I found this in a ‘Backup of Backup of Dead Hard Drive Backup Backup’ folder in my e-mail, and smiled. This was going around the blogosphere about a year ago – maybe Twitter? I forget when I joined. But I thought it was nice, so I wrote one, then immediately saved and forgot about it. The thinking is, say whatever you want to your sixteen year-old self.

Dear Sixteen-Year-Old Self,

You have questions.

The short answer is: yes. Things improve.

The long answer is: well, on the one hand, you are a teenager, and though you may not believe it, the strength of your feelings is not due to circumstance but to you being a teenager. I know, I know. But it is normal. On the other hand, you’ll be diagnosed with mood disorders later on, so it’s not entirely normal. Sorry about that.

As for the other question: you know what, you never do prove conclusively that he technically cheated on you. But guess what? You go to his wedding with two terribly handsome dates, so chin up.

The main thing I want to convey to you is that this is not your low. It feels like it, I know, but it isn’t – that is the universally gloomy illusion of adolescence. I don’t want to scare you by telling you there is a serious low later, but instead to lift your head up so you can see the beauty and goodness of the world around you right now instead of staying in that fog of misery.

You are, at sixteen, a fundamentally wonderful person. You are still funny, generous, impulsive, affectionate, and loyal. You don’t think you’re pretty, because you see the world as it really is rather than how you think it should be, but believe me, you will look upon these days of terrific cardiovascular health, twangy musculature, vigorous lungs, unconcussed skull, and sturdy sinews thirteen years later and laugh your flabby rear off. Your insides are like the Ritz. Self, you have the best friend you will ever have – yes, him, the one you went to grad with instead of the other guy. There is something else I have to tell you about the best friend, but it’s better if you find that out later for yourself, I won’t give you any clues. Suffice it to say that he will be there for you when no one else is, and no one will ever make you laugh or think harder. Or lunge further for a tennis ball.

True, your parents are crappy communicators, but they love you; and your brother is, as you’ve correctly deduced, the greatest gift they’ve ever given you. University is coming up soon, and you’re a little alarmed, but here’s something they didn’t tell you: so is everybody else, from the janitors to the postdocs. It’s OK.

This is, I repeat, not your low. You are all potential energy, like the rock at the top of the cliff. And I know you’re afraid to fall – I’m sorry to say you never outgrow that fear of your own awesomeness – but I’m proud of you, in retrospect, for going out and doing things anyway. I’m proud of you for being brave.

Self, in the future, you have a condo and underground parking and contact lenses and a bigscreen TV of your very own. Your sweet voice goes unused but your unpredictable wit does not. The people who stood by you at age sixteen have, in most cases, fallen by the wayside; the ones who remain are like the heads on Easter Island, and will remain at your side forever. But I won’t tell you who’s who because you need to learn that lesson, hard as it is.

I have some other advice for you, not that you ever take it (I know you too well for that). Which is: move forward when it is time to move forward; stop when it is time to stop. Go a little easier on yourself. You’re not actually gifted or special and you don’t have to slave away and burn out trying to prove to everyone that you are. Be gentle on your heart, don’t expect miracles. Know that it’s OK to not believe in anything. Above all, go on the way you’re going. Everything turns out fine. And you have a lot to look forward to.

Love,

Your Twenty-Nine Year-Old Self.

I’m not a typical Virgo in many ways (mainly my failures to be practical, neat, organized, and thoughtful) but I do love me some lists. So a while back I found this book series which was, wait for it, JUST LISTS. I bought the ‘My Future Listography’ book, and recently a good friend bought me the ‘Friend’ one.

I’m going to post a few completed lists here as I do them, but as I do them, I’m struck by just how snapshotty they are. I’m a changeable beast and I think if I had started the list even four months ago, even a year ago, all my answers to all the questions would be different. Because sometimes the trite things are true and we’re not the same people we were even ten seconds ago.

So anyway, I’m just going to do a random one (can’t do these things in order, obvs). Let’s see…

Ohh, a perfect home one! Interesting. When I was living at home, my parents (wisely) picked their battles and stopped arguing with me about the state of my bedroom, which was my only private space. So I papered the walls with all sorts of crap (posters, postcards, photos, drawings, etc) and filled most of the rest of the room with books. In all of the various apartmenty-style things I’ve lived in since I’ve moved out, none of them felt like a home – not even this one, in which I’ve lived longer than any of the others, and which I actually own.

