#i mean there's a song soup on sea youtube channel but it's not. That

[flavia-draws]

why doesn't that jon green promenade the puzzle the first 4 kc albums are actually about frederick ii guy have a youtube channel. i'd watch convoluted interpretations of sinfield lyrics way too much if videos of that existed

[lovemesomesurveys]

Thought I Couldn't Top It, Huh? OVER 2000 Questions! (Truly the Longest!) Created by distortedcognition

Part 4

.Favorites. Color: Pastels, rose gold, sea foam green, coral, yellow. Number: 8. Store: Boxlunch and Hot Topic. Book: I have way too many. Story: Uhh.

Magazine: None. Television program?: I have several of those, too. Movie: Those as well.

Series: I’ll tell you the authors of the several different book series I’ve been into/read the past couple of years, which are Willow Rose, AJ Rivers, Mary Stone, and Elle Gray. Apart from AJ Rivers, they each have a few different series and from what I’m read so far I’ve enjoyed them all. If you’re into the murder mystery and psychological thriller thing, you should check some of ‘em out. Poem: I don’t have one. Onomatopoeia: I don’t have one. Verb: Sleep.

Paradox: *shrug* Idiom: Noun: The beach. Adjective: Blah. Adverb: Bleh. Work of fantasy: Classic work: Contemporary work: Writer: The authors I listed previously are some of them. Fairy tale: Is Alice in Wonderland one? Dictionary brand: Webster is good. Summer scene: The beach. Winter scene: Snow. Spring scene: Rainy days. Fall scene: Orange, yellow, red, green leaves. Season: Fall and winter. Planet: Earth. Space feature: None. Thing about summer: Being able to go to the beach is like the only thing I like. Thing about winter: The weather and Christmastime! Thing about spring: The rain. Thing about fall: The weather, the smells, and ~spooky~ time. Mammal: Giraffes. Insect: NONE. Arachnid: NONEEEE. Fish: I don’t have one. Reptile: None. Amphibian: None. Science: Psychology. Thing to do during summer: Go to the beach. Type of weather: Fall and winter weather. Bird: I don’t have one. Thing to do during winter: Celebrate Christmas and enjoy the coziness. Thing to do during spring: Enjoy the rainy days. Thing to do during fall: Watch scary movies. Nature sound: Rain. Real location: The beach and Disneyland. City: San Francisco is one. Culture: Hmm. State: Out of the ones I’ve been to (California, Idaho, Arizona, Georgia) I’d choose California. There’s several states I’d like to visit that could possibly take that spot. Island: I don’t have one. Landscape: Beaches, mountains, lakes, streams. Place to go in your neighborhood: I don’t go anywhere in my neighborhood except for my house. Italian food: Pasta. Mexican: Burritos and quesadillas. Indian: None. Chinese: Chow mien, potstickers, egg rolls, chicken in foil. American: Chicken tenders and boneless wings. French: Some pastries. Snack: Chips and dip. Pasta: Pesto and spaghetti. Desert: Milkshakes, ice cream, donuts, muffins, cookies, cupcakes. Ice cream flavor: Strawberry, mint chocolate chip, birthday cake, cookies and cream. Soup: I’m a ramen gal. Salad: Caesar. Pancake: Blueberry. Restaurant: I don’t have one, unless Wingstop counts. Fruit: Bananas. Vegetable: Spinach, potatoes, broccoli, green onions. Dinner: Wingstop, spaghetti and meatballs, other pasta, salisbury steaks, pizza. Lunch: Chicken tenders, sandwiches, pasta salads, pizza. Breakfast: Over-easy eggs, waffles, eggs and country gravy, hash browns. Cereal: All the sugary yummy ones, basically. Pop tart: The frosted strawberry and brown cinnamon sugar. Candy: White chocolate. Artificial flavor: Banana and strawberry. Cookie: Sugar, shortbread, Oreos, peanut butter. Yogurt: None. Clothing store: Boxlunch and Hot Topic. Outfit: I like my graphic tees and leggings. Shoe: Adidas. Shirt design: Hmm. Brand name: Adidas. Top: All my graphic tees. Pants: My leggings. Skirt: None. Pair of socks: My Baby Yoda ones. Color [of clothing]: Black. Subject in school: English. Music: I like variety.

