musings of the unemployed

(taken at point roberts, usa, last week by yours truly.)

a horn honks in the distance again and again and again. wind whistles up the alleyway, madly rattling my bamboo windchimes. a gull squawks. his friend answers.

the little girl across the way is playing with a plastic bag. tied to a barely visible string, the bag’s hanging over the solid-wood balcony, at the top of which i can just see the outline of her scalp.

the bag drops, jolts back up, droops down lower now, almost hanging in the middle of the downstairs pad’s sliding glass door, dangling loosely whilst being batted about playfully by the wind.

she just giggled, but to whom? and loudly, too, if i can make it out from 70 feet away with the wind whistling and the constant but quiet drone of nearby city-bound traffic.

alan ball, the writer of american beauty, commented that the whole movie began from the experience of seeing that plastic bag dancing in the wind on a lonely grey day once, memorialized in a scene towards the end of the film.

i wonder what mr. ball would have created had a giggling, mischevious 6-year-old been hidden behind the misadventures of that bag?

throw one small detail into the creative process and the whole thing spirals into a new, delightful little mess. got to love it.
===
it’s funny i live in the city. days like today are so blissfully quiet and sedate that it’s hard to believe i’ve got two million neighbours.

my oh-so-metrosexual hipster of an ex-coworker likes to taunt me by telling me i’m so far from the downtown core i might as well live in the suburbs. he calls a visit to my pad “a hike.” yada, yada, yada. at least i get to sleep every night, pretty boy, no constant whining of transit buses whinging past me, nor the blaring of fire engines erupting from their stationhouse, blasting on the horn before barrelling through the monster intersection a few stories below his digs.

yes, today it’s almost hauntingly quiet. nice. very.
===
today is different. it's sunday. not just any sunday, though. it's an unemployed sunday. no corporate blackhole looms dangerously on the horizon, threatening to suck my soul through a straw for eight and a half hours tomorrow. there's no dread or sadness that my time's no longer mine for the next 96 hours.

i've never been unemployed and i'm not sure how i'll adapt to the uncertainty that comes financially. all my life, my parents toed the line with money. there was always a threat of bad things happening, and no safety net to fall back on. somehow, the bad things never did happen, and we always got by. my mother died penniless, making between $7,000-$12,000 in each of the three years before her death. money terrifies me, always has.

but i'm really welcoming this learning experience. i want to prove to myself that i'm resourceful. i want to know i got by, and on my own. there's a great deal of pride that comes from overcoming obstacles. i've overcome a great many, of different kinds, but this is the first that has a lot of leeway as to how to overcome it. normally, how you get by doesn't really allow for a lot of creativity. someone dies, you deal. you get injured, you rehab.

but this? this is so frickin' cool. i get to deal--freestyle.
===
i was probably going to babble a little longer, but then this strange man stood in his apartment across the way in only a pair of saggy old grey jockey shorts with his gonch all gravity-impaired as he ineffectively bundled up his curtains (at 2:30 in the afternoon).

when he caught sight of me staring at him, agog, and misinterpreted it for awe, and started sucking in his gut and doing the i'm-not-really-trying-to-flex-but-look-at-my-stunning-musclature kinds of poses that shout "when i have sex, it's nothing to brag about."

so i kinda lost my train of thought, and now i feel all dirty inside. when the fuck am i going to get an unmarried hottie that's an exhibitionist move in and experience window treatment-closure challenges? huh? i'm so goddamned due, with hairy-backed artist, repressed married man, and now "gone, gonch, gone"? i'm a woman with a fondness for the aesthetically pleasing, and these are the neighbours i'm afflicted with?

and to think, i thought the cosmos favoured me.

[ed. note: i now have two desires. one, to watch american beauty, and two, to listen to the violent femmes' "gone, daddy, gone."]