Nostalgic Blue

This is my swansong and my denouement. Don’t worry, sit down. Everything is fine. We are safe, and you and everyone else don’t have to listen to a word I say. It was ever thus.

I have fallen so far and yet learned nothing. I have moved so much and not travelled a mile from where I started. Everything is just the same as it always was, only a little bit different, and a lot worse. I’ve always been alienated from other people, but now I’m a genuine alien.

It started out in a fairly normal kind of way. I went nostalgia tripping after the rain tapered off. Since moving back to Calgary last summer, I believe that I have visited all the physical places in this city that seemed to mean a damn thing to me, long ago. You know those places; felt in the stomach as much as the feet.

Standing on eerily familiar ground, I think about how I am not that person anymore. That person may never have existed. It was probably no more recently than 2004, the last time. Yet it looks and feels the same. Exactly the same. Somehow, I perceive that every time I have ever been to that island of grass ringed by houses, it was the same time. It is 2004, 3, 2, perhaps even 1, and 2020, all at once.

I’m always alone when I let distant memories do the navigation. Some place seems to tug at me, as though there were an invisible string wrapped around my retinas and anchored to some spot at that distant place. A large, invisible demon slowly reels me in so I stand in places where I am haunted by the phantoms of my selves long gone past.

If I’m not mistaken, all kinds of memory have something to do with spatial memory. The visual cortex has maps. The motor cortex has maps. The best way to memorize large volumes of information, they say, is to associate that information with specific places in your house.

Looking at the date, I am sure that anybody reading this will have an idea for why I might be spending so much time alone. This started long before the pandemic. It started, I think, as long ago as 2010. My first visits home from university, to a city that was truly alien, and more indifferent to me than it had been before.

In some ways, this is really what I have always wanted. But in others, it is only what I wanted second to a great many other things. Those more primary things, I think, have evaporated as possibilities for me. Careers, family, friends, and a place to belong. The basic things, that according to many, make life worth living. They aren’t for me anymore. Once upon time, when I could rent VHS tapes from blockbuster and hear System of a Down on the radio, and the internet was cool but not quite ubiquitous.

At this point I must apologize for misusing language. I have sinned against it gravely. I’ve used it to disappear beneath the waves of my own endless, black negativity. This epistle is unlikely to raise me from the bottom of the wretched sea in which I have dwelt for ten years or more. When I try to imagine what effect these words will have on the world, even if only my own subjective one, nothing comes to mind. Its just a grey sea of asphalt, convenience stores, and people telling me about the great times that they had with other people.

This one goes out to Kat, Kristie, Olivia, Mike, Jen, Samantha, Elliott, Caleb, Dan, Tim, Joe, Chad, Karl, Joyce, Sheri, high school English teacher, high school psych teacher, Jack, Sara, Sarah, Sara, and Sara, Savita, Mo, Kurt, Abdullah, Steve, Cazzie, Wish, Irene, the Maple Hill boys, Laura, (fictional) Laura, Laurel, Mikayla, Mazzie, Danger Cat, Danger Haus, Jack, the 435 and in a strange sideways way, the LGBTQi+(etc.) community. My greatest wish is that none of the words I write that in any way have to do with your lives bring you any suffering. If my own experience is any indication, your lives are filled with enough suffering. I hope it makes you smile, and maybe gives you a strange feeling of frisson that you really just can’t put your finger on.

Its pretty doubtful that any one of you would give a damn about the words contained in this document. Still less likely that the story is engrossing enough to retain your attention for any period of time. It just needs to come out so that I can look at it for a while, and I don’t know what. Nevertheless, I spit these words into cyberspace, and hope that they find you in some strange way, and that our minds, after such a distance, can speak again. This time with more connection than I could ever manage in real life.

