January is Whacked

So I've completely lost track of where I am and where I wanted to go since I got sick this past week and my dad came into town from Saskatoon and my partner had his birthday and it just seemed like there was a LOT going on around here. A lot for someone who's unemployed....well, almost unemployed. I've been lucky enough to land a contract position with Descant Magazine's S.W.A.T. program (Students, Writers and Teachers). They place writers in high schools around Toronto to be Writer-in-Residences and run writing workshops for the students. Totally my dream job and anything else I end up having to do for money wouldn't even phase me at this point. In fact, I have an interview at Blockbuster of all places, and I don't even care. I'm just thrilled that my education and my book have placed me on a slightly higher rung on the career ladder than I was a couple of months ago.

I've been wanting to do a debriefing of the memorial service I went to last weekend, though I'm wishing I had done it earlier as my mind has been clouded with other things since. Mostly I wanted to talk about how amazing it was and how deeply I was touched by the event. I went there knowing very little about this person and left feeling like I got to know him. The truth is though, there isn't much more to say. It was beautiful and moving and I don't know how I feel about talking about it on my death blog. I just don't know if it's my place to talk about this because I was really an observer. But in some strange way I was a participator as well. I wanted to be there, just didn't want to overstep my bounds. Anyway, I simply feel lucky to have been there.

January is basically whacked. It's the 31st day today and I'm just so happy this month is almost over. I feel like it's been a struggle from day one, fighting against myself and my world around things like work and money. January is the kind of month where everything goes wrong. Plumbing in the house backs up. You bounce cheques. The milk goes bad before the expiry date. You get sick with one cold, it goes away for a few blissful days and then a new one takes its place. January is the month of waiting. You wait to find out about the program you applied for, the contest you entered, whether or not your life is going to change. You make resolutions and you break them before the month is over. You hurl yourself through the days with your face against the painful knife-cutting wind of reality. At least three more months of winter are looming ahead of us, Christmas and its warmth and joy is over and what we really need to do is drink as much hot chocolate as possible, curl up on a couch (if you have one) and nap the month away. Put your head down and go forward as far into the future as you can make yourself. Pass the month by as quickly as you can.

Waking

So, I've been invited to two 'wakes' this week, back to back. One is for a close friend's 93 year old grandmother and another is the friend of a close friend who died tragically of an overdoes. I find it strange that the universe is engaging me with death in these distanced ways. These are not people I knew, yet I am tied to them through the people we share our connection to.

I went to my friend's grandmother's home once. She lived in a huge gorgeous house, in a small community town outside of Toronto. I was around 19 or 20 when I went up there, but the image I have in my head is of my friend and I swimming in her glorious cement swimming pool, not as adults, but as kids. Young, immature and ridiculously self-absorbed adolescents with dreams and ambitions gushing from our lips and sexual energy spilling out of our pores. It may as well have been the summer we were sixteen, watching infomercials and talking on the phone; me ranting about my mother and how many chores she expected me to do until I found a summer job (seriously Mum, you want me to clean ALL the outside windows of the house?), and my friend lusting after Ludwig, the man we had met the year before, with the black curly chest hair who worked at City Perk, the local coffee shop we obsessed in. The man who bought the girl he loved blue roses and told our fifteen year old ears to watch the movie Stealing Beauty immediately, because that was the movie that would teach us about love. Or it could've been the warm autumn night we dirty danced with those beautiful Lybian men who we met at an ESL student party, who whispered in our ears the words to 'Shy Guy' and 'Be My Lover', our bodies grinding together, the room a haze of musky cologne, warm breath and sweat. That time has blurred into one long existential adolescent angst, and my friend and I were comrades in our mutual obsession, ecstatic wonder, and longing. The visit to her grandmother's was just one of hundreds of times we spent floating around in a desperate pool of our desire to become 'grown up'. To have sex, to fall in love (either order was fine), have babies. To have love affairs with sweet men and women who we'd tearfully have to part ways with due to our own high ideals and ambitions. We knew what we wanted, and at that time all we could do was hope that it would all turn out as we imagined it could.

