up for air

God, I gotta tell you. So much of this is fractal bullshit.

It's 12:02am. My alarm clock says 1:02am, because I refuse to fiddle with it twice a year when we have our arbitrary time change; I figure it'll catch up when it catches up. I'm starving myself back into clarity -- I reckon I deserved a couple months' leeway as far as steam-letting went, and now the steam has gone right the fuck back up into my neck where it used to rest, and it's making me severely uncomfortable. I distract myself with stars and streetlights.

I really, really dig the streetcorners in this city. I could just walk from corner to corner all day and especially all night. You think I'm kidding -- go stand on the corner of College and Bathurst on a really cold night, just outside Sneaky Dee's, and watch the drunks trudge by. Or swing down to Queen and Spadina and close your eyes and feel the vibration of bodies looking for something to eat, something to swallow, something to put their teeth in. You truly, truly don't need eyes to see that kind of heat rising in December, let me tell you what. It's palpable -- it's like standing next to a blast furnace. It's awesome, and not in that skater-boy kind of way, either. We could solve the energy crisis if we could determine how to catch libido in a bottle. Put your teeth in it and watch it burn.

But yes. I missed this city. It's a terrible cliche to say it's in my blood or my bones, and my friends never believe me when I talk that way anyway -- they chide me for trying to cover up nine formative years in rural Ontario and walk cool like I was always Here and never There. But I swear to God I never really left. There was always something exciting, something alive about the wild urban versus the mild suburban to me, even as a kid taking his first trips on a subway. I know it sounds romanticized, and it probably is on some level, in that very Lorca "Poet in New York" kind of way, but this ain't New York, so I feel partially liberated from that most supreme of cliches.

Blood runs under these streets, I'm convinced of it. This isn't violence the way you're thinking; this isn't gangs and mobs and bike clubs. It's not cutthroat politics or nightmare jetsetting. It's just blood, you know? Life. The good stuff. The stuff that makes me feel something, now that I kicked myself once again out of another year-long binge. It's like every so often I come up for air, before the next steam ship comes by and rolls me back under again. And every time I come up -- well, this is a lot like treading water, isn't it? I'm not saying anything, I'm not going anywhere particular: I'm describing a moment, treading water under stars and streetlights and distracting myself from my wrongheaded clock.

Yeah, a lot of this is fractal bullshit, but I think tomorrow I'm going to take a subway ride downtown and invest in a magnifying glass, some Super Glue and a couple of mincy little tweezers. See if I can't start putting some of this together -- never know, right?

You people are going to get sick of this shit, really quickly and really soon.
Funny, though, how I still find you inspiring.