As soon as I drove by the church, the Earth’s seemed to disappear below my feet. I was no longer driving my car, I was flying it. I walked around the church. It has a brown paint job now. My more entrenched memories of this place are of a kind of teal colour. The brown I think has been there for 10+ years, but my more primal memory remains of that teal, and some ruddy shade of red. Coincidentally, I think Eastside City Church has followed a similar paint job trajectory, but that place is nowhere near as important as First Assembly was. It was the first place where I assembled, on my own, making my own decisions. A place where I became, not a man really (I don’t think I will ever really become that), but something. An autonomous being, I suppose. It is much more recently that I have become an automaton.

There is a park in a residential area just off of Elbow Drive, and across the street from First Assembly church. It's an island of green around which a bunch of middle class houses are built, and all face. Under ordinary circumstances, this is not a heavily trafficked area. There is no direct connection from this residential area to the large thoroughfares nearby. No thru traffic to the mall. I saw nobody outside at all when I got out of my car. This place is so strange. At the moment, I can’t think of any circumstance in which I would live in one of these houses. A different world from the one I seem to have found myself in.

Back then I suspected that something like this would happen.

First I walked to a bench that faced the open road and Elbow Drive, but decided to stop at the picnic tables. I reckon these things have been there since at least 2001, which was around the time that I first saw them. I look at the carved grafiti in the table, hoping that one of these ancient glyphs will be another hidden trove of nostalgia, but none of them really strike a chord in my memory. They look, in their unassuming way, like every piece of carved graffiti on every picnic table that has ever been done.

I used to take a byzantine route on transit to get here. The best was when I went by myself. One of my parents usually picked me up from youth group at First Assembly. I went to Sunday service as a little one, but as I became a teenager, my parents stopped going. I think that was when their marriage really started going terminal.

Make no mistake, I am not saying that no longer attending church services ruined their marriage. I think that when they stopped going together, it was simply a recognition that they had both diverged too far from each other to ever meet again.

Like a lot of my decisions in life, continuing my attendance at the Friday Evening youth group had more to do with spending time listening to music than anything else. Not that I cared much for the contemporary christian praise and worship musical scene at the time, although it did have its moments. Not nearly as many moments as every other kind of music I have spent a significant amount of time listening to. But those moments did exist, perhaps in the more psychedelic, free form, altar call towards the end of the band’s set.

This particular moment of the praising god experience is fraught with tension. Are you going to do something that sounds good, or just jerk yourself off and make a performance of your devotion to your imaginary friend? I would ask the band leader psychically. The pained and emotional faces of teenagers holding guitars in the arms and acne on their faces was really just priceless. But nobody else was laughing. Only myself. So who was the joke really on, after all, then?

It was about an hour and a half trip on transit. That’s about two cds, or depending on the time period, one blank CD with my favourite napster, morpheus, kazaa, or limewire downloaded tracks on it. Inevitably as I tried to jam more tracks onto the CDs, one or more would be compressed. Sped up, like Alvin and the Chipmunks.

I don’t remember exactly when I started taking transit home as well, and I certainly didn’t start doing that alone very often. But it did happen. It was especially good in the summer. When the late evening was only a partial reprieve from the blistering heat of day. In the twilight, the misery of sunshine hours didn’t even seem possible. That was the dream. This is the reality. An endless warm night, with the horizon hanging on to the last rays of day. Rays of pink bisecting curtains of grey and blue. The twilight comes from all the artificial lights. No, night time now doesn’t quite mean what it used to. Or what it should. It means something else now. A hazy dream of nightmares and waking daydreams.

Two or three people on the train. The sound of its parts moving beneath and around me so much louder now than they were in the daylight. Strange bugs with long limbs fly in through small ventilation windows opened to fourty five degrees to the larger, non-opening window. They look a little like mosquitoes, only about ten times larger. They’ve even got a hella long proboscis. If they used that thing to draw blood, it would hurt worse than a hypodermic needle, I am fairly certain.

In the cd were a variety of things. At some times Metallica, at others Iron Maiden. A host of mixed, burned cds. Sometimes even a cd wallet, but not that often because they are a pain to carry. When Skyler was a worship leader and used to drive me in the Van, sometimes he would let me listen to one of my CDs in the car. That was cool, although I could always tell he didn’t like it. It made me so sad, and still does. It's an experience that seems to repeat itself a thousand different times in a thousand different ways.

