08 JAN 21

My mom told me to write this. Well, she told me to write something. “I write when I have something to say,” I told her. But I’m not going to e-mail a realtor, and I’m not going to call the bank about changing my address so they can set up my RRSP, so I figure I owe her this W. Also, I recently backread my DM’s with the hottest woman I’ve ever met in real life, and, the one time she responded to me a couple years ago, she asked me if I still write in some capacity, and why do any of us do anything, right?

Also, I’m finally listening to the two Taylor Swift albums that came out last year.

Last year. God that’s messed up. I remember my last year in Toronto, when I told people over and over again how frustrated I felt being stuck in what I considered an “in-between time” — done with one life stage and just sitting around waiting for the next one. I’ve spent the three years since then nominally “in training” for the job I officially signed up to do, but really mostly just sitting at various desks in a fireproof onesie waiting for the actual training courses. The air force should really get into writing novels, the way it spins irony.

But I digress. Here we all all are, hopefully somewhere near the tail end of the greatest in-between time we’ve ever seen and hopefully will ever see. When all’s said and done, it’ll have been more than a year of sitting in our homes afraid and bored, dying slowly except when we were dying a little more quickly. What an in-between time it’s been. I got really fat when they closed the gyms, grew a contender for the most regrettable mustache in the history of young men growing regrettable mustaches, left a wonderful woman, finally went back to the gym when one of those few generally acceptable women I met afterward semi-obliquely pointed out that I should probably go back to the gym, shaved the regrettable mustache, moved halfway across the country.

Was I a young man growing a regrettable mustache? Maybe I was just a man growing a regrettable mustache. Do I say “young” to make myself feel better about growing older, or to make myself feel better about how terrible that mustache was?

You’re probably familiar with the signs at state and provincial borders. “Welcome to [X province/state]: [Tired motto or staid descriptor].” “A place to grow,” “Live free or die,” “The Empire State”.

B.C.’s reads: “Welcome to British Columbia: The best place on earth.”

I get the feeling it’s not a boast. It’s the middle of January, and I had to take my sweater off on the way home from Costco today. Driving from the Alberta border to the coast is a dozen or so hours of hurtling down mountains that make you feel close to God almost as much because of their majesty as because of the sneaking suspicion they give you that you’re probably about to die. The land is wild and verdant and the ocean is infinite and perfect. Even the people are beautiful, and also somehow really tall. Why is everybody here so tall?

It’s most striking in comparison to the place I left. “I have this love letter to Winnipeg churning around in my head,” I told a friend-adjacent person shortly before I left (I say “friend-adjacent” more because I’m not sure I was ever very interesting or entertaining to her than any failing on her part). I was telling the truth about the love — Winnipeg meant a roughly comparable amount to me as any other place I’ve ever called home (y’know what I’m proofreading this and it actually kind of didn’t; it meant something to me though), but the letter was a lie. What is there to say? There are like four highways and it’s real dusty in the summertime. It gets to literally -50 degrees in the winter it’s super fucked up. The people are a little medium city hippie eccentric and a little old timey small town folksy, frequently at the same time. One time there was a Bhangra remix music video of “Winnipeg vs. Everybody”, the ode to the Winnipeg Jets produced by local Virgin Radio affiliate DJ Ace Burpee.

And now I’m here in the best place on earth, doing dishes and playing World of Warcraft day in and day out in an apartment (“condo,” I guess) that’s an order of magnitude nicer than anything I could possibly deserve. I wear my uniform at home to keep warm because I don’t want to wear out clothes I had to pay for while sitting alone at my computer. I have granite countertops and way too much cupboard space (most of it unused) including slots next to the cabinets that look to be specifically for liquor or wine bottles (surprisingly entirely unused). I have an oven that’s way too small and a heated bathroom floor and piled up used cookware and recycling because whom am I trying to impress in a global pandemic?

My building has its own gym (I can’t believe I used to /go/ to the gym like some sort of caveman), so I can work out most days. Mostly stopped eating sugar. At least I’m physically healthy. I might be just about bordering on decent-looking again, but it’s hard to say when you’ve seen like twelve human beings total over the last four months.

And I wait for there to be a world again for me to go out into. I wait for beers with friends and friends I haven’t made yet with men chasing after a ball on half-watched TV’s arrayed around walls. I wait for faith and songs in wooden benches surrounded by elderly people who are delighted to see such a polite young(?) man show up at least every once in a while. I wait to be able to leave the best place on earth and see home, whatever that word means to someone who’s moved four times in thirteen years. Maybe it means nothing, but at least it’ll be better to be able to chase the past than to be stuck wishing you were. I wait for anything but video games and the virtual company of friends whom I love dearly but who I KNOW desperately want more just as much as I do.

I wait for anything but this.

If you’re waiting for a point, there isn’t one. I don’t really have anything to say.

Maybe that’s the point.