I write fiction (buckets of it these days, in fact, since my work day is about two hours of chaos followed by six hours of dead time) and the question often comes up: “Where do you get your ideas? What inspires you? How can you keep coming up with stuff?”

Are you kidding me? This is EARTH. Something wacky is happening all the time, everywhere, in every country, to everyone possible. Ideas flow from reality like snot from a toddler.

For example, I initially misread this brief headline on MSNBC a couple of times: DOG SAVES WOMAN ATTACKED BY KANGAROO. I kept going “What? What?”

But you can see how that could happen, right? It could have been practically any permutation of attack and salvation. I mean, it’s Australia, things happen. Ideas:

KANGAROO SAVES WOMAN ATTACKED BY DOG - a woman is outside watering her lawn on the outskirts of a major Australian city and is attacked by a roving pitbull. A passing kangaroo, attracted by the sound of the running water, hops across the road and coincidentally frightens the dog off.

WOMAN SAVES DOG ATTACKED BY KANGAROO - it’s rutting season in the outback, a small dog has gotten tangled in a fight between two male kangaroos. A woman driving by in her ATV spots the white bundle and pulls over, scares off the rutting ‘roos with the sound of the engine, and rushes the dog to a vet.

KANGAROO SAVES DOG, ATTACKS WOMAN - a kangaroo has gotten inexplicably attached to a domestic dog owned by an abusive alcoholic. One day, it hops the fence to play with its little friend and discovers the woman beating on her pet. The kangaroo kicks the woman out of the way and leaves with the dog in its pouch.

KANGAROO ATTACKS SAVED DOG-WOMAN - a Mexican circus is lost near a rural Australian city and pulls over to ask for directions. They send the dog-woman because she’s the only one who speaks English and because, as a born-again Christian, she wants to convince the residents to accept Jesus as the one true savior. As she enters someone’s yard, she is savaged by their trained attack kangaroo while the circus looks on in horror.

Just when I thought I couldn’t love Nick Cave any more, I run across this - a letter he wrote to MTV in 1996 asking to be withdrawn from the music awards.

“TO ALL THOSE AT MTV,

I WOULD LIKE TO START BY THANKING YOU ALL FOR THE SUPPORT YOU HAVE GIVEN ME OVER RECENT YEARS AND I AM BOTH GRATEFUL AND FLATTERED BY THE NOMINATIONS THAT I HAVE RECEIVED FOR BEST MALE ARTIST. THE AIR PLAY GIVEN TO BOTH THE KYLIE MINOGUE AND P. J. HARVEY DUETS FROM MY LATEST ALBUM MURDER BALLADS HAS NOT GONE UNNOTICED AND HAS BEEN GREATLY APPRECIATED. SO AGAIN MY SINCERE THANKS.

HAVING SAID THAT, I FEEL THAT IT’S NECESSARY FOR ME TO REQUEST THAT MY NOMINATION FOR BEST MALE ARTIST BE WITHDRAWN AND FURTHERMORE ANY AWARDS OR NOMINATIONS FOR SUCH AWARDS THAT MAY ARISE IN LATER YEARS BE PRESENTED TO THOSE WHO FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE WITH THE COMPETITIVE NATURE OF THESE AWARD CEREMONIES. I MYSELF, DO NOT. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN OF THE OPINION THAT MY MUSIC IS UNIQUE AND INDIVIDUAL AND EXISTS BEYOND THE REALMS INHABITED BY THOSE WHO WOULD REDUCE THINGS TO MERE MEASURING. I AM IN COMPETITION WITH NO-ONE.
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY MUSE IS A DELICATE ONE AT THE BEST OF TIMES AND I FEEL THAT IT IS MY DUTY TO PROTECT HER FROM INFLUENCES THAT MAY OFFEND HER FRAGILE NATURE.

SHE COMES TO ME WITH THE GIFT OF SONG AND IN RETURN I TREAT HER WITH THE RESPECT I FEEL SHE DESERVES - IN THIS CASE THIS MEANS NOT SUBJECTING HER TO THE INDIGNITIES OF JUDGEMENT AND COMPETITION. MY MUSE IS NOT A HORSE AND I AM IN NO HORSE RACE AND IF INDEED SHE WAS, STILL I WOULD NOT HARNESS HER TO THIS TUMBREL - THIS BLOODY CART OF SEVERED HEADS AND GLITTERING PRIZES. MY MUSE MAY SPOOK! MAY BOLT! MAY ABANDON ME COMPLETELY!

SO ONCE AGAIN, TO THE PEOPLE AT MTV, I APPRECIATE THE ZEAL AND ENERGY THAT WAS PUT BEHIND MY LAST RECORD, I TRULY DO AND SAY THANK YOU AND AGAIN I SAY THANK YOU BUT NO…NO THANK YOU.

