted,” I assured whoever I was with. They said no way, that the cat wouldn’t have it. So I walked the cat up the steps and into the apartment and, still holding the guy, walked through all the rooms. Tour over, I set him down by the open front door, giving him the chance to return to whatever rightful owner he had and whatever rightful life. Instead of bolting, he just flopped over and showed me his fat stomach.

2006, Ave Coloniale (Bunk or Murphy? or It Tas'es Like Coke!)

My friend Ross moved to Montreal while I lived in this apartment. He worked down the street in a thriving bike shop and would often cycle by afterwards to drink on my balcony. It was a shared balcony, but no one else was ever out there. Across the street was a three floor building. The top two floors were occupied by a whole family. The two grandparents lived at the top and below them lived at least six people, uncomfortably I’m sure. My favourite thing to watch from that balcony was the oldest son unfold his Murphy bed every night, thinking to myself how awesome it would sort of be to unpack your bed like that every night.

Below the two floors of cramped family, at street level, was a girl who never shut her blinds and spent hours trying on different outfits in her mirror. Shit never got nude, but there was always that boozy, half-joking hope. It was an awkward situation: it seemed odd and prematurely guilty for Ross and I to go inside just because this girl didn’t close her blinds. And anyway, after being waved to one time it was clear she knew we were there—not necessarily watching, but there. One weekend this girl had an older woman we assumed was her mother visiting. When going to bed that night, we watched this old woman climb to a spot in the bedroom that was out of view, leading us to believe that this girl had all along had a bunk bed.

What would be better? Bunk or Murphy?

The apartment itself was forgettable, if somewhat dingy. My landlord was Hasidic and wouldn't look at the girl I was subletting from during the official meet-up. The girlfriend I had at the time refused to stay over, being mostly bothered by the old man below me who coughed up death every morning at exactly 08h30. Across the hall from me was a girl I was told was an outpatient of some sort, and I was given the task by the person moving out of my new apartment to notice when this girl began piling all her stuff outside her door because this was a sign she was getting ready to kill herself and I was to inform the landlord, who, though he'd never look at the suicide-prone woman, would ostensibly make the call that would save her life.

One last thing about the neighbourhood. Down the street, children would collect in front of one particular building. It was hard to tell which kids actually belonged there. One time, Ross and I overheard an exchange between a kid and her mother that confused us at first, but then became clearer. The little girl was taking interest in whatever drink her mom was drinking, and then was given a sip. Either thrilled or confused, the little girl announced—in a statement that’s still a source of hilarity between Ross and me—“It tas’es like Coke, mommy! It tas’es like Coke!”

I moved out, again a month early, when one of those aforementioned moody couples moved next door and would pound furiously through the wall if I made a peep after 10pm. I heard them fighting through the walls nightly, the dopey guy complaining that his girlfriend treated him like he was a fucking stupid child. “You make me feel like such a child,” he’d told her once, “And that’s why I can’t fuck you anymore. Okay? Jesus Christ.”

2005, Rue De Chateaubriand

I don’t have a great disposition for roommates. I can be cagey and odd, and usually want to be left alone—not necessarily to write, but to fuck the dog while sweating not writing. But in this apartment, down a side street just below Mount Royal metro station that the garbage truck barely squeezed down, I strove to be friendly and stay out of my room. My roommate was a friend of a friend, and for the most part we got along, bonding over a half-sarcastic, half-legit love for CSI and Doritos. The space was awkward for an unromantic couple, the bedrooms right next to one another (they might have been one room cloven in two by empty wall) and the living room gigantic and high-ceilinged, so hard to decorate. It was this tall living room that my roommate and I tried to turn into a communal office, her illustrating and me trying to keep up the writing stuff the first summer out of school. Roomie loved the idea of us creating in the same space, and I pretended to. In secret I set up a makeshift desk in my bedroom, which is where half of Pardon Our Monsters was written.

After two months of living in this apartment, I returned to Ontario for a few weeks to go on a camping trip. When I returned, my roommate cornered me with something important to tell confess. Before I could fret the possibilities, she dropped the news: while I was portaging she had successfully cast a spell and now considered herself a functioning witch. My digestion of this information was complicated by my roommates other lifestyle switch: she had become besotted with a group of metal-loving French-Canadian crusty punks. When I’d come home from my 9 to 5 brewery job, wanting only to shower and get drunk, the shower would be occupied (can you wash dreads) and the kitchen and living room was all torn denim, studded, patched leather, and single dreadlocks. A few of these guys, who were all very sweet and mostly children of wealth, were in a metal band they called Excreted Cowboy. They had no songs, but had stickers and t shirts. My favorite sticker of theirs showed the Statue of Liberty holding an automatic weapon in each hand while fighter jets soared above her. The band’s name was up top, in creepy spray paint font, and below was what I presumed to be the band’s slogan (I didn’t know bands had slogans): Audio Terrorism.