Tree: Pine. Flower: I don’t have one, but so many are pretty. Quote: I have many. Scent: I have a lot of those as well, like the smell of rain, coffee, the ocean/beach-y air, coconut, garlic, fruity scents, sweet scents, vanilla, cinnamon, pine, peppermint, sandalwood, cedar wood, patchouli, my favorite foods, desserts, autumnal scents from Bath & Body Works, that wood/fire smell during the fall... Adage: I couldn’t choose just one. Television channel: My TV is usually either on The Hallmark Channel, CMT, MTV, UPtv, or TV Land. Day of the week: They’re all pretty much the same for me. Perfume: I like ones with patchouli in it and some sweet ones. Radio station: I don’t listen to the radio anymore.

Cologne: Ones with sandalwood and cedar wood. Sound: The ocean waves crashing in and out, rain, fire crackling, various ASMR sounds, music. Feeling: ASMR, that first sip of coffee, that satisfying feeling from a good meal, the beachy air on my face, the feel of fall in the air. Emotion: I mean, feeling happy is a nice emotion. Haven’t truly felt that in a long time. :/ Song: I have a lot. Music artist: I like several. Month: October-December. Religious holiday: Christmas. Fun holiday: I think Christmas and Halloween are fun. Obscure holiday: Hmm. Videogame: Mario Bro games. Computer game: The Sims. Sport: None. Athlete: None. Instrument: Piano. Composer: I don’t have one. Singer: I have several. Website: YouTube and Tumblr. Word: Hmm.

Slogan: *shrug* Commercial: I don’t have one. Shampoo: I’m currently using Dove shampoo. Conditioner: I’m using the Dove conditioner as well. Body wash: I don’t use body wash, I use bar soap. Soap: Caress body soap. Lotion: My current favorite is Into the Night from Bath & Body Works.

[purplesurveys]

718

If you lived in Bikini Bottom, would you befriend Spongebob or Plankton? Obviously Spongebob. I’m there to have a good time and catch jellyfish, not eat holographic meatloaf and make it my life’s goal to steal a secret formula. Do you have any bananas in your house right now? I think we still have some left. My dad bought a pack? a group? a bunch? of them so he can make banana cue and turon for my mom and sister while we’re all stuck at home for the meantime. Which overrated tattoo are you sick of seeing? Eh I don’t judge this easily since I assume tattoos mean a lot to people but where I’m from, line tattoos are pretty overused. They DO look nice and I get why they’ve been trending for a while, but yeah they’re evvvvvverywhere. Is it easy to distract you? Yes haha I have a rather quick attention span. Do you prefer to drink from glasses or mugs? Depends on the drink. I drink my water from a glass but I prefer my coffee in a mug, that sort of thing.

