Sitting home, Wednesday night

Sitting home Wednesday night. Today was ridiculously hyper. There was an air of it in Halifax; I suppose it’s the students being back that’s doing it.

Sitting out on the deck. We have the smallest deck in the world. If I sit with my chair rammed up against the kitchen wall, I can prop my feet up on the railing at the far side, put the laptop between my stomach and my thighs and type with my elbows on the arm of the chair. The only problem is when I’m having a cigarette (sorry, mum); I have to lean forward to tip the ash.

Why have they not invented the ash-less cigarette? It is a total pain in the arse tipping one’s ash when one has one’s laptop balanced delicately as a creamy tankard of frothy Arthur’s between one’s stomach and one’s thighs.

That was a Baz sentence, by the way. Baz is my brother. I must tell you all about him some day. I talk about him quite a lot. I sometimes wonder does he ever talk about me. I can’t ask him, because to do so would be to invite a carefully crafted, superbly supercilious email about how far beneath his contempt I exist; too far to deserve the effort of a response. Which hits every one of my many buttons simultaneously.

There’s nothing worse than a bitter Piscean.

An insecure Cancerian possibly….

Anyway, I’m burning cds for the weekend. I’m going down to Long Island. Again. It is my new drug of choice, for so many reasons, none of which I am going to go into in any detail here. Those of you who care know. And the rest of youse can all fuck off, because I met someone I knew in the street today.

And she said hello to me first.

SCORE QUEENIE!!!!!

The insecure Cancerian in the Royal family. The one who spoils Christmas. The one who never knows when to shut up. The one that has to be the centre of attention all the time.

Why do I believe all this SHIT about myself. I’m febblus me. People I don’t know notice what I’m wearing and then when they meet me they say ‘were you walking down Barrington yesterday wearing a pink skirt’. And I pretend I can’t remember. Even though, inside, I’m on my knees weeping with gratitude at whatever divine being sorted this little victory out for me.

I love this city. It’s just the right size pond for me.

I guarantee you I will know everyone in this city in one year’s time. Then I’ll want to leave.

But I won’t really, because I’ll want to do another summer here. Tish was talking to the Gorgeous Gabe the other day while donating her beautiful hair to child cancer victims, as only Tish can do, and he told her that fall here is a long redolent slide into the hoary forgetfulness of winter. Well, he didn’t use those exact words, but that’s what he meant. I’m really looking forward to it.

There are five of us in the house. The last one arrived today. A deep, silent Cape Bretoner. Which means he’ll be mad on some level, but it might take a while to figure it out. But he’ll be mad, oh yes. He didn’t know what to make of me. This long stringy thing in painted on jeans and a low cut top babbling at him about how he should come upstairs more because the basement is very dark, isn’t it. And you need to get a bit of light all the time.

He came up, give him his due, and we sat on the tiniest deck in the world for a while and he opened up a little bit and told me he gave up engineering to go back and do nuclear medicine. Which I had to look up on the internet afterwards.

The deck is my perch. That’s what Bruce says. Bruce is the guy I’ve been sharing with since I moved in. We have a very strange relationship. He resents me on some level. I think it’s because I’m smart and I’ve got a good job and he’s smart and he’s got a shit job. And he can’t figure out exactly why I’ve one up on him but he suspects it’s probably got something to do with my having a nice ass.

Prick.

It’s unnerving sometimes. I get nervous when he’s around. But then I relax and he does too and we have great chats. And he does loads of stuff for me. He puts out the bins and he hasn’t asked me to do it yet. And he went to get us cigarettes the other night. After he had smoked all of mine. And he lets me into the bathroom first in the morning. But there’s always something bubbling under the surface. He reminds me of a lot of guys I knew in college. We’d have these strange afternoons, or evenings, or nights when they’d insist on walking me home and I’d insist they slept on the floor and they would keep me up all night talking as a punishment for not sleeping with them. I’d sit there and curse whatever divine being it was organised for me to be a woman.

I deserve my little victories. I do.

Marissa and Justin are the other two. They’re very young. Students. Marissa’s very bouncy and Justin’s a big stoner. Apparently he’s a good soccer player as well. I’ll have to give him the lecture about his lungs.

We’re all rammed into the little yellow house on PrettyArmyInstallation (PAI) Ave and everyone’s wondering who the troublemaker’s going to be.

Who’s going to spoil Christmas?

Why is Google so slow today? It’s not the internet connection. Everything else is humming along as usual. I started imagining that the internet collapsed today. I am extremely unprepared. I should find a website that tells me how to prepare for an internetless world, as I can’t remember what they’re like. I am such a goldfish. We all are I suppose.

Poor New Orleans. It puts everything into perspective doesn’t it. I find that when I’m done with the goldfish moment on that, it puts my own life into some sort of perspective. I used to feel really selfish about thinking like that, but now I realise that almost everyone does. And the people who don’t are really special and should be helped in whatever way to keep doing it. And not given to bureaucrats to manage, because if that happens they’ll just wither and die of pain from the neglect and indecision and penny-pinching that comes with that territory.

The rest of us are more selfish. The thought I had today was that I gotta keep travelling. Everywhere I go gets destroyed afterwards and a lot of places I haven’t been. That’s really selfish. But it just popped into my head. So I thought I’d write it down, to show you all how selfish I am.

Because it’s my blog.

This level of honesty is starting to freak me out a little bit. I’m starting to think of whom I’ll be upsetting. The weird thing about a blog is that once even one person starts reading it, you adapt it to ensure they won’t be offended. Well that’s what I do. Sometimes I end up writing stuff and looking back at it knowing I changed it in my brain before I wrote it down.

Which wasn’t the original plan.

I’ll never have the nerve to write a novel. Which is probably just as well for the rest of you.

Jesus! I’ve gotten another spam comment on Percy’s. GOOGLE! What the fuck is going on? I’ll have to switch my comment function off. Which is fine, because no one comments anyway.

Truly, there is no escape from the entrepreneur. I think they should be all taken out and shot myself. They do more damage to the world. Give the venture capital to the caring in the world and lets all sit back for a moment and watch them fall over in excitement and then tear themselves to shreds spending it. We had to watch the internet pioneers do it. It couldn’t be any worse this way.