Your Dime, My time.

Sexual confidence emanates with every click of a woman's high heel. Click, clack, click, clack. Heaven forbid she runs, delicately pounding out a Morse code mating call.

My own high-heel boots are clicking almost inaudibly over the music in my headphones as I walk down York Street in Ottawa. I'm walking an all-too-familiar stretch, Eastbound from The Dominion Tavern. If I hadn't known better, I'd have thought I was walking to my ex-boyfriend's apartment. For a moment, I forgot that his place was not my destination. In that moment, something shiny caught my eye.

A dime.

What a beautiful piece of Canadiana.

Dimes haven't always been significant to me, but for the past few years they have meant more than a stack of hundred dollar bills ever could. At this particular point in time, all you need to know is that, to me, finding a dime is a sign. It's rarely a warning, but a reminder that someone is watching over me. I tend to find them when I am uncertain about something. A job, a lover, a purchase, decisions big and small - the dimes guide me.

The dime on York Street, a rare occurrence thanks to the resident crackheads and panhandlers in that area, is an unignorable sign.

I pick up my shiny treasure and cut through a parking lot towards Rideau Street. I have no more business on York Street tonight.

Later in the evening, right before boarding a Greyhound back to Montreal, I drop some currency from my pocket. Of all the change that's been burning a hole in my coat for days - only two dimes fall to the ground.

Surely I'm making the right decision.

My high heeled boots are sitting by the door. I will put the on again tomorrow. I'm sure they'll be clicking a more confident tune than they have been for quite a while.

Is this what 6am is for?

Molson Dry 8.5 goes down like water to me.

I like to blame (or accredit) my French-Canadian heritage for this but I know other Francos who can't handle the stuff.
Maybe I'm just dirty.

I'm sure that when you imagine the personal life of a burlesque performer you don't envision a girl sitting on her couch in a dirty wife-beater at 6am, swilling from a 40.

But this is who I am, or rather, where I am.

I can't sleep tonight. I say it's for a multitude of reasons, but the simple fact is that I am packing up my life and moving again. A mere four months after the last time I relocated.

I hate moving, but I love packing. At least, I usually do.

There's something very zen about taking the time and care to properly arrange one's belongings in a box like Tetris pieces. Everything in its place. It's almost poetic how my eclectic collection of souvenirs and evidence of a life lived fit together perfectly, erotically. Like a couple meant to be together; Like falling asleep inside of the one you love.

When something doesn't fit, I wonder if it even belongs in my life.

I am pack-rat living the life of a hermit crab; A nomad in desperation of belonging

I've been putting off packing. I fear it won't offer me the serenity it usually does. I know that I need to rid myself of a lot of my belongings before I can move again - but I can't bring myself to part with many of them.

I have a small stack of books resting carefully on my headboard: Unmarketable, Dandy in the Underworld, Portrait of Dorian Grey and The Elements of Style.

I have started all of them, nearly finished a couple and have fully skimmed through one. Each having its own meaning to me. Why else would I have 4 books on standby? These books fit neatly in a stack on my headboard, but I can't bear the thought of cramming them in to a box.

What if they don't fit neatly, perfectly?

What if these 4 books aren't the interpretive summation of myself that I have deemed them to be?

What if I go back and I still don't belong?

I can't get Molson 8.5 in Ottawa.

Breaking up is hard to do.

I've always felt like a bit of a nomad.

Born in Halifax, raised in Ottawa and growing up with strong emotional ties to Montreal, I was never quite sure where I belonged.

When I was a child, my parents used to take my brother and I to Montreal about once a month to visit family. As a very depressed child who always craved something bigger and better than what I had, these visits to Montreal were my little getaway.

I would grab my pillow, my sony walkman (complete with my Dance Mix '95 cassette) and sit patiently in the back of my parents' Chrysler Intrepid, a car that would later be mine, for what felt like hours before we finally hit the highway eastbound to Montreal. If we go even further back, I remember doing this with a teddy bear and the Hyundai Stellar.

Montreal has always been a home to me. It felt warm, welcoming and full of a heritage I never fully understood and still don't, but will always claim ownership of.

When my father passed away and the Chrysler Intrepid finally became my own, trips to Montreal with friends became one of my favourite activities. Sometimes we'd plan them: we'd drink and smoke at Foufounes Electrique then stay in the cheapest motel we could find. Sometimes it would be as impulsive as "I want a real poutine.". and we'd find ourselves eating La Belle Province poutine at Club Supersexe, trying to stay awake. Sometimes we'd come down just for a show. T(i)NC, MSI, NoFX, etc - all fantastic reasons to escape Ottawa.

Even after giving up my car in favour of urban living, trips to Montreal remained part of my lifestyle.

By 2009, it was about damn time I took a chance and moved my entire life there.

I've been here for 3 months, and I must say that I have been very unhappy. I had taken for granted the leisure of being established in a community, of having favourite nightspots, of having my friends within arm's reach. I thought I wanted a new start, but what I needed was not a new start. It was a break. I've had a break and I want it all back. I love this city dearly, but I do not want to start all over and make new friends, develop a new network, start from scratch. None of it.