What was the last thing you taught a younger kid? I don’t feel confident teaching kids just yet, huhu. It usually works the other way around: when I’m with kids, they teach me how to play their toys or whatever game they’re playing on their parents’ phone/iPad. Are the clocks in your house mostly digital or analog? We only have one analog clock. We mostly tell the time from our phones. How long have you had your television(s)? Answered this before but we have two TVs that are 12 years old and two others that were bought within the last decade. Do you like watching movies made with CGI or do you prefer hand-drawn ones? I don’t care. As long as the end product is done well I can enjoy the movie. Where did your parents buy their car(s)? I know for sure the two family cars were bought directly from the official dealers. I think mine was a secondhand one. Do you know why your grandparents chose your mother's name? No. I think they just liked the name. That makes me want to ask my grandma though. What is your favourite kind of soup? Miso is the only one I really like. Have you ever made your own musical instrument? Nope. What do you think of Leighton Meester's singing voice? I only know one song of hers and I reeeeeally loved that when it came out, but I don’t think it’s enough for me to have an opinion for her music altogether. I definitely don’t hate her voice though. Do you think you'd do well at teaching the English language to a foreigner? Yeah, it’s my other everyday language and I’m a little bit more fluent in it than I am in Filipino. How long have your neighbours lived there? About the same time as us, I think. We all moved in at sort of the same time when the village was newly developed. Is it weird to hear your name in movies or TV shows? It’s not a very common name so it does feel a bit weird to hear, yes. It’s weirder if I have to refer to the character in third person cause I never liked saying my own name :/ Why do so many people seem to hate the Jonas Brothers? Am assuming this refers to the Jonas Brothers pre-reunion because I’m sure no one hates them and their new music now lmao. I think, simply put, it was because they were teenagers then, and pre-teen and teenage girls was their main fanbase? Most people liked to shit on that category of celebrities, even today – case in point, Justin Bieber, 5SOS, One Direction haha. What is a store you like that is exclusive to your country? Fully Booked! It’s the most complete, up-to-date, and chic bookstore brand we have. The Fully Booked branch in BGC in particular is a partnership with Starbucks, so you can immediately walk over there to get a coffee and read after buying a book heh. If you attend school, what time do you usually get home after? I always have extracurriculars like org stuff, meetings, or fieldwork after my academic schedule so more often than not I’ll get home by 9 or 10 PM, which leaves me feeling exhausted as fuck at the end of the day. When was the last time you really needed to just let loose? Like two weeks ago? I was bored out of my mind being stuck at home so I chugged a lot of soju that I asked my dad to buy so I can at least be drunk while being bored lol. Have you ever been blackmailed? Kinda. There was a time when I didn’t talk to my sister and didn’t really feel well enough to reconcile with her yet, but my mom threatened to go to our class guidance counselor and expose me and ‘the kind of older sister I am’ if I didn’t make amends with my sister immediately.

This might sound sarcastic but thanks, survey, for reminding me what kind of mom my mother actually was during the years that were the most critical to my development lmao. I always need reminders like this because despite how our relationship has ‘improved’ now that I’m older, I shouldn’t forget the trauma she caused me and the fact that I had always planned to detach myself from her as much as possible once I’m fully independent. I can’t disappoint my younger self by keeping her in my life as if nothing happened.

Do you suffer from Restless Leg Syndrome? No. I keep forgetting what that means. Would you rather have novels based on your life or a series of comic books? Novels, so I’d be more interested to read it. Have you written a resume before, either for yourself or someone else? I did a resum�� when I applied for my internship. Did you know that they plan on releasing a movie based on The Smurfs? This survey is sooooooo old hah they’ve made a bunch of films on it already. Do you ever wonder what it would be like to live underwater? Not really. Mostly I’ve just wondered what it would be like to be a creature from the deep sea, where it’s totally dark and most of the animals there look prehistoric as fuck lol. Have you ever worked in a bakery? If not, would you like to? No but this question reminded me of Harry Styles, aw :’) ANYWAY if I did I’d probably take up a job in the office, since I can neither bake nor deal with people on a regular basis even if one argues that bakeries aren’t really particular spots for angry Karens or Barbaras. What is your favourite thing about snow? I like that we don’t get them because it’s bound to make my first encounter with snow in the future magical as fuck. Is there a big personality difference between you and your sibling(s)? Yeah. I tend to adapt to new environments way better than they do and I’m definitely the most extroverted of the three in all aspects.  Do you enjoy decorating things with stickers? Hahahah yes, it’s an uncontrollable urge. I keep my stickers to just my laptop case these days, but back then I used to put stickers on my phone case, my ID case, clipboard, wallet, etc. Did you lose anything recently? Did you end up finding it? I lose my hair tie every now and then; my hair’s a bit short for a ponytail now so my hair tie gradually slips out my hair with me barely noticing it, so it always ends up in random places around the house. I do end up finding it after a while but it gets frustrating whenever I realize it had fallen off again. What colour oven mitts do you have? We don’t really use the oven so we barely use the ones we have. I don’t even know the color of it.

