So Much Has Happened

I was sleeping on the couch because the cat peed on my bed. It wasn’t her fault – she got locked in my room. Thank God for fluid-proof mattress covers, that’s all I’m saying – not just for girls who won’t knock it off on their period.

Mattress protectors do stain like crazy though, and blood’s a right bitch to get out. Mine’s still bespeckled from my last relationship, which, you know, ended almost a year ago.

Due to the cat pee situation, my mattress protector was hanging over the balcony, displaying my bloodstains (which survived yet another whirl in the great washing machine of life) to the Mile End community at large, a proud virgin’s shroud after the wedding night.

Hello! How are you? Did you miss my blog posts? Is no one else you know oversharing on the internet? It’s okay. I’m back. Maybe I got a bit lazy. Or maybe I wrote some stuff and didn’t want to publish it. So what’s been happening? Arree, so much has been happening, and nothing’s been happening at all.

I got up and folded the sheets and fed the fucking cat (with whom I was not angry, because it was not her fault), and put on the kettle.

Colleen got up too, and by the time the kettle was whistling, our houseguest, the illustrious wandering troubadour and acclaimed poet, C.R. Avery, arose from the blow up bed in the study, whereon we congratulated him on not snoring loud enough to wake us up and he did a little topless victory dance in the manner of his people, the sluts.

I went to check my mattress protector. It was dewy, not dry. Billy le Kit – who is not our cat – tried to break in again. I informed him that he doesn’t live here, then fed him, potentially sending mixed messages.

I told CR and Colleen about the publicly mounted bloodstains, and CR sang a song about sex on your period still being fun. Colleen remarked, logically, that it’s strange no one has written a musical about menstruation yet. After all, there’s one about menopause. I contributed a verse of a vintage composition, Please God Let My Period Come, penned in Dublin circa 2007. We considered character titles and arcs.

Breakfast was tea and bagels. Maybe I’ll turn into a bagel. My belly button will just get wider and wider and I’ll get more and more delicious until people start smothering me with vegepate and prosciutto, which is a great bagel filling and/or way to die.

I made myself clean and hopped on a bixi bike downtown for physio. My mind whirred: tea propulsion. I thought – I need to contact a friend I haven’t seen in ages. I composed the e-mail in my head. I thought – I want to write a blog post, but so much has happened, how do I even choose what to blog about? I thought – why can’t I write my book? I thought about the feeling I used to have during my PhD, of being in the right place at the right time, and I wondered was that naivety, or the comfort of a clear goal, of a desired, delayed end-game, was it just being younger, or is there some kind of intuition that tells us we’ve taken a wrong turn, tells us if we’re on the right paaaaaa

Fuck!

Dude!

I screamed in a ladylike fashion. Two young lads in a snazzy car nearly knocked me off my bike left-turning without checking the rear-view. I looked over my shoulder and shouted fuck one more time for good measure before pedaling away in wiggly indignation.

I was proper angry. I rehearsed the confrontation in bad French. Est-ce-que vous voulez tuer quelqu’un ce matin? Comprenez vous que les cyclistes ont le droit ici?

I thought – every time some automodick pulls this shit it’s always a young dude. I thought –  they should have to put stickers on their cars, warning people that they’re manned by pure testosterone and death drive. I thought – it’s ridiculous that insurance companies are banned from charging young fellas higher premiums.

Then I came down off the adrenaline and reminded myself of all the times that I’ve made mistakes on the road and how grateful I am when folks are patient with me and how most young men are perfectly competent drivers.

I looked forward to telling my physio and friend (friendsio?) Francis about nearly getting run over and about Menstruation the Musical and about Frida pissing in my bed through no fault of her own.

And there was this sudden gorgeous feeling: it’s not even 9.30, and so much has happened.

So much. It just keeps happening.