It's official, I have finally taken away the last boxes of my belongings out of my mom's basement. In one of them, I found a stack of old writings from my university days, not academic papers, but simple one pagers people and my life at the time. I guess I've always enjoyed writing for fun. In those days, and this will date me, the world didn't own personal laptops or cellphones, and so most of my writing was done on electric typewriters.
In the stack of papers, I found one short story I wrote which I think is still kind of interesting. It starts like this: Last summer, living in Montreal was hard.... (Which means the year was 1995) Here is an excerpt. I hope you enjoy it, I think it tells a lot about my situation that summer and what I thought about writing.
Last summer, living in Montreal was hard. I spent most of my time cleaning the hippie apartment we had sub-leased, shopping for food and wondering what kind of job I would get. When I found out I had to go on welfare, I was pretty upset, I had enough to get by, which didn't help motivating myself to find work. I hated the situation I was in. I hated the apartment, hated the piles of dog hair, the bright red cupboards, and the environmental posters plastered on every horizontal surface. The heat was intense even though most the place rarely got any direct sun. I woke up alone, made coffee, my usual ritual, and lingered at the crusty kitchen table wondering how I was going to fill my day.
The previous tenants had left their beat-up car to go to work in some kid's camp in Northern Ontario. They had left for the forest before I moved in, but as I looked around the rooms I already had quite a clear picture in my head of what they looked like. It annoyed me that I was so bothered by their interior design. I took down all the posters, hid them at the back of the cupboard above the fridge, I swept as much of the dog hair I could ding, and tried to spend more time outside. I felt better sitting in the blistering sun than being swallowed by their cheap lumpy couch.
One day, I finally had something to thank them for. The room I slept in was windowless, filled with their boxes and piles of junk. Every night I wondered if I was going to be buried alive in this room. No one would ever smell my decaying body, the sour smell of dampness and dog sweat would cover it up. I decided to rearrange some of the boxes, to shorten the tower, and as I did, the air was filled with clouds of canine dandruff. Behind a broken guitar, which had been redone to look like a tacky spice rack, I found something to occupy my time: a primitive version of a lap-top computer. I smiled. To think that these politically correct, vegan, cause-loving, recycling, barefooted, free-love ratty haired hippies had tried to keep up with the times amazed me. It's funny how easy it is to judge people when all you have to judge them with is their taste in interior design. I spent some time trying to figure out the small annoying things that machines tend to make you crazy with and once that was basically dealt with, I actually set myself upon writing some text.
The trouble with trying to make yourself believe that if only you could really set your mind to becoming an author you actually could, is that the inspiration is never there. I sat down and wondered what the hell I would write about. I sat there for hours. After a long while I noticed that the only thing that came to me were vague ideas about my friends. I wrote a page long story about a few of them, imagining things they thought and I guess making fun of them a little bit.
Among those sharing the apartment with me, the feedback was excellent. Now, I took it with a grain of salt, knowing that English is not my first language and that most of my vocabulary is very simplistic. I remember trying to impress my professors at university with long complicated words, half of which I didn't really know the meaning of and receiving my papers a week later noticing that my professors had had a field day with their red pens. I pictured them, crazily scaring my paragraphs with long strokes of red ink. Since then, I've stayed away from long academic words, even if it means being reduced to writing like: "See Spot run, see Spot jump". All this to say that although I was told that what I wrote was great, I didn't really believe them. I guess I thought that only fancy, mind-twisting words were worthy of being considering worthy of reading. I enjoyed the clicks of the keys and the sound of the printer. I was overjoyed to notice that my typing speed was improving. And so I wrote, at least until other things came along to keep me busy.
I guess it's been a year since then. Now, I back in the beautiful yuppie land of Vancouver. The summer ended in Montreal, and I found a job in a vintage clothing store. I stopped writing. The winter was long. The hippies came back from summer camp, and I met them for the first time. Serina was a very upbeat girl, she wore long skirts and tacky bead necklaces. Her fat gut hung out from under her skin tight shirts, and her hair looked like she hadn't washed it in weeks. Her boyfriend, Chris, was nice also. He was very much into the environment, and wore a tiny bird's skull around his neck, it was gross but represented him quite well. And so, after formal introductions they moved out with their giant golden lab, packed up their ugly posters and bags of unknown spices, and we left it at that. They took away the typewriter. I didn't really write all winter, I worked and tried to make cold long days go faster by decorating my new flat within my means and by taking walks around the neighborhood. I saw the hippies a few times over the winter, but I got sick of their long heart-felt debates about this issue or that issue, the trees, the pollution, the whales, the legalization of pot, women's rights and the beauty of rainbows.
I forgot all about how I like writing until a few weeks ago, when a friend of mine entered a novel contest. He locked himself up in Horseshoe Bay and wrote continuously for three days. I was jealous. I guess I wanted to do it too, not enter the contest, but find time to write again. So this is how it has begun again. My book.