Why do you/don't you watch award shows? Because there are sooo many commercials in the middle of it, some presenters are awkward as fuck and I’d rather save myself from the secondhand cringe, and most of the time the choices for the winners are undeserving and end up pissing everyone off. It’s always easier to just wait a few hours and check the results on Google; and besides, the only fun parts are seeing what everyone is wearing and who attends to begin with hah. What do you think of Ellen DeGeneres as the new judge on American Idol? God this was a lifetime ago. I think I mostly didn’t mind it but I never did get over the replacement of the OGs Randy, Simon, and Paula. Do you ever do the exercises featured in some magazines? No. Have you ever watched What The Buck? What do you think of it? I don’t think I’ve heard of that. How long ago did you switch from cable to satellite, if you did? We didn’t make a ‘switch,’ per se. We had cable in our old home but when we moved to our current house in 2008, having extra channels wasn’t really the priority as moving already entailed a whole lot of expenses to begin with. That meant we only had free TV for a while which was extremely fucking boring, but eventually my dad got us satellite in like 2011 or 2012. When was the last time you partnered up with someone to complete something? I decided to partner up with Andrew for my undergraduate thesis in like August last year. Do you consider Lady GaGa's appearance artistic, or just plain weird? Artistic. What do you usually do when you have trouble sleeping? I put a lengthy YouTube video on so I can fall asleep to the background noise. At least that’s what I do these days - I always thought I needed complete silence to fall asleep, but apparently that’s not the absolute case. What was the last thing you used scissors for? I opened a sachet of 3-in-1 coffee.

Have you ever used some kind of food as a facial mask? Nah I always just use Korean sheet masks. How many USB cords do you have lying around? I personally don’t have any but I do have a hard drive. Are you satisfied with your social life (or lack thereof)? I’m very satisfied with it and I’m glad I got to open up in college. Do you know anybody whose initials spell something? Sure. What is your favourite flavour of Kool-Aid? I’ve never had Kool-Aid. Is there a specific food you think NEEDS to be at Christmas dinner? My grandma’s steak. Would you be able to re-string a guitar? I wouldn’t even know where to buy guitar strings. What TV show do you just assume you wouldn't like? How I Met Your Mother, just because their fans love to make fun of and compare their oh-so-great show to Friends so much when I’ve never seen a single Friends fan make fun of HIMYM like ????? Why the one-sided, unsolicited hate??? I was always planning to watch the show and appreciate Friends and HIMYM at the same time but because the fans are so pathetic I just stopped wanting to watch it altogether. Do your friends have more money than you? Seems unfair to pit ourselves against one another when we’re all still depending on our parents’ money lmao. Who always has the power to make you feel intimidated? Ate Frances has always had a very strong personality. Do you have more bread or cheese in your house? Bread. What was the last movie trailer you saw? Not sure. I don’t really like trailers since most of them give away too much of the plots already. Did you purchase any meat product when you were at the store last? My dad did. Have you ever been told that you have chubby cheeks? Well I don’t, so no I’m not usually told this lol. Do you know how to properly use a saw? Nope. Isn't it a shame that what Kanye West did at the VMA's overshadowed what was supposed to be a night dedicated to Michael Jackson? Hahahaha not really, I found it hilarious and so so stupid. There were a billion other tributes to MJ that year that went smoothly so it doesn’t really matter to me if the 2009 VMAs will always be known as the Imma-let-you-finish VMAs.

[surveysonfleek]

1322.

Shot of whiskey, or a bottle of Smirnoff? i prefer the taste of whiskey but of course i’d rather a whole bottle of vodka. Would you consider yourself an adventurous person? to an extent. i’m not an outdoorsy person though. Have you ever snuggled with someone you weren’t dating? yes. What were you doing at 11 pm last night? working. How often do you hold back from saying what you are thinking? most of the time unless i’m with family or friends.

