cool dry place

Dear Internet,

These are crazy times.

Last July some friends came to visit us for the weekend at Sherry’s parents’ sweetcorn/tax-evasion/polygamy compound in the sparsely populated flatlands outside of town. There were pink drinks and brown drinks and salty snacks and computer generated tennis matches all over the place. Tudor took a picture of me at the TeleComShack where I work, and I took a picture of him emerging from the corn like a frankenstein.

Later in the month, Sherry and I strapped our bicycles to her diabolical Pontiac machine and drove to Hillside. She says her car can’t fly, but I think we just haven’t found the switch yet. We listened to the music and inhaled with the cigarette smokers and drank the gratis synthetic water-replacement beverage from municipally-subsidized stainless steel beverage canettes. A guy played techno music on eight feet of PVC pipe, and these other guys rapped in a strange Montreal dialect with a klezmer. We wove through the throngs of dreadlocked government-haters, brush-cutted girl-likers, and seven-year-old candy-eaters. My neck beard was sharp and fiery. My backsweat darkened my polyester shirt and my hippy-fear flared. I stuck out like a compound fracture. In the nighttime, local orphans who never lost the magic of childhood took skunk form and menaced us at our nightly wood-burning and sugar-melting ritual. Dave says marshmallows are made of meat.

Kevin Frankish just walked past the CelleTalkOutPost, Internet, and his neck-beard was grey and non-threatening. When I was seventeen I worked at Emil’s Furniture Repository. I strapped a twin mattress to the roof rack of Frankish’s Toyota Highway Conqueror. He was curt, but not impolite.

Sherry and I conducted an intensive house-buying campaign this summer. Our Gandalfesque mentor on this quest was Max the Realtor (REEL-uh-dur). He was patient and informative and the caps-lock on his BlackBerry connectivity device was malfunctioning. He led us through the perilous innards of Barrietown’s strained real estate market, teaching and indulging us like an overly permissive governess who makes commission. We saw small, beautiful houses, like brick geishas, and big, ugly houses like giants hunkered down in Barrietown’s moist, sandy soil. We saw a house whose walls defied euclidean geometry, and one whose owners had just rolled down new linoleum over the cigarette burns and shit stains and spilled Broken-Down-Golfcart-and-ram’s-blood cocktails — the detritus that accumulates when a whole house is rented out to five college-attending werewolves.

One house had a bedroom with a cavern in it, a sort of eggshell-white-painted plywood safe haven carved into the wall from waist height to the ceiling, big enough for a mattress and a television and two milk crates full of comic books and a mini fridge with energy drinks and leftover chicken in it. The kind of place a certain pensive sort of person could retreat to when the sound and shock of these crazy times got to him. I imagined myself curled up in there with my plaid comforter, Super Nintendo controller in hand, insulated against all the frightening things the world will start hurling at us in a few years when the pact between the Chinese and the sky people is made public and the two twisted civilizations begin to carve up the earth into their own respective domains.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t know so much.

The basement was a mess there, and the wood-laminate floors were loose and slidey. I could see myself enjoying an afternoon in our new home, racing up and down the hallway in sock feet playing foot-Tetris with the flooring, manipulating the gaps between panels to score points and earn bonuses. The hobos next door had constructed a replica of the set of The Price is Right in their back yard, with all the games altered to depend on, and emphasise the spiritual importance of, drinking. Plinko became DRINK-O, with a high wooden board hastily painted yellow and erected in the yard, red dowels screwed into its surface to obstruct and randomise the path of a china saucer dropped from the top.

In the end we chose another house.

Our journey ended, as do all epic journeys, where it began, three doors down from the first house we looked at. We get a sidesplit with hardwood floors and a wicked birch tree in the front yard. The basement is mostly finished. Sherry wants to find a normal person to rent the basement. I told her she was naive, and that we’d have to get just a regular-type person to live there. I also proposed that my little brother Tyson could live in the crawlspace. He went to live with our cousins in BC for the summer, and now that the scent of patchouli and the ocean is on him, I’m not sure our parents will take him back.

Sherry says I get to pick a paint colour for the den/office. I think she means I get to choose from whatever Debbie Travis’s website suggests. I need to get her drunk so I can convince her that Dragon Mural is a colour and not some other kind of noun. I’ve been talking to Albert, the guy who runs the Giant Replica Swords, Inc. booth at the local Warhammer Depot. He showed me some paint chips for Horseblood Red. It’s a rich, deep red, like if you spill Ragu on the counter and leave it overnight. The ceiling I think will definitely need Deep Space Nine painted on it, and Albert knows a guy who can install the fibre-optic blinking lights on the habitat ring for half-price.

Note to self: get broadsword.

Well, Internet, that should get you up to speed on what’s been going on in my life these past several weeks. I have clean underwear on and I’m winking cryptically at the future.

–Regan