summer mixtape.

Prompted by the fact that I never update my iPod anymore, and also by my obsessive love of summer playlists, here is a short but sweet compilation of albums by bands I have been listening to for a depressing amount of time (more than ten years, to be precise) and who, as such, remind me of my own horrible mortality.

The Strokes--Room on Fire

Even though I've been listening to this record fairly consistently since it came out ten years ago, it really reminds me most of my first summer in Kingston back in 2009. I think I put Reptilia and The End Has No End on every mix I made that summer. Arriving in Kingston I felt freer and younger than I'd felt in years. That August I drove out to Almonte along the gorgeous back roads of Frontenac County, on my way to my best friend's wedding, listening to the Strokes and Plaskett on repeat. I felt like I'd finally figured out where I belonged.




Weezer--the Blue Album

I know I reference Weezer and kissing boys a LOT, and I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but look: If I'd had a baby with the first dude I kissed while listening to this album, that baby would now be nearly finished college and asking if it could move back in for just a few more months while it got its independent coffee shop/performance space up and running (my imaginary babies are INCREDIBLY creative and intellectual).



Thrush Hermit

I've loved Thrush Hermit ever since they did the theme song for Street Cents on CBC back in the early 90s (I have been a public broadcasting nerd for a long, long time). I found a used copy of Smart Bomb at Dr. Disc when I was 13 or 14 and listened to it all the damned time. I couldn't get over their clever, poetic lyrics, the wordy jokes they made; I'd found my nerd-rock gods. A little while later, my best friend made me a series of amazing mixtapes to listen to on a family trip out west, and she put The Great Pacific Ocean on one of them. I rewound it and listened to it over and over again. We had a complicated, overwrought, intense friendship, and I missed her like crazy while I was on the other side of the country. Listening to that song I felt my heart leap and sink and break and mend a thousand times.




Elliott Smith--Figure 8

Here's a fun story about this record: I bought the CD at Chapters on Bloor Street in Toronto, during my second year at Trinity. The dude who worked in the music department there was really cute and nice, and he seemed pleasantly surprised to be helping someone find an Elliott Smith album rather than something operatic or otherwise Yorkvillian. "Are you a Nick Drake fan?" he asked me, and I admitted that I had never heard of him. "He's an amazing singer songwriter who killed himself before he really got recognized," he told me, and found me a copy of Way To Blue: An Introduction To Nick Drake, which, naturally, I bought. I stopped by my boyfriend's residence room on my way back to St. Hilda's to show him my purchases. "You didn't know who NICK DRAKE was?" he asked incredulously. "Well, did YOU?" I countered. Of course, he did. He then got really sore about the fact that a cute boy had prompted me to buy a record and we got in a fight. A year later, we were both in a Canadian Literature class and there was this British guy in the class who looked and sounded EXACTLY like Nick Drake, and when I pointed it out to him, my boyfriend declared me a genius. It was one of a handful of running jokes that somehow carried us through an ill-advised year of sharing an apartment. A year or two after that, Elliott Smith killed himself, and I wondered if I had somehow made it happen by buying his album at the same time as another misunderstood suicidal genius.



Belle and Sebastian--Lazy Line Painter Jane

The same boyfriend put this on a mix tape for me once. During our first summer, both of us lived back in our hometowns, and we'd take turns hopping on the train from Hamilton to Oshawa to visit each other. One Friday night he picked me up in the dark at the Oshawa GO Station, and blared this song on the drive back to his parents' place. It was dark out, and chilly for a June night. I'd heard Belle and Sebastian plenty of times before, but never this song. The sound of it made me want to lean against him, burrow down, nod my head till I nodded off. But we weren't that close yet, or maybe we just weren't that honest yet. So I just told him, "I really love this song." It was a time when it was easier to tell him I loved a song than that I loved him. "I figured you would," he replied. "It's on the tape I made you."

music to like boys to, volume 2c: postcards from tiny islands.

Third in a series. Catch up here, and then here.

