further adventures of rocket bride: may 18, 2001.

may 18, 2001.

Fig. 1: Aye, that it was.

lesson I: summary
returned from the west
my body needs more sleep time
too much booze and fries.

I.
time: 11:25 AST
place: the air above Quèbec
This pen belongs to the stewardess and I absolutely love it! If she hadn't specifically enjoined me against stealing it, I'd 'forget' to give it back for sure.

We've been in the air for more than an hour now. Things got a little sticky this morning - we haven't been sleeping much this week, so when we went to bed late last night, we weren't as disciplined as we should've been when setting the alarm clock. I've discovered that 45 minutes is not long enough to tie up all the loose ends before a weekend flight. We left the house 15 minutes behind schedule and I still managed to forget to stow the tiny compost bag on the kitchen counter. When I realized this, I had a total Simpson's moment: I heard an orchestral beat as a succession of still shots brought me closer to the soon-to-be-smelly bag. Think: when Marge remarks that at least Bart is wearing clean underwear in his moment of danger; then there is a succession of stills that ends on a pair of underwear lying innocently on Bart's bed. Buh. Buh. Buh. BAH!

The drive into Halifax was fun but tense - whereas our last flight out involved a 6-hour wait in the airport, I knew on the ride in today that we'd be cutting it awfully fine. We pulled into the parking lot 3 minutes before absolute last check-in time. Take it from your Auntie Amo - if there's a way for you to avoid running across a parking lot with two heavy pieces of luggage while you are filled with fear and weighed down by a week of sleep-deprivation & dieting, that is most certainly the course your life should take. Fortunately there was a long line-up and we made it with a half-hour to spare before boarding commenced.

One of the things I like about flying AC is the pre-programmed radio stations. Since we live in an area with little access to decent commercial radio (hello easy listening!), being on an AC flight is like being in Toronto again. From an aural standpoint, that is. I particularly enjoyed the Alan Cross retro-alt. program. When he played 'Close to Me' & 'Swamp Thing,' I took it as a sign.
"if only I was sure that my head on the door was a dream."
I thought of that line during That Tuesday, when I had my head on Poet's bedroom door. Circles. Loops. Retrograde motions.

time: 3 p.m. EST
place: the air above western Ontario - or possibly Manitoba; it's hard to tell when one's husband has scooped the window seat for the second time in one day!!! If I could only see out the window, I'd know if we passed the big dotted line that separates the provinces from one another.
The Boy is really cranky. He's been napping off & on since the first flight, which has left him groggy & hard to please. I've made up my mind to stick it out (wakefulness, that is), so consequently I have more energy and am thoroughly enjoying myself. Being drowsy actually helps with the airport experience. Besides, I'm on Vacation Time now. It's like a switch has flipped in my brain - one of those enormous knife switches, the kind you see in Frankenstein movies. Vacation Time is time to be giddy, humourous, relaxed, flexible, childlike, & curious. As I walked through the Toronto airport swinging my Groovy Girl in one hand, I felt the spirit of Vacation Time very strongly. I'm wearing my green patterned dress over a black body suit, plus the inevitable 8-hole docs and a broad-brimmed straw hat that I bought on our honeymoon in Niagara-On-The-Lake (a.k.a. Tourist Town) and intend to wear to the wedding ceremony. This outfit, when combined with our Maritime origins, makes me feel like a demented version Anne of Green Gables. On her, the big black boy boots and the brown second hand leather coat would've been considered a mark of low caste. Funny how that works.
I'm feeling happy & puckish. I want to start shit, just to see what will happen. For instance: when we deplaned in Toronto, the flight crew requested that only passengers with 'tight' connections deplane at first. She added that this should only involve 15 people at the most. As I was watching the hoards of deplaning passengers, I had the urge to loudly comment on this to the Boy. "I don't think that all of these people have a tight connection." Watch the fur fly! But I didn't. Small vestige of squareness, holding me back.
It's funny how Maritime-y I feel today. Walking through the Toronto airport, I was surprised by the amount of people who avoided eye-contact. Considering how I resisted any attempt to take away my tough-girl-from-Toronto façade back in the fall, my sudden switch to openness is amusing. I've known for months that I was feeling a deep satisfaction in leading the East Coast life; this was the litmus test. Pass? Fail? It depends on your postulates.
On the last flight we got talking with our seat mate, a nervous young girl visiting her sister in the American West. It was fun to just chat with a stranger - not because you had to, not because it was a pre-requisite or logical extension of anything, but because we're all nice people here. That in itself runs counter to most big city thought, and for very good reason. I'm reminded of Nic's sudden willingness to talk to strangers since his Quèbec City experience, which is all the more encouraging considering his deep natural shyness. As Red Green says, 'I'm pulling for ya. We're all in this together." Nic takes that very seriously these days.

