anecdote Jus I can’t remember anything I’ve ever done, but I need an anecdote for class. I’ve only lived in two modes: hot mess and snooze fest. I can’t write about the former because it’s explicit and the latter is…snoozy. I would love to write about animals but I’ve recently been demoted from vegan to vegetarian, so I don’t even have that going for me. I try to do things but I’m bad at everything, which sounds self-deprecating but it’s simply fact. I honestly would be my happiest as a vapid rich person who does nothing but relax and shop and travel. I’m not a doer, I’m an enjoyer. I’m also a parent, it’s hard, but I love my kid…so much so that I’ve developed severe anxiety that something bad will happen to this little nugget who genuinely tries his best to hurt himself as often as possible. I think about food constantly. I miss smoking and drinking, for the numbing qualities. God, now I feel everything, it’s awful. Did you know that humans created beer over 12,000 years ago? It’s as if we developed consciousness and instantly decided “nope”. 250821 ... epitome of incomprehensibility This is anecdotal, but I've heard that beer brewing was traditionally a woman's occupation, and the idea of pointy hats for witches came from pointy brewers' hats. Retelling this, I remember more. Not about the brewing process, but where I heard about it. At a bar, appropriately, though I wasn't drinking: this was a presentation on the history of beer told at a pre-pandemic Fringe Fest (indie theatre festival). I think the ticket had a picture of a bee on it, but I might be mixing this up with another. 250821 ... Jus The idea that it’s beer in a witch’s cauldron is delightful 250821 ... Jus I have to learn how to drive by February but I’m fucking terrified. I’m okay when I put it off and keep alive the dream that someday, in the distant future, I’ll be a capable adult. A self-assured, fearless, hair-in-the-wind, belting Taylor Swift in the driver’s seat kind of adult. But I’ve spent twenty years breathing into a bag, flinching at every lane-ending sign, pressing my foot against the floor to fantom-stop acceleration. Before the accident, reckless was too small a word to describe my approach to life. I felt most alive when we passed a bottle of Crown Royal back and forth on the Expressway. A 2 foot bong, we called Patrick, always tucked safely between my platform flipflops. My ex’s name, memorialized in a sticker of the starfish from SpongeBob stuck to its side. Bass pulsated through yellow smoke billowing from human-Patrick’s lungs and bong-Patrick’s neck. We raced his “souped up” Sunfire against Toyotas. Lights blurred. Colours bled. I’d vibrate from the thrill of feeling invincible. When the car flipped, I was half asleep. We were cruising at 120 on the back roads of Belle River, listening to Wu-Tang on low, stale smoke escaping into the night air. Feeling the tail end of a buzz, a weight fell over my eyelids that I couldn’t fight. Just as I slipped into a comfortable haze, someone in the back seat let out a short primal scream, then said flatly, “we’re done.” I opened my eyes to a grassy ditch and a hydro pole glowing in the headlights. Pat opened his eyes too. White knuckles gripped the wheel. All I could do was clench every muscle in my body. He jerked us back onto the street. Bong Patrick strained between my knees. My temple knocked against the window. Yellow lines blurred. The crack of the rear axle jolted the tires away from the road. Patrick fought back. The struggle, like two hawks in talon lock, sent us into a brief shutter before clipping the corner of a boulder. We catapulted skyward. Time stretched enough to feel everything – sharp plastic stippling the skin on my feet, deltoids slamming into the door harder than a linebacker charging the line, the seat belt biting into my throat. My vision, a kaleidoscope of road and sky. The piéce de résistance, gravity and motion and speed finding equilibrium on the concrete. The front of the Sunfire crushed like an empty pop can. My face violently ripped towards the dashboard, just an inch from impact when the airbag deployed. The explosive force tore open my lips and punched the air from my lungs. The car was still. I pushed the deflating airbag out of my face and searched through the talc powdered cab for the handle. I crawled my way onto the road, gasping desperately for clean air. The others followed in silence. I held my position on my hands and knees and watched as a sticky stream of blood met the road. Someone asked if I was okay, but I wasn’t sure yet, so I tilted my head towards him and said, “am I bleeding?” He took off his shirt and balled it into my face. Patrick was already throwing the Crown Royal bottle and the broken pieces of his bong counterpart into a nearby field as the cops arrived. That night, after I lied through my teeth to the police, and to my mother—who didn’t recognize me when she picked me up from the hospital—I broke up with Pat. It was the first time in my infantile life that I considered mortality, the fragility of it all. Not as an idea but as a fact. I knew then, as I do now, that anything is possible, good or bad or otherwise. No one is special or exempt. And the longer you live, the more there is to lose. So now, in the quiet of my empty driveway, I relive the Sunfire in the ditch. The blood, the shattered Patrick, the smell of talc. It doesn’t leave me, and maybe it never will. But I have to drive anyway. 250928 what's it to you? who go blather from