30.EPILOGUE.73: December 23, 2003 --
INFINITY.
"*30*."
INTERLUDE FIVE: "Cold Blue."
Oh, cheer up!
Why you such a Negative Nellie?!
-- Edvard Munch
Sitting here at the University, 7:00
am.
It's dark outside and I'm
barely awake. The lights are dim. I'm in a stuffed, square
chair. Armrests. I lean my head back, close my eyes.
Beside me, a coffee. I don't really like coffee, but coffee is warm
and I'm cold. And then there's the caffeine.
My laptop is on my lap.
I'm surfing the Internet from the air.
A few days ago I was told
that the heat from laptoms can make men sterile. I don't really care.
I'm wearing headphones and
listening to Music In 12 Parts by Philip Glass. I've transferred
a lot of Philip Glass to my laptop. This way I can listen to Glass
whenever I work, or whenever I surf. And it's much easier than bringing
my 40-odd Glass CDs with me wherever I go.
I really need to get more
Philip Glass.
A Japanese girl sits next
to me. She's little and cute, slightly angular. And she smells
faintly like flowers, like jasmine. And I don't know why she's sitting
next to me because I've never seen her before and there are lots of other
empty chairs in this lounge. And she's not interested in talking
to me at all. So why she's sitting right beside me is a mystery.
But the smell of jasmine
takes me back ten years, maybe even more than ten years. Back to
Calgary and Urusei Yatsura. And the first time I rented those
videos:
It's winter and it's night
and I'm walking through the snow with Alex after I've finished watching
the videos, and there's this excitement inside me that almost burns.
Because I've experienced something I just can't put into words. Some
sort of transcendent aesthetic experience. The cartoons were funny
and achingly lonely at the same time. And they reached some sort
of terminal point-- they were about something-- something that just
can't be expressed through live action film. It was the artifice
of the imagery, the stylization-- the fact that mere animated drawings
had forced me to identify with them and become them, and the way they wrenched
emotions from me that I'd seldom experienced under any circumstances--
that there was a symbolic order to the way the images repeated that was
their own-- that the flatest of the flat contained the deepest depths--
that this indefinable something somehow moved Urusei Yatsura beyond...
beyond what exactly I couldn't tell. But, somehow, I knew that when
I saw those cartoons I knew that I'd moved beyond-- and that was all I
knew.
And it's so cold out here
that it doesn't even really feel cold. The kind of cold that instantly
freezes your breath, and your breath just hangs there, and you can't really
breathe in too quick or your lungs will burn. And there are ice crystals
in the air, heavy icefog. And somehow the smell of jasmine is associated
with this memory.
And there's this pristine
precision to this memory, like I'm experiencing simultaneously both the
inside and the outside of some precisely sculpted object. And the
memory doesn't feel real, but the ache it generates is real.
And all the Calgary trips
after that, for years: Driving for hours and then reveling in anime
and Japanese pop culture.
And, again from the jasmine:
a totally unconnected memory, now:
A warm late Fall and I'm
in highschool. Years before Urusei Yatsura. Weeks before,
in this memory, I ordered a copy of Port Of Saints by William S.
Burroughs and it finally came in.
And it's an evening again,
and I go for a walk, walk to the bookstore and buy the book. And
then I meet up with my friends at another bookstore and we all go to Taco
Time, a group of about 8 of us, and we hang out at Taco Time till late.
And these friends are my real friends, my real circle. I don't go
to highschool with these people-- they're older than me, most of them,
either in university or carrying fulltime jobs. Adults. Not
the kids I hang out with in highschool.
Because the kids I hang
with in highschool are just that-- kids, children. They don't understand
the world like I do, and I don't really relate to their banal, immature
concerns. Maybe when I'm there, when I'm in highschool, I can smile
and nod and act polite, and I can run around and act weird and laugh and
try to fit in with these people who are my own age after all-- but
still, even though I'm only 16, and actually even my highschool peers are
mostly a year older than me because I got into school when I was 4 and
not 5, I know that they-- with their better grades and richer, more socially
significant parents-- are still lightyears behind me. They care about
grades and dating and homework and sports, while my main concerns are Art,
Literature and Deconstructing Reality.
And so it's when I'm out
of school, at night, with my true circle, a group of people who seem at
least to treat me as an equal and-- if not exactly respect me (although
some of them do), at least they're not condescending children caught up
in the soapopera politics of Grade 12. We don't care about who's
dating who. We talk about thermodynamics and art and literature.
And we all listen to music that highschool kids would find alien and contemptible
because of its distance from banal teen crushes and pedestrian concerns.
And they're always kind
of stunned to find out I'm only 16 when they're in their early 20s and
30s. They don't always get me but that's because I'm just on another
wavelength, not because I'm beyond them.
This is where life really
is.
And this is, I realize now,
sitting here beside this girl, maybe why I only remember the names of a
half dozen of my classmates, and why-- even though I do have good memories
of highschool-- my highschool memories are so few. At least compared
to the memories I have of being with these people. Real people.
Friends I've chosen, not had thrust upon me through the random placement
of lockers and desks.
And then the girl is gone
and so's the jasmine. And so I'm back in the now, my coffee getting
cold, Philip Glass burbling away in my ears.
The light in this room is
dim. The walls are a dull brown.
The sun hasn't come up yet,
and it won't for a while. It's winter now, and even though there's
no snow on the ground, the days are getting progressively shorter.
30.EPILOGUE.73: December 23, 2003 --
INFINITY.