He asked, "What does it mean, then?"
She laughed.
"What? You - of all people - don't think there's some kind of reason?"
"I'm not self-absorbed enough to assume I - or we - are entitled to narrative -"
He cut her off. "Bullshit."
She wanted to look wry, but the result was sadder than she could have known. "There's no narrative unless your life somehow gets ripped open and exposed, and even then, it's shredded and reconstructed because as it was, there was no plot arc. That's the goddamn problem today, everyone thinks they're entitled to be a fucking protagonist." She tried to will there to be a pause. For effect, you know. "Have a smoke?" she asked, hand out.
He gestured to a package on a shelf across the room. She looked annoyed and crossed the room, taking a cigarette and then leaning against the window. She stared out the window, wondering if it was possible to be deliberately deliberate, or if the self awareness made it superficial.
We're still young, but we're so dreary already, he thought. Beige curtains that hang like flags, symbols of having given up. "I really can't believe you can say that. When was the last time you weren't all caught up in some fucking cause or ten, help the whoever, support the fucks offs - don't pretend you don't know what I mean."
His tone was rough and he stood up and started pacing.
She held her gaze perpendicular to his, wearing an expression that made it look like she was watching her face from outside of it, every gesture slightly too calculated.
"Yeah well. You have to do something."
"No you don't. 90% of the planet - at least - are a bunch of hedonists busy gorging themselves not thinking about any of that shit. Pointless. The only people who do worry about that shit are people who think there's a point."
"I just don't want to be embarrassed if I ever have to explain how I spent it."
"Spent what?"
"Oh, whatever cliche, the time I had."
"So it's guilt."
"Fuck off."
"No, really."
"No, it's not guilt. It's bitterness that the world is such shit."
"Who has a narrator now, huh?" She stared out the window. He had stopped pacing and stood across the room. "I just thought you might, that's all. Seemed like a nice idea, so I thought if you did..." he trailed off.
She didn't appear to hear him. "You have to be able to say you weren't a selfish sob with it."
"So you just resign yourself to being miserable and anxiously watch the world go to pot? Seeing every fucked up bit? Focusing on it?"
She leaned out the window, blowing smoke rings. He tone remained flat. "No. You just have to not get too involved." She reached behind her for the shelf, and another cigarette, still not looking at him. "So don't go looking to me for answers, christ."

summer, i swear, still clings to my skin in that barley tangible way of a spider web you accidentally pull your arm through walking through the woods on a dark night or an unexpected stranger's hand on your back on a crowded street, just to get by.
underneath, in my muscles and organs, the churning tells me the next thing is already underway, being processed, plotted, prepared -
in that limited way we can, only imagining we can peek around the corner or over the horizon.
i try not to hold my breath because it is it's own kind of release, even when you're caught up in things.
transitions are really at issue: how to escort a recalcitrant self towards another feast of uncertainty and effort.

After some six and a half years (can it really be?), I'll be again pulling up roots and hauling off to call a new place home. After a life time of moving every year or two, the stability of this place has been dear, so much so that leaving it behind is my biggest moving anxiety.

Come August, my commuting days are over and I'll see you at the beach.

I feel like a creature
one from some time before now
where things like drawing rooms would have existed
where I could claim a delicate constitution
and ward off stares
when I spend two hours breaking my fast.

Too much depends on pacing.

That's all.
I'm not talking to any of you anymore. You can take your NIMBY, me-first, gentrifying, scare-tactic-buying, soulless selves and fold them into corners so sharp they can penetrate your ribs to prove that you literally have no heart. I'm nauseated by having to face the fact that the people in my province think cementing us as the national leader in child poverty and tripling the number people who don't have homes is something to be rewarded with another term in office and six-figure salary - proof positive that we haven't come past about age 10 as a society yet. We want to have our cake and eat it to, without ever facing the consequences. We shirk responsibility like it's math homework when we want to watch cartoons, denying the inevitable cycle of action and reaction. We are the ostrich with it's head so deeply in the sand we won't even blink when the lion creeps up behind us. We are guaranteeing our own demise, one term in office at a time, and seem intent on doing so until the gap between the rich and the poor is a chasm that swallows us all and there's no where to run to because every stream is an economic project, every building is privatized, and centuries of smog that our denial has yet to successfully dissipate suffocate us in our sleep.

My disappointment cannot be parted from my anger. Both sit in my throat like lava or embers, burning and choking.

... and if you're from my side of the tracks, he probably hates you too. Given the past 8 years and the number of ways he's come up with to have an extremely negative impact on my life and on the lives of those around me, I literally can't imagine another 4. I won't. I'm trying to generate faith (I don't have) in my fellow British Columbians so I can believe they won't sentence us to another term of...

- sky-rocketing tuition rates and claw backs of bursary and remissions programs such that the correlation between income and post-secondary education rates has increased sharply. This also directly impacts student debt rates - were it not for Campbell's policies, my own student loan could be nearly $20 K less.

- rental housing shortages and lack of protection for tenants; from his zero-residency requirements for residential property to renovictions to failure to fund social housing, Gordo himself guaranteed our current housing crisis would come to be

- even better, he ensured it would bloom into a homelessness crisis by reducing eligibility for social services and forcing people off of disability. Since I've been teaching, I've watched too many of my students be pushed from the margin literally into the gutter because of Campbell policies. Vancouver, your homeless population has been tripled by this man's policies.

- in the tradition of marginalizing those already facing barriers, Campbell has already done just about all he can to eliminate government services aimed at supporting equality for women, from closing women's centres to reducing avaliability of legal aid. At this rate, we'll be back to the 1890s in no time.

- in the realm of education, students now face more overcrowded classrooms and teachers struggle in "classroom impossible" where the combonation of student needs, special needs, and lack of support creates a ticking time bomb.

This list could go on (and on). I tend to the humanist side, so focus on policies and how they affectt people, but if I were a rocks-and-trees type, I could produce a similar list on environmental issues (all one has to do is look at the annual Squamish eagle count and everything unfolds from there), and then there's the entire realm of privatization, more than enough to warrant a post of its own.

Whatever this election is, it is not one where any person with a still-beating heart can justify apathy.