By Lucy

I’m writing this on two hours of sleep in the last 24, so I’m curious how much of this will make it past my faithful editor.

It’s especially frustrating because I was doing so well in terms of getting a good sleep every day. It broke at some point last week and I wonder if there is some unacknowledged emotion keeping me awake. I’ve decided to return to the bottle, as I always do. Rich pointed out that it is only two weeks until Christmas, and theoretically only two more weeks of nights, although no one is sure when exactly it will slow down.

I left the freezer unplugged and open and expected the frost to melt and evaporate. It did not – instead, the inside of the freezer is covered in sludge, soon to be mold, I imagine. I’m not sure what to do about it… I suppose the logical thing to do is clean it, but I am irrationally afraid of spiders and the thing is covered in them. My usual course of action would be to pay Luna to help me, but she’s in the midst of a crisis. Her roommate got engaged after a whirlwind romance, and decided she had to move in with her fiancée less than two weeks after travelling to meet them for the first time. So Winter broke the lease and has left poor Luna with less than a month to organize a move, in the midst of a cost of living crisis and a housing shortage. As you can see, I’m loath to pile more misery on her, although I’ll help her as much as I can with the move.

She was talking about moving to Newfoundland to live with her dad next year, and I’m debating offering to drive her in January if she pays for gas and food. I’ve got time to kill, and it might be a good excuse to visit my family on the coast.

I got paid on Thursday. My first course of action was to throw half my paycheck onto the credit card. My second was to spend almost 200 dollars on my hair, turning it from brassy blonde to this lovely ash blonde.

Well… those don’t really do it justice, because the difference in the lighting is also clear. I did scream for joy when Julia finally let me see it, because I wasn’t expecting it to look as silvery as it did but it’s exactly what I wanted. It was three hours in the chair, occasionally yelping when a lock of hair got caught on the brush. She would always smile and say (in your best Edna Mode voice) “It’s vanity, darling, it’s not supposed to feel good!”. It already hurts my pocketbook, but the reactions are involuntary anyway.

I have a casting call tomorrow and I imagine the person doing the selecting will love my new hair. It’s for evening gowns, although when they saw my Instagram they also added “I have a teenager collection as well”. I’d take either – money and exposure are good enough for me – but I did resent the implication that I look like a kid.

Work was fun last week. I’ve become the de facto leader of the Christmas casuals; Amelie called me the team mom. Part of it is because it’s less embarrassing for them to come and ask me questions since we all started together, I know. But a large part of it is my new attitude, and I’m glad I have such a casual environment to test it in. The steward told me I’m one of two people he’d hire on after the Christmas period is over, and the general plan is to get myself hired on and then put in a transfer to the Thunder Bay branch. Then I’ll have something to fall back on when carpentry is slow.

There was one particular instance when I got in a fight with one of the regulars. In what we call ‘second sort’, the packages get sorted into bins labelled with a number from 300 to 380. More often than not, there’s packages mixed in that belong elsewhere, either ‘CUS’ or ‘mobiles’ (don’t worry about what they mean). I had only one empty bin to sort those into, so I marked the mobiles and piled them on one side and the CUS on the other. The full-timer wandered over and took umbrage at this, to which I fired back “I got hired at the same time as the rest of them and I’m not a full timer. I’m not getting paid to be a team leader, or find another bin – I don’t even know where to get another bin. If you don’t like it, by all means take over”. He grumbled and walked off and I spent the rest of the night muttering “Not my circus, not my monkeys” to myself.

I realized a problem with my first tattoo: people are constantly asking what the kanji means. It lacks any indication that it’s for someone who died, so I’m left with either making something up or telling them the truth. My face always screws up like I just bit into a lemon and I say “it’s for a friend who died. His name and the date”. I’ve debated trying to add something to it to make it obvious so I don’t get asked so much.

I’ve also been thinking getting another tattoo before I leave town. I’ve been interested in this movie – which I haven’t watched yet – called “A Good Person”. Morgan Freeman’s character has a tattoo that says “amor fati”; to love one’s fate. I interpret it as my version of “this too shall pass”. Taking the good with the bad is a hard line to walk, and I always risk falling into a helpless sort of fatalism. Earlier this year I was telling people I prefer misery to happiness, because misery, like death and taxes, is always certain. I view a lot of the unfortunate events that happened this summer like the pain that accompanies surgery, unpleasant but necessary, and I think I’m on the mend.

The question is where. My first thought was on the inside of my wrist, but I’m a wuss and it’s painful. I’m also concerned that it might cause damage to my tendons, which are already not in great shape from the years of factory work. My other thought was perhaps the back of my hand, where my thumb is, although I end up getting a lot of IV’s there. Maybe that’s a good reason to get the tattoo there – so they’ll stop doing it! I might end up getting it on my forearm, but I already have a few planned there and I can’t have too many sayings tattooed on my arms or it’ll start looking tacky.

I spend a good bit of time musing on who I am, now that Rich has pointed out I’ve changed. “In transition”. To a certain extent, it never dawned on me that this is significantly different than the face I presented the world, because in my head I’ve always known who I am and what I’m about. He is correct though, I carry myself differently now.

Let’s see if I can organize this clearly.

I bought Hunter S Thompson’s book on Hells Angels last week. It’s not often men come with a manual, after all, and the Vagabond grew up in that counterculture movement in the 60’s. Regardless of its applicability to modern one-percenters, it’s definitely part of his mental image of himself. Although he’s not an Angel and I’m unsure if he views himself as a one-percenter, per se. One time I jokingly called him a hippie, and he commented that his kid has said the same before firing back that he’s “no flower child”. True that, but people still call the Manson family hippies, so I’ll keep calling him one.

