February 19–May 19, 2005 — Choices you’ve made

I’m still trying to figure out what to do now that the lights above my desk and bed don’t work. I used to use the light above my bed to wake me up in the morning. Every morning after my alarm went off the first time, I’d hit snooze and turn on the light; after hitting snooze a few more times, my eyes would have adjusted and I could start my day. Without light, I lie in bed for more than an hour most mornings.

But instead of trying to sort out my lighting situation, I’ve started keeping a flashlight beside my bed. When my alarm goes off, I turn the flashlight on, set it on the table beside my bed and point it at my face.

I have to move in four months. Windows are going to be a priority. Just below price. And price will probably lead me to another 12 months of darkness.

Lately I’ve been trying to leave Toronto a bit more often. I’ve gone to a couple of shows in Oshawa lately, a Cuff The Duke show and an Anagram show.

After the Cuff The Duke show, a few people were playing instruments and singing outside, one person each on acoustic guitar, fiddle and mandolin. They played a lot of songs I didn’t know, and a few songs I recognized from CDs my parents used to listen to. The one I remember most had the chorus, “I wish that I knew what I know now / When I was younger,” (then repeated with stronger instead of younger, but I think you probably knew that already). A crowd had gathered around them, and other people were singing along. Some cab drivers had stopped nearby and were listening, too.

The next week at work Matt was listening to music on his computer and that song came on. It seemed really empty and flat compared to the version I’d heard sung into empty streets a few nights before. I remembered it meaning a lot more then.

But I think a lot of things work out that way.

On the way back from Oshawa the day after the Anagram show, the train was full and two middle-aged couples crowded around me. I don’t listen to music in public anymore, so I heard their conversations for the next hour. It turned out their kids were eating poorly, the profit margins of the companies they worked for were up, and they were very excited about Cavalia, the stage show with horses that I don’t pretend to understand the appeal of.

They talked about spending $300 a week on groceries and all of the vacations their kids were taking.

For those keeping track, each couple spends more on groceries per month than I have to spend on rent, food and everything else. And I can’t even afford to visit my family in Richmond, much less take a proper vacation.

I started to wonder if I have much to regret. I feel I’ve probably thrown away any chance I might have had at the sort of life that involves marrying someone from high school and working a job that allows for home mortgages and family-sized grocery bills. And I guess that’s fine for now. I just wonder how I’ll take it five or twenty years from now if I’m still renting a basement apartment with no windows, sitting alone on a Saturday night and eating dry cereal from the box because there’s nothing else to eat.

Or maybe it’s less a matter of lifestyle — less whether I went to university and made decisions that would get me a more typical job and a more respectable place in society — and more a matter of me failing to find contentment in being poor, alone and sober all the time.

I guess the last one’s probably the easiest to change. I just have to decide whether I’d prefer to change my life or to anaesthetize myself to it.