Last Nights in April

Moving on.

In Departures: Part II I mentioned an old piece of poetry I needed to unpack before I could post it here. You’re in luck—I found it.

Did you remember it being better? was the response I got to this work the last time I shared it. Not exactly the most constructive critique I’ve ever received, nor particularly flattering, but—who cares, right? Live through this and you won’t look back.

But I will just a bit…

I was eighteen when I wrote this. It was my last year of high school, and it was part of the last assignment for my creative writing class—one of the only classes in school, aside from photography and shop, where I felt like I could be me the most, where it was okay with other people if I was good at something. I hadn’t learned yet I could be good at something and it didn’t matter if people where okay with it or not.

It was late on a summer evening—much like tonight—and I was at my computer listening to music when one of my favourite tracks came on. You might know it from the movie Mortal Combat or Mean Girls, but I know it from the opening of Hackers, one of the first movies I ever saw with just me and my friends in a theatre—so the track, the movie, and the entirely new‐to‐me genera of electronic music became forever etched in my mind. It’s a truly laughable movie in its terriblness, but it’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. Yet I digress…

The track is Orbital’s Halcyon + on + on, and to this day it will still give me goosebumps when it starts, pulling me right back to the night when I wrote these words, when I knew when to start and when to stop and didn’t think for one second in between it all. I went from moment to moment, zigzagging through my memories as years of previous nights streamed in front of me. I changed seasons, changed provinces—I moved through time and revisited myself. It all just sort of happened—I ended up happy with it—and then the song ended.

Last Nights in April

on the night before,
the rain stopped in the air
and was held in the orange lamp light,
like silent smoke,
drifting up from an ash tray
sitting on the corner
of a pool table
in the bar down the street.

on the night before,
my feet stood in the fallen snow
and the coldness crept in.
the wind cut into my bare face.
the moon came down
illuminating the yard,
and my mind
like the frozen trees,
stood naked in the night.

tonight, all the thoughts,
of all the nights before,
came to me all at once,
and the night seemed far too long.
and morning might never come,
for all the things that had to be thought of
seemed to take more time.

on the night before,
the summer air was thick
and the mosquitoes filled what space was left.
the iron porch railing caught me as I stood
head to the sky,
thoughts to the past,
wishing for the future
and at the same time
dreading its arrival,
like the front of the line
for the highest roller coaster in town.

on the night before,
the mountains looked sad,
and the sky bluer than usual.
the cool air came rolling down
to push the heat of the day
away until tomorrow,
and me away forever,
like any other day past by
in this small town,
whose confined valley
sets the spirit free
and holds it down at once
in a perpetual state of confusion and
understanding.

on the night before,
the true nature of life revealed itself to me
for a split second.
eyes of failing vision
called to a distant hospital,
but me across a lake
linked by a collection of orange,
and a car that's leaking oil.
hours of darkness after days of the same,
and another week to go.

the night is the time
for transformations
from high to low,
far to near,
away to home,
home to away,
and away from home.
welcome to the city,
with lights orange bright
tracing the path of other night time travellers,
in glowing trails that dance from the plane.

on the night before I left,
the rooms were empty,
the dog was sleeping,
and the last of the tape was stuck to the floor.
the cool cement on my bare feet
as I stepped away,
was just like the night before.

Welcome

I show up in the dark and meet a new friend.

Well… I made it. I remember a massive wind farm near Creemore, tacos from Momofuku, Sloan performing in a barn, I think my birthday was in there somewhere, and then it’s a blur of caffeinated four to five hours of sleep a night for three weeks, more trips to and from my apartment than I care to remember, and a bunch of stuff I don’t think I can remember. But somehow it all worked out. I’m here. My new home: the city I’ve always but never quite lived in. Let me explain…

My decision to move out of my apartment was mostly practical—but the other part, since there’s never been anything fun about a mostly practical decision made in the history of decisions ever, was made with a sense of fun in mind. I wanted it to be an adventure. I wanted a new way to live and experience the city. I wanted to be mobile. I wanted to be different as a result. And I lucked out. I found a room in a house near school where things feel out of time—Paris in the early thirties I’d say, when art nouveau and art deco had been overlapping for years, but if it were happening in a hundred year old house in Toronto with stainless steel appliances in 2016. It’s like living in a hotel at the end of the universe. Everything’s taken care of so there’s actually little for me to do when I’m at home except for write, and that’s the point. I’ve got two months to do as much as I can with my writing before school starts, so if I’m not working I’m at home writing, and if I’m not at home writing, I’m out exploring. I’m a happy time traveller.

