New York felt like I was a tongue in someone’s moist, hot mouth. All week a mist of rain combined with my sweat, and swiped at both with a drug store facial wipe that reminded me of the windshield wipers on my first LA car, just smearing a patina of greasy water back and forth. I loved it. I’ve barely walked in the past four years, almost never seen weather.

I’ve started documenting some of the random things that are being sold in the process, hoping to make some kind of regular feature out of it while killing any sitting-around-on-a-lawn boredom. Here’s last week’s.

Here I look like not-myself, because I think I’m trying to make the face I make at the mirror, which is always kind of grotesque for everyone.

This coat was ruined 12 hours later when I drank an entire bottle of Chardonnay, went to a party where I knew no one, and woke up covered in various kinds of cake icing. My friends tolerate this because I get to embarrass them so infrequently now.

YVR Airport, Vancouver, morning-ish, outside of a Tim Hortons where I broke a $20 bill on a small coffee to get change to buy these photos.

I think my dad is really, really cool. Whenever I’m home I go through his old photos and random younger days stuff like a total child. His basement is pretty much a museum of the Arctic in the 1970s and 1980s, and growing up around all those artifacts has made me fascinated by the North. This Christmas I started picking out my favourite photos from his adventures to scan and post here, but by the time I finished going through two cigar boxes of loose photos and a couple albums I had a giant pile of photographs. So instead of posting them here I made a whole other blog for them: My Dad, The Adventurer.

He never really found out what I was doing with all those photos, but mostly because it was like:

Dad: What’re you doing?
Me: [not looking up] Project.
Dad: [equally distracted by TV] There any ice cream left?
Me: I dunno I don’t eat ice cream.
Dad: Hey, did you say you want a project? You can go through my RCMP trunks when you come visit next time. See what’s in there. I don’t even know what’s in there.
Me: Can we have caribou for dinner tomorrow?
Dad: Survived off caribou for five years in the North. Beef was too expensive and the caribou was free, so we ate caribou. I don’t like killing, though. That part’s hard. I was never a hunter. You do that up North because you gotta eat, but I’m not a hunter. The caribou is a big roast; I have moose and deer, small steaks for two.
Me: [holding photo] Dad, what is this?
Dad: Oh, I was 21, that’s Nova Scotia. I was directing traffic in my diver’s suit there because–
Me: –Because?
Dad: [is now watching the news]
Me: DAD.
Dad: Hey, can you see if there’s any ice cream?

Below is my favourite set of the photos I found, from a camping trip when my dad worked at a house for troubled youth before joining the RCMP. Photos taken April, 1965 in British Columbia and Jasper, Alberta.

(Love you, dad.)

Best 23:33 of my recent internet trolling.

If you can’t watch early-’60s James Brown dance the shit out of the TAMI stage for twenty mins (highly recommended), there’s a stripped down tap-shoes and finger-snaps version of “I Got You (I Feel Good)” just after the 18:00 mark that I can’t even handle.

I have already watched this four times tonight because I thought this would be good background music for writing a gloomy sestina about earthquakes, but then I’m like how can this poem have any emotion if I am not sweating in the face and gliding manically across the floor and throwing myself to the ground–just hammering all of my feeling into that floor–and where are the girls screaming, I should be throwing myself on the floor so they know I felt it! I cannot write this if I am not screaming! And where are my backup dancers and how can I write a poem about earthquakes without any sweat or screams or pomade.

Just an excuse to watch this again.

Track listing:
1. Big Star – “Thirteen”
2. Van Morrison – “Sweet Thing”
3. Neil Young – “Hey Babe”
4. The Seeds – “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine”
5. T.Rex – “Jeepster”
6. Neko Case – “That Teenage Feeling”
7. Patsy Cline – “I Fall To Pieces”

Seven songs that felt like December, or have been in my head long enough to make it to the end of the year.

This ended up a much more appropriate length at a certain point, like actual playlist length, but then I cut a dozen or so songs out because some weren’t as true to the things that make the cold worth standing in, and the rest were too much like January feelings. This isn’t really about the calendar months at all.

Every time I update my layout or CSS I’m listening to something on repeat forever that manifests itself in whatever colour choices I end up making (Mazzy Star last fall in grey, Guided By Voices in the spring with gold and yellow and coral). This time it’s Beach House, which, I dunno I don’t even really listen to this stuff that much despite how cheeseball indie this paragraph is sounding, but all of a sudden one song on repeat and everything is rose and a dustier rose and a bit of mauve.

The screenshot above is from the tumblr I dump drawings on (when I don’t “dump them in the trash,” my usual reply in some variation twice a week when I come home from class and Nichole asks to see what I painted) which I decided to make all matchy with this site after finding a simple theme I liked better than what I had before. (Okay, so mostly it was just easier to customize, whatever.)

The first drawing reminds me of my friend Nick, whom I used to work with in Montreal. I haven’t spoken to him in the longest time for the longest reasons, but he’s one of my favourite people. Here’s an anticlimactic story for you: the drawing doesn’t look like him to me now, but at the wine-and-candlelit time during one of our (former) art nights with Alex I was drawing this dude and just–well shit, there’s kinda Nick! Then I spent the rest of the night drawing hands because we were too busy talking about important adult things such as whether we should order pizza.

