The Radio Department stole my sleep

It's a bit like the taste of a fever dream baked into the cake they'd serve in a Sophia Coppola film, the streets of Calgary are hazy with the manic inability to pick between winter and spring. And so, in that cloudy white feeling of 2006 it presses down on all the roads of the NorthWest. Sometimes, if your sunglasses are the right shade and you turn the heater up enough to get the inside of the car muggy you turn right and look at that stretch of hill coming down John Laurie and it looks like summer again. The dry and parched January grass laying in heaps and tangles as if its been burnt by a West coast sun. But it isn’t. It is still winter. February is always the worst month of the year.

In here, in this house, we are entrenched with thoughts of Lutwyche and Lodger. Laid back fantasies of bright promises given to you through a youtube screen of the new look this season, some new earrings shaped like almonds (because you declared studs were out), a realization that you're going to keep dying your hair till it looks exactly like it did that day on the bus when it was dewey. Cherry and brown and sweet, the same colour and dampness of being a young woman and basking in that new skin. Sleeping in, but awake with thoughts of a navy memory from a long time ago. The sweet smell of manufactured rain that your Febreeze canister gives you so readily, a distant glimpse of an orchid you bought in a bottle when you turned 15 and the fantasy of running away to live as a fruit vendor in London. All those things trapped in your pillows, all those things caught in the lining of your carpet and divider. 6 years later you flip through those books you used to hold dear and carry around in your jackets and bags and hid in your binders. Intrigued you notice that the smell on page 56 is still of menthols and a strange nameless perfume you stole from your mothers room (in a seashell shaped bottle that smelt of, well, the sea). What is this present if all it seems to do is remind you of the past in which you only thought of this present?

You wish it would rain so bad. The same wish for a couple months now but it doesn’t seem to come through. A melancholy wish the same tone and texture of Disney's Robin Hood (you know), the same crackly sound as 'Queen Jane Approximately'. 

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I got a package in the mail and it was quite frankly one of the best presents I've received. I'm listening to a mix made by a friend and it has brought back all sorts of strange old day feelings. I've decided to regularly start getting back into this thing now, and by thing i mean 'blogging'. Mostly because I need to organize my moronic thoughts. 

Learning to Navigate in 2013 and Calgary.

In this place, one new and yet not, I am a rather clumsy sailor. Or perhaps an unkempt boat, led by a spectacular moon. No sun yet, but I suppose those gifts are only given to the most resilient of sailors, or the sons of kings. Like Odysseus, who took a decade to go home, (I always wondered how Penelope never wavered) my hair is also filled with sand and old phrases you all once uttered. And a net full of fish, each of them a life, each of them a history of its own species.  In this place, lilies have a fragrance of something else. Not a flower, but a waxy smell, of childhood? An imprint of some stoney version of who I may have been? Or is this just another betrayal of my own tendency to fit all things into a bigger truth. Must all things come with a meaning, fleeting but still just loud enough to be caught by those who sit and wait and listen. Coy and fickle, only showing itself to those fools who gaze lovingly at lilies and curtains and pillars waiting for some brazen young thing of beauty to emerge from a hidden conclusion. Must an epiphany always burst forth if one stares long enough into a starstruck sky above a prairie field.  I don't think it can be helped though. The map in my pocket – the one I drew myself (of the sky and the land), it always tells me to do just that. It's folds are deep and browning, with the whispers of those dead old men who thought themselves such great thinkers. They were. They are? But how useful will those century old secrets do me? A woman.

Dead men, surprisingly though, only grow more senile and vulgar. Even if their words remain inactive. Their souls clamber on, a heavy and ridiculous air of old gods and old knowledge. Resisting the truths offered by Chthonic heroes, and shifting slowly, slowly to an Olympian philosophy. And there they are, in their obsession with the sky and hatred of the ground, breathing down my neck, telling me how I should read my own map. "Look up, don't look down. Keep looking skyward. There is nothing of value in dirt and roots. Only an atlas of stars can help you" It can all be very patronizing. And yet, it is precious to me. This is precious to me. Words are all I have. Mine and theirs and yours.