Et cetera Web Log

Going on vacation teaches you a lot about how you should live your regular days. It's easy to get caught up in your own life and your own surroundings, completely oblivious to how big the world is and how many other things are happening in it. I spent the last two weeks racking up about 2,600 kilometres in my car by driving from Calgary to Vancouver to Victoria to Peachland in the beautiful British Columbia. I've been around the province before, but I've never driven border to border by myself like that and it puts a lot of things into perspective. It makes those cities seem a whole lot more real when you have to drive through a hundred small towns along the way, all full of equally real people that I may never meet, see, or be affected by ever. In the broadest sense, I actually departed with the intent of spending the most selfish two weeks of my life, only to return with an even more pronounced sense of my own insignificance. I say that with a smile, though. By necessity, I did spend the weeks selfishly in practice, if not in philosophy. For the first time in a long time, I found the balance between being a good person and being happy without stress.

I left on July 11th and planned almost nothing. A Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament at the Simon Fraser University on the 12th was my only scheduled stop and so I left early the day before. As soon as I was on the highway (which isn't too far from my house at all), my head cleared noticeably and the realization that my vacation had begun slowly washed over me. It was like my subconscious mind suddenly received the news that it was time for a break. A break from life that I almost didn't know how to handle. It seemed absurd to me that I was off work for more days than I even bothered counting. I knew I had to be at work for the 28th, but it was only the 11th! I didn't even do the math. All I knew is that it was more than a thousand hours and that was plenty of time to clean my slate, so to speak.

I didn't get far out of the city before hitting a massive backlog of cars on the highway. Evidently, a semi trailer had tipped over several kilometres ahead and they were closing the highway in both directions and re-routing traffic. I thought this was just awesome! Seriously! I was so happy to be stuck in a traffic jam, potentially costing me hours of travel time, because I knew that it didn't matter and I had all the time in the world. Hell, I'd drive for 30 hours to Vancouver if I had to! Why not? It's my vacation, I'll do whateva I want and nothing can ruin it! Huzzah!

A kind trucker who took the time to walk a good distance up the line of parked cars along the TransCanada informed me and several other cars that the wait was looking to be pretty extreme and advised us all to spin around and detour through a backroad. It was a nice scenic alternate path and I was back on the No. 1 in no time, Vancouver-bound.

Somewhere around this time, I finished listening to the second CD of the road trip and promptly killed my radio entirely. I must've driven in absolute silence for at least four hours and it was a rare and therapeutic form of relaxation. Coupled with my already relaxed mindset, it was nice to be able to have that reflective block of solitude that we are so rarely afforded in the hustle and bustle of city life. I didn't have nearly as much to think about as I expected to, and that's probably a good thing. Even the heaviest of the stresses I had carried with me up to this point were faded with the onset of my vacation and it made the quietest parts of the drive peaceful and not at all boring. The stunning scenery of the Rockie Mountains of interior British Columbia certainly didn't hurt as a tranquil backdrop. I didn't know what to expect of my vacation, but I couldn't have imagined that it would begin so well--with nothing happening whatsoever.

Driving somewhere that you've never been is different when you're alone because it allows you to react and experience those things without concern for those around you and without their influence clouding what it is you're seeing. I saw a lot of things I had never seen before and will probably never see in the same way again. When I was younger, I would see weird town names like Salmon Arm on a map, or hear my parents talking about how much faster it is to take the "Coca-cola Highway" instead of the Crowsnest Pass. All these names that originally meant nothing to me. But as I grew up, I learned that it's the Coquihalla Highway and that Salmon Arm is a town along the Shuswap Lake, but those sorts of grey facts don't really sink in until you drive there. And I do mean drive. A bus doesn't cut it. You have to be standing outside your door, looking at your house, walking down the drive, getting into your car and then driving to another doorstep thousands of kilometres away for it to be real. Otherwise, you're just traveling to the airport. Or traveling to the bus depot. Then the bus driver ends up doing all the traveling while you sleep in the back only to wake from your dreams in a magical new place and you don't really know how you got there. But when you drive right from your house, even the furthest destinations only seem to be just down the road and the world seems like a much bigger place. One single place--not several, strung together by bus stops, airports and marinas.

I remember the drive in sections but there's very little to report. There's a nice little rest area just before the Coquihalla Highway starts in Kamloops, the highway itself has a downhill stretch that seems to go for about 45 minutes and you don't even need to have your car running to maintain highway speed, but other than that, I can only recommend that it's a good way to spend time.

After quite a journey through nature's impressive Canadian forestry, the first signs of Vancouver began to pop up around Abbotsford, a place in the Fraser Valley that claims to be "the city in the country." It didn't seem to be big enough to carry all the benefits of a metropolis and it certainly smelled like the country, so I was happy to clear that stretch of highway approaching Coquitlam and the rest of the monstrous urban sprawl. Abbotsford and Coquitlam in particular were surprisingly far from the rest of Vancouver when it came to drive time. Funny, they always seemed so close together on a map.

When I passed through Surrey, it was clear that I was no longer driving on a rural freeway (though it had probably been true for awhile by then). I contacted Jodi to warn her of my immanent arrival and get final directions to where she lived. It was much closer than I thought and when I eventually entered Vancouver proper, it was less than ten minutes before I had found her house. It was pink, but not as pink as the one across the street.

I set up shop by the futon in her single-bedroom shared basement quarters and after the grand tour, a cigarette and a brief trip to the grocery store, my vacation was underway. Everything began more suddenly than I expected, but I was in a pretty good mood so I went with it. Before really getting settled, I found myself in The Lennox Pub in downtown Vancouver with Jodi and her two friends from law school. Having just been delivered by a Richmond taxi, it was like being thrown into a new world after driving alone in quiet solitude for so long. But then again, it might've seemed that way no matter what.

I had been in Vancouver before, but only in passing. It's a very different place than Victoria and although I always knew that, I didn't understand in what way they were different until my week on the coast was over. I felt like I got a pretty good taste of BC in general, but even within that area, I covered a wide spectrum of life in the Vancouver area.

Vancouver is very alive and it makes me realize how dead Calgary really is. Not that I ever considered Calgary a bad place to live, but going to a place with a less office-oriented downtown core is a good reminder that there's more out there. Sure, Calgary's got a few nice little areas. You can walk down Stephen Ave. and it's cool, I guess. Or you could go to Eau Claire Market, which is cool, I guess. But in Vancouver, that same sort of energy is EVERYWHERE and you don't have to look too far to find someone or something to put a smile on your face. Walking around downtown Calgary is much less rewarding; we are surrounded by giant buildings with intimidating and desolate marble entranceways that belong to oil companies that nobody's ever heard of unless you happened to work for them. Half the pedestrians are in suits and the only place you can buy a cold drink is the Tim Hortons appearing on every third block. Usually inside the lobby of an office building. Vancouver, on the other hand, is like walking around in a high school during class change! Except the high school is actually a sweet mall! Consumer-friendly stores line every street, there's people breakdancing in front of the hotels, hot dog stands every ten feet and if you want a cold drink, you can go into ANY store! And it'll be a damn good drink every time! I wouldn't fault anyone for living in Vancouver; too bad about that hockey team.

The following day, the 12th, was the SFU smash tournament I was attending. The Simon Fraser University is located in Burnaby, east of Vancouver. I had driven through it on the way to Vancouver, but suddenly going back that way to spend a whole day in that part of town made it a little different. Whenever I think of urban sprawl consuming surrounding towns, I have the tendency to believe that it just becomes one city. I always figured that Burnaby and Vancouver and Surrey and Richmond and all those Greater Vancouver cities essentially become one. It's not actually true, at least not in Vancouver. It seemed to me like Vaughan was a part of Toronto while I was there, and Saanich seemed like a part of Victoria, but the Vancouvers are not the same. Part of it stems from the fact that there are large chunks of ocean that separate most of the major municipalities in the Greater Vancouver area, but some of the nuances of each are striking. Admittedly, I didn't explore much of Burnaby other than the SFU campus, but it just feels different than Vancouver. There's more open space and less energy.

