paralogue.org

Part 1: Stencil

I was in Montreal from the 20th and the 29th. It was a gift to me from my most cherished friend maru. The following is a breakdown of the whole week and a bit, as much as I can line up and haven’t accidentally let slip my mind. Sorry if you were there and anything is out of order. First, an outline of events. Second, a rundown of how I've been feeling and thoughts while traveling back. I’ll make a reply with pictures some time in the next day or so once I pick some out.

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Monday - Stressful transit. Traffic made me miss a train. The ticket confused me and the people I asked. I felt like I was cracking open from stress and fear, brain frying and body revolting from allergies. A conductor helped me work out my trip which helped stabilize me. Then I unwound when I got into the airport and relaxed once I sat down on the plane. The flight felt short and I spent a lot of my time reading. I get all excited staring out the window after a short sleep. It dawned on me after a bit that all the white on the ground was snow, and not water reflecting the sky. Exiting the plane and going through security was a breeze. The border check was partly automated, there was a computer that took a picture of me and used a real bright flash. My lips looked very red in the picture. maru met me by a pillar right in the arrivals area and I was very happy to see her. That night we almost went straight home, but did a little shopping for the week. I met the cat and housemate Sam. And then we watched a silly double feature that came to me in a vision: Mousehunt and Serene Velocity. We couldn't figure out how or why I got her to download them, and I can't even remember when the idea hit me exactly. We looked and couldn't find it.

Tuesday - I left the house early to go to a cafe and meet up with nousnaut, but I went the complete wrong direction and sat down in the wrong cafe. I waited outside for a bit, a little apprehensive about going inside. I was already delayed a little anyway because I absolutely had to make a stack of pancakes before I left the house and I didn't even eat any until I got home. Once we figured out where I was she walked to meet me and we were sitting, drinking coffee around 11. I last visited with her in Vancouver, same as maru. Afterward we visited the fine art museum together. I got in free, and paid for her ticket. The place was absolutely stacked with incredible art and we saw most all of it. Later, after I got back to the house, maru and I went to the hackerspace she'd mentioned. And I met and chatted with almost everybody, and learned about and how to play The Fantasy Trip: Melee. I helped someone by being a rubber duck they talked through their rust code with. Got to see and touch a bunch of awesome old computers.

Wednesday - Visit to a friend’s place with nousnaut. We met up at a clearly defined location (lol) and had some coffee. We hung out for a few hours, and it was almost all talking between her, her partner and I, and I did a little reading. I had a chicken burger (no bread) with a delicious homemade relish on it. I looked up the manual for their toaster oven because I couldn't just use it without knowing how it worked. When I got back I prepared dinner for maru, sam and 8sumint who came to visit. Before dinner we shared each-others music we'd made and talked a lot. I forgot it was so damn late when we decided it was the time to prepare dinner. I went to the store and did some quick shopping. Together we prepared airfried crispy tofu in spicy duckfat, stir fried bok choy and rice. I almost cried, so panicky trying to cook and apologized because I was concerned it would be bad. But it wasn't bad at all. I was just a little out of practice. Some time that night we watched The Dirties.

Thursday - Attended mass with maru, we walked through the snow to get there. I was moved, to say the least. And afterward she, nousnaut and I took the train to a diner near the hackerspace that was really, really good. Maru had a hot sandwich (drenched in gravy) and told me I’m who got her into them.

Friday - Movie night with nousnaut, maru, their partners. We watched Picnic and Dream Scenario. Both great movies. The latter was really great. The former had a lot of really striking scenes that I couldn't really pull together in my head as something that made total sense ... Oh well.

Saturday - Attended mass again, walked and talked, saw pawn shops and computer shops and stepped into another pretty church, drank a good amount of coffee. Big walking day. Cooked spicy tofu and fried rice, all vegetarian. I think this is the day a button came off my coat. I'll have to sew that back on soon.

Sunday - High mass. I sang. I was blessed. The third blessing I’d receive on the trip, last mass I would attend during the trip. Everyone sat together for coffee afterward and I spoke to a man in the congregation. I was told he studied Russian literature iirc. He said my hands were like alabaster. He asked if I was an angel. I thought about that for a while. Afterward maru, nousnaut and I went for a long walk to a closed bookstore, and then in disappointment went to a bar where I tried absinthe for the first time. 69% alcohol (nice). Melancholic buzz. Maru and I watched Barton Fink and The Player that night. Maru’s roommate and I did I clay masks. And after wiping it off, my nose felt absurdly smooth. Then she set me up with a wonderful bath with salts and herbs. It was very relaxing, but sort of like I was the protein in a soup. Pretty sure I made grilled cheese sandwiches with fried onions that evening.

