aMMusing

It’s quite remarkable how, perhaps moreso now than ever, we can find that we are somehow connected to one another, however loosely. Last weekend, while The Quad was in Montréal from Fredericton for some vacation R & R, I found a very indirect but nonethelesss fascinating connection with fellow Montréal blogger Tornwordo.

It has to be understood that The Quad, whom I’ve known since I was 12, is perhaps the most gregarious person I know. As a result, I suspect it’s impossible for him to travel incognito. No matter where he is, he is bound to come across someone he knows while minding his own business on just about any street in any Canadian city. Or, if not, he’s meeting someone who likely will be added to his vast repertoire of people he’ll unexpectedly bump into weeks, months, or years later. In fact, it’s through The Quad that I met Jain (a.k.a. The Pastry Monster), whom I had called the weekend before to urge her to come to Montréal while The Quad would be visiting, which she did.

While in Montréal, The Quad went to dinner with someone he befriended about a decade ago at some rather extraordinary event in which they were called upon to participate. Before dinner, he told us how she was a very interesting, knowledgeable, sophisticated and successful lady who works extremely hard but who, for some reason, has had a great deal of difficulty learning English despite expending extraordinary time, effort and money to learn the language. He was going to meet her for dinner after she got back from spending several hours with a private tutor in her continuing effort to parler anglais. Another attempt by this lady to perfect her English consisted of spending considerable time in Nova Scotia, whereupon Jain thought, but couldn’t confirm, that she may have met her and even spent some time in a car with her, going from some town to another.

Around 11:00 that evening, The Quad met us in the Village after his dinner. At one point, he mentioned how she spoke very highly of her English-language tutor, and he proceeded to give a description I instantly recognized.

I asked, “Would her tutor’s name be Tornwordo by any chance?” To which The Quad added, “…who’s married to this Québécois named Spouse? You know them???”

We were all floored.

I think it was about four years ago while still living in Halifax that I stumbled across this blog by a guy from California living in Montréal with the guy to whom he’s now married. I took a liking to his writing and, one night, I even read everything back to the beginning of his blog, enjoying his little video montages and the accounts of his travails with one he dubbed Nude Dancer. Afterwards, aside from comments on each other’s blog, we very occasionally e-mailed, like the time he had an apartment to rent just days before I would be coming to Montréal to apartment shop. (Turned out he rented it out within hours of posting an ad for it, so that didn’t work out.) Other than that, we met in person precisely once, for perhaps 3 minutes two summers ago, when I recognized him and Spouse walking down the closed-off street in the Village. Thus, it’s probably fair to say that ours is more a case of knowing of each other than truly knowing each other.

But still! I can’t help but marvel at these kind of connections or coincidences. Like, how was I to know that day in June 2001 when I switched Web host that one of that company’s owners would move to Nova Scotia to marry one of my now best friends who, in June 2001, I had only met once and would be staying on my couch a few weeks later as she would be beginning her new job in Halifax? Or when, during one of my stays in Chilangolandia, my now-estranged spouse introduced me to one of his friends who needed no explanation of what or where “Moncton” is because he’s been doing his master’s degree in Aix-en-Provence where one of his classmates is an Acadian from Moncton. After all, it would be reasonable to expect someone from Mexico never to have heard of that speck-on-the-world-map called Moncton!

So, allow me to indulge in a little kumbaya moment without Kumbaya…

Given I started this blog in late 2002, it’s probably not too far-fetched, considering how things moves fast on the Web, to start this entry with a long, long time ago…

A long, long time ago, I started this blog after considerable hesitation. I worried about many things, not least of which wondering if I had anything really worth putting “out there” for anyone and everyone to read. But further up my list of concerns was hearing about and reading for myself blogs that put so much out there that their writers were exposing themselves and making themselves vulnerable in so many ways, including personally and professionally. Today, with social networking sites like Facebook, it seems like many people, confident with these sites’ privacy settings, have set aside such concerns. However, I remember well, small business owner as I was back then, feeling the need to suppress so much at the risk of disclosing stuff that would cause much malaise between my clients and me.

Today, as I mark my 44th birthday, these concerns have arisen again but for entirely different reasons. I will certainly write again, but here? I’m not so sure. It wouldn’t be fair if, at the same time, I wish to remain wide-opened and candid. Moreover, I think my motives for writing would be suspect. And quickly old and boring.

