Rain

This time last year, I was living in London, in a little apartment in Islington with two students from Winnipeg. I wasn't a student, and I worked mainly night shifts at the pub. I didn't see either of them very often. That suited me fine. Why would I come to London to spend all my time with Canadians? I wanted to experience a Londoner's London. I wanted to mingle. I had been cultivating a London accent, which I thought was quite good until the girls at the pub told me that it sounded ridiculous. I dropped the accent after that.

Most days I would go to the Angel's Deli downstairs for a coffee and one of the day-old muffins, which were half-price. The owner's name was actually Angelo, but the sign painter was, according to Angelo, a "Damn foreign Turk." Angelo says that he keeps meaning to change the sign, but he doesn't want to spend the money.  I think he's come to like being called Angel. His son was at the counter most of the time. I think his name was Nardo, but it may just have been short for Bernardo. We never did become great friends.

I always carried a little notebook with me in case a phrase caught my eye or a situation struck me as particularly ripe. I thought of myself as a writer, but to be a writer, one has to write, and my notebook was filled mainly with doodles. Angel's  I was just finishing a rather elaborate ink drawing of Toucan Sam when I realized the rain had started. Huge drops landing with distinguishable pops pummeled the pavement, and gusting winds changed the direction of the rain alternately horizontal and vertical. Suddenly, there was no one in the street. The boy behind the counter was staring out the window as though the apocalypse was upon Cross Street, clicking his tongue and letting out a whistle.

I went back to putting the finishing touches on Toucan Sam, when I heard the boy behind the bar take a quick breath and swear in Italian. When I looked up, he was craning his neck to see something apparently just out of his line of sight. I got up and stuffed my notebook in my pocket.

"What happened?" I asked him.

"I just saw this bloody kid almost get killed on his bike," he answered, nodding towards a boy who was struggling to get up under the weight of a huge waterlogged knapsack. His bike was wedged between a Transit van with its 4-way flashers on and the edge of the sidewalk. The van's passenger's head poked out of the window and asked something. The kid didn't seem to notice. He was shaky on his feet

Lucid Hibernation

Sparse and stark is life alone, doubly so in winter.
And apartments take on haunting, lonely, loathsome coldness when the one colour outside is white
and the one sound heard is car tires crunching through the white snowy roads
and the one smell smelled is the gas from a burnt out pilot light.

And the thoughts inevitably thought are those of past and failure.
The two collide,
often violently,
and the wreckage spills
to every corner of the mind.
Little licks of shameful flame
torch every last ambition that had been laying
dormant.

Apropos of the Squalid Life

I lived by myself in this apartment for about a year before She moved in.

We had been dating, we had been sleeping in the same bed, for a long time, though. I always relished the opportunity to stay at her place. It was always so clean. It was so tidy, the bed always made, never any clothes on the ground, all her DVDs stacked tidily on shelves behind her, well, massive television. She had a balcony that gave onto a tennis club, so the water drop sound of tennis balls was another source of comfort, along with what seemed to be the Friday night Barbara Streisand cover night.

I enjoyed it there. I enjoyed the company of her sister, with whom she lived, and the company of her sister's boyfriend, who moved in afterwards. We laughed and we spoke to each other freely and happily. And far be it from me to say that the sister made a mistake, but she decided it would be a good idea to make an escape down to Venezuela with her man, as he was looking for proper work in the SCUBA diving industry. Her sister was fine; leaving like that is a great adventure, and had I the balls, I'd do the same. However, She had a little less in the way of adventure.

Her options were essentially stay in Montreal, and deal with the language barrier, or go back to your parents' place in Toronto. Oh yes, and I imagine my being in Montreal made a difference. Since, apart from anything else, I had an inexpensive apartment, which was relatively close to her old apartment and her places of employment, and damned close to everything you would need. Namely, the liquor store. Which, in retrospect, may partly have been the cause of her taking on a half-bottle-a-night habit. Which was really not so bad, but helped me to downplay my bottle-and-a-half-a-night-plus-whatever-I-could-afford-from the liquor-store habit.

