For reasons I can’t fathom, the band Stars completely escaped my attention until very recently. Despite the band having been around for 20 years, being Montréal-based, and having a Patreon that states, in part:

We don’t believe if you have more money you should have more access. We are socialists. The meek are getting ready. We love you equally so we have one price to open the passenger door. 

Also, their Are You With Me? melts my insides a little every time I listen to it.

In Midnight Chicken, Ella Risbridger concludes a recipe:

A trivet on the table. Get someone else to pour the wine, put out knives and forks, and maybe make a salad (I mean, empty a bag of leaves in a bowl, maybe whisk up a little olive oil with lemon juice and balsamic vinegar: this is a lazy meal, remember.)

That was all I needed to take me to salad town: for some reason I’d always been daunted, and also kind of thought of salad as essentially non-essential. By lowering the bar, Risbridger won me over, and now I’ll toss a salad together on a whim a few times a week.

Tonight’s: lettuce, carrots, grape tomatoes, mushrooms, Parmesan cheese.

Fifteen years ago my entire family descended on Charlottetown to surprise me for my 40th birthday. 

I will never ever forgot how good that felt. 

Not only can May Erlewine cover Taylor Swift, she can also tell you how to make a good cup of coffee.

A true sign of spring: Receiver Brass Shop Thursday night pizza-pasta is over for the season. So it was back to the yeast bin at 100 Prince, re-re-realizing that making pizza dough from scratch is easy and takes only 15 minutes.

May Erlewine covers Taylor Swift.

From the liner notes:

I think in order to make room for the new dreams ahead I need to grieve the dreams that didn’t happen

It would’ve been sweet

@dollyparton says, “if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

In this moment I want to let the rain wash over me
so that I can really feel it
because it was serious
because it flooded the world because it took things that we’ll never get back
I want to feel that
so that when I open myself up to the brilliant colors ahead,
I can see them with clear eyes and I can feel flooded with the light
and full of gratitude

Here’s to brighter days, dear ones
They are coming

Going through the archives in the spare bedroom I found this rare photo of me-with-beard. It was taken in Peterborough when I was 25 years old; the kids in my arms are now in their 30s.

Last year I achieved something of a minor household victory when I managed to patch a hole in my duvet cover.

Because, at the time, I was focused primarily on keeping my head above water, it never occurred to me to realize that I was sleeping under a brown duvet cover that, let’s be honest, was somber and depressing. To say nothing of the grey pillow cases.

This weekend it occurred to me that I didn’t have to live this way. 

After extinguishing the stock at local shops for its  prevalence for beige and gingham, I looked outward and found an online source for a striking spring-like Marimekko duvet cover. Sold.

It arrived today.

Already my mood has improved.

As regular readers will know, I seldom write about sex in this space¹.

And I’m not going to start now.

But the tale I will tell, while not sexual at all, certainly involves vulnerability in the same neighbourhood. And also nudity.

I drove up to Summerside today to visit The Recovery Studio, to spend an hour floating in their “sensory deprived isolation tank.”

I do not know exactly why I decided to do this; I really don’t. There was an aspect of 7% more risk to the plan. And curiosity. A need to travel somewhere, even if it was only to Summerside, and inside myself. Perhaps the most honest reason I can give you is that I’ve been wading through some tectonic shifts recently that feel, in a way, like a rebirth²; I needed a way to stop and look at that outside of the daily flow, and removing my senses from the game seemed like it might afford an opportunity to do that.

This is what a sensory deprived isolation tank looks like:

Think “space pod filled with enough super-saturated salt solution to replicate the Dead Sea.” There’s a video walk through of the entire experience; watch that and you’ll have a good idea of the practicalities.

It’s harder to communicate something of the actual experience, because so much of the experience involves absence. Which is the point, but still came as a surprise.

Absence in the sense that after 5 or 10 minutes of acclimation, parts of me simply disappeared. And by “parts,” I mean both my sense of where I was in physical space, but also insidey parts.

It took me some time to get comfortable: I had a kink in my neck, a neck unused to being able to just be, that I needed to find my way through. The position I ended up in was not unlike one you’ll be familiar from the innumerable long-term-voyage-to-Mars where the crew goes into stasis, with my arms folded over my chest.

I didn’t experience any claustrophobia; indeed if I experienced anything it was whatever the opposite of claustrophobia is.

And then everything just kind of drifted away. I wasn’t asleep. But I wasn’t exactly awake either. And for a time–10 minutes? 20 minutes?–I’m not sure where I was. But I do recall, with palpable clarity, a feeling of warmth and confidence and safety that was profound.

I thought, in the back of my mind, that who I might meet on the inside was other people; but I met me³.

When the music faded back up to signal that 5 minutes were left, I was caught unawares. But I was okay. I lifted the lid, had a shower, and emerged into the daylight.

I don’t wish to oversell the experience: I’m still Pete. The parts of me, inside and out, that were sore, are still sore. But I did get somewhere new, and I’m carrying that little bit of new around with me still; it seems to have staying power. 

1. I never write about sex in this space.
2. I have used the word rebirth in this space three times in 22 years: modern-day rebirth of the Star Trek franchise, rebirth of the Brackley Drive-in once again, and implies a rebirth of the nuclear power industry. I have never used it to describe myself, and doing so feels deeply weird.
3. Yup, this.

I can literally not conceive of what pattern of search behaviour led Google to conclude that I’m in the market for a Saskatchewan tryst.