What do you think?

Last night was our friend Krista's birthday, so we hung out in a really smoky bar and drank beers until later than we should have. It was actually really fun and lots of awesome people were there, but I've been working late and going in early a lot, trying to get the stupid bi-weekly used car newspaper insert done so people can throw it in the garbage on schedule, and now I'm sort of wiped out. I was supposed to go over to this guy Jay's tonight because I've been playing music once a week with him and a couple of other people... I guess we're sort of becoming a band. I don't know, we'll see. But anyway, I had to stand him up ("je l'ai posé un lapin," as those kooky French people apparently say -- "I have posed him a rabbit.") because I just needed some time to myself and to get to bed early.

Ali's at a play tonight: To Kill a Mockingbird. The woman she works with at the government got free tickets. I had a good idea to draw a cartoon with the caption, "Cats waiting for Godot to kill a mockingbird." You can imagine what it might look like.

My billboard is up now, I found out, and from all accounts looks spectacular. I'll have to ride out to that end of town and get Ali to take a picture of me in front of it. Sorry, Mike, it's a Viacom. Not my decision.


So, what do you think about this? When I was a teenager I had this HUGE unrequited crush on a girl in Halifax that I didn't really know, but had met on a train. When we moved to Markham I wrote to her all the time, trying to sound very smart and hip and thereby make her fall in love with me from afar. It didn't work, but I got friendly enough letters back and continued to pine away for her, i.e. Halifax, because by this time she had taken on the symbollic proportions of an entire city.

By the time I moved back to Halifax I was over my childish infatuation and would run into her infrequently, and that was fine and normal, etc. Then I went to Montreal for six years or so and when I came back with Alison the girl -- or actually married woman now -- was still here. Sometimes, though again not very often, through converging social circles or work-related circumstances, we would end up face to face, and now so much of our lives had passed independently that we really were barely even acquaintances and it would be awkward and uncomfortable to even acknowledge the youthful, long-distance false start our relationship had had because we were too close to being strangers to talk about such intimate things. Or at least that's how it seemed to me and I judged from her behaviour that she felt the same. So there has been an unspoken rule between us for the past, oh ten years or so, that we make no reference to how we know each other. Conversation is kept to general niceties and references to the present or very recent past only.

Except. The other day I ran into her as I was just about to go in the front door to where I work, and she told me out of the blue, as a self-deprecating illustration of her quirky character, it seemed, that she had only recently gotten rid of all the letters I sent her. As in, "I'm such a pack rat, can you believe it?" I really didn't know what to say and kind of stammered uncomfortably and got in the door as quickly as I could. I still don't exactly know how to feel about it besides surprised that she both 1. broke our unspoken rule, and 2. admitted cheerfully that she'd thrown out my very thinly disguised expressions of youthful, boundless love. Am I overreacting? What do you think?