Monday, May 10, 2004
"I'm so afraid of getting cancer"
When I moved out to the country there wasn't a whole lot for me to do as I didn't have many friends my age who lived close by and things such as the mall, all ages shows, and the movies were all located about 30-45 minutes away. It was incumbent upon me to dream up my own ways of passing the time.
One thing we used to do when friends came to visit was head down to the side of the highway. There'd be three or four of us and we'd pretend to beat on one of the members of our group while cars passed. We'd continue with our faux swarming until a good samaritan would slow down or stop and then we'd flee into the woods. It wasn't terribly bright, but it did while away the idle hours.
In the summers Lachie's family would spend a great deal of time at their cottage about a mile down the road from my house. Lachie, I, and his brother would play a game of my invention called Underwater Guatamelan Druglords. This entailed diving under water and kicking and thrashing at each other as much as possible. It looked pretty cool and the name was catchy so it stuck as an activity despite the fact that there was absolutely no point to the game and no connection to Guatamela or drugs.
The non-summer months were particularly hard because I'd hear from my friends at school how great the show at the Pit was that I'd missed. Not only was it difficult to get a drive to Sydney to see shows at the Pit, but it was extremely difficult to convince my brother to let me tag along to see his friends' bands play. I spent a lot of time watching Star Trek re-runs (MITV use to broadcast like 16 hours of Star Trek a week) and then when that wasn't enough I was reading Star Trek novels and attempting to write my own scripts for Star Trek. I'm glad we didn't have the internet at my house at that time otherwise I'd be a fan fiction mephisto.
I used to be really angry that my parents moved me all the way out into the country when I was just hitting puberty and hanging out with your friends and out of the eyes of our parents meant the world. I used to think that I was so unlucky that we moved out of Sydney. I pitied myself.
Sydney's slowly becoming a wasteland. I joked with the woman who cut my hair that I don't think that I'd want to move back to Sydney if given the chance because 'I don't want to catch cancer.' I relayed that story to Amanda and we talked about how true that was. Neither of us has encountered very many people in Ontario or Alberta who have friends or relatives dying of cancer on a regular basis. I could be wrong, but the word cancer doesn't seem as foreign to me as it does to a lot of people I've encountered who've grown up outside Nova Scotia. It's not that the word cancer doesn't scare me, but when you encounter it so much well you the fear stops being accompanied by shock. It's the same feeling I get when talking about layoffs or unemployment. It was nothing for me to have a dozen or so friends whose parents weren't working or were working under the threat of lay off. It's a scary thought, but it isn't uncommon, it isn't even unacceptable.
I read one of those economic 'feel good' articles that gets published in the Cape Breton Post every month. It was titled something like "People Still Island's Greatest Resource.' I suppose they are until they start dying early or flee due to the threat of it.
It's a beautiful island. I don't think I'd want to have grown up anywhere else, but there is something rotten in the state of denmark.
When I moved out to the country there wasn't a whole lot for me to do as I didn't have many friends my age who lived close by and things such as the mall, all ages shows, and the movies were all located about 30-45 minutes away. It was incumbent upon me to dream up my own ways of passing the time.
One thing we used to do when friends came to visit was head down to the side of the highway. There'd be three or four of us and we'd pretend to beat on one of the members of our group while cars passed. We'd continue with our faux swarming until a good samaritan would slow down or stop and then we'd flee into the woods. It wasn't terribly bright, but it did while away the idle hours.
In the summers Lachie's family would spend a great deal of time at their cottage about a mile down the road from my house. Lachie, I, and his brother would play a game of my invention called Underwater Guatamelan Druglords. This entailed diving under water and kicking and thrashing at each other as much as possible. It looked pretty cool and the name was catchy so it stuck as an activity despite the fact that there was absolutely no point to the game and no connection to Guatamela or drugs.
The non-summer months were particularly hard because I'd hear from my friends at school how great the show at the Pit was that I'd missed. Not only was it difficult to get a drive to Sydney to see shows at the Pit, but it was extremely difficult to convince my brother to let me tag along to see his friends' bands play. I spent a lot of time watching Star Trek re-runs (MITV use to broadcast like 16 hours of Star Trek a week) and then when that wasn't enough I was reading Star Trek novels and attempting to write my own scripts for Star Trek. I'm glad we didn't have the internet at my house at that time otherwise I'd be a fan fiction mephisto.
I used to be really angry that my parents moved me all the way out into the country when I was just hitting puberty and hanging out with your friends and out of the eyes of our parents meant the world. I used to think that I was so unlucky that we moved out of Sydney. I pitied myself.
Sydney's slowly becoming a wasteland. I joked with the woman who cut my hair that I don't think that I'd want to move back to Sydney if given the chance because 'I don't want to catch cancer.' I relayed that story to Amanda and we talked about how true that was. Neither of us has encountered very many people in Ontario or Alberta who have friends or relatives dying of cancer on a regular basis. I could be wrong, but the word cancer doesn't seem as foreign to me as it does to a lot of people I've encountered who've grown up outside Nova Scotia. It's not that the word cancer doesn't scare me, but when you encounter it so much well you the fear stops being accompanied by shock. It's the same feeling I get when talking about layoffs or unemployment. It was nothing for me to have a dozen or so friends whose parents weren't working or were working under the threat of lay off. It's a scary thought, but it isn't uncommon, it isn't even unacceptable.
I read one of those economic 'feel good' articles that gets published in the Cape Breton Post every month. It was titled something like "People Still Island's Greatest Resource.' I suppose they are until they start dying early or flee due to the threat of it.
It's a beautiful island. I don't think I'd want to have grown up anywhere else, but there is something rotten in the state of denmark.
# posted by Die Brucke @ 1:56 PM 
