A Broken Crow

to amy for writing offensive stuff on my back. to iain and mike for caper stories. to chris for all the hugs and for huffing over the cherry on the ground. to katie for the compost pile and the shotguns and almost making me cry. to kaitlin for fluffy puffy and being so awesome. to ian for coming in loaded, humping everything in sight and promptly passing out on the couch. to the girls for girly talk on matt's bed (foetus sounds for bianca). to the boys for throwing me a great party. three words: you guys rock.

that was a mighty fine birthday.

(also: to jon pye who was not there and was missed, i hummed a little "dinner and we're loaded" in your honor.)

swoon.

this early, i feel like i've been turned inside out. i suppose it is a rather contemplative experience, getting up on one's birthday at dawn to spend all morning alone working. maybe.

come visit me at work today.
birthday visits would be awesome.
hugs too. awesome.

i love the way you fit. everything. the idea of you coming to my work dressed as a present makes me giggle right down to my knees even if you would never really do it.
the new duck has met scrubby. i think they can be friends.

(to the girls)i'm stoked for tomorrow night. drinks and laughs. zany schemes and the rita pictures. we have to creep around the south end and find the perfect lawn ornament to kidnap. total stealth with fatty and co. total stealth.

melissa, i hope you can make it. it won't be the same without you.

with the blue over the glass and you sleeping softly behind me, nothing is the same. everything is subdued and perfect for this time of the morning.

i work at the killam second cup from 11 to 2. then what?

if you could construct your world with words, would you scream "orange!" at the sky? would you whisper the words "light" and "soft" and "serene"? would you scream "dramatic" and fall down onto your face demanding "warmth" and "comfort" from the earth?

if you could construct yourself with words, would you dangle juicy metaphors from your ears? would you wear a shirt that said "quirky" or "eclectic", all the while muttering "perfectperfectperfect" under your breath? could you even resist?

would you rename yourself "roxy"?

(yeah. totally a joke. and i totally won. word.)

what the hell have we be doing all these years if that's how you really felt?
you two-faced pack of bitches. self-righteous and vicious.
don't you dare pretend to understand me when everything is always about you.
i just love the way you laugh at all the things that have hurt me.
(and by the way) i know that i'm "the fat one", but you crossed the fucking line.
fuck this. i'm hanging out with guys from now on.

holy tunderin' christ.
lord dyin' buddy.
jesus mary 'n' joseph.
fuckin' jesus h christ.

i'm writing my last exam in a matter of hours.

(can i get a 'hell yes'?)

i wake up. morning. the sunshine is a brick in my face, pounding.
sleep feels numb so i stay there until the afternoon.
outside. in the rain. my body is warm and my fingers are cold.
the air smells sweet. almost rancid. like old fruit and death.
i spend the afternoon tracing my fingers around the ridges of dusty records.
oscar peterson. cool jazz. paul bley. experimental multiphonics.
ad lib moriava. prsi dest. czech folk cimbalon and 5/4 jazz piano. cool shit.
i keep my forehead against the wood grain and breathe slowly.
i can smell the varnish and see nothing.
at the coburg i sit with matt. we share a tuna melt and some carrot cake.
he wins many points in a short time span. disgusting.
i watch the milk swirl in my coffee and he listens to everything i have to say.
katie arrives and neither of us will eat the pill/candy/mint he found.
i knock the cups into him and he falls over. hilarious.
we walk in the rain and spend the early evening baking cookies.

where is ian? i have his cookies.

jon pye rocks.
and will be missed.
(i'll mail you the demo of our eighties cover band and a g-lock t-shirt)

xoxoxo

i guess i want you to know that i love you. (all of you.)
but i don't understand you.
or why you were so angry.
i don't know what happened last night.

i would never intentionally belittle you.
and i'm sorry if my joking around rubbed you the wrong way. i really am.
it breaks my heart, what you said.
you pushed a rusty blade into my ribcage.
twisted and sharp.

yeah.
i guess i just want you to know that i love you.
but maybe i'm not coming over anymore.
and maybe that's what you wanted. so who cares.

remember the way this felt, this time, last year? there was so much expectancy. we had huge plans and not enough money. never enough money. it's hard to believe that the train trip across the country was an entire year ago. it attached so much to my idea of summer, it's as though i'm constantly forgetting something now.

i want to have big plans.
i want risk everything. (do you remember, i barely knew you?)

last night i fell asleep thinking about the trip. about that diagonal slice of sunlight that cut across your face while you read the same magazine for the tenth time. i thought about smoking weed behind shrubbery and sizing up the via rail staff in terms of who might be a likely enemy to our debaucherous behaviour. i thought about 90 point words in scrabble and the dick deck. 52 pictures of naked cock on guys with mullets. no one could possibly find that hot, but after a few provinces you forget that they're even there. i thought about the guy with the giant willie nelson belt buckle, the gigantism lady, the amish family and the super-gay cowboy. we almost got murdered the night of the hockey game by some crazed junkie, but saint iago (?) would have surely protected us if we gave him some cocaine. i thought about robert, our nose-bleeding, pill-popping roommate. and squeegee. (i so wish we knew his real name.)