I imagine you can guess that she did stay in Montreal, with a moving day fit for the best of them. I had to get rid of my couches, which were brown leather abominations, 2 and 3 seaters with footrests so loose that they would spring out at you as soon as a sneeze rang out. Eventually, though, the suede sectional we had bought together was all in, and both my bed and my couch were gone.

Which makes this next part a touch more interesting.

She left.

Well, she was leaving, unless I wouldn't mind having her as a roommate.

Well, she was going to leave, but she hadn't found a place, would I mind helping the woman I still loved find a place?

Oh, look at that, there's an apartment just three blocks away!

Oh, would you look at that, she left her Facebook profile on on my computer.

Well certainly this Favid Deddock couldn't be big enough of an asshole to sleep with her in the back of his tour van!

Well certainly she wouldn't make plans to see him while we were still living together?

It was at this point in my reasoning that I was struck with the idea of finishing her packing, and conveniently placing her things quite close to the door. On the other side of it.

I didn't speak to her for 2 days following that, except for a terse message explaining why I was being such a prick.

And then we started talking again. There was suddenly a lot to say, and a lot to be interested by. We talked about work and interests and problems in our relationship. Intermittently, I had the feeling of throwing the fodder of emotion into a fruitless, self-extinguishing fire. So I (rather suddenly) concluded that it would be better for both parties to stop being succubi to each other.

And that's about when the squalor started. While we were speaking, I was unstoppably tidy, I was annoyingly clean and exercised, stayed away from alcohol for the most part. I was reformed.

But fuck did it ever go wrong after that.

3 months. I calculated it. 3 months of not doing dishes or laundry or dusting or sweeping of wiping or mopping.It was bad, but it didn't seem that bad: a little slump, a small misstep. Until I went to see my friend D, whose apartment is always spotless, and his girlfriend constantly cleaning. And I passed out there after a few drinks. I should say that I was also on blood thinners, which seem to work with alcohol as a very effective soporific. But I passed out. At 9 O'Clock. I woke up in the morning feeling very woozy. I made it home via metro, though, and dropped into the depanneur to buy a can of chicken soup. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I get home and seemingly for the first time, I see the dirt and shameful conditions I've been living in: the counters are covered with old tomato sauce, bread crumbs, pieces of cookies and all the garbage that didn't fit into the bin. .The living room, which I never go into usually, is littered with paper bags and Styrofoam containers from delivery food. The bedroom is covered in clothes, dirty and clean. My office is no longer an office but a deeply filthy guest room wherein I was the guest. I had been sleeping on that couch, which, although it was a hide-a-bed, I had slept on as a slightly-smaller-than-me couch, flinging the aforementioned delivery food containers across the the room at the office chair.

I heated the soup by rinsing a small pot that had been holding a mushroom soup for long enough that it had turned rancid, then transferred it to my last clean bowl and ate. I took it to the living room, decided I was too hung over to watch anything. As a great surprise to me, I started sobbing, and all I could think of was: "I'm living in squalor. This is squalor. Squalor is the only thing I can do, and truly the only thing I can do."

And for three days after that, of which the details I will contain, I was quite sick. By the third day, I was mobile enough to clean the floor next to my bed of the vomit which I had expelled.

It was a great week.

The next day (as in the day after I cleaned the vomit I deposited on my own floor) I cleaned my apartment mercilessly. And thus was halted, seemingly, the squalor which has prompted this blog.

Still sick, I washed all the dishes, wiped all the surfaces, cleaned the toilet (which gets extremely dirty when you're bulimic) as well as the sink, then filled two garbage bags with my laundry.

Afterwards, four of those same garbage bags were used to cleanse my apartment of both recycling and garbage. Many trips later, after lemon-scented and honestly entirely too efficient all-purpose cleaner, all was well.

And then for 3 days I cleaned regularly enough that it seemed permanent. Why do they not tell you that it is never permanent? It's always squalor, just held at bay.