Right now, I can’t help recalling again, as I did in my very first blog entry, the closing paragraph of Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God:

Where I’m going, anything may happen. Nothing may happen… I will be light and straight as any feather. The wind will bear me and I will drift and settle, and drift and settle. . . . God’s mercy on reluctant jesters. God’s grace on fools. God’s pity on God.

And so it may be.

• A week for now at this time, I will have been in Moncton for almost two days. Indeed, my entire family will be heading to the hometown to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday. It won’t be a surprise; we announced our visit to her several weeks ago and she’s really looking forward to it. What she doesn’t know, however, is the schedule of activities we have planned. So, all this to say that I’ll be taking a plane around suppertime next Friday and returning to Montréal early Monday morning for a very long commute to work.

• Of course, my mother’s newest son-in-law will be the only family member unable to attend the gathering. However, it’s clear that she — and everyone in the family, in fact — now see Esposo as being part of the family. The last time I spoke to her, she insisted that I tell him that she bought a new fall jacket that goes perfectly with the scarf he gave her in February (which, by the way, had belonged to his beloved abuela), and that she had worn it to mass that day. She was also wearing as we were speaking the silver medallion of Our Lady of Guadelupe he gave her at the same time. Although he hadn’t met her yet, he really knew her number!

• The day I return from Moncton is also the day of my final exam for Level 2 Spanish. Yes, we’re ending Level 2 already! Once I finish this posting, I’ll be heading for the shower and then hitting the books for the rest of the day because I won’t have much time to study in the days leading up to the exam.

  I have to admit that, while the course is still going well, I am finding it gruelling. Six hours of classes per week plus homework on top of a full-time job and everything else life dishes my way is a lot. At one point last week, I wondered to myself if I should slow down the pace to three hours per week, but I think I’ll forge ahead until the end of December and only consider slowing down in January if, looking back at four months of study, I find that it’s really been too much too quickly and that I’m not learning as well as I could if I relieved a bit of the pressure.

• Speaking of the end of December, in an attempt to be responsible during these uncertain economic times (among other good reasons), Esposo and I decided I won’t be going to Mexico for the holidays. As a result, my mom will be spending a day in Montréal when she transits through here on her way to my sister’s in the Ottawa area, which will allow her to see the new digs and to go visit her sister in Longueuil. As for me, I’ll go to Ottawa for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. With all the overtime I did at work in August and early September, I expect I’ll be able to take the Christmas/New Year’s period off, as it is traditionally a slower time of year anyway.

Astonishingly, by the end of October, it will have been seven months already since I moved to Montréal……

I never delete e-mails (except spam, of course). I keep them all — incoming and outgoing — and, for the most part, sort them in folders. I’ve been using different versions of the same e-mail program since the mid-1990s; consequently, I still have messages from 1996. You might be wondering what’s the point of keeping all these messages. But last night, I rediscovered why.

Before e-mail, I used to be a prolific letter-writer, and my friends who’ve received those letters could attest that my letters were not only long, but unconventional. I would narrate my thoughts and what was happening to and around me as little stories — stories that were sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes silly, sometimes banal, sometime irreverent, sometimes sentimental. It was before the time I was addicted to word-processing for writing, when my handwriting was still legible and my prose, if I can dare call it that, would flow easily from one paragraph to another, unlike today when I can’t write worth shit with pen and paper and jump all over the place to edit and cut-and-paste as I write (as I’m doing right now).

However, when e-mail came along, I made the deliberate choice of viewing the keyboard and computer screen as a modern form of pen and paper, and the Send button as a stamp and envelope. I didn’t see it as giving me license to be telegraphic and sloppy, but at the same time I got off on the idea that, unlike old-fashioned letters, my missives would be received instantly. I kept my voice and continued to write the tales of my life as I had always done, and much to my delight, many to whom I wrote adopted the same candour when writing back to me.

Thus it really isn’t that surprising that I took to blogging nearly five years ago; it was an extension — a natural evolution — of what I had always done. But there are significant differences between my letters of old and this blog. The most notable difference is that, because letters and e-mails were one-on-one, my correspondents and I allowed ourselves to be a lot more coarse and politically incorrect because we knew each other well enough to recognize that we were indulging in hyperboles and that we could divulge raunchy details with the knowledge that they would remain between us. Writing in a blog, however, requires more tact and discretion, unless, of course, I as a writer chose not to care an iota that readers might misconstrue my musings due to their lack of context about me and knowing that I’m merely being flip.