if i could do anything right now, i would walk down yonge street with you. we could sit on the deck of the hotbox cafe and marvel at the old men and dudes in business suits sparking up joints.
i would climb a mountain in kamloops at four in the morning, on mushrooms.
i would bang my beer bottle onto the table at the cock and bull.

i would sit next to you and watch the flat stretch of prairies slowly chug by the train window. endless and perfect.

i want to get the fuck out of here.
let's go somewhere.
let's get the fuck out of here.

i love those movies.

who wants to come visit me at work today?

the answer is obviously you. and you. (and you.)

(there will be serious per-co-la-tion in the works.)

this is serious deja vu.
like dancing on those sheets of paper with all the steps drawn for you.
some people have a crisis mid-life.
i have one mid-season.
and i guess i'd be a little more concerned if this didn't seem to happen every spring.

(make me feel special)

is it so wrong to be currently obsessed with the Back To The Future movies?
is it so wrong to think that 1985 michael j. fox is slightly adorable?
is it so wrong to shudder at the thought of doing my masters?
is it so wrong to want licorice for breakfast on a regular basis?
is it so wrong to feel more lonely the more time i spend with you?

(i plan to finish reading my book underneath my desk, because when i feel this way i seek confined spaces)

is it so wrong to constantly worry that something terrible is about to happen?
is it so wrong to sit up at night surfing the internet for sources on ecstacy. absinthe. opium. laudenum.

(someone should take charge of this. someone should call. knock on my door. take me somewhere else. make me laugh.)

i almost visited two different people today. almost. but then i felt stupid. so unbelievably stupid. i walked around the city by myself and touched the fabrics of all the clothes i can't afford. i let my fingertips glide over the fibres while i stared purposefully at my shoes. i sat in the paperchase and watched a boy watching the street below over the top of my book. he kept pulling on the hair behind his left ear and crinkling his nose at the passerbys. he'd smirk at them, as if they were walking jokes and he had the punchline tucked in his breast pocket. i ran into my mother and let her buy me a few beer. i went to the nscad grad student show. i ran my hands over the sculptures and textiles. cool and smooth.

(is it so so so wrong?)

i'm excited for patios and hot pavement on bare feet. pitchers in the afternoon, barbeques and camping. shopping for the perfect pair of sunglasses that i will never wear and stealing the fan from the living room because you live in a storage closet without a window and it gets damn hot in there.

let's get coffees and sit on the end of a pier until three in the morning.

let's go swimming and get a sunburn.

(we've seen this country, so now where do you wanna go?)

ever wake up hungover? you walk upstairs. slowly. you want breakfast, just some yogurt. but when you walk into the kitchen all you see is a picture of yourself eating the very breakfast you desire taped to the fridge. whaaa...?

this is bianca's doing.

my mom bought the photos of me and ian.

fuck. i look stoned as hell in those pictures.

i'm going to work now.

ugh.

almost time. waiting game sucks. last minute cramming is proving futile. the words are empty symbols scrawled in a hand that no longer resembles my own. what did i mean? was i drunk? i read it out loud and it's a language foreign to my ears. just noise. the second hand moves with the sound of a pistol. fuck. i hate this. i spend days preparing for an exam, only to convince myself that i really know nothing at all in the last few minutes before i leave the house. this is self-destruction. willed insanity. there is nothing i can do but write the damn thing and favour some of the voices in my head over others.

who is coming out tonight?
word.

who would like to shoot me in the face?

why is it that when i'm upset and want to talk about something, you can only respond by being mean?

your voice gets cold. short. ugly.

and it always makes me cry when i hang up the phone.

i sat up all night writing my last paper and i heard nothing.
i didn't hear the glass break and shatter all over the parking lot.
i didn't hear the forced entry of the window right next to mine.
i just kept writing my paper like everything was the same.
how easily a crime can be committed here.

(with the splotched, blue material over the window, it's like it isn't day at all)

and i want it all back, you know.
the ease. the comfort.
falling asleep in the chairs outside your door.
because there are no other chairs. really.
and no one else would laugh at the note i left the next morning.