That Inevitable Crisis

So far, in my rather short history of often disappointing romantic endeavors, I've found one aspect of ending relationships (among many) to be constant. Some days, weeks, or months following a relationship shifting from romantic to decidedly hostile, there will inevitably occur one or more crises for one or more parties involved, causing a rethinking of one's feelings towards the other person.

Now, I'm not implying that these crises are caused by the relationship. Far from it. In fact, if the problem had arisen from one's ex-lover, the problem I am about to describe would be easy to solve: simply blame the other party and redirect your frustration towards the idiot who is, even beyond the romantic grave, tampering with your life. These problems must be unrelated to the relationship. They must be independent of the ex-lover. They must be a health problem, (barring STI's, of course,) they must be a pet dog being run over by a neighbor's Toyota Yaris, they must be a family falling-out over Thanksgiving holidays, culminating in a short but heated argument between Aunt Holly and your dad Phil about why they didn't choose her as a Godparent, followed immediately by her saying that she never wanted to be your stupid Godparent anyhow. In short, they must be impossible to blame on the ex-partner. Because, let's look it in the face, if I had any reason to blame an ex for anything, I would.

But these crises are crucial. These crises are genesis for a true reevaluation of oneself following a rupture of romance. They are what separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and the foolhardy from the phlegmatic.

Why do I say this? Because I've often thought of myself as a very phlegmatic sort of man. I am generally calm and collected and I like to think that I don't rush in where angels fear to tread.


But god damn do I ever disappoint myself in times of crisis.

At the first sign of anything in my personal life going wrong, I buckle under the (all too commonly nonexistent) pressure of the issue and revert to a former state of using a lover as a crutch. I won't speak to my sister, father, mother, and friends about the trepidation that overcomes me, but I am absolutely loose-lipped to women who have betrayed my confidence or whose confidence I've betrayed. I favor a person I've wronged and pushed away to one I've wronged and has stayed with me. There have been moments when I reject my sister's calls when I know all she cares about is my well-being, immediately after which I call a girl who lied and cheated, and didn't bat an eye before discarding me. It is an inner struggle, which I lose all too often. But sometimes I win. Sometimes I keep my composure long enough to realize what and whom I really want in my life.

And to my credit (or to others' discredit) I'm not the only one to do this. I'm also the recipient of these phone calls and sideways attempts at redemption. "My brother is a delinquent, he's tearing my family apart" or "my dog just had kidney failure, she can't use her hind legs," or even "my heating is off, and my landlord won't turn it back on until I pay for rent." These are all legitimate problems, totally impossible to be connected to me, and yet why, why am I the one to receive phone calls and e-mails about them?

I put forward this theory: simple addiction, coupled with self-destructive tendencies and/or a skewing of reality.

The causes of the situations which throw us back into the reluctant arms (more realistically, ears) of our former sweethearts would have occurred without them. However, this article in Psychology Today states that we are all addicts, to some degree, immediately following a breakup. When we are faced with crises within relationships, (of course, I can only speak from personal and anecdotal evidence,) we are rewarded with caresses, comforting phrases and a chance at good, old-fashioned, mind-relieving sex.

Meanwhile, this doesn't account for the crises. Why does it seem that these earth-shaking crises are always put to us fairly soon after a break-up? According to my theory, there are two main reasons:

1. Self-destructive behaviour: With regards to health problems and interpersonal problems, the person whose problem it is is often to blame. The same idea is applicable to personal financial problems and, to some extent, psychological problems.

2. Skewed interpretation of reality: This goes hand in hand with the idea of addiction. An addict of heavy painkillers will often overstate a minor injury to, say, a leg, in order to justify their need for hardcore opiates. Parallel to that is the idea of recent bachelors overstating (often to themselves) the magnitude of their perceived emergency.

Indeed, I did say that the reaction to these situations defines the man, woman, and fool. And I maintain that. I think that in a perfect world, people could disassociate themselves from past lovers and that esteem of one's own control over one's life would be unaffected by those that have whored around.


But god damn do I ever disappoint myself in times of crisis.