Take, for example, a passage of an e-mail to my oldest friend, who happens to be quadraplegic. Although I’m able-bodied, I’d call him “The Crip” or “The Quad” in the same vein as gay guys might refer to themselves as faggot or how some Black guys might use the N word among themselves even though no one including myself would ever consider that very same word as being acceptable coming out of my mouth. Someone with no knowledge of my long friendship with him and the fact I was his attendant for several years — not to mention that he’d often call me a slut and a cocksucker — wouldn’t understand how anyone could write:

Speaking of people with that monicker, remember the crip who’s been studying at our alma mater since the Year Dot? Well, her wheels drove her into the ground so she’s six feet under now. She was a pain in the ass but no one wished her dead.

All this to say that last night, I started reading e-mails dating back more than 11 years. I don’t know what brought me to doing that, but it was an experience that, at various times, brought me to laugh out loud or get a bit misty-eyed. Moreover, these e-mails now stand as a detailed journal of countless happenings which, at the time, were incredibly consuming but that, until last night, didn’t even register as a memory anymore.

One set of three extremely long messages I wrote for the benefit of two of my closest friends at the time (as well as myself, I suppose) recounts, in the present tense, the days of my father’s open-heart surgery in 1996. I can’t tell you how glad I am to still have such a detailed journal of that difficult period of my family’s history. Many of the details are mundane while others are not; however, I was amazed last night to realize how many significant details I had long forgotten.

Monday, July 29, 1996 (the day before my father’s surgery)
[...]
Eight thirty comes too soon. Dad will have a big day tomorrow and he still has some pre-op prep to do before going to bed. He gets up from his chair, ties the belt of his housecoat and escorts us out the ward. He and Mom stop in the hallway so that my oldest niece can snap a picture. When we reach the entrance to the ward, we look out the large windows overlooking the parking lot and Dad points out our cars. He has few interests, but cars have always been one of them. Then we start saying goodnight and that’s when his tears come back. All choked up, he echoes our goodnight and, gripping his IV poll, he turns around and starts walking away from us, back to his room.

I break my own rule. I look back. But he does not.

Not only had I forgotten that moment; upon reading the whole series, I realized I had forgotten the long days of waiting for his surgery and the longer days of worries afterwards when the hospital was intent on shipping him out five days after the surgery even though he clearly wasn’t ready to be discharged. It was in those five days I figured out in my heart that the system had irreparably broken my father, and indeed, the remaining seven-and-a-half years of his life turned out ghastly when they weren’t wretched.

But not all the stories I’d e-mail at the time were of sadness and heartbreak, as evidenced in the first quote. The early/mid-1990s was the period I was bestowed the nickname “Whore of Babylon.” And I really played into that character both in writing and in action, whether to recount tales of whoredom or non-sexual incidents, like when I e-mailed a good friend about my then-car Homomobile blowing up on the way to the airport.

This here Whore resolutely gave up his spot in the fast lane a week ago yesterday when Homomobile decided that life wasn’t worth living.

Homomobile, you must understand, is the most ungrateful of creatures. He doesn’t care that this here Whore spent two grand on him less than three months ago to prolong his life by a few years. Nor does he care that, on any other four-wheeled motorized device like himself, the repair he received would work like a charm. And he certainly doesn’t give a sweet flying fuck that this here Whore is officially on the verge of unemployment.

Picture it: May 17, 1996, and the Whore of Babylon is driving the Queen of Sheba and Colonel Snodgrass to the airport so that they can catch their plane for Helsinki. At precisely 1.5 km from the exit to Halifax International, the Whore feels Homomobile lurch back and his gas pedal stiffen. The Whore’s losing speed. Without alarming his passengers, he starts moving into the slow lane. As he does, he notices through the rearview mirror that he’s leaving behind the thickest trail of oily blue smoke you could ever imagine. The cars behind him are not only peeping their horns; they’re keeping away in case the thing in front of them (to wit, *us*) blows up. Maintaining control of Homomobile, the Whore manages to get to the airport exit and crawl to the garage near the exit ramp, where, upon turning in the parking lot, all of Homomobile’s lights go on and he not only stalls, but seizes. As the Whore’s sexy neighbour commented a few days later, the Whore has a way of getting cars that are real drama queens.

