this email kind of made me feel old
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Dear Raymi;
Hi there.
I’m impressed by how you built so much value around living –initiating contact is something important, and you do it well. I’ve been reading your blog for just over a year, I don’t read blogs just yours. This habit use to strike me as a little toxic, your content at the time made me envious (success balls social compatability burlesque dancing). I got over it. I’m 18, I moved from the west end last year (roncessvalles) to montreal, where I’m trying to start a life (I do art like a hermit in a home ‘studio’ and work in fast food -weekend overnight shifts ughhhh). This is going to sound ridiculous, I know you’re a twenty-something, but I always feared that people, in essence, were built to recede. But you’re doing a good job with everyday consistency and striving. I feel like I’d be able to hold a conversation with you, wish I could come to your events, but the internet isn’t a hipster coffee shop and toronto isn’t in quebec.
Kudos, I like ya.
-Gabrielle
initial response You sound v smart and riddled with potential and only eighteen wow impressive. Gab away gabe. Why did u move to mtl? And how, parents?
but then, 18 year olds exist? why am i boggled by this at all, 18 is the year i graduated high school and fucked off to new york fucking city. vice printed my story about it, i was working for them. hanging with ex strippers, degenerates, rock n rollers thirty year olds and older everywhere i looked i was the youngest and dumbest but i played it pretty cool though you wouldn’t know my age really.
this was the hottest summer, the summer of 2001 in new york city, brooklyn. you can’t say new york city and brooklyn in the same sentence can you? well i do. cos that means something to canadians and especally hipsters haha.
matt good wanted to use this for an album cover some day. this might have been the time he was going squirrely because that is way too flattering for me. anyway nice haircut. ugh. the humidity and growing out my hair just did a number on that mop top. this is when you must invent yourself a personality.
that’s the WTC still standing behind me btw.
that’s me in laura’s orange stripper wig and tight snakeskin stripper dress. this is normal, i was eighteen you see? she danced at pumps. does it still exist? my dad would die if he saw the neighbourhood it was in. i’m a tough chick. touch stupid chick. would i do half the things i did back then today? no chance.
me (back turned bad hair) singing on a rooftop in greenpoint the night they dynamited those water towers. had a massive party. we didn’t last that long though for the explosion but heard it in park slope. my ex is the guy with the plaid pants on bass. shannon my other roommate is the blond. she worked for mtv. amazing chick.
our livingroom the easter (april) prior to my moving here. i took the bus easter weekend to check out the apartment, i was still in high school. scandal! suffice it to say i had zero in common with anybody in my high school and made little attempts to relate. i had friends, i was cool blah bla liked etc etc but i lived in a dream internetland that emo kids today probably dwell in, friends afar. i mean, i fell in love with someone over email and then i moved to his city. it happens.
this is from my archives of that summer
went to lucky cheng’s last nite and sang karaoke with anita cocktail the transvestite. she grabbed my boobs a lot and danced when i sang VOGUE and FERNANDO. she told me she weighed 217 lbs and called me a superstar. i am hungover.
this is me at 17.
williamstown mass., the week following 9/11 when we were finally allowed to leave the city we drove to new hampshire to see his sister, then in on cj in mass then to maine, to stay at the house. we would come to live in this house together, for three months, january to march. i flew back to canada on my birthday telling my dad my next plans of moving to toronto finally. a sparkly bruce lee is on my tshirt i bought at black market. i dressed like a dumpy hobo slob hippie. always in flip flops. i was stopped once by a UK fashion magazine once for a photo i swear i am not lying hahaha.
i look super happy.
and here i look like the kid from the shining. this is when my hair was finally starting to grow.
we had a going away party for me. so many people came. hot guys everywhere and the random assortment of misfits i had gathered during my time in NYC. one girl with massive fake tits and a killer body. i looked very cool, total champ. jamie and i had just missed being friends with one another at this time. that sucks. who knows how the universe (known universe haha) would have panned out had we met back then. oh yeah i am on vicodin in this photo, other shit too. wild times.
ok back to that email i barely scratched the surface i got all nostalgia jones.
brbrbrbbrbrb
then i started looking like this.
during the april visit ha.
in maine. three months before i turned 19.
this is what i was wearing when that uk mag stopped me. same day. bartending a vice boozecan in-store, soho. i’m inebriated here. you can’t see the arch of my back so i look pregsalot. i was definitely rocking baby fat. this photo was in a show of some sort or other i think.
ok back to email sorry sorry.
