Stoners In A Dangerous Slime

These days, I would rather stab at the daylight until it bleeds darkness. With all due respect to Bruce Coburn, of course.

There is a season for everything here.  Right now, it is the beginning of both 24-hour daylight season and mud season. And something else is always just around the corner... 

When I first came to this place, in late-May of 2007, there were no stop signs in town. Soon, the company I was working for at the time decided put some up.   The people in town didn’t seem to need or want them, so what was the point?  To give the miners, so far away from home, a bit of familiarity?  In hindsight, it was all a bit silly. The signs themselves seemed out of place, unwilling to stay put.  While you can drill a hole into permafrost, it’s not like putting a fencepost into dirt.  The hole doesn’t close up around the inserted object.  It stays steadfastly wide open. The stop signs wobbled insolently.  They flipped defiantly like weathervanes in the wind.  They practically begged to be plucked from their holes.  And so, naturally, they were.  Yanked in the night, taken home as trophies, beginning a cycle of theft and replacement that went on for some time.  Every day, I got up, took an inventory of signs gone missing, and sheepishly reported the disappearances back to head office in Toronto.  Eventually, the locals gave up the fight against the invasive species, like our own particular cane toads (of Safety. everything in the name of Safety. always.).  The children of the town quickly decided to make vastly better use of them: target practice.  

And so, as the slimy mud leaves the road for every surface BUT the ground, revealing pebbles and then larger stones, Rock Season will begin.  The never-ending chorus of howling sled dogs that ring the town will be soon be accompanied by a hamlet-wide percussion section: children throwing rocks at stop signs (and occasional tin roof).  All night long.  And by night, I mean day.  And by day, I mean night.  You know what I mean, goddammit.

Sigh.

To everything, Turn, Turn, Turn. 

(Actually, speaking of that song: one of the first “big girl” auditions I went to (i.e. alone, without my mother in the room), I busted out the Byrds tune.  It was the first time I’d ever heard my voice alone, unaccompanied, in a big, empty room of adults.  It was thin and small, and I lost my nerve by the second verse (it’s okay, nobody knows the second verse, anyway).  I learned to hate the sound of my voice that day, to dread vocal auditions.  And as a result, I choked on every single one that followed.  Well, except for that one time that I ripped off an audition panel member’s toupee while belting out ‘Turn Back O Man’ from Godspell.  That one, I blew for other, very obvious reasons.  But that is yet another digression. I will embrace this turn of seasons, even though the very thought of the rock choir makes me grit my teeth.  I will go headlong into it, if only because it is a season closer to the finish line.  Maybe I’ll even throw a few rocks for good measure. While singing at the top of my lungs.)