Sitting here the girl next to me on the phone is talking about resolutions and because the office is small and the house echos I can hear every word. Because I'm lacking in discipline I interject. I feel bad everytime but not bad enough. Should this be my resolution? I didn't even think of resolutions this year. Truth be told I didn't even think of New Years. It was just another event on the already bursting Katima-calendar. What does it mean when your jaded by eventfullness? I remember entire years where nothing noteworthy would happen and yet this entire week has been exhausting with activity. Although perhaps every week seems tiring when your living it and then when it's gone it's forgotten. Like the news. Like everything. What do you remember?

At what point does it stop being hockey and become just an excuse to fight?

At what point do we draw the line between a children's movie and something else?

To what extent can privacy be expected in a house of paper walls?

Where does youth end and that next thing begin? When does your situation shift from 'Young Adult' to 'Adult'? Is it a sudden change or something slow and progressive? Is it qualitative or quantitative? Is there something that shows you when you've crossed the line from marginalisation? Can you know? Don't we need to know? We must know mustn't we?...I must?

I went to a bookstore the other day. It was a small intellectual type place. In a nice old wooden building on the mainstreet of a small town on the ocean. Looking out the window it's target audience loomed from behind some snow-covered greenspace. If a university encourages economic growth I'm almost certain that it would be in one of two markets: beer or books. The bookstore had one of those niche looks and was that size where it's uncomfortable to wear a backpack and you feel like you have to move constantly to allow others the same oppurtunity to peer at the spines of books you've never seen before. A browsing bookstore. One you can get lost in even though the number of shelves can be counted on both hands and half a foot. Yet none of this struck me. Not the almost too young looking clerks or the lady I bumped into no what struck me most was translation. The translated culture that this bookstore illustrated. Certainly it had french books written by french people. It even had acadian books but right next to the Sartre was the Danielle Steele. You had your Michel Tremblay crowded by J.K. Rowling. I found it shocking. Hérménégilde Chiasson doesn' really have any place next to Stephen King (but than again not many english writers belong down there at least it's the right language though). I'm not sure whether I find this state of affairs disturbing or not. The people here seem to accept it but does that mean they should? I can't however feel indignant for people who aren't idignant themselves can ? Last night I watched the movie 'Gaz Bar Blues' it's Québecois. In it though there is a character who gets arrested in Berlin trying to rebuild the wall. It's set during the time the wall came down. He feels that the people on the East had a much more wholesome way of life undiluted by partying and american style capitalism a throwback kind of place and he was trying to protect that little slice of the old-life. He was idignant for people who aren't indignant and he got sent home. Movies are another place that here the live in translation the video stores are packed wall to wall with re-dubbed english movies. Now I understand why the Québecois fight so hard. The Acadians don't fight nearly that hard and they have to sit through the same blockbuster shit we get in Alberta. Hmm. I just don't know which is better create a segregated community based on protectionism or integrate.

right?
The Question is Right!
no statement is certain.
Thinking,
of all that is said in a day...
All:
statements,pronouncements,commandments,promulgations, edicts, etcetera, etcetera...

should end in a ?

?uestions

Through the open gate the ghosts come riding in. It could be catching sight of something in the corner of your eye, or perhaps it's a scent on the breeze (they say smell is most closely linked to memory) more often than not though I find it's a song, a sound, a riff or bassline that conjures the past. A hazy image, the impression of a moment. So fragile and tentative; then the present comes rushing in and it to is vulnerable, beautiful, worthwhile. Too much reminscence has you missing the now, yet too little has you losing the then.

It's Christmas...

a realisation not a pronouncement.
how very odd.

Why?
Why not?

exhaustion.
sometimes the aerobics of futility are exhausting.
existence becomes a tiring thing.
not as in "Tired of Life"
but perhaps "Tired from Life"
in the end though we must all fight! explode! erupt!
Rail Against the Void!

or do we?

I was thinking about shame the other day. Anecdotally, of course. I was thinking about the time i was in the wrong picture for the yearbook in elementary school and the time that my aunt wrote a story, back when she figured herself to be an author, and I had given it to a friend who left it lying on his desk and then when he came back he didn't recognise it and gave it to the teacher and the teacher asked the whole class and I felt so ...ashamed going up and explaining myself. Shame is I think like guilt, they are both self created emotions. I wish I couldn't feel shame. Guilt however I kind of like. Actually what I wish was that I never felt as awkward as I did in that period of time beginning at the end of elementary school and following me to the beginning of high school. I work at a school here. It brings back memories. I think to myself how horrible it must be to still be in Junior High.

I once thought about sadness and beauty,
and how the two are so inter-related.
There always seems to be something so much more beautiful about misery then ecstasy.
I think it's because of the vulnerability, the fragility of sadness.
In an instant it can be crushed yet happiness is so abrasive,
so in your face,
so inpenetrable...

unless it's not.

... it was strange and cold haddock hung from the roof and whiskey sat in dusty bott-

-ttles on unused shelves. this my friend was purgatory an empty bar in a bor-

der town.

The smoke billowedblowing around the room. it was...