You arrive on a rainy Thursday, feeling somewhat crazed. He's not waiting for you by the baggage carousel and for a moment you wonder, did I make him up? Is this a trick? And then suddenly there he is, and suddenly you're hugging awkwardly, and suddenly you're in a taxi to the Best Western downtown. You lean into him carefully as the cab crawls down wet streets. Don't tell them you're sharing the room with me, you warn him, suddenly certain that you want him to stay. Do you WANT me to share? he asks. Of course, you reply, I just don't want to have to pay the extra ten bucks. It's more than that, though. It's also that you like sharing a secret.

One day you rent a car, and at first neither of you see quite sure what to do with it. You drive to his house so he can pick up a change of clothes, and then downtown, and then finally back to the hotel to park it before walking back up the block to the pub. It's cool and drizzly out, and after a walk along the waterfront you scurry back to the hotel for a nap. You fall asleep as he bearhugs you close. When you stir, and decide to roll over, he doesn't seem to wake up, but he loosens his hold, opens his arms, lets you get settled before gently wrapping them around you again. Oh man, you think. Oh man.

The next morning you head out on the Trans Canada toward the west side of the island, en route to a cottage on a cliff occupied by an old friend. He doesn't have a license, or much of a sense of direction. You hate driving. I hate driving, you tell him, white knuckles on the steering wheel. Maybe let's pull over and check the map, he replies. He's steady, somehow, in spite of it all. He buys you a bag of Cheezies at the gas station. I've been here before, you think.

Having found your bearings, you keep driving. He puts on the latest playlist he made you and tells you why he chose each particular song. Your heart melts and you get only slightly lost on red dirt backroads. At the cottage there are little girls offering copious high-fives, treks through sleeping lofts and power tool nooks and half-built forest forts. Your dear friend leads everyone down to the beach as the tide is coming in, and as you dip your feet in the shallow water, tiny crabs scuttling around your feet, he wanders off and looks at the erosion lines along the red rock. It's pretty neat, he says, interested and excited at the idea that his little island is sinking into the sea. I read somewhere that in a hundred years none of this will even exist anymore, he tells you. Leave it to you to find the endearing quality in someone fascinated with end times.

The girls send you on your way with a bouquet of wildflowers in a juice glass and you drive onward. You choose to trust the insane GPS on your new Fancy Phone and it leads you down every unmarked country road between Bedeque and Cavendish. Everything is so green and so vast. He is an incredibly good sport about following you around Green Gables. In the front entry you spot a 1980s era phone on a low shelf and shout, Look, it's Anne's original touchtone. The historical interpreters are remarkably cheerful about your outburst. Well, she had to call Diana SOMEHOW, one replies. That was surprisingly fun, he tells you in the car on the drive home, soundtracked by Joel Plaskett. You feel warm and tired and if you weren't in the driver's seat you'd lean right over and put your head on his shoulder.

The afternoon nap becomes a ritual, and when you wake up in his arms again you don't move right away. You don't want it to be over quite yet. You order pizza and watch episodes of the Simpsons with the commentary track on, half listening and half narrating the episodes to each other. It's Saturday night, and you head to the bar. The guy working the door is a friend of his and gives you a deal on the cover. Later when he goes back to thank him, the doorman smiles knowingly and says, I didn't want you to look bad in front of your guest. The bar is packed and his cousin's band is playing but you spend most of the evening out on the back porch, giggling and giddy. At one point when you return from inside, it takes you a few minutes to sneak your way back into the seat next to his, and when you make it he tells you, Boy am I glad to be sitting next to you again.

Me too, you reply.

Later on, you walk back to the hotel in the rain. You have an umbrella, but you don't bother to get it out. This is something, you both admit to each other. This is definitely something.

music to like boys to, volume 2b.

A sequel to a previous entry, which can be found here.

The winter passes, and spring creeps in slowly. Girl is sick, a lot, and spends too much time online, conducting business from the couch with episodes of Homeland playing in the background. Boy gets a new job, and either doesn't have enough to do or would rather talk to Girl online than paint the wall behind the theatre's urinals. It works out pretty well for both of them, at least Girl thinks so. Boy and Girl spend an inordinate amount of time discussing an inordinate amount of things. It's comforting, being involved in and aware of the minutiae of a person's life. Every time there's a blizzard warning Girl looks at the weather online, checks to see if it's coming in from his direction or heading from her toward him, suddenly curious about the patterns of movement up and down the eastern seaboard. It doesn't matter, not really, but she likes the idea that they might both survive the same storm, days apart.

