Inspired by Heathenfest (with Eluveitie, Belphegor, Alestorm, Kivimetsan Druidi, and Vreid) here are some rough guidelines Lily and I came up with while not screaming, drinking, or getting kicked in the back. These are not really instructions, since most people at metal shows already follow these guidelines and are shockingly nice, but rather observations based on the average cordial metalhead's show behaviour.

-- Be friendly! Everyone here is probably awesome.

-- Identify your needs for the evening and situate yourself accordingly. If you just want to chill against the wall and listen, find that area. If you feel like going completely batshit insane, there's an area for you, too!

-- Don't be too sensitive. Even if you're on the calmest sideline, you might be accosted by someone's elbow. They probably didn't mean it.

-- Watch out for girls

-- Some girls want to be in the very centre of the craziest section of the pit. Watch out for them anyway.

-- People in the pit want to be on the pit; people who don't want to in the pit aren't in the pit. Don't shove someone in against their will (unless they're saying no with their lips but yes with their eyes).

-- People on the very edge of the pit should be treated like the bumpers in a pinball game.

-- If a dude goes down while in the pit, at least two, and preferably four, other dudes nearest to him must stop what they are doing and help him up.

-- If a girl goes down in the pit, everyone stops what they are doing until she is safely returned to an upright position.

--If a girl gets sucked into the pit against her will, use any means necessary to get her back out again, up to and including bodily throwing her to safely. (This actually happened to me).

-- Official security guards are almost invariably dicks. Don't incur their wrath.

-- Metal dudes who are working security are awesome. Buy them a drink.

-- If you're the biggest dude around and there's no security in sight, congratulations. You are now security. Sorry about that.

-- This is a tricky one, and hard to manage, but we appreciate it so much when it happens: pay attention to your comrade's footwear. Some are wearing steel-toed boots; some threadbare chucks. Try not to land directly on the feet of the poorer shod.

-- And finally, thank you all for taking the time to carefully groom before the show. While Lily and I were getting crushed and kicked and elbowed in the face during Alestorm, all we could smell was clean shampoo, deodorant, and fresh sweat. Awesome. Keep up the good work.

Labels: Metal

Way back in the middle of June, I got a shit-ton of paperwork from my ex-husband's lawyer. After the agonizing wait for the year-long separation to run out, the time had officially come to file for divorce. I read through all the forms, scrawled my illegible signature across each one, and got them notarized. I sent them off the day before I left to spend a month in Los Angeles. While away, my ex sent me an email to let me know that the papers had been received and formally filed on July 12th, my twenty-sixth birthday. In a mere six weeks, the process should have been complete.

Four months passed. Because he had to file in the summer, most people working for the family court system were on vacation. This led to a huge backlog of paperwork and ridiculous wait times. All because every judge in that godforsaken city decided to spend six weeks at the cottage instead of placing three stamps and a signature on my divorce papers. Every day I would check the mailbox, and no matter what other goodies might be in there for me, I'd always swear a little under my breath when once again, my divorce judgment failed to show up.

And then, today, the Day of the Dead, after a very full weekend of Halloween-related debauchery, it finally arrived in a nondescript white envelope. The paperwork that officially severed my last remaining legal connection to my ex-husband.
I proceeded to pour myself an awful lot of bourbon over ice and am going to get blazing drunk. I can't imagine a more logical or appropriate course of action.

The process not completely over. 31 days after the judgment was granted, I can request a copy of my Certificate of Divorce, the last bit of paperwork that will ever need to be processed in the matter and something I will need if I ever want to get married again (ha. ha.). But the judgment is the important thing, the formal degree that the marriage I once had has been dissolved.

Because here's the thing: while I've been using the term ex-husband since Ed and I separated, we've still been married. We've been completely autonomous, completely apart, since I got on a plane at the end of June last year, and as more time and geographical distance elapsed and I started to scab and scar over. But the feeling of being somehow still being bound to another person that I would be perfectly content to never see or speak to again was deeply uncomfortable, and the wait has been awful.

I expected to want to celebrate. I expected to do an undignified dance and invite everyone I know out to drink with me. It's a kind of freedom, to be sure, but even more so it feels like a cauterization. An old wound that might have eventually gone bad has been reopened so it can finally heal. This is good; it also hurts like a motherfucker.

I have a high pain tolerance. Winter is almost here. Its the Day of the Dead. I'm ready.

Labels: Le Divorce

cinnamon-flavoured gum, black dress shirts, chili sauce, pine needles, brown sugar, cool glass, fountain pens, wasabi, raw silk, tactile sound, whiskey, leather, shaving cream, fresh sheets, dark chocolate, aloe, melted wax, melted butter, bare wrists, damp temples, cedar, bourbon, rubber, tall black boots, a long black coat.

Labels: Too Much Information

You're not going to believe what I am about to tell you. I don't mind. In fact, it's probably for the best if you don't believe me. It'll make your life a lot simpler.

I can tell the future.

See?

I can already feel you casting your doubt, just as I've cast mine countless times. But all the disbelief in the world cannot alter the fact that were you to ask me, I could tell you exactly how some aspect of your life is going to resolve.

There are boundaries, of course. There are so many variables, so many possible unfoldings of the universe, that is becomes impossible to see anything accurate past a certain distance. A year and half is about as far as I can reasonably reach, and at that point the best I can do is present two options. It will either happen this way or it will happen that way. Anything beyond that and the multiple choice gets too vague to really be of any use to anyone.