YOURS SINCERELY, NICK CAVE 21 OCT 96.”

Jesus. “My muse may spook!” he says. If I ever met Nick Cave I would fall at his feet. (Then slap him upside the head for ‘And The Ass Saw The Angel.’) (Then fall at his feet again.)

My first week of work was a crucible in a couple different senses of the word:
1. It was very, very, very hot this week.
2. I think there are actually some crucibles on site.
3. Crucible (n.): an ordeal, trial, gauntlet, or other difficult and ultimately life-threatening task or process, esp. in terms of inquisition, torture, and tests of faith.

Like most of my readers, I’ve had about an average number of jobs in an average variety of fields depending on my proclivities and bank account - barista, field technician, data entry, research assistant. I’ve plied my trade in stuffy offices and jungly greenhouses, in meadows and labs, in the storm and the night. Yet this is the first time I feel like I’m working on a different world.

OK, so it’s a metal refinery. I was expecting the occasional tank, maybe a couple of tubes here and there. But this place, it’s way over the top, it’s just barely a class-M planet. Coveralled men in respirator masks zip around on bicycles with little cans of chemicals in their baskets. You walk along the oddly-named streets and something huffs on you from a pipe. “What was that?” “Oh, I think that’s a steam pipe.” “Mm. Then why, pray, have both my ears suddenly fallen off?” “Sorry. I guess that’s chlorine or ammonia or something then.” “Eh?” The ground, it smokes like old-tymey engravings of Hell. “What is that?” “Steam.” “But the dandelions are nineteen feet tall and have glowing red eyes!” “Well, OK. There’s radioactive material in that warehouse. You got me.”

Thursday I did a site recon at the tailings ponds. I’ve seen photos of the ones in the oilsands. They don’t prepare you for the reality of the ones here at the refinery, which look like Mars. Or how Mars would look after a night of heavy drinking. The gouged erosion crevasses, the manycoloured strata - some barely an inch thick - the viridian water, the turquoise and golden banks, the endless red vistas of warm crumbled stone where metals have gone to die and nothing else can live. My response was about equal amounts “My God, it’s beautiful” and “RUN AWAY!” Because in industry, as in life, the more beautiful something is, the more likely it is to kill you dead.

I admit the danger is kind of exciting. I can see why people love working here. A preliminary list of things that could spurt from a valve and kill me include: acetone, propane, ammonia, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, carbon monoxide, chlorine, cyanide, and sulphuric acid. There’s another, much longer list of things that won’t instantly turn me to a puddle but will instead riddle my body with tumours and cause my descendants for seven generations to be cursed with frogs, flies, and Oozing Crevice Disorder, yea, O Israel. If you breathe in too deeply near some of the storage sheds, your heart begins to lug like a racecar in the wrong gear. It also has the distinction of being the only place I’ve ever worked where I’ve seen the phrase ‘mass casualty incident management’ in the new employee orientation handbook.

(Postscript: I have a whole new respect for engineers after doing the plant tour Friday. I have never seen bigger, scarier, louder, or smellier machines in my entire life. And these guys work within inches of these molten belching things all day. Good God.)

Camping out on my apartment floor, will update when I have furniture and etc. So much for living in civilization, eh?

Transportation situation more or less resolved, feeling more gooder now, and in comparison to some lives mine isn’t really so bad. I mean the WOE is more or less a subjective measure. And the other lives I am referring to are… Sunny McCreary’s.

Michael H. Kelly wrote another book! I can only assume it will be a suckfest of brobdingnagian proportions, which isn’t an insult because that was the goal. It is available for the very reasonable cost of seven squids, so go buy a copy!

(If any grammarians would like to interject that I ended the title of my post with a preposition, drop dead. I am in a grouch today with.)

(Note: free-consciousness rambling, feel free to ignore, I just have to vent or else I’ll explode into a volcano of tears again.)

So, the new job - hooray! It starts June 30th.

But my carpool guy just e-mailed to say “No, you can’t!” They work in a slightly different area of the plant. It would add a whole extra ten minutes every morning! Ah, so. After three weeks of searching and asking, this was the only carpool available. Evidently Sherritt has 600 employees and only two who live anywhere near downtown. Great.

Rent at my new place is lots of money and coming from Calgary downtown, listen, when I say lots, I mean lot$. Parking is an extra $175 monthly. Plus gas, plus insurance. If I drove, I would have to cut out luxuries like food and electricity. And I don’t have a car. And Sherritt is paying me $14,000 less than Imperial Oil. Such is the price of sanity.

If I stay here at my parents’ place in the Stalbert, I would have free parking. I could steal my brother’s car to drive to Sherritt and he could take the bus. But… living at home again. Sanity?

Plus, can I really break my lease at this point?

