just lay your head down I am ready for the fall. I'm ready for the smells of damp decomposition, the way the light hits the leaves just so, the way the sun heats up your back and the hairs on your arms if you sit outside reading. I love watching the world pass by from the bus, from the train, as I listen to thoughtful or melancholy music. It makes even ugliness seem beautiful, and inspires me by wistfulness to see the small joys and successes in my days as wonderful things. Fall is the most romantic season of the year for a canadian I think.

Common sense dictates that this would be the wintertime, going with that terrible "keeping warm" cliche we are so apt to say about ourselves, but as for raw beauty touched and disciplined only by nature in a season, fall is the most incredible. Surely the new life of spring is a miracle, but is death of life not just as profound, if not more? One fell swoop of a chill, and the green lush children die overnight, and we are surrounded by beautiful death in the morning, the sunlight glittering and flickering worriedly amongst crystallized corpses, yellow or brown in their death pallor.

I want to be amongst old things. To me St. Albert is stucco, paved trails, vandalism, never-ending aesthetical war and winning campaign against nature, broken glass, newness that is dirty, the true are maligned, the false are worshipped, lego-grass lawns, shining meaningless possessions, shining meaningless faces, dying children visible as ghosts drinking or smoking up behind perfectly manicured trees, artificial colors, artificial smiles, one color, one flock.

Old things. My grandmother's tiny warm kitchen, with the ancient red linoleum, my old wooden bed, my old particleboard ceilinged basement converted office, the brown velvet couch that smells like pipe smoke, the livingroom with parlour potpourri smell, creaky hardwood floors, creaking stairs, corkfloored bedroom silenting my footfalls, slanted roof that makes me feel I sleep in a berth, memories of old ship wallpaper, the smell of oilpaintings and old books, Huge white poplar trees, a quiet street, the sound of schoolchildren, the familiar cracked sidewalks. I miss cosy and complex life of dilapitation...

I can't live the life I live during the summer here for any longer than that. It is important that I never lose track of my friends, though I'm not sure they realize how bearable they make it for me, because they do make all the difference sometimes. Oh, poor maligned me...but, I'm not the right kind of person to be in this wrong kind of place.

  ¶ 9:49 AM