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'.
* * *
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.