As for my friend whose dear friend overdosed, he is one of those people who I didn't know and never heard of until his death. Kind of like Kurt Cobain. I was one of those girls who fell in love with Kurt after his tragic death and began listening non-stop to his music. The 'wake' I'm going to is more of a huge celebration of his life, the kind of thing I would want for my own life when I die. My friend asked me to come and at first I was hesitant. How could I be a part of a celebration for someone I had never known? I felt like I might be overstepping my bounds and was worried about how it might look to those who did have a relationship with him. My friend said that this was exactly why I should come, because he was the kind of person I would have really liked and gotten along with. 'I really wish you guys could've met," He said, "and now maybe you'll be able to feel like you had'. What a beautiful thought. I realized afterwards that I would be flattered if people came to a celebration of my life, simply because friends of mine were confident that we would've been friends HAD we known each other. And the world is connected over and over, intrinsic in how it draws us together.

I feel honoured to attend both of these celebrations. It makes me wonder how my own 'life celebration' would come together. Hopefully the food would be good. I think my family and friends would make sure of that.

Here's a little 6FU homage to Kurt Cobain:

This Is Your Death

Ever wanted to know when your last day on earth is going to be?

http://www.everythingends.co.uk/quiz.html

Part 1: Everything.

A couple of nights ago I watched the last episode of 6FU. Though that was likely the 7th or 8th time I'd seen this hour and twenty minutes of brilliance, it's probably been at least a year since I watched that particular episode and I watched it with friends who were seeing the episode for the first time. It was awesome. We all cried. All I want to do now is talk about the last episode, though this seems like such a monstrous task. So I've decided to divide this into a four part post.

Today is Part 1 of Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.

I'm compelled to do this justice. I'm unemployed. I'm looking for work, job hunting, job begging, whatever you might call it. I'm struggling. It's January.

January is a shit month.


Here are my thoughts on Everything.

I like everything. I'm pretty sure my friends and family have noticed. I mean, I hate most things too, but when it comes to art and literature and and theatre I tend to really really like everything. And I always end up feeling kind of foolish because I really should be more critical about the artistic experience and entertainment I'm exposing myself to.


A few days ago I saw a staged production of Part 1 of Angels in America. For those of you who haven't seen the HBO mini series, it is so so SO worth it. Go out and rent it. Actually, no. Go out and BUY it, because you'll need a few years to properly absorb this drama. By the time I made my way through the entire six hour series (with some good friends in Vancouver), I had already seen the Part 1 about four times over the course of three years. A friend of mine and I tried to watch the whole thing together, twice, and failed. The first time we needed time after Part 1 to process and breathe and engage in some form of dialogue about what we were watching (which basically meant crying into our chip bowls and talking about how fucked up the world is). We needed a lot of time. So much time, in fact, that we didn't start watching again until a year later. Then of course we had to watch Part 1 OVER again because we had forgotten a lot of what happened. And again, the same conundrum. I tried to watch it alone, and failed. I tried to watch it with other friends and failed.

Finally I saw the whole thing this past May.

Maybe, it's just that I like absolutely Everything. that HBO has done (that I've seen). Is that wrong?

For the record, Al Pacino wins hands down for awesomeness playing Roy Cohn (opposite James Cromwell who plays George Sibley in 6FU):



There's an actor with clout.

Here is a lovely wikipedia definition of the Theory of Everything:

The theory of everything (TOE) is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and, ideally, has predictive power for the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle.

I don't REALLY know what any of this means, but I like how it sounds.

People Who Died

I started watching 6FU by myself. A close friend of mine had been urging me to start watching it and I found myself at Blockbuster one evening on a search for the perfect movie. I don't remember the movie I rented, but in addition I ended up grabbing disk four of season one cause it was the only one left on the shelf. So the first episode I actually watched (called 'The New Person') was the one where, in the first scene, the woman kills her husband by bashing him over the head with a cast iron frying pan:



This is the first glimpse I had into the show. I love how she eats the guy's breakfast after.

I'm clearly into this. But then, I see the next scene with Nate and David where they discuss why this woman decided to kill her husband:

David: ...so now the wife's in jail, according to the cousin who arranged the funeral.

Nate: Yeah, I bet he was abusing her or maybe he had some sick sexual thing he made her do.