Tomorrow marks a week since arriving. It’s amazing how quickly a place can start to feel like home after cooking a few meals, reading quietly, and hanging your underwear up to dry. I’ve left my car on the street and use transit to get to and from work now. I’m exploring a familiar but often only just passed through area of the city. There is a 24 hour diner where I had steak and eggs at 2AM after work yesterday. There was a pickup truck full of raccoons in traps I passed by on my way to work this morning. There’s a coffee shop where I can get a double Americano made with more coffee instead of just hot water, plus they put chocolate in it. There’s a dog park and fruit markets. There’s a fancy grocery store. There are several terrible ones. I haven’t even started on all the shawarma places. And it’s only been a week. Yeah… I’m a happy time traveller. Except maybe about the raccoons in traps. They were cute, but it was a sad sort of cute.

The best part so far, by far, is the sleep. It’s so good. It’s quiet here. I don’t need ear plugs. My room is cold and dark. I can even leave the window open if I want and listen to the sounds of the wind in the trees at nighttime. And I’m dreaming again—big, long vibrant dreams where I forget I’m sleeping and then wake up and remember I was. I rally for words and they are calling back. I hear them again. I don’t worry as much as I used to about coming back. I know I am. I don’t have to believe it anymore.

The night I arrived here for the first time it was late after work. The power was out, weirdly, and I’d stopped for a drink with a work buddy, so I was being extra careful in this ornately decorated, cramped, completely foreign, totally dark house in my giant work boots, many backpacks, and cellphone flashlight. I make it to my room, breathe a sigh of relief, and in the silence of the house hear the faintest of footsteps on the carpet.

Freddy? I ask to the darkness.

The lights come on as a black cat with two white whiskers chirps at me, purring.

Welcome.

Departures: Part II

Lights out at CityPlace.

Walking back from finalizing the details for my new place I realized I’ve entered into what I call the lasts leading up to a move. In this case—the last weekend in my apartment. To celebrate I’m making a gigantic dinner made up of all the things I’ve collected from the various markets around the neighbourhood, eating as much of the food in the house until I feel like I can’t budge, and then forcing myself to make the fourteen to fifteen trips from the apartment to my car to fill it with stuff to move. Then I get to have fun and post pictures and write.

But—of course—before the pictures, some more words. In Part I my dad and I walked around CityPlace on a bright summer day. This time, along with my sister, we did a night shoot along Queens Quay on a warm summer night.

The exhaustion is setting in. When I sit and rally my thoughts for words they do not call back. I want to do something at least a little bit fun amidst the work I need to do this month. It’s almost over. I’ll I hear is sleep. But I want to write—finally I see them, the words I know will one day be sitting on a page. I can see the book. I see the beginning—the ending. It’s in my hands. I’ve done it. …I want to write.

These pictures are from September of last year. At this time I’ve only just figured out the lack of proper darkness in my bedroom and over‐abundance of nighttime noise is slowly depriving me of the sleep I need each night to keep me from slipping away, but I don’t know how tired I actually am yet. Tonight I know I’m exhausted, but I understand why. Back then I didn’t. I can see it in the pictures. They feel tired. They’re unfocused. I see the lack of a solid foundation.

My photos are my notebooks and my compression algorithms. They are my bookmarks and placeholders. I write from what I feel and remember feeling when I see them. They are notes to my future self. For a while I couldn’t look at them because I didn’t like what they were saying. Now I understand I can’t pick and choose what I want to hear from myself. It works better when I just listen. What’s the point of time travel if you’re just going to argue with the past?

As I’m writing this I’m looking out over the street from my desk’s new position in front of the giant wall of glass that is the one side of my apartment. It’s better like this, without the giant couch filling the room and blocking the windows. I wish I’d done this sooner, but at least I get to enjoy the view for my last month and last weekend here. And I now know it’s perfectly possible to live without a couch.