(We went for Vietnamese instead.)

The moon seems to be a recurring motif in what I write, when I’m trying to write seriously, although maybe you don’t notice since most of it ends up being like, blah blah blah extended metaphor relating to the boy at work I have a crush on blah blah blah cryptic phrasing so I just leave those as private because the stuff I’ve left publicly on the internet is already embarrassing enough.

But what I mean is, like you know how there are girls in high school who just really love dolphins? Like they had the dolphin necklace from Claire’s, and wanted to be marine biologists as children, and their dream vacation was anywhere with a dolphin tank, and when they looked old enough to get a tattoo they paid someone to put a terrible dolphin on their ankle forever? Sometimes I’m just talking to someone about how awesome Las Vegas is (it’s not) and the whole time I’m like, I bet you totally loved dolphins in high school.*

Yeah, so I think I’m a weird moon girl.

Today I texted Nichole, the moon is so giant and yellow i wish i was a moon–which, I know, I just hated on dolphin girls so hard for being total freaks–but immediately after sending that garbage I was like wait, I think I actually really am just living in a giant moon analogy. And I thought I would maybe write about that and be super cryptic and wait for my sister to tell me I broke her brain. And I probably still will (as I have before), but instead I pulled up this gif and watched it for 20 minutes while writing this, just a fraction of an orbit on infinite loop.

* Sorry to any dolphin girls reading. If it makes you feel any better I’m like insane-obsessed with whales if you ever wanna just go to Sea World and talk it out

We got to the Lower East Side apartment just before 1am. We had taken a lot of cash out in Vermont so in the safety of the dark, recessed stairs in front of the apartment we counted enough American bills out of our bank envelopes to pay for the sublet and put the rest in our wallets. We called the phone number we were given. We were told a buzzer number which we pushed, were let in, and went up to the meet the friend of the woman we were subletting from.

He was a 40-ish man named Jean-Paul with a closely shaved head and the grizzled New York accent and street speech of a Scorsese lead. He had a bulky leather jacket on, ready to leave.

Jean-Paul gave us way too many details about where he would be spending the nights while we were staying at his place (“with a close female friend Uptown, maybe staying at another friend’s on Saturday night–I dunno, I’ll be around, okay?”) but ambiguous details on the actual apartment (“so bathroom light’s kinda fucked–pardon my French”). He gestured to where the keys were, an extra blanket, and if we want to do drugs it’s our business but please be discrete and quiet and clean up after yourselves. We laughed awkwardly and let him know we weren’t going to be doing any drugs.

He asked us if we were eighteen. We stiffened; a shorter round of awkward laughter. He made only half of an attempt to explain why he needed to know. Yeah, and one more thing, he said, it’s still New York; never count your money in the street. He looked at us deeply to gauge our reactions and paused. He picked up the remote, took a calculated aim at the television, and pressed the power button deeply. The old screen lit up with an ominous delay. I noticed a simple hand-inked tattoo on his hand. He stood between us and the door, his legs shoulder-width apart.

The sounds of: lightbulbs firing behind the television; heavy, scattered breathing from the Scorsese-esque man; my pulse, loud like under a stethoscope. The man shifts his weight, then broadens his shoulders almost imperceptibly, the leather of his jacket whipping and ringing in alarm.

A black-and-white channel appears, the composite of four square surveillance camera feeds. At the bottom-left the camera is focused on the apartment’s entryway, where we had counted out the money for the sublet, and filed the rest of our spending money for the trip into our wallets. He had been watching the screen before we arrived and knew exactly how much money each of us was holding. I turn white. The TV snaps off and the screen goes black.

. . .

After Jean-Paul left, Cori told me she did not notice a single sign that supported my absolute conviction that we just narrowly escaped murder. I proceeded to ruin whatever sleep she was expecting to get that night with my completely unfounded paranoia. I convinced her that there was a surveillance camera in the apartment somewhere that he was watching at that very moment–I also said this in barely a whisper due to my complete certainty that the apartment was bugged. I told her about his prison tattoo, that the dozens and dozens of Catholic icons, photographs of the Pope, and other religious items around the house were the deliberate props of a killer, and that we would probably be murdered that night. I wrote my sister to not tell my parents where I am but if I don’t text her again by 9am to call the police. Never text that to your younger sister.

I fell asleep within an hour.

The next morning Laura and Ruby arrived and the idea of Jean-Paul as a killer seemed a lot less plausible as we attempted to retell the story. Here was a man who had a tough life and found God! Here is an honest person with a good apartment in Manhattan who needs to pay the rent somehow, he’s not a hotel proprietor! He was just looking after our safety! I felt like the worst kind of person.

The four of us spent three nights covering every sleepable surface of that one-bedroom apartment for $25 each a night. The bathroom light never turned on so we showered in pitch black. I walked one of the less-famous bridges to Brooklyn in the afternoon because I couldn’t afford the subway. I spent my last $20 on a second-hand leather jacket I left in Montreal when I moved, and bought a pair of shoes on my credit card that I still wear often.

That night I stayed in with Laura watching The Apartment–black and white, although it turned out to be a colour TV–and I completely forgot that there ever was a Scorsese New York.

Photo: Chris Ford, ‘Not Open Yet’, United States, New York, New York City, East Village, Tompkins Square Park Area. On Flickr