Monday - I spent most of the day reading, then left the house in the late afternoon to give maru some space with her girlfriend, and went to hang out with 8sumint. We talked about all her gear and her projects and work and I had dinner with her. Got home late after a pleasant walk. It was the only evening during the whole trip it wasn't below zero out.

Tuesday - Another day hanging around, reading. I finished Blindsight that day, I think. It was a slow day, and then we took the walk to go see Slowdive. To kill time we got some sushi at a nice, expensive place. Then we left, queued outside for the venue and eventually were let in. Maru got me a beer (that she said was her favorite kind once upon a time) and she had wine. We stood and waited at the spot we’d be at for the whole show, so close to the stage. It was the the first concert I’d ever attended. It was one of the loudest things I’ve ever heard in my life. I’ve heard quieter guns. It is absolutely nuts how the bass hits your chest and the loudness differential between the new and old material they were playing was so crazy. After we left we wandered around, looking for food, walking through the gay village, getting cockblocked by gas station closing times denying us A&W or McDonalds. When we got back I cooked maru a grilled cheese sandwich again.

Wednesday - Final day. Went out early in the morning for a walk. Then I came back to the house, hung out for a bit, made sure I had everything and cleared out. Missed two buses. Made it to the airport safe, though. Met a fellow musician while sitting at the gate. She pulled out a Thinkpad and it sang a beeper song and I had to strike up a conversation. I cried my eyes out when the plane took off. Dreamless sleep in noise cancelling headphones.

Part 2: Gravity

I’m sitting in the Costa coffee at London Liverpool Street sipping a cortado and hugging my backpack to my chest. This is the first real chance I’ve had to sit and decompress. I was out in the big cold main room of the station and ate a pack of crisps and a shitty breakfast sandwich from Greggs. That little shop had no seating, no chill, and a line out the door. The guy behind the counter was pushing people to move real fast and get their shit and go. He called me up and called me ‘madam’. It’s cold here, but only 5 degrees. I could handle -20 for a week, but this is making me wish I had more layers.

I’ve been in Montreal. It was a Christmas gift, and I can easily say its the best one I’ve ever received. My best friend brought me to see her, and see Slowdive together. Seeing the band was ‘the point’ but not the point. They’re British, I could’ve gone and seen them all alone, and she’d even seen them already. This musician I met while waiting to board the plane back seemed surprised I came all this way just for a band. But that wasn’t the point, it was about getting into a different environment and out of my own head. I feel like it was a direct injection of love and kindness. I met up with people I’d spoken with online a bit, or met before, a couple of years ago, and caught up.

I spent all winter obsessed with puking and submerged in depression. I was wishing I could just get everything out and sift through it. I’ve puked my guts up plenty of times. You puke five or six or seven times in a row and your brain shuts off and you alternate between being sucked into the bathroom floor and puking. My birthday came and went and it felt like I got sandblasted. I was sitting alone, going nuts, staring at the corrosion I could suddenly see. The internal conflict was nonsensical. I’m crying wanting everything to get out of me so I can look at it, but also crying because theres nothing inside and desperately wanting to be something and to be real. Going off my medication could be viewed as an absolutely horrible decision, but I got to see my baseline. It’s sheer terror, apprehension, trembling and crying and need. Taking a big dunk in the seasonal depression bath with no filter almost tore me, the ‘I’, apart completely. When I got off the plane in Canada it felt like all the pressure was gone and when the excitement reeled back a little, I started to feel like cardboard and glue going all melty in spite of the cold.

At base I am pure physiology, ruled by my guts. I imagine holding them as they writhe, this separate little animal squirming and striking out and trying to sabotage me. It makes me dump weeks into crying and thinking about puke and suicide and has me pinned to my bed until 3pm. Or more like the gravity got heavier, and I simply don't have the strength to get out of it. Mass on Thursday was ruled by that little animal. I was working myself up and feeling nervous and embarrassed for nothing, for tripping over my words, for not knowing things, not catching on and following along right away, and I didn’t give enough information. “I went when I was a kid” gives the impression my family was churchgoing, not literally one or a couple of attendances total. And to a totally different kind of church, too. My eyes were acting weird and it felt like my focal length changed and made the paper and my hands look small. I kept thinking I’d explode, or catch fire, or get a nosebleed, or scream. I received a blessing because I am not baptized. I cried a bit before things concluded. Afterward, the tension was gone. I was relaxed in a way I haven’t felt in forever when we sat down at a diner and had sandwiches.