It’s Monday night. I started this post on Saturday afternoon. This is how chaotic things have become—where I spend three days writing something and it ends up reading like the same: a little more clunky than I’d like. Normally I’ll write a post in one shot with very little editing. It all just ends up happening and I end up happy with it. I don’t really see it happening that way for this post, so I’m ending with some old writing from years ago inspired by some of the many the lasts in my life. Yes—it’s poetry. And it’s the best kind of poetry too: high school poetry.

…And after going through my computer I realize I only have a hard‐copy of this poem, and it’s packed. So—we’ll come back to that in a few days.

In the meantime…

I’m Tired

…but more writing is coming. More everything is coming.

I’ve been working long nights these last few weeks. Once I came home as the sky was lightening. By the time I was finished eating dinner and getting into bed the sun was already up. I couldn’t do it—I was back at work hours later on no sleep. It’s too loud to sleep here at night let alone in the day.

This amount of work is temporary. I am doing what I need to do to get what I want done. I told myself I didn’t care what I had to do, I was going to do it. If it means little to no sleep until the end of the month, I’ll do it. If it means hauling each box and piece of furniture to where it needs to be myself, I’ll do it. I will do whatever it takes. I’m back.

The moon is keeping me company through it all. From my new vantage point in my apartment it will swing around the buildings and shine in while I work on packing or attempting to write. My hands hurt from work. It’s tough to type, but I do. My head hurts from building skids in my mind. I can’t find my words, and I dream of irregular shapes I form into cubes and then wrap with clear plastic. I walk around inside transport trucks and pretend to unload them. I think in reverse picturing how each order will attempt to rip itself apart as the deliveries are made.

But my hard work is paying off. I’ve been promoted at work—I’m now a pack leader.

Like I said—I’m back.

한

All I wanted was a quiet drink, but I ended up in the middle of Spadina Ave looking for pizza at 4am. What happened?

They—whomever they are—say not to get drunk and read old LiveJournal posts. Well, we’re in luck. I’m only 2.5 drinks in, far from drunk, and it’s not LiveJournal I’m going through, just the collection of half‐started and half‐finished—and there is a difference—blog entries sitting on my computer.

I drink directly from the small Jameson bottle mistaking it for a beer immediately realizing my mistake as my head burns and waters in a wave of sudden whiskey…

In preparation for moving I’m drinking all that’s left in the bottles on my shelf. If I like a bottle, I will leave a little left in it so I’m reminded to buy another one. I don’t keep what I don’t like. And this is almost the same way I treat a blog post on my computer. If it’s still there, undrunk as it were, it means there’s something to it I’m hanging on to. It’s unfinished. So in the spirit finishing what I’ve left unfinished—bottom’s up. I’ve dealt with the Canadian rye and polished off the Irish whiskey. There’s one bottle left and the Dj just mixed Missy Elliot into The White Stripes.

…I don’t know how to delineate the post I’m making now from the scraps I found on my computer from then. They tie into the next two posts I will be making as part of my Departures series as it turns out, a spot of good luck, although Egon Spengler maintains luck is for the ill‐prepared.

Let’s try this—October of last year: I’m covered in cat scratches and there’s half a body’s worth of hole in the apartment wall. It’s my first Saturday to myself in what feels like years. I don’t know what to make of it, so I dig out my old 35mm SLR, walk, and write.

You typed “flim” for the filename—nice.

Shut up.

—

I take the last roll of film I’ve got with me for a Thanksgiving walk. My camera comes too—it all works out.

The previous roll of film I shot was May of this year. The roll before that, almost a year and a half ago. The previous roll before that, likely five years ago. The film I’m using is at least that old.

Digital equipment affords me, usually now anyway, hundreds to thousands of shots—or an unlimited amount with deletes. With film, usually 24. A hard 24. No deletes. There is a finality to the medium I suspect makes me craft a shot more than if I’m shooting digital. Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I pass by picture after picture waiting to find that one out of 24.

I think film makes me a better photographer because I think about each shot more. I think film makes me a worse photographer because I do just that. Think. Too much. I think too much. I walk with my 24 shots. The digital vs. film debate not entering into what’s still an empty camera.

And then I remember: take the picture. It doesn’t matter. Take the picture.

—

The film canister sits on my desk—full of pictures. I know what they are, but I don’t at the same time. A USB stick from my dad loaded with preview images of shots I took with him the other day sits beside it. Twenty‐four shots takes up more space than over three hundred.