Are you doing this because you’re bored? yes. Would you consider yourself heartless? not at all. Do you ever wish you were the opposite sex? nope. If you could go on ONE DATE with any celebrity, who would it be? no one. i’m sorta over the whole celebrity crush thing. Have you ever been afraid of being underwater? only in open seas. Would you ever scuba dive in shark infested waters if you had the chance? nope. i don’t think i’d feel comfortable with scuba diving in the first place. If you woke up and no one was home, would you wonder where everyone is? usually i know where everyone would be if they’re out. Have you ever been drunk at work? while i wasn’t working, yes. Have you ever hit a parked car with your car? yes lol. If you just drank 15 beers, what would you be doing? i wouldn’t be able to even drink two beers. they make me feel so bloated. What would you do if your girlfriend or boyfriend didn’t like your friends? i’d hate it.  Have you ever slept on the floor with someone you like? yes. Have you ever woken up next to someone and were freaked out? nope. Would you take a road trip with your friends? of course! Which do you prefer: french toast, bagels, or cereal? bagels but i have to have cream cheese with it. Do you prefer light or dark haired? dark. Do you have photos up around your room, of you? yeah on my corkboard. If you’re extremely quiet, what does that mean? i’m tired, pissed off, angry or sad. Do you have a hard time controlling your emotions? not really. i usually hide from my problems a lot. Ever been suspended from school? nope. Does it make you mad when people stare at you? not mad, just annoyed. Do you prefer pens or pencils? pens. Have you ever read any of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books? never all the way through. Last person you were in the car with? myself. otherwise toni yesterday. What time did you wake up this morning? hmm midday. Do you have a friend of the opposite sex you can talk to? yes. How tall are you? 5′4″ How many drugs are in your system? none. What foreign language do / did you study? none. Do you own sunglasses? yes. Where is the next place you will travel to? philippines probably. Do you say sexy a lot? hardly ever tbh. Do you want to cut your hair? no. i want it to growwww. Do you have empty bottles of alcohol hidden somewhere? nope. Do you miss anyone? yes. Think back to your most recent relationship — Serious or not? Was it worth it? my current one now is serious. Who was the last person in your bed? me. Don’t tell me lies, so is the last person you texted attractive? yes. Where is the person you last kissed at this moment? sleeping. Have you ever sneaked someone over to your house? yes, years and years ago. Is it okay if you kiss people when you’re single? of course. as long as the other person is single too. Do you think it’s possible that you could move on from someone, and then redevelop feelings for them? i think it’s possible. How’s your hair right now? messy and curly. Do you only wish the best for your ex? yes. How are things between you and the person you like? they’re good. What were you doing at 4 AM last night? i was at home about to sleep. Who was the last person you talked to before you went to sleep last night? my boyfriend. What time did you decide to get out of bed today? midday. Did you straighten your hair this morning?  nope. When was the last time you laughed really hard? today. What do you hear right now? youtube. If you were breaking up with your girlfriend/boyfriend, what would you most likely say? no idea. it depends on why we’d be breaking up. Do you think that once people get married, they eventually fall “out of love”? i don’t think so. Ever had a near death experience? no. Where’s your cell phone? next to me. What is the last thing you thought about? ^ Do you regret anything? there’s things i wish i did differently but i never really dwell on it. Who would you like your next “fling” to be with? no one. Are you slowly drifting away from someone close? no. When was the last time you saw the person you last kissed? tuesday. Do you like your phone? i guess. Last alcohol beverage? wine. Have you ever slept in a bed with the opposite sex? yes. If you had to move in with a friend, which one would you pick? my boyfriend. What do your best friends call you? i have a million nicknames. Who was the last person to go to the movies with you? my boyfriend. Are you currently fighting with someone? nope. Last time you had butterflies in your stomach? i forgot. Do you mainly use your house phone or your cell phone? cell. Is there an empty place in your heart? no. Do you count down the days till anything? hmm vacations usually. Are you looking forward to something as of right now? the weekend. Have you ever been called a tease? no. What are your chances of getting with your crush? i’m with him already. Are any of your friends so close that you consider them family? yes. Anyone told you a secret this week? no. Do you hate anyone? nope. Last time you wore the opposite sex’s clothing? yesterday. What do you want in your life right now? money. When was the last time you laughed so hard you thought you were going to cry? idk. Do you trust people easily? not at all. Proud of anything right now? no. Have anything on your mind? i need sleep. Favourite type of music? rnb. What band/group have the most lyrics that represent you? tamia probably. Pass or fail a drug test if you took one right now? i’d pass. Do you drive? yes. Own a car? yes. Best season? autumn. Who’s your best friend/s? my boyfriend. Would you rather sing or dance? haha i can’t do either. One thing you really want to learn? idk. What’s your favourite tv channel? i hardly watch tv anymore, i just stream everything. Name your favourite programs? huh. What are you doing this summer? nothing. How many times have you been on a plane? plenty of times. i’d say 50? give or take. One thing you wish for? happiness. Do you get jealous easy? not really. What colour is your hair? dark brown/black. What night club plays the best songs to dance to? i hate clubbing now. Made up with anyone recently after an argument? yes. Missing anyone right now? yes. Do you use MSN? not anymore.

