Topic 6: My Friend Nick
I had a drink with my friend Nick last night on the Garnet patio even though it’s not warm enough and we had to bring the chairs out ourselves. Also he had soda water, even though that’s usually my move, because he is on the wagon. I had vodka in my soda water, but it still looks exactly like soda water so how can anyone even tell. He told me about this disaster date he went on. He met this woman online. Date #1: She reveals she hates campfires, like she doesn’t even notice he’s a Cree wearing a plaid shirt. Date #2: She burns him with the bar bill. Date #3 (WOAH . . . buds, what are you even doing on Date #3?? because Date #1 is a clear deal-breaker): She thinks making records is a waste of time, when all Nick does is make records, and after she says this, he shows her his killer record collection. So he dumps her by not returning any of her texts. Then he tells his best bud the story while drinking soda water on the Garnet patio and bam. She’s sitting behind him and sends him a mean text because she heard everything.
Topic 7: Pink Pants
Pink Pants is awesome. In my mind, he deals in essential oils, and he mixes them up himself in his lab across the street from my house and his potions are better than whatever you can buy at the health food store. I know this because I am home all day looking out the window, and people come and people go exchanging things in brown paper bags. But I’m not around Pink Pants. He is more like a reality TV show that is in real time out my window every day. I like Pink Pants even though he is not always wearing the light pink jogging pants he was on the day I coined his name. Pink Pants is busy. Sometimes he ties the push mower to his bike and drives around on his lawn to cut the grass. Sometimes he puts on a show at dusk that is sort of a fusion between white layman’s martial arts and Lady Gaga’s dance troupe, and he karates around the lawn with LEDs on different parts of his body and sticks that he wings around. One time he tied the hose onto his bike and drove around the lawn and watered the grass, but then he got into trouble because it wasn’t his day of the week to water the lawn and our hell-bent-on-rules neighbour went over to put a stop to the illegal lawn-watering. Pink Pants also walks different dogs a lot. I don’t know where he gets all of these different dogs. Or where they go. One time he brought my cat Moonshadow home because he thought Moonshadow looked chilly.
Topic 8: Keeping Score
Ok. I’m going to think about you as much as possible for the next 2.5 minutes because I’ve done such a good job of not thinking of you for the past 13 minutes and 33 seconds and this is my little reward.
Topic 9: I’ve Never Not Once Gotten Along
with People Named Rachel
Let’s get to the bottom of this. The first Rachel I knew did the Mexican Hat Dance (which was wrong for a hundred reasons right off the bat) straight off the stage of the gymnasium at Singleton Public School, but at the time it was Singleton Pubic School because some high school kids stole the “l,” and this was during morning kindergarten’s rehearsal for the Thanksgiving assembly and Rachel was wearing overalls from marks & spencer or maybe I was wearing overalls, and if so, mine were mint green and homemade out of the scraps left over from when my mom made my dad a mint-green leisure suit.
Rachel was 5 years old with glasses and she was the kind of 5-year-old that had teachers for parents, which means she never made mistakes and she was not messy and she never used too much white glue or returned her library books late and she never got lice either.
Since Rachel never made mistakes, her trip off the stage during the rehearsal was re-cast by herself as a fainting episode, which yielded pain-in-the-ass rest periods from Mrs. Pratt, the kindergarten teacher, a trip to Dr. Cupboard, and wheelbarrows full of sympathy from all the other adults.
Rachel needed a lot of sympathy.
And I apologize to all the Rachels that don’t need even one little bit of sympathy.
Topic 10: Getting Old, Part 2
The only way to live a long life is to get old. I saw that on a bumper sticker. I really didn’t peg myself for someone who was going to be so upset about the decline of my physical body. I never really liked my young body in the first place, and I never really cared that much about how it looked. I was more interested in what I could do with it. I think I wasted my youth. Like I should have enjoyed my body more when it was beautiful.
Topic 11: Being a Writer Sucks
Writing actually sucks. Like you’re alone in your head for days on end, just wondering if you actually can die of loneliness, just wondering how healthy it is to make all this shit up, and just wondering if you did actually make this shit up, or if you just copied down your life or worse someone else’s life, or maybe you’re just feeding your delusions and neuroses and then advertising it to whoever reads your drivel.
Topic 12: Taxes
Good one, Kwe. Good one. You can go on and on and on about taxes. First you Canadians stole the land, then you make up this elaborate system of oppression to keep us too dead or too depressed to do much about it, then you create this elaborately irritating system for us all so that you have the cash to maintain the deadened depression and, admit it, Revenue Canada irritates the fuck out of you guys too, it’s like our first point of agreement, and then, to add salt to our wounds, you make us figure out how much zhoon we gotta pay for the oppression. Don’t even talk to me about roads and hospitals because we all know the irritating shit like the Indian Act, stolen land, pipelines and jails and nuclear waste outweighs the useful shit, and to add even more salt to our wounds — EVEN MORE — you create this undecipherable set of quasi-enforced and loosely interpreted rules printed on newsprint, which you get at the post office and that I use mostly to light big bonfires, while perpetuating the myth that I don’t even pay taxes. Seriously, people, if we all stopped paying.
