Tag Archives: the imagination of writing

Knowledge Messes Up My Self

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I had something in me that was real. I remember it. I don’t just remember it. I was wholly in that, everything raw and wild. That was when I was a kid, and I didn’t think about it like that. I was a kid and the world was open to anything I could imagine. I want to get back to that.

My head is old now. Experiences have eroded my wiring, bashed it about with learning to kowtow, inebriation and pretending to know. The desire is the thing, on tippy toes, to keep getting up like that. And I cannot.

It reminds me of a realization of love, that thing as it was at the outset, pure, the excitement, that anticipation, all of that wonder in the eyes, then realizing it was not magic, but a drug we’re self-prescribed. And now I can’t think of it as anything else.

The light from a childhood window, the smells from the hall, sounds of people downstairs, someone approaching, a mother, maybe not, knowing that space, looking back, realizing you are there, no one to answer to, just for the moment, in that world as long as you can make it, without closing your eyes, for as long possible.

Buying Secrets from the Past: NHL Action Players

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I spend a lot of time digging into my memories. I look at pictures of me as a boy – fishing on the dock, beside the Christmas Tree, with our dog Celeste – trying to access that momentous time. I have also tried to searched out childhood things like Checkerboard Ice Cream and Pantry cookies, both of which I cherished in those days and both of which have vanished.

Modern-Day Checkerboard Ice Cream but not my brand (Not the Gluten-free notation!)

It seems somehow possible that if I could just taste them again, I would rediscover a key note to my uncluttered mind, like the magic of holding the tin or the feeling of my bare legs against the kitchen linoleum. But I have not been able to find either.

Something I have found is the NHL Action Players Book from Loblaws grocery store.

Toronto Maple Leafs page of Loblaws NHL Action Players

I collected these stickers from the Loblaws grocery store, furiously opening strip after strip to fill the booklet, trading for missing stamps, finding out who had found the un-find-able ones. There were dozens of Larry Carriere and Walt McKechnie and so few of Guy Lambert and Don Awry. It was impossible to find those.

NHL Action Players available for purchase on Ebay.

And then Doug Crosby, a rich and somewhat simple boy in my class, bought the completed book from Edward Etchells for $50. The class bully Andy McAlpine mocked him. “You idiot! That’s not how it’s done!”

Class bully Andy McAlpine today.

I realize that the whole thing was about the experience of collecting things, but why not do it Doug Crosby’s way? Why go through all of the hassle of bartering for the rare stickers when you could just buy the whole thing in one shot? As much as Doug seemed to have missed the point, Andy totally misses it. It’s not about scamming the system but learning from the experiences of the thing, be that finding Don Awry or eating Checkerboard Ice Cream.

The Orgiastic Pleasure of Writing

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Writing might be hell, but it’s also nakedly divine. Being in there, not knowing what might be coming next, not thinking about it, but looking forward to the words as they sort and bloom, or maybe none of that, but writing wildly with electronic music and gummy bears in my head. That is serenity for me.

Hastings, UK (1989)

It’s a hard thing to wiggle inside of, get my arms out and understand, but I do know this place. It is quiet and everything, tiny and never there. It is impossibly so, a sideways, half-mirror thing, dipping into dreams and memories, imagination of what could be, all of it as concrete as anything, more so than anything else. I know in this place.

McPhedran, Kingston (1986)

I do know about this shitty world, this place we share and begrudge, but I do think that I could help it be something else, not really exactly that, but imagine something like a child. And there is something orgiastically real about that.