(there won't always be a space for you on the blank pages. eventually they will all fill up on their own. random jargon. white noise.)

morning's here are like being locked in a dark room.
a dark room.
i get up and i can't feel the tips of my fingers.
put on the music.
sway.
nothing will ever change.
i'll wash all their dishes and walk home by myself.
i'll go to the gym, trying to attain a standard that isn't even my own.
(it's yours and you know it)
nothing will ever change.
i'll seriously consider a road trip where i may or may not be welcome.
i'll plan a whole novel with a viable soundtrack in my head and then forget every word and every note the second i fall asleep.
in the room with no windows.
and no light.
put on the music.
put on the music.
put on the music.
help me get away from myself.

today is so beautiful. the sun. the warmth. my brain feels drunk and content.

(yes. retreat my sometimes friend. retreat as fast as you can.)

i had fun last night. did you guys know that you are my favorite people? it's true. even iain, who can only address me in snarkiness. (i'm not sorry for being so drunk that i had to link arms with you. i'm just sorry i didn't try to make you skip with me.)

let's do something outdoors.

okay. so. okay. so.

i am seriously suffering from what has been referred to as "last paper syndrome".

i cannot make myself write this sonofabitch.

on the plus side: I have gotten far enough to be finished with the math part...for the most part. thank fuck. (tom rockett, i will never understand you. you are a scientific oddity with nipple piercings and a penchant for narcissism. still, you must be damn smart.)

i'm going to eat microwaved popcorn for supper. word.

who wants to have fun this weekend? the answer is you. (and you.)

It was no surprise that the first party I hosted on my own did not go well. I was assigned to the Venus Room. When I learned this I remember immediately thinking about how funny it would be if I “accidentally” invited the birthday child and all his or her friends to meet me in the Penis Room. This momentary musing was my first mistake, because when it came time to make the announcement, this was exactly what I said. Things only went downhill from there.

When I went to the kitchen to pick up the food order, I was greeted with a nasty surprise. I checked the slip on the wall. Nine kids, nine hotdogs. Easy. I started looking around for them, but they didn’t seem to be anywhere. After a few minutes of futilely searching without turning up any hotdogs, I began to worry that there had been some terrible mistake. I appealed to Jacob, the man-mountain of a chef with a propensity for gothic fashion.

“Hey, man. Where are my dogs?”

“You tell me.” His voice was flat and emotionless. He didn’t look at me.

“What do you mean?” My face started to feel hot and all over my arms and neck I felt a prickling sensation.

“You get them off the grill yourself. You’re capable of that aren’t you?” Jacob grunted and waggled his septum piercing at me in what I could only assume was annoyance.

“Oh….Thanks.”

By some stroke of luck, when I walked behind the front counter of the snack bar, there were exactly nine hotdogs turning slowly and greasily on the rollers. I decided to pile them onto a plate first and then go look for buns, just to ensure that my hotdogs weren’t sold out from under me. I thought this was pretty clever of me and was in the process of mentally patting my own back when I discovered that all of the buns were still frozen. I didn’t bother asking Jacob if there were any other buns, since I was pretty sure then that thawing out the buns had been my responsibility as well. I began to frantically pile the frosty, hard buns into the one microwave. I stacked a plate three levels high with them and put them on defrost for two minutes. During these two minutes, I got the birthday cake and the four pitchers of ambiguous red juice that the party had requested. The microwave dinged triumphantly just as I was setting the last jug onto the cart and I began feeling better. This feeling, of course, did not last. As I started pulling the defrosted buns out of the microwave, I realized that I probably shouldn’t have put them all in at once, piled on top of each other. The buns were too soft, soggy and crumbling in my hands. I wanted to thaw new buns but there was no time. The birthday child would have certainly gathered up all of his or her friends to meet me in the Penis Room by now. They would have to do.
I turned to my platter of rapidly cooling hotdogs. But oh. Oh god. Not only were they completely cold, but also they no longer even resembled the plump, juicy dogs I had taken off the rollers. In the time it had taken me to destroy the buns, the dogs had deflated and puckered into a plateful of little pruned fingers. As a last resort, I turned to Jacob for help and found him quietly and viciously hacking away at a piece of meat with an enormous cleaver. His tattooed fingers were spattered with blood and bits of animal flesh. I decided to leave him alone. I jammed the shrunken dogs into damp, mushy buns and rushed the cart down towards the party room.

Wheeling my cart into the room, the first thing I was greeted with was the cold stare of a disgruntled mother. She was short and lean, with fake nails, black lip liner and a bad bleach-job. One of those really stringy bitches whose sallow, smoker cheeks had already begun to cave in like yellow wax. Her lined mouth was pursed and seething with rage. I couldn’t really blame her at this point. Not only was I late starting, but also I was serving up the most unappetizing platter of cold, shriveled wieners that anyone could ever imagine. The fact that I had mistakenly referenced the male genitalia in my birthday announcement, and that all the children were exclaiming with delight The Penis Room! The Penis Room! We’re in the Penis Room! was doing nothing to help my situation.