What if I do break it, decide to live with Mr. and Mrs. Bonkers, and then immediately find some other way to get to Sherritt from downtown? I shall die. (That is the entirety of the plan.)

What if I can’t break my lease, move in, and have no way to get to my workplace? I shall die homeless and alone because of lack of money. Or I shall die in my parents’ basement. It is unfinished “for tax purposes” (i.e. laziness) and that means my death might be on a concrete floor under exposed wiring and a dripping tap. Which is very Russian-gulag-novel and not so much how I pictured my death.

The move was so horrible. Much worse than my other five moves. I am covered in bruises and black widow spiders, someone else who lives in the building did something underhanded/illegal yesterday that I am being blamed for (and may be fined $300 for because it’s my word against nobody’s), it took two days instead of one - and that meant two drives back and forth from Calgary in the past 48 hours. My arse hurts. My head hurts. I am tired of being so tired that I cry from tiredness every nine minutes. I hate crying in front of people. It seemed like everything went wrong at once. And I thought everything was turning around like in a good way. But it kept turning and now we’re back to bad.

I miss my Calgary friends. I didn’t get to see a couple of them at my going-away party and now I may never see them again. (Due to spontaneous death, see above.) Glass tables are heavy. Steam burns blister and hurt. A bottle of Captain Morgan’s smashed on the mailroom floor. The fumes helped for about two minutes, then we all got nauseated.

I should quit my job before it starts and spend all day in my old bedroom wrapped in a quilt. That seems like the best option at this point. And all over a lack of transportation and a bad move.

Who took away my good life that I was supposed to be starting? I don’t even want to go to my high-school reunion now for I am all self-pity and woe. How can I drink and play pool when I am full of WOE? This life isn’t worth the… yeah.

Move-out inspection on Wednesday

Spilled Thai red curry on carpet half an hour ago

Can’t feel left arm: pinched nerve?

Severe steam burn on right middle finger: defective kettle

Can’t touch-type

Still need to finish packing

SOS SOS SOS SOS

SEND CHOCOLATE

Spurred by the delicious Von’s offer to move in with me and share the ol’ queen-sized in my new place, I turned around and took a good hard look at my bed-sharing quirk. It’s a pretty small quirk (perhaps a quark?) - I just have a really hard time sleeping if I’m not alone in my bed.

I don’t know where it came from, really I don’t. The first I remember hearing about it was when my parents took me (aged approximately ?two?) to stay with relatives in Toronto, and my uncle’s place didn’t have a crib so they just put a mattress down on the floor and Mom and I were supposed to sleep on that. Apparently I kept getting out and wandering around at night, and in the morning they would find me asleep wherever I had dropped - stairs, kitchen floor, whatever. I slept fine for naps on that mattress, but I had to be alone. Weird, no?

I don’t think anything particularly traumatized me into wanting to sleep alone (I do share beds under protest, and usually when beverages are involved so I fall asleep before the quirk kicks in - though sometimes I freak out when I wake up the next morning to another person in the bed. This happened at a friend’s wedding, when I woke up and rolled over to find myself eyeball-to-nipple with my assigned bedmate, who hadn’t mentioned he slept in the nude). In Guyana, I had to share a bed with my mother, and ended up rolling against the mosquito net every night; in the morning, there would be precise rows of bites along my arm where it had pressed against the netting. And it hasn’t come up much with boyfriends, believe it or not; I would do a lot to avoid spending the night, or if the guy had come to visit me when I lived alone, I would usually end up just lying awake till he woke up and got out of bed, and then I’d just sleep in while he did whatever people do in the mornings. (Seriously!)

Having another person in the bed just makes me intensely uncomfortable, that’s all. Just the… I have no idea. The other person’s heat, the breathing, the mass, the small involuntary movements, the AAARRGHHH I just gave myself a massive dose of the screaming heebie-jeebies.

So what the heck am I going to do if I ever get involved with a guy again (ha! Fat chance) and the issue of spending the night comes up? Consulting the Voice of Reason in my head, we came up with the following list:

1. Tell him I’m saving it for marriage, wait till he proposes, make him buy a large house, then spring it on him after we move in. Sleep in second bedroom with visitation rights as needed.

2. Tell him, then make him buy bunk beds.

3. Tell him, then make him buy twin beds to put on either side of sizeable bedroom, as per most sitcoms before the 1980s.

4. Tell him, then make him buy a canopy bed. Install a hammock in the canopy.

5. Don’t tell him, and sneak out of bed every night to sleep on the couch. Sneak back into bed just before alarm goes off every morning.

6. Don’t tell him, and build a little shed in the backyard for him to live in. Tell him it’s one of the major tenets of Cathomuslinduism and there’s no arguing with religion. Then, to keep up the facade, garnish his breakfast with a communion wafer every morning and make him eat it facing Mecca.

