Incense rising out of the sunroof.
Common interpretations of beauty.
An explanation of a new affection.
The story not done justice.

Two-step around the room.

Relentlessly melancholy.
Just as I would choose it to be.
I'm seeing that character strengths can disguise themselves easily as flaws.
And that we are lazy with the ones we love most.

I keep looking for imperfections, but only as a way to figure things out.
There is nothing unlivable, certainly.

As the song says...

this is the sound of settling.

This is the other perspective.













Appreciators of music.
And talk of a self imposed exile.
Out of what?
Music from the hair metal era and a drink suggestion. Three takers.
We shared a round and a few smokes in a dingy back lounge.
Nelson Avenue: Vancouver.
Cloves and the potential of misery.
We all wore shoes sewn by the same third world factory.
Dying plants and anxiety were on my mind that day.

And it was this day that the idea of an apple on the forearm was explained to me.
More prominant however, was the song playing in a record store somewhere on West 4th.

My eyes have brightened.
Light has spoken to me through the rising of the moon with the backdrop of paper thin trees in Banff.
More loudly, it has spoken through the great Aurora Borealis.

One meeting.
In just a few days, he was exchanging the telephone for a menthol cigarette.
The same package that was later released into the prairie wind.
It was an embrace behind a tour van, like a well kept secret.
Then a hand to send me away.













It was a kind of moment that has been refined through the night sky at Deer Lake Park, where words were laid emphatically in the air as if they were written with the thought of another.
He plays the song I waited for with the prelude:
"Let's take this ship in. "
I lit a smoke.
The Amsterdam kind.
White, with a trace of vanilla.
I breath deeply and exhale into the dark.

Just the other day I lost track of it.
I just wanted to be sure of him.
When the orange moon hung low in the sky,
I saw something running away.
It returned quickly in the coming of the rain and the perspective it brings with it.

Music should be about developing a relationship with an idea or with the skies.

I'm back in that old place again,
Watching the smoke rise, exhaling towards the screen in front of me.
Once again, I'm in that beloved city, the one I called home for one short year.
In one short day I am romanced in a park, bumping into people who wander the streets, challenging the rules of a members only pub...

Nostalgia comforts me. Downtown seduces me.
One Great City they call it.
Or simply The City, to whom it isn't home.



Billy Holiday, along with a beat created in this very place:
that is my soundtrack tonight.





Then there's that old church down the street, the one with red brick and stained glass. The one that forced me to think, doubt, and see beauty.

And my precious friend:
who taught me to choose character above beauty.
Love of light and Christ.














All of this, along with Portage Avenue, are the things that make this city seminal.