So the Whore has managed to get the duo to the airport, although certainly not without incident, and he must then return to the city by shuttle bus. This is the beginning of the long weekend; therefore, no one deigns do anything with Homomobile before Tuesday. Already, the Whore figures that Homomobile is toast — not even worth the space he occupies. So a disgusted Whore finds his way to Stonehenge, where he drowns his sorrows in five DOUBLE gin and tonics, and gets the bartender to call him a cab home some two hours later.

Of course, I never forgot when Homomobile blew up; that story remains a fixture in the narrative of the days of the Queen of Sheba and the Whore of Babylon. But I had forgotten that it happened a week before my job at the time was ending and that I got drunk out of my mind that night.

When I was teaching, I/the Whore had no qualms in describing my colleagues as hot if hot they were, as in this passage I wrote to a dear friend with whom I studied in the late 1980s.

You wouldn’t know Gorgeous either; he completed his degree at our alma mater a few years ago, did a Master’s out West, and is currently considering a PhD overseas. But Gorgeous, who’s definitely (even defiantly) “family,” is nothing less than a Greek god: prematurely (short) grey hair; strong, angular Germanic features, pale blue eyes that make mine look like shit, and (based on my beach experience, although I regrettably have never partaken in the pleasure up close) a dick that grows hard and big and shoots like a freakin’ revolver. Gorgeous is generally extremely well liked by the students because he’s as challenging to them as was our own mentor in the program, with the added bonus that, unlike our mentor, he’s really not hard to look at.

And I certainly had no trouble telling friends of my escapades in the crudest words imaginable, like:

Yes, the Whore is back in Halifax after a dirty couple of days in Montreal!

Just got back tonight, actually. Fornicated with my rendition of a minor deity, a semi-Atom Egoyan lookalike, and then three guys sucked me off simulatenously in a dark hallway. I’m really tired today. Go figure.

Or:

I bumped into this guy at Infections, whom I did for a while in early ’97. To make a long story short, I found out that night that he just got a Nissan Sentra (same year as mine) and, later, I spotted it on the Hill. I waited around for him to return to his car and, no more than two minutes later, he “confessed” needing to be fucked in the worst way. So, what’s a whore boy like me to do but to oblige… There are plenty of guys who like to fool around, but fewer are those who want it up their ass — a particular delight for me to fulfill — pun definitely intended.

It’s with a considerable amount of shame that I admit now that reading some of these old e-mails reminded me of fuckbuddies and boyfriends about whom today I keep only an abridged and highly redacted recollection. That’s despite the fact that, at the time, moving on had been extremely difficult, but clearly when I finally did move on, I really did move on. And invariably, it was through writing and then shelving what I wrote that I was eventually able to escape from the pain. But reading some of this stuff many years later, I’m reminded of how long I’ve intrinsically known that I’m an “either/or” kind of guy in the sentimentality department: either a true whore, or a guy who, when he falls, falls completely.

Turning to Rachmaninoff. Seeing a carefully crafted sense of strength and self-reliance fall prey to so little. Heart pounding in my throat. An inexplicable sense of fatigue. No reproach; only a wish onto which I must hold, at least for now, to prevent myself from sinking into that pit I’ve once known. Bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
[...]
Alone in bed, deliberately lying on my back, fighting the urge to assume the fetal position I’d instinctually want to assume. Three sentences forming perfectly in my mind, with a sudden, irrepressible urge to send him flowers in the hope of expressing the different pains — his and mine — and the knowledge that our dilemma speaks more of our simplistic, adolescent immaturity …but that’s okay.
[...]
“You’re killing me,” he said to me as he was trying to leave my apartment that last night, his eyes locked into mine, and I echoed those words to him. And there stands the ellipsis.

Indeed, there it stands, amidst flashbacks and a few regrets, leaving a trail from intimate moments during which I committed the sin of sparing words for fear of irritating that unease within him that I sensed very soon after I first met him.
[...]
That afternoon the phone rings: it’s him, calling to thank me for the flowers. I can still sense that unease in him, even over the phone, just as I suspect that I might be adding another dimension to it. “Really nice card…” I hear him say. And then, neither knowing what more to say, what to do, if only, perhaps, speaking as though nothing more ever was. “What are you doing tomorrow night?” A play with a cast too large for the stage.