Topic 13: 45 Minutes Seems Too Long and Here’s a Great Reason Why
It’s too long because time is different than it was before the internet. The internet makes time pass more slowly. For instance there is a radio station in Calgary that only plays half-songs now because you can’t stand to hear an entire song start to finish. There is generally only one good part to most songs so let’s save time and just play that. So that means, pre-internet, 45 minutes could mean 11 to 13 songs, and now it means 22 to 26 songs. So 22.5 minutes is the new 45 minutes. So I should really start with 22.5 minutes and that means reward time starts now, which means I can go back to thinking about you directly, and that wasn’t actually so hard, plus I probably thought up some really good shit with all this not thinking about you.
song for dealers
she is standing on
tentative ice
glory singing
to a flock of smirking demons
sharpening their wit
to a choir of ten thousand cuts
widening their cavities
to blunt, tyrannizing wind
grinding her edges
to floundering normativity
unsure if she will bless
to the forming committees
pie-charting her reconstruction
“Oh love, come to me”
“Oh love, come to me”
COFFEE
I actually don’t even know if you drink coffee. We’ve been friends, close friends I’d say, for more than eight months and I have no idea if you drink coffee. I think for sure, though, this is a healthy relationship. Like I don’t worry about it obsessively. I have almost no anxiety around it. There’s a normal, healthy ebb and flow. Sometimes you get busy with other things and with her, and sometimes I’m busy here too. And when I tell you bad things that happen to me you say nice things back and ask questions and make sure I’m ok. And you check in. Like not in a weird obsessive way, but in a “Hey, how are you” way. Mostly I tell you how I am.
Sometimes I seriously want to know more stuff about you. Like, are you a vegetarian? Or do you have siblings? Or which parent is Innu and
which parent is white? Or why is nobody writing about class when in one generation there is going to be a massive shift from lower to middle class for Natives? Or does she know you text me forty times a day? Is that ok?
We’re meeting for the first time tomorrow. Holy fuck. I just realized that and now I’m nervous.
I don’t think you’re a robot. Robots are what me and my sisters call “emotionally unavailable people.” Well we just learned that term from reading the “Twenty-Six Things About Emotionally Unavailable People” on Buzzfeed. I notice with robots that they are actually better at typing emotions than feeling emotions or talking about them. So I like that. It is easier to connect with robots emotionally via text. I always wonder if robots feel emotions and can’t express them or if they don’t feel them at all. At the beginning of all my robot relationships I assume they feel emotions and can’t express them, and just before I leave I decide they don’t feel emotions at all because it is way easier to leave that way. And if you are going to leave, why not make it easy? I’ve never been wrong in this particular type of situation. So my point here is that I don’t think you’re a robot.
I do generally find robots sexy, to be honest. They can’t connect emotionally so they are kind of depressed all the time, which leads to sarcasm, self-deprecation, and satire, and I like that in a person. A lot. But anyway, I don’t think you’re a robot.
I think you are healthier than me because you are very good at emotionally supporting me via text. I generally know that I am terrible at emotional support so I have a list of things to say when someone is feeling bad. I know from reading attachment-parenting books that you are supposed to mirror the emotions or reflect that level of emotional intensity back. Unless it is an unhealthy level — then you are just supposed to be calm. I always say, “So sorry,” because I like when someone says that to me, although I can only think of one time that’s ever happened.
This seems to occur naturally for you. I’ve never met anyone like that before. I also think you are a good judge of people. Like when I go on tour and meet fans — particularly on the east coast, because that is the only place I have fans — I say, “Hey, so-and-so seems really cool. We had a few drinks.” And you are always like, “So-and-so is not cool. They just want something from you. What did you give and what did you get back?” Which is a really smart question because every single time you say that, I can’t think of anything I got back. And then you type this paragraph that says friends have your back no matter what, and that friendships are reciprocal and each person gives the same amount of kindness, honesty, and commitment. And that friends are supposed to be there and that they give back and that if they don’t give back then you shouldn’t be friends with them. “Proportionality,” you call it.
That really makes so much sense. It seems like a dream come true! Like woah! Imagine?! Like when I was a kid I had a stuffed Owl from Winnie the Pooh and he was always there for me no matter what happened. He was fucking on my side like no one else I have ever met. I have him still. I sleep with him a lot. Because having someone who has your back is important.
