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Showing posts from 2018

sleeping in your car (quiet piano) / / cigar-tin stories one hundred three

It's 6:02 in the morning. Lately I've been getting up at 5. I used to get up at 5:30, but then I thought,  Well, I'm getting up this early anyway, why don't I push it a bit to get more done? It's not like I'm here for my looks.    In how many ways do you flinch when someone starts telling you how tired they are? Or how busy? At this point I think most people avoid even saying it. I think  distracted  or  disjointed  or  slightly unraveled  would be more accurate. I am most tired when I wake up. Yawning and yawning. There's two other points in the day –– early afternoon and just after supper –– which might as well be filled with smoke bombs for all the seeing and thinking that gets done.   I used to work with a guy who would go out to his car to have a nap in the backseat over lunch. This worked not only because he was very tired but also because he was a small guy. Could just curl up. I think he packed a blanket. Sometimes he would go to the gy

how to be organized in one thousand easy steps / / cigar-tin stories one hundred two

We got some new dishes on the weekend. I had resisted this, in a low-key, subtle way, for as long as possible, but for C a visit to Ottawa is often like a visit to Chernobyl, only with IKEA contagion instead of radiation sickness. Sure enough, a full-on pandemic of antagonized reorganizing ensued, meaning things in front of things, things on top of things, an almost Soviet enforcement of category that does not respect the practical limitations of drawer size, cupboard size or any laws of physics, and that treats anything that does not look like something else (matchy-matchy!) as something heretical, and any odds and ends are immediately judged guilty regardless of their usefulness, and so marked for destruction (read: the garbage). And of course anything from my former lives that has somehow survived to this point (and believe me, there isn’t much) will now be purged, finally, at last, thank God. I could not watch it while it was all happening last night, but I knew what was wai

read this for instant riches / / cigar-tin stories number one hundred

In the New York Times Magazine there is a feature called  This Boy's Life: The enduring spell of S.E. Hinton's 'The Outsiders'––then, now and always . This includes an interview with S.E. Hinton and a fashion spread of bloodless young men in stiff, unforgiving denim and  very  thin moustaches. The clothes have a gritty, flawed, surplus-store quality. Some items include:     • Polo Ralph Lauren jacket, $1,998     • Calvin Klein 205W39NYC sweater, $1,600     • Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello plaid shirt, $890     • Helmut Lang t-shirt, vintage, from the David Casavant Archive,  price on request     Eat your heart out, Ponyboy.     I know you're bitter about everything , C says,  but those are great books, and she wrote them when she was still a girl. Am I bitter about everything? That feels inaccurate, like the German army crossing the Polish frontier being described as a home invasion. 'Bitter' implies a level of understanding and engagem

cigar-tin stories ninety-two / / pictures came and broke your heart

I don’t know what to write about in this week’s Tinyletter. I went to bed early last night because I was tired. A nd I would have slept in, too, but the Siamese started coughing and coughing and I thought,  Well, that’s it . I would write about the provincial election but it’s all  about the parties just trying to scare everyone into not voting for the other guy. The government has been in forever and can hardly keep their eyes open at this point, it’s one little sneaky  scandal after another, but they are very clever, too, and quite slick about things, especially when it comes to planting tiny tiny hopes and fears but in the end they know (and pray, I think) that they are going to crash and burn here. And the party that is supposed to win (by default, it seems) is run by a guy who reminds me of someone who might sell you tons of insurance and then not honour it, saying that it was you who was trying to hit that meteor and maybe the meteor will sue  you  if you’re not careful and y

cuba libre

So: we went to Cuba. It was cold and grey and raining when we left. It was  cold and grey and raining here today, but then the sun wandered around after lunch.  I desperately needed a break. Or at least some kind of line or marker, somewhere to restart from. Sometimes you can just feel yourself drifting along.  And Cuba was filled with: megatonic sun and sudden walls of heat and winds building throughout the day, warm bottle-blue  ocean, foam- crashing waves, endless white beach. And some random things ... • Someone should do a documentary called  Strange Hotel Rooms . Ours at the Montreal airport didn't  appear  strange; in fact, everything looked quite nice (although the view, over acres of parking and wet pavement, threatened to slide from one's field of vision ). But at night the sounds came out, the little  click click clicks  of the heater, the gasping of some unseen fan, disembodied voices above or below or somewhere down the hall, double muffled in cushioned d

getting the cut that suits you

Driving through Queen's campus on a Sunday afternoon and everything reeks with SUV's parading vanity plates emblazoned BUNNY1 and KITSCAR and PRFXN2, it's no-holds-barred parking and everyone chauffeuring like slow-motion heart attacks, all expensive heads lolling out the window and the rearview mirror completely obscured, and suddenly we realize that these are PARENTS picking up their KIDS from university––it's the end of the semester and here's mom with fourteen scarves to frame her blazing face, calling dad an idiot and telling him to circle the block while she stuffs Wilder's or Saxon's or Audrey's dirty stinking clothes into a brand new hamper from THE BAY. It's time to regroup. It's time to go back to Sunnybrook and lick our wounds and talk about failure and plans for the future and money not very well spent after all and things we might do  differently . If only we can try. Don't worry, none of this will last. All falls will be cus

cigar-tin stories number eighty-five // no i don't

This morning an eight year-old told me that I am the worst person in the world who makes her breakfast. Considering that I am the  only  person who makes her breakfast, this is a strange, abbreviated list. Sitting in the dimmed light (“Too bright! I can’t eat when it’s too bright!”), half perched between her chair and the dining room table (despite my repeated requests for sitting flat on her bum, so she won't fall off, which she has done before, several times ), complaining about the blackness of the grapes (“I don’t like black grapes! Stop buying black grapes!”), wearing a sweater that I had told her  not  to wear to bed,  she was merely being consistent with her behaviour over the long weekend—a constant kind of commentary/half-arguing about everything. If I asked her to, say, tidy up the floor of her bedroom and pick up a few things, then she would immediately ask  how many things , and argue that she was  playing with that , and anyway first she has to  go get something fr