January 05, 2006

The second part of the year was like one of those journeys where after months of travel you end up in the same place, changed utterly. (read the first part).

On the first of July, Canada became as old as my grandmother and the village of New Hamburg decided it would be right to celebrate this feat with fireworks. After the official celebrations, Laura and I celebrated privately by getting drunk and naked, not just once but repeatedly throughout the month. We had no other choice — in the summer the whole city is alive with jazz, and when the jazz is gone there’s always the Hillside festival to go to, which is a hippie dream within a dream.

At the beginning of August we moved Laura’s porcelain dishes to London. The apartment that was full of cat hair when we got there, but that didn’t stop us from sprawling naked on the hardwood floors (the house came with no furniture, only hair). After all that, I came back to Waterloo and decided to blog for 24 hours straight without once showing my crotch (that last part was harder than I thought). August was also a month for photoroams, new, beautiful strangers, and Flickr, the DemonGod of images.

In September, Laura moved to London and left me behind to write meaningful stories about monkeys. Thus, the first days of autumn were filled with longing and mad attempts to leave Waterloo or die trying (with a little practice). September is always fucking melodramatic like that. But instead of dying, I spent my days chasing words on streets and swinging naked from trees.

I finally did leave the Waterloo in October when I found a job in London talking to Americans for eight hours every day. I moved into Laura’s room, ate her food, and fixed her bicycle wheels. It was pretty great. In the dark, we confessed things to each other, like how terrified she was of me the first time we kissed. And work was good for the first little while: I drew fish, learned about mitten bunnies, and snuck out during lunch breaks to take pictures of rain. Life was good.

In November I got naked at Laurier while listening to Cohen croon in the background. I’ve never been a nude model before, and the experience was vaguely satisfying, much more so than my day job which increasingly involved taking other people’s problems upon myself. Slowly, I grew disillusioned with London and the way it coats your internal organs in a tiny membrane of filth. Performing experiments on decomposing tissue was a lot more enjoyable than my work.

In December I got a new mountain bike so I could ride to work in 10 feet of snow, since the City of London refuses to plow its streets. In a further act of rebellion against winter, I peed in Laura’s yard, further grossing out her roommates. Sometime in the middle of December, I decided to quit my job and search for something better, but first I encouraged my customers to cancel their accounts and stick it to the man-beast. As the holidays came, we feasted like kings amongst friends, peed in bottles, danced by candlelight, and returned once more to the city where it all started.

I’m in Waterloo now. She’s in London. We’re dancing with distances and missing parts of ourselves.

Timewarp, again:

• 2005 Review - January to June
• 2004 Review
• 2003 Review