7. Don’t tell him, but install clear plastic wall down center of bed and tell him it helps my allergies. If he asks what I’m allergic to, I’ll tell him “Being poked awake.”

Other suggestions?

After one interminable morning dragging my (cranky, whining, and above all cheap-ass) father around Edmonton, I found an apartment. So that’s part one of the Move of Doom taken care of - next comes the other stuff, packing and cleaning and driving and probably crying of exhaustion at 3:30 a.m. on the very last day, as often happens.

I went to the hospital with the good news. Mom said, “How much are you paying?” I said, “A little bit more than my current place.” That, at least, is true. The rent is only $150 more than I’m paying here. “That’s disgusting,” she said, “that’s way out of your budget, you’ll go broke in six months, you should have picked a much cheaper place so you could save money.”

A lot of replies lined up in my head and waited patiently behind my teeth, waiting to jump out and yell at a woman who’d just had major surgery and was doped up on three different types of painkillers. So I shrugged instead.

What I really wanted to say was that I am sick unto death of being told I should live in a dive to save money. Guess what? I did that twice - Saskatoon and the first time in Calgary. I saved lots of money. I also came home to headlights shining on my living room/bedroom wall all night (Saskatoon), one silverfish that sent me into hysterics and caused me to draw up a Rube-Goldberg-y device involving dental floss, borax, a flashlight, twenty feet of acetate sheeting, and a hammer (Saskatoon), a front step literally filled corner to corner with fresh blood (Calgary), deafening pipe noises causing up to six months of insomnia (Saskatoon and Calgary), and cigarette smoke curling up through my sink and down from my bathroom vents (here, right here).

When you first move out, you expect to get a place that sucks. You expect to suffer. It’s even kind of funny, in a way - and of course, it builds character. The experience of living in that bachelor pad in the Toon was something I wouldn’t give up for the world. I was right next to the boiler room and after a couple of months without much sleep, I could hear the boilers talking to me at night. Of course, they also told me I couldn’t repeat the secrets they were telling me. Sorry.

But I’m twenty-six now. And perhaps it will sound pretentious if I say I deserve a nicer place to live, but I will say it and I think I do deserve it. Listen, when I got into my apartment yesterday I shut the door behind myself and almost dropped to my knees in despair and disgust. Although I had taken out all the trash, I hadn’t left my air purifier on (I had to get a goddamn air purifier to live here!) for the four days I was gone; and although I hadn’t left any doors or windows open either, it stank. The reek hit me like the flat of a shovel. It was the smell of stagnation, smoke, age, neglect - a stench immovable by any air freshener, candle, burner, or vats of Febreze. It was the smell of a dive. The smell of a place where a young urban professional might camp out for a while, but never ‘live.’

I can’t open my doors in the heat of summer because my neighbours on three sides smoke pot, and the fourth smokes cigarettes, and the smoke blows in like quilts. At night, I wake up every hour on the hour to yet another siren, yet another riot, yet another stupid or unlucky drug dealer running circles around my block screaming for help. In the year that I’ve lived here, there have been four reported murders within fifty metres of my building. I can’t even fit a full-sized cookie sheet in my oven. It’s too small. I have to use a ten-inch pizza pan when I bake cookies. And never mind the fact that our water gets cut off at least three times a month for repairs. Never mind that I’ve had to wash my face using water collected the night before, left out overnight, and heated on the stovetop in a wok.

So I think what I was saying to my mother with that shrug was, “I think I deserve a change.” To live in a newer building, with hardwood floors so I don’t have to die of carpet dust every time I get a respiratory infection, with a storage room so I don’t have to have all my spare cereal and toothpaste sitting on the floor, with a dining room perhaps large enough to seat more than one, with a bathroom perhaps of a size where I could step out of the shower and not have to crash directly into the counter. To have room to correctly partition my stuff - and no, I don’t have that much ’stuff,’ aside from books. Filling out the movers’ cube sheet I find I don’t even have the rudiments of urban living, such as a coffee table or a couch or a barbecue or a filing cabinet or an entertainment system or a gun cabinet.

Just once, I’d like to live somewhere civilized. Just once, I’d like to see what it’s like to come ‘home’ rather than just ‘back to the apartment.’ Even if it’s only for a few months.

Just once, I’d like to live in a place that doesn’t make me feel worthless.

And I think that’s worth the extra $150.

NOT FAIR

NOT TRUE

The test is rigged x a million because of the PERIODIC TABLE QUESTIONS.

It didn’t even ask me if I was learning how to bellydance, or whether I regularly make brownies, or do up butter chicken in my crockpot, or whether I happen to have 900 colours of lipgloss, or whether I once helped paint a friend’s nursery with underwater scenes - all of which are true, and highly non-nerdy.

Slander!!