There’s a nice footnote in Martin Amis’ ‘Experience’ where he describes his father silencing a party with one word. What happens is, the question is put round the crowd as to what in their life has disappointed them the least so far. People discuss their jobs, their kids, their travel experiences. When it comes to Kingers, he says “Love.” And everybody goes quiet: because he got it exactly right, and justifiedly so. Isn’t that great? That anecdote always puts a smile on my face.

That said, I got to thinking about what’s disappointed me the least in life and I’m afraid I can’t say it’s love. Nope, to the contrary, love has been consistently and unexpectedly and crushingly and sometimes deservingly disappointing. I’ve never once been not disappointed in love, now that I come to think of it. (Big words at twenty-five. I’m well aware of that.)

Anyway, after another twenty minutes of thinking I had to conclude that it’s cartoons that have disappointed me the least in life - and that can’t be right, can it? I couldn’t think of one other thing. I mean, you only have to watch two minutes of Looney Tunes circa 1930 to about 1965 to conclude that cartoons rarely, if ever, let you down. How do you beat someone saying “That dawg, Ah say, Ah say, that dawg is lower than a snake fulla buckshot. Ah’m a gonna go over there and break him gently in half with mah good right arm” ? You can’t, that’s how.

This epiphany came with an amusing coda. I put the question to my brother a couple of hours later, and he gave me a seriously surprised look, as if I were too dumb for words, and said “You, of course.” He’s twenty-one, I should add. Neither of us has seen much of the world, or even been given the chance to have the world disappoint us too severely. But still.

What in life, so far, has disappointed you the least?

Spring is coming to St. Albert. How do I know this? Is it the geese in the fields, the haze of pinkish buds on our chokecherry tree, the layers of grot on the streets? It is all of those things, and more: I almost got savaged by the neighbourhood dingo again.

The people across the street have a dingo. (Curious, I did a search for breeds that resemble dingos, and came up with a ‘Carolina Dog,’ above. So maybe they’ve got one of those. But it’s awfully savage and intractable and for all I know it is a real dingo.) They own a corner property and have fenced off the side that faces the street and the one that backs onto the park, but there’s no fence in the front, just a rock garden with a bunch of gnomes and crap.

Anyway, last year before the snow fell, it was a sure bet that as I got off the bus near their house every day and walked along the sidewalk, the dog (as yet invisible) would be barking its lungs out and scrabbling at the fence, which was fine in my books since it meant it was tied up in the backyard, so I was all like, “Yah boo sucks to you fritzy,” etc, but one day I passed the end of the fence and began crossing the street to head to my own house and the dingo was on me like Gangster No. 1. It was a damn good thing that I reflexively froze rather than screaming and running across the street, because it was about two feet away (plenty close to see the teeth and whatnot), growling and hackling and salivating and staring and twitching and quite prepared to disembowel me.

We stood there for about, oh, a minute. It took a step forwards, then another. I was like: Gosh, I’m about to get mauled. And I do mean mauled. It wasn’t a huge dog but I’m not a huge person and its head was almost at kidney level. There was a very distinct impression on its neck fur of a collar recently removed. Luckily, at that moment a big SUV came around the corner and started up the hill; the dingo glanced urgently at the passing car, and I took off across the street - a five-second sprint. I guess even domestic dogs have a good sense of territory, because it ran across the street to the median - obviously as close as it wanted to get - and stood there and barked for about ten minutes while I congratulated myself on a narrow escape and made a grilled cheese sandwich and gasped a little bit.

Friday: same time, same place, same ring of flattened fur indicating it’s slipped its collar again. Again, froze stiff and held my hands out in front of me in a placating gesture that made it even madder. Again saved by a passing car. Christ. I’m going to start carrying a stick for when I get off the bus.

The ‘ides’ thing refers to a bad anniversary on the 14th, some bad decisions that I made on the 15th, losing my favourite (brand new!) suit jacket that same night, suffering horribly through the 16th, and spending St. Patrick’s Day at home glued to my computer assessing a comprehensive study report of a decommissioned uranium mine. Are the ides over yet? I’m dying here.

Well, that’s the bridesmaid dress problem solved once and for all.

Anyone else have problems that need solving?

It took me an uncharacteristically long time to start it, but a characteristically brief time to finish it - three hours. Yet it was only with great difficulty that I finished Martin Amis’ ‘House of Meetings,’ though unlike with ‘Yellow Dog’ it was good difficulty - a good, a meaningful difficulty, and the tears I was holding back were grateful tears. When something manages to punch through my slowly-crumbling wall of miserable cynicism, that’s cause for celebration. Leaving a hole in the wall: I salute you, Mart. Yes I do.

It wasn’t just a love story, of course - what is, these days? - and it wasn’t just a survival story or one of regret and change - it was unquantifiable, which is hard to do in a short novel. My biggest problem was seeing the narrator’s brother (small, ill-favoured, clever, unaccountably successful with women) as my first love, and the narrator himself as my most recent romantic failure. The brother, a poet and philosopher with nothing in him but love and loyalty, loses all his love - though it returns, revenant and barely recognizable as love, near the end. But that narrator is a thug all the way through, a complicated thug whose emotions play on a pipe-organ rather than a penny-whistle, but a thug. A hateful, cynical, handsome criminal not quite beyond redemption, as we all are.

It is a hard and hurtful thing to read words and see familiar faces. ‘House of Meetings’ hurt me terribly, but I’m through the worst, smiling, recovered. It was like yesterday in the Artworks, reaching down for the silky warmth of their little cream-coloured spaniel: Jesus God! A living thing has noticed me and would like my touch and attention. When was the last time that happened? (Well OK. I’m twenty-five and it could happen again. In fact, once I move to Calgary it could happen at any minute and I could be happily married by 2009.) (No I couldn’t. But let’s not think that.)

Over the last few months, probably due to the bizarre singlehood I can’t shut up about, I feel as if I’m rising through a kilometer of gelatinously polluted water (acid mine drainage, perhaps), myriad and poisonous in its many shifting layers, into something quite foreign - clear water, and sunlight. There’s a few feet to go before I get into breathable air, and I will have to reach down into myself for old strengths and desires, but I think I can make those last few feet. I think I’d rather have solitude forever in the light, somehow.

In unrelated news, I picked up my bridesmaid dress today and, so far from my greatest fears, it fits and with my new shoes looks actually really cute and even dainty, although there’s an unfortunate sausage-casing effect that pushes my whatsits up to my chin. So - a few more pounds to go, obviously. Or even more stringent body-shaping undergarments? Do they make them in titanium these days, I wonder.