I moved out a month early, on foot--the place was just up the street--and paid two rents that month. This was an ebullient, kind person I had been living with. The shit part of the situation was that she hadn't been living with the same.

2002 - 2005, Rue St. Marc, Montreal, QC

The stillest I’ve been since quitting my parents’ house at nineteen was my first apartment in Montreal. I spent the three years of undergrad in this 4th floor 2 ½. (I never figured out the numeracy of Montreal dwelling, but believe this half refers to the bathroom. I could look this up, but maybe I’ll leave that to you—whoever you are.) The summer leading up to my moving in, the building had been chock-a-block with drug labs and caught fire on a weekly basis. These street scientists were ousted by the time I moved in and replaced by moody couples who were not thrilled with where they lived.

The parquet floor stands out in my memory, as well as the blister of water damage above my shower. I was nineteen when I moved in, so still found movie posters to be an acceptable decoration choice. There were these potheads next door who would always knock to borrow my guitar tuner and never return it. They were black and muscular, and having just come from a town whose racial quilt was made up of two patches, Caucasian and Asian, I was also so ashamed by my kneejerk fear of these guys that I never bothered to get my tuner back.

But nothing stands out as strongly as my feeling embarrassed about living there, in that highrise--which, by the way, had a thirteenth floor. I was in Montreal just as it was becoming the goddamn hippest place to be, living in a grey downtown apartment building while my just-as-new-to-the-city peers were finding cheap niches on the Plateau, where their bedrooms were as big as my apartment. These apartments had French doors, the glass hazy and old paint flaking; tangled layers of 60’s era bikes on the porch; rickety chairs culled from the curb and crudely painted whatever gaudy colour; overgrown backyards; languid cats that seemed to have come with the flats; deadly, drunken trudges up the icy helixes already rickety spiral stairs. Most of my friends lived with more roommates than I’d ever had visitors to my expensive, small, white bread apartment.

I wanted to be one of these freewheelin’ people living in one of these freewheelin’ places. And my life since, as I’ve lillypadded from place to place, has been a constant reminder that I’m not so freewheelin’, that I’m a fairly melvin and often prefer to be alone. Fun houses are places I’d rather visit than live.

In The Mood To Move

This is tenth time I’ve moved since 2005. This is not a stat I’m strutting. Moving is goddamn exhausting, expensive as sin, and always just a bit humiliating. It’s not healthy to box your life on a yearly basis. When I began this entry, my worldly possessions were stacked in the corner of my denuded room and I was sweating whether or not I’d manage to Tetris the lot of it into the body of my purple 1997 Rav4—“The Grimus.” I made it just fine. Halifax to Guelph in two days, listening to Stephen King’s time travel novel.

I’m not a gewgaw guy, not sentimental with possessions. The boxed life I’d moved was books that I either haven’t read or can’t do without, furniture that I could either collapse or disassemble, and clothes I’d mostly had since high school. The lot of my worldly junk equals the size of a moose, maybe, or a grizzly bear, or one of those poor obese adults you used to see on TV being taken out of a hole cut into their house by a forklift.

I’ll be thirty in half-a-year and this is a mite fucking depressing.

Seriously Ensorcelled, Guys

I'm in a cynical old stink, guys. So it doesn't often happen that I get besotted with a thing. But I've seriously become obsessed with the below-mentioned artist, Riff Raff. Particularly the below-linked song "Time." Visual reasons: maybe I like to watch with a man with a BET tattoo yawning in a music video, and furthermore enjoy watching that same man have Pringles placed on his fridge-proped body as if it's an obvious, maybe holy thing to do. Textual reason: the section Riff Raff spits about being alone and sick and needing to fall asleep with the TV on is a real kick in the dick. I've spent some serious spates unable to sleep without the TV on, specifically (and let's just keep this between you me and the net) episodes of The Simpsons with creator commentary, And to be alone and sick--few friends, no family or girlfriend available to stop by and check in with you--is one of the gloomiest places I know about. (This one time, during my first year living alone in downtown Montreal, I fell seriously, deliriously ill. My legs were taken out for three days. I didn't leave the house, and when I finally did, it went to the grocery store where--instead of soup, or tea, or tiger balm--I picked up a six-pack of chocolate chip muffins. Let me mention that this was Halloween. At home I ate all those muffins while watching episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? on the cable I then had. And I'm serious: I got well.) But also the yawning and the Pringles.

I'm telling you.

(Also, it may interest you--whoever you are--to know that James Franco is playing Riff Raff in the upcoming Harmony Korine movie...)