[howyoutalktostrangers]

Inebriate of air

by Will Johnson

Shane squats to the meal pot, red-lit from the campfire, and dips his pinkie finger into the stew. Shirtless and shoeless, with an ocean-themed full sleeve tattoo on his right arm and a messily scrunched man-bun jutting from he’s skull, he’s the quintessential Victoria hipster: beachy-looking and pseudo-homeless, with a deep Tofino tan and scraggly-looking flannel. He’s the type of white kid who pore-oozes privilege — one percenter progeny — and from where she’s slung her hammock Tanille can watch him finger-slurp, tongue his lips.

“You know I broke my back as a teenager?” Shane asks. “Doctors figured I wasn’t going to walk again. Fell into this off-run crevice in Switzerland, man, like just barely out of bounds, and I ended up in the hospital for two months.”

“Sounds like something you’d do,” says Tanille.

Shane continues, too caught up in the rhythm of his storytelling to acknowledge her voice. “I’m carving down this slope, blissed out, right? Time’ve my life. All of a sudden I’m just falling. Like I know I’m falling and there’s nothing I can do about it, right? Then bam, I’m draped over this cleft like twenty feet down, sprawled out on this rock ledge, and when I look around me I’m in this shimmering cavern.”

Shane likes to hear himself talk, but it’s not normally Tanille that has to listen. He’ll find himself a readier audience with Paisley, but she’s been gone all afternoon. Now she’s stuck with some dipshit musician too drunk on groupie love to realize what a fucking idiot he is.

“I could’ve fallen a lot further. I mean that crevice, right, it must’ve been like hundreds of feet deep. There’s crazy light bouncing, like I’m inside a mirror ball, and here I am drifting in and out of consciousness. The rescuer rappelled down and strapped me to a spine board, got me helicoptered out of there, and in every direction all I could see was a white dream.”

She noisily turns the page of her book.

“I made a promise to myself, right there: I’m not going to waste this miracle. If I get out of here alive, I’m going to do something — I’m going to make music, I’m going to help people, I’m just going to live the shit out of my life.”

Tanille sighs. There’s plenty of proselytizing going on in her vicinity — it’s part of the protest camp package — but there’s something about Shane’s particular brand of self-righteousness that makes her feel like wrenching out his fingernails one by one. It’s not that she hates straight men, or white men. It’s not even that she hates rich people. It’s that Shane thinks he deserves everything he’s received from life, including Paisley’s long-term attention. Tanille’s savvy to his barefoot bullshit; his social posturing and faux humility couldn’t be more transparent. She has no patience for listening to him self-aggrandize while he stinks up his parent-bought clothes and pretends to be an activist.

“I bet undergrad girls eat that shit up,” she says. “Carpe fucking diem, Shane? Your emotional depths awe me.”

All around them, conversations like this are in progress. People are praying, preaching, singing — hundreds of social justice warriors coming together as part of an affordable housing protest in downtown Victoria. It’s nearing dinnertime and the sky has turned ashy, the ocean wind buffeting the ragged blue tarp overhead. All day long Tanille smells untreated sewage, rotting garbage, cannabis stink. She’s surrounded by dirt-caked feet and unwashed clothes, and she wishes it didn’t disgust her but it does. Princess Tee, that’s what Paisley’s been calling her even since she dared to question their multi-month participation in this little project. 