The first truly warm day of the year is a Wednesday in May. That afternoon, spring fever gets the best of Girl. She buys a plane ticket to the island where Boy lives. Boy and Girl ask for, and get, the time off work. Girl trawls the internet for a hotel room and Boy advises her on which spots are okay and which spots are roach havens and which spots don't actually exist. Girl is thankful for the help.

At first the flight feels so very far away, an abstract and vaguely wonderful thing. Girl blinks, and suddenly it's time to go. Now it is high summer, almost too hot to be outside in the evenings. Girl checks the weather forecast obsessively in the days before she leaves, feeling strangely hopeful about the possibility that it will be cooler there.

Boy makes Girl a mix for her birthday, and for her travels. Here we go again, Girl jokes, remembering the long ordeal of their first music exchange. This time, though, it's easy peasy, downloaded in seconds. Girl uploads the songs to her Fancy Phone (things sure have changed on Walton Mountain) and it becomes her soundtrack for sun-soaked walks to work. It's the kind of hot that makes you feel dumb and dreamy. Summer fever doesn't have the same ring to it, but that's what it is. Boy says he hopes she won't find the playlist too weird or jarring, and truth be told, it is an odd one. Girl hears Bowie followed by Snoop Dogg followed by Thrush Hermit and feels more optimistic than she's felt in a long time.

The night before she leaves, Girl listens to the mix. She's overpacking, as usual. It's hard to tell what she might need when she gets there. You can't really trust the forecast; it creates the dangerous illusion that you can be prepared for what's ahead of you. She knows she'll never be fully ready for whatever's waiting for her on that tiny island, but she'll try. It's raining when she leaves Toronto and raining when her plane touches down, and as she walks across the misty tarmac she wonders if the rain followed her across the provinces. Not that it's all that important. What's really important is on the other side of the Arrivals door.

Three Junes, part 1.

In the spirit of one of my favourite books by Julia Glass, here’s the first in a series of June memoirs.

2010

Three years ago I was still in Kingston. Earlier that spring, the love of my life bought a little piece of the wooded Canadian Shield paradise that is South Frontenac County, and suddenly our weekends together shifted. There was work to be done, ground to clear, boxes to pack. He was going to live that first summer in a trailer, if he could get the goddamned excavator to come the hell out to his property line and dig up the fucking road (I am paraphrasing). For some reason every goddamned excavator in the County was overbooked that spring, and as the end of his lease at the old lake house wound down, things got a little bit hairy. He was not exactly a patient man, prone to panic and worry (two peas in that particular pod is a recipe for disaster; I see that now). It was an uncertain time. Every night I'd fall asleep praying that the goddamned excavator would arrive the next morning. He had his buddies coming the first weekend in June to help haul the trailer up the hill, and there was no way that would ever work without a road to haul it up.

That first Friday of the month, I took the day off work. I woke up to my phone ringing (when you are in love with a non-technologically-inclined hermit, you spend a lot of time talking on the phone. After years of internet dating and passive emails, I found it insanely refreshing).

"That motherfucker is here!" my one true love shouted into the phone. Obviously the goddamned excavator had risen up the ranks to motherfucker status. "I've got a fucking ROAD!" I nearly wept with joy. Small miracles come in strange places.

I drove up to his place later that afternoon and watched as two trucks and one trailer somehow caravanned up a road that was a road in the very loosest sense of the word. I did what I always seemed to do: provide moral support and CDs to listen to and ingeniously weird meals cooked over an open flame. It was nearly dark by the time the boys finally had the trailer situated. I'd been promised a trek to the lake, but it was too dark for that now. I didn't mind, though. We’d have all summer to go swimming. The trailer’s stereo only played tapes (and came, it is worth noting, with cassette copies of both the Smiths’ and the Monkees’ greatest hits), so instead we blasted our music from the truck and sat by the fire till late that Friday night.