My perfect home would entail:

1. A large backyard, which someone else would take care of, and which I could just walk around in without worrying about drug dealers or being run over by a bus or bear attacks or whatever.

2. Lots of large, heavy, dark wood furniture similar to what my parents have now. Maybe I should just rob them when I eventually buy a house? But this would be indispensable to me in my perfect home. There’s something reassuring about all the pieces they have, not just the fact that I grew up with it, but that my own furniture (bed, dresser, etc) was always crappy white particleboard and theirs felt lovely and smooth and glossy and dense. It was very much a tactile thing, a tactile value.

3. Some kind of solarium thingy or a conservatory or something. Uh, like this:

4. A secret room under a staircase, depending on how big the house is. I wouldn’t want it to be behind the basement stairs if I had a bungalow. I seen horror movies about that. (nods)

5. A huge amount of houseplants. Like, every room having two or three at least. I like houseplants.

6. One room just for books so I don’t have to walk back and forth a million times trying to find a specific book I’m looking for. (What? They said PERFECT home.)

7. A couple of dogs, so that I have something to love, and when I’m not there, they both have something to love too.

8. A person I love, who either enjoys or doesn’t actively dislike the things I have in my perfect home.

9. One room to corral all my stupid obssessions and collectibles, including my minerals, robot toys, rocket art, papercraft, Monty Python stuff, metal crows, Transformers, art supplies, action figures, model cars, and so forth. (That way, they hopefully won’t spread all over the rest of the house. And then that one room could just be the room of TOTAL PREMEENESS. This might be a good choice for the secret room.)

10. A bathroom with a giant marble tub that holds its heat for a very long time, and some kind of seat/handle/step setup that would encourage easy access when I’m drunk. (What?)

11. Enough guest rooms to sleep eight to ten people if a bunch of them don’t mind sharing a bed or a room.

12. A vegetable and herb garden that the person who takes care of the rest of my yard never touches. I like the idea of having the garden be my personal responsibility, so that if it does really well or if it fails horribly every year, I’m the one who gets to learn from it and re-fooble it the following year.

13. Every room having a really big clock. I love huge clocks. Minimum size about two feet across. No theoretical maximum. And they can tick as loud as they want, the sound of a ticking clock doesn’t bother me now.

What’s in everyone else’s perfect homes? High technology? A theatre room? A wrap-around verandah? Underlighting? Geodesic dome? Panic room? Subterranean parking? Zombie-shooting tower? Do tell!

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you and your loved ones and, if you have them, your velociraptors.

This is my Christmas tree! It only fell on me once. This was also the first year that I had somebody to help me decorate it. So it’s kind of a red-letter tree, even though it looks about the same as it does every year.

This is the big Christmas tree that they lit up in Churchill Square. It was motherfupping cold that night – one of those Arctic thingies they show on the Weather Network as a couple of snowflakes riding strips of blue bacon, meaning that the temperature had dropped fifteen or twenty degrees the previous day.

Devon, at sunset. I thought there were great shades of cannibal hillbillies in all these photos. Rural Alberta has a specific menacing toothiness to it, especially in the winter. You find yourself wondering, Was that a shadow in that abandoned outbuilding? Was that a light in that decrepit water tank? There can’t be people here, surely. So what did I just see? Then the next thing you know it’s all The Hills Have Eyes and wonky six-pointed crosses and chanting and you don’t want to get out of the car to get a better angle on the sunset because you’re worried that someone might be hiding at the side of the road with a big bottle of HP Sauce and a pitchfork.

Luminaria, at the Devonian Botanical Gardens. Warm night, full moon with just the faintest chip off the edge. A couple of inches of snow. I lit a candle for two homeys no longer with us and thought about mourning and grief and how they are not at all the same thing, how one isn’t over when the other is, how the other might not be over ever, but you don’t know necessarily. Nobody tells you. Nothing inside you can tell you either, even if you ask. So it was pretty bad for a few minutes, cupping the lit-up glass in my mittened hands, striving to feel a moment’s warmth, telling myself I would take it as a farewell.

