More raw stuff.

I think the last time I did anything you’d call brown bagging I was sixteen and thinking that the fresh bills coming out of the mint had my smiling mug on it. Don’t misunderstand me here, we all did at one point or another until someone or something brought you crashing back down to the Earth. I know I certainly did that night, because it earned me the nickname “Slurpee Machine” owing to what it looked like when I puked up everything I ate from what felt like between a week earlier and everything I’d yet to eat for the next week. Modern medicine tells us that you can’t vomit what you haven’t eaten yet, but I wouldn’t count out the possibility that a vengeful god gave me just enough of a taste of liminal time to experience my breakfast from the next morning going the wrong way before it went the right way.

So I probably should have known better all things considered, and if I hadn’t sacrificed my memory to Dionysus using a $20 bottle of sauvignon blanc in a paper bag as the dagger, I might be able to tell you if I had. Known better, I mean. Because knowing and doing are two different things where dating is concerned. When a woman like Cat is involved, the improbably gorgeous bad girl with a whiff of mystery about her, you just throw in with her. It wouldn’t even be fair to say In Cat We Trust except as a placeholder. In Infatuation We Trust is more like it. I’d stop rambling about this and get on with the story, but I see you. I see that stare, like you haven’t been there, teetering across a precarious pile of old driftwood in the dark.

Out on the islands where my dad took us on vacation we called that driftwood “the highway.” Any beach you care to name in the lower mainland and probably anywhere else in the Pacific Northwest has it. They’re either big old logs that broke free of one of those corals they float down the water, or trees that ended up in the ocean from a storm or erosion. All the practice I got back in the day as a kid that went home with splinters all over the place until I could keep my balance is probably what kept me alive that night.

You can feel how sturdy a log is by the vibration under your feet every time you step down on it; the worse it vibrates, the sooner you ought to get off. I blame that for why I couldn’t stay focused when I asked Cat if she knew what I found depressing. Being the way she is she responds
“Republicans that get away with telling people theirs is the party of Abraham Lincoln?”
Yes, I said, hopping down from the shaky log I was on and nearly impaling my foot on a sharp branch sticking out of the one I landed on. I let that hang in the air for a few seconds before Cat brought me back from my silent drunken musings on the oft overlooked exodus of the Dixiecrats.
“You’re supposed to be saying yes, but that isn’t what I was thinking of.”
It’s a good thing that the amount of wine I had brought enough red to my cheeks that a bit more wouldn’t be noticed, and it’s a better thing that it was probably lost in the dark. Except that vampires see in the dark, so it wasn’t. She had to talk me back another three times as I protested about being so apparently drunk after less than half the bottle, but I finally managed to make it back on topic to tell a story from the last year I spent back home before coming out to the coast.

When I get drunk, I get a bit bitter about my hometown. It’s not a bad city really, just boring and more than a little backward from how I want to look at the world, so I probably referred to it as skoal stained and cowshit reeking, which isn’t entirely off track. If you’re at The Ranchman’s on any night of the week and they’re playing “It’s Five O’clock Somewhere.” Which is often.

So the story goes that people get so bored in this city of just hit a million, that a favourite pass-time is to just drive around and talk, and in the heart of oil country you can do that without living in a box. One such night I was reclining in the shotgun seat in my friend’s car fighting madly against her sudden urge to subject me to some mild nostalgia in the form of that Justin Timberlake album where he’s kicking a disco ball in half on the cover, when she got a marginally better urge. We knew each other through slinging coffee for the same rich bastard corporation, so I hadn’t met many of her friends, which were what your grandparents might call a colourful bunch. Cautionary tales, mostly, and her idea was for us to swing around and visit arguably the most cautionary of all.

They’re friends of hers, basically un-biological siblings, the kind of people that let you believe that you really can choose your family. What feels strange for her about it is that they hooked up. You don’t much like thinking about your siblings hooking up, even when they aren’t really your siblings. The other problem is that she knows way too much about either of them for it to feel good to her, and isn’t that always the way. When you only know half the baggage in a relationship it’s easier to sign off on it, but when you know even more than each one knows about the other and it’s a head on highway collision in the middle of winter waiting to happen? Well now that’s a whole other breed. It’s what they call pathos, when you know something that eats you up because you can’t tell the person on account of getting in some kind of shit or looking like an asshole, and what better way to look like an asshole than to tell your best friend that your other best friend- that they are fucking prodigiously- is an asshole they need to flee from post haste?