David: Please, stop. And you're wrong. All she told the police was that he was boring.

Nate: That's it? That's all she said? (DAVID nods) The sick part is I understand it.

David: I do too.

Nate: Sometimes I'm boring.

David: I am too..


Amazing, right? I thought so too. I finish the episode. I'm obsessed. I go right back out to a different video store and rent the rest of season one. Then I watch the pilot, which is going to be a whole other post (lots to cover about the pilot). Then one of my roommates comes home and I convinced her to watch the pilot with me. Then our other roommate comes home and the three of us watch the pilot together.

Basically I watched the first episode three times that first night (or at least this is how I remember it) and then finished that first season in five days.

So as you all know (and if you don't know, you probably want to watch the show before I start spoiling things for you), the start of each 6FU episode begins with someone dying. I've chosen some of my favourites for your viewing pleasure:









I've been having a lot of really nasty nightmares lately, all of them completely vivid and almost more real than life itself. Many of them have been dreams in which close friends die somehow and I wake up with that crying clenched-fist-around-my-lungs feeling. It takes all day to shake it off. I think about what I would do without that person in my world and it's inconceivable. The worst is when they have children. I also dream about old relationships coming back to haunt me in some form or another, a completely different kind of death. Boyfriends or girlfriends popping up in various parts of my daily grind, showing up to tell me something, give me something, or take something away. A reconciliation that I never thought would happen might take place in a dream. I might wake up so light and happy, only to realize that person is still walking around possibly hating me, secretly hurt by me. Or I am still hurt by them. Or whatever. We sort of mutually hate/love each other. I always dream about people in my life, about things that could easily happen to them. I dream about myself placed in situations I wish I could act out in my life. I dream about resolution.

Last night I dreamt I had a beard. Oddly enough, this hasn't been the first beard dream I've ever had. In the first one, I was looking in the mirror totally admiring my awesome, amazing beard. Like, it was surprisingly hot. In this one, I couldn't figure out why it had suddenly developed and why now? My partner was all diplomatic about it and was like, 'you know it's up to you what you do with it, I don't mind' and I was kind of like, really? You're seriously okay with me having a beard? Then he was like, 'well, if it makes you uncomfortable, you can shave it off, but do it for yourself, not for me (a nice Bridget Jones I-like-you-just-as-you-are moment)'. But I didn't want to do that because my face would be all stubbly. It was a really unsettling dream and I basically had to cup my chin when I woke up to make sure I hadn't suddenly sprouted all this facial hair.

My point? Well, maybe it's just that dreams are kind of like dying for a night, in the sense that we go off into crazy worlds that are so similar to reality that we think they must be, but actually they're a whole different existence. Death might be one long dream with beards and fairies and talking steaks. I have no problem with that.

Here's a special song that touched my heart so obviously it will touch yours too:

Just Thinking About How Lucky I Am

Let's begin with the opening credits. If you've seen them before, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, check them out:



The tree. The crow. The hands that pull away. The tagged toe of the dead guy. The wheel of the gurney that does its quick jarring swivel. The flowers that slowly waste away.

The first time I watched 6FU I was living in a house with two roommates that we called The Spadina House for the obvious reason that it was on Spadina Cr. in Saskatoon (obviously, right?). It was an anomaly of a house on a block with fancy expensive mansiony type homes. Ours was all run down with yellow peeling paint (it has since been repainted blue and looks considerably nicer, though I still find it horrifying. It's the change that gets me) and a dingy unfinished basement. The kitchen was a 70s haven of wood and crappy linoleum tile. The upstairs was a sauna in the summer and an icebox in the winter (once, I took a hot water bottle with me to bed on one of those forty below nights in January and the next morning the water bottle had a block of ice in it the size of my fist). But it was ours. And it was CHEAP. Amazing for three undergrad students who lived off their wits and $520 worth of student loans each month.