A little girl is acting up across the aisle. She is travelling with her brother and mother. I found myself watching them earlier in the flight, partly because I'm generally interested in children and partly because they're an East Indian family and I'm starved for non-white faces after 9 months in the vanilla provinces. They're a perfectly normal family, identical to thousands of people I've seen recently, but their skin and presumed cultural background makes them exotic to me. (I felt the same way about the Asian stewardess on the last flight and the black mother & infant in the airport w.c. Damn, I need a vacation to a truly multicultural part of the world.)

We saw Miri & J last night. It was supposed to be a brief stop to drop off house keys so that they can look in on Ceilidh while we're gone. But it turned into dinner at the local Indian restaurant (the Boy needed a curry for the good of his soul) and an extended chat in our living room as they explored our comics & movies. They left really excited & happy about spending a weekend with our stuff, which made me very happy too. It's so nice to feel needed & cool. Later we regretted all the time spent happily gadding about as our packing stretched on into the night, making me incredibly tense. We went to bed cranky, ill & exhausted. A bad omen, for those who believe in such.

II.
We arrived at the Edmonton airport happy, although heartily sick (the plane had dropped into a big pocket of turbulence right before landing, and my iron stomach was reduced to a heaving mass of yuck). But this did not dissuade me from running and jumping into the arms of my Angels, although it may not have been the best idea from a purely physical standpoint. "What, no beer waiting for me?" I joked to Preacher. "I thought we'd rip into the weekend right away."
I was destined to regret this comment.
We scooted out off to homebase, i.e. Sally's "I'm in Paris anyway" apartment. I met Nich, one of Poet's oldest friends and someone I'd only read about in Poet's voluminous past emails. Poet's friends tend to be sharply divided into two camps: Camp Trebuchet and Camp Decent Human Being. Nich definitely fell into the last category. And as the person who knew me the least in the room, he paid a flattering amount of attention to my stories, which is aces with me.
Reunited with his luggage, Palaver was able to give me several presents from Toronto. Although I had asked him to pick up Bust for me, I had no idea that there was more swag in the works. And what swag!! Stacy, seamstress of my heart, had not only sent 2 mix CDs of industrial to keep my dancing feet in shape, but also included 2 goth outfits for my Groovy Girl Jayna!!! Although I had only known Nich for 40 seconds at this point, I was compelled to ignore him and everyone for several minutes until I could stop dressing up Jayna and squealing.
As Preacher, Poet, Palaver, Nich, the Boy and I left for "dinner," it was 11 p.m. on my personal clock and I was getting incredibly sleepy. A meal of thick Alberta beef and communal pitchers of beer somehow failed to alleviate the dozy feeling. Conversation was quick and charming, interspersed with toasts and laughter. Although I usually forbid the Boy to make geek toasts, I broke my own rule and quoted Neil Gaiman:
To old friends, lost loves and the season of mists. And may each and every one of us give the devil his due.
As a description of the weekend, it was less prophetic than inevitable.

Fig. 2: Team Alpha in action: Palaver & Preacher in "The Indefatigable."