She couldn’t help but be fatalistic, cynical, because what did Paisley actually expect to happen here? Did she figure the Mansion-Landers would offer up their luxurious beachside estates, open their condos to the homeless? Just like that they would embrace gender fluidity, communal living and interracial relationships, right? Did she really think people would happily participate in the dismantling of the social hierarchy that had benefited them for generations?

Tanille’s tent is pitched at the base of a granite plinth with veins of moss sprouting from the dark stone. At some point there were words chiseled into its base, but not anymore. It looms phallic above their semicircle of tents, the tarp tied around its midsection, shielding the meal pot from the ocean breeze. Most of their camping chairs are empty at the moment, leaving only Shane stirring the communal soup while her friend Espoir lazes belly-down on an air mattress,  wrapped in a sleeping bag and scrolling through her iPhone’s Twitter feed.

“Paisley told me you’re a cynic,” Shane says, taking a soup-slurp from his pinkie. “A Doubting Thomas type.”

“And that makes you what, a believer?”

Shane grins. “I’m John the fucking Baptist.”

***

The year before Tanille started herbology school, she road-tripped out to the Kootenays with some friends for the Shangri-La Music Festival. That’s where she saw Paisley perform for the first time, crowd-crammed against the Treehouse stage as thousands of ravers trampled in. One half of Paisley’s head was shaved, while the other sprouted tangled dreads that coiled over her shoulder like uncoiled pythons. She had Cleopatra-style mascara, her lips looked like they were bleeding, and her elaborate beaded neckpiece sent splashes of light out in all directions. Below that she was wearing a thin white dress with thick woollen leg warmers. 

The crowd roiled as she took the stage.

“This is a ditty I call ‘Demons in the pews’,” Paisley said, climbing on to her stool with her banjo. “Wrote this while I was in high school, back on the coast. I grew up in a little town called Garibaldi, up the Sea to Sky Highway, and when I was a teenager we all went to church like good little Christians. Who here went to church growing up?”

The audience answered with one indecipherable voice. She sneered for a moment, looking down. “Jesus loves the little children,” she murmured.

Paisley let her eyes close as she strummed through the intro, her legs hooked around the legs of the stool. She had backup — there was a fiddler, one guy with a stand up bass, another one on percussion — and though Tanille had never had any interest in bluegrass, she was drawn in by the way Paisley whispered and sighed into the mic, cooing the opening lyrics. Eventually the electronic effects built behind her, encompassing them.

“Saved by grace n’ swathed in lace, I came into the chapel,” she sang. “My second life as Jesus’ wife, who wouldn't eat that apple?”

As she neared the chorus, a man carrying a large electronic didgeridoo appeared behind her. She exposed her pale throat to the audience, her voice cherubic yet furious, and as the man let out his first vibrating blast she leapt to her feet and shrieked into her mic.

“In church you showed me God, then fingered me ’til I bled — are the demons in the pews, or are they all inside my head?”

It wasn’t until Tanille was back in Victoria that she got a chance to download Paisley’s album Church Fire and look her up on social media. It didn’t take her long to find Inebriate of Air, her YouTube channel, where she’d posted a capella versions of her songs, interviews with fans and experimental short films. Tanille sat in her residence building and worked her way through the entire playlist, scribbling down choice lyrics in her journal and playing particular music videos over and over again. She felt herself being seduced by the savagery, the feral power in Paisley’s voice, the raw defiance. In one minimalist black and white short, Paisley screams into the camera and claws at her face as images appear of Jesus healing the sick, turning water into wine, walking on water. Tanille had never been especially religious, and didn’t have any particular problem with Christianity, but Paisley’s anger was intoxicating, communal. She was autonomous in a way that Tanille had never seen a woman be.

On one track Paisley’s backed by a children’s choir: “If blackmail’s the price of Heaven, then set me a place in Hell, no matter what you’ve forgiven, this won’t be ending well.”

***

“The cops’re coming tonight,” Shane says. “I can feel it.”

He’s belly-balancing his stew, puffing away at his pipe while his campmates ladle out dinner and gather in the dirt. The sky has gone orange, the horizon burning, while people jostle and gossip. Tanille swabs a crust of bread along the rim of her bowl, reddening it. Paisley still hasn’t returned and she’s still pretending not to care.