Better than listening to my music in the car on the drive home was just gallivanting around town in the middle of the night, hanging out with his older teenaged girl-friends. I think they sort of thought I was cute. It was the curly hair, I think. That always gets their goat. I’m rather the opposite of cute now.

Art Bell on the radio. That was the dream. Certain bumper music coursing through the speakers of the Montana. Its so weird that I wound up driving that thing for a little while. In the end not all that weird to any person who hears about it. The weird part is the subjective experience.

Eventually that stopped being a thing. Around the time that Skyler moved out, but I think long before that as well. Not sure why, exactly. It had to have been somewhere around 2003. I started going to Taekwon Do on Fridays or something, and I don’t think Mom wanted me going to the church that Skyler was going to. At times I would go to Eastside City Church Youth Group, dubbed, “En Fuego” or something like that. I went explicitly trying to evoke the feelings that seemed to have been lost since leaving First Assembly, but it never felt right. They never did come back. There were new feelings, sure. But something really died at First Assembly. Some small part of my psyche was fed exclusively by it.

Probably because I was also going to the private school that ran in that Church during the week. It didn’t feel like there was really much of a separation between my fake self and the self that came alive on Friday evenings. When I started going to mainstream High School I stopped going altogether. My brain could no longer tolerate the cognitive dissonance required to attend church and have anything approaching a good time. I could not bring myself to believe, or to have faith.

I walked away so slowly, always looking over my shoulder, hoping somebody, anybody, would pull me back. Throw me a lifeline. Drop me a line. But, the silence was deafening. A pattern which seems to have persisted throughout much of my life. In a restricted, directional way, I began to drift. I simply opened my wings, and let myself fall into the sky. I wandered literally and figuratively for so long. Like a ghost.

There is an alley at the East end of First Assembly. Its a thin thing. It leads to the much ritzier neighborhood. A place that I used to love walking and listening to music. A place where my friends and I would ditch church to go hang out in. Never stopping. Always moving, but never really going anywhere.

One time, I think it was a Sunday morning, I was skipping with Skyler, perhaps Chelsea, and or Kat. We were in an alley that branches off from the first alley I mentioned. There was a pair of mannequin legs sprouting out from a garage front. Skyler through a rock or something at it. Little did he know that there was an old man, the homeowner I presume, doing some gardening in the properties back yard. An angry, gloved hand reached over the gate and unlatched it. I don’t remember exactly what the old man said, but needless to say, he was not impressed a bit by Skyler’s shenanigans. I don’t remember what the exchange between the two was, but it scared me in that, “Oh fuck I’m a child and I’m in big trouble from the adults.” kind of way.

Kat was an interesting person for me to know at that time. Her face has almost disappeared entirely from my memory, though I recall that she was a petite woman. Short, sometimes unkempt pixie cut, or something very much like it. An overall aesthetic that I immediately gravitated towards as soon as I met her. She, like me, had a penchant for music, and travelling around with CDs and Discman players. She liked Korn and System of a Down, and Tool, and quite possibly Insane Clown Posse.

At some point, I believe around the time I finally managed to start going to Youth Group regularly, she was banned from Youth Group. That’s right, banned. Ostracized from gods flock like a misbehaving chimpanzee. I think the sin that earned this excommunication was lust. A deadly one. No wonder they cast her away. I believe she was permitted to go to Church on Sunday, as her guardian was with her there. I think she was about seventeen at the time, and her guardian was her grandmother, though this could easily be incorrect.

Then, as now, I wasn’t much for the telephone or any sort of primitive social media, so there was really no way to stay in contact with her. I think I saw her on an occasional Sunday that I would go to church, lugging my skateboard which I always sucked at, around with me wherever I went. She faded into the background of my life, and became a rarely thought about person until now.

I can’t really put my finger on many of the things that we used to talk about. I don’t think it mattered much to me. There was another human, not really affiliated with my family, that I could talk to. That was something dumbfounding, perplexing, and magical to me at the time.