The plan was for us to convoy over to the bar that was to hold the night's bachelor party, and then I was to leave the boys to their carousing, driving Preacher's car "The Indefatigable." Although they promised that this night would be far tamer than Preacher's last night as a layman party, there was still emphatically no girlzz alouwd. Several weeks before we flew out, I has stated clearly that I would need something to do if they decided to abandon me. Preacher's solution had been to pawn me off on the bride, who suddenly went incognito. And as the alternate all-girl plan spectacularly failed to materialize, I found myself sitting alone in Sally's lovely apartment, watching the Fisher King and convincing Preacher (who had called from a payphone at the bar) that there were no hard feelings. It was when the Boy called to commiserate that I realized that in fact there were a lot of hard feelings. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until I noticed myself weeping into the phone. The day's stress was piling up, and I felt enormously put-upon. Before we had gone to dinner, we had discovered that Tymothi:J was flying out to meet us and would need a pick-up from the airport and a drop-off at the bachelor party. Guess who was deputized? Did you guess the girl who was barred from the bar? Well, didja?
Yargh.
I discovered that night that I have an unreasonable fear of being lost and alone in the dark. I had never driven in Edmonton, plus my map didn't cover the airport, plus it was dark, plus I was full of beef and beer, plus I was on the point of crying again at the massive unfairness of letting me be the only girl present at every drinking night but this one. Of course I became hopelessly lost, finding myself on a wide tree-lined street with no turns for what seemed like an eternity. When I found a cross-street, I pulled over to have hysterics and check the map. Surprise surprise, I was heading in the right direction - I was just 6 or 7 streets west of the right road. As soon as I rejoined traffic, the drive went without noticeable incident, and I was even early for the plane arrival. Tym:J strode off the escalator looking abstracted, and saw me waving cheerily.
He asked if his eyes were red. I misheard him; thought he was asking about me, and answered that my eyes were red because I'd been crying. He had the story out of me in 4 long sentences, and immediately said the exact perfect thing: "Why don't you come?" Oh no, I demurred weakly, I couldn't. They asked me not to. "Just come, Amo." Which was the perfect amount of arm-twisting, and I decided to crash the party.
We walked into the bar, and I immediately felt as welcome as Catherine MacKinnon in the Playboy Grotto. I pulled out a chair for myself and broke 2 of the long nails I grew for 2 months in preparation for the wedding. D'oh. I saw the Lawyer at the other end of the table and thought of the rumours I had heard, that he had been furious at me for not inviting him to my wedding last year. I tried a tentative wave. He seemed...indifferent. Great. Preacher grudgingly said I could stay, but forbade me to go beyond the first of 8 pushed-together tables. I was stuck at the far end of the action, near to Preacher (drunk & uncommunicative), Beowulf (who despises me), Brit Boy (whom I despise), the bride's father (a stranger) and the Boy. I was so full of terrible feeling that I couldn't even take comfort in my husband's sincere welcome. I wished that I had never put the passive-aggressive screws to Tymothi:J. I wanted to be home, not in Sally's apartment, but in my own home in the Annapolis Valley.
Beowulf said, "Ok, Amoret, you can stay. But you have to be promised not to be offended when we start sniffing cocaine off strippers' titties." I made an I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it face and continued to marinate in my vast immaginary soup pot of inappropriateness. I noticed grimly that the only boys who were speaking to me civilly were complete strangers (Brad) or near-strangers (Nich). I just shouldn't be here, I decided. Finish this beer and go home.
And then the Lawyer came over; crossed the invisible line. I apologized for not inviting him to our wedding, and he brushed it off. We began talking excitedly, inches from each other's faces, and I started to feel a little better. Shortly after this, I crossed the line myself, and wedged myself in between Nich and Palaver, armed only with my full pint glass. I was strengthened by the newly-lit Romeo y Julietta cigar Seth had just offered to me ("bite off the tip, but don't swallow it." "yeah, because I usually swallow whatever's in my mouth." "oooh. that's the spirit."). After a suitable interval, they fully accepted my presence, and we started taking shots of the only known full gathering of Tisiphone's Angels that included the Lawyer (that is, when we could get Preacher to stop wearing the unused puke bucket on his head).
I stopped having to work hard at having fun. I began to drink seriously, though not excessively; someone would have to pilot the Indefatigable home. And I was rewarded for my earlier discomfort. First, Poet: "I'm really glad that you're here." Then, Preacher: "I'm so happy that you came." I chased a bar whore off Brit Boy's lap and onto mine, to an audience of snapping cameras and Brit Boy's extreme displeasure. I had a chance to tell Poet my epilogue theory: that the main story of our relationship ended in 1997, and that our weddings are the two main parts of the final epilogue. He didn't think much of this theory. "Don't you see?" I said. "Now we can write a whole new book." He thought about that for awhile.
Preacher, of course, topped them all. Massively drunk, he held eye-contact with me with visible effort. "Amoret," he said, pausing for emphasis (or perhaps to recall the next part of the sentence.) "Yes, Preacher." "Forget everything else I've said and remember this." "Okay." Another pause. "You rock." "Thank you, Preacher."
It doesn't sound like much. But it is, believe me.

