Rock the Seesaw

I was obsessing about finding some sort of pull-out bed for my new livingroom because I wanted my place to be THE pit stop (and hopefully destination) for friends and family when they’re in Vancouver.

I obsess about things. Pros? I take the time to get the good stuff. Cons? A guilt complex and a lighter wallet.

So, I found a hide-a-bed that was free. I called the guy:

“What’s the condition?”

“Oh, excellent. We’re Italians so you know right there that it’s in fantastic condition…”

I did not know this, and whether it was a fact of life or a big fat stereotype.

“Uh, okay. Why are you getting rid of it?”

“It was my sister’s. She died a month ago and her husband just recently died. But, don’t worry, they didn’t die on the couch.”

My brain would have never come to that thought, but I’m really glad he told me just in case I went to sit down with Julia, cuddle up and watch a movie on the thing and all of a sudden formed that notion. Paranoia would sent in, consisting of my try to inhale strong enough to smell any odours that I hadn’t noticed, and trying not to inhale too loud so I didn’t get her attention.

Her: “What are you doing?”

Me: “Oh, I wasn’t sure if the previous owner died on the couch, so I’m sniffing for decomposition.”

But, hey, free retro hide-a-bed! And this is where the couch gets multicultural…

-> I get it free from an Italian.

->Delivered by an East Indian.

->Received by me, a white boy.

->Assisted in a beautifully choreographed zig-zag into my livingroom by my Chinese landlords.

I understand this city now. I get it. We all feel like minorities, but when we combine forces no majority can stand in our way. (or couch). So if my logic is correct, then Vancouver is like Voltron, with language barriers. Vancouver Voltron may take twice as long to save the day, but we’d save it at some point, damnit.

I have a feeling she's not here to tuck me in.

Late June…

I’m bunking at my aunt’s home on her pullout bed in the basement. It’s the home theatre den, and I wake up every morning looking at these menacing, massive box-speakers.

Metallica’s speakers, but without the cocaine residue.

I always love coming back to this temporary living quarters everyday after marathon home-hunting stretches because 2001: A Space Odyssey at arena volume levels in full peripheral vision beats your mom’s homemade baking. Owning a burly home theatre system is like having Mr. T and a Stargate in your livingroom.

I’m a cinephile. Look it up before you judge.

So, we had technology, and my Blackberry GPS kept my cousin and I in the right direction here in Vancouver. In my impatience to find a place to live I’ve started making appointments to see homes all over. They sound nice, until you plug the address in to Google Maps.

“Pender Place. Aw, that sounds nice and cozy! Right?”

“Uh, James man, it’s literally right around the corner from Main and Hastings. Literally.”

“THAT Main and Hastings?” (I walk around like a zombie pushing air drugs in my arm and stabbing an invisible person.)

“Yeah dude.”

“Sheeit.”

House hunting is funny this way. The places that sound wonderific end up being a shanty from Bolivia. I set up a viewing at one place. It seems like a nice area. I creeped it on Google Street View – the only legit purpose for that thing. How could Google be wrong?  And the landlord was this sweet-sounding latin woman. It was big, she said; wood floors, close to transit and everything you need (I’d come to understand the dual meaning of this one), new appliances, yadda yadda yadda good things yadda.

So I get there and it’s this squat apartment building. Maybe only eight units, four on two floors. And the area was definitely not Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood. (Bad Google Street View. Bad. Very bad.)

Linda meets me at the door. She’s five feet tall and older, so you’d automatically figure “Hey! If this old woman lives here, it’ll be great!”

Wrong-o.

“I can’t find the key,” she says, and proceeds to say it 17 times as she rummages through her unit for it. So now I’m thinking Alzheimer’s, the condition you never want your landlord, SOMEONE YOU WRITE LARGE CHEQUES FOR, to have.

Without a key, she leads me out of the superficial characterish main lobby (not bad) to the balcony of  said unit. I asked her:

“How’s the area? Find it safe?”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaa- ummmmnnnnnnngggggg, haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawww, it’s pretty good.”

2 point deduction.

On the balcony, she shows me (more…)

Vancouver, meet Roxby.

