Chapter 4: Make it excellent

I couldn't sleep last night. Or more appropriately, this morning.

I fell asleep at the usual time, sometime after 1:00. I descended into sleep at the usual rate but was met with turbulence. It didn't really take and after drifting in and out for a few hours I finally accepted that, at 6:00 AM, I wasn't really going to get back to sleep. Not in any meaningful way, anyhow.

In a way, it was kind of exciting. I hadn't seen 6:00 in any serious way in almost a year. Probably since that party in Hamilton last July, when I fell asleep on Cary and Chris' couch and was awaked by the wonderful roaring of cars speeding down nearby main street. Part of me really wanted to get up and go. Part of me wanted to die so I could rest. The most important part of me, however, was seriously hungry. So what's a guy to do? For once in my life, I had a legitimate reason for going to Tim Hortons. It was 6 in the morning and I was out on the sidewalk for God's sake.

So I hit the road and did my thing, to get good and caffeinated, and my first Breakfast Sandwich in a while to boot. I took a few snaps of the vacant Trafalgar Road under the orange glow of sunrise at 6:30 from high on a hill, because lord knows when I'll catch that again.

So I came back and mulled around for a while, did a small amount of writing, cleaned up (though I still need to shave,) and almost went for a bike ride, but the fucking tire's deflated. We need a new pump, and/or a new inner tube (the good news is, it's the front wheel, so if I need to replace it I can, unlike the handicap that keeps me from using my other bike.)

There's a certain relaxing freshness to being up early, but let's face facts, I'm tired now and going to feel exhausted later when I'm at Aunt Karen's place for Ali's birthday, which officially ushers in the May Birthday Madness. Sigh...

Our relatives in Palmerston, specifically cousin Elizabeth, seem to be making an effort to alienate us, but that's probably not so deliberate. She's holding her baby son's Christening next weekend, aka Mother's Day/Brandon's Birthday. Everyone's agreed that they're either going to that or to his birthday but not both. His birthday happens to fall on the same weekend as mine. I don't personally mind and would in fact rather we go on the birthday even if it means ignoring my birthday altogether, since that would save us the trip to Church, the dressing nice, the moring segment and other crap, and allow me to at least let my mom relax on Mother's Day. I'm thinking I might like to see my birthday delayed until June so we can all clear our heads. I hate May sometimes. I was having this conversation with the dental hygenist as she scraped the shit from between my teeth. Apparently, the bulk of her family, like mine, has May birthdays. We shared a sympathetic laugh.

I was mad at Elizabeth in November 2005 when she told me she was expecting a kid on my very birthday. As annoying as that is, it was more because that was the same day Eddie Guerrero died and I was really upset anyway, this just gave me one more thing to get upset about. Now I'm just annoyed at the extra stress it's putting on the family situation. As weird as it seems, looking back it feels like the tie that held our two families together was Kris, as I was always had him to look forward to seeing, and thus the impetus was there to keep up regular visits. Now that's out of the question, with him generally exiled to his domestic bliss in Windsor and the Williamses and the Stemmers seem to largely be drifting apart.

Life goes on, I suppose, if not always in the direction you want, tried, thought you wanted, or predicted.

Well, it'll never be all that easy, I know. But you can be good, man I know you've got it in you.

I've recently, and not surprisingly, upped my creative output. I'm in the midst of a moderte rant (actually a new category, more like "Love Fest") for Interneta, and researching a second. I've also broken a year and a half or so of creative lyrical drought (mired in stuff I think of as poetry but are really just disjoined thoughts in snappy paragraphs) and started writing songs, inasmuch as one who is in no way musical can write songs (there are a whole bunch hidden somewhere on Interneta, you can find 'em if you look. They're not much to see, though, because you can't devine the tunes.)

Just because you're not blind, you don't necessarily always understand what you can see.

Keep on rockin'
-Scott