Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

This isn’t quite as good as it should be but the idea is there, at least…

This guy, contrariwise, hits all the right (hilarious) notes.

I just went to the café here at work to get a cup of coffee and noticed the St. Patrick’s Day-themed lunch menu included a little horrorsome item called Corned Beef Pizza.

Which made me throw up in my mouth a little.

Many thanks to John Sakamoto for the tip-off on this beautiful version of MGMT’s song, Kids, by Ben Lee.

Oracular Spectacular is one of my favourite albums from the past couple of years but, honestly, I pay more attention to music than lyrics these days so I never really thought much about what they were singing. I’d blahblahblahblah along with what I thought they were saying, but without thinking about it. Ben Lee’s solo acoustic version turns the song on its head for me–with the lyrics front and centre.

When I listened to it for the first time on Saturday morning, I burst into tears.

I have found that music is a real trigger for sorrow in recent weeks. It doesn’t even have to be something as complex as lyrics that set me off–sometimes, it is just a chord progression or the key the song is in that is enough to squeeze my heart.

For the first week or two after Tristan died, I didn’t dare try to listen to any music. Gradually, I started to allow it back into my life. At first, just a little–listening to the radio (which is unheard of for me!) during my commute.

Then I listened to a few disks I’d picked up at a local record store–feeding the nostalgia that had been hovering around me since last fall when I reconnected with some friends from university… music from my past.

Later, at my request, my sister gave me a bunch of Tristan’s music–CDs, home-made mixes, and his iPod. A lot of it is rap and hip hop and metalcore but every once in a while, in one of his personal mixes, I’ll get a surprise–f’r'instance, Stayin’ Alive knocked me for a loop and a laugh one day, sandwiched between a couple of metalcore songs. Listening to his music hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be but the way it is hard is not in the way I thought it might be… What’s hard is hearing one band and wondering, “would he have liked this other band?” Because he’s not around for me to ask.

I keep running up against that subject here–regret, I mean–and I continue to step around it. It is the hardest thing I am dealing with at the moment.

I’ll never have anything to do with computers.

I’ll never go back to school.

I’ll never move back to Sarnia.

I’ll never allow myself to move back in with my parents.

I’ll never get a tattoo.

The “never say never” rule is one that I have learned over and over in my life. Saying I’ll never do something pretty much guarantees that someday I will do that very thing.

Thus, I am inked.

My nephew Tristan used to wear a silver ankh pendant on a chain around his neck. He got it on a vacation in Mexico a couple of years ago and wore it all the time. His mom wears it now. All the time. Without telling her why, I traced its outline after dinner at her place a few weeks ago. Over the next little while, I modified the drawing so that the top loop was reshaped into a heart. Tristan’s ankh was a little lopsided–with one side of the top loop a little narrower than the other–and, after designing a “corrected” version, I decided to leave that “imperfection” as-is. Because, y’know, Tristan wasn’t perfect. And neither am I. A couple weeks ago I took the design down to the tattoist who had done all of Tristan’s tats and had him put it on the inside of my left wrist, facing me.

I look at it all the time and marvel at how much it means to me and how surprised I am at that and how much he would love that I did this.

If only I’d done this while he was here.

I find myself plagued with regrets like that one, and I will try to write about the pain of that soon.