This is going to sound ridiculous, I know you’re a twenty-something, but I always feared that people, in essence, were built to recede.
you sound like glass half empty girl. doomed from the start. stop it. wrong approach and outlook also a backhanded compliment. you’re old but you keep getting better and more prominent. exactly. it never occurred to me that i might turn into an aged rocker who just won’t let it go, or the dream die. your shelf life in canada is shorter i think and you spend more than half the time at work on it.
you need a degree of arrogance, skill, confidence and the ability to always be right. righter.
eventually i’ll recede, but it will be the good kind of fade, the hippie sort, still there kicking it around in some bizarre swirl of habitat or other typing out nonsense to whoever is still listening.
like willie nelson in half baked, people will come for miles to pay their respects to me in the form of delivering weed and i’ll say shit like those were the times maaaaan and i’ll finally let that one lone chin hair grow in, nice and long and wiry.
it could go that way OR i will recede into psychotic stepford anal-retentive dying on the inside-repressed housewife. my utopian domestic fantasy would be a combination of dharma and greg (my last one was pretty much exactly that haha) meets i dream of jeannie. YOU GOTTA RUB ME THE RIGHT WAY.
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i’ll do anything for you as long as i get to wear this and be stoned the entire time.
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rrrrawr. pink and red? perfect. weird pillbox hat? divine.
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in cartoon jetsons form replete with mc hammer pants, sign me up.
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yuppie and the trophy, works every time!
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this is melodie and i working on adventures or she’s trying to study or do biology stuff and in i come and make it all about me and take over completely, take zero of her advice and leave when it’s her turn to talk. hehehhee. no wonder she tells me off.
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who doesn’t (in their head) live in a pink sultan’s abode within a gaudy magic lamp?
how fitting is this? liz made it. i love her. we’ve been blog buddies for years. she is a magical sparkle insane princess bizarro version of me somewhere in america. she went to burning man and i read her blog obsessively as she prepared for it, go look through her archives. addictive.
oh my her hair.
Why didn’t you tell us you were dating Rob Lowe?
nice.
i like the short hair look on you…that first pic on the lawn chair is really nice
this post is great! I have always LOVED the photo of you w/the knife. classic Raymi. those checkered nails = YES! cool people will always be cool, and get better with age. why, just look at Johnny Depp. slurp.
SLIZZURP LIZZURP
Who said anything about dating?
OKAY I’M GLOWING NOW.
i’ve been enjoying the vintage raymi posts & photos.. xo
Yeah, who knows how the universe would have panned out. I might’ve married that chick with the massive fake tits and killer body.
who’s the cute boy?
first piece of fish i snagged
Fuck, have to read NY archives now. DAMN YOU!
don’t sweat it, i blogged 1/5 the amount back then that i do now.
this is what i needed to read after bawling for an hour today. i dont know why but somehow it ties in.
i remember when mg blogged that photo on your birthday years back (is it really years now? god). and he wrote something like ‘she’s got that IT quality’ and there was like a billion comments. you’ve still got IT
don’t drown in your tears comrade. spring is almost here. jellybean hunt date?
i’m waiting any moment now for you to post pics of you in mid-sentence, “AS IF, you fucking loser” with your finger + your thumb in the shape in an L on your forehead.
Wow…this post was really captivating. Now that I am married and in a rural town of another strange country, where there are only and handful of shops that close before I even finish work, I am just reflecting on my life for the last 10 years. 18 I was doing nothing but homework, hoping that in University I could get out of my house and be free like other 18 year-olds, to what you did. Have experiences, make stupid decisions, live my own life. Never really happened for me – some freedom happened in my 20’s, in spurts, I managed borrowed freedom from others. I got to live as I wanted in Toronto when we met, but I was already engaged, and now back in a place where I am far away from friends, family, hobbies and interests, and I can’t necessarily pick myself up and decide to do whatever I want to do anymore. Sometimes I consider myself very blessed for being daring and risking so much to share a possibly exciting future. Sometimes when I’m alone I get tears in my eyes wonder if I lost too much in my decision. I think I’m lucky to have lived the life I have, and I know that I’m creative enough to carve something out here. No sense in feeling sorry for oneself; Raymi, you are still YOU and I am still ME, and that can never change.
Liz will be forever gorgeous. And these old school Raymi’s photos were breathtaking. You two are amazingly beautiful women. Kisses from Brazil
Fantastic post.