My mind races.

Is the stick of files more real than the undeveloped film? I can’t look at either without an interpreter. For one, electronics. And chemistry. For the other, chemistry. And electronics.

It doesn’t matter. Take the the picture.

I start to think about black holes again. Fascinating objects. All you ever see of them is what just crossed into them. An echo of something that was there that now isn’t.

An abusive relationship.

The title of this post— 한 —is Korean. Pronounced han it haphazardly translated and highly‐simplified means grudge but has also been described to me as a feeling of unfinished business.

Like many nuanced concepts in other languages there is no direct translation into one English word. Do we have a way of encapsulating the feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined into a single word? Not that I know of. Lucky me, right? But this concept is woven into Korean culture. It’s part of an identity. And as an outsider looking in I am acutely aware of being a foreigner in someone else’s language as I talk about a concept steeped in otherness as if I know anything about it.

Yet—if I put some thought into it—this otherness isn’t as foreign as it seems. Those feelings are not unfamiliar. The scale might be. But to claim it as unique to a single culture and not within grasp to those outside it—as it often is—is a disservice to the second greatest cross‐cultural bridge we have: solidarity. How do you reach a concept so wanting to be understood yet maintains there is no way you could ever understand it? It starts to look like an impossible problem. And I’m immediately suspicious of an impossible problem because I don’t believe it exists.

Does English contain the same raw trauma where a concept such as 한 would result? Possibly. Show me a language which doesn’t. But in exactly the same manor? …Not really. So I’m left with an attempt at the greatest cross‐cultural bridge we have after solidarity: relation. If 한 is representative of a complex set of thoughts and emotions spanning past, present and future, experienced by the individual both as a single entity as well as part of a collective then the corresponding English must sit on the other side and have a similar complexity and weight for it to properly relate.

Revenge seems like a good choice. But it’s too narrow in focus. Too procedural. Too active. The initial translation of grudge by comparison seems far too small a concept in of itself. Too simple and juvenile. What word within English has the power to unify with such sharp and heavy concepts so thoroughly entrenched they become part of an identity that’s both lamented and—perhaps inexplicably—quietly celebrated?

Just one bottle left…

Addiction? …Addiction.

That’s what I’d offer back from English to put on the other side of 한. But not the state of being an addict. I’m talking about what addiction does to people who aren’t addicts themselves. If you took those effects, scaled them up, applied them to a nation’s worth of people, and let the clock run, I think you’d end up with what could be considered 한.

Or as Mark Twain in the 24th century via Star Trek: The Next Generation puts it:

CLEMENS: Any place that doesn’t stock a good cigar doesn’t rank high in my book.

TROI: If you must have one, I’m sure we can replicate it for you.

CLEMENS: You think one of these imitations can take the place of a hand wrapped Havana?

TROI: I wouldn’t know.

CLEMENS: Well, that’s the problem I see here. All this technology it only serves to take away life’s simple pleasures. You don’t even let a man open the door for a lady.

TROI: I think what we’ve gained far outweighs anything that might have been lost.

CLEMENS: Oh? Well, I’m not so impressed with this future. Huge starships, and weapons that can no doubt destroy entire cities, and military conquest as a way of life?

TROI: Is that what you see here?

CLEMENS: Well, I know what you say, that this is a vessel of exploration and that your mission is to discover new worlds. That’s what the Spanish said. And the Dutch and the Portuguese. It’s what all conquerors say. I’m sure that’s what you told that blue-skinned fellow I just saw, before you brought him here to serve you.

TROI: He’s one of the thousands of species that we’ve encountered. We live in a peaceful Federation with most of them. The people you see are here by choice.

CLEMENS: So there are a privileged few who serve on these ships, living in luxury and wanting for nothing. But what about everyone else? What about the poor? You ignore them.

TROI: Poverty was eliminated on Earth a long time ago, and a lot of other things disappeared with it. Hopelessness, despair, cruelty.

CLEMENS: Young lady, I come from a time when men achieve power and wealth by standing on the backs of the poor, where prejudice and intolerance are commonplace and power is an end unto itself. And you’re telling me that isn’t how it is anymore?

TROI: That’s right.

CLEMENS: Well, maybe it’s worth giving up cigars for after all.