Looking back at this sampling of my writing from a decade or more ago, I find myself in awe of how much has changed and how much hasn’t changed, and how committing such raw thoughts and emotions in the moment not only allowed me to forge ahead, but quite literally forged who I’ve become. I both am and am not that person from 10+ years ago.

While I miss — or at least look back nostalgically at — that guy who wrote so constantly and so vividly, the last thing I want is to rebecome that guy. That guy was restless, never quite content, and very vulnerable. In fact, “vulnerable” is a word a then-friend of the Queen of Sheba used to describe that guy after she met him, and he took considerable offense to that description at the time. Today, however, the guy I am agrees that that guy was vulnerable because, for whatever reason, he refused to own and vehemently rejected his “or” part. To cut that guy some slack, perhaps it matters to recall he was bearly 30 at the time. But that hardly excuses the viciousness with which he would cut down others who aspired for the “or” he expended so much energy deriding, as when he wrote a friend about how quickly a guy he’d just dumped had moved on.

By the way, Dumped is head-over-heels in love with a shoe saleman in the town where they live who’s even younger than I am and who’s extremely eager to spit toothpaste every morning down the drain of Dumped’s bathroom sink. What a fuckin’ relief for me, but then JESUS! I get just a bit angry, to tell you the truth. Here I was worried about shattering someone, namely Dumped, and he had a Plan B all along. I’m now brought to admit that, in many respects, Dumped is about as deep as a puddle of two-day-old rain. Funny how I glossed over the shortcomings when I was in the thick of things…

Today when I read what that guy wrote more than 10 years ago, I think, “What a fucking, petulant bitch!” But then I think about how it was all just a façade and, worse, an elaborate (nor maybe not so elaborate) mechanism to make himself believe that he was right. And then, when I realize that I hardly recognize the guy who wrote that nasty passage even though that guy was me, I can’t help but conclude that I have changed. However, I have to own up — and am owning up — to the fact that the bitchy façade of old contributed to the change in some way. The passage of time and the acquiring of more experiences not only proved me wrong, but it helped transform me from someone who’s “restless, never quite content, and very vulnerable” to someone who’s basically happy, optimistic, and at ease with the notion of not being able to control everything.

Some of you might think that I’m saying that now because of the entry of El Poema in my life — a kind of distancing. However, with all honesty, I think that’s reversing the cause and the effect. It’s not that I met El Poema and that’s forcing me to deny positions I once took. Rather, it’s that I have been changing my positions well before meeting El Poema and it was that slowly evolving and more receptive person El Poema met in that park in Montréal in August. I truly believe that, and that belief is supported by an offhand remark BeeGoddessM made, coincidentally, just days before I left for Montréal: “I sense that you’ve changed in the time I’ve known you,” referring to her feeling that I wasn’t destined to be a lifelong bachelor.

I remember my reflex kicking in and receiving her remark with only a mild degree of skepticism, whereas before it would have been met with flat denial. But shortly before, I had written in this blog in reference to the Town of Truro’s refusal to fly the gay pride flag in front of town hall:

The thing I envy the most of heterosexual couples is how they can walk down any street hand-in-hand without it being noticed and without them feeling they’re making a public statement of any kind. I despise the fact that if two men hold hands while in a restaurant, they still stand the chance of being accused of “flaunting their sexuality” when the same would not be said of a man and woman.
[...]
Actually, that last statement just made me swell up a little. I’m realizing how, at nearly 42, I’m yearning for that little something that has nothing to do with appendages and orifices. All of this because the mayor of Armpit …I mean, Truro, NS, decided not to recognize my existence?

Maybe.

Just as this blog provides me points of reference in my past, so do my e-mails from so very long ago. Many think it strange when I tell them I still have e-mails from 1996. But what they don’t realize is that, for me, e-mail was my way of keeping a journal well before blogs came into existence.

Hence, after reading samplings of those e-mails last night, I indeed did laugh and cry a little. And then I spent this afternoon writing this blog entry. Because the whole experience hit me like a ton of bricks.

You may recall back in June that I went through a bit of a nostalgic phase. I summed it up to unconsciously reaching a 25-year milestone, but it is when I fleshed out my thoughts about why I’m still in Halifax and why the heck I don’t finally just go to Montréal. I believe that by telling everyone — in person and in this blog — I have done the reverse of sabotaging myself: everybody thinks it the right thing for me to do, and my day-job employer is quite willing to accommodate me since it doesn’t matter where in Canada I live because I work at home.

