Open Journal Montreal

The problem is, I don’t know what exactly I think about short stories or suburbs or kids or being married. I didn’t have anything witty or wise ready. I’d like to keep asking this writer questions and laughing and being inspired by his answers because he’s making this thing I want: a spot of good thought, writing talk, music and animals. And I want to hear all about it all, and talk about it all, but I don’t want to eat up too much of his time. Or let myself eat up my own time. Except I’ve managed to convince myself that good conversations with people from beyond your bubble are always good wastes of time. Plus I don’t have a day job.

Loveliest and most strange for me was how we wanted to know more about each other’s weather and cities. Maybe because the city is a safe extension of yourself, and asking about buildings and the weather is a way to find out what the other thinks and lives without getting too personal. Maybe in a way what we want is to draw as much real as can into this sweet and potentially fleeting thing. Maybe we just like to listen to ourselves be writers.

But email is a funny thing. You can, if you can stomach it, look back and see in print how you are in conversation. Right there are all the same things you notice you do just a second too late in real life. Things that seem like awful communications mistakes, but are probably barely felt by your fellow conversationalist who’s mostly just busy with his own life and day.

I wonder if Jamie Allen read this he would cringe and say: “oh, god, there I go again.” Or if he is too well-balanced and devil-may-care to over-analyze in this way. Some people claim that this ubiquitous self-consciousness is kind of Canadian- that we doubt our selves (sometimes defensively) because we’re always trying to figure out who we are in relation to the loud and looming southerly space. But if this is so, then it must be looked at in a scalable way- that the people inside there might be othered by the idea of America as well.

I think the biggest surprise of mass two-way communication will be that the old cliches are true: that in a fundamental way we’re all the same. All feeling big and small in drastic, emotional ways, and trying to focus on the outside stuff of life instead. Trying to convince ourselves to stand up straight (on our hind legs) and take a good look at what’s going on: to be a part of it all in a likeable way instead of falling over (like a Nanny goat) in a dead faint. And then with this new knowledge of all-the-same-ness we’ll write stories for each other’s magazines, and work on each other’s code, collaborate to save the planet, and travel to stay at each other’s places. Yes!