I would prefer it if you didn't believe I can see your future. A very few of my friends do, but they are the ones who know me inside and out, knew me before I was me, and never doubt. Only one of my friends, my muggle friends, ever believed me. I told him his future regularly. Then, one day, he asked me a hard question, a far question, one that would not resolve itself for a year and a half. Because I loved him, I reached, and I told him how it would end -- either this way, or that way. For a long time, it looked as though I was wrong, and though he never said anything, I knew he was angry. After the situation fell in place and one of those two possibilities did come to be, he asked me again if I could really tell the future. I refused to answer him. It seemed like a stupid question. Not long after he stopped speaking to me altogether.

I don't often tell people the futures I reach anymore, though if I am asked directly I will answer. I love my friends and can deny them little, but since the future is always strange and never easy, it is better for you all to continue not to believe me. You probably don't want to know.

I often, however, reach into my own future. The older I get, and the better I know myself, the further I can reach and the easier it becomes. It's still difficult for me to process and accept, so I often ignore my own prescience (and at my own peril). Sometimes the future is too difficult and painful for me to properly see (since I cannot imagine it). Sometimes I flatly refuse to believe what I see because for all that I am I can be very stubborn. And sometimes I stop looking entirely because I'd rather not know. I'd rather cover my eyes and hope I miss the scary bits.

So I have to get sneaky with myself. The best way that I have found to talk to myself about anything, though especially the future, is through my notebooks. I always have one on me, and I am forever jotting down lines of poetry and doodling and keeping a pseudo-journal of thoughts and smells and memories and complaints. So when something occurs to my deep, powerful, future-sensing mind, it tends to get folded in to whatever I am writing at the time. Scrying amid the scribbling.

It can take some time for these love letters from the past about the future to finally reach me. But inevitably I'll be looking for an early draft of a piece or a phone number I wrote down, and suddenly find myself winded, sucker punched in the gut by a future that is already clearer that it was when I first called it out.

I say all of this so I can tell you one small thing: something is happening. The day that everything came undone a year and a quarter ago, I saw the future ahead of me more clearly than I ever have before. This future was warm, light hitting a white stucco wall on a late, fat summer afternoon. This future was easy in a way that things only are after you've fought for them longer and harder than you believed you were capable of. This future was a cup running over, and now I feel like the first drops have finally dropped down on parched lips.

I will tell you more when I can. I would tell you everything now, and how it is going to resolve. I would happily tell you the future. But you wouldn't believe me. And soon, I will have forgotten again too. We'll both just have to find out as time slowly unfolds at its own pace.

I don't mind. After all, the woods are lovely, dark and deep.

Labels: Magic

Dos!

-- Eat all the delicious, free food offered to you regardless of the meat content or calorie count. You need those precious nutrients for the long winter ahead.

-- Make sure you have an awesome friend who will invite you to drink beer and hang out on her family's dock into the small hours.

-- Spend at least one night at your little brother's kickass new apartment playing Harry Potter: the Trivia Game.

-- Steal your neighbour's wireless internet. They're nice; the probably don't mind.

-- Bring a flask. That way, the line "This man whan to die for his country; OBLIGE HIM" is even more awesome than you could have imagined.

Don'ts!

-- Do not watch more than four hours of true crime documentaries with Harry Walschots, lest you find yourself in a heated conversation about blood spatter and ballistics.

-- Do not engage in debates with surly former schoolmates who now work at the local Walmart. It is so tempting to try and rescue them but it will only make you crazy.

-- Don't believe your sadistic parents when they try to convince you that you've slept in past 4pm. It's barely noon.

Labels: Family and Friends

Some part of me is still surprised when I hang out with a couple who really works together. Granted, this might be me speaking from the twisted lump of scar tissue where my heart should be, but I find it's a rare thing. Every now again again, though, even I have to admit that a certain couple is just smashing. They think the other person is just the coolest. They genuinely try not to hurt each other. And while I might not have ever put them together in my mind had I met or known them separately, once I see them together it makes perfect sense.

Chris and Sandy are one of those couples. They're endlessly patient with one another. Both of them want the other to succeed as an artist. They're also two hilarious, tough, one-of-a-kind people who haven't lost a shred of their identities in sharing their lives with each other. They've always been a pleasure to know and a hoot to hang out with.

This past weekend I was honoured to attend their wedding. It took place in Vancouver, and the Calgary people poured in to town to celebrate with them. Local friends had their couches and floors and spare rooms filled with friends. We barbecued and and danced, argued and drank. The feeling of goodwill, of vicarious joy, was absolutely overwhelming. There was not a cynic unmoved. We all agreed that someone should get married every year out West, if only so we can have a smashing reunion.

There was sushi at night and delightfully greasy breakfast at noon. There was hiking and catching crabs and falling into a blackberry patch at Lighthouse Park. There was beer and wine and beer again, and pitchers and pitchers of mojitos. There was exquisite weather and a view of the mountains. There was even some metal.

Thank you Jordan and Summer for letting me (and GoVo and Jill and Paul) crash at your place. Thank you to all my friends from afar and before for reminding me that my time in Calgary was pretty fucking awesome. And thank you most of all to Chris and Sandy, for being wonderful together. Nostrovia.

Labels: Family and Friends, Travelling

Dear Douchebags on the Patio,

I give up. I have absolutely no idea what attracts you anymore.

On this particular Sunday, I was suffering from both a slight hangover and a headbangover, and was certainly not at my best. Walking down Bloor, on my way to water a friend's plants while he was out of town, I felt pretty invisible. Apparently not. Who knew that the combination of metal t-shirt, floor-length skirt, x-tra large coffee in hand, and makeup-less face would be such a draw to you?

I am not sure what exactly you said to me -- it sounded a lot like "GrrrAUWwwwAHHH TITS RAWrgggg." All I could do in response was throw my hands over my head in defeat. If there was something about the dark circles under my eyes that made you think I would in any way respond favourably to your overtures, there is really nothing more I can do.

Labels: Anger Management, Open Letters to Late Capitalist Society