During that period of reflection, I wrote an entry where I musically walked down Memory Lane. In that entry, I made a reference to my first ex and wondered what ever happened to him. But just last week, I found him in Facebook and we’ve exchanged a few e-mails in which we’ve started to catch up on the last 20-plus years of our lives.

It’s funny. Reading his e-mails, I still hear him. He hasn’t really changed, and that’s comforting somehow. He now lives in the Ottawa region, and we agreed that once I’m in Montréal, we’ll have to make a point of touching base in person. I’m looking forward to it.

I have to admit there are days when everything around me seems a little bit surreal. One thing there isn’t, is inertia. I wish El Poema and I weren’t living in two different countries right now, but that’s the only negative and I don’t see it as a permanent feature. Really, everything else is positive. I even think the current situation with El Poema has some positive to it: I certainly can’t take him for granted, now or ever.

More than commercials on TV or anything else, my weekly visit to PostSecret reminded me that today is Father’s Day. That brought me to look out the window to the sky and whisper, “Bonne fête des pères, Pa”. Were he still with us, I’d certainly be phoning him today.

Several cards at PostSecret refer to the ambivilance and emotional conflict some people have towards their father. One in particular refers to how their dad had trouble saying “I love you.” My dad was definitely like that; in fact, it’s only in her senior years that my mom has taken to actually saying the words rather than simply writing them in a card or a letter.

But there was never any doubt in my mind that Dad loved me and all my siblings. His love manifested itself by how he would quietly worry about us. Occasionally, he would let slip a remark about what he wished would happen to ensure our happiness or well-being, and though I knew it then, I know it even more now: his remark would be the product of a lot of thought and praying, for he was a deeply religious man after all.

The only reason he couldn’t bring himself to say “I love you” is because such expressions were weird and corny for a man of his generation and upbringing, the kind of stuff only people in movies and sitcoms said. There’s a strong stoic and reserved streak on my father’s side of the family, which is in sharp contrast with the emotional and boisterous tendencies on my mother’s side. So, I recall the little things Dad would do to say to me, “I love you.” Like the time he stood with me at the garage door, away from the rain, while I had a cigarette before going inside even though he didn’t smoke. He said absolutely nothing the whole time, but he just wanted to stand there with me. Or how he played with me when I was a kid with his typical dad antics of pretending he was pulling off my nose and showing his thumb between his fingers as evidence that he had succeeded. I remember thinking how corny his sense of humour was, but now I recognize his actions for what they were: he cared enough about me to let go and be silly, which didn’t come naturally to him. Or how in the last two years, at the anniversary of his death, something significant and good has happened to me professionally. While some might dismiss this as coincidence, I can’t help thinking he has had a hand in making it happen because of how much he worried about me and sometimes felt powerless in that respect while he was alive, but now he has at least a finger on some lever to make things happen and remind me that he still cares and worries about me. As sentimental that image is, I do believe it’s true and I believe it more fervently as time goes by.

I’m still haunted by what he said to us once whilst in his death bed: “Oubliez-moi pas” (“Don’t forget me”). Clearly we haven’t in the 3 years since he left, and clearly we never will.

I went for my semi-annual visit to the dentist a few days before Christmas, and I don’t know why I didn’t blog about it before now.

My regular hygenist and I get along like a house on fire. Of course, I can’t speak much while I’m there because she’s busy doing what she does in my mouth, but she has no trouble filling the air time. And often she has to pull out in order to let me comment or laugh. This Cape Breton native is very good at making me laugh.

It was no different during my last visit, even though the baseline of her main story was extremely sad. Indeed, she was telling about her lifelong best friend who still lives in Cape Breton who found out just a few weeks prior that she is dying of cancer. Although my hygienist and her friend have always kept in touch regularly, lately they’ve been calling each other every day “just to talk.” Sometimes they speak only a few minutes to touch base; other times they talk for hours and go through the whole gamut of emotions from laughing hysterically to crying bitterly.

During one of their conversations, the friend confided to the hygienist that she’d been looking in her closet to figure out what she was going to wear. At first the hygienist didn’t quite understand what she meant, but then she realized her friend was thinking about what she would wear in her coffin. I think the hygienist just wasn’t ready to entertain such a morbid thought, so she deflected it with dark humour worthy of a chick flick, that got both of them laughing to tears.

