if i didn't i'm a fool, you see no one knows this more than me

I used to believe in Eddie Vedder more than I believed in anything.  

Sometimes I try to copy his hands on the guitar, try to pick the way he does.  I really can't do it.

Sometimes I try to count his breaths; Stay with me, let's just breathe.  Sometimes I can still tremble on the edge of that particular cliff like I was twenty-three and miss that specific kind of ache more than I have ever missed anything.  I have no idea what to do when that feeling overwhelms and then recedes, and overwhelms again, what to do with the brackish lines it leaves behind inside.


*

(i still want you.)

For the most part the seniors have stopped coming to school, although there are officially three weeks of classes left.  This morning in first block I won twelve dollars playing dice against the five kids who showed up for my Film Studies class.  That's twelve dollars represented by paper squares, not twelve dollars in cash.  I know these shady characters; they're not going to pay up.  But sometimes they bring me coffee when they're late so I won't mark it on their attendance records.  I'm a horrible teacher, I really am.

This is how I accidentally get mixed in with the cool crowd once in awhile.  I have a history of this kind of mistaken identity; although  I have a few things in common with the genuinely cool, these things are illusions, and cannot be sustained.  Or, in psychological terms, the fact that one suffers from Impostor Syndrome does not mean that one isn't a fraud.




*


Last night as I was falling asleep with Shawn's hand on my hip beneath the blanket, he said, This hipbone makes a good handle.  And I dreamed of myself with hipbone handles, perfect half circles like the handles on a sugar bowl, perfect for lifting and for pouring.  On this side of the veil my hipbones are more useful for steering than for pouring, but my mind liked the idea.  Still likes the idea of hipbones like handles.

I dream a lot.  Sometimes I dream more, I suspect, than I live.


*

if i should fall from grace with god

Blank page, blank look, shooting blanks.  Blank cheque, blank verse. Blank slate. Point blank range.


*

It is a long weekend and I received an email advising me that in honour of Victoria Day, Adult Sensations is having a blowout sale on sex toys.  I wonder what Queen Victoria would have thought of that.



*

i love the way you lie.

I decided to respond to T because I was feeling guilty.  And because, to be honest, I wanted to decide what to say for myself instead of letting him decide what Quiet means.  I talked about Topsy & Tim at the Seaside rather than about what he wrote to me, and this was one of those things that might appear quirky and cute but is really just a distraction from Things I Do Not Want To Talk About. 

*

This is my fourth year working at the school I'm at, and having invested enough time to earn a permanent contract for the first time in a very long time, I have also invested enough time to have infiltrated the Cool Teachers Club.  (The first rule of Cool Teachers Club is Don't Talk About Cool Teachers Club.  I might get kicked out for this.)

You know the Cool Teachers by the way they get to go on all the cool field trips, the kind of field trips that allow them to wear sunglasses and stick their legs in hot tubs laughing and talking to each other and ignoring the 100 teenagers they are supposed to be supervising.  You can tell them apart from the Uncool Teachers who do not get invited to go on the cool field trips, who instead get recruited to supervise the Kids Who Got Left Behind at School Club because they're allergic to bees, grass, peanut butter, sunshine, and fun. This year I was promoted; I get to supervise the year end water slide field trip.  Not sure what I did to up my status this year but I'm looking forward to taking my place in my new clique next to Playoff Beard, Tattoo Sleeves, Olympic Almost, Stand Up Comedian, and Smokes a Lot of Pot.  (My name will be Lawn Tractor.)

There are six teachers in the Cool Teachers Club, four males and, including me, two females.  It took them far too long to notice how extraordinarily cool I am, but I have finally arrived.  I wonder what more is left for me to achieve in this world.


*

just open up the door and fill your mouth with freedom's feeling

Two counsellors are my school are sick now, each one working half time which still leaves me working a full counselling schedule instead of teaching.  Shawn says I am doing voodoo so I can take their jobs.  I'm not, not really, but I do like their jobs better than I like mine.  Mine is too loud and as the generation gap widens I find myself less and less amused by teenagers imitating things they have seen on Youtube.  I'm too old to know what Youtube even is.  I have also learned why counsellors wear pretty shoes; because they can sit down all day if they want to, but I have opted not to sit.  I go get my victims in person instead of phoning and ordering them like they were pizzas.  I own pretty shoes but I hardly ever wear them.

*

Shawn bought a new car which is what boys do, I think, when they get new jobs.  He bought me a lawn tractor as a consolation prize, and although I love mowing the lawn, riding the lawn tractor is a lot more fun than I thought it would be.  Yesterday he shouted out the window at me as I rode by, It's not a go-cart!  

*

I said T was a lint ball and I was wrong.  I thought he was writing to reminisce, which was annoying because I liked him all tucked away in the distant past.  And I am not so much a fan of Modern Technology and the End of the Clean Break.  But he wasn't writing to reminisce, he was writing to apologize which makes him less a lint ball and more some sort of spiky thing, like a burr that is tangled up in my hair, a bit prickly and taking more effort to disentangle than I wanted to dedicate.  And slightly painful.  

It would have been nicer if I had responded but now it has been three weeks and though I have spent almost exactly 21 days trying to think of what to say, the problem is that I am still completely ambivalent.  And now I have lost control of this ending because there are an infinite number of ways for silence to be interpreted.

*

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