I placed a withered tube of meat on each plate and watched in awe as they were gobbled down. I had underestimated the masking powers of ketchup. Then again, these kids were about eight, so they probably ate dirt and crayons on a regular basis. Before the sog-dogs were fully consumed, I ran out of juice and had to go back to the kitchen and get some more. It was because of this one little girl. She was enormously fleshy, her round belly protruding out from under a too-small sweater. Her hair was long and wavy, plastered down to her forehead with the sweat from running and climbing and sliding around in the play structure. She smelled strange, like hamsters and old milk. She sat at one end of the table and all the other kids had inched as far away from her has they possibly could. I could tell she was a pity-invite. An obnoxious neighbor or cousin that Ol’ Stringy forced them all to play with. She kept asking me for more juice, over and over again. It was incredible and disgusting. Every time I filled her glass, I watched her greedily swallow it down as quickly as she could. Little, red streams dribbled out of the corners of her mouth and formed sticky pools in the folds of her flabby neck. She finished off an entire pitcher by herself and silently held her cup out for more. I was astounded. When I returned with more juice, Ol’ Stringy was waiting outside of the room for me.

“So, is this what I paid for?” Her voice was sharp and quiet.

“Excuse me?”

“Cold hotdogs and a host with a potty mouth but no personality? Huh? You’ve barely said two words to Andy.”

“Who’s Andy?” I didn’t know what the fuck this woman was talking about, but I started to get a feeling in my stomach like I was on a sinking ship and there was no way off.

“Who’s Andy!?” Her voice began growing in decibels with every word. “He’s the fucking birthday boy, that’s who!! How fucking stupid are you!?”

Now, there are a lot of abuses I will take with a smile. Being called stupid, unfortunately for Stringy, is not one of them. I smiled a too-wide smile, bearing all of my teeth in a way that was disturbing. “Now who has a potty mouth?” I said sweetly as I pushed past her and walked back into the room.

There is no other word to describe the actions I took next other than vengeance. I grabbed a handful of candles from the cupboard and jammed them all together in the center of the cake, ruining the sugar-sprayed, smiling face of Cosmos. When I lit one candle, all the others quickly ignited, creating a huge, flaming torch. I started to laugh, loudly and heartily, turning around to a room full of wide-eyed children. Ol’ Stringy looked stunned and frightened, her mouth moving up and down slowly and mechanically, as though she were chewing on something that had suddenly turned rotten. I began singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in a snarling, aggressive voice. Only the little fat girl in the too-tight sweater joined me, noticing nothing amiss. She had her shining eyes fixed on the cake and the cake alone. The song ended and I dropped the cake in front of the boy called Andy, who uselessly tried to blow out the blazing mass with his eight-year-old lungs. Ol’ Stringy found her voice again and had just started screaming when something silenced her.

It was the little fat girl. She had begun to vomit. It happened in slow motion. I saw her chubby hands float up to her mouth. Her spine curved with nausea and her head sunk down into her thick neck before the sheer force of it lurched her body forward. And then everything sped up to a ridiculous speed and the vomit was rushing out of the little fat girl in a thick, red torrent. It sprayed through her fingers in all directions and liberally covered the children who had the misfortune of sitting closest to her. It put out the candles on the birthday cake. It pooled around the pile of presents in the corner. It erupted from her like a volcano, spilling sticky-sweet, sour smelling lava, and just when it seemed like it was over, it started up again with a force that could propel a small boat. Which was exactly what I wished I had, since the entire party room floor had been turned into a deep, red sea with little bits of floating bread and hotdog. The sheer volume of liquid that came from this girl was astronomical, defying everything I thought I knew about physics, which I’ll admit, wasn’t much. At this point, the children had leapt up from the table and were cowering in a group by the door, screaming and pointing and laughing. I took my gaze off the girl long enough to see Ol’ Stringy ushering them all outside, leaving me there to deal with the sick girl and the room that was literally coated from corner to corner in regurgitated fruit juice. Stringy gave me one, last, victorious glance before letting the door swing shut after her. She was getting her money’s worth now.

I closed my eyes and sighed deeply, hoping that when I opened them I would be somewhere else. Anywhere else. I opened my eyes only to find a grim, vomit-spattered reality, and that the little fat girl had started to laugh. It started as a giggle and grew to hysteria. She laughed and laughed until she was bouncing up and down, her chubby cheeks jiggling in maniacal glee. The sheer force of the laughter made her throw up again.

the view out of my window is limited. smudged with dirt and strangely-angled. i can see into the window across the lot. the orange ceiling light and tattered curtains. the cream coloured paint is worn, peeling in moist skin-heavy flaps.

they push their carts past and head for the wooden recycling bin behind the building. i can hear their cans rattling. she always laughs and i wonder if she has ever noticed me sitting here, peering through my designated square of sight.

the pope is dead and i am unfeeling towards it.

it can't be helped.