step up i’ll mess with your face

today is jamie‘s birthday. we go back to 2002, back to nerve.com which is how we met, unromantically. just kinda i dunno, we were dicks to each other i think, quite indifferent. snarky. i had already moved from brooklyn back to canada then to maine, can you picture me in remote maine for 3 long winter months? on dial-up? it happened. i had an amazon wishlist at the time and jamie decided to buy me a shirt off it as a joke, it was like 3 dollars and i actually rotated it quite a bit in my tickle trunk collection of raymi couture for awhile there. so we got to talking, maine didn’t pan out i moved back to canada, the suburbs, and worked a bit more at the hardware store to save money to move to the city. ok this is turning into being more about me now (shocking) but i remember being on my computer in the basement and a package arrived from jamie, some sanrio hello kitty stuff. it broke up the monotony of that three month interim and i realised he was a pal, more of one.

months later and i am living in little italy, breaking hearts, being a mess, being 19 then my heart got broken so i wrote jamie and said i’m coming to see you i have to get out of toronto before i explode. more or less. there are numerous posts about my visit in my archives as well as on jamie’s blog here and here and here and here and here.

ok so basically when you meet someone as depressed as you, your souls speak to one another without you ever having to open your mouth, which is good. they can’t bullshit you or you them, good too.

in my life i have learned that it is so much easier being depressed because happiness is just far too shocking, people would be completely content being down-trodden and sticking that out. happiness tricks you up because you feel like you don’t deserve it. it takes work. it’s a skill, actually. this is just a little side note that i have recently discovered. do what you have to do to be happy, genuinely, disgustingly happy, and do not question it or turn it over and over again until it makes sense because you will spoil it. accept it and carry on.

anyway, i seem to collect sad people, i feel like the saddest one of them all and i do a fair enough job hiding it as best i can so much so the general population doesn’t know it, ‘cept for the rest of the sad guys, they know it. you can sense it very easily. sometimes i sense it so profoundly (i swear i’m not baked right now) emanating off some stranger or other and i have to either leave the room or say something to them about it.

this is not a secret jamie is followed by a dark cloud sometimes, but now he has deb and she is such a gift i am so proud for them, of them. before her jamie was just blowing around in the bushwick night breeze with girls that sucked, none of which could patch him up. being friends with someone like this from afar is tough, i can do nothing over here, you know? other than listen to all of it, read it on his blog and not be surprised.

i dragged jamie all over the place. nice coke jaw, eh. so you think you can dance, so you think you can break dance.

then i went insane and jamie came to visit and i was a mess, a zombie, i spent many days alone, i couldn’t write, couldn’t think, talk, smile, nothing. couldn’t even lift a newspaper. i was kicked out of these meetings my mom forced me to go to, i was basically a ghost. basically worst company ever, but jamie still visited me and also he let me visit him for a week over halloween, i was sort of in the process of being dumped, long distance style. i slept on jamie’s couch. i was isolated from everything, especially myself. honestly i look back on these times and i am astounded by how i didn’t kill myself, or why.

thank you jamie for being my friend, through it all, all of it, you were there. i sincerely wish you the happiest of birthdays, you are a gem. you get it and those who are lucky enough, get to hear it from you. i think about you this time of year. one day before john lennon’s birthday, as well as sean lennon’s – yoko miscarried a few times to get that timing down. so i think of you, john lennon, and yoko ono’s miscarriages. haha xo.

anybody willing to be friends with an idiot like me is obviously a saint. oh remember i used to smoke. i have those pants still and they are baggy as shit.

blow hung, or quite possibly E hung. or both. a pal is a pal is a pal when they let you come trainwreck their schedule for a week.

you can also track the karaoke bendering on this old blog of mine.

i’m heartbroken in this photo, this is in williamsburg at planet thai, the first place jamie and i sat down in one of many silences together. i miss that scarf.

october is the month of remembrance as far as i’m concerned. layers of reasons to why.

very much feeling this jam right now i am, yep.