Fig. 3: I love it when a plan comes together.
When they kicked us out of the bar, we walked down Whyte Avenue with all the rest of the drunken and displaced - although we were the only group singing sea shanties. I drove us home, praying that a vigilant cop would not pull me over: I felt sober enough to drive, but my blood alcohol was unquestionable above the legal limit. Thanks to whatever god that looks over irresponsible U of T students, we made it back to home base without incident (although several passengers of the Indefatigable would not remember how they got home that night). We fell onto the floor, bed or couch, depending on prior arrangement, and we stayed that way for a long time.

Fig. 4: Palaver go sleepy now zzzzz.

"To all you bastards that forbade me to come, so that I had a chance to crash the party."
- my toast

lesson II: the bay of pigs
crashed the bachelor fling
because i felt so unloved
besides, no paid whores.

smoking fun picture from palaver. smooch!

	may 18, 2001. Fig. 1: Aye, that it was. lesson I: summary returned from the west my body needs more sleep time too much booze and fries.

	I. time: 11:25 AST place: the air above Quèbec This pen belongs to the stewardess and I absolutely love it! If she hadn't specifically enjoined me against stealing it, I'd 'forget' to give it back for sure. We've been in the air for more than an hour now. Things got a little sticky this morning - we haven't been sleeping much this week, so when we went to bed late last night, we weren't as disciplined as we should've been when setting the alarm clock. I've discovered that 45 minutes is not long enough to tie up all the loose ends before a weekend flight. We left the house 15 minutes behind schedule and I still managed to forget to stow the tiny compost bag on the kitchen counter. When I realized this, I had a total Simpson's moment: I heard an orchestral beat as a succession of still shots brought me closer to the soon-to-be-smelly bag. Think: when Marge remarks that at least Bart is wearing clean underwear in his moment of danger; then there is a succession of stills that ends on a pair of underwear lying innocently on Bart's bed. Buh. Buh. Buh. BAH! The drive into Halifax was fun but tense - whereas our last flight out involved a 6-hour wait in the airport, I knew on the ride in today that we'd be cutting it awfully fine. We pulled into the parking lot 3 minutes before absolute last check-in time. Take it from your Auntie Amo - if there's a way for you to avoid running across a parking lot with two heavy pieces of luggage while you are filled with fear and weighed down by a week of sleep-deprivation & dieting, that is most certainly the course your life should take. Fortunately there was a long line-up and we made it with a half-hour to spare before boarding commenced. One of the things I like about flying AC is the pre-programmed radio stations. Since we live in an area with little access to decent commercial radio (hello easy listening!), being on an AC flight is like being in Toronto again. From an aural standpoint, that is. I particularly enjoyed the Alan Cross retro-alt. program. When he played 'Close to Me' & 'Swamp Thing,' I took it as a sign. "if only I was sure that my head on the door was a dream." I thought of that line during That Tuesday, when I had my head on Poet's bedroom door. Circles. Loops. Retrograde motions. time: 3 p.m. EST place: the air above western Ontario - or possibly Manitoba; it's hard to tell when one's husband has scooped the window seat for the second time in one day!!! If I could only see out the window, I'd know if we passed the big dotted line that separates the provinces from one another. The Boy is really cranky. He's been napping off & on since the first flight, which has left him groggy & hard to please. I've made up my mind to stick it out (wakefulness, that is), so consequently I have more energy and am thoroughly enjoying myself. Being drowsy actually helps with the airport experience. Besides, I'm on Vacation Time now. It's like a switch has flipped in my brain - one of those enormous knife switches, the kind you see in Frankenstein movies. Vacation Time is time to be giddy, humourous, relaxed, flexible, childlike, & curious. As I walked through the Toronto airport swinging my Groovy Girl in one hand, I felt the spirit of Vacation Time very strongly. I'm wearing my green patterned dress over a black body suit, plus the inevitable 8-hole docs and a broad-brimmed straw hat that I bought on our honeymoon in Niagara-On-The-Lake (a.k.a. Tourist Town) and intend to wear to the wedding ceremony. This outfit, when combined with our Maritime origins, makes me feel like a demented version Anne of Green Gables. On her, the big black boy boots and the brown second hand leather coat would've been considered a mark of low caste. Funny how that works. I'm feeling happy & puckish. I want to start shit, just to see what will happen. For instance: when we deplaned in Toronto, the flight crew requested that only passengers with 'tight' connections deplane at first. She added that this should only involve 15 people at the most. As I was watching the hoards of deplaning passengers, I had the urge to loudly comment on this to the Boy. "I don't think that all of these people have a tight connection." Watch the fur fly! But I didn't. Small vestige of squareness, holding me back. It's funny how Maritime-y I feel today. Walking through the Toronto airport, I was surprised by the amount of people who avoided eye-contact. Considering how I resisted any attempt to take away my tough-girl-from-Toronto façade back in the fall, my sudden switch to openness is amusing. I've known for months that I was feeling a deep satisfaction in leading the East Coast life; this was the litmus test. Pass? Fail? It depends on your postulates. On the last flight we got talking with our seat mate, a nervous young girl visiting her sister in the American West. It was fun to just chat with a stranger - not because you had to, not because it was a pre-requisite or logical extension of anything, but because we're all nice people here. That in itself runs counter to most big city thought, and for very good reason. I'm reminded of Nic's sudden willingness to talk to strangers since his Quèbec City experience, which is all the more encouraging considering his deep natural shyness. As Red Green says, 'I'm pulling for ya. We're all in this together." Nic takes that very seriously these days. A little girl is acting up across the aisle. She is travelling with her brother and mother. I found myself watching them earlier in the flight, partly because I'm generally interested in children and partly because they're an East Indian family and I'm starved for non-white faces after 9 months in the vanilla provinces. They're a perfectly normal family, identical to thousands of people I've seen recently, but their skin and presumed cultural background makes them exotic to me. (I felt the same way about the Asian stewardess on the last flight and the black mother & infant in the airport w.c. Damn, I need a vacation to a truly multicultural part of the world.) We saw Miri & J last night. It was supposed to be a brief stop to drop off house keys so that they can look in on Ceilidh while we're gone. But it turned into dinner at the local Indian restaurant (the Boy needed a curry for the good of his soul) and an extended chat in our living room as they explored our comics & movies. They left really excited & happy about spending a weekend with our stuff, which made me very happy too. It's so nice to feel needed & cool. Later we regretted all the time spent happily gadding about as our packing stretched on into the night, making me incredibly tense. We went to bed cranky, ill & exhausted. A bad omen, for those who believe in such.

