V: Toxic Ticktock and the Brand New Reruns

For a little while ago now, I've been reading old posts. At first I was skipping around indiscriminately, but then I realized I was missing out by not picking a time in my life and studying from there. So I started reading posts from the "end" of the blog - that period in late 2010 through 2011, that last year when the posts slowed to a trickle and nearly every one of them was half about how I never post anymore (like this one is.)

There were good times then. There were also bad ones, and they're a lot more prevalent because I only turned to this blog when I was desperate for an outlet, a complaint department. The good times passed without comment. But it was the end of four exhausting years of University education... lots of essays to write, by-then familiar places and routines, constantly surrounded by strangers I couldn't quite reach... a constant cycle of meeting people and letting them leave my life. Frustration. Stagnation. Growth, actually, but too slowly for me to recognize it when it was happening.

The word depression comes up a lot on those old posts and a lot of the time I catch myself and try to correct myself and clarify that I'm not using it in the clinical sense. I don't think I ever was depressed and eventually I started softening the discourse by using the phrase "bummed" a lot which makes sense. It's sad that the tone of the blog then was so negative but when I was in a good mood I really had little to say for myself. Same as now, maybe. There are things that have happened in the last 4 or 6 months that, years earlier, I would have written lengthy, lengthy posts about. Some good, some really not, and some just needed perspective.

Working has made me different. Tamed me some, compared to then. I almost don't like thinking about it, because part of me is just like "Yeah, shut up kid," and part of me thinks "Well he knows he's being annoying but that's his situation. He knows that's it." I was very aware of the world I had set myself up in. And my life is different now so I'm not like that.

So I flipped back a few years to the beginning of my University life, September 2007. That was a section of the blog I don't know that I ever re-read much... it felt very fresh, and of course when I read it all it came back to me, the events, the observations and what I felt about them. That far back, the posts are vividly detailed, if rambling. The kid writing them is so fascinated by every new thing, and yet he at least does a decent job filtering them (after all, he's been at it for three years or so by that point.) But there's a lot new going on so he's overwhelmed and excited and scared but he doesn't want to let it show. And his writing style is maybe a bit too self-satisfied and stylized, but I know that's exactly how I thought back then. It's such a time machine. Years later - and I'm only 25, my memory shouldn't be that bad, but it is because I spend much of my life zoned out - but years later, this blog is a wonderful gift I left for myself, to remember it all. If I wasn't doing this, it would be gone. All these stupid observations and experience would flicker out the day after they happened. Instead, it's all there. Most of it. More than one could expect. And I took great care to include a lot of irrelevant nonsense, too.

I'll tell you a story from back then which I didn't see anywhere on the blog so maybe I kept it to myself. It was either my first day at U of T or not long after. My first class of the day was Philosophy, it was dense and hard to wrap my head around and definitely a very intimidating way to start a possible 4 years of education. So I ducked out to the washroom and set myself up at the urinal and looked down at the little rubber urinal cake holder. It had the word "AROMEX" on it. And I thought "Huh. So even if I don't learn anything - literally anything at all - in this class, then at least I learned that the urinals in Alumni Hall (the building where the class was held) have urinal cake holders from a company called Aromex." And that's dumb and a pointless thing to remember, but hey, here we are all the years later and I still remember that. It was my way of reminding myself that I wasn't just there to study and learn facts, I was there to see the city, to see people and learn the world outside my little suburban bubble.

Now I embody that bubble. I am the bubble. I used to remark about every single person that I interacted with in a day (it wasn't that hard.) Now I have entire swaths of people that come and gone, have come and gone, unremarked, and will be unremembered because of it. We'll meet again someday and I'll have a hard time remembering exactly when we worked together.

If I was more attentive, I'd keep better track of all the people that come into the store, the questionable ones. Someone came in looking for "Something mafia something," which turned out to be Swedish House Mafia. She asked if it was any good. I told her I didn't know, I don't listen to any electronica.

"Electronica?" she said, "What's that?"

"Um... like electronic music. Dance music. Club stuff."

"Oh. So what's it like?"

"Um, I don't know. I just told you I haven't listened to it. I can let you sample it."

"Well... I just like that one song. Is the rest of it like that song? Is the rest of it good?"

You wouldn't write this in fiction because it doesn't even halfway make sense. I'm even abbreviating it somewhat for ease of reading.

So I say "Yeah, I had a former co-worker who was a DJ and he used to get it a lot, so it must be good." She bought it and I sent her on her way.

I turned to Oral, who overheard this entire interaction and said "So... when I said I didn't know anything about it... wasn't that her cue to stop asking me fucking questions?"

He laughed. "Trophy wife."

"Yeah," I said. "Third place."

Participant, even.

And that's it. Keep on rockin'
-Scotto