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Excerpts
from Lloyd's Journal
Here a few excerpts
from the journal Lloyd kept when he was living and lounging in
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. |
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7 June, 2000
Freed of my quasi-voluntary incarceration at the ranch, I meander through the streets of downtown Ottawa. Downtown is a peculiar place, combing stoic, square, smooth, shiny temples to the invisible hand with quaint shops crowded with knick-knacks, curios, mementos, sandals, satchels, mukluks, mittens, placemats, and peculiarities, all sold on the very garishness that repels, because that garishness is "CANADA". In front of the slick, clean obelisks of money transfers and portfolios sit rows and clusters of early-middle-aged people, ill-garbed for the weather. They are glad of the sun, under which they are so over-dressed and constricted, for they are out there regardless of its capricious whims and seasonal hibernations. They smoke. They talk eagerly and loudly and quickly about their work—despite the pretense of wanting a break from it—in order to make it seem interesting, in order to make smoking seem interesting.
Girls just past the dawn of their blossom combine adorable sweetness with sensual allure, making both feel dirty for the beholder. They sit on semi-ornate "park" benches on the leather and hemp pedestrian street which runs through this urban centre like a vein of simulated chocolate through petroleum-based ice treats. The girls are trendily adorned, like the shops which feed them. A young man's urge knows not whether to pet or caress, to beckon and pat or slide and slip.
~~~
I'm hanging with the hippie girls, languishing in their newhippiedom.
One has to have learned this from a parent, from a family, a community,
a village, to live in immersion, one-way, like a street sign.
Everybody knows that everybody knows, but nobody knows that. Reticent
to relive a fantasy of the past, we are blind to our own reticence.
"Remember when people used to think it was silly to do things
that people did before them?" will be a conversation starter of
the transitional generation between postmodern cynicism and La
Deuxième Renaissance.
8 June, 2000, 10pm
As we dined at a remarkably charming little restaurant called "The Euro Star", I on shawarma and she on vegetarian delight , I gave a little start and almost wave as a member of the world's top caste of beauty walked by outside. Having spent so much time—at least fifteen to twenty minutes, it seems—scrutinizing her soft, inviting, calmly proud figure and gentle, soothing, happy face, I instinctually felt as though we knew each other. Thus my almost-wave.
I had no qualms about telling the whole story to my hippie friend. She loves me for my story-telling, among other things, and we had already established ourselves as a non-established relationship. Naturally, I took a savoury pleasure in describing this girls' variety of beauty. Its composition, features, flavour. The mind-looping absence of straight lines, the assuring face, the en mode hairstyle (two small buns at the back of her head), and the shades (cat's-eye shape, red velvet frame). And this lovely hippie took it all in her easy, timid, appreciative, and—retrospectively—attentive way.
She is a neo-hippie. Hand-made clothing from India, patchouli, dreadlocks. She has to do her hair for work. A covering scarf, for example. Today, at work (where I visited her) she wore a stylish hairdo. Two small buns at the back or her head. I complimented her. It looked cute.
She calls me a country boy. She likely chose this particular avatorial moniker for the qualities she perceives in me because the first time I met her I told her that I'm from Edmonton (she must have latched more onto "Alberta"—rural—than to "Edmonton"—city) and played her what I called "my country song" on her acoustic guitar. I have drilled her several times on the specific qualities I possess which make me a "country boy." She claims it's that I am friendly, open, charming, and flirty. I could and would summarize this as "simple". I left Edmonton in search of a different perspective on myself and the elements of my life. She has been instrumental to my own self-discovery as a bumpkin.
She likes-—I know because her compliments always come after demonstrations of these qualities and increase in intensity with the degree of the demonstration-—my wide-eyed awe, my continual exaggeration of everything, my stance as excited spectator to the world. My childishness. She continually tells me that she continually forgets about the discrepancy between our years of birth. Five years. She feels comfortable with me, not distant.
Near the end of Paul Auster's Mr. Vertigo, the eponymous narrator reflects on how he has changed, having arrived at middle-age: "I had no idea what was wrong with me. I had always been so fast, so quick to pounce on opportunities and turn them to my advantage, but now I felt sluggish, out of sync… The world was passing me by… I had no ambitions. I wasn't on the make or looking for an edge." Is that me? Do I not epitomize missed opportunities? Did I not stay cowed and silent as beheld Ms. Red Velvet shades? Did I not leave town as the apple of my eye, the chamomile of my worries, and the unwitting sculptor of my smiles mourned at her dying father's side? In perfect bumpkin form, I took her strong front at face value. Dull, I failed to pierce the surface. I saw no farther than my own dark-rimmed spectacles, which obviously help my vision none. Is life not passing me by? How does one live so as to avoid such a state? What lifestyle is the opposite, in which life is not passing one by? Is life not always passing us by?
What is hegemony, and what is universal truth? I digress in order to ask myself whether an achievement-centred value-system is natural, or merely popular.
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