In her place came Jennifer. She came from the wrong side of the tracks. Much like Kat, I think. Jen, in retrospect, may have had FAS. She had the characteristic facial dysmorphia and a little bit of dyspraxia as well. About the same age as Kat, similar musical tastes to Kat, I think. I hung out with her a lot. She and her friends liked it when this strange, Jonas Brother forecasting motherfucker told off colour and terrible jokes. I could actually make people laugh, which felt bizarre. Most people I knew at the time (and still, really) give me a quizzical look of disgust when I try to make a joke. Like with Kat, I hardly recall what we ever talked about. I just hung out with her. Ditched church with her. Talked about boys with her. Eventually she stopped going to Youth Group. She aged out, I think. Got pregnant fairly soon after that, if I remember correctly.

At some point, between Kat and Jenifer, I think, I met Samantha. She was closer to my age than the other two. I think she was about fourteen when I was twelve. I remember her face. Its a striking face. My ability to accurately, or entertainingly describe faces has always been shit, so perhaps I shouldn’t here try. All I know is that she had the kind of face that a dollop of red lipstick would illuminate like a glossy billboard.

There was an early June camping trip that the Youth Group went on to Kananaskis Country at some point in early June. For the long weekend, I have little doubt. It rained, and even snowed the entire time, but I had a fairly good time anyway. It was good to be away from my family, even if little parts of them had gone along with me.

I can’t be certain, but I think it was on this trip that the talented Chadwick Burnell invented the catch phrase, “What the Heeeey!” which is battling “Nostalgic Blue” for the title of this document. Jordan, Karl, Chad, and a few others made up a cluster of friends and acquaintances I would awkwardly travel in and out of over the next few years of attending church.

Samantha was on the trip. Together with one of the Youth Leader’s dogs, we went on a long walk down a wooded path. The rain was on and off, mostly off. Don’t remember the dog's name. We were not supposed to split up, I can remember that much. Leaders bothered us and quizzed us when we returned. But it was totally innocent. All we did was talk.

She stopped going some time after that. She became one of several people who I would hope to see every time I went back to church, but never seemed to be there. Eventually, I came to know that she would not ever come back, and in a way, she was gone forever. There was never any particular incident or moment that seemed like her last. Nobody told me on some Friday evening that I would never see Sam, or Kat, or Jen again. But after trying to summon them week after week, I accepted that they were indeed gone, and I diverted myself in other ways.

After those first three girls disappeared, a new crop of teenagers started going to First Assembly. Many of them, I think, came from Lord Beaverbrook High, and high schools in that general area of town. In other words, quite distant from myself in the ghetto ass northeast. Kids like Chad, and even Karl in his way, were the primary missionaries, and managed to get a bunch of otherwise secular kids to go to church with them, sometimes for many years. This is an ability that mystifies me. It's magickal. In some ways I think it is absolutely beautiful, if it weren’t so foolish.

Even back then, I could not imagine how church would seem at all like a thing worth spending any time on if you weren’t raised in it. All of the imagery and idiosyncratic (and syncretic) spiritual rituals, it was ridiculous. But I am grateful that they did go. Exposed me to culture outside of that which my family could provide to me.

Amber was, I believe, one of the Beaverbrookians. Her attendance during the time that I knew her was less than the previous three, but it stretched over a couple of years, I think. I don’t think we ever spent much intense, close time together at church that I had with the others, although there may have been an msn messenger relationship, one of my first. At some point she got depressed and started cutting herself I think. I don’t remember if she told me about it, or if I heard it from Chad or something like that. She was very pretty. Colombian or something if I had to guess. Raven hair and mocha skin. But she faded too, into memories of songs and turning wheels.

Somewhere in all of this Kristie Sparksman appeared. God she was a cutie. Older, and in to me, or at least she said she was. We, “dated” very briefly, and I wrote her a very shitty e-mail. I don’t know why I had such a compulsion to be so shitty and vitriolic at the time, but boy howdy did I. A pattern I have found difficult to change over the course of my life.

