Hey "Person Tomorrow"

You know what I like to do? When I get over a bad period I reassure my past self that it's going to be OK. I think it works great the other way around.

This barely makes sense.

It seems lately I flow seamlessly from being depressed about one girl into being depressed about the next girl.  I’m not the begging type, I’m not going to grovel and crawl for months and years buying you gifts and drawing you pictures; there’s just no time and it’s hard enough to stay upbeat and attentive for girls who actually like me back.  Furthermore, it’s a sick joke this business of never giving up-- convincing her you’re the one.  I’m not the one. I’m not that one anyway.  I couldn’t keep a straight face if I were to say, “hey listen, just gimme a shot, you won’t regret it, I’ve got a few surprises up my sleeve, there’s more to me than meets the eye, I’m a provider baby.”  Nope, I’m an open book, I’m about as neurotic as they come and any woman that dares to love me has her work cut out for her.  I mean I’ll try my very fucking best to hold it together for her but the truth is I’m a miserable bastard.  My previous lovers will attest to this.  I’m happiest when I work myself up into a romantic frenzy though, when my feet are so high off the ground that the inevitable crash becomes hilariously ominous and when the voices of my detractors disappear into the thundering hum of my creativity.  And, were an unimaginably brave girl to appear --a girl who wanted to live in a crazy lawless universe-- I must say I’d be thrilled to hell.  These sorts of things can’t last though.

ANGER

I went to a rock show tonite, I guess that’s what you’d call it anyway. The second band that played—and the last band I would be willing to sit thru, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back if you will—was one of these “noise” bands. A more accurate term however is post-music. It brought to mind the scene in “The Royal Tanenbaums” when Royal has to sit thru Margot’s play and when she asks him what he thought of it, he says, “what play? It was just a bunch of kids in animal costumes.” So that’s essentially how the young people of today make me feel; I’m like an estranged philistine with no soul and no willingness to humor people’s egotistical and childish desire to be artists. On the subject of Wes Anderson, I was on a 13 hour long bus ride the other day and this man who quite resembled Mr. Anderson got on the bus about 8 hours in. The rest of us who’d been together for hours at this point had grown quite accustomed to each other --at least in a superficial sort of way-- when this man and several other people got on the bus effectively filling up all the seats. My first feeling of revulsion with this man was aroused when he found himself without a place to sit. There was a girl sitting in front of me who’d fallen asleep and thusly was taking up two seats. The Wes Anderson look-alike stood above her and kind of looked around at the rest of us so as to suggest we were all complicit in this woman’s unforgivable rudeness. He then proceeded to slap her chair in the weirdest most aggressively meek manner. She woke up and drowsily moved for him to sit down. His equally irritating wife sat across the aisle from him reading a tiny little bible in the most theatrical way imaginable, it was after all Easter Sunday and by god none of us were going to be afforded the luxury of forgetting that boring fact on this woman’s watch. This is when it gets really interesting, at all the previous stops the passengers had been allowed to get off the bus to stretch their legs, have a cigarette and take a shit or whatever but, at this stop we were asked to please remain seated. I guess this didn’t go over very well with this one rather weatherworn woman (she actually looked like she may have at one time been a man) it would seem that this woman’s desire for a cigarette had reached calamitous proportions and she disappeared into the washroom to have a few quick puffs. Before you could blink, the man who looked like Wes Anderson had jumped out of his seat and was marching to the front of the bus to report this woman’s outrageous audacity. The bus driver who, I must admit I’d also already formed negative opinions about, promptly came to the back of the bus and demanded that the woman vacate the premises. In a typical Canadian way nobody stood up for this woman. Nobody took it upon themselves to say, “ya know, it’s not that big a deal. Are we really gonna desert this woman in the middle of nowhere ‘cuz she made a stupid mistake?” Nope, there wasn’t a single word of protest from any of us as this woman thrashed her way to the front of the bus and out onto the lonely streets of Chiliwack. I was ashamed of myself and for the rest of the trip I had violent thoughts about the snitch and his idiot wife.

The person tomorrow.

I'm always going to be me, you know? I keep thinking I'll do things in the future like I'm gonna want to do them then. But I'll be the same, I'll be the same person not wanting to do it. I went through this phase last year called "Future Me", I'd make a lunch every night before I went to bed so that I'd have one at school, so "Future Me" wouldn't have to worry about it or spend any money. It was all about looking out and preparing for "Future Me" like she was someone else, someone more important that appears the next day. But it was always just me and I'd sit there with my lunch and barely thank "Past Me". So, I stopped that. I stopped really looking out for future me. That doesn't mean that I'm living in some proverbial moment, thinking only of today. I'm just leaving my comfortability and security in the air.

Kelly the snail.

There once was a girl snail named Kelly.  All the weirdest boy snails were in love with her because she was nice to them and she didn’t smell bad and she wasn’t as slimy as all the other girl snails.  One Friday she left for a big adventure to a neighboring yard where the humans let the grass grow real tall and all the creatures weren’t nearly as boring as the ones in Kelly’s yard.  There were grasshoppers and mung flies and shitty beetles but Kelly wasn’t scared, she was meeting her best snail buds Billy and Mikey and Debra Sou.  This was gonna be the best snail weekend ever with camping and singing and weenie roasts, Kelly was thrilled to hell.  She had to get up really early though to make her hair pretty and brush her teeth and she was on the road by 5a.m.  She had a little snail bindle and a bagged lunch consisting of turkey chili(weird food for a snail, I know!)  After about an hour travelling--remember snails are notoriously slow--  Kelly stopped to take a swim in a puddle.  A little known snail fact is that they love to swim and they actually get out of their shells to do so, this fact has escaped the inquisitive minds of human scientists for centuries.

After her swim she dried herself off with a leaf, got back in her shell and continued on her merry way.   

To be continued…     

I love getting older. I'm nearly thirty. It's the best. My twenties had no respect for me. They said, "you're a chicken!" and I was a chicken. I think anyone who starts longing for their youth the moment it's passed is missing the point. Youth is eternal. That's the nice thing about it; it's always there.