After the tournament, I had the opportunity to visit Surrey as well. Surrey has an unfortunate reputation of being the dumpy part of town with low rent prices and high cannabis exports. Either way, I spent the evening motoring around Surrey with a few smashers, hit a liquor store and the vacation continued into obscene hours of the night at the house of the famous "robyextreme". I drove back to Jodi's place very early and after that, Vancouver becomes something of a blurry mess. I didn't want to remember it all in great detail, instead preferring to hang on to the memories that stand out and use the rest of them as a disposable medicine for my malady. We spent several days at several different beaches, I swam in the ocean, lost a cheap (but cool nonetheless) wire frisbee, toured the downtown, saw a few movies, ate a few "foreign" meals and eventually rendezvoused with my brother.

Dean happened to be vacationing in Vancouver at almost exactly the same time that I was. I met up with him in a park along Commercial Drive and hung out with him and his lesbian friends for awhile. He had brought his guitar with the intention of playing an open mic somewhere in Vancouver, and we found many places that hosted them. Eventually settling on The Wired Monk, Jodi and I met up with Dean's crew one evening for a few local beer and three of Dean's showstopping tunez. My brother and I also spent a day wandering the downtown towards the end of both of our Vancouver stops. We hit the stunning 6-floor music store, Tom Lee Music--the only place that I've ever been to that can claim to have like a hundred grand pianos on the second floor. We did a lot of walking and a lot of pointing out just how easy it is to find cool shit here compared to Calgary.

I spent one day across the water in North Vancouver as well to see Sarah. We first planned to rendezvous at the Sea Bus location known as Lonsdale Quay and climb Grouse Mountain in the early hours of the morning. Sarah works up on top of the mountain and the "climb" is really more of a glorified 5,000-foot staircase. It's obviously a popular tourist attraction because it is relatively tame for a climb, but still harsh enough to exhaust most people without hospitalizing them. It's also not easy on no food and two hours sleep, but we did it in just over an hour and a half and I had an expensively hearty meal afterwards.

Sarah gave me the grand tour of Grouse Mountain complete with verbatim tour guide dialogue about which animals do what at what time of year, who carved this wooden sculpture, what are these mountainside houses for, how much of Vancouver's fresh water is supplied by this body of water, etc. It was the most tourist-ish part of my entire vacation, now that I think about it. We watched a Lumberjack show, a half-hour Discovery Channel movie about the bears living on the mountain, rode a Grouse Mountain-style sky ride o'er the scenery and made a pretty complete day out of it by the time 2:00 rolled around. Then, Sarah departed for her shift, I rode the lift back down to ground level, bought a smoothie from Starbucks and headed back across the water. Although I didn't spend much time in North Vancouver, even it has distinctions that separate it from the other urban centres. These subtleties are so difficult to put into words that the best I can do is say that they exist and they are undeniable, but you have to be there to know what I mean.

I was glad to see that Sarah seemed to be doing okay--maybe better than any of my other friends. She's done a much better and faster job of getting her life in order than I would expect of anyone my age and looks to be well on her way to domesticated bliss. To get to that point seems like about five years work ahead of me, but the appeal of being happy and "settled down" never struck me quite so hard until I had seen shades of it in the eyes of someone my own age. I feel like I've aged ten years in the last three and it's no way to live, but seeing is believing and I am now at least able to look forward to a positive outcome instead of wasting away dreading that such a thing is not even possible.

I arrived back from Victoria in the evening. The sun was on its way down when I came back to my car on the ferry terminal and by the time I was back in Vancouver, it has disappeared entirely. Jodi was at a theatre to see The Dark Knight with the aforementioned law school friends. The plan was to wait for her call after getting out of the movie and then rendezvous with the lot of them at a bar afterwards.

While waiting, I decided to drop in to Earls on West Broadway for a meal and a beverage. Evidently, the film was longer than expected and I didn't receive a call until well after I had finished my meal and begun cleaning the interior of my car to pass the time. When I did, I learned that the theatre was actually not in Vancouver, but in Richmond, a city that I had just driven through on the way back from the ferry terminal. I knew that this effectively made me a cab driver for the night, but I didn't mind so much and didn't exactly have anywhere else to go.

The problem that would eventually manifest itself comes back to my constant, unabated war against people giving me directions. I operate based on maps and addresses. If I have a map and I have an address, I can probably find it--it's not that hard. But for some reason, everyone in the world seems to believe that it's simpler to just drive until you see a Mcdonalds, turn left, go through the 4-way stop, take your second right after the playground zone ends and stop in front of the red mailbox at the end of the street by the bike path. And usually they follow that up with a house number, but no street name--apparently just to piss me off. But I digress. I tried to warn Jodi about this problem in the hopes of getting an address, or at least an intersection (which is just as good typically), but I wasn't fast enough and by the time I had enunciated my preference, she had already passed the phone off to one of her friends. Who, naturally, immediately proceeded to give me way more details than I needed to know in a parade of convoluted instructions.

To make things even more difficult, my cell phone was dying due to having spent the last couple days in and around Victoria without a charger. So, between the convoluted instructions, the beeping of my low-battery alert and the subsequent untimely death of my phone, all I got out of it was a "Famous Players" on the "Steveston Highway" and something to do with veering off to the right in an HOV lane near the Ironwood shopping centre. This miscommunication is nobody's fault, but in my defense, the first question I asked was "what intersection is the theatre located at?" and the answer was, "where are you coming from? Do you know Richmond at all?" I guess I should've just repeated the question instead of answering his, but that was when the phone began to die and it sounded awfully loud wherever they were to begin with. My repeated attempts to get the name of an intersecting street failed in the end, but I figured that I probably had enough information to find it. After all, there's only one Steveston Highway and there can't be more than two Famous Players on that street in the vicinity of the Ironwood shopping centre that happened to be surrounded by bars.

That said, in case you were interested, there is no Famous Players anywhere on the Steveston Highway. Believe me, I know, I drove the entire length of it both ways. I received a text message saying "Where are you?" which promptly killed my phone upon reading it so the fact that I hadn't found this theatre a good hour after finding the Steveston Highway was getting to be a problem. I did find the Ironwood shopping centre, though. And I must've driven every adjacent street four times over trying to find any sign of a theatre. I even found an HOV lane at the end of the Steveston Highway and since I was running out of ideas, I took his advice about "veering" off to the right. Two minutes later I found myself in a tunnel heading back towards the ferry terminal and leaving the city again, so that didn't seem to work so well.

This was when I felt like something was going wrong with my vacation. Bad luck, when it chooses to show itself instead of hiding behind that which appears good, has a certain "feel" to it that cannot be mistaken. There's a point where you think that bad luck might be screwing you over, and then there's another point where you know that it's out to get you, as though sentient. In this case, I thought I was in trouble when I realized that I was heading into that tunnel, leaving Richmond and yet it was nobody's fault. What, really? Is this happening? Nah, this isn't happening! It wasn't until I tried to turn around and head back to the city that the almighty Luck decided to prove it. I exited off to Ladner, a smaller settlement south of Richmond--and wouldn't you know it? You can ENTER Ladner that way....but you can't get out!!

Because you know, I figured: Hey, this isn't happening, because I'm not letting it happen. There's no bad luck on my vacation--there's no familiar feeling of self-doubt and foreboding!! Screw that! I'll just exit at Ladner, pull a U-turn, get back on the highway and be back in Richmond in no time!

