the children go wild for maundy thursday, and the ceremonial washing of their feet
My father's apartment building burned down a few days ago. It's insured, but what he'll get out of them is of course up in the air. Also yet to be determined is: cause, rehabilitative possibilities, how much my father cares.
He sounded pretty nonchalant talking about it over the phone.
We got more mileage phone-wise out of talking about the upcoming trip out to Rosebud to see my cousin act in a play. He's doing a series of tv commercials for Shaw cable, they're not awful, we're all chuffed for him.
My cousin gave scripture readings at our grandpa's funeral - at the time I thought he was weirdly over-the-top. Calm down, I remember silently imparting to him - you've already got the gig. Of course I'd gone up and sang some churchy song earlier, I'm sorry I can't remember what it was just now, does that make me a shit? I'm listening to Sly and the Family Stone in my girlfriend's earbuds at this moment so I can't focus on it. It's not important right now. The message I am trying to pass on to you is that sometimes when you try to apply your weaselly little shitheel artistry to the life outside of and wholly unconcerned with you, you yourself don't buy it. It's like writing yourself a cheque for a million dollars. Then you stand in front of all these people you know, people connected with you genetically and united in grief but removed, somehow. Look, I gave myself this: is it good?
The two of us got our family showcase. And I actually connected with my grandma through it - not sure how present she was for that, but her thanks to me are a much better memory than the dying green glow of the pong game they had or the organ they wouldn't let me goof around on or the wheat grinder in the basement I used to make flour with because it was the only fun thing there was to do. Or: collecting eggs from the chicken coop. Staring uncomprehendingly at the Model A which my dad as a teen had oxied the roof off of, for the purpose of home-crafting a convertible (and certainly ruined in the process, to my eyes), bagged and tagged out in the brush behind the fenced yard. Walking out along the muddy footpaths, leading nowhere.
There is a house up the hill from our apartment building that was burned down by some neo-nazi skinheads (important to distinguish what kind of skinheads) that got upset by a communist russian flag that one of the tenants was using to tie his room together. I just took a walk around the neighborhood - the smell of burned wood floats forever in the spring. We like our fires here in E-town. We get boners for flames licking at boards and bricks. Next door and further up the hill a band practises often, sending incorporeal echoes across the street. They sound like they're coming from the ruins.
Entropy. I remember a lot of things about that apartment building of my dad's. Weekends doing work. I remember the old wringer-washer the tenants used to share, the no-way-this-meets-any-fire-code stairwell of incorruptible darkness and wet mustiness, scoring and laying salmon tiles on warped and cracking cement. Tough knotty brushes in the face pushing the lawnmower round the bushes in the yard. Near indigent tenants, some old and gentle, some young and insane.
The building is - was - one of the throwbacks of Camrose, one of the crummy husks in the town's centre left to fend for itself, a sociological butt end, a smithereen already. The grocery store it used to be three blocks from is now called "Liquidation World". Safeway's now sittin' pretty out on the ring road, giving to Wild Rose Country's motoring bon-vivants what goodies the satellite Wendy's/Tim Hortons does not. Opposing apostrophe philosophies! Who will win out?
Camrose has sprawl - it fancies itself a little mini-Edmonton. You just want to slap it in the face. And puke on it.
And now the spate of fires will begin. Won't they? A fire in every hearth.
A dick in every mouth. My parents lived, and taught school, in every goddamn little shit town in this fuckass province and they are all the same. If you've taken a dump in the woods you can set your clock to Czar, Alberta, which is where I nearly would've reached puberty but for the holy hand of God reaching down and making me a eunuch just in time. Why the fuck doesn't anyone ever set Czar on fire?
Oh what will I do when the air bites with snow / and the geese have all flown with the sun / I'll think of the past and my grey and fading dreams / Noone's lonesome, I'm the only one / Noone's lonesome, I'm the only one.
Jim & Jenny and the Pinetops, that. It kind of took over.
He sounded pretty nonchalant talking about it over the phone.
We got more mileage phone-wise out of talking about the upcoming trip out to Rosebud to see my cousin act in a play. He's doing a series of tv commercials for Shaw cable, they're not awful, we're all chuffed for him.
My cousin gave scripture readings at our grandpa's funeral - at the time I thought he was weirdly over-the-top. Calm down, I remember silently imparting to him - you've already got the gig. Of course I'd gone up and sang some churchy song earlier, I'm sorry I can't remember what it was just now, does that make me a shit? I'm listening to Sly and the Family Stone in my girlfriend's earbuds at this moment so I can't focus on it. It's not important right now. The message I am trying to pass on to you is that sometimes when you try to apply your weaselly little shitheel artistry to the life outside of and wholly unconcerned with you, you yourself don't buy it. It's like writing yourself a cheque for a million dollars. Then you stand in front of all these people you know, people connected with you genetically and united in grief but removed, somehow. Look, I gave myself this: is it good?
The two of us got our family showcase. And I actually connected with my grandma through it - not sure how present she was for that, but her thanks to me are a much better memory than the dying green glow of the pong game they had or the organ they wouldn't let me goof around on or the wheat grinder in the basement I used to make flour with because it was the only fun thing there was to do. Or: collecting eggs from the chicken coop. Staring uncomprehendingly at the Model A which my dad as a teen had oxied the roof off of, for the purpose of home-crafting a convertible (and certainly ruined in the process, to my eyes), bagged and tagged out in the brush behind the fenced yard. Walking out along the muddy footpaths, leading nowhere.
There is a house up the hill from our apartment building that was burned down by some neo-nazi skinheads (important to distinguish what kind of skinheads) that got upset by a communist russian flag that one of the tenants was using to tie his room together. I just took a walk around the neighborhood - the smell of burned wood floats forever in the spring. We like our fires here in E-town. We get boners for flames licking at boards and bricks. Next door and further up the hill a band practises often, sending incorporeal echoes across the street. They sound like they're coming from the ruins.
Entropy. I remember a lot of things about that apartment building of my dad's. Weekends doing work. I remember the old wringer-washer the tenants used to share, the no-way-this-meets-any-fire-code stairwell of incorruptible darkness and wet mustiness, scoring and laying salmon tiles on warped and cracking cement. Tough knotty brushes in the face pushing the lawnmower round the bushes in the yard. Near indigent tenants, some old and gentle, some young and insane.
The building is - was - one of the throwbacks of Camrose, one of the crummy husks in the town's centre left to fend for itself, a sociological butt end, a smithereen already. The grocery store it used to be three blocks from is now called "Liquidation World". Safeway's now sittin' pretty out on the ring road, giving to Wild Rose Country's motoring bon-vivants what goodies the satellite Wendy's/Tim Hortons does not. Opposing apostrophe philosophies! Who will win out?
Camrose has sprawl - it fancies itself a little mini-Edmonton. You just want to slap it in the face. And puke on it.
And now the spate of fires will begin. Won't they? A fire in every hearth.
A dick in every mouth. My parents lived, and taught school, in every goddamn little shit town in this fuckass province and they are all the same. If you've taken a dump in the woods you can set your clock to Czar, Alberta, which is where I nearly would've reached puberty but for the holy hand of God reaching down and making me a eunuch just in time. Why the fuck doesn't anyone ever set Czar on fire?
Oh what will I do when the air bites with snow / and the geese have all flown with the sun / I'll think of the past and my grey and fading dreams / Noone's lonesome, I'm the only one / Noone's lonesome, I'm the only one.
Jim & Jenny and the Pinetops, that. It kind of took over.
posted by gibletquesterrs at 10:05 PM
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