	II. We arrived at the Edmonton airport happy, although heartily sick (the plane had dropped into a big pocket of turbulence right before landing, and my iron stomach was reduced to a heaving mass of yuck). But this did not dissuade me from running and jumping into the arms of my Angels, although it may not have been the best idea from a purely physical standpoint. "What, no beer waiting for me?" I joked to Preacher. "I thought we'd rip into the weekend right away." I was destined to regret this comment. We scooted out off to homebase, i.e. Sally's "I'm in Paris anyway" apartment. I met Nich, one of Poet's oldest friends and someone I'd only read about in Poet's voluminous past emails. Poet's friends tend to be sharply divided into two camps: Camp Trebuchet and Camp Decent Human Being. Nich definitely fell into the last category. And as the person who knew me the least in the room, he paid a flattering amount of attention to my stories, which is aces with me. Reunited with his luggage, Palaver was able to give me several presents from Toronto. Although I had asked him to pick up Bust for me, I had no idea that there was more swag in the works. And what swag!! Stacy, seamstress of my heart, had not only sent 2 mix CDs of industrial to keep my dancing feet in shape, but also included 2 goth outfits for my Groovy Girl Jayna!!! Although I had only known Nich for 40 seconds at this point, I was compelled to ignore him and everyone for several minutes until I could stop dressing up Jayna and squealing. As Preacher, Poet, Palaver, Nich, the Boy and I left for "dinner," it was 11 p.m. on my personal clock and I was getting incredibly sleepy. A meal of thick Alberta beef and communal pitchers of beer somehow failed to alleviate the dozy feeling. Conversation was quick and charming, interspersed with toasts and laughter. Although I usually forbid the Boy to make geek toasts, I broke my own rule and quoted Neil Gaiman: To old friends, lost loves and the season of mists. And may each and every one of us give the devil his due. As a description of the weekend, it was less prophetic than inevitable. Fig. 2: Team Alpha in action: Palaver & Preacher in "The Indefatigable." The plan was for us to convoy over to the bar that was to hold the night's bachelor party, and then I was to leave the boys to their carousing, driving Preacher's car "The Indefatigable." Although they promised that this night would be far tamer than Preacher's last night as a layman party, there was still emphatically no girlzz alouwd. Several weeks before we flew out, I has stated clearly that I would need something to do if they decided to abandon me. Preacher's solution had been to pawn me off on the bride, who suddenly went incognito. And as the alternate all-girl plan spectacularly failed to materialize, I found myself sitting alone in Sally's lovely apartment, watching the Fisher King and convincing Preacher (who had called from a payphone at the bar) that there were no hard feelings. It was when the Boy called to commiserate that I realized that in fact there were a lot of hard feelings. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until I noticed myself weeping into the phone. The day's stress was piling up, and I felt enormously put-upon. Before we had gone to dinner, we had discovered that Tymothi:J was flying out to meet us and would need a pick-up from the airport and a drop-off at the bachelor party. Guess who was deputized? Did you guess the girl who was barred from the bar? Well, didja? Yargh. I discovered that night that I have an unreasonable fear of being lost and alone in the dark. I had never driven in Edmonton, plus my map didn't cover the airport, plus it was dark, plus I was full of beef and beer, plus I was on the point of crying again at the massive unfairness of letting me be the only girl present at every drinking night but this one. Of course I became hopelessly lost, finding myself on a wide tree-lined street with no turns for what seemed like an eternity. When I found a cross-street, I pulled over to have hysterics and check the map. Surprise surprise, I was heading in the right direction - I was just 6 or 7 streets west of the right road. As soon as I rejoined traffic, the drive went without noticeable incident, and I was even early for the plane arrival. Tym:J strode off the escalator looking abstracted, and saw me waving cheerily. He asked if his eyes were red. I misheard him; thought he was asking about me, and answered that my eyes were red because I'd been crying. He had the story out of me in 4 long sentences, and immediately said