So yeah, the opening credits are badass awesome. And yes, I've always been a fan of Alan Ball for his work on American Beauty. Therefore I've pretty much always loved the composer, Thomas Newman. He's quirky. He fills me to the brim with sadness, but in a good way. He (and Kevin Spacey's sultry hypnotic voice in the opening scene of American Beauty) makes me believe in possibility. And, like, the universe and shit. Listen to these:





So I watch the opening credits of 6FU and I get a little chill. I wonder why it is so easy to get pulled into a feeling of longing I can't explain. Truthfully, I have always been susceptible to this. These opening credits yank me down into a place where I'm allowed to be completely self-indulgent because all the characters on the show certainly are. I can think about death, examine and explore it, and it isn't cliche. It's dirty and raw and ugly and beautiful.

The plastic bag scene in American Beauty is probably considered overdone, in the sense that it was so profound and meaningful at the time the movie came out that most people are likely to roll their eyes at it now. Kind of like Titanic getting so much ridiculous publicity. Perhaps it was just too easy to manipulate the viewer in that scene, but honestly I still love it. The dialogue is simple and beautiful. Any time a scene is strikingly gut wrenching, no matter how overplayed in the future, I can't help but feel attached to it.

I get a little sick of trying to be cool and not affected by certain things. The funny thing is, once I get attached to something I can't ever let go. I'm not easily Buddhist. I have trouble with my attachments. Maybe that's why death is so fascinating to me. It's a loss of power and control, which is a bigger and much more impacting loss than losing people. Or maybe you just feel powerless whenever the threat of loss is obviously present.

Speaking of death and fantastic opening credit sequences, True Blood is another show I'm deeply invested in. I love the creepy fundamentalist theme here:



and (by suggestion from Ky from Open Fors) here's the opening sequence to Carnivale, which is also brilliant:



Thanks Ky. I love tarot cards.

On that note, I've got some read bad things to get done today (laundry), so I'll leave you with a wicked awesome remix of the title track for 6FU. Just to get you thinking about how lucky you are:

Titles

Okay, here we are at post #1.

There's a lot of pressure to make the first post of the very first blog you've ever created to be amazing. I imagine mine will likely be fairly boring because I'm kind of doing this on a whim and I really have no idea how I want to organize this thing yet.

Truthfully, I want to talk about more than just 6FU. I want to explore all the HBO shows (and perhaps one or two more that really should be HBO shows, but just happen to be with other networks....i.e. How I Met Your Mother) that have proved their awesomeness and have given me something concrete to live for, while working crappy retail jobs and sinking further and further into debt. The characters on these shows have become my frustrating family, my loving but troubled friends, my irritating neighbors and my fucked up teachers. They are what I turn to when I'm getting my existential angst on and I need to get swallowed up in someone else's tragic circumstances.


The title of this blog is significant to me for two reasons. First, it is the title of a fabulous episode of 6FU (Season 2, Episode 12, written by Jill Soloway, a friggin genius, if you ask me and my favourite 6FU writer), and contains a scene, which I've been mulling over for years, in which Nate is helping a cancer patient fill out his pre need form:


Nate: What about a girlfriend?

Cancer Patient: Nah. I mean yeah, I had girlfriends, relationships. I'd be in something for, whatever, like two months, two years and then it would just get too....too....nothing. Just too. I would start thinking 'I don't like this about her' and 'I don't like this about her' and I would start to feel this thing on the back of my neck, just like one of those superballs and it would just throb with the word leave leave leave and so I would and the second I got my life back, the ball would disappear. I suffer from that American thing big time. You know, always looking around for something better. Shopping.

Nate: I think a lot of people go through that that.

Cancer Patient: No they don't man. Okay? They don't. Most people just pick someone. I never looked at someone and just said, okay. I'll take you.


The second reason (which stems from the first), is that it is the title of a poetry manuscript I've been working on, which will hopefully one day see the light of publishing day. It's very new, very fresh and rough, but it's been fun to work on because of its exploration of relationships, and why else to I write poetry, but to obsess over the trials and tribulations of my 'cushy alienated life' as Claire says in an episode. Basically I wanted to explore the idea of settling, and what love means within a relationship and what happens when you aren't 100% sure and how people choose the people they will spend their life with. And what happens to those who decide not to choose or who choose a life that strays from the traditional.

There is a lot bubbling around in my head about this blog, but I will leave it at that for now. Thanks for reading.