“Well of course, girl,” the hygienist told her friend. “There’s nothing more important! You just got to look good in the box!”

You’ll remember that I was quite pleased when my former upstairs neighbours moved out in December. As far as I can tell, no one has moved in to replace them …or if someone has, they’re perfect neighbours because I don’t hear anything. As for the kids downstairs, they haven’t been around for a while. So I’m happy.

Two weekends ago, I found out well after the fact that Halifax’s arguably most famous drag queen had died. I admit that, in the past, I’ve made no secret of my dislike of Halifax drag queens. And while the title of that rant might suggest I wished them dead, that would be — and is — most definitely an overstatement.

The late drag queen in question had taken to blogging last summer, but only a few weeks later s/he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I spent a while reading Chuck’s blog that evening I found out he had died; I didn’t know him at all and I probably wouldn’t have come to know him had he lived, for even though we lived in the same city, we were in different circles. Hundreds of comments poured in on his blog upon his death, and I read them all. He had touched so many people in his own way and was genuinely loved by so many, which is a huge legacy in itself.

One of the many who left a comment upon Chuck’s passing was my former upstairs neighbour. And that’s how I discovered that he, too, has taken to blogging last summer. I read through his blog and realized how I harbour so many ambivalences (if “ambivalence” can be counted). No, I wasn’t keen on him as a neighbour, but there’s definitely a part of me that respects him as an artist even though I’ve heard over time many comments from others to reinforce my less-than-enthusiastic feelings about him. Or, I wonder, is it and has it always been a case of star envy on my part? That the man’s oeuvre is acclaimed to the point of earning him a Governor General award and that he revolves in circles in which he can swing inviting the GG herself to dinner in his new home: am I jealous? envious? feeling remorse for possibly reading his character all wrong? Or is it possible that the truth lies somewhere in the middle? For let’s face it: I’m more a loner than gregarious, so dinner with the GG and her entourage would be a little slice of hell for me.

But speaking of hell, since I’ve had a bit of time to digest the news that my day job won’t be ending in 10 days, a new thought has crossed my mind. I was in Montreal a year ago at this time because I was treating myself before starting what I knew would be a year of sacrifices and few opportunities to play. That year is done now, and while I still have a shitload of work to plow through for my business, I have to think beyond. Yes, the (almost definitely taken) decision to keep Junior and saving for an uncertain future is one strand of my recent thoughts, but another one is how I need to shift the balance away from work. I’m not quite sure what exactly I mean by that other than the fact I should deem the time of sacrifices over; all I know is that thoughts of travel, beaches and raunchy men randomly come to mind.

On the latter front, it’s rather pathetic how I’ve taken to occasionally peek on my geeky but cute neighbour. When I come back to my desk after pouring myself a cup of coffee, I peek. Or if I just happen to be going by that window, I peek. I don’t go out of my way to peek, except on days like today when he’s sitting at his desk with his shirt off. That’s just too intriguing to me since we’re not in the dog days of summer and, even when we were, he wasn’t much of a sitting at the computer shirtless kind of guy. To add to the stupidity of it all, I happen to know his ex partner who used to live with him was a woman. I’ve never been one to pine over a straight guy, yet in this case I’m finding myself deep in wishful thinking that perhaps the woman is his ex because he switched teams.

And it’s when I find my thoughts stooping that low that I realize I need to get out more. Or, more precisely, that I need to shift the balance away from work. Because there’s something rather disturbing in how, when given a choice between going out or doing little more than staying at home to read with a glass of wine, I choose the latter every time. And I’m left wondering if instead of taking a big bite of the apple, I’m just letting it sit there until it rots.

Okay, I admit it: I’m one cranky sonofabitch who hates noise. In fact, I think my tolerance for noise is a lot lower than most people’s. I generally don’t like loud music; I hate crowds in crammed quarters; even the sound of loud wind gets on my nerves. Maybe, in that sense, I’m the quintessential bachelor (and, some might say, prematurely old fart).