But no, you can't get out and Ladner was not on my map, of course. I don't know how much time I spent there. It was very dark and it was very quiet. The streets were unfamiliar and not exactly intuitively named if you're trying to get back to Vancouver. I wandered in and out of various residential areas (because that seemed to be all there was) until finally finding a second exit further south that allowed me to drive back to the city instead of into the ocean. The evening was pretty much a wash by then and I expected nothing but more shit to hit the fan, almost as though the vacation never began. It was past midnight, I still had no phone and was just getting back on to the Steveston Highway in Richmond. I thought I'd try to find a payphone or an open convenience store (whichever came first) in an attempt to figure out where I was going. To the best of my knowledge at the time, Jodi's ride had left early which meant that I had at least one passenger waiting in some mystery location that was probably closing soon. And besides, by this point, I was at least gonna be getting one drink before the night was out. I eventually found the payphone and phoned Jodi asking for the name of this bar, because the theatre had not exactly been a useful point of reference. She was back in Vancouver, at home.

The evening's goings-on were the biggest challenge during my vacation, the biggest hurdle to clear. Which is why I have more to say about it, despite being significantly less important than most of the rest of the holiday. When I am content and happy, I have very little to write about because I'm not sure you gain anything by trying to relive your happy memories on paper. It's not like it's going to make them any better than they were in the first place. However, memories rooted in sadness, anger and frustration become malleable objects on a page and by recollecting them through writing, you have the opportunity to twist the memory into a positive and apply it to what you've learned since experiencing it. That's not to say that you can't write a happy memory and spin it into something horrible, but why would you? Driving the wrong way on a one-way street doesn't get you anywhere.

When I had made it back into the city, I had been driving angry for a long time and it gradually subsided as it all began to transform from Richmond to Vancouver again and I realized I was still on vacation. My brain didn't do that by itself--it took a few clove cigarettes and about a thimble full of trichomes--but by morning, the Richmond incident was a thing of the past and I had already resolved to "erase" it from my vacation (ironically, just to end up re-writing it all here!). In retrospect, it seems like it brought Jodi down a lot more than it did me. She's always been inordinately complex so it's difficult to say what it was, but by the next day, I had packed up all my stuff after she asserted that she couldn't continue housing me in Vancouver. Something along the lines of "I can't even support myself," as though she felt some sort of obligation to "support" me while I was there--when really all I expected was a shelter to sleep in and nothing more. Nevertheless, I thought it best not to question it and at the slightest hint that I had become a burden, I was gone, leaving Vancouver. I didn't have room in my head to ask her for clarification and nor did I have the inclination to immerse myself in one of the various pools of drama that a longer conversation may have fed into. Not on vacation.

So I was out of there and it was the right move. I didn't actually leave Vancouver directly--after packing everything into my car, I met up with my brother once more, as he was heading back home the next morning on a Greyhound bus. At the end of the afternoon though, I had set sail once again and it was a nice quick flashback to the stress-free sensation I first experienced on the highways just outside Calgary. The drive was shorter this time, but more interesting because I was going to a place I had never driven before. The highway that eventually detours off of the TransCanada and into the Okanagan is quite mysterious at night. The sun had set by the time I had reached the turn-off and most of the driving in through the Okanagan was in blackness. It was like they were shielding my eyes from all the glory to be seen when the sun comes out. I didn't even realize what a secret paradise I was driving into because of it.

Peachland was very small, but nothing seems as small as it is while you're there. My mission was to find Jon's restaurant, the Gasthaus on the Lake, purchase a drink and wait for him to get off of work. Poor Jon didn't even know I was coming, but this is largely due to his failure to keep in contact with anybody and I did everything in my power to warn him. But, being paradise and all, it didn't exactly matter.

The Gasthaus was very easy to find and it is, indeed, on the lake. It was a good feeling to finally pull up to the restaurant after years of hearing about it from Jon and imagining him pounding out some delicious entrées. It was obviously still dark out when I arrived, but it was a nice, calm night and the lake was no longer hidden as it had been on the drive in. Not that you wouldn't expect to see an eleven-kilometre long lake at night whilst standing on its very edge, but the moon glistening off the rippling water was a fair glimpse of the buried treasure that is the Okanagan Valley.

I ordered a house ale (the Gasthaus Lager) without hesitation and politely inquired as to whether or not Jon was still around. The message was relayed back to the kitchen and from out the double doors, there he was. He looked good; maybe better than I'd ever seen him, and he seemed healthier to boot. We moved out to the patio, drinks in hand, and the final leg of my vacation had taken its first step.

Two factors made the Peachland portion of my trip a little different than I anticipated. The first was the appearance of Josh "Sweez Beats" Carlson, a mutual friend of both Jon and I who was also from Calgary. It had probably been at least a year since I had seen Josh as well, so it was a surprise for everyone involved. Incidentally, he had arrived in Peachland slightly earlier than I did. However, he wasn't at the Gasthaus right away; apparently he was passed out at Jon's place due to leaving Calgary early that morning and smoking weed for practically the entire duration of the drive.

He joined us later and I learned that he would be leaving Thursday--I intended to head out on Friday or Saturday. This more or less meant a clash of vacations wherein neither Josh or I would get as much "Jon time" as we might've expected. Not that it was a problem. See, Josh is the man--he's personable, laid-back and rolls the finest joints of anyone I've ever known. I don't know him all that well and he's never been one of my closest friends for that reason. I have a longer history with Jon than Josh does and I've always known Jon to be the type of guy who has a malleable personality based on his company. Josh's relationship with Jon is a much better fit to his current lifestyle than mine and it shows in his behaviour. He was surrounded by a paradisaic, cannabis-fuelled culture of people who did little else but have a good time and Josh fit right in. However, a lot of my history with Jon exists in a more developmental stage of both of our lives; we know each others weaknesses and we know about the tribulations we endured before being cast in to the real world to become workforce-ready adults. I don't think Jon is very proud of what's happened in the past and that's probably a big part of the reason that he vanished from Calgary and became difficult to contact. The impression that I got from many of Jon's newer friends was that he actually wasn't that hard to contact at all. Josh had been able to coordinate his trip and plan the dates on the phone with Jon well in advance and Desraie looked at me like I was nuts when I said he was impossible to get ahold of, citing that she had talked to him earlier that week. I don't think Jon holds it against us time-honoured friends; it's just that his life is very different now and although it's no fault of their own, sometimes good people carry the weight of a tainted past that rarely, if ever, comes to the surface once you've found out how to be happy. I remembered how easy it was to lose touch with everyone when I moved back to Victoria, and even when I returned, the people that I grew up with seemed very far away until the Great Randall Collapse of '05.

Am I still jaded? Did the vacation "work"? Am I "fixed"? It's hard to say because I'm not even sure what that means. There are some things that I cannot undo on my own, some damage that cannot be undone without the support of others. Happiness is still a product of itself; a combination of my own happiness and the happiness of those that I care about. The vacation did work, though. I knew it was going to the second I was on the road. I knew it was going to be a success because I had not allowed it the opportunity to fail. I purposefully resolved to let nothing ruin it. If I had lost my wallet on Day 1, the vacation certainly would've changed, but it would not have been ruined. I was used to bad things happening (too used to it) and was prepared for the worst. What I received was the best. I didn't see it coming and I'm glad for it.

I said earlier how spending your days on vacation teaches you how to spend your regular days. You are not afforded the same luxuries and freedoms of a typical vacation, but that doesn't mean that you can't take a stand against them. Let nothing ruin your days, do not let them fail you and do not let the failures and faults of other people bury you along the way. Live to make yourself happy first, and help those you care about second--not the other way around. You can't let the happiness of the people you care for dictate your own, because people are an unreliable source for happiness. Instead, do what you can for yourself and only then are you in a position to be making sacrifices for the well-being of others. If you spend your days as a selfless altruist who isn't happy, you might have the greatest intentions and the kindest heart in the world, but don't waste it on others because unhappy people don't know how to make other unhappy people better. Two wrongs don't make a right. You might think that you're doing some good, but you're not and you won't know that until you're happy with yourself alone.

