Send me something. Send me a postcard.
Okay. Send me a pic of your tits.
Sure.
No. Really.
Send me a fucking postcard, what do you need
a pic of my tits for?
Because. I need them. I’m researching stuff
all about tits.
Retard.
Send it, do you want to be a part of this
groundbreaking research?
Yeah. So you see how many loads you can get
out of each photo?
Yeah.
Whose did you like best?
I don’t know yet. The study isn’t complete.
Send it. now.
No, I’m in love with someone.
What does love have to do with tits?
Do you love me?
Fuck you.
Lol.
In the past, even the recent past when I was
a child, when my parents were my age, how
did people get off? Or how did they find
people to say things to? Who were they gross
to?
It’s not reasonable to assume they didn’t
say disgusting things, not my parents
specifically, this isn’t an emotional query.
But how? And maybe they didn’t think in the
same ways, maybe men whispered everything in
a girl’s ear while her man was standing
right there beside her studying a drink
menu. It’s impossible to imagine our fathers
hunched over cheap laptops begging
girls they’ve only ever kissed and pressed
their boners into for tit pics. Or our
mothers riding the train home typing on 700
dollar cell phones, asking our classmate’s
dad’s to think of them while they fucked
their wife that night. I’m not saying it
didn’t happen in some way, in its own way
but could it have, really? Were they born
too late or did they believe that love did
have something to do with tits?
I want to move to the country. I want to see
the stars. I want to get a trailer and move
to the country and see the stars. I don’t
think that’s some kind of hillbilly plan, I
was raised in the country. I have been here
longer than I ever lived there. I was free.
I wouldn’t be doing any of this if I was
there and I could look up at the sky and
sleep at night.
I'm one of the many talent squanderers of my
generation. There is a path and select few
will follow it all the way to MFA-ing /
awards galas-ing / their way into an admin
position with a mid range press. The rest of
us didn’t consider this option and now it
seems I’m laughing, like I’m lol-ing
at the mf’s who clearly knew what they were
doing when I was sleeping in until 3
and writing two hours a week. I / we
exploited every little bit of ‘talent’ we
had until we were considered at least
republishable then squandered. All squander.
We’re always tired. We always needed to get
to the LCBO before it closed and we usually
needed a little help with rent. Am I
laughing at them? If I am I have no clear
idea why. One of these days, say like twenty
years from now one of my babies, or my whole
pack of dirty unkillable babes will swarm
them for their copies of the Believer.
They’ll steal their un-creased Moleskins and
crease their first edition Hemingway who by
chance will be experiencing a renaissance in
popularity, the benefactors of his estate
living in the North of France taking calls
again.
So? What’s so funny about that?
What?
So you’re going to have a whole bunch of
poor babies who steal shit?
Yeah. No, it’s not funny.
Take off your shirt. We’ll drink here
without our shirts. Who’s going to say
anything?
That Chinese man. He’s been ordering people
around like it’s his park. He’s all no
drinking on the Queen’s own park.
It’s 12 am, get one of your monster babies
to jump him.
How do you know they aren’t also your
monster babies?
Because you don’t love me.
Are babies made of love?
Yeah. And other shit.
Are they?
Take off your shirt. Maybe they are and
maybe they aren’t.
Once you’re there in the country, and say
you have a trailer or a shipping container
and you’ve done it up a bit and you can sit
on a little stoop or deck kind of thing and
just smoke a cigarette and look at the whole
fucking universe up there like it was
nothing. The universe squandered up there,
living off its own coattails. Just banged
itself out and we all love it or don’t but
mostly we do. As if love had to do with
beauty or random events and as if when you
look up you could believe anything else. I
can read books there, my boyfriend is good
with jerrying and rigging and overhauling
and hammer and nails.
You could learn all that on your own, you
know.
Really? I could learn to renovate a shipping
container?
You picked the container idea because he
could do that.
I got lucky.
Right.
You could get a smaller apartment. You can
visit the country anytime.
I have no money.
I have this study, I told you about it,
yeah?
Oh yeah? Pays in what?
Love.
Yeah.
But it’s a kind of love, it’s the middle
school love that’s like best friend love and
it’s that inseparable kind of love.
But you get separated.
Yeah that’s what makes it love. It’s awful.
Love is awful.
Love is awful.
Did our parents love each other? I would
have said no, I would have said for many
years that they just lived in houses
together where they tried not to look at one
another too much, where they tried not to
move their mouths as they counted down the
days before their offspring bled them dry in
fruitless arts programs and humiliating
internships. How is that anything but love?
To not mouth the countdown, to avoid that
eye contact, all of it was the sweetness
they had available to them, they didn’t have
iphones or skype. They wouldn’t tell us if
love had anything to do with tits if we
asked anyway.
There’s a place in Parkdale, 2 bedrooms and
Is there a yard? Smoke?
Yes.
I don’t like it. It’s not for me. It looks
nice. Where will my babies live? Where will
you keep you TLS?
Beer? You don’t want to go. Right because
you’re authentic and you need to go figure
out about love and getting stabbed to death
in a Winnebago in Douro.
I wish I could afford a Winnebago.
Fuck you.
I couldn’t be more in love with you.
No, really. Fuck you.
Those people under the stars, I always
imagine they have no wifi, I imagine they
love each other in that not mouthing the
countdown way people love one another. I
imagine they will have a past and they make
their menial little days into history or
matter--it matters to the other ones of
them. And I see my own past stillborn,
swirling or frantically, statically
shivering in a galaxy, a milky way of
similarly hideous, lazy, hysterical little
fuck ups--our histories. There’s nothing up
there. It’s very pretty, we mostly love it.
And right now, at this moment we’re all
still pretty beautiful, there is no past,
there are at least twenty men jerking off to
pics of us let’s say this week alone--is
that not love? To squander our time
together. To sit in the Queen’s own Park and
say you’re not in love and think about your
parents and text your thoughts about all
this stuff in full later that night.
