Winter is a White Dog Running Blissfully in its Sleep
a non-linear collection of notes on living non-biblically
The second day of January is always the day I feel the most beautiful. I have this lucky thing where sometimes sleeping in my makeup makes my skin a little glowy and I’ve slept enough of a hangover off to make any remaining regrets feel like a very weird dream. January second is when you make a bed for the mistakes of the last year, which always ooze into January first. It’s for wearing clothing that is more warm than sexy and going to the grocery store to stock the pantry. It’s for folk music that’s a little hopeful and a little nostalgic (and a palette cleanser from the electronic stuff I listen to between Christmas and the end of the 31st). This year I am trying to remember that I only have to pay attention to the moss on my street. I think I will be going sober again. At least until I make it to Germany. At least until I graduate. On the plane ride that took me back to Vancouver for big city new years festivities, I cried about being home for only five days— not enough time to mean it, but just enough to pick fights with my mom. On January first I stir in bed about all the people I drunkenly kissed, and the people I’ve let down. On January second, I just have to get up and clean my room and try again. I’ve never been catholic and I’m trying to remember that guilt is pointless after you’ve learned from it. I just get emotional on planes.
I only come back to my hometown in the winter months so the landscape is forever immortalized as an oil painting in appreciation to Andrew Wyeth. Okotoks is the Blackfoot word for Big Rock, referring to the massive glacial erratic just outside of it that kids drink beer on and most local restaurants are named after. The planes stretch greyish white into the sky as if the only distinction between us and the clouds is the hay bales and houses on the horizon. You used to be able to see straight to the mountains before the urban sprawl, an outline of hazy blueish baby teeth that fell out when the golf course got turned into a suburb. On the outskirts of town there are acreages owned by stadium country music stars, doctors, engineers. There is a Tim Hortons, and a Costco staffed by the younger siblings of people I went to high school with. The prom queen just had a baby. The town square looks like a Hallmark movie. At Christmas they put up these lights shaped like reindeer in rows on the big bridge that separates the town into public and catholic school divisions. There are more Mormon churches than there are kilometres of town and though it has spread itself out in the five years I’ve been gone (so much so that there are enough people now to consider it a city), I never learned how to drive because it was possible to get from one side of town to the other on foot or a bike. No one ever asked you to pay for gas when they drove you because they’d rather you not freeze. Things are easier out there, but no less real. When I was in high school I read a short story about a scientist in Regina trying to convince his reluctant father that the earth is round. If you’ve ever been to the prairies and looked at the sky, it’s easy to understand his father’s hesitation.
Though I love Vancouver, I miss being somewhere where it’s normal to be middle class. I miss not having to justify whether or not it’s aesthetically interesting to love hot dogs or dessert salads that feature sour cream in the same bowl as marshmallows. I love spending Christmas eating spaghetti and watching National Lampoons Christmas Vacation and not doing it to feel like I’m making up for something. My grandmother sews all the grandchildren Christmas pyjamas every year. I have never been to a house in Vancouver that has a small light-up replica of Graceland, but I would love to find one if they exist. I know a lot of these are my own hang-ups after spending so many years in an art scene that tries to convince you the only way to be happy is to be interesting, which is often considered synonymous with wealthy. I used to worry that people would find out some secret kind of truth about me: that I wasn’t cool, and I didn’t learn about Sonic Youth until last year, and I didn’t know about fine photographers or Japanese jazz musicians or Rick Owens until I had nodded along with enough people to look them up. The closest thing to an art theatre I knew about growing up was the one that played A24 films 45 minutes away. Though I think they could use it, most farmers care very little about the Criterion closet.
The more I spend time in big cities, the more I appreciate the fact that the only thing adjacent to a cool coffee shop in my hometown is the local Starbucks. In high school, my dad and I used to get up early and drink a tea there and work on our respective extracurricular passions until the world woke up. Me on my screenplays, him on his web design. I’ve never walked into that Starbucks and wished it was cooler, just that the layout hadn’t changed. I’m glad that I don’t feel guilty anymore for growing up without ever knowing anything specific about Harmony Korine. My favourite people in Vancouver are the ones that know what that feels like. Also, the ones that know you can tell how much money a household makes by how nice their lamps are, and know that though this doesn’t matter, it also matters very, very much.
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I have never been crazy for new years resolutions because I’ve always felt like they’re trying to push you further away from being able to sit comfortably in an armchair beside yourself. That being said, I am very excited to move into 2023. Those who know me personally know that last year was tumultuous to say the least. I struggled through a car accident, losing my job, losing my apartment, subsequently working four jobs, going to court, and a myriad of other things that made it normal for me to wonder if adulthood was just a series of misfortunes to deal with. I also started this Substack, got published in another collection, made two films, met an entirely new group of friends who now feel like family, and learned more about myself than I even thought possible in the span of a year. The one thing I took away from it all is that love is a renewable resource and does not run out when you start giving it to yourself. This includes the days where I have a weird haircut or laugh at a mug with a Buzzfeed adjacent saying on it or rely a little too much on other people to give me validation or do something else that feels invariably unchic. It’s comforting to know that although I struggled to be forgiving to myself this year, there was a version of me that once shared this body and could go to the bar and drink a normal amount and tell my friends that “things are actually pretty okay”. I had a very hard year. This doesn’t make me special or uniquely tortured or astrologically tied to anything specific, but it does fucking suck. Things are allowed to suck, and I am allowed to be pissed off about them. Things are also allowed to keep on moving, and keep being hard, better, funny, worse, more interesting, and normally all at once. And that’s why I keep writing, which is—coincidentally— one of the reasons why I am happy to keep living.
I am coming to the end of my degree and have two trips planned for the next little bit. I feel like I have some kind of project in my head somewhere and it’s getting ready to come out. I have decided that for once in my life, I am very, very happy in the body I inhabit. I do not want to change my face, or my heart. I’m trying to treat myself like I’m setting an example for someone’s daughter. I think all this self-reflection has something to do with the snow. This is the first winter where Vancouver has been cold in the -20 way, where you can’t help but pay attention to all of your limbs. It feels a little easier to be closer to your own skin when the air is nipping against it. I am getting better at looking at the world instead of glazing over it. I am better at using my fingertips. Just like I do with my apartment, I want to spend the year touching and re-arranging everything so that I remember it’s alive. The world is too big and too beautiful not to love every part of it, including myself. I am learning to embrace my sensuality. I am okay with the fact that sometimes I’ll let things feel very big and important, and sometimes I won’t believe anything matters at all. I have a lot of actor friends, and I’m learning a lot about using my body as an instrument of life by watching them do the same. I am okay with knowing that sometimes I just need a friend to tell me to go out and get some fresh air. Sometimes I am mean and sometimes I am sad, and those things do not exist as a scoreboard for whether or not I am valuable or real. I do not want to settle down. I don’t want to like things for other people. I do not want to change for the new year, just find all the beautiful things that are already there. One day. I will find the pulp and stop squeezing. I made a “shrine” to my favourite poem this past year, Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese, which I have written and re-written in every journal I’ve ever owned.
"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."
Have a wonderful 2023.
Kenna x