the pool came from a sponsored ad on instagram and every day i wonder about my choices
Obuxum - Own Your Truth Feat. Furozh
(Buy the fluorescent Re-Birth here)
"If you cannot open a door and it consists of two doors, don't / surmise that you are locked in,"
Hello:
I stopped writing in the journal. I pressed play on the song. I paid for the subscription. I broke off a hundred here, forty there, twenty, twenty-five. I inhaled smoke from a ceramic pipe that was handmade by a woman I will never meet and shaped like no other object in my home. I squatted down in the corner of the park or the Catholic school playground or the alley and watched the sun dappling the ground while I whispered you’re alone you’re totally alone to myself. I called the mayor. I called the mayor and learned you can order a letter of congratulations or an official proclamation for a fee. I called the mayor while I was walking to the grocery store, while I was walking to the park, while I was lying in the grass, while I was watering the marigolds, and envisioned the words I spoke dissolving into something deeper and darker than a black hole. I laid on the couch and read this: Doubt, uneasiness, dissatisfaction with writing or with existing forms may result in the formal integration of these doubts by the creation of new forms, forms that in one way or another exceed or surprise our expectations. Whereas repeating old forms, traditional forms, implies a lack of desire or compulsion, or a refusal, to entertain doubt or feel dissatisfaction with them. I walked down to the water but just that one time. I had some dreams I can’t tell you about because I’m saving them for something else. I realized I don’t know very much about birds. I got chocolate from an ice cream bar on the corner of my favourite shirt and have not been able to wash or oxi-clean it out. I met the new neighbour. I slept badly. I slept until noon. I saw a baby reaching for a big dog as it walked by him. I saw two mothers, stoned and happy, leaning against the trunk of an enormous maple and heckling their sons as they shot hoops together and tried to ignore it. I looked up at the branches of the tree I was resting under and watched the wind lift them and set them back down and thought A whole ecosystem. I used the same spatula for Carlo’s real burger and my vegetarian one. I laid in the hammock and read this: Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum - that is, any reality - so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. I laid on the couch in front of the fan and ordered an inflatable pool and a pair of bike shorts. I tucked the masks into their little mesh bag before I put them in the laundry. I just stared at the sunset for a while. I picked the cat up and stuck my nose in that one spot at the back of his neck that for some reason always smells like maple syrup and held him for as long as he would let me. I did this one hundred thousand times. I drank half a beer and poured the rest of it down the sink when I felt the same spot at the top of my head start to fizz. I watched Jeopardy! and was surprised by how much I missed the narrative continuity yesterday’s champion provides. I hooked up the projector in the backyard when Deragh and Doro came over and it felt like real summer. I sat in a wide circle in the park for James’s birthday and laughed when a train started thundering past in the middle of his grand speech about how he knew each one of us. I remembered the shameful shot of pure joy that happens when you make a group of people laugh all together at the same time. I thought more often than I am proud to admit of this dumb instagram caption I saw like two months ago: some things can’t happen during quarantine, some things can only happen during quarantine. I worried about the winter. I worried about the winter. I googled “common law ontario how long.” I put the asparagus on the grill vertically and half of it fell into the fire, obviously. I exhaled ten dollars’ worth of government-approved sativa. I felt no fear of repercussion, not really ever. I missed the pool. I clicked play on the video, posted to stories. I bruised herbs in the community garden when no one was there to see me do it. I smelled the grass in a park in a neighbourhood that was not mine. It smelled mostly the same. I looked up through the leaves of the pergola and saw a raccoon peeking down at me, his dumb little face making that raccoon face at me, eyes flashing in the darkness. I rode my bike to my mother’s house and saw my grandmother there, on the front porch, wearing a polka dotted dress and a string of multicoloured beads and surrounded by geraniums and holding the arts section of the newspaper and laughing at something her daughter had said and I felt like a millionaire, like a lottery winner, like always, when I see this. I watched the cat dart under a bush and come back with a bird in her mouth. I eavesdropped as the barefaced cashier at Food Basics told the woman behind me that you could get a doctor’s note exempting you from wearing a mask if you’re really claustrophobic. I barely touched the big computer. I stayed up until 2am on the couch, scrolling through ebay listings for teapots from the 60s, trying and failing to catch an echo of the Value Village high. I called my councillor. I called my councillor. I called my councillor and after weeks of it the sound of her biting off the syllables of her own name embedded itself in my head like a jingle, like three seconds of a top-40 song. I let Louise trim my bangs in the garden and watched the perfect spirals of my hair blow away in the breeze. I watched Carlo pushing the dull mower across the lawn, his cheeks flushing rose. I emailed the oven guy to ask for an invoice. I wrote the same long email again and again. I called my grandmother and asked what I should do and she said just keep calling, they have to listen, they work for you. I called my grandmother and thought about my grandfather. I called my mother and thought about my grandfather. I watered the garden. I watered the garden and thought about my grandfather. In my family you can’t really grow vegetables without invoking his memory. Even my dad said it when I sent him a picture of all the tomatoes and herbs and lettuces: he would be so proud of you. I knew he would, I know it. I remember him growing beans along a trellis shaped like a tent so I could sit inside of it and read while he worked in the vegetable garden. I remember him swinging the rope ladder over the tree branch, letting me drive the tractor, driving us across the country so I could travel with them like they’d travelled with my mother, ordering room service at the hotel so I could have the little glass ketchup bottle. I kept finding my gaze drawn to the old sign for his constituency office I have tacked up on the wall, the one that makes me feel good because when I look at it I think of just him, the individual, singular, a human being I loved and who loved me, who made my life what it is and me the person that I am. I never see it and think about the other thing it signifies: the system he worked inside of, upheld, believed in, fought for, loved. I have never had to work to separate the two; it just happens, like instinct but deeper and darker than that. I watered the tomatoes and I thought about my grandfather and I tried to hold the discomfort and the love and the ache of it as long as I could. I told myself it’s a practice and felt sometimes honest when I did this and other times like a coward. I watered the tomatoes and invited friends over to see them. Rudrapriya came, and Layne and Carlyn and Deragh and Doro and my mother, over and each time I felt so lucky. I texted a picture of myself to my hairdresser the way you text a picture of yourself to a crush you know you can’t and shouldn’t. I won at trivia for the first time ever and then the next week I lost at trivia, terribly. I went back to the park almost every day, just to lie in the grass and read. I laid in the grass and read this: To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us. And the vestiges of boarding schools, the soup-wielding missionary wraiths, hang their heads in defeat. I moved the dracaena to my desk. I poured a full mason jar of cool water into the hanging basket almost every morning, because that’s what it needs to stay alive.
Something longer to listen to:
Angela Davis - Revolution Today
Pets, interiors:
Submit pictures of your pets flopping around in the summertime heat to @apartment_poem on instagram
Roommates/Dreams:
We're gonna keep doing these as long as people need or want it. Submit petty complaints about the people you share space with or dreams anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com.
&&&:
Carlo's basketball corner:
Carlo's asleep so I'm taking over: Wilt Chamberlain - Passing Ability (After 50ppg Wilt Averaged 8.6 Assists) - this video takes a few minutes to really get going but I promise you it's worth it