D is for changed my mind. Oh, and DEATH.

I was going to write my D is for. . . entry about the lovely blog DaddyLikey; it's author, Winona, writes haiku about chlamydia. Her weekly feature "Don't Showcha your Chocha" is a highlight of my working life.

But.

There's been something kind of brooding over me the last few months. It's hard to describe. Okay, it's not. It's this:



Yeah. A giant Canada goose decoy. That's what I see when I look out my office window. I thought nothing could be worse than the neighbor's giant satellite dish, but, man, was I wrong. That thing just gives me the creeps.

If I had made a collage when I began this writer’s life, it would have featured the following:
Absinthe
Red velvet armchair
Cigarettes
Remington typewriter
Kerouac
Francoise Hardy
Black eyeliner
Istanbul
Ornate jewelry of unknown provenance
Heavy glass bottles of dusky perfume

I’m just riffing here, but that’s the kind of thing I would have pasted on my walls to serve as inspiration. What I was aiming at. You might be able to tell that I was principally interested in being different and preferably being different in another country. Another culture.

As it turns out, I’m a well paid, sensibly attired, bottle-blonde mother of a young child and I write lies about software in suburbia. In the city in which I was born.

I’ve never seen a bottle of absinthe. Never been to Istanbul. I’ve been to the predictable places: Paris, London, Rome, Frankfurt, Los Angeles.

Edmonton.

When I stare out my window, it's at the fat back end of a fake goose nestled improbably in a small spruce tree.

I just added 2 hours to my invoice to pay for the funeral of my dreams.

Not the funeral that I always dreamed about, but the funeral of what I always dreamed about.

A-HA is playing on my computer as I write.

I would call that the death of something.