Raaaaaambling!
I'm very tired at HUB Mall on campus. Yes, there's a relatively big mall on campus that doubles as a residence building. It looks like the inside of a ship. I come here for the nightmarishly overpriced coffee and to hang out occasionally. I usually get here at noon sharp when my classes are done, and I have a 40-minute long breakfast by myself. Noon is the malls busiest. It's completely packed with people, all kinds - students or otherwise. The building the mall is in is basically structured as this big hallway, with its two longest walls being facades for infamously cramped and unclean dormitories, while the pathway at the bottom is left for restaurants and accounting offices. It has that contrived, tacky feel all spaces that try to recreate the outside world indoors feel, but in the case of the HUB, it's regained whatever sense of being lived in it has lost by being as beat to shit as it is.
The mall is at its best when it's dark out in the winter. Nobody is here, and the only lights left on are a part of this 24-hour purple and pink light show whose streaks resemble a weightless, clinical aura borealis. It takes on the whole of the space, and it's entirely unimpressive. But what I really like about it is the faint view of the dark sky above from the few windows around the ceiling. It's a long way up from the floor, and the feeling I get sometimes is the same one I've gotten from being at the bottom of a valley out in the country at night. One of a hundred million valleys under a sky that doesn't care to think of the differences between any of them. There's something about that.
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I was reading this essay by Greil Marcus, who is this really famous music critic, where he writes about how he came to the realization that truly great art is Christian art, which, if you even just vaguely know of the guy like me, is really surprising. He was one of the first people to do scholarly writing on rock music, and his whole project is about minding the gap between high and low culture(1), and he admits in the end of the essay that what he realized he was searching for in all of it was the Divine. This is something I think about a lot. I wonder if I'll realize the same thing.
On my mom's birthday this year, we kayaked alone down the Red Deer River, in the part of it that's at its busiest when you see a single river boat. I told her I "oscillate between being a nihilist and a born-again Christian." This is related to what I was saying with Greil Marcus.
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When I was at Natalie's house for the barbecue, her and K--den were laying together on the couch in the once flooded out, barely finished basement, and they were both obnoxiously crossfaded - K--den moreso than Natalie. For most of the night, they just taunted everyone with freestyling over Steely Dan and really funny jokes I forget now. But for these twelve or so seconds, I don't think anyone else but me was watching them. They both had these warm, grand, brilliant smiles, and their eyes were closed as if they were content enough with all they had ever seen, and they held each other absolutely. Those two can be hard to read for a lot of people. They can be kind of obtuse, even to me. But I knew right then that they loved each other. It was so bright. It always is. You don't just feel it: you see it. At least I do. It's an actual, observable light that illuminates the entirety of the space it's in. It can be a room, it can be a train, it can be the whole world. It's incredible. Some of my friends say it makes them feel lonely. When it's real, it could never make me feel bad. It's like the first sun of the morning. It makes me so happy to be alive. Love is real.
One time, on the train, in the thick of my last break-up, I saw an older man resting his face on the neck of who I assumed was his wife. They had Patagonia on, but their scarves maintained their quaintness. They looked so tired. The train only goes within city limits, but you told me they'd been on the train for two months non-stop, I'd believe you. Despite this, they looked comfortable, desperately so. Despite the odds, which were mounting - whatever they were - they truly had each other. You could tell. There was some kind of frustration and worry, but the LRT in all its pornography might as well have given them some time to relax. I saw them, and I started crying. It was a dark, drab, dreary, miserable, Russian, Mancunian Edmonton winter day, the kind that have forever robbed the city of the life it is notorious for never having, and I was just beginning to feel my first dumb little heartbreak. But seeing them didn't make me feel worse, as much as I was overwhelmed by it. Love is real, and I knew it then. I never have had it, and I still don't, but it's out there in so many people. Maybe there's not enough to make any lasting change in the world, but there's enough to exhausting counting all of them on all of your fingers. There's enough to fill a single building, or maybe even a small town. Imagine their town council. Imagine their neighborhoods. Most importantly, imagine the way their streets. Their lawns, their sidewalks, the picnic benches beside their Tim Hortons or their Sobeys, where all elderly and the chainsmokers alike assemble every morning. Imagine their parks and bus stops. There wouldn't be much difference. Life would go on as it does, mornings, working weeks, and weekends intact. But there would be this impenetrable silent solidarity all of the time. Everyone would love each other, everyone would know it, and life would go on unchallenged. It would be a world of perfect, elegant, almost machinic harmony: the world like a song. But nobody would say anything about it, and it would go on indefinitely. It would be the open secret of the town that everything is in perfect working order.
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Long periods of frustration, and 0.5 seconds of the Sublime.
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I'm very undisciplined. My interests have all been haphazardly developed through totally impulsive, inconsistent fooling around. I think I could be great any one of them, especially writing and photography. Everyone says I'm really good at writing in particular, and I think I could be really good, too. I just need to lock in. I'm trying to be more arrogant. The world is for the taking.
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Learning how to be alone in the world. I'm always around people. I know too many damn people. So I need to relearn solitude. How to be in the world.
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I'm trying to be less nostalgic. I am nostalgic, but drunkenly so. I don't mean that in some Tumblr fucking way. 'Drunkenly' in this case doesn't refer to some romantic, indulgent emphasis, like "Oh, I'm so drunk on love!" I mean it in the shaking in the morning because of withdrawal sense. I mean, that's it's bad for me. I have a fucking wide open future that's been unattended to because I keep thinking of times and people and places I honestly hated being around, even when I'm happier than ever now. I can change.
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I feel like so many interesting things have happened to me in the last year. I've met so many interesting people who have said so many interesting things to me. The look of forests in late summer as weed smoke erupts from the pudgy, bearded face of your old history professor, offices in the middle of the night, water-restricted downtowns you used to know with complete strangers, math majors named Jacques explaining to you the Nicean Creed, the lonesome charm of the highway strip. I hope to remember it all. Maybe not for their sake, but for mine.
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Talking to J-les last night restored the humility and empathy I didn't realize was kind of slipping. Hearing both her and Ewan say the same shit about each other unknowingly was strangely nice. Nothing is ever the same, but there is infinite rhyme.
I feel like I have unique access to people. I feel like I see more of people than other people do. There's got to be something about me that makes me easier to open up to. There's got to be something universal about me. And it's never one kind of person. I seem to get along with everyone. I ought to make use of this in some kind of vocation.