You're always somebody's kid...

I just turned nineteen, and I believe I am an adult. My friends and I, a guy and a girl, are walking through a complex of townhouses in winter. It is windy after a snow fall, and dunes are starting to take shape. It is late into the night and the party goers are still going strong. Feeling excellent after a nite of partying we passed a man shovelling snow in the middle of the night, and thus offered to help. We started shovelling with him and once we were finished the man invited us inside. He offered us drinks and the next thing I know is that I'm witnessing my friends getting tortured with blades and pressure to the forearms. I ran as fast as I could out of the house, through the maze of random houses (while in my head I have a clear map of where I am, and my destination), and make a sharp right and see the familiar sight of my Christmas tree in front of my house. I don't know how my house got here, but the floor plan is the same as the apartment we used to live at in Mississauga. I ripped the door open and ran to my parents room. My father was on the bed talking on the phone. I fell to my knees next to the bed, and just gripped him as tight as I could, and started heaving and couldn't open my eyes, could not breathe, could not stop tightening up. I heard my dad stop his converstaion, quickly excuse the person on the line, and hang up the phone. I looked up and was scared stiff, all I knew was that it was now over. I woke up heaving and clenchin my covers. I was exhausted from fear yet I could not sleep.

Why would they burn it all?

Sometimes I wonder how much what we read can affect our dreams.

What should I do? I'm in front of this burning house, actually rows of burning houses, and people are looting things left right and center, so I double check to make sure I still have my wallet. People are scrambling to get their things out and I am watching as people are getting robbed. I realize I'm in Moscow, and something is hitting the fan, the city is burning, and I'm still waiting for Napoleon. I feel completely out of place, I think I stand out like a sore thumb in the crowd. The people that should be keeping peace are creating chaos, purposely, while the subjects are docile and can't seem to grasp the language barrier. I know every language, and feel pretty good about it. Yet I don't utilize my skills and help out. I am being pulled by a great big horse that has this oldschool yoke on made of dark redwood (for some reason I remember it as a yoke from the Old Testament, yeah, REALLY OLD). I know that I am taken to a big function, but I am not sure of how it will turn out. Somehow i realize that this is all deja vu and that I have been there before, but I look in my passport, and I don't even have a single Russian stamp! I am bewildered and scream at my captor, the horse does not respond. I am stopped at a border patrol and they don't believe I am being taken against my wishes, they seem to communicate with the horse. I am dragged now past the gates, and the guard gives me a rum and coke with a lime. I look back and in mere seconds I'm miles from the city, and there is a great light coming from the city. The sky is lit from the city's glow and all I feel is gloom, sadness and regret. I can not stop smelling earl grey tea and thinking of her.

Somewhere Between Nervous and Curious

I know in the back of my mind that this place is familiar to me, but I cannot recall with precision where it is that I am. I am lying on my back, and cannot move my arms or legs, they seem to be frozen, or super glued to the plastic surface of the desk/table. My neck will not move left or right and all I can do is strain my eyes by trying to see anything that would trigger my memory to relieve me of this mystery. The room is dark, and dripping wet. Water is dripping from the ceiling, cupboards, and tables but not on me. I am alone in the room but i can hear Cebo talking to someone in a computer language (something like the martians from Tim Burton's Mars Attacks, but less annoying, maybe a little more like George Lukas' R2D2). I have no idea how I understand him, but I know he is saying something about computers and someone close by having a company that sells them. Then all i heard was lots of moving tables around and then someone interrogating me about my sinus'. I didn't know what they were saying expect they repeated sinus, why is your throat sore and why is your nose running? I could only muster up the strenth and courage to mumble something at the armed guards dressed in suits. I blink and they are gone and Cebo tells me I just woke up from far away place. That he doesn't think it's good to go home and that we have to get "back to the family, a radical emergency". Part of me understood everything he was saying, but a different part of me did not know how to locate that part of my brain and digest what was being encoded. I could not retrieve the information even though I had just heard it seconds before. This thought tortured me until we went to Cebo's house and got my school bag I forgot the night before. There was a ship coming, you could hear it from far away.

Jumpin' like it's nothing...

Me and my cousin Rob are picking and trimming in the scorching paved utopia they call Mississauga. Although it's unbearably hot, we seem to work at an unbelievable pace, holding the bin and picker in one hand, and the trimmer in the other. My reach, similar to my cousins, is five to ten meters, so walking down the middle of the strip of grass I'm cleaning and trimming both sides of the street at the same time. I am able to do the work oof two men, all at a walking pace. I am not even breaking a sweat and wondering when we will have a break. I decided we had worked far enough and signaled mentally for breaktime, my cousin in one leap jumped to my side of Mavis Road, threw his gear into the back of the truck and slipped inside. Suddenly we are on the BK plaza and the bank is closed. For some reason this dilema barred any chance of doing any further labour for the day, so we called it one and drove home. All evening we practiced songs to sing at work. The next morning we got up and drove to work in the company truck and changed our bad pickers with other people's good ones.