I’m sitting on a train that has come to a stop. The signals aren’t working right today, so it’s delayed. Maybe it’ll be too late to catch the bus once I arrive. If it is, I’ll have to go in somewhere for a coffee and kill time. That isn’t such a bad thing. I spent the plane ride to Canada reading Simone Weil. But I was reading the wrong book, dumping energy into The Need for Roots instead of Gravity and Grace.

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I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead. — Simone Weil

The train is moving again. It’s all green and brown out the window, tinted a pretty yellow by the afternoon sun in a clear blue sky. The sun was even shining in London, right on my face and in my eyes on the overground. I’m practically being welcomed back back home, but I keep wishing I wasn’t here. Trying not to feel like I’m being sucked into the floor. I see rolling hills and lightning trees. I remember believing a lightning tree was a rare thing when I was a kid, but they aren’t. The country I used to live in was just bigger. England is small. There’s weird stuff, chunks of forest, blocks of preserved old growth intermixed with evenly-spaced trees clearly planned and planted. Windmills and power lines and splotches of houses, three-house villages, big tracts of farmland. From the air it’s like looking at a mess of cables on a patchwork blanket. I was so excited to see what seemed like a real city from the air, as the plane descended into evening Montreal.

I’m sitting in a bus station. I have another hour to wait. Three hours to catch a bus. An hour bus ride home. A radio is blaring in the background and there are a couple of intermittent announcements: No smoking, vaping, etc. No riding bicycles in the bus station (???). It’s cold here like in London. I’ve been intermittently drafting this post all day. I drank a chocolate milk to fill my stomach. The sun is setting. I think about how dark it will be once I reach the house. I wonder what it will smell like. I wonder how the cats are. I wonder if anything happened. Another dead chicken? Some new lie I have to keep in mind? I wonder about what going to the local church will be like. I wonder how I’ll fight against gravity.

In this bedroom again. In this chair again. In this bed again. It is warm in here. CO2 is sitting at 1076 ppm. When I stepped off the bus and looked up at the stars. I was a little surprised about how many I could see.

Before I left, I was in a foul mood. I was thinking all sorts of mean things, angry at every last thing in my life, practically impossible to talk to because I was such a bummer, taking nasty tones with my parents, seething and going over the same things I’d always be mad about again and again. My self-analysis, including prodding this little spark of faith I had, was turning every last thing I touched into vapor. I was corrosive to myself, being corroded by my environment. I couldn't even find anything very positive going over old journals, they just made me feel sad and terrible and more complicated. The tension disappeared and I 'woke up' in a way after mass that thursday because it was like, no I'm not going to literally explode and no this isnt some isolated thing. I felt like my relationship to my faith had to be solitary and adversarial, but no, it didn't, and it's not like I was told that directly. A simple opportunity to participate just led to that clicking into place without any internal or external violence. And it didn't just disintegrate when I touched it.

I do not want to be here, but I have not wanted to be here for almost a decade. Another chicken died, but it’s like no time even passed. One died before I left too. I have somewhere to be tomorrow. I was hashing out a plan for another visit with somebody closer to home next month. It was the first thing that sprang to mind when I was on the bus and all the lights disappeared. That fucking night bus tearing down these tiny roads, making me feel scared perched up in that top deck front seat. I was trying to read but the book was making me cry.

Once I stepped off and started walking I kept wondering about things that could’ve changed. A thought like, “all your shit out on the lawn. Somebody went into your room and found something they didn’t like. Figure it out.” But thats just not the life I have, its not precarious, I’m not threatened.

I did a tarot pull when we got home from Slowdive: Two of Cups reversed, The High Priestess, The Star Reversed. It wasn’t my deck, different decks speak in different registers. I did a tarot pull tonight: The Sun, Queen of Pentacles Reversed, King of Pentacles. I called off that visit tonight too, because making frenzied decisions right now is no good. I have a clear sense of myself again, I was miserable during that whole journey back here but I was happy during my trip and will be happy again. I will make it happen.