Konstantine

April 2, 2014 - 3:35am - by admin

When the guy I was seeing left me it was 11pm on a Thursday and he did it in the Second Cup on Graham Ave and I was dumbstruck and I cried.

I was young and I didn't know what to do so I got up and left and he followed me because that's what you're supposed to do when someone storms out of somewhere, I guess.

It was February and it was snowing and I was trying to put on my coat and my mittens and my scarf at the same time and failing because nothing made sense, least of all arm holes and wool and zippers.

Nothing makes sense when someone hurts you.

He followed me and took my hand and because I was young I thought that meant something and he said "I'm sorry, let's go back to my place and we can talk" and because I was young I thought that meant something so we did.

But it didn't mean anything. It didn't mean anything at all.

He drove me home at 2am and I screamed at him in his car, I said what the hell is wrong with you why did you invite me back to your apartment when I was trying to go home

and he said

I don't know. I don't know about anything right now.

and I said some awful things that I wish I could say that I regret.

When I got home I called the man I'd been in love with all along and because it was the kind of man that he was, he stayed on the phone with me until I fell asleep.

The next day he dropped his Friday night plans and picked me up from work with flowers and when I saw him I began to cry either because I was wounded or in love or probably both

and he held me in his car as I shook in his arms.

We went out for dinner and on the way home he held my hand in between the red lights and shifting gears, and we listened to Konstantine by Something Corporate and I watched the snow and the traffic as we drove from downtown to Old St. Vital.

Later that night when we were alone and I was consumed by the smell of him I thought of the words of that song, the slow sadness of it, and though I was young and sad and fucked up I felt like maybe I’d be all right.

Which turned out to be true, but not then.

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I remember standing in Nathan Phillips Square

November 13, 2013 - 7:10pm - by admin

I’d like to say that it happened just before things fell apart but if I’m being honest they were well over at this point and we were just clinging to some stupid hope that we could pull through even though it was obvious that we couldn’t.

I used to think looking back that we were in Toronto because we were looking at apartments but that isn’t right. This happened after I’d dragged him from Hamilton to Toronto to look at a place because I was lonely and miserable in Hamilton and desperately looking for some sort of familiarity which is how Toronto felt to me –something I knew and understood. He’d played along and we’d already put our names down for an apartment in a month or so by this point.

We were in town for WinterFest which maybe they still do in Toronto or maybe they don’t, I’m not sure since I haven’t been before or since that occasion.

The Weakerthans were playing and I wanted to see them. They weren’t one of my bands the way that they are now but I was sort of grasping for anything that felt like home at the time even though I didn’t realize it then.

I remember that we had a fight because he didn’t want to go so I hopped a Go Train and met him in Toronto as a compromise which didn’t really help because it was cold outside and he didn’t want to stand outside in the cold and see a concert even though that was the point.

He wanted to go and I didn’t because their set wasn’t finished and it was snowing and seeing this concert was the whole reason I’d dragged him to Toronto, dammit.

So he stayed on the edge of the crowd and I weaved my way to the front and felt better surrounded by all the people and a group of guys and two girls started talking in between one of the songs and mentioned that they were from Winnipeg and I said

hey me too

and we all talked about how they were on layover between London and Winnipeg for a few days and were in town to see the show and I said I’m moving to Toronto soon and they said

you’re so brave

and I felt brave for the first time in a long time.

One of them gave me a swig of the rye they were drinking as the next song started playing and I remember closing my eyes and feeling the snow on my face and listening to that song and feeling

so hopeful and excited for the future.

Well.

It didn’t last very long. A few weeks later I found myself on a flight back to Winnipeg to pick up the pieces of my heart and the life I had tried to leave behind.

I couldn’t listen to The Weakerthans for a really long time and especially not that song which I associated with that last perfect moment which of course wasn’t perfect at all.

It’s been a long time since that moment and last week I found myself wandering around The Exchange in the dark humming that same song as I looked up at the big rows of windows

and I realized that it still made me feel hopeful and happy. Just in a different way.

It’s funny how things change.

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Drunk girl in the Exchange

November 5, 2013 - 5:37am - by admin

I first saw you on Albert and McDermot

while Tyrone was taking photos of the storefronts of Rhymes with Orange and Tiny Feast

and I was standing by holding his papers and humming a song by The Weakerthans.

You were walking up the street in a tiny dress and a blazer

holding your phone in one hand

and a glass full of some sort of drink in the other

my hunch is a long island tea, but it's anyone's guess.

You walked by and kept stumbling on the cobblestone streets

and I felt compelled to say something to you

but I didn't because mostly we're taught to keep to ourselves

lest we bring trouble or interfere.

However

as I watched you stumble away down the block

and then across McDermot

almost falling twice

I thought "fuck convention" and started to run after you.

By the time I reached you, you were already a block away

by King and Notre Dame

and I sprinted around the corner and shouted EXCUSE ME at you.

I think I scared you but you stopped.

I asked if you were okay and you drunkenly said you were

even though your dress was half-tucked up and you'd lost that glass somewhere and I could smell the booze on you

and I thought to myself

that you would have looked really professional if your dress wasn't so short & your little boots were so high.

But that's besides the point.

I asked if you wanted me to call you a cab and you said no

so you said you would call your boyfriend and I said I'd wait with you and you said I didn't have to

but I did

and when he didn't pick up you got up and straightened out your skirt and said

I AM TOTALLY OKAY

and sprinted across the intersection and through an empty parking lot before I knew what was happening.

I yelled after you

where are you going?

and you said

HOME.

I hope you made it back okay

to wherever your home is

because I'm still worried about you

dashing around by yourself in your high heels in the cold.

So if you read this, please let me know you're all right.

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I bet you want to know why I'm watching 'Chocolat'

October 17, 2013 - 2:44am - by admin

The answer is that it's partially because it's on Netflix.

But mostly the answer is because back when I was fresh out of high school I knew a girl named Rae-Annon and it was her favourite movie if I recall correctly. If it wasn't, and I'm wrong, it was damn near her favourite because she talked about it a lot.

Even though she and I went to elementary school together, or maybe it was middle school I'm not sure anymore I knew who she was because she was the weird goth chick that my yuppie friends and I would look at from down the hall with big saucer-like eyes and wonder what could possess someone to dress that way.

(We, however, were dressed in as little as the school would let us get away with wearing without having to wear a garbage bag for a shirt and we were barely on our periods so who were the fucked-up ones, really?)

Anyway after high school we reconnected by chance because we both worked at the same McDonalds in Winnipeg Square where I wiled away a year of the year and a half between when I graduated and when I moved to Ontario.

She was way more self-assured and I didn't realize it at the time but I really looked up to her even though she had slightly hippie-er tendencies than me like not always shaving her armpits and talking about shakras and stuff.

She went to the East Coast for a month and brought me back a small bag of sea glass which I still have and treasure even though we haven't talked in years.

We used to hang out in her parent's basement which was basically her little pad and watch movies like East of Eden and Breakfast at Tiffany's and drink wine from a box and talk about the boys in our lives. She showed me how to paint watercolours and bought me a martini glass set for my 18th birthday and we had stupid made-up words like 'citag' that we used with each other because young girls are dumb that way.



She knew me back when I was still a pretty fucked-up mess and sometimes I feel bad about that.

We've completely lost touch over the years after a nasty falling out that was, largely and unsurprisingly, my fault. But when I think about those years I try not to think about the end, but rather the rest of it which was sweet and amazing and good.

So when I saw Chocolat on Netflix the other day I put in my queue and even though it's not a very good movie (which I didn't expect it to be) it's nice to remember her and my friendship that feels like a lifetime ago.

So hi Rae-Annon, if you're reading this.

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Am I angry because of the Internet?

September 17, 2013 - 12:25am - by admin

Brian Fung at the Washington Post published an article stating that the Internet isn't making us dumb, it's making us angry.

Which doesn't make me angry per se, but it definitely makes me think of the stuff I say and do online, and how it makes me feel afterward.

From the article:

In a study of 70 million posts on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, Rui Fan and a team of others at Beihan University tracked the spread of joy, sadness, anger and disgust across the social network. According to the MIT Technology Review, they found that angry tweets were far more likely to be retweeted by others — or be the subject of angry responses — up to three degrees away from the original user.

Maybe things are different in China but if you tweet a bunch of negative shit you're getting an unfollow from me.



I don't think that it's the internet is making us angrier, it's that it gives generally negative people a soapbox to broadcast their negativity to everyone else, specifically when it comes to sites like 4chan, Reddit and etc where you have a fairly large degree of anonymity and because of that are able to to disregard regular social conventions and straight-up be a jerk to people.