Her best friend was Savita. Savita had a much longer tenure at the First, and I think had some sort of friendship with Skyler. She used to go on MSN messenger and tell me that Kristie was going to go Youth Group, but honestly I think she only ever went once or twice. Always I hoped that she would show up again, but never did she.

I saw her one night on the train, as I was going home from Youth Group. I think it was cold outside. Not amazingly so, but not pleasant outside in any event. She said, “Sam Swaim” or something like that. I couldn’t place her at first. I was a little older than I was at the time when we “dated”. Old enough to look eighteen months in my past and laugh at how uncool I used to be, in my Youth. Old enough to see that now she was way cool. Dressed like a little punker ruffian I think. Stickers and what not all over he thick, black leather wallet which was tethered to her by a chain. Being cute already made her a certain amount of cool, but now she was way beyond that. She was really a different person. And I thought to myself, “Damn, I was actually a part of that cool for a little while, and made a horrible mess of things.” It was a kind of rug being pulled out from beneath me sort of moment. My reality and the reality beyond myself were crossing streams, and I saw that the reality beyond myself was indeed much better. That was something that I actually wanted to be a part of. But how? What do I do?

Here I am, thirteen or maybe fourteen years at the oldest. The train. Who knows how many times I had been on that train by that time. A quick, back of the envelope calculation reveals that I probably did not go more than two hundred and eight times. In reality, I imagine that the upper range of conservative estimate puts it at like, one hundred and four times. Therefore, the amount of times I actually rode on the bus home from First Assembly really has to be like fifty at the most ludicrously upper estimate. But I saw then that there were people out there who were doing everything that I really wanted to be doing but couldn’t. They were going out to see live music performed that actually did move them. Sounds that for a moment could do what people appeared to need church to do to them. I wanted to have that experience. I wanted to be slain in the spirit.

Naturally, I don’t think I could bring myself to say anything of note to her. Nothing that made her want to reach out to her the way that I had always wanted to reach out to her, but somehow just knew that I couldn’t. After I stopped using MSN messenger, I lost track of her altogether. I think she had stopped using the service long before myself, or at the very least started using a different account. Perhaps she just hoped that that weird curly haired kid was going to talk to her again. God, I was and am such a walking nightmare. A spook in human form.

My mind scrambled during the few stops we shared together. I think she was going to watch a hockey game or something. It sounded like more fun than I knew I was going to have that night. I knew how much fun I was going to have at home. Exactly none. Coast to coast could for a few moments at a time do the trick later on on a Friday night, but that was lamentably few and far between. But it was closer to the dreary reality of my home that I had to return to. People fighting, almost no matter what, it seemed like. Mom usually somewhere near the epicenter. And I could not escape. I wanted so badly to escape, but nobody seemed to want me with them. There was my family and there was the street, the desert, nothing but my doom.

When she got off the train, I felt that indeed something had died inside of me. One of the first of many times I would experience this horrible petit mort. Jordan was there. Silent. Distant. Sour. Smelly. Angry. Sour. In that moment, I was as old as I would ever be, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. But nothing is ever the same again, and maybe its just being conscious of that fact that I’m speaking of.

Jordan was there, unfortunately, when I met my next girlfriend. I touched her breast near him I think. She made out with her friend Malachi. It was really a surreal moment. If Jordan hadn’t been there, it would be a good memory. Perhaps my most darkly cherished.

That basement was a mess. An insanely cluttered mess. Beer cans, cigarettes, joints, and so on. Don’t remember what we were listening to. I want to say it was Rob Zombie. Rob Zombie was for me at the time, the bees knees as it pertains to extreme music. Jordan did not quite share my enthusiasm, only nominally endorsing such artists. He did really like Tool back in the day, and that seems like a pretty solid choice. But his fondness for later era Papa Roach, when they were cool, was where we parted ways musically, and I think as people. Around this time, I think he developed a strange sort of hatred for me. But that could just be paranoia and angst.

