From my window I see a Baptist church, our gravel driveway, another co-op house, the circle line roadway and an island park. I've had this window for 6 months and in the county where I was born, there is a park with white brick tiles that spiral up around plots of earth where bushes were planted. One of the satellite streets that meld into the circle line of that park is lined with ginko trees, and stationary stores. It is called Flower Street. There is also a bridge over the canal to The West Side, and a park named after a famous mathematician. Down another satellite street is the hospital and next to that, the elementary school where I was enrolled for one term. The park is called The Heart of the Street Public Gardens.

The park I see now is named after a poet who taught herself ancient Greek, Aramaic, and Sanskrit. And still no one took her seriously. Her preferred poison was alcohol and she died the year I was born. In grade 11, I read one of her poems in front of the class for a rehearsal exercise and the teacher told me afterwards that it was as good as the time he'd heard her read in person, years and years ago. In grade 10, one of my best friends wrote a report on her work and used a picture of underwater trees going up in flames on the cover page. We walked down Bay Street to the Archives and pretended we were living in the 70s. She wrote a poem about colours at the National Gallery, but more so about the boy who she saw the colours with. She was going to show it to him as a way of figuring out how he felt about her, but I was to vet it for any declarations that might have the potential to have been perceived as too fawning or swoony. She thinks writing to the internet is emotional pornography and an easy way towards making your pain special. She thinks plural and the indicative mood should be avoided in poetry. We stopped talking 14 months ago.

I have had this window for six months and the park outside my front door for six months and this afternoon was the first time I walked up to it and read the placards. After swerving through some people outside the church on a smoke break, probably from an AA meeting, I passed by it on the way back from another co-op house where I'd left my planner on Friday during a vegan potluck/movie night discussion. There are lists of phone numbers in the planner and I really needed to use some of them as a way of feeling less alone after having spent half an afternoon watching Clone High after my parents went back home. They brought me 2 bags of snacks, 2 jackets, 2 socks, 2 glittens (or else mloves), 1 scarf. It's ok though, now that I know something about where I am.

The music when I started writing this was from a penpal who left school to volunteer with the Ron Paul campaign team.

Leo Tolstoy wrote As long as there are slaughterhouses [... some text that was cut out from the documentary... ] there will be battlefields. In the Globe, John Allemang is hating on people who are conspicuously concerned about their food and where it comes from. He advocates learning from your Sicilian grandmother and cooking for yourself as if his advice and what his advice is trying to prevent are mutually exclusive. I don't know what neighbourhood he's living in, but it is not an off-chance that my Easter eggs will come from mass-produced chickens raised in a factory.

At one time most people used to listen to a lot of sermons. Where are we going to now? It's the second day of spring! But I haven't even seen Orion's belt.

I am writing this in bed, in an orange coloured notebook for recopying later on. It's necessary and I feel the words restlessly because I am trying to be more clear with feelings recently and I've been having a pretty numb few days where I've shut myself off and tried to get lost reading a lot of internet text.

I've always come here to talk about how I feel but in fanciful ways, layers of wording that can safely obscure what is it I can't actually talk about. It was very good for that, I think, when I had a lot of people to interact with very regularly and consistently. I haven't written here much in the last two years because I couldn't translate feeling into non-feel words, or non-feel safely in any terms. But because it was so big and blunt that it couldn't be any other way and I couldn't (can't?) do big and blunt, I shut a lot of everything down. (You see, I still don't have all the words.)

Here's another way to put it: I have a draft saved in one of my email accounts where I used to type furiously when it got to be too much. Nothing much to be proud of - it's not for the quality for writing, but just functional for what I had to do. I didn't hate the words, you see. But I haven't typed there in ages and ages. Not because any of those problems had given way, but I didn't have the words anymore. Everything clunked and crushed and it was too too ugly to even begin.

I have started learning to use words for feelings again. Not just written down, but also spoken and shared. So that I can be not so closed away off anymore. I'd felt the incessant need to be as private, as hunkered down, as possible. It hadn't helped with anything.

And I've been thinking, last 6 months give or take, that I ought to try, maybe, another approach. (another approach?) Cheers for uncertainty, but cheers for trying.

At one point in Margaret Lawrence's book of linked short stories called A Bird in the House, the main character Vanessa gets to know a cousin who's from a poorer shabbier part of the family that's still stuck working on the land God knows where. He doesn't tell it like that though, when he's visiting them. There are beautiful strong horses and the most beguiling little sheds and barns of hay, and meadows, you wouldn't believe the kind of meadows where it's a dazzle of colour all the way to the line of the sky which you look up at night and become aware of the insignifance of your toils because there's a whole universe out there, Vanessa, and that's what I'm going to do. The milky way and stars millions of miles in the past; I'm going to be an astronomer.

And he moves on, leaves, because he's just passing through.

A few years later, Vanessa gets a chance to visit these relations still stuck working on the land God knows where. It's not beautiful strong horses. Just an old asthmatic mare. Falling apart buildings. A muddy pond. Barren farmland because it's a dustbowl drought and everyone's dirt poor. There is the sky though, with its multitude of poetry-inducing stars and lights and clouds and after having spent a few miserable weeks with surly taciturn country relatives scraping to get by, Vanessa understands where her cousin might have gotten those illusions to sustain life from day to day.

A few more years later, the cousin visits them again in the city and this time he's selling encyclopaedias door to door. Books. Everyone needs books and learning these days. This is just the beginning. There's going to be a bookshop, maybe a library. Just a little bit of work now and it'll get started up in no time.

Later still, no one's heard of this cousin for ages - the last anyone knows he had been peddling vacuum cleaners. Mechanized housekeeping, wave of the future.

And of course it turns out that all his dreams all these years are as elusive and impossible as the story he spun all that time ago. And it's not clear if he knows all along, but he keeps doing it just to survive, or he never really gives up believing.

Raise your hand if you think Ryan Gosling was a good teacher and not just potentially having been a good teacher at one point long before. Keep it up if you thought the time he washed the dishes and wiped the counters and took out the garbage and swept the cat's grave at the end was different from all the other times he washed dishes and wiped the counters and took out the garbage and swept the cat's grave.

And then Salman Rushdie writes about this rickshaw pedaler in India who is certain the government is going to ship him a radio as promised compensation for having undergone a vasectomy.

I'm not sure which version of which story makes me want to cry more. But if you'd really like me to sob, make sure to bookend your stories of utter and final defeat with 'and just as we thought they were taking a turn for the better.'