3:22am 24th July 2011

So January started off with the remainder of my time in NYC… it was reckless as usual and I’m sure i found myself wandering alone and staggering home at 8 am… I love it there… I feel for that city in the same way I feel about music… that sometimes, even when it’s bad, it’s so good that it makes my heartache… like i can actually feel my heart swelling on the verge of exploding from my chest, just thinking about it… So we rang in New Years at National Underground… seems fitting right? Haha… Had a DeGraw or two yell at me for talking to strangers, as usual and celebrated the kick off of 2011… A band called the Madison Square Gardeners played… they were awesome… there were a few too many Oasis covers, maybe we were actually ringing in 1997? I recognized the guitarist and couldn’t figure out why, then I realized it’s because he plays with my girl crush Serena Ryder… so that was pretty exciting…

And I spent New Years Day eating chinese food and watching a Honeymooners marathon in Brooklyn.. until a car service charged me $30 to drive me to the cross-streets I had requested… but instead of taking me to the cross streets I requested in the financial district of Manhattan… he took me to the cross-streets i had requested in some random “Little (Insert Foreign Country Here) Town” part of a far end of the burrough… I lost my shit on him, refused to pay and grabbed a subway… It was like the Planes, Trains and Automobiles of walks of shame, but I made it home eventually.. Ilana’s doormen love when I come to visit.. I always wander in at some point, on a different day from when I left looking a wreck in an outfit that is never appropriate for the time of day that I make it home… Anyway the trip was fun as usual… i wanted to steal Joey’s dog Colonel, we went for a nice dinner and spent some catch-up time with Lefty and did the usual routine of drowning a trip-long hangover with Lifetime movies and Delivery.com…



Went back to work for a day and was tired and grumpy… Jessie walked up to me and sang “Step 1 open the box, step 2 put your ass on that box… I’m wise enough to know when a gift needs giving… IT’S MY FART IN A BOX!!!” and the nasty bitch had actually managed to capture the rankest fart imaginable in a tiny little gift box and opened it in my face… the entire showroom at work filled with the stench and I’m pretty sure that something must have died somewhere in her bowels to produce something that repulsive… but it did cheer me up… and then i headed to Tampa for Rock Boat!!





Tonya backed out of the trip to go back to school, so I flew out to Tampa to meet up with Audrey and Ilana… I always get searched at the airport… I always bring way too much stuff for the amount of time I’m gone… Rock Boat is understandable, because there are theme nights, and anyone knows me, knows that I can’t pass up an opportunity to play dress up… and also, keeping in mind that I know if I’m going to see Ilana, I have to pack with her wardrobe needs in mind too… so my suitcase is always busting and overweight, and smart cookie that i am, i realized that shoes are heavy, so I always load my carryon with more shoes than i will ever be able to wear, that way it lightens my check-in baggage load… it does however make me look awfully suspicious in the eyes of TSA… and when my duffle bag containing a book, a hat and 12 pairs of shoes pops up on the xray machine, I always get corralled off for secondary searches… I guess most people pack an extra outfit in case something goes wrong, but short of attacking someone with a heavy wedge heel, is it really necessary to search for traces of gun powder in my cowboy boot?!



Anyway, made it to the hotel to find Aud and Lan already plastered and we decided to walk to the grocery and liquor store… we didn’t realize that Tampa wasn’t much of a pedestrian-friendly place… we walked miles, considered hitchhiking but realized from the reaction of the drivers in passing cars to seeing 3 women walking alone at night, that it probably wasn;t the best idea… we made it eventually, took a shopping cart full of booze to eat our weight in Taco Bell where I made a friend who looked like Jacob from Twilight, before we headed back to the hotel to prep for the pre-party and begin our stealthy cruise booze smuggling techniques… Most of my friends go for filling the plastic rum-runner flasks with a funnel, whereas I like to be a little craftier, using 6 packs of pop/gatorade/water bottles, filling every other one with booze and leaving a couple controls, you know in case i’m forced to do a chug test by port security, and then i super-glue the lids back on… maybe a bit too much effort, but it makes me feel like a spy…





We headed to the Rock Boat pre-party at Gaspar’s Grotto… it was fun… saw Matt Hires (it was our one year anniversary afterall) and his drummer Bob, who he had arranged to be my Rock Boat boyfriend for this year… (the last RBBF i had turned out to be a dud… but that’s a whole other story, haha)… Back at the hotel Audrey made it her mission to track down pizza… Now, much like we didn’t realize that walking wasn’t customary in Tampa, we didn’t realize that pizza delivery was unheard of either… we got back to the hotel fairly early and assumed that being that Tampa is a city that I’ve heard of and not somewhere tiny backwoods, that it would be easy to order a pizza around midnight… Audrey learned the hard way that that was not so… I’m pretty sure, without exaggeration, that she called every single pizza place in the phone book… she tried bartering and begging, she tried haggling and cursing… “Is this delivery?” “Sorry the business is no longer in service.” “Oops, did I wake you?” “Yes” “oh… Do you have pizza?” and the one place that did delivered wouldn’t come to our area… “Do you deliver?” “We haven’t changed policies since you called 5 minutes ago.” “Oh, ha, I love you.” “I love you too.” “Goodnight.”





