thirty-nine: I got it 'cause I always take the long way home

This lyric showed up last newsletter; for various reasons, it's been promoted to title this month (a temporary gentleman!). It's from (friend to all organizers) Faithless's "Take the Long Way Home", which has been on increased rotation the past few months, slowly growing on me.

Aside from the way he's riffing on what's basically a 20th century music standard (excellent when people invert a classic line and a whole universe springs out) I've spent this spring doing a great deal of thinking about the scripts we have for our lives: at what point they terminate, or grow rigid, and what happens if you just--don't do any of those things, and keep wandering deeper into the underbrush, looking for something more satisfying. At what point we encode a situation or person into monster and what happens if we slip that trap and try different strategies. All the things we could salvage or remake or transfigure, if we weren't so fucking quick to flee the scene.

I do everything the hard way; this has been true since I was a kid. This is simultaneously the heart of Taurus country and something I've never thought I was being obstinate by doing. I just want what I want, and when I'm making choices, I want real choices, not "cake or death?". And the trouble and glory of this is that everything that actually works in my life--I got it because I sidestepped narrower options and just started sniffing out new track (or, at least, new-to-me track, which, eh, it's just as good). It works. It's not without its blood and scarring. But I usually find, or build, eventually, what I need.

As a strategy: this hurts! It's hard! People don't always get it, and I don't always get it while I'm doing it ("Am I just inventing new and elaborate ways of screwing myself over?" is a common refrain here, and when you ask yourself that question, man, it's terrifying. And yet, the quiet voice persists: I want what I want.) But: There's not nothing to this. Some shit you only get by thrashing about in the weeds and thorns until your foot finds purchase, and you go: oh.

It's been quite a month (season, year) for that situation. All the stuff I want is in the briar patch, so: in we go, motherfuckers. Armour/unarmour your hearts.

assuming you can build one

This alongside the resumption of home improvement season, which can be a good placebo for stability if you get it right. Unfinished projects tend to spawn; you look around and find them everywhere, and the more of them you can take down, the easier it gets to polish off the next one. Which is how I found myself listening to a livestreamed Walrus Talks event about the future of cities -- one that touched urban farming, zoning, tax structures, tree canopies, and the role of the arts -- while putting up a handcrafted pair of reclaimed-wood shelves on wrought iron branch brackets. (Yes, sometimes I fully am The Thing.)

Nothing fancy is happening on these shelves. They will hold extra pantry stuff: candles, Kleenex boxes, things like that. But they're going to be pretty while doing it.

Likewise, the garden is inching forward. I can't assign credit to this month, but ten years ago I came into a Grow Your Own Sequoia tree kit. I think it came from ThinkGeek or something, the kind of thing people did then? Package trees on nerd websites? It's been moving house to house, sitting in back cupboards ever since, because I have nowhere to put a sequoia; I have no back yard. But this spring I finally opened it up and started it (which is a bit of a process; you have to simulate a freeze and thaw, so that means timing up three weeks in the freezer). Around the first of May: tiny sequoias, plural.


I recognize why I waited so long, but it stopped being a good reason. Because it occurs to me belatedly that these are large and ancient and Entlike trees whole lifetimes are immense compared to mine, and where do I put the sequoias? is a problem I'll have time to solve.

I have been emboldened by this because a white cedar mysteriously fell into my tote bag at the Allan Gardens plant sale a few weeks later.


It's currently sitting next to what turned out to be my birthday present: A small Meyer lemon tree.



This is an incredible birthday present, because it's a bit of a long-held wish. Sometime in my mid-twenties I went to a games day at a friend's place, where this one dude told a story about a full-sized lemon tree his friend grew in a Waterloo dorm room. And suffice to say: I wanted it. Immediately, thirstily, bloodily.

This hasn't been a practical wish for a long time, because of various things including rental housing, daily light, etc., but: right now there is a balcony and nine-foot windows, and it can happen. And turns out it just did. :) It bloomed last week. I have apparently been waiting my whole life for a tree to bloom in my bedroom.