Olivia’s dad was some kind of cowboy drug dealer, I think. He gave all of us losers a ride to the nearest train station because he was going to buy weed. I don’t know why I found that so alluring, but I did. Anyway, I wound up “dumping” her a few months later. All we had done so far was talk on the phone and occasionally MSN, and it was all really stupid and stressful. I remember one Sunday I talked to her for like four hours on the phone and didn’t even deliver my flyers. I did that evening, when it was very cold, and far too late. It was strange, the way talking to a girl made me do just about anything to continue that experience. But I knew there were too many barriers. I found the transit system far too difficult to navigate by myself. I often wonder what would have become of me without a smartphone, in terms of navigation. Lord knows I never figured it out before GPS.

A year or two later, I remember going to a friend of Skyler’s friends house. I don’t know why he invited me to go along with him. It it seemed like a very strange thing for him to do. “Don’t you know me?” I thought to myself. “I am the freak that nobody wants to see. If you take me with you, I will do something horrible to you. I do horrible things. Even when I don’t want to. You don’t believe me, but trust, you will see.”

Likewise, his friend castigated me for popping off during the film. But I really couldn’t help it, or so it felt that way at the time. I knew I shouldn’t be saying a thing. I hated it when people wanted to talk through movies. Yet I also desperately hated that movie, but knew that I couldn’t leave. “Why weren’t we watching porn or horror movies, you idiots?” my adult self asks the. Radio. God, some actor pretending he’s retarded, its the most offensive thing I’ve ever seen, and yet other people just don’t seem to get it. Trapped in my head. Alone. Vibrating with discomfort. This would come to be another very frequent sensation. Indeed, in many ways I think it has typified my experience of other people in the present.

I couldn’t express how significant it felt to me that I had wound up over there. I thought about going over and saying hello to the gal, but ultimately changed my mind. I was definitely unsure about which house was Olivia’s. Skyler’s friend had a pet ferret. It smelled like rancid piss. Rancid piss and neurotypical assholes impersonating autistic kids when they are neither a child nor autistic. That’s the feeling. The negativity upon which so much other negativity is built.

It felt so wrong to pass by without saying hello. But I knew that there was really no reason at all to try. Why hadn’t I done better? If I played my cards right, I thought, I could run away from my house and go to normal school. Wouldn’t that just be so much better? But I chickened out.

The version of this that all my brothers did is barely more independent than mine. They all just found other families on which they could be parasites. Something which until the present day, seems to have persisted somewhat.

Laura came next. She was a Goth, I’m pretty sure. Emphatically not Emo. That was important. Though I think at a certain point she began to use the old canard of saying that labels don’t define her. I found this terribly charming. I would thereafter have a fluttering heart to some degree on the rare occasion that our paths crossed. She seemed cool. She seemed, in some way, like a person who would like a person like me.

If I’m not mistaken, she dated Karl, and possibly Chad. I wonder if that was the end of their relationship? Laura was good friends with Alyssa, I want to say. Jordan eventually dated Alyssa, who was herself a very cute and wonderful, if misguided person.

Laura would get very upset if people compared her to Avril Lavigne, or when adults thought she was depressed. I sardonically loved this, because it just seemed so very clear that she was trying to pull both of those off visually. I think I heard either from her, or somebody close to her, that she was in to wicca, or paganism, or something like that. Kat may have been as well, but it was so long ago now that it is difficult to be certain. With that, a strange fascination in me was born, that I have to this day not been able to satisfy. Something about the witchy woman archetype, more authentic than any form I have yet to encounter it under. I have been close a few times. In a certain light, from a certain angle, they seemed like the woman of my dark desires.

Even Laura wasn’t it. She was just a doorway for me. Beyond her threshold lay a world populated with adventure, crystals, rock n’ roll, weed, loud cars, strange houses, frightening people, ghastly death. All the things that I wanted more than anything to be surrounded by, rather than the cluttered, decaying mess that I was born into.