Ottawa exhausted me. It wore me out. Those who saw me on stage at Zombie Strippers, right before I moved, couldn't help but notice how burned out I looked. I could not perform. I needed a break.

Well, I've had it.

Montreal, I will miss your clear cream soda; your appropriately timed last call; your abundance of GOOD food; your cheap beer and your alluring exotica that is the French language.

But it's about time I head back to Ottawa - at least until I burn myself out again.

No, Woman, No Cry

Nary a day goes by that I don't see a woman crying on the Métro.

I sometimes wonder why she is crying, but I think I know.

There's a man behind it.

When I see these women, I want to hug them - to tell them it's alright. But that would be weird. Approaching a crying stranger is always weird. The last time I did it was on an OC Transpo bus in Ottawa. She was happy that I asked if she was alright and she shot me a thankful smile, but just went on crying alone.

In retrospect it was very fearless of me to do so. A woman scorned is a dangerous thing. Interacting with one is about as safe as taking up residence beneath Mt. St. Helens (It's about time she blew again.).

If it weren't so dangerous, I would offer her my ipod, and tell her to listen to Lemonade by Tsunami Bomb.

A cute song at best, it's still a helpful little reminder that you're worth more than what whomever has made you cry had appraised you for.

Isn't that always the case?

And I Made Lemonade Out of it

I've decided that this blog needs revival, but in a new format. Welcome to my personal life. It's sexy, it's exciting, it's humorous, but most of all, it's mediocre.

If you've followed my blogging over the years you will remember the years of personal exploration and expressions of heartbreak that I etched in to various webspaces. These blogs are all long gone. It wasn't easy. Deleting years of honest and heartfelt words was like taking a sandblaster to my heart, but it's something I felt I had to do.

Rockalily was in it's fledgeling year and my profile was rising in the Ottawa scene. Someone I didn't know recognized me on the street and tried to talk to me for the first time and it scared me as much as the first time I had sex. It was new, exciting - and it kind of hurt. I immediately made every effort I could to delete my personal life from the internet. Nobody needed to know that I had been raped, that my father had died, that my favourite fruit was avocados, that I peed my pants once when I was 16 or what my religious views are. More importantly, I didn't want anyone to know.

I spent another year building up a profile of the public-figure versions of myself, only to realize that I was a dumbass and didn't give myself a proper pseudonym. Perhaps it was my subconscious masturbating my ego; maybe I was entering into a habit of slow self-destruction, like smoking. All I know now is that in the long run, there has been no point to it. Everyone who cares about any aspect of my public life is aware of all of them. All that I'm left with is a confusion over which persona I am at which times.

The first time a journalist bothered to properly research me before interviewing me, I was flattered. The most recent time, I was flattered, but I kind of felt like my privacy had been invaded. I want to blame twitter.

Norma Jean was a fan of free association. She found it to be therapeutic. Long after her death, Playboy Magazine published a transcript of a recording of when the lovely miss Marilyn let her mind wander and her thoughts be free. That's how I know that she enjoyed enemas in a sexual context. Kinky!

I've always found it extremely difficult to fall in love with something that had the capacity to love me back. I love avocados, I love Montreal, I love Desperate housewives. These things could never possibly hurt me.

I don't have the capacity to be in love with a human being. There are many people whom I love, but I have not been in love in years. Even in an intimate situation, I have difficulty amalgamating my personalities in to one. Which one am I? Am I all them? They are all pieces of me, only exaggerated and often with fake eyelashes. Some of them can love, some of them can't. You can love my stage presence, but it's merely a facade. Loving her might garner you affection from a part of me you don't like.

Sounds fucking crazy, right?

Which kind of brings me back to where I started. I deleted all of my blogs. I didn't even save them for myself. Right now I would like nothing more than to look back on an entry I titled "The last person I let break my heart" I know what it was about, but my memory alone can not mimic re-reading my own words. It's not the same.

I've just spent the first 3 weeks of the year in a miserable relationship that I didn't want to let go of. I tried desperately to work it out, but he gave up, rendering my efforts futile. I'm not heartbroken. I feel more like I've been fired from a job because the business was closing. I sure hope I still get a good reference.

I am both sorry that I couldn't offer the totality of my love to him, and relieved that I didn't.

I'm sorry to myself that everything I do is "terribly public". Perhaps I could love someone if I felt that I had any privacy left.

But, I'm coming to terms with my lack of privacy. I put so much of myself in to my public personalities that I don't feel like a fake, but I don't feel like I should hide my thoughts and feelings anymore. Chances are that most people don't care, anyway.

So here it is. My heart on my sleeve.

When I started deleting everything, I stopped writing poetry. I recently started again, but haven't shared anything.

Here is a poem for you. Yes, you.


Tiny fists
the glitter in my peripheral
the tickle of a feather
the last drop of toothpaste
a bus ticket
I can fit it all in my pocket
for you to look at later
in our fortress made of books.




p.s. please don't tell anyone about the time I peed my pants. It was terribly embarassing.