Back in August, the building super at the time mentioned that my neighbour upstairs was planning to move out in December. The news gave me reason to hope: by then I had had it up to my eyeballs with the man — a term I use loosely — that my neighbour married this summer. While he seemed rather drop-dead gorgeous as a humanoid, his behaviour and demeanour was more that of an out-of-control gorilla on speed. I can’t count the times I nearly jumped out of my skin when huge heavy objects would come crashing on their floor (hence my ceiling). And in addition to having the booming voice of dumbfuck and the tendency of playing the same music way too loud, it seems it never occurred to him that it’s not a good idea to walk on hardwood floors with shoes when there are people living below. Once I even had to knock on their door in the daytime to ask them to turn down the music because one of my clients remarked that she could hear music over the phone. I can’t be calling clients all over Canada and have that. Funnily enough, Godzilla didn’t answer the door but he must have seen through the peephole that it was me, and the music got turned down, then off.

Aside from that one time, and ever since the super told me that the guys upstairs were on their way out, I refrained from complaining. I just had to endure three more months, two more months, one more month… I feared that if I complained, they — especially Godzilla — would make sure to make the remaining time a pure hell for me. So I didn’t risk it. In addition to being my neighbour, he also shares a double garage with me and consistently Buddy always parks as if he was renting the entire garage to himself, leaving me to manoeuver so close to the wall that no passenger could get out if I had a passenger. It was clear to me that Buddy and his husband Godzilla were the kind of people who have to be told to be considerate of others, and to me that’s a sign that telling them could work fine for a short time or go very, very badly.

The last weekend of November came, and I was hoping to hear some noise — moving noises, that is. But it never came. There was plenty of noise, but not the kind I had hoped for. Nor did it come on the eve of the first of December. Nor the first full weekend of month. In fact, instead, the downstairs neighbour starting having custody of his two little rugrats kids. Whiny kids. Inside marathoning kids. Crying kids. Crying at midnight kids. So now the racket was coming from upstairs and downstairs. I didn’t know if I should shoot myself or go bowling. What the super had told me about the upstairs neighbours wasn’t panning out. Plus, in early November, the new super told me she had no note saying that they were moving out in December.

Yesterday was particularly bad. Even my next door neighbour, who’s a really sweet guy with an unfortunately high-pitched voice and an even more unfortunate laugh, was at it yesterday. But that’s when I resigned myself to the fact that as long as have to or choose to live in an apartment, I’m always going to have to deal with noisy neighbours.

Between 8:30 and 9:00 this morning — a Sunday when I wanted to sleep in until at least 10:00 — I was roused out of my slumber by banging around and people walking with shoes on upstairs. It was so bad that the oval antique mirror on my dresser tilted forward. So I laid in bed thinking, “Maybe I should get dressed and ask them to be more quiet.” But if I were to do that, I had to calm down first for fear of screaming at them and lose any chance of reaching an amicable conclusion.

And that’s when I heard the sweetest noise. From outside. The sound of a truck starting its engine.

I bounced out of bed and over to the window, and there it was: a truck. A movers’ truck. To be precise, a movers’ truck from “Two Small Men with Big Hearts Co. Ltd.” And I can vouch for their big hearts for delivering me from Godzilla.

So it’s one down, and one to go. And in fact, I think the guy downstairs only has part-time custody, so the kids’ current extended stay could very well only be temporary. Now let’s just hope the super, when she rents out the upstairs apartment, makes a point of saying that the guy who lives downstairs is a sonofabitch who works at home and can’t stand noise.

Sexy Lebanese Guy called last night. He arrived in Halifax late yesterday afternoon after spending a week with a friend on Prince Edward Island. Unfortunately, he’s returning to Pennsylvania early Wednesday morning, and given his busy agenda, it looks like the odds that we’ll be able to meet up for a quick coffee are getting slimmer by the minute.

It’s funny, but just last weekend, I finally set a few minutes aside to send him an e-mail message. He didn’t get it (yet) because he was already travelling in Canada. Indeed, he has to spend a set amount of time in this country, where he has citizenship, in order to stay another while in the U.S.

The schooling idea he was telling me about on New Year’s day didn’t pan out, but from the sound of what he was telling me last night, maybe that’s just as well. He only got into the line of work he’s in to please his parents; what he always wanted to do — and is now looking into — is radiology. That profession would certainly make him more marketable in the U.S.

Update: The phone just rang and a window of opportunity just opened. I’m going to go pick him up where he’s staying and we’ll be heading downtown for coffee. I must say: I’m looking forward to seeing that sexy little guy again.