The cruise itself was fun… It’s all kind of a blur at this point… For those of you who are not familiar with the Rock Boat, it’s run by a company called Sixthman, who actually put on several music cruises and it’s basically my idea of a vacation, a music festival on a cruise ship.. We had good weather for the first time this year and ported in Cozumel, Mexico… this is my third time on the boat and they have all kind of blended into each other at this point but the highlights of this year include playing butt-darts with Bob (non-sexual, i swear ;) ), finally getting to hear Matt play some of my fave songs full band and watching him try to push an orange into a hula hoop using a banana on a string tied to his belt, getting to wear my sweet new penguin onesie for pajama night, doing everyone’s makeup and getting to wear the absolute best worst dress that my mom actually wore to a Christmas party in the 90s, for glam rock prom night, guarding Audrey’s ladybug wings on Halloween night, finding out that I am special enough to be the only non-band member to have been granted a nickname by Will Hoge (it’s Pearl, btw… and you don’t to know, it’s gross… lol), seeing needtobreathe play and actually paying attention because i love them, Amanda getting engaged, Audrey meeting her soulmate, Matt Wertz hijacking the Paula Abdul song during the Guilty Pleasures set… i dunno… it was fun… i’m at my happiest when i’m on that boat and severed from the rest of the world…















































Of course, the second I stepped off the boat and turned my phone back on I was inundated by a shit storm of bullshit that still doesn’t seem like it will ever end to the point that this was a real conversation… “They weren’t mean to me today.” “Who wasn’t?” “The internet.” and the rest of that day was pretty terrible and ended with me having a panic attack, buying a pack of cigarettes, weeping in the Tampa airport and being comforted by a long distance phone call that was really only made to me out of courtesy than genuinely caring, but it was still appreciated at the time…





Went to a few events with Jessie, one where I helped a celebrity chef roll cheese balls and he tried to make use drink something that had an oyster in it and legit looked like an abortion in a shot glass… Tonya and I went to see the Dukes of Hazzard in concert, because that was actually a thing and we like to go see pretty much any old man band that comes to town and we somehow managed to talk our way into being the youngest people backstage and got to meet them… then I discovered that the reason Tonya had wanted to go was because one of them played Superman’s dad or something on Smallville… she’s a dirty little Smallville trickster… had I known it was a Smallville ploy I wouldn’t have helped feed her addiction… she’s smart… but it was pretty hilarious… we stayed to hear them play the theme song and booked it..





It was a rough few weeks after that… I let some ridiculous rumours and just cruel smear campaign bother me for a bit, but then real life kicked in and things got a lot worse and a lot more realistic… one of my best friends Stephanie’s brother Andrew took his life and she had a lay-over in the city on her way back to England after the funeral in Newfoundland… it was so sad, my heart broke for her and I can’t even imagine how you cope with something that difficult… a guy I went to high school with who used to poke me on facebook every once in a while was stabbed to death in the middle of the road outside a bar downtown in our ritzy little town which was unbelievable… and then i got a call from my friend Martin… Martin was the high school love of my life… I adored him unconditionally and he became one of my best friends… his mom was like my second mom and she helped me through some of the harder times in my life and his little brother Matt was like my little brother… I used to catch him out getting in to trouble and take him home for a movie night to soften the blow so he wouldn’t get in too much trouble… he always called me his big sister and he was one of the sweetest, goofiest guys I knew… and on January 13th, his mother found him slumped over at his computer and he had overdosed… i went to the viewing which was surreal and i had nightmares afterwards because he looked like himself, like he might get up and laugh it off at any moment… January 17th is statistically the most depressing day of the year and after spending mine between a funeral and the cemetery, I’ll vouch for that… it was a hard day and my heart broke for Martin and Mary-Lou and what made it harder was knowing that I couldn’t do anything to fix it.. he was 23 and has a young son and it’s devastating to feel overwhelmed by hindsight and helpless…



I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately… I don’t know if I believe in signs from people who have passed or if I’m giving myself too much credit in thinking he would send me one… but I lost my mind the other night because forever ago I had accidentally saved my voicemail # under his contact profile on my phone but had deleted it and somewhere in getting a new phone and loading on an old backup it must have reloaded that as well… and twice in the past couple weeks, my voicemail has called me out of the blue so that his name and picture have shown up on my caller ID and my heart stopped… and then I started to feel guilty, that maybe he’s calling me out for being a terrible friend… for not following through on any of the promises I made.. I haven’t been able to go to his grave, it’s by work and every time I go to switch lanes to turn down the street of the cemetery, I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it… I haven’t gone to visit his mother like I promised, because i’m selfish and awkward… i know i won’t be able to keep it together when I see her and the last thing she should ever have to do is comfort me in this situation.. i haven’t gone to see Martin’s new baby even though I want to and i promised I would, because seeing him will make me sad… and I’d rather avoid feeling anything… because I am selfish… and because it will only make it harder for him and to have to deal with me acting a fool and treating him like he’s about to shatter… But maybe it was a sign… Matt calling me out on being an asshole and not following through on any of the things I’m supposed to.. maybe I should do something about that… I love you and miss you Matty… I hope you’ve finally found peace…