But it was beautiful and beauty heals a lot. So maybe they, the Devonian Gardens people, were thinking of that when they came up with the Memory Lane part of Luminaria. I was grateful for it, unsentimental atheist varmint as I am. You don’t need to believe in an everlasting soul or a posthumous paradise to feel comforted by a little light in the darkness.

I’ve been neglecting my blog for real life again!

This is a slightly hilarious sentence. It is funny because yes, it is 2011, and shouldn’t I have a Tumblr or something? What are the kids doing these days? You’d have to be, like, you’d have to…you’d have to be like somebody’s grandma to still be blogging. Eesh. And it is funny because it’s me, about whom there are two things it is helpful to remember:

a) I have always regarded 90% of real life, except the bits where sexy boys buy me hot chocolate at confectioneries in Montreal or nuns glare as I drink raspberry-peach vodka from a lavender pleather flask in an alleyway or I get attacked by northern harrier hawks, as sheer drudgery. After so many years spent living firmly in my head, real life seemed like a shite thing to live in or do or have or whatever the correct verb is.

b) I produce about 5,000 words a day between Twitter, Facebook, G+, journaling, e-mails, fiction, and work. So claiming that I don’t have time to blog on top of that is bullshit. Christ, I’m even doing NaNoWriMo. Slightly behind, but I should be able to catch up my wordcount by mid-week.

Writing’s a funny thing for me. When I did the Neil Gaiman-led #whyIwrite hashtag on Twitter, I wrote something like “So I don’t drown in the words my brain produces 24/7.” The mental image is like water coming through the damaged hull of a boat, in a ferocious highspeed foam of words, and writing is what lets me bail it out so the boat doesn’t sink right away. Like that. I would be at the bottom of some unimaginable ocean if I didn’t write. The black dog has no problem breathing at the bottom of that ocean, if I may be so bold as to mix metaphors.

I don’t write here to brag or boast or update people, really, though I have used it for all of those things. I don’t write here to vent, bitch, make recommendations, or showcase my meager wit either. I do think I have discussed what I use this thing for before, and how it’s changed over time. It’s not really an archive, in the sense that an archive should preserve what’s true. It’s more like my Bible. Snapshots of my Iron-age mythology, filtered through the lens of Past Premee, her vocabulary and mindset, her little hurts and little triumphs, what she was reading at the time, who travelled with her, what she had seen in her personal desert. I’m OK – happy even – with it being that forever.

Also, here is a picture of me pretending to be Nimrod, the Mighty Marshmallow Hunter, in Churchill Square yesterday. (Oh yes, it put up a fight. Even after I had put it over an open flame and removed its skin, it was fighting back.)

Final, typical update (if I were telling you this in person, it would be in a dazed tone of ‘What has my literary life become?’):

Things that are on top of my nightstand right now:
1. The collected Conan stories of Robert E. Howard
2. Umberto Eco’s ‘Baudolino’
3. Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’
4. The third book in the Lord of the Rings series, The Return of the King
5. Mayhew’s ‘London Labour and London Poor’
6. Five ‘Conan the Barbarian’ comics from 1986
7. Three ‘Thor’ comics from 1992
8. An illustrated guide to venomous snakes

My nightstand is actually a cheap Ikea table on three curved legs and it is tilted over so dramatically by the weight of the books that when I set my alarm and put it back down, it slides across the surface till it hits the books and stops. Maybe I do still need to get out of the house more. Or read faster.

What have I been up to lately? Just, you know, shooting the shit. Out of shit.

(Sidenote: including shooting the shit out of Jason Statham, not on purpose. I had good grouping…I just couldn’t use the rifle scope for love or money.)

This is my friend LH’s dog Charley, also known as Chuck, Chaz, Chazzer, Chunk, Chip, or sugarlump, depending on how indulgent we’re feeling that day. In this getup, we occasionally also refer to him as Hannibal.

Charley is some kind of pitbull mix – he was a rescue and nobody’s sure whatall’s paddling around in his gene pool. There’s probably some Labrador retriever in there, maybe coonhound or setter. His coat, captured poorly on this cloudy day, is a rich golden-red, and his eyes are a curious mix of green and bronze. He attracts a lot of compliments on his unusual colouring.

He also – as I discovered Saturday – attracts a lot of ill will. And I suppose that didn’t seem too unreasonable at the Farmer’s Market downtown; if I was like the rest of the yuppies and had a small dog or young kids, I’d have given him a wide berth too, in his serial-killer gear. A lot of people aren’t comfortable with strange dogs period, let alone a dog that has been so visibly and publicly labelled as He Who Cannot Be Seen Without A Muzzle, a dog whose getup tells me it is prudent to fear.

Charley has to be muzzled and kept on a short leash because a municipal bylaw classes him as a Restricted Dog. A vet at the shelter looked him over and figured he was part pitbull, not a purebred (interestingly, if he was, he would be allowed in public with no restrictions whatsoever). LH could be fined $500 for having him out without his muzzle.

I’m not going to get up on a soapbox and proclaim that all dogs are precious innocent angels and would never hurt a fly. I’m not going to argue against restricted dog laws. They exist for a reason. I know darned well that there are naturally aggressive dogs out there, that there are dogs who will get so nervous and overstimulated that they could pose a risk to other people and animals, that there are abused dogs that will attack with or without provocation, that there are dogs who have been trained by douchebags to be douchebag dogs, and that all of those dogs can be very dangerous indeed.

My concern is that dangerous dogs can come from every and any breed, or any mix of breeds, and since you cannot predict it, how can you make a law of it?

What I would prefer to see is some fairness. Why should Charley – a dumb, affectionate marshmallow of a mutt – be shunned and demeaned in public, while some crack dealer’s purebred killer be allowed to go free? Why should it be Charley who has to wear the ‘YES, I’M FRIENDLY’ t-shirt while he’s muzzled in the vain hope that people won’t cross the street to avoid him? That’s not fair. It’s not even rational, when you look at who’s been socialized, loved, neutered, and sent to doggie daycare, and compare that to who’s been trained to eat rival crack dealers.

I would like to see Edmonton’s restricted dog law changed to remove the last two bullet points under the ‘Definition of Restricted Dog’ section. I think the first three are reasonable tests of a dog’s temperament and behaviour. I also appreciate that they are breed-neutral and mutt-neutral, so they don’t penalize good dog owners but are more likely to catch bad ones.

As you can tell, I was shaken by the way Charley was treated on Saturday – all that disgust, all those stares and glares, all that presumed guilt for a dog whose most aggressive action that day was bumping someone in the face with his muzzle while trying to give kisses. I want to see him hold his doofy head up high, unencumbered by that horrible mask. So I don’t know what my next move is – maybe nothing – but I’m considering at least writing a begging letter to the City of Edmonton suggesting they re-examine their restricted dog bylaw. I think it’s the least I can do for the love he’s shown me.

I don’t think this is the longest I’ve gone without a blog entry but, y’know, I’ve been busy since July 1!

On Canada Day I went to City Hall and took in some of the patriotic stuffs and The Works:

Then, I went to the Legislature grounds and wandered around eating a hotdog and photographing classic cars.

And the next day I went back downtown and saw 100 Mile House at the Works stage. They were very good. Morpheus bought two of their CDs and left them in my purse, so they’re technically mine now, and when I find them I intend to enjoy them immensely. Um. I think this was also the weekend that I bought a book about organizing, and promptly lost it. Shut up.

Also, I went to the museum again, and touched inappropriately, or was touched inappropriately by, a giant squid.

Then this happened to a bunch of us:

Then, I went to Shakespeare in the Park (Othello):

Then I went to Montreal and did all sorts of stuff. Including taking a picture of this:

Then, I volunteered at Heritage Days.

And, I saw Wicked at the Jubilee Auditorium.

So you can see how I’ve been slightly too busy to blog. How’s everyone else’s summer going?

Someone retweeted this link the other day and I loved the concept of inappropriate literary crushes, so I am appropriating (ha!) the idea for this blog entry.

FYI, these are not in order (of either level of crush or level of inappropriateness).

1. Case, from William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer.’ Nondescript in appearance, temperament, intelligence, and charm, Case is nonetheless one of my all-time big-styley literary crushes. His affect is so phenomenally flat that when he does show emotion, it seems like a big thing. And he’s so immersed in what he does, rather than who he is, that he’s just begging for someone to break him out of his sexy, sexy shell.

2. Steerpike, from Mervyn Peak’s ‘Gormenghast.’ From the moment this guy appears in the book I’m always like “Ewww” and “Rowrrrr!” simultaneously. He’s a ruthless schemer, ‘high-shouldered to a degree little shy of malformation,’ a a serial killer, torturer, sadist, and attempted usurper. But he alone, out of everyone in the castle, wants something different and new to happen. Ambition and desire are hot. (Illustration by Mervyn Peake. I have no idea why they cast the delicious Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Steerpike in the miniseries. People who do Hugo Boss ads should not have been considered for the role.)

3. Captain Yossarian, from Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22.’ Yossarian is clearly nuts (but he’s not) (but he is) (but he’s not). Prone to total insanity and extravagant fabrications, he would be hell as a boyfriend or husband. He can’t even cope with all the mad women he meets in the book. And yet there is something attractive about his wartime abandon and despair and lust that I can’t help but enjoy. I feel like he would be an unreflecting lover prone to fits of maudlin PTSD afterwards, and the change would be kind of fun.

4. Candace Compson, from William Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury.’ Caddy has obsessed me for years; I’ve always had this very clear mental picture of her (glaring, head tossed back, high colour in her cheeks, hands on hips). She doesn’t give a damn about what anyone thinks of her, or her honour, or her family, and she’s downright creepy about love. I feel like she’d be an infuriating mess to get romantically involved with – you’d always be vacillating between kissing her and strangling her. I for one would be screaming at her constantly, to no effect; manipulative, headstrong, high-strung dames drive me crazy. All the same, I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off her.

5. John Carter, from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘Mars’ books. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like an inappropriate crush – John, after all, is ruggedly handsome, muscular, adventurous, and fearless. But MAN would that get tiring after a while. His attitude towards women is very much a product of his times (uh, sometime in the future, but also far in the past) and would eventually lead to me killing him with a rock in his sleep. Still, so dreamy! I have a collected Burroughs with these great black-and-white drawings and he is a heckuva slab of rare steak in it, let me tell you.

6. Yuri Zhivago, from Boris Pasternak’s ‘Dr. Zhivago.’ This guy is at one and the same time a dreamy, baby-faced romantic, and a humungous bastard. I adore his idealism and resourcefulness and determination. However, talk about an affair? Ees no one-night stand. Ees BEEEEEG GIANT AFFAIR. I know it’s trendy to say monogamy is dead, but in ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ it’s deader than dead. He cheats on his wife with a sexy nurse and all three of them are so totally effed-up by the war that it’s kind of heartbreaking. Like, on top of a war, and being a starving single mom, your husband has to go sleeping around? Wow. Just wow. But at the same time, rowrrrrrrr.

7. Van Veen, from Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Ada.’ This one is super inappropriate, you guys. For one thing, my crush is on the young version of Van (he’s in his early teens at the start of the book, eww), but in my defense, I did first read ‘Ada’ when I was in high school, so it wouldn’t have been that icky back then. It’s just a crush that’s never died. He had a lot going for him (handsome, athletic, intelligent, rich, imaginative) but he’s also haughty and venal and jealous and thoughtless. And, um, he’s not really attracted to my type, if you know what I mean.

8. Lord Vetinari, from Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ series. This guy has been described as being as passionate and hotblooded as a dead penguin. He’s tall and thin and has fussy facial hair and long skinny hands. He’s sort of faintly…slimy. Yet if he propositioned me at a party, I’d totally sneak upstairs with him. I think it’s the combination of him being slightly repellent and foreign, and curiosity at a new experience, and the anticipation of him being really weird in bed or something. Because unattractive guys can be full of surprises.

OK, that’s my inappropriate and/or shameful list; I’ve come more or less clean. What are yours?

OK, OK, OK, I’mma try a thing here, that I created using my best friend’s Web Album Generator, which you can get here (and which he says is due for an upgrade, but anyway it worked fine for me until I had that little case-sensitivity-slash-idiot problem). Hope this works. It’s working on my computer but that might just be because the pictures are here.

Pride 2011

(I had a blast at Pride. The weather was so much better than last year and I actually got to watch the parade. I did give myself a touch of sunstroke and had to go home and have a cold shower till I stopped dry-heaving, but still – awesome.)