The next morning we hiked the treacherous path from the clearing to the water, and I jumped in off the old dock. It wasn’t my first swim of the year, but it felt like it was. No one else was out on the lake and the water was still and cool and perfect. It felt like a balm after a day and night of hard labour and hard drinking. I felt the summer coming on that morning, the promise of so many more days like that one, so much more of the freedom and stillness and the quiet broken only by Gord Downie’s voice on the stereo. I felt myself come home.



I drove home to Charles Street later that afternoon, after a baking-hot trailer couch nap. Jammie and Freya arrived a few hours later. We had planned to run the Beat Beethoven race the next morning, but when Freya got out of her car and realized she’d only brought one running shoe along, we kiboshed that plan (probably not a bad idea, given our horrifying track record at that particular run, but that is a story for another day). That night we made our way out to Wolfe Island, where the Great Lake Swimmers played a fundraising concert for the Swim Drink Fish project. We crowded into an old town hall and drank sketchily-prepared vodka cranberries and took the late boat home.

Walking home from the ferry terminal, I thought to myself, how lucky am I, to have the ones I need so close by, to love a man who loves me back tenfold, to walk into the water just steps from both my front doors. I spent most of my time in Kingston falling in love with the place over and over again. No place has everything you need, but my lord, did that sweet town and the countryside around it ever come close.

affairs of the heart.

It's hard to be the Cool Girl, to pretend indifference. It's hard for me, anyway. I don't hide my emotions with even a modicum of grace, hard though I may try. Part of the problem is that I have too many feelings to hide. I wear my heart on my sleeve. Sometimes, really, I feel like my heart's wearing me. Which is good, I think. Hard, but good. More and more I'm realizing that I'd rather teeter on that heartbreaking edge, so full of love and nerves that I'm sure to fall right over, chest first. I'd rather feel too much than too little.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I am absolutely horrible at dating. I have no poker face, and I am an emotional fire cracker, and I REALLY hate it when people don't intuit all that super quickly. It never ends well.

When I started dating, I was a WHOLE lot worse. I gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. I was coming off a five year relationship that had ended badly, and naively hoped that the next dude I met would be the dude I would marry. I didn’t have time or energy for any other outcome. This could be--no, WILL be--the one, I'd always say to myself, though I never really meant it. But it's nice to hold out hope. I'd hold out hope, and I'd let people get away with a lot. Oh, you're in a 12 step program? That's okay, I am really happy that you're on the path to recovery. An ex accused you of date rape? Well, acknowledgement is the first step toward atonement. Sorry you forgot your wallet, no no, I've got this one. You're falling in love with me and telling me so on the third date? Great! Yeah, maybe we SHOULD move in together! In those days it was a very short path between the first date and my best friend coming over to help me change my locks. And yet, I pressed onward. Over the years I learned to steel myself against the inevitable insanity of riding in cars with boys, but it was all purely superficial. I could only hide my heart so much, and nine times out of ten I'd end up betraying my Cool Girl exterior, letting my utter excitement or complete disappointment shine through.

And here's the problem with that: in dating, it always seems like you end up feeling the exact opposite of how you ought to, in any given situation. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man you really really like on the first date would probably prefer to be friends ("You're such a great girl, though.") and a man with whom you shared absolutely no chemistry would like to marry you ("I can't stop thinking about you, here is a terrible poem."). Affairs of the heart exist in a delicate balance, and the scales are perpetually tipped in the wrong direction. This is a really hard thing. It makes you feel like you don't really know what you're looking for in the first place. It makes you feel untethered and uncertain. And when the good things do come along, it makes you wonder if you can really trust that they are the good things. You start feeling like you need to play a version of yourself rather than trust your own instincts, like you need to protect yourself. And it is fucking exhausting.

I don't really have a great piece of advice to tie this one up. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be working on figuring it out for the rest of my life. But recently I was on retreat with my first teacher, and she told me something that amounts to this: if you feel firm in your own foundation, rooted down somehow, you'll be grounded enough to let things into and out of your heart. You'll be secure enough to open up. You'll know what's right. I really liked that. I'm not there yet, but I hope I will be someday.

So yeah, I still give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I'm a little more careful now, but I'm also a little more certain of who I am and what I need. As I get older, I get more and more comfortable with the fact that I might not get everything I need from one person. And yet, I foolishly still believe in soul mates. Granted, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to meet my own, but I bet he's out there, trimming his beard and thinking about writing a letter to the editor about community gardening, considering which version of Bob Dylan's Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You he likes best (It would be great if he was into the one from the Rolling Thunder Revue recording, but I'm not picky, I'm really not). Knowing my track record, he's already married to someone else. Maybe I'll catch him on his second pass. Till then, I'll keep on looking. I'll let more people in. I'll take calls from boys I've never met, boys who live far away and yet seem to know me better than I know myself. I'll let the ones I have met drive me home and keep me warm. I'll keep promises and accept them from others too. I'll keep on looking. Something's out there for me, and I might not know exactly what it's supposed to look like, but damned if I'm not going to seek it out.


(Footnote: It's wicked hard to find ANY original version of Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You on the internet, so here's a worthy substitute. Really, as long as he's into Nashville Skyline, he can stay on my soulmate roster.)

some nights.

Some nights you don't mean to be out till all hours, but it happens. You intend to just stay put, but then one of your oldest friends calls and tells you he's on his way past your house and is coming to collect you. You walk up to his place, taking alleys and shortcuts, sneaking cigarette drags. Spring fever looms large and it's easy to justify spending too long with people you don't see often enough, old friends and their girlfriends, husbands and wives. You walk home after midnight and can't get to sleep. You can't believe how long your trail spreads back behind you, how long your stories are getting.

Some nights you stay up too late after getting up too early. You go out for too many drinks before the evening's really begun. Someone who seems to be around a lot more these days picks you up, and you end up at a karaoke bar. Through a series of circumstances and uncertain steps in a new direction that do not warrant a public airing, you're feeling nervous and self-conscious and more than a little drunk. You cope the only way you know how, by singing your heart out. Your rendition of Midnight Train to Georgia impresses the table of well-intentioned and equally tipsy fiftysomething women next to you; you've always been good at making friends with people twice your age. Later, driving home, there's a Smashing Pumpkins song on the radio, and as you pull up to the house where you're spending the night, you try and remember the first time you ever heard it. You think to yourself that when you were young, you probably imagined that things would be simpler by the time you got to where you are now, that you would be certain of more. Granted, it is hard to be certain of much at 2:00 in the morning, other than the promise of sleep, the strength of arms wrapped around you, the relief that the night is over.

Some nights you can barely keep your eyes open till the sun sets. After spending a day outside, keeping busy in the garden in an attempt to stave off a creeping anxiety that too often takes hold, you feel spent, and yet you cannot bring yourself to relax. It takes the gentle prodding of someone you've never met, someone whose voice on the other end of the line always manages to make you laugh and calm you down, to set you straight. Go to sleep, he tells you, gently. Alright, you reply. How your heart can want so much, so many, so very far apart, is beyond you, and maybe it always will be. But sometimes you realize that's not for you to sort out right now. Sometimes you just need to be told what you already know.

And some nights you walk home from yoga and marvel at the fact that the sun's still up, that it's warm enough to wander without a jacket. You have that quiet, heart-full feeling that you get after you practice, sad and happy and opened right up. You listen to Wilco, because that's always what you feel like listening to on your way home from yoga. The streets are still bright, and you smile shyly at the people you pass, feeling vulnerable somehow, but also hopeful. When you get home, there's a message from your best friend that another member of your sweet karass is in the final stages of labour, about to push out her first beautiful baby. Welcome to the world, little girl, you think to yourself. It's smaller and bigger and harder and easier than you could ever imagine. It's a hell of a place.

back and forth, forever.

These days I work in the same neighbourhood I went to highschool in. It's a bit of a mindfuck, albeit a pleasant one. I love the feeling of bumping up against my past all the time, I really do. Walking streets I used to know, taking shortcuts and remembering classes missed, fears realized, hearts broken. I'm not one of those people who has a particular nostalgia for highschool itself (the opposite is true, in fact), but I sure do look back fondly on the emotional education I got during those years.

The neighbourhood I work in is also close to Hamilton's only university. There are student houses everywhere, couches on porches, pickup trucks full of beer parked nearly perpendicular across ill-paved driveways. It gives the streets a pleasantly anarchic feeling that I find comforting. Yesterday things were even more ridiculous and messy than usual--April 30th, move-out day. As I walked around on my lunch break, I saw countless U-Hauls, decimated Ikea shelves, frustrated mothers and methodical fathers, young adults hauling armloads of clothes and pillows down rickety front steps. I heard in their voices that particular mix of relief at the end of another school year, and resignation to the fact that they would be spending the next four months in a childhood bedroom, suddenly accountable again after a year of total independence. Those are strange times, liminal times. Times between times, when you're not really sure who or where you are. Are you a student, mature and thoughtful and On Your Way Somewhere, or are you a daughter, dependent and uncertain and skulking back home? You don't really know, not when you're filling a borrowed truck with all your worldly goods, saying goodbye to the best people you've ever met.

Watching it all unfold, I couldn't help but think back to the many move-homes I've known. The one that came to mind immediately was the very first, in May, 2000. I had spent a transformative, sketchy, unforgettable year living at St. Hilda's College, surrounded by amazing women and annoying girls (and some who were both at the same time), across the street from the boys' residence, where we'd go for meals and beers and general insanity. A few weeks before the end of term I'd started dating a boy who felt different than the others. We liked all the same bands. We read all the same books. For weeks before we even kissed we'd stay up nearly all night talking about everything and nothing. Sometimes he'd call me on the phone and we'd talk that way for hours, even though he lived right across the street. I was falling in love with him, just as I'd fallen in love with the friends I'd made and the life I'd somehow forged for myself. I did not want to go. The prospect of leaving him, leaving my friends, leaving the tiny basement room that was now my home, terrified me. I was heading back to my real home, a place so unfamiliar to me now that it might as well have been Siberia.

One quiet Friday night my dad drove in to haul home my last load. The boy I couldn't get enough of had left for his parents' house Oshawa earlier that day, and already I felt like I was missing a limb. Before he left I thought about telling him how deep my feelings for him went, but I couldn't get the words out. The uncertainty hung between us as he walked away, hovered around me as I finished packing up my room before Dad got there. I remember those last few minutes, bringing the final boxes upstairs, cramming them into the back of the car, and then just standing there crying. A handful of the girls with whom I'd shared the last eight months were still around, and we all hugged and bawled like a bunch of tweens leaving summer camp. The air was warm and the sun was setting. My dad waited patiently in the driver's seat as I sloppily bid farewell to the best year of my life. As we drove back to Hamilton, further from my Toronto life, further from my eastbound love, I sunk back into the passenger side, exhausted. Everything that mattered felt so far away. In hindsight, it was the end of the beginning.

Of course I didn't know it yet, but that absence would make the heart grow fonder. I'd spend that summer working at the library. Nearly every night I'd run off to one place or another, often ending up in one of the same parks I'd spent my highschool years running off to. I wasn't looking for trouble the way I had been when I was younger, just a soft place to land. Every weekend I'd find myself either getting on a train or meeting one, following the path to my secret heart. Each time we'd see each other we'd get closer; each time we said goodbye it would get harder. Every train ride away from him made me feel like I was living that last day in front of St. Hilda's over again, dying another death, letting another great and wonderful thing come to an end. Come September we'd land back in each other's arms and vow to stay there for the rest of our lives. It would be exhilarating and terrifying and I would feel more alive and more secure than I'd ever thought possible.

That part wouldn't last either. I guess the point is, nothing does. Like it or not, we're bound to spend much of our lives in these liminal states, between things, between stops, between homes and great loves and times both hard and good. The silver lining, I think, is that eventually you get it. Eventually you see the changes coming, see that they're part of something bigger than you, know that you are strong enough to handle them. Eventually you make yourself your own anchor, and just hold on.