That kind of behaviour and the negative tweets Fung refers to in his article aren't the products of the Internet, these people would be just as negative, destructive, horrible, disgusting, and whatnot regardless of whether or not the Internet existed. Their bad qualities would simply manifest themselves in a different way.

The one thing that the article neglects to mention is the fact that, before now, we didn't have a global public forum to express ourselves and there was no global public record of it before now.

We can't go back in time and see a timeline of what millions of peasants in the Dark Ages had to say. Though I'm sure it would sound something like this:

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Today is the birthday of the best blog in the world

August 23, 2013 - 4:09pm - by admin

Once upon a time I was a stupid kid and my friend Kira who used to blog over at the now-defuct 'manicidiosyncratic' showed me this thing called 'blogging'.

It wasn't the pussy LiveJournal shit I'd done in high school which was boring paragraphs no pictures and no reason for anyone else to give a shit.

This was a bustling community of interesting people who had long-distance internet friendships and connected through the stuff they published online.

she told me about the best blog out there, the busblog and the dude who wrote it, Tony Pierce

and she said "if you read any blog read the busblog" so I did.

I still do. Every damn day.

Probably because out of all the blogs out there the busblog is the only blog that, I think, still keeps it real.

It's still kinda raw and gritty and though it's not as debauched as it used to it it's still a damn good read every time.

It inspires me to keep writing this pos every once and a while.

Recently I was told that I should start shaping my blog to be more professional and less about my life and my thoughts and that scared me a bit. This slice of the internet is who I am and I had a crisis of confidence of sorts and I said to Tyrone

"what do I do? I have a career now but I don't want to just stop being who I am online" and he said

(no word of a lie)

"what would Tony Pierce do?"

which is why I'm still writing to you in the way that I've (almost) always written to you.

So happy birthday busblog. Thanks for making blogging cool and for keeping it that way.

Biggest hearts to you, Tony. Always.

xox yr girl Shaner

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Re: the fast-food walk out on August 29th

August 21, 2013 - 5:52pm - by admin

When I was a youth I worked a string of minimum-wage jobs in fast food joints, most noticably when I worked for McDonalds full-time the year after I graduated high school.

I hated that job.



I was treated like shit, the hours were shit, the customers were (largely) shit, management was shit... everything about it sucked except my coworkers, most of which were young people like me.

Except Maria, our older badass morning lady. Who showed up at 5am like a boss Mon-Fri even though she had two kids who she never got to see between her full-time McJob and her other part-time gig somewhere else.

We all respected her in a work-mom kind of way.

One day not too long after I started working there she came in to work late, which was unusual, and looked like she'd been crying.

She told us that one of her kids had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Her little baby. She was heartbroken.

Luckily though, she said, she lives in Canada where a lot of that stuff is paid for or subsidized so she and her husband could afford to pay for all the doctor's visits and insulin and etc her little one would need for the rest of their life.

She thanked her lucky stars that she had a husband who had a job and contributed all he could and that she lived somewhere where the combination of her minimum-wage job and universal health care would be able to provide for her family even with this new burden.

I thought about Maria when I read the Washington Post article about the scheduled fast-food walk out on August 29th.

I thought about

all those people who get paid less than she did back in '05/06 even though it's 2013

who don't have any health care at all

who are working to support their families

sometimes without any help

working way too many hours to try and make ends meet

and

who really, really need things to change.

I hope they're able to get what they want.

*image via Salon

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Friday was Charles Bukowski's birthday

August 18, 2013 - 8:17pm - by admin

even though he's dead but you probably knew that. It's important, I think, to remember stuff like that anyway. People who move you should always be remembered. Bukowski moves me.

I started reading Ham on Rye over Christmas break and it was the first Bukowski novel I've owned and read which is embarrassing to say out loud.

A few months earlier I was getting my hair done and my amazing baber at Hunter & Gunn, Mason, told me about when he lived in an awful, dingy, dark apartment. It was in the basement of a sketchy building with old, yellowed plastic venetian blinds in the windows and he talked to me about reading Bukowski at night.

"You have to read Bukowski" he said "you'll fall in love". So I did.

The feeling of love I get when I read Bukowski is the sickening kind. It's heavy like when you lock eyes with someone across the room and your stomach sinks into your toes. It's good but in a way that makes you feel not yourself.

Bukowski is harsh truths. It's the side of people we don't want to read about or would rather pretend isn't there at all. Reading Bukowski isn't like reading about serial killers and bloodbaths and people we can distance ourselves from. Pretend like we're different.