It’s for myself, as well – I intend to be a biker, with or without him, and researching the darker side of the culture is important even if I have no intention of seeking it out. When I told my father of my impending move to Thunder Bay, he replied “are you sure? It’s a rough place”. I laughed – he has no idea what I got up to in high school, or even since.

He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named showed up on my Twitch last night. I only noticed because I checked my viewer list while waiting for the game to load, since I already had him blocked from the chat. There’s nothing I can do about it – even if blocking prevented him from viewing, he could just log out and view it from another account. Just as he might be reading this, it’s a reminder that you never know who’s watching, so you should think before you consider yourself safe.

My thoughts spinning as I lay in bed waiting for the sleeping pill to not kick in at all, there was a moment of reflecting if the Vagabond and him are comparable. It’s not the first time such a thought has crossed my mind, because I’m sure that to most people they look the same. ‘Bad boys’ who walk on the dark side, stealing, dealing and doing drugs.

The key differences are the reasons me and the Vagabond get along so well together and feel separate from everyone else. We were both born with silver spoons in our mouths – not rich, but money was never an object for our parents. Yet we eschewed that for whatever this life is.

This is where the book got me thinking. There is this curious phenomena – which persists even today – where middle-class people yearn for the “walk on the wild side”. Males get drunk and do stupid things, females try to get picked up by a ‘bad boy’ for a wild night. I know for a fact that the Vagabond thought that was my interest in him at first, and to a certain extent he was indulging that, waiting for the moment it was too much and I went back to my middle class life. I think the minute it definitely clicked for him was when we came back from a bike ride in the rain, cold and soaked to the bone. He asked me if I enjoyed the ride and I screamed “yes!”. He threw his head back, laughed, and exclaimed “yeah, you’re a biker bitch!”

Me and He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named almost seemed to be yearning for each other’s life, and that drew us together. He definitely wanted the white picket fence, a wife and two kids, the university degree framed and hung neatly on the wall. What I wanted is more nebulous, but it went beyond wanting a wild night of fun – I did want to live in the world on the fringe. I don’t want to break any laws, like stealing or doing illegal drugs (I can say that now that pot is legal) but I do have this mental image of myself as someone who doesn’t belong ‘among decent folk’. Now we’ve switched places entirely, so far as I know – he’s gone off to be a proper middle class dad, and I’m running away to be a vagrant.

Someone asked me on stream last night which Legend of Zelda character I view myself as. I said Nabooru. Do with that what you will.

I find myself in Hunter S Thompson, to an extent. The book was his first major publication, and from the way he writes it, the year with the Angels charted a large part of his life’s direction. He was always a beatnik and a malcontent, but the Angels introduced him to sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in a way he never shook off. Indeed, he seemed to have continued to ‘descend’ further into it as his life went on afterwards.

I read this article recently about how what looks like obsessive love is actually an obsession with figuring out who you are, and it’s very accurate. Not that I don’t love the Vagabond, but I talk about him far more often than I talk to him. He’s the mirror I hold up to see myself in, who I want to be and where I want to go.

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Hunter Thompson used that quote so much I’m sure many people think he wrote it first.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the other women in my family. My grandmother (not the woman who gave birth to my father, but the woman who raised him) said she married her husband because he had long hair and a motorcycle (she also said that had been a mistake). Sometimes when I’m out on the bike, I wonder if she’s watching me from the afterlife, and if she’s nodding or shaking her head. Hey Grammie, I picked up a biker with long hair! He’s a little young for you, though. Hah hah.

As I sat down to write this, I realized as confidently as I talk about it, my mother’s story is something I don’t have a complete grasp on. She was also married to a biker, her first husband. I don’t know when or for how long. When I was growing up, Hunter S Thompson’s books were prominent on the bookshelf, and she had a large framed picture of the cover for “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. The story she told us, in sparse detail, was that her husband was a normal middle-class man, and his older brother was a one-percenter. The brother got sent to jail and her husband decided to run middle man for him, slowly becoming absorbed in the one-percenter lifestyle until she didn’t recognize him anymore and left.

One memory sticks in my mind, although I can’t recall it clearly. There was a documentary of Hells Angels playing on cable, and she clicked on it. The air was immediately tense – she turned it on with a shrug, as if it was no big deal, but I could sense it meant a great deal to her. Halfway through the program they were interviewing a former Angel, and she sat up and gasped, “That’s his brother!” I remember trying to commit the name to memory so I could look him up later, but that was before I had free access to the internet and I’ve lost it.

I searched recently, and found a CBC article that says the Angels didn’t move into the area until 2000. Is that accurate? It does say there was a chapter of the Nomads beforehand. I was also amused that the same article mentions chapters of Satan’s Choice in both Thunder Bay and Simcoe County. Not Barrie.

The Vagabond asked me more than once what my mother looks like. I wonder, and I’m sure he does to, if they knew each other. I doubt it, because my mother was in Toronto proper and he’s never been. I debate trying to track down the documentary and the name. Until now, it hasn’t been relevant. To a certain extent, it still isn’t relevant. I didn’t get interested in this because of my family, it just informs my view of it somewhat.

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

There’s a proper Hunter S Thompson quote that fits me like a glove. Carpentry is good, vanlife and voluntary homelessness I think could work for anyone and need to be more mainstream. But to a certain extent… don’t try to be me.