Every single time I’ve been worried that you are mad at me, I text you, “I think you are mad at me,” and you text back, “Got you.”
I googled “got you” to make sure it means “I have your back no matter what” and according to the Urban Dictionary it does. You suggest I write it down on a sticky note and place it around the house. I do. It’s cool. Everywhere I go when I’m not on my computer I see this reminder that you’ve got me.
I’m in a bar telling Kwe that I’m meeting you tomorrow and she says I should be nervous. Very nervous, she says. She google-imaged you and says that she can’t believe I’ve known you for eight months and that I have not google-imaged you yet and that you are fucking insanely good looking. She says I am going to be immediately attracted to you and this is a problem because I am already emotionally attached to you. I need a fucking plan. She says, in kind of a bossy way, that I should masturbate three times before I meet you, preferably once at the coffee shop before you get there. I am not to drink anything other than sparkly water or coffee. I do not want to fuck up this possibly healthy relationship with a drunken make-out session. For fuck’s sake.
Holy fuck she is so right.
I decide to tell you I’m nervous because I’ve read using your words is key to healthy relationships. I type in, “I’m nervous to see you tomorrow because we’ve never seen each other in person.”
You reply, “It’s fine. We can sit at separate tables and text if we don’t work in real life. Ha.”
God that makes me feel a lot better. Because we totally could. I don’t think I told you that I have social anxiety issues. I type in, “I think I might have social anxiety issues.”
You reply, “Haha. I got you, remember?”
Good. High five. That was the perfect text, really. Like I alerted you to my insecurity around social contact and it also got framed in a potentially sarcastic way which saves face because probably I am supposed to be confident and sure of myself by now. At this point in my life I should have that shit under control. Now it looks like I’m funny instead of neurotic.
Fuck. What if I am attracted to you?
I think I really am emotionally attached to you even though it occurred over text. Like you know every single thing that happened to me over the past eight months right when it happened because, like me, you were alone in a basement apartment in a suburban deathscape writing a maybe-novel.
I wonder if you eat healthy. Like I used to eat healthy when I tried, and now I’m beat down and I don’t try and mostly I feel bad about not eating healthy.
If I am attracted to you it will be fine because at the most we are only spending four hours together face to face this year and distance/time/text should take care of the rest. Plus even stunningly good-looking people have at least one bad feature and I am excellent at finding that and focusing on it and that takes care of the attraction on its own.
It’s all good. It’s going to be good. Trust this. You’ve got me. I write that down fifty-five times in my moleskine and then I rip out the page and tear it up and put it in the garbage in case tomorrow the book falls out of my bag and opens onto that page and you see it.
i am graffiti
i am writing to tell you
that yes indeed
we have noticed
you have a new big pink eraser
we are well aware
you are trying to use it.
erasing Indians is a good idea
of course
the bleeding-heart liberals
and communists
can stop feeling bad
for the stealing
& raping
& murdering
& we can all move on
we can be reconciled
except, i am graffiti.
except, mistakes were made.
she painted three white Xs
on the wall of the grocery store.
one. two. three.
then they were erased.
except, i am graffiti.
except, mistakes were made.
the Xs were made out of milk
because they took our food.
one. two. three.
then we were erased.
except, i am graffiti.
except, mistakes were made.
we are the singing remnants
left over after
the bomb went off in slow motion
over a century instead of a fractionated second
it’s too much to process, so we make things instead
we are the singing remnants
left over after
the costumes have been made
collected up
put in a plastic bag, full of intentions
for anothe
r time
another project.
except, i am graffiti.
mistakes were made.
DOING THE RIGHT THING
There is a hierarchy of people gun owners hate: Indians, vegetarians, “people from the city,” and all political parties other than the Conservatives. My plan was to pretend I was a nurse of i-talian ancestry, but in the first five minutes of the firearms safety course, when we went around the classroom to share why we were here, I said in my most uncompromising voice it was so I could exercise my treaty rights. Then I applied my best don’t-fuck-with-me face as the other students’ necks snapped around to see the Indian-squaw-lady in gun class.
The older instructor is a combination of Lawrence Welk and Red Fisher. He is a blue-blooded Harper Conservative and he knows guns like I know I-don’t-know-what [?] because frankly I don’t know any single thing that well. He knows ballistics because he is an expert witness in the court system. He knows all the stupid mistakes you can possibly make with a firearm because he has been teaching this course for five hundred years. He knows how to hunt in a line like a white man because he is a living, breathing stereotype of the white man. He knows every gun on the market and how to repair or not repair them because he works at the gun store in Peterborough. He is Police Pistol Combat certified and Range Officer certified, and he is also a slug-gun specialist. His bio on the firearms training course website indicates his nickname is “Big Chief.”
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