The personalities in his books are us in all our filth. Our hate. Our depravity. The disgusting things we think about each other. The fucked up and awful things that we do to each other for no reason.

Reading Bukowski leaves you feeling hollow afterward. Like someone came and scooped out your humanity while you were turning the pages.

Even though I'm a few days late, today I'm going to have a stiff drink and read Post Office.

It feels appropriate.

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Almost got hit by a car on my run

August 16, 2013 - 3:12am - by admin

I was running along the sidewalk on my way to meet Kat
and there's a pedestrian crosswalk at Balmoral and Young
one of the ones with the white painted lines so you know who has the right of way
that thing
and I looked to my left and saw no traffic
on the the right in the incoming lane there were two cars and one of them was turning left
onto Young
and I paused for a second and he waved at me, one of those "go ahead" motions
so I stepped out into the street and as that happened a car came swerving around the corner
some flashy silver thing
I think it was a BMW based on the hood ornament but I can't recall
and he slammed on his brakes and stopped a foot or so from my left leg.

I looked at the guy in the car and he looked back and me
with this mutual disgust and hatred
me, for his reckless driving in a residential area in a school zone
he, for, I don't know, having to stop quickly?
for having the evidence of his own recklessness pointed out to him in such an
obvious
physical
way?

who knows.

After a pause I kept running because what could I do, really?
kick the hood of his car
yell
scream
YOU ALMOST SHATTERED MY LEGS YOU IDIOT
go on at length about how he would have definitely put me in the hospital
broken at least several of my bones
and how I would have sued him and taken him for all that he was worth?
No.
There's no point.

As I jogged away it struck me how lucky I was that he hit his brakes
or that I had waited that one second to check with the other car
and how often

lately I've been telling myself that I'm lucky because my life is good
but those are all things I've done.

I chose my friends
my partner
my job
as well as the plethora of other decisions which have put me where I am
after years of hard work and stress
fighting and arguments and trying to smarten the fuck up in the process.

Which isn't luck at all, really.

That's just life.

Now, not getting hit by that guy in the car today
that was luck.
Or the universe working in its bizarre and unpredictable way
if you want to get fancy about it.
Because I don't think luck is something you earn, or create for yourself
it just happens to you
(or it doesn't).

Like tonight.

That was lucky.

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Last night: a recap

August 11, 2013 - 8:57pm - by admin

Gord and Karley threw a wicked shaker and I stayed up way too late which has resulted in a do-nothing Sunday which I really, really needed.

We did a bunch of tequila shots and it wasn't Jose Cuervo tequila which means that I didn't immediately throw up after doing it. Gord did, though, and that made me feel good about myself.

For a long time there was a Songza playlist on which was playing Rhianna and Britney Spears and nobody noticed until I brought it up and then we listened to gangster rap.

Kat and I made these wontons with shrimp and cream cheese and other good stuff in them and they were amazing and I ate too many of them and actually had to leave the kitchen so I would stop shoving them in my gullet.

I tried to learn to play cribbage and failed horribly.

Gord showed me how to make a tart except there were no eggs for the dough and we almost forgot about it in the oven and I don't actually know what happened to it after that. Did someone eat it?

Karley informed me that the sign of a functioning nuclear family unit is half-completed butterfly puzzles on the table and I almost peed myself laughing.



While on a walk to get smokes for Karley I kicked this weird box that had a pipe running to it from a fire hose and nothing happened so we walked across the street and then a weird man yelled WHAT ARE YOU DOING at us from his porch and we ran away.

This photo of Tyrone and I was taken and I fucking love how cute we are.

Realizing that the word 'enjoy' on their wedding invites was spelled 'engoy' and I laughed so hard I had to lie down on the floor for a second.

We also got totally lost on the way back and Gord didn't believe me when I found his street because you can't see the gazebo they have set up on their front lawn from two blocks away.

Ty bought me a chicken tendercrisp sandwich from Burger King and while we were in the drive-thru line some guy in an SUV passed out while waiting for his food so the line didn't move for a long time. I eventually got my sandwich, though.

Which brings us to today.

I was supposed to hang with my mum today and go have lunch in the Exchange District but she cancelled which means I've been lying around in my underpants watching Quentin Tarantino movies which is, it turns out, the only thing I'm capable of doing after last night.

Thanks, Gord and Karley Obama.

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