Vacation over.

It was nice to give myself time away from the internet, but I cheated. (Damn you, Facebook.) Time away from typing creates lots of thinking to put down in words.

I’m back.

What the hell did I do with my June and early July?  The most I could possibly think of doing: I graduated university (I must be sure to pat myself on the back – I’m not good at that), deemed Victoria empty of opportunities in my writing field and moved to Vancouver.

Yep, this has been a busy time.

My next few posts will bring you (and my subconscious) up to speed with all the details, thoughts, worries, excitement and shock that has been the last few weeks. This blog followed me through bipolar, then cancer, my Editor-in-Chief duties with This Side of West, and now it will chronicle the adventures of an island boy in the big city, just trying to carve out his place in it.

In other words: life just keeps happening to me and I just keep trying to hold on to it.

I LML (Love My Life – © Julia), I really do. As I write this, I worry about where I’m going. It’s the primitive dark cave fear, but with bills stacking up. I have trouble juggling too many projects. I don’t want to prioritize. I want it all to happen like this *SNAP*.

I can only face this challenge one way. I have to get fired up, dust myself off and find that gold again, light that cave with the shine I give off when I’m enthusiastic and excited. I am thrilled to be here in the big city. It’s gorgeous and couldn’t have asked for it better. I’m stoked to have successes.

A friend gave me the best advice ever, and you can apply it to everything: DON’T FUCK UP.

I won’t screw this up. I’m just going to let it all go and let the city and people I meet, along with my passion, sweep me in the right direction.

I’m kiting. Both grounded and floating above it all.

(I was going to make a funny Facebook-related comment here – but, that would be FUCKING IT UP.)

Show of hands if you were dominated in street dance offs by a rival mascot.

If you were like most kids, getting your haircut was like going to the whiskey-breath’d dentist. Not me. In my town, there used to be a glorious kids’ hair salon called Tickety-Do’s.

Yes, at Tickety-Do’s there was Nintendo while-you-wait, loaded with Super Mario 3, Paperboy and that Bart Simpson game. Each hair cutting station had a small TV built into the counter that you could request play any Disney movie you wanted, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or (always my choice) Tim Burton’s Batman. When you left, you could choose from a rainbow of high octane sugar suckers that were one chemical element away from glass with all the flavour of liquefied Sunday morning TV.

Tickety-Do’s was the bomb (to use lingo of the time). My mom worked there; part-receptionist, part-buzz cutter – the only times they trusted her with clippers, the only times she could indulge in her destructive tendencies. Not that she was violent or psycho, she just loved making kids a fraction closer to bald.

In the summer after grade 7, I had attempted my first (more…)

why can't I dream of Playdoh instead?

Last post: The dreams I’ve been having make LSD users jealous.
Today: The continuing story of my recent onslaught of dream-mares. Private stuff, but I know I’m not the only one who simultaneously enjoys and suffers from dreams.

3. Who Needs Superheroes?

I’m some building. On the ground floor, it’s just a second hand shop of glass ashtrays and brass pots. Above that is really sketchy. Have you ever seen the old couple’s house in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party? Each floor is in shambles and an old wooden ladder placed at an odd angle leads to each upper floor. It’s like a barn with floors that get increasingly demented as you go up. So, I’m a superhero; something I deduce by the fact that I can see my cape flapping when I turn quickly and I have red tights. On the landing of one of the stairs is a picture frame of some woman with frizzy hair. My dream personality thinks the world of her and is creepily obsessed. A little sock and twine doll version of her lies against the frame. Then I hear something and hustle up the ladders to the roof – the Matrix roof, but in Victoria. A fat guy that looks like Dom DeLuise on Hawaiian vacation has the doll and is sticking big pins in her. I start to cry and burst into a sprint, charging at him and I send him flying off the edge. Splat.

I take the doll I assume I grabbed from him and replace it back to the frame (I know, there should be two dolls at this point. It’s a dream, get with it.) Now I hear some woman’s voice yelling from the roof. I run up. It’s the woman, but she’s wearing a superhero costume, the same as mine. She’s laughing saying (more…)

nightmares for some, dreams for others.