There’s a school near First Assembly. A small school in a quiet neighborhood. It almost looks too idyllic to be real. I bet with all the cars there on a Monday morning its a nightmare. But today, in my waking life, on a bright early Sunday Morning, it is a particularly eerie dream.

I think about parking in the schools parking lot, but as I drive by, a minivan pulls up to it. It looks like the school is doing some extensive gardening in the courtyard. I decide not to. What if I have to talk to a teacher? Just seems like nothing good can happen from that. I take a long look at the many paneled mural. That is an indelible mark on my memory, that abstract, colourful thing.

After I park my car in Liminal Park, I walk to the school's playground. Nobody is about. Things are quiet here. Quiet in such a deep way. All I hear are the birds. There are some children somewhere in the distance. But they can’t detect me in any way. I walk to the trees at the far eastern part of the field. There are a lot of trees here, presumably to block noise from the school from reaching the residences. Strangely, on this very flat ground there are about a half a dozen small hills. Humps, really. Maybe they are built on top of some ancient municipal equipment they didn’t bother getting rid of. The voices of children get louder as I walk through the ring of trees. My first exit is blocked by fencing, but having to walk around it gives me a chance to look at the mural.

There are people nearby. People who have seen me, doing nothing at all wrong. I don’t spend as much time looking at it as I wanted to because of them. But it is a dense text to look at. There are a lot of stories going on with it. I would love to know what has happened to each and every one of the kids who contributed that mural, starting on the day that they painted each square. I imagine it was an art class project, and each student got a panel to paint. I shortly return to my car, and then try to drive my way into Glenmore Reservoir. I feel like walking over that would really satisfy my nostalgia tripping curiosity.

I don’t exactly find it. But I find a place that reminds me of something, yet I can’t really be certain. I drive by a place I once drove by with Marcy. Ironically enough that was the last time I had been to church. I think I may have played ultimate frisbee down there with Mark’s buddhist friends or something like that. From the top of the coulee overlooking the river and the Sandy Beaches park, I hear and see a combination of things. People are gathered together way down there, hundreds of metres away from me. They are laughing. Carrying themselves with ease. And I hear something as well.

A distant bass beat. It sounds pleasant and light, rather like calypso, or a similar genre. I don’t think about it at the time, but I think it reminds me of Blue is The Warmest Colour. My god, how that movie just wreck-wreck-wrecked me. That fucking steel drum sound at the beginning and the end. Thats what the sound I heard from the top of the valley reminded me of. I had no intention of going on that wide ranging of a trek, but I couldn't help but follow the music. After all, I have nowhere in particular that I need to be. This is one of the few luxuries that my current position.

I really don’t believe at first that there is a way for me to get down there from my current position. But one reveals itself. I walk down the gentle dirt slope in blessed silence and disconnection. Joggers pass me as I walk in my strange clothing, thinking my strange thoughts, doing my strange doings. I wish I could do and be something else, but that there just seems to be

I pass by the happy people. It is much more uninteresting than I thought it was going to be. Just a bunch of twenty somethings playing bocci ball or something. To be honest, it looks insufferable. The music is louder now, but so haunting and distant. I pass the twenty dorks and a few yards later see the source of the tunes. It appears to be some sort of Salsa dance class, if I had to make a guess. I don’t have to, make a guess, that is. I am both emboldened and saddened by this development. Its one of the things I have always wanted to do. I think of Senorita Sarsons for a fleeting moment, then return to walking. I walk to one edge of the shore, passing by two women, one with a camera. I think to myself, “Fuck, I’m the person that raises the hair on the back of their neck by my creeping, awful presence.” On reflection, I think the more frightening, and realistic scenario is that I have not and did not in any way enter their perception more than in the periphery of their vision over a few scattered moments. I walked to the furthest edge of the shore that I could. I passed by the same girls again. This glimpse is even more furtive than the last. They are behind several layers of vegetation now, on a raised bank.

I watch the swallows, diving, and swallowing I imagine, bugs above the river water for a little while, before I return. The lookout spot near the bridge is cluttered with different couples. I miss the one that I saw on the walk over.