FanPost

Lions in Winter, Spring on the Tundra

The days of thirty below are behind me for now. Though not so far behind that I can't remember how it feels in mid February when the sky is clear and all you can see is everything. Stars and moon and the sounds of domestic violence to score it. Whining dogs. Huskies whine and it sometimes sounds like they're being abused but they are just, as my friend from the SPCA explained, telling stories. I wonder what stories a dog would tell. My dog starts barking and snarling whenever someone approaches her too quickly or when large men are about. Her story is bleak before the present chapter I fear.

It was just three degrees above freezing when I walked to the post office in a sweater and dress shoes. The thaw is here and it is dramatic. Along the coast it's probably beautiful and indescribable without the visuals but in this small town it's all sand and six inch deep puddles in the parking lot. I keep extra socks in my desk. This is the price you pay for trying to will summer into existence. It will not truly be summer here until early July. Sand blowing on warm winds and snap freezes in August killing the garden that was already dead from sand. There is sand everywhere here. Salt doesn't work in temperatures this cold and the consequence is that we appear to live in some frozen desert.

Bad notions this time of year. The wolves will be coming closer to town a man who has two last names tells me. One for his people and one for dealing with the outsiders like me. I am an outsider no matter how much I learn or how hard I fight for reform and that is how it should be. Doing the right thing should not guarantee acceptance into a family that never asked you to come here. So I change my socks and go make a cup of coffee. Every time I leave my office an alert goes up and every person I deal with leaves me voicemail with no details whatsoever to help me understand. Low voices and poor English. Bad moods coming through the speaker from people I can't help in the way they need.

The grocery store burned down the summer before I moved here and then this winter a gas station damn near blew up when it caught fire and took a small strip mall with it. Something like one hundred and fifty girls, high school seniors, lost their very expensive grad dresses when the seamstress' building collapsed. A lot of them don't have parents who can afford to buy another one and so I suspect this will haunt everyone for at least a few years. My date to my high school graduation is married now and wasn't even with me then. She wore an orange dress that everyone told me was more of a salmon pink. I tried explaining that I was colorblind and we were seeing the same thing. We just had different names for it, that was all, I said. They told me again not to tell the girl she looked good in orange, as if this was some horrible slight. Menacing feelings from these people, my closest and most cherished loved ones.

I read somewhere that native Russian speakers can see more shades of green than English speakers can because they have more words for it. I could probably look this up and confirm it but I have a flimsy grasp of linguistics as it is. I enjoy the subject matter but I am not wired in such a way to absorb and process that information. I only passed my linguistics elective because the professor was an adjunct who didn't want to look bad in her first review. I like to think that she would be proud of me for venturing onto various limbs and loudly proclaiming things I barely understand to be true, and then I think that of that Cormac McCarthy essay about the development of language — which either confirms or refutes that language is unnatural, I can never quite tell with him — and remember that some of the smartest people in my world are probably way out of their depth in most subjects. It's like that saying about the Inuit having dozens of words for snow. Is that a saying or a myth? Semantics matter sometimes. Really they just have words to describe states of snow, the same as native English speakers. Ice and snow and water and sleet.

She did not look good in orange. Maybe if it actually was orange or whatever I would interpret as not orange it would have looked better. She looked washed out and ghostly. I was dating another person at the time and we were very bad for each other. She was dealing with some things I didn't understand and I was dealing with some things I didn't know I was dealing with. I was drinking heavily when we were together after high school. Maybe I had a problem or maybe I just liked projecting some person, some more interesting person, out to the world. That person was horrid and it really served no one. I made a lot of bad friends, as my dad often says. They aren't enemies but they're people who don't like you that otherwise would if not for that one thing you did. I cleaned up somewhat and found out that I needed to be doing things differently. Now I have an apartment and a dog and what will soon be considered by Canadian common law to be a wife and good job that pays good money. I don't live in nostalgia the way I thought people did when they became adults.

I can look back clear headed and say that my youth was largely fine but adulthood has been much better. My old flames all hate me because I was pretending to be someone else. Someone who didn't understand his own heart. You have to learn who you aren't and then by process of elimination you might figure out who you are. I can feel myself growing into it. I relate more to the middle aged father in Big Mouth more than anyone in the world. What's that line? A man is at odds to understand his own heart. I think it's one of those things that you never truly understand but learn to appreciate in some primitive way. You respond to changing emotions and do what you can to reign them in.

The winter was hard and it made me angry. I did a lot of brooding. About the snow and about the cold and about the utter lack of sunshine. I wanted to see a wolf wandering around the streets at dawn so I could confirm that, yes, this is on the edge of the frontier. That this is close to where the wilds begin. Between here and the north coast there is basically nothing and I feel very good about that. I am learning to love the cold and snow and the possibilities of what exists in it.

I was in Montreal a few weeks ago to watch a hockey game and to experience something. I grew up loving the Canadiens de Montreal more than just about anything and it wasn't until I was a man that I understood what I loved. It wasn't the players or the team but rather the idea of what it all meant. Real, good values like responsibility and hard work. Things I would in theory like to aspire to but in reality am indifferent to. Bleu Blanc Rouge and Nos mains inanimées vous tendent le flambeau/C'est à vous, à présent, de le tenir bien haut. All that. In Quebec and in Montreal the Canadiens mean so much more than what they should because they were a point of pride for a spat upon people. My father grew up in the most rural of rural settings and that is why he was swept up by what the Canadiens were. It is why he passed it on to me, because Newfoundland is the most spat upon place in Canada. We have funny accents and strange proclivities and we all drink too much. And some of us don't drink at all but get branded with the label anyway. And some of us don't have funny accents but they still mock us in the airports and on TV and in the media and when we visit the mainland.

When I was walking through the Montreal airport I was feeling nervous about speaking French to French people. When I was asked if I wanted to sign up for a credit card I responded reflexively and perfectly. I was in awe of myself, which is a bad thing to be for someone who is a little narcissistic to begin with.

I wonder why I write these things as though you, the unfortunate and unsolicited reader, care deeply about my most idle thoughts. My productivity as a writer has hit an all time low. I have nothing to say except that I have these thoughts about the world and I want to articulate them in a way that you might understand them and in turn provide me some insight into what exactly it is I am trying to say. Some comment on the absurd or maybe about the absurdity of trying to understand it. I spend most of my free time playing video games and worrying about the dog when she's outside trying to drink puddle water or dig holes.

I like that dog. She's loud and poorly behaved but she likes to lay on my feet and sleep next to me. Nicole likes to sleep next to me too and while a sane person might hold that against her it makes me like her too. That dog has a bad hip from being run over or kicked; The vet couldn't say for sure which. I have a bad back and I think we understand each other. So much we would love to be doing if only our bodies could handle it. I lost some weight and it didn't help. We changed her food so she'd lose some weight but she can still barely stand early in the morning. She likes to run and lay in snowbanks.

I think there's only one thing worth finding in the world. Find someone who likes sleeping next to you. The rest is filler for the time in between the moments together. The rest doesn't mean a fucking thing.

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