Special thanks go out to my recent graduation, reiki session, and my David Lynch-a-Thon for turning my brain to the Spin and Tumble cycles. I haven’t had a memorable dream in at least four months let alone a nightmare. I don’t even know what a nightmare is anymore; one of the perks of becoming a typical desensitized adult. The scariest dream I can recall occurred during the middle of a long work week. I came home from my home décor store job, conked out and dreamed that I was working. Nothing different at all, just working a full 9-5. Then I woke up and had to go to work again.

pardonmyfrenchbut…FUCK.

So, last week, I finally I get a dream I remember. And it’s haunting. And then I dream another. I had FIVE FRICKIN’ SCARY DREAMS IN A ROW. And I remembered all of them, all totally lucid, cinematic 3D style dream-mares. It’s not often you remember this many in a row.

Just for fun, let’s look at them. I tried to analyze them. The only thing I learned is that I have issues. Nothing new there.

1. All-You-Can-Eat Slaughterhouse

I’m sitting at a restaurant table with some blurred out (like on Cops) friend. We look at the menu. It’s a ribs type eatery. A chain smoking waitress comes by and I point to an item. Everything sounds 50-feet underwater. I’m ushered to the backroom: a slaughterhouse floor with a broiling fire pit that looks like an open elevator. The pig I picked slides towards me on a hook. I slide it through the flame until golden. I’m told to slide it along and the waitress hands me a carving saw. Apparently this restaurant is a You-Cook-You-Eat sort of place. So, I slice the thing up. The guts weren’t taken out first, so they’re splattering on the floor or splashing off as I saw through them. An eyeball hits the ground and rolls into the blood trough. A fat guy with no shirt slaps the cuttings all on a plate, weighs it on a scale, cling wraps it, and gives it to me to take home.

I wake up.

2. The Bad Student

This one stems from my panic that my final grade wasn’t entered into the school’s database. For background, I had an assignment where I was to devise a program for a certain local anti-poverty group and actually submit the proposal to them. More background, I am incredibly self-conscious about things I’ve written for people’s approval.

I’m at home. A knock on the door. I answer. It’s people from the anti-poverty group. They’re super nice and I invite them in. We have tea and biscuits. How nice. Then they open up a briefcase, laptop, screen and Powerpoint slide presentation. They proceed to absolutely rip my proposal apart. Showing how idiotic it would be for them to start a website (something I proposed) or even use social marketing (another proposal). Then they started showing me why I’m the worst person to come up with ideas because I’m totally out of touch with society and I totally overshoot my target and I totally can’t even type a sentence without some kind of grammatical error. They tell me I should never have been born. They actually prove it to me. Then they slide me something to allow me to put myself out of the world’s misery; a taser. Not even a gun.

I wake up.

Dreams 3 through 5 next post…

Reiki. Not the poster for the next X-Men movie.

Yesterday, I had reiki. Or… I had reiki done. Or is it, I did reiki? Maybe it’s, I was reikied.

Either way, reiki is not a new agey thing to dismiss. There’s a stigma that comes with doing these things. I’m happy to say that reiki did not make me go out and buy a crystal amethyst necklace or gain a sudden concern for the alignment of my chakras and angels.

What it did do was make me so relaxed and grounded that I felt like a baby at nap time, mouth dribble included.

But, what the heck is reiki, you ask? I know, that baby description sounds way better than meditations and mantras.

My mom’s boyfriend’s mom, Gabriel, was my practitioner. That’s not even the right word. She’s at the level where she can say she’s my reiki master. No. Big. Deal.

(Isn’t Gabriel the perfect name for this sort of thing?)

Reiki is a Japanese spiritual technique that uses palm healing. So, for an hour, Gabriel would place her hands on or above the different parts of my body to restore the “healing energy” we all have. Throughout the day of our hectic, techie lives, our energy is usually overrun by the “Fight-or-Flight energy”. You want better “healing energy”. Take note of that.

I always wondered if my bipolar chemical imbalance causes my energy to do something crazy. Or if the meds do it. I sometimes hope to be different from others that way. Not in a “I hope I have superhero powers” sort of thing… well, okay yeah, that sort of thing. At least something that makes a reiki master surprised.

