2007 summary

And 2007 was like that last great haul of a Marlboro affair, and with a plume it vanished.

I spent the morning holding an end-of-year Gilmore Girls marathon with a bowl of tofu salad and dusty cats as company. The night before was reserved for plastering problem child flicks and teen suicide tricks up and onto the projector screen of my dad’s home-furnished movie theatre, thereof including anything and everything to do with Evelyn Rachel Wood.

The physics death march was like an aubade for those last few weeks of December, with Chopin lurching in throughout the examination gym. I was starlit and spangled on stage for a moment that month, Etienne as an ex-pianist with broken finger bones, fermenting those noisy drinking bouts, the pleadings of whores being taught a lesson, the back-alley brawls, into a vindictive wine that eventually had his father capsized. The semester was a great heave across the Champlain parking lot, an Exodus where zebra mussels scurried behind car tires and wisps of snow slithered their weaving ways like snakes. Otherwise, I think the summer was for Utopik trysts, organic beer, cherry-mouthed kissing in Berri Park, then number punching into an Excel spreadsheet, a Mont Tremblant breach into the nether-world, and a slew of gay clubs. Let’s not even mention the second semester, and that moon-walking from April to May. The 2006 permeation into the nonce was spent cleaving my then-girlfriend with this Creating-pumping bros from Vermont, in this dank club remix of vacuum cleaner and blow-dryer, which resonated throughout the year, I think. The only time for quiet was that one night beyond the city borders of my dad’s tundra village, where the moon and clouds were like lace fringing the sky and peels of lightning volts and bolts plugged themselves into the circuit board of the planet. And I was skimming the ridge of a mid-field canal, and hemming themselves onto its slope was the electric circus of thousands of fireflies, winking themselves into the night.

Now I am here, I light incense and careen into the anxiety of having failed my aptitude test. There are still moments to wait, to catch up on current affairs and find out who Arafat whoever was so I can get into Concordia journalism. Or McGill biology, then I can finally wow fellow mountain trekkers by knowing the remedial benefits and ecological origins of a field berry, or seven neat ways to use owl pellets. Or I could think about a degree in etymology, and discuss nonce-words and that ilk and hold circle-jerks to Miriam's and Webster's bareback tussles, without getting a paper cut.