This brings the tiny apartment tree farm (now a thing!) up to: one white cedar, three tiny sequoias, three avocado saplings and counting, one Meyer lemon tree, and two grapefruit seedlings. No, I do not live in the right growing zone for most of those things. But I kind of want a houseful of trees. I'll do what it takes to get there.

things read

With the reviews put away, I've dipped back into fiction-reading this month, and really enjoyed Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden. It's got a trick of being simultaneously really domestic and cozy and terrifically gripping: I kept doing one more chapter through these small details of gardens and relationship and nursing. It's also thinking wonderfully about good-faith first contact scenarios, where we assume good faith is and isn't, and not getting sententious about the whole thing. It's a fun read: smart, welcoming, with crunch.

The standout read of this month was a surprising one: Sarah Polley's Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations With a Body of Memory, which I'd been putting off because I haven't been sure how much trauma narrative I could take this spring. There was no need; she's a thoughtful, intelligent, considerate reporter. I was in thoroughly safe hands.

Some of this book hit me with a shocking amount of resonance. Her first essay traces some of Polley's time as a teenaged working actor, living in the neighbourhood I lived in ten years later--possibly the same building from her description of it--with a high school dropout boyfriend who I actually know casually through Toronto media/stuff circles; who was, like my high school dropout boyfriend when I lived there as a teenaged working writer (an ex-boyfriend who went to the same high school they did), learning to cook and starting a career in restaurants by accident and necessity--

So: Let's say I was thrown.

It all rhymed enough to take me utterly aback, especially when I caught myself thinking: Man, you have lived a life. And that--right, I have lived a lot of that life too from a different angle, and the only difference between Living A Life and reacting as frantically and best you can out of terrific fear and survival instinct, out of pervasive suffering you don't even know you have no tools for, is whether you're seeing the thing from the inside or the outside. It's Living a Life when you don't have to live it, later on, from a safer perch. When you do, it's all the kicking you do to try to keep your head above water. (Have I mentioned I always do it the hard way?) I don't remember those years as a Lifestyle. I remember them as mostly being about long hours, overwhelm, fronting, and survival--and an era in the life of this city when that life was even possible.

And yet it reminded me (see: the important skill of this era is understanding when two seemingly contradictory things are true) that--I have lived a life. Even if I didn't appreciate it at the time! I have done mad, enviable stuff almost instinctively, and keep surviving it! That external perspective, that hindsight perspective counts too! And the farther in I got, the more I felt my self reseat itself in my body, with an audible thunk. Both things are true. Which story am I telling myself more often: the one about the pain, or the one about the power?

It's a forthright, non-ruminative, fascinating book about work, art, and the tackling of painful things in practical, honest ways. I doubt anyone else is going to have those personal associations (if so, I would dearly and sincerely like to know about it). But: highly recommended.

things to read

This month was my reviewer residency at CAROUSEL Magazine, and despite a little too much life-induced Deadline Chicken (god, do not even ask, she says, actively volunteering the information), this was fun. The three works on the docket are Rebecca Campbell's Arboreality (Stelliform), Meghan Kemp-Gee's The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books), and Freebird Games's To the Moon, Finding Paradise, and Impostor Factory trilogy. It's a pretty revealing mix of what I'm interested in these days: climate fiction, different expressions of fabulism, poetry, literary video games, and the high-wire structural craft running through all of them.

It's such a pleasure to write about books that you like. All three works were really worth spending extra time with--I could've written a thousand more words on each of them even after blowing all reasonable concept of wordcount limits, and there's a pile of learning I've done myself just by looking at each up close. The reviews are linked above; I hope they're interesting to you.

Looking farther ahead, I got news this past week that two poems, 'Rewilding' and 'February Wool', are going to appear in a future issue of Prairie Fire. The second is about sweater lint, animacy, imperfection, and a bit of technical experimentation; the first is about weirdo pandemic hibernation and logging trucks (our first infernokrusher poem!) and is one of my current favourite things in the portfolio. Every time it came back declined I kissed it straight on the mouth and went no, you are perfect, I love you. Probably winter sometime, I'm guessing?

***

So: a full month. We haven't even gotten to the spending every available minute outside (it's beautiful out. It's been beautiful for weeks. I'm about to go outside some more after I hit send).

Next month's letter might be a little oddly timed up, because I'm going to be somewhere with very little internet, but it'll happen when it happens. Here's hoping everyone's having a lovely mid-spring.