“Don’t be such a drama queen. This isn’t Iraq.”

“Not yet.”

“Does it make you feel important, this delusion that you’re in danger?”

“Did you see that guy they arrested last week? Dude was screaming like they were going to break his arms.”

“But did they?”

Shane shrugs.

“Didn’t he bust somebody’s windshield? Right? It’s not like they’re grabbing randoms, this guy was destroying other people’s property.”

“Some rich fucker’s car.”

“You have no idea who’s car that was. It could’ve been a students. Could’ve been mine.”

“You don’t even have a car.”

Tanille takes a long deep breath through her nostrils. Shane’s not here in Tent City because it matters, he’s here because it’s cool. Because this is the sort of person he wants to be. Earlier she’d caught him taking selfies near the entrance, watched him swipe through various filter options before posting it online. His middle name could be Narcissism.

“Did you see the video King Solomon posted last night?” Shane asks. “The shit he was saying about the God-shaped hole, that was basically what I was talking about the other night.”

Espoir snorts. “I want someone to fill my God-shaped hole.”

Shane ignores her. “He was talking about the basic dissatisfaction, you know? Everybody has it — that impulse that drives us towards sex, towards drugs, towards God. It’s that part of us that can never be one hundred per cent happy, no matter what.”

“Cheerful sentiment,” Tanille says.

Shane ignores her.

“Or did you see the one he did about his youth pastor?” Espoir asks.

That’s another topic Tanille knows something about. Apparently the Garibaldi church Neil and Paisley grew up with had a pedophile as a youth pastor, a guy who ended up in a Tijuana prison called El Cuchillo for molesting a teenage boy. His name was Trent Stonehouse and according to Paisley he’d spent over a decade in Mexico before fleeing to the Yukon. On her last album there was one song, “Conflagration”, which was addressed to him: “Though you taught me well / I’m a scorched out shell / When my soul caught fire / That’s when you fell.”

“King Solomon made this good point,” said Shane. “Like about how we label people—criminal, hooker, junkie—and suddenly we don’t have to care about them. Sinner, stuff like that. And it’s like, yeah, this dude Trent did some horrible shit, but that doesn’t negate everything else, right? Nobody’s one hundred per cent black or white.”

“So you’re a pedophilia apologist now?”

“No, see: that’s exactly the attitude he’s talking about. He who is without sin should throw the first stone, all that.”

“I’ve never raped any kids, Shane.”

“I know you get my point but you’re just being a bitch about it.”

***

Tanille isn’t quite sure how to feel about King Solomon, this guy Neil that grew up with Paisley back in Garibaldi. She’s subscribed to his channel, Fellowship, where he releases music videos and meandering pseudo-sermons, never failing to mention the affordable housing crisis or whatever particular social justice cause happens to be most fashionable that week. At first she couldn’t take him seriously: in his videos he wears giant aviator sunglasses and shaggy headgear, black shirts with white-slashed words across the front: “Forgive yourself first”, “All of us are seekers, none of us are found”, “Only one believer”. In one, “Whatever you’re on, I want some”, he monologues about his time living as an addict. In “This is how you talk to strangers” he describes how Paisley has helped him funnel his spiritual pain in a positive direction, how they collaborated for one track on her album Church Fire. Then there’s the one that describes his experiences performing at the Shangri-La Music Festival for the first time — that one’s been shared over 600,000 times.

Solomon’s catchiest track, the one that went viral during Tanille’s undergrad, was called “Wasting Days”. It was upbeat, with ska elements, and an endlessly repetitive chorus. Solomon’s vocals were animalistic, Cobain-esque, tortured-sounding.

“She comes round like a virus, like a hustler on the run — asks me ‘you want to have some fun?’” he sings. “Like a bigtop freak drifter tryin’ to eke a living from this chaos, it’s useless and fruitless and nothing can be done!”

A children’s choir, their voices distorted, then chant: “Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done! Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done! Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done!”

Solomon’s on his knees in front of a silhouetted church, steam rising from his shