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 cushioned and quickly uploaded to Instagram. Who wants to ruin the mood for summer? Don't do it, dad. Don't be an idiot. Again. Everything will be fine! New clothes the cottage the trip to Italy the new computer should we hire a tutor who paid for that tattoo? awaits. What have you been eating? Your skin is terrible. Why don't you get a cut that suits you?

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For some reason I have warm memories of my university days from this time of year. Certainly it resonates, but darkly: all roads narrowing, the end of pretending that certain issues could still be resolved, that certain causes could still be rescued, the desperate blankness of summer employment, the realization like falling lightning that money was needed and had to come from SOMEWHERE. Jesus. And that pale sun emerging like a sick joke, flaring on the survivors staggering down the hill, shining on their no-hope-of-rescue. In fact: no money, no ideas, no exemptions, no anti-depressants, not a single vitamin to be found anywhere in the bloodstream. All those skipped classes, all those cheap noodles, all that ambition left to sour on the counter. 

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Oh God we were so broken and willing to debase ourselves. In fact, an entire tree planting industry was floated on this, carelessly, on the economic model of press-ganging stupid white kids into the incinerator of predatory employment. Work like a back-breaking maniac and make a couple of grand maybe. Brilliant. Too bad about the scurvy and the skin infections and the way your poo turned green for six weeks.

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In fact: I was planting trees in northern Ontario when a provincial police car appeared to take me to the local station. A cinder block bunker with chipped desks. A phone dialed and handed to me. And on that phone was my mom, telling me about some generic application I'd put in with the government, and how it landed a summer job at a mental hospital. Steady, decent money. Like a small lottery win. All I had to do was come up with a lie to my boss in order get the deposit back on my tree-planting tools (no problem), hitchhike into Thunder Bay (interesting), get to a money transfer joint to pluck the $100 my mom had wired me (okay), and then use $97 of that princely sum to buy a 24-hour bus ride back to Saskatoon (see the least interesting one-third of the country! talk to maniacs with fiddles! starve!). So I did.

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There will be no Tinyletter next week. I will be in Cuba. It's the vacation we can afford, and the beaches are glorious.

I will talk to you soon,
djb

Draw things, paint things, write things, make things. Always.

p.s:

HOT TRACK TAKEAWAYS

GET THE CUT THAT SUITS YOU

LAST DAYS OF THE FOREIGN EXCHANGE