I don’t know how they keep killing me—and I’m tired of trying to find out why—all I know now is I keep coming back. So here I am… again.
I have restored access to every file from my failed external hard drive. All my words and pictures and music are here now. Not a single bit lost, so I’m working on my word book again. And my MacBook is up and running, just like new, only without any battery, so I’m working on my photo book again.
School—got caught up in the crossfire. Between moving, working, moving again, working still, computer failures, and the inevitable post‐manic downturn after running through June and July on no sleep fuelled by coffee and cigarettes I did not make the progress I needed to make for a September start, i.e. today. I forgot to stay happy about it. I forgot to stay happy at all.
And then I remembered: I realized I’d been subject to a childish trick some time ago. How it works is if you see someone playing with something you want to play with, rather than asking if there’s another one or if it can be shared, you instead convince whoever is playing with it there are sad people some place far away who are sad because of what you’re doing and the only way to get them to not be sad is to stop playing with the thing you’re playing with—and then you do and then they pick it up, reverse‐engineer it, rape the planet to make a billion shitty copies of it using the same sad people they used as leverage earlier, and then sell them to all the other people they’ve made sad with the same crap, take all the money, and then claim art is derivative and it’s really society’s fault for creating intrinsic value in the first place as the profit rolls in.
Okay—the schoolyard bully analogy got lost in the run‐on commentary of global marketing tactics—industrial espionage if you’re nasty—but the point stands: if someone is trying to make you feel sad, make double sure they aren’t finding out how much your happiness is worth, because once they know, you’ll see some knock‐off version of whatever it is for sale to someone else.
But what’s this got to do with Pure Morning?
Well‐spotted. I got a little distracted by catharsis. I’d lose my head if you weren’t in it.
No you lost your head years ago—that’s why I’m in it.
Hey—doesn’t this remind you of the early version of this thing, where we’d talk back and forth to each other trying to figure out who was who? And then you or I said it was too disjointed and chaotic and needed to be its own thing? Do you remember that? Did we ever finish that?
Let’s finish this first.
From my last post—I drew my first scrap:
Pure Morning — anthem for Canada?
Pure Morning is the first single off Placebo’s Without You I’m Nothing released in 1998. I’ve always liked the start of the song and resultant movement and momentum once it got going—the intro was my ringtone for a few years. Classy.
To me the lyrics are a bit silly. But they’re genuine, and genuine sentiment, even if expressed a little silly, is worth more to me than any amount of serious sounding trite acting like it’s anything but. To me the song’s always been about friendship through all, and the idea of a pure morning, well, that just reminds me of the immense natural beauty greeting all who live on this land each day. A good friend. A beautiful place. To me—that is Canada. It’s the country I want to live in. It’s the country I’d like to be and try to be if I could be a country.
In preparation for this post I read more about the lyrics for the first time having listened to them countless times before. Brian Molko, lead singer and author, says the lyrics were written “off the top of my head”, so he only noticed their significance after recording.
Molko said the it was overall “a song about friendship”, starting from the situation of “coming down when the rest of the world is waking up”, such as when clubgoers get home as the sun rises and everyone else is going to work. The feeling of dislocation, “that point you feel like your life is the least sorted ever”, would be solved by someone to “slip their arm around you and make slumber easier.”
Molko summed up as “All you really crave is for a friend to put their arms around you and make you feel better. That’s the pure morning, when that happens.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I was on holiday for five days in Algonquin Park the other week, and for the first time in years it actually felt like a holiday. I was so happy to be there, and I found myself sad for the first time to be leaving after what felt like not enough time there.
Sitting on the dock looking at the stars one night I realized I’d let myself down by allowing my excitement about going back to school to fade and be lost in the shuffle of life’s latest and relentless catastrophe de jour. I’d failed to be a good friend to myself. I’d fallen for the same crap I fell for before, only it wasn’t anyone else who’d bought and sold my happiness—I’d done it to myself.
The longer I looked at the sky the more I could see. I remembered my posts about the Hubble Deep Fields, the countless stars filling such a small portion of the sky—and me looking back up at so much more of it. Billions upon billions of objects, each made of billions and billions and billions of other objects. The dock floated on the lake and I felt the lake under me. I felt the land under the lake, the land around the lake, the rocks and the trees. I felt the forest. I felt the planet under me as the sky continued to reveal more and more of itself. So many new points of light. So many new worlds—a new sky. I’d changed the sky. I’d changed my stars.
I’ve redone my applications to start school in January of 2017. It means I’ll finish my first year at the end of next summer and then go directly into the start of three more years of design school. I will be designing the future—my future.
And it may not make sense to parts of me why I’m doing this, but the idea makes the rest of me happy, and I’m not letting anyone else, myself included, attempt to steal that out from under me again.
…I thought you’d left me behind.
I thought I had, too.
Are you ready for this?
No—are you?
No.
I’m glad you’re here though. Round 3?
My favourite number.
Let’s roll.