With a little bit of Sounds from the First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest, Gabriel cupped her hands around my head over my ears. In her palms, my mind was bouncing around, like when a kid throws a bouncy ball at a wall inside the house and watch it ricochet throughout the kitchen and livingroom. Her hands were the kitchen and livingroom. It wasn’t Parkinsons I had, but the effects of a high pace culture.

Though her hands were cool as they moved on to my arms, back and legs, I felt an emanating heat between her hands and my body, proving to me that energy is there and can be manipulated. Eventually, all of the barely contained Fight-or-Flight energy was dissipated and I felt like I had a clearer sense of how my body and mind felt. If this isn’t impressive, you, my friend, are a cardboard box.

Mythbusting…

-Reiki will not solve your existential crises or stop the HST, but it will put you in a space where you’re better protected from the stress of the day. REIKI MAKES LIFE CHILLAXABLE.

I used to meditate more regularly than a smoking habit, but stopped a year ago. For bipolar, for anything, meditation is amazing if you can stick with it. Take 15-20 minutes before bed or when you wake up, focus on deep breathing, focus on the sound of it and try to keep thinking of nothing. Do that. Rinse and repeat.

But, for the last year, all that stress from my last university year and cancer jacked up my adrenaline so high that the only way to sleep was to knock myself out with glorious Seroquel (cough*sarcasm). Now that I’ve been held like a baby by an energy healin’ reiki master, I can do away with the sleep meds and put my mind on the Slumberland Express with new agey supermight.

I did find out something I didn’t know about myself: I have “smooth energy”. I’m special after all, and all I had to be is me.

Beware 'the Arts' Cuts.

I had to write an opinion piece (like you see in newspapers) for my last class. So, in my traditional crazy fashion, I took Satan’s side against everyone rallying against arts cuts. Yes, I may lose all my friends. I may even lose myself. But, to hell with it. Sometimes you gotta let that monster breathe.

Why Save the Arts?

Arts funding was cut. Yes, it’s truly a horrible act committed by the federal government. Arts funding, murdered and the finance minister has blood on his hands.

Who will save us? Margaret Atwood pulled up her superhero tights and leapt to ‘the arts’ defence in a Globe and Mail manifesto. “There’s more to the arts than a bunch of rich people at galas whining about their grants,” she says. Harper, Atwood continues, “Told us that some group called ‘ordinary people’ didn’t care about something called ‘the arts.’”

Well, maybe they don’t. And why should they care when Canada’s arts heroine has to (more…)

gross. I hope they make patches for this.

There’s no other way to say it: I dropped my Blackberry in the toilet.

I told most people I dropped it in the sink when I was doing the dishes. I can’t believe they fell for that. How do you pull out a cell phone when you’re doing the dishes unless you’re an employee of Cirque du Soleil?

This lie made me feel more guilty, so I came clean. What really happened was that I went to use the public washroom at school. Hung up my bag in the stall, pulled my pants down and sat. My Blackberry ba-dinged. A text message! I pulled my phone out of my pants that were around my ankles, and before I did any business (no 2, not even a 1) my phone slipped from my hands. A little juggling act later and splash, right between my legs.

Of course, in my idiocy, I jumped up, swore at myself and thrust my hand (more…)

March was apparently This Side of West Month. The month where all my attention went to creating a book, the best damn literary journal your $12.95 can buy (shameless “I made this website, too” plug: thissideofwest.uvic.ca).

So, now I’ve hit the Post-Project Blues and feel sorry for everyone that had to put up with my Crackberry-ing.

I’m now feeling like a paranoid Kurt Cobain. From constant worrying that a lump in my throat might be cancer (from what little I’ve smoked) to preemptively hating how I appear to people before I talk to them to loathing how I’m too tired to create.

The Nirvana No-No’s.

Never let this much homework pile up, extensions and all. When life goes so good, these are the times I forget about.

I just want to play Scrabble with my girlfriend.

I’m selfish. I’m complaining. I know you understand.

Next post… how I dropped my Blackberry in the toilet and didn’t lose my world.