the exact perfect thing: "Why don't you come?" Oh no, I demurred weakly, I couldn't. They asked me not to. "Just come, Amo." Which was the perfect amount of arm-twisting, and I decided to crash the party. We walked into the bar, and I immediately felt as welcome as Catherine MacKinnon in the Playboy Grotto. I pulled out a chair for myself and broke 2 of the long nails I grew for 2 months in preparation for the wedding. D'oh. I saw the Lawyer at the other end of the table and thought of the rumours I had heard, that he had been furious at me for not inviting him to my wedding last year. I tried a tentative wave. He seemed...indifferent. Great. Preacher grudgingly said I could stay, but forbade me to go beyond the first of 8 pushed-together tables. I was stuck at the far end of the action, near to Preacher (drunk & uncommunicative), Beowulf (who despises me), Brit Boy (whom I despise), the bride's father (a stranger) and the Boy. I was so full of terrible feeling that I couldn't even take comfort in my husband's sincere welcome. I wished that I had never put the passive-aggressive screws to Tymothi:J. I wanted to be home, not in Sally's apartment, but in my own home in the Annapolis Valley. Beowulf said, "Ok, Amoret, you can stay. But you have to be promised not to be offended when we start sniffing cocaine off strippers' titties." I made an I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it face and continued to marinate in my vast immaginary soup pot of inappropriateness. I noticed grimly that the only boys who were speaking to me civilly were complete strangers (Brad) or near-strangers (Nich). I just shouldn't be here, I decided. Finish this beer and go home. And then the Lawyer came over; crossed the invisible line. I apologized for not inviting him to our wedding, and he brushed it off. We began talking excitedly, inches from each other's faces, and I started to feel a little better. Shortly after this, I crossed the line myself, and wedged myself in between Nich and Palaver, armed only with my full pint glass. I was strengthened by the newly-lit Romeo y Julietta cigar Seth had just offered to me ("bite off the tip, but don't swallow it." "yeah, because I usually swallow whatever's in my mouth." "oooh. that's the spirit."). After a suitable interval, they fully accepted my presence, and we started taking shots of the only known full gathering of Tisiphone's Angels that included the Lawyer (that is, when we could get Preacher to stop wearing the unused puke bucket on his head). I stopped having to work hard at having fun. I began to drink seriously, though not excessively; someone would have to pilot the Indefatigable home. And I was rewarded for my earlier discomfort. First, Poet: "I'm really glad that you're here." Then, Preacher: "I'm so happy that you came." I chased a bar whore off Brit Boy's lap and onto mine, to an audience of snapping cameras and Brit Boy's extreme displeasure. I had a chance to tell Poet my epilogue theory: that the main story of our relationship ended in 1997, and that our weddings are the two main parts of the final epilogue. He didn't think much of this theory. "Don't you see?" I said. "Now we can write a whole new book." He thought about that for awhile. Preacher, of course, topped them all. Massively drunk, he held eye-contact with me with visible effort. "Amoret," he said, pausing for emphasis (or perhaps to recall the next part of the sentence.) "Yes, Preacher." "Forget everything else I've said and remember this." "Okay." Another pause. "You rock." "Thank you, Preacher." It doesn't sound like much. But it is, believe me. Fig. 3: I love it when a plan comes together. When they kicked us out of the bar, we walked down Whyte Avenue with all the rest of the drunken and displaced - although we were the only group singing sea shanties. I drove us home, praying that a vigilant cop would not pull me over: I felt sober enough to drive, but my blood alcohol was unquestionable above the legal limit. Thanks to whatever god that looks over irresponsible U of T students, we made it back to home base without incident (although several passengers of the Indefatigable would not remember how they got home that night). We fell onto the floor, bed or couch, depending on prior arrangement, and we stayed that way for a long time. Fig. 4: Palaver go sleepy now zzzzz. "To all you bastards that forbade me to come, so that I had a chance to crash the party." - my toast lesson II: the bay of pigs crashed the bachelor fling because i felt so unloved besides, no paid whores. smoking fun picture from palaver. smooch!