I spent too long concerned over whether or not what I was doing was "right" or "wrong." Most of the time, I thought what I was doing was right and didn't understand how the "right thing to do" would so often backfire and I'd be left even unhappier than I was before. As it turns out, I was really worrying over nothing because it doesn't matter what's right and what's wrong--they are subjective concepts and everyone's interpretation of right and wrong vary wildly no matter how bulletproof your argument may be. Just because I believe something is right and can prove it doesn't mean that you have to and you have perfect right to reject my proof as baseless slander. The fact that we are able to disagree so intensely and fight to the death on opposite sides of the same issue is what makes us human and I'm prepared to deal with that. I know some people share my ideas, some don't and some reject them outright, but I think it is unreasonably selfish to judge them for it. For me, it's not what you believe, it's how you express it--a new mantra for sizing up other people based on "why and how" instead of "who, what, where and when."

What I realized was that when most people meet for the first time, they ask a lot of empty questions about where they live, what they do, etc., just because it's the polite thing to do. After all, that's how you find out what you have in common with one another and finding common threads is what makes the social experience much easier than it would be in utter silence. Then I got to thinking, where did my strongest friendships come from? Although I do have some things in common with my friends of today, their interests and activities are not what forms the foundation of our friendship. Then on the other hand, I've met many people in passing who I have a lot in common with, but I hardly ever actually keep in contact with them--sometimes not even after first meeting them. Plus, my strongest friendships are scattered all over the map when it comes to their interests and the "type" of people that they are. What they share in common with myself and each other is the way they do things and why they do them--even if it means reaching different conclusions.

TO BE CONTINUED...

This morning, my face is battered and my nose is swollen. I am feeling tired and empty, but above all, undefined. It wasn't as though I didn't see it coming. On the contrary, I've been anticipating this kind of damage for a long time, but what I never considered was what would happen afterwards. I was so fearful that it would happen that I never even thought of the possible outcomes. As though this was the end and I wouldn't be able to go on.

At the risk of sounding like a crying emo teenager, I still intend to write about Saturday--my second nervous breakdown. Please understand that I've never been told what a nervous breakdown is and people like to throw the term around as a blanket generalization for "freaking out." I knew that was the way people saw it before I had my first, but immediately thereafter, I knew perfectly well that the term is washed out and does a very poor job of illustrating the magnitude of what I now know to be a nervous breakdown. It's not a temper tantrum. It's not just some sloppy panic attack where you're breathing all heavy and teary-eyed, not knowing what to do and not knowing what to say. It is not the same thing as what people call an "anxiety attack" either, which has the tendency to force people outdoors in public situations so they can "get some air" and afterwards, they're fine. No, this is more like the kind of thing that results in waking up the next morning to clean the blood and vomit out of your own car from repeatedly slamming your head against the interior driver's side door the night before.

Saturday was Tim McCaughey's 50th birthday party, held at the Blackfoot Inn in the Sundance Room on the lower level. It was very well organized and catered with enough delicious food to feed twice the people who actually showed up. Tim used to live next door to my family while I was growing up and it was both theirs and my parents' first house. They were neighbours for something like 15 years, but up until Saturday, my mom and dad hadn't seen Tim for 15 years either. Plus it was a surprise party, and any surprise party where you get to meet all kinds of people that you haven't seen in that long is guaranteed to be a good time. The food was delicious and the wine was free; I don't blame the wine for what happened afterwards, but it would be naive of me to believe it didn't play a factor.

I don't know how much I drank, but unlike my first nervous breakdown, I wasn't incapacitated due to physical illness--just drunk. Memories from the evening are spotty at best, but I remember when it started to fall apart and the party itself was more or less over. I went outside to have a cigarette with my parents because I had never ever done that and it seemed like an appropriate occasion wherein I wouldn't have to worry about being chastised for the habit. About a half an hour later, I was in the back seat of my parents' car with my head in my knees crying violently. I'm not exactly sure how I got there, but bits and pieces keep coming back to me and I think it makes sense in retrospect.

My parents had suggested at some point that I drive them back to their house, as I was really in no position to drive. Normally I'm aware of my own inability to drive, but this is where my brain began to twist and it becomes a slippery slope when my emotions override my logic.

I had intended to go to Mugs Pub after the party, because it ended pretty early (or at least that's what I thought; really no way of knowing what time it was). In fact, as important and all-encompassing as the party was, my mind was in another place and towards the end, all I could think of was going to Mugs. And I've just been broken for so long that it was like a race towards a resolution between a nervous breakdown and Jessica Ranger. I am not impatient. There is nobody to blame. I hope Jessica understands that, but more importantly, I hope she has some tolerance for my weakness and that this story of a nervous breakdown doesn't look totally insane on paper. Nobody wants anything to do with anybody who is so perpetually lonely that they start acting crazy--which is horrible, because the only solution to loneliness is finding someone who can get past that and maybe see that you really could be a great person under that psychotic mask of a pathetic, single and deprived nervous wreck. A mask that can be swiftly discarded forever; it just takes two people to remove it.

My preoccupation with going to Mugs began to dominate my actions after my parents had pretty much insisted that they drive me home. So my work wasn't done and I became recalcitrant and stubbornly selfish about what I had to do. I had lost my cell phone battery somehow, and had reason to believe it was in my car or in the parking lot somewhere. They didn't let me try and find it, and that was when I began to fall apart. I had also lost my glasses somewhere in the mix and by the time we got back to my parents' house, I had little memory left of the drive and all I could think of was my cell phone battery. What if I missed a call? What if I missed a text message? What if Jessica's expecting me there for some reason? Maybe she's already sent a message--what does it say?? I don't know, I was fucking crazy.

I remember being back at my parents' house quite vividly compared to the ride home. I'm not sure how I got in the door, but the violent crying continued until I was lying down on the floor of the laundry room, my nose bleeding on to the door mat and my mom sitting over me holding my hand and not really knowing what to do. That was the first time that I was aware of the bleeding but I couldn't remember how that came about. I remember trying to talk to my mom a little about how it really will drive you crazy to be in love, true love, for six years, and then spend the next three years lonely and single without a girl in the world who will so much as bat an eye at you. No two-week relationships, no one-night stands, not even a flirty little peck on the cheek--nothing. She probably got the point, but I don't think I enunciated this very well in my state, and besides, you kinda have to live it to really understand.

They had set up the fold-out bed in the basement for me to sleep on and when I finally found the legs to stand, it was nearly 3:00 in the morning. I ambled around the basement in a daze for a long time, pretty much unaware of what a complete wreck I was and still irrational and crazy. So much so that it was my full and complete intention to go to Mugs Pub still, even though they were long closed. But of course, in order to go there, I would need my car and if I was going to get my car, I would be grabbing my cell phone battery and when I remembered that I had been shafted out of the chance to get it before we left the Blackfoot Inn, I was out of the house immediately. I began walking and had no qualms about walking all the way from the far northeast corner of the city all the way to the Blackfoot Inn. Fucking. Crazy.

First I went to the 7-Eleven to buy a lighter, and maybe if I had walked a little further, I eventually would've called a cab, but my dad followed and caught up to me before I had the chance to do something that crazy. It was for the best and I wasn't surprised at all to see him walk into the convenience store at quarter-after-three. I knew I was defeated, though. I knew I wouldn't be getting the battery for my phone and I knew I wouldn't see my car until it was light again. I didn't sleep on the fold-out bed because I wasn't sure I would be able to and I didn't want to sleep in too late anyway. My mind was still on the battery and I don't think I let go of the actual phone portion all night in the hopes that it would miraculously come to life. I felt so helpless that all I wanted was a message from Jessica and it didn't matter what it said; just the fact that it was sent to me would've been enough to ease my mind a little and remind me that there are people who know that I exist. I've always hated text messages, but it's funny how something that you hate in principle can become so priceless in times of desperation.

I eventually passed out on a reclining chair in the basement with my phone still in hand, but I don't know what time it was. I was awake again by about 9:00 in the morning and could hear my parents getting up upstairs. I had rested some, but my mind was still all over the place--you don't really recover from a nervous breakdown instantly, you know. The first one left me incapacitated for six months and when I remembered that, I realized that I didn't know what to do. The thing I had been dreading for so long had come and I wasn't prepared for any steps after that. So I immediately fell back into my resolve from the night before, looked at cell phone, remembered where the battery was, and went to get my jacket.

I knew it was too late, so I wasn't in a rush, but I had my jacket and shoes on before my parents were even dressed. I sat on the front porch and smoked five cigarettes in a row, had a coffee and waited in silence until they were ready to leave. They drove ma back to the Blackfoot Inn and I was quiet for the entire ride. They had outfitted me with the usual several bags of hand-me-down shoes, groceries and clothing from their recent trip to the States. It was a little after noon at this point and when we pulled into the parking lot, one of the first things my dad said was something along the lines of, "Your car has moved." It had no effect on me, but I basically knew what that meant and sometimes things are going so badly that adding more bad news doesn't actually make it worse so much as it starts to make sense. It was natural and expected. In fact, I would've been surprised if we had returned to that parking lot and things went smoothly.

I didn't remember where my car was parked before, but it did indeed move and when I stepped out my dad's truck, I could see that my parking brake was not on and the car had rolled forward, scraping up against the side of a mini-van--the only thing that stopped it from going further. I didn't understand why my parking brake was off because I didn't remember being in my car the night before. Though when I finally turned the key and opened the door, it was very clear that I had been there. There was a significant amount of dried blood on my steering wheel and on the inside of the door. It smelled like a hospital and a drunk tank combined, sour and pervasive. The whole interior of the car was a rank and bloody mess and I sat down with the door open just looking at it all in silent resignation.

I saw my cell phone battery on the dashboard and grabbed it immediately, pulling the other half of the phone out of my pocket. I put the battery in and turned it on. But it didn't turn on. I tried again and it didn't work. I flipped the battery around, tried to put it in a different way, but it only fits one way, so I tried holding it a little firmer and turning it on and the phone beeped at me once. It was like a glimmer of hope. But it didn't turn on and when I had flipped the battery so many times and pressed the power button so many times, completely oblivious to my parents and everything around me, I finally saw that there were two little cracked plastic joints at the top of the phone and hurled it into the pavement with all the strength I could muster. It was broken and it was broken before I threw it, but my dad didn't know that and initially reprimanded me for doing so.

My dad pushed the car forward and away from the side of the van I had scraped up against. The van took it worse than my car did, but it was obviously a slow roll and more of a scrape than an actual dent. Noting the damage, my dad paced around for awhile, had a smoke and eventually asked me, "So what do you wanna do about this van?", to which I replied, "What can I do?" I really didn't care, I was well past the point of trying to fix unforeseen consequences of the night before. After a bit more pacing, my dad eventually said, "Let's just leave." And I nodded, my parents hopped back in the truck, I got into my car and we drove away.

I was thirsty and I just wanted a coke and I figured that might be a good reason to drop in at Mugs. When I got there, it wasn't even 1:00 and as luck would have it, they don't open until 1. I left and went home. The drive was slow and with the adrenaline running out, my head began to ache and I felt sore all over. When I got home, Mitchell was awake and watching TV but I didn't have the energy to explain what happened. I took an ice pack out of the freezer and laid down on my bed for awhile. Eventually Mitchell left for a couple of hours and I went to have a shower. When I looked in the mirror, it was humbling. I hadn't shaved in awhile, my nose was bruised and swollen and there was red spots scattered around my face. That was when I felt the bumps on my head too and had a vague recollection of being in my car the night before when the breakdown had hit its peak. I remembered thrashing violently in my car seat and slamming my head against the side of the door and the steering wheel. Then I remembered the blood stains on the door mat of my parents' laundry room and felt so sick, I can't even describe.

Ever since, all I can smell is the dried blood in my nose when I walk around and all I can think about is that before, I feared the nervous breakdown like it was death, but I'm not dead yet and I don't know what to do next.

For a long time, I've been very self-critical and therefore unintentionally selfish about my own judgment of my own character which (one could argue) is about the only way to look at something involving only me. Or at least that's what I thought. Now, though, I'm thinking about it a little differently and realizing that I've never given enough credit to other people in shaping my behaviour. I don't know why I didn't consider it before, but now it just seems obvious that whether or not I am a good person is heavily dependent on other people. I guess you could toss that verbal salad around for awhile and try and turn the blame of my behavioural follies on others as well, but I'm trying to be as fair as possible and conclusively, I am a better person in the company of those personalities that compliment my own--like a weird sort of symbiotic relationship of ideals.

Indeed, every once in a blue moon, we meet someone who brings out the best in us.

Well....I'm glad I haven't written in this space for a few months. That's usually a sign that I've been doing okay. Nowadays, I've picked up an interesting burden (though not an unpleasant one) in the form of ending up star-crossed with a diamond in the rough whom shows no qualms or anxieties about the situation at all. Right now, I'm very confused about the whole thing, but that's mostly because I'm at a point where no conclusive lines have been drawn and in fact, I'm not so sure there's even a pencil to draw them with.

I'm not sure this website is ever going to have all the content that I want it to have. In fact, I may never even come close.

Also, Jones Soda has been dropping mixed omens into my bottlecaps lately.

Oh yeah, and we're getting kicked out of our house too. Good times!

Dear immature teenagers,

FUCK YOU

I am sick at work because everyone at work is sick.

Brutal.

The conspiracy theorist documentary Loose Change has surfaced amongst my co-workers for the first time, all thanks to the media coverage of the sixth anniversary of September 11th 2001. I had never watched the movie, but I read a lot about it, as well as the rebuttals and criticisms that it endured by multiple groups who were keen to point out its flake citations and unreliable sources.

I've never really decided how to feel about the investigation that followed the tragedy. Its magnitude and coverage on the day of was enough to discourage me from an extensive analysis for many years after. However, the documentary has many valid criticisms against it, but also makes many valid points and the real truth is most likely a combination of both. There are definitely unanswered questions about the attacks, but that doesn't mean that all the answers are in this one film student's documentary. He does a mighty good job of asking those questions, mind you.

Problem is, if enough Americans saw the movie and took its implications as fact, there would be a civil war and a world-changing uprising against their own establishment. Stay tuned, everybody...the ignorant but aggressive internet generation is getting older by the minute....

In retrospect, it's only fair. After all, I did the same thing to her, though not intentionally.

I'm not happy about it, but I can deal with this. I don't have much choice.

In an unrelated series of events, the social pressure is beginning to close around me more and more each day since opting to teach guitar lessons on lunch hours at work. I should be able to come up with the strength to resist its inevitably-attached cloud of stress and tension, but that would've been a whole lot easier if I had just had one last chance to say my piece and apologize in person.

Unfinished books are depressing. Especially when you know there's a finished copy out there, but the writing is so messy that it's impossible to read.

Here's what happened to me today:

I woke up this morning, had quick shower and a not-quite-as-quick shave with the fancy-dancy 12,000-bladed Gillette Fusion. I went upstairs to put on my shoes, threw the ol' City of Calgary polyurethane jacket over my shoulders and grabbed my keys off the hook in the foyer. I locked the doorknob from the inside (since our deadbolt hasn't worked since breaking a key in it a month after moving in) and suddenly remembered that I had forgotten something: my access card for work!

I put the keys back on the hook and shuffled down the stairs with my shoes on, grabbed the card from my bedside and fastened it to my belt. Then, proceeding with the original plan, I went out the door, closing it behind me.

It wasn't long before I realized the error of my ways, but it only truly sunk in when I realized that all of my car doors were locked. With both my car keys and my house keys sitting on the same ring and dangling from the same hook inside my now-locked house, there was no immediate need to panic. Considering how I've felt all week, I wasn't particularly in the mood for panicking, nor did I have the energy. Locking keys in the house is not usually a difficult problem to solve. After all, there are multiple copies of the keys, all in the custody of warm-blooded, intelligent people who can come unlock it eventually.

On the other hand, it's much more difficult to solve the problem of locking car keys and house keys in a locked house at 6:30 in the morning when nobody is home and you have to be at work for 7:00. It becomes even more difficult when you've destroyed your cell phone and have -$58.00 in your bank account without so much as a quarter to phone anyone from a payphone.

My first recourse was to attempt to get back into the house. In the past, I have been able to do this; mostly due to the periodic forgetfulness of all of the home's residents with regards to securely locking the patio door. I climbed the balcony and gouged the palms of my hands pretty good in the process, but alas, the wooden locking bar was in place this morning. I was able to circumvent this before by crawling in through my bedroom window, but I had since secured the screen within the frame well enough that it wasn't going to be possible (without notable destructive consequences) to open it from the outside. Plan A was officially out the window.

I thought of where I could go to use a telephone, because I obviously wasn't going to be able to work my own way out of this morning mess. The first priority was phoning Gloria at work to explain why I wasn't there. I was already afraid for my job and this was shaping up to be yet another too-elaborate-to-be-true-sounding excuse for not making it on time. I was less worried about that this week since most of the people who seem to keep a better eye on my working hours are all away on holidays. The local 7-Eleven was the most obvious and nearest commercial location and I knew that had a pay phone. However, I also knew that the only money I had was spare change...which was locked in my car.

About a block away from the 7-Eleven, there exists the Thornhill Pool and Murray Copot Arena, two City of Calgary Recreation facilities. As an employee (sorta), I reasoned that I would be able to convince them to let me use their phone and luckily it did work out that way. I phoned Gloria and let her know that I was on my way but wasn't sure how or when I'd be getting there quite yet. Plan B seemed to be underway.

My parents have a spare key for my car at their Coral Springs home, which would be sufficient, were they able to drive to the pool, pick me up, drop me off at home and then I'd be on my way to work, returning only after Mitchell would already have gotten home to unlock the door. However, I was surprised to find that my grandma answered the phone! Not only were my parents not at home, they had apparently travelled spontaneously to Coeur d'Alene on two days notice. A highly uncharacteristic thing to do for my parents! Furthermore, my grandma didn't really know what my spare key looked like, where it would likely be, or have a vehicle with which to deliver it anyway. Plan B was officially out the window.

I had to rely on Chris, who (judging by his recent Facebook status update), was not likely to answer his phone while asleep and hungover. Plus, I was calling from the swimming pool and for some reason, everyone in the entire fucking world refuses to answer calls if they don't recognize the number, despite the fact that the most important calls are not always likely to come from a typical source (you know, payphones for car accidents...convenience store numbers for when you just got mugged in the parking lot...restaurant numbers when you're too drunk to drive...or maybe even swimming pool numbers when you're stuck without a means of communication and need to get to work. He was staying at his parents' house, which was convenient to the location of my spare key, so I phoned his house phone four times and his cell phone five or six times until he must've stirred in his sleep, checked the phone, not recognized the number and shut it off in order to prevent further interruption. Good times, plan C out the window.

I phoned Mitch, the other key-bearer, but I was almost sure that this would not work. He usually has his phone off while working in the hospital, possibly even by regulation I don't know. However, today it was actually on! But it rang one and a half times, which likely meant that he forgot to turn it off and didn't realize it until he was getting a phone call. Plan D: Phail!

I was semi-confident that I would be able to find my spare key at my parents' house if I could only get there, but I was running out of people to phone. Jodi had already bought me some food and stuff this week just to make it less miserable for me, so she was the last person I wanted to impose on; but that's just it...she was the last person. I phoned her house and her mom answered. I suspected this, because if you've just quit your job and are planning to move to Vancouver in a few days, you probably aren't awake at 7:30 in the morning. She was roused from bed and was noticeably sleep-deprived and weary, which made me feel all the worse. At this point, though, the turbulence of the day's bad luck began to reach oversaturation and I began to roll with it. At the time of this writing, I have yet to write the article that I just linked to there, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot. When you've been exposed to seriously bad luck, little things, like getting lost trying to find a place or getting stuck behind a train, don't really bother you very much at all. Then, it starts to look bad for a second when you have a day that begins to go sour, but one or two shades of bad luck per day are actually far harder to handle than 25 in a row in a single day. That's because it just gets to be predictable, and as today progressed, I knew full well and was not surprised when a wrench got thrown in the spokes of nearly every attempt I made to get to work. I've witnessed similar things with other people who have bad days where three or four things go wrong in sequence and they talk about it like they have the worst luck in the world. "You wouldn't BELIEVE what happened to me today!?!" Oh, not only do I believe it, but I know it's probably not bad enough to warrant that kind of reaction.

Anyway, so Jodi says that she'll be at the pool soon and I told her to take her time, expecting that her speedy arrival would not necessarily guarantee anything. She was on three hours sleep and to ask someone to drive from the southeast end of the city up to perhaps one of the further northernmost points in the northwest at ten to 8:00 on a weekday is an inexcusably large favour. Again though, having reached the oversaturation point for the day, I rolled with it and was content to wait as long as possible. It is under these circumstances that it would be best to fire me from my job; the reaction would not be violent and climactic as it would be otherwise because it would just seem like the natural progression of events for the day. Things get worse and worse and worse until they come to a head in the worst of it all, then the daily misery is over. Only tomorrow would I truly suffer and begin packing my things for Australia.

Having reached a level of content indifference, I used my time waiting at the pool to socialize with the pool attendants and life guards, finding solace in their hospitality, free cookies and tour of the facility. Since I'm arranging At Melee's End and was slated to host the event at this very pool, I got the chance to look at the multi-purpose rooms that were available. In light of the positive response for attendance, it doesn't look like the rooms are going to be big enough and I may have to select another venue. The pool attendant (Stac(e)y) recommended the Renfrew Pool, but I'll have to have a look at their rooms myself to be sure.

I piddled around the facility for quite some time and I knew the traffic was going to be bad, so I didn't make any effort to revert to Plan F quite yet. Jodi, conveniently, also does not have a cell phone and I wasn't entirely confident that she knew where the pool was exactly (directions are not her forte). When I saw her mom's borrowed red Honda Civic pull into the lot, I bid farewell to the pool staff and headed out the door. By the time I had gotten outside, however, Jodi had turned her car around and zoomed back up northbound Centre St. to my resigned bemusement. Swimming pool staff members chuckled about my predicament and I shrugged and smiled, satisfied that everything was going more or less as expected.

In the time it took Jodi to realize that she had already been and gone to the correct location, a co-worker I knew from the Manchester Centre office by the name of Jack Birkett came into the Thornhill Pool. He was rather surprised to see me behind the counter, but amused at my tale of misfortune nonetheless. Jodi showed up a short time later, clearly still exhausted and probably pretty miserable overall. I'm sure she wasn't looking forward to the prospect of driving to my Coral Springs house, then driving back, then driving home. In fact, since getting in a car accident a couple weeks ago, she had to drive her mom to work beforehand as well in order to acquire a vehicle. At this point, it was almost 10:00 and I was more than just "late," so I suggested that she stop at a McDonald's on the way for a coffee and a small breakfast since she hadn't yet eaten.

We greeted my grandmother and Guido at the door of the house in Coral Springs and I began rummaging through drawers searching for my key while Jodi ate. My grandma is a wonderful and generous person who managed to make up a coffee for me and heat some food as well. I looked in every place I could think of for my spare key, but it was nowhere to be found, and since I hadn't physically seen the object in like six months, that wasn't much of a surprise. We also tried phoning my parents' cell phones and their hotel in Coeur d'Alene as well just to check if they happened to know where it had been moved to. Alas, no answer.

Jodi offered to drive me to work and my grandma gave me $42.25 so I would be able to afford bus fare as well as....well, probably fuel, but she doesn't question how I spend lent money, even if I do. Having failed Plan E, F and G after leaving the pool, it goes without saying that the actual drive from Coral Springs to my workplace was to be inevitably interrupted by a freight train. Which it was. It was a short train, but just long enough to have made a normal person fillet their own throat with their car keys after a morning like this. I, on the other hand, relaxed as I watched the cars go by in my continued state of bemused indifference, just as I expected. Jodi, and her entire family, all seem to believe that she is cursed due to her odd knack for getting stopped by trains while driving. I knew better, though; this train wasn't meant for her, it was meant for me, trying desperately to provoke me and prod my deepest feelings of hopelessness. This time, I won. I like to play with the idea that fate is sentient, though I don't actually believe it.

Anyway, I made it to work for about 11:00, just over four hours late.

When I tried to explain my confidence in seeing Lindsey again and the resolution that would follow to Jodi, she found my outlook depressing because of how my own happiness is tied to Lindsey's happiness. To clarify, the lighter side of it is that right now, it's killing me that I can't see her and although she doesn't really know the severity of it and doesn't want to, it almost definitely makes her uncomfortable, because she thought it was ancient history until I e-mailed her and I have yet to see her since expressing a need to.

When I see her again, that discomfort and anxiety about the encounter itself should lift off of her once it's all over and done with, and just to know that will be a tremendous relief for me and an lift an overwhelming weight off of my shoulders. The way I see it, it's a no-lose situation for both of us; things aren't getting much worse.

The problem is, I think, that Lindsey doesn't believe I'm strong enough to not react just as Jodi suggested; wanting what I can't have even more than I already did. But she doesn't really know what happened to me since losing the apartment pretty much. She doesn't think the encounter will turn out well, whereas I am confident that it really will present a proper resolution. The problem is, the longer I have to wait, the less confident I get, and the worse the encounter will be, as I probably said somewhere else on this page.

It's getting to be a real problem and it's making me afraid. Afraid of my own stability for one thing. I do not have a violent or destructive personality, but I've destroyed both of my cell phones throwing them into walls (without concern for the repercurssions) and injured myself breaking pieces of my computer desk and generally trashing my entire bedroom in angry, emotional tantrums of unbridled rage too many times now. I also fear for my excellent job and the path of success that seems to be paved before me for the first time ever, yet I can't seem to walk on it. Everything in my life is going perfectly well, improving quickly and dramatically, and I need everything in my head to be okay so I can maintain that.

It's already having its effects, poisoning the things I enjoy and nickel and diming my bank account to death in the form of cheap, disgusting cigarettes; absences from work due to immobilizing exhaustion brought on by being miserable and; gasoline, so I can escape my house when I feel like it's closing in on me and an occasional shred of how true of a "home" it really is rears its ugly head. I knew Chris couldn't help me anymore, I know Jon disagrees fundamentally and Mitchell is just fed up that I haven't been able to deal with this by now, maybe not recognizing how incredibly hard this is for me.

I am alone in this fight.

While slacking off at work, the majority of my co-workers don't have a problem with it and will often jokingly refer to what a productive day they're having. I wish I was able to smile and laugh at things like that, but repeatedly getting fired for no reason seems to have crippled my ability to enjoy doing nothing at work. It doesn't bother me when other people relax and take it easy (I'm all for it, frankly), but I can never get myself to that same relaxed state and am constantly stressed at the subconscious level about being reprimanded for not doing my job.

Consequently, I'm sure everyone thinks that I'm this lifeless work robot. That sucks.

I got through the weekend alright. Mostly because it is incredibly exhausting to be miserable, I think. At least when you handle it like I do. I missed a day of work last week and worked shifts varying between 10 and 14 hours in length without additional pay in order to make up for it. Not because I was asked to, or was obligated to in any way, either. I can't really explain why I do things like that. Part of it is to punish myself for the one day I missed and another part can be attributed to the fact that I didn't want to go home because I doubted that I'd be any happier there.

Sunday's tournament went well and naturally, I still haven't seen Chris for days on end. Mitchell and I went to Joey Tomatoes post-tournament for a meal and I think I needed that to pave the way for this week. Of course, every work week shouldn't be struggle and I shouldn't need to put off all of my responsibilities on the weekend just to get through the coming five days. Learning to do that is the next step.

Oh, you know what else is frustrating? Taking crap at work when I try so hard to do everything to an above-and-beyond level. When I hear things about moderating the amount of "personal time" I spend on the internet at work (like this time, right now), there's nothing more frustrating because believe me, if I had work to do that I could plug away at throughout my shift without having to ask someone a question or (more likely) run out of things to do, I would. The only reason I'm writing this is because I need a list of facility supervisors from Gloria in order to proceed with entering arena compressor times. I asked for it half an hour ago. Guess I'll go ask again.

This hasn't been an easy week. It's not unusual for me to feel as though I'm not working as hard as I could be in this office job, but usually it's because I don't have enough to do, not because I can't physically work up the initiative to do any work. It's not like it's hard, this job is pretty simple compared to the others I've had (or maybe there's just considerably less pressure) but I find myself staring at a work order that could be entered, stamped and mailed off in about fifteen seconds if I would just go ahead and do it. But I don't. I didn't come in to work yesterday, but if I did, I surely would've been absent anyway.

This miserable swim can only end on a weekend, I'm almost certain. And it doesn't sound like this coming weekend is going to work, so that's at least today, tomorrow, the weekend and an entire 5-day work week. How am I going to do this? I've been an unpleasant, bitter, angry, sleep-deprived, chain-smoking asshole since Sunday because I can't seem to put up with consciousness any other way. It would be nice if I didn't have to artificially simulate a state of placidity just to tolerate being awake everyday.

I fear that my job is in danger if this should continue. At this point, if I lose that, I've lost everything. And at that point, this website and every trace of me that I can clean up will be gone, I will sell everything I own and move to Australia.

Seriously.

It doesn't look like today's going to work. I've been plugging away at this pile of work orders I'm supposed to enter, but it's not going as fast as it should. After all, I've been here for five hours and am maybe 5-10% complete with only three hours remaining.

The pile of work is not insurmountably high for three hours. In fact, I am typically able to bang it out in about one, but working poorly and inefficiently is just as bad as not working at all (at least in my mind; I know employers disagree). Plus now I have these ugly hiccups that resemble a vomit-induced gag reflex which is very unpleasant. Hopefully I come up with the drive to finish some of this off. If not, I've set a busy work-related agenda for myself tomorrow. Perhaps for the first time ever. But is that really so bad? I mean, it's not really bad thing to have a busy work schedule so long as it's not too busy and you didn't bring it upon yourself. Which I did. Or will. And maybe that's not so bad either, but there's nothing good about sitting here at work and knowingly avoiding the actual "work" part and then trying to justify it by writing blog entries.

How come no matter how hard I try to do everything right, it's never good enough for anybody? Not even me.

I haven't actually sat down to write a journal entry of sorts in many, many years, so it is with a sense of disappointment that I begin so sourly. I've now spent more than a couple months trying to effectively convert Et cetera into a wiki-based hub of useless information and I seem to finally be making progress. The entire procedure has been unacceptably frustrating and the vast majority of the inhibitions I have encountered can be blamed squarely on incompetent people all over the place. I thought my web host had the worst customer service in the world until I went to MediaWiki.org and, over a period of a couple weeks, was ignored despite repeated, scattered requests for support until the only other user who was even trying to help me out was actually banned for making insightful contributions and promoting a community-based attitude towards customer service. It doesn't help that all the power-hungry, warmongering teenagers at Smash World Forums all somehow have moderator powers and insist on giving me "Minor Spam" infractions for being openly critical of their policies after ten months of being treated like a child. It would be time-consuming and fruitless to list all of my gripes about the shit I've been eating on the internet, because realistically, I don't give a flying fuck about any of it.

What pisses me off on the real level is how I've been sitting here at work since 3:30 in the morning because I couldn't think of anything less miserable to do with my time. There is always sleep, of course, but people talk about sleep as though it's an option that's always available in the middle of the night. However, I've been struck hard with the realization that not only did I have love and the companionship of someone that defined the characteristics I would come to love in others, but I also threw it away without foreseeing the consequences of my own actions and if I'm right about me (and I usually am), that means I'll be single for as long as I can conceivably foresee.

Oh, don't give me your "you gotta change your perspective" bullshit. I don't wanna hear none of that "with an attitude like yours, it's no wonder" garbage. What, you think just because I'm embittered by the system that that makes me resigned? No, sir, in fact I'm more determined to not be single than I ever have been in my life. Like most complicated personal problems, it involves other people and the variables therein are often beyond my control. I'm stuck because I need to see Lindsey again; I haven't seen her in like a year now, which hadn't happened since we lived apart and that's very grating to someone who spent six years in a relationship and then the last two completely alone. That's the main hurdle for me and it is easily the highest, but it gets higher and higher every day. See, Lindsey's done with me; I'm in the past, I'm an antique, ancient history, poof! Gone! I know this and I have known this for a long time. That's about all I know, though, everything else is inferred. Some possible inferences include: she neither needs nor wants to see me, she does not care enough about me anymore to overcome that fact to help me and/or she doesn't understand the severity of the problem. The one thing that she definitely doesn't seem to get (and, like all related issues, probably doesn't want to know) is that the longer I go without seeing her, the worse the encounter is going to be for us both.

I've thought about it a lot and I remember a few days after my crying fit and near-nervous breakdown on Easter Sunday that I was fully prepared to see her. I had to. Therefore, I had to be prepared. Since then, I've thought more about how she's going to react than myself. I mean, on one hand, I would never make Lindsey do something she didn't want to do and if she really doesn't want to see me for her own sake, there's not much I can do about that. On the other hand, the longer I sit on it and the more cigarettes I smoke to distract myself from the problem, the more selfish and embittered I get. I understand that it's not her problem but (and this is just speculation) I'm pretty sure that the stress ready to come off my shoulders when I see her far outweighs any damage she could sustain along the way. But then again, we're not a "we" anymore so she doesn't owe me any emotional support. Maybe that means I don't owe her any consideration for her feelings, but I have a hard time even writing that, never mind showing up at her work spontaneously one day just to ruin her day.

That's what I hate...I don't know if that would ruin her day. I mean, it might if I just walked in without warning, but even if she actually willingly sees me, it might, for all I know. Despite our heavy e-mail correspondence, I'm still not really sure how she feels and I only ever got the one reply out of her so I must once again infer that she doesn't want to associate with me much, if at all. Up until I suddenly turned into a blind idiot about my own actions, I had always been extremely careful about not hurting Lindsey because I understood how she reacted and what things she took seriously over others. I don't know how to field that anymore, so I don't know what to expect when (if) I see her again. What I hope....REALLY REALLY hope...is that it is not awkward. Lofty expectation, I know, but I can't let it be awkward. Our relationship and everything we worked so hard for has already been cheapened well below its value and I refuse to let social pressure and that supposed "proper" code of conduct do that anymore.

But then I'm left with another problem because I had to go and consider what the purpose of that code of conduct is and why people behave like robots in social situations. Well, it's because people are weak and can't handle reality. But I don't really believe that to be totally true. More likely it's because people think that other people can't handle reality and therefore they resist making any social faux pas amongst others to ridiculous extremes. That's why you can't tell a racist joke around strangers, why you can't insult an old person's mother just in case they're dead and why you can't collectively reminisce about happy memories with an ex no matter how happy they were. Which is bullshit, as well as the sole reason that strong memories die. My fear is that it will be awkward because she will make it awkward. I'm not sure she's strong enough to look past the proper code of conduct and that makes the meeting unpleasant for both of us, guaranteed. I want to make it as easy as possible for her to see me again and I don't know how. The stress associated with just thinking about it is enough to drive me to drink.

Nothing makes me feel more helpless and weak than thinking about this. Which sucks particularly nowadays because everything else in my life is actually on the rise. I have a pretty pro City job, debts are being paid off, I'm not being kicked in the face by bad luck over and over again and hell, I'm even starting to learn the difference between true friends and ones that borrow money, take cigarettes and mooch rides without ever offering anything in return. But all of this is in Jeopardy because as I said, I can't see Lindsey and the longer she continues to avoid me, the worse it gets and the worse our actual meeting will be. And that's on my end. Who knows, maybe she just needs more time, but it's working the opposite way for me. Despite believing that there's not much point, I still think about what's going to happen to me in the future and I've run through the scenario with Lindsey many times in my head and at various time points. Like I said, after Easter Sunday, I was prepared to see her and I was confident that the meeting would go well. After several weeks passed and after our e-mail correspondence had concluded (as expected, with silence on her end), it began to get worse. When she didn't come to Chris's birthday party, I didn't handle it that well (mostly because Chris didn't tell me that she had actually called to cancel, as opposed to the usual no response) so in the coming days, I would realize that I wasn't really prepared to see her after all. Whether she was ready or not, the last Randall she wants to see is one that breaks down crying at the very sight of her. Recognizing this, I tried to pull myself together and arranged a Ratcatcher's Day Party to invite Lindsey and several others over to our place for a box social. I sanded and re-painted the deck rail so it looked all nice, installed some fancy new rope lighting, supercleaned the house, fixed our screen door and spent like $250 on drinks and snacks (even a new snack tray for chips and salsa!) for the event. In the days approaching, I was optimistic and pretty happy about how things were looking, but Lindsey herself hadn't responded. I ruined the party for myself when it was confirmed that she wasn't coming (although had heard about it) and ended up drinking as much as I could before getting sick and passing out. In fact, hardly anyone had showed up by then and I missed the likes of Mike Moffatt, who had suddenly and unexpectedly returned from Toronto. When I awoke, everyone was leaving, Jodi had finally managed to pass out in Mitchell's room instead of mine (about time) and then Mitchell went straight to bed. I left the house in a volatile and exhausted state, still half-drunk and intending to spend my late night drive smoking 10 kreteks and three grams of weed. Which I did.

I haven't slept or eaten much since. I'll use that as my excuse for going off on a tangent as though a journal is supposed to have structure and revert back to why I can't see myself in a relationship in the foreseeable future: because it's too important to me. The little facets of relationships that are actually quite basic and appear even between the shallowest of partners are worth so much to me. A girl leaning her head on my shoulder or just willing to even touch my hand instantly reminds me of what I had and when I think about that happening in the future, I don't think I could hold myself together; the reality with which it would strike me would be completely overwhelming. And what girl is going to put up with that? Great, good for you Randall, well done--you've managed to bring a woman into your life for the first time in years just in time to remind her of how little she's worth compared to Lindsey. Oh, but that's okay isn't it? She's probably just another shallow bitch anyway and maybe you can continue to convince yourself that those six years with one person are worth infinitely more than the five hundred one-night stands your friends are having. Sure, they may be smiling on the outside, but they're not ACTUALLY happy! No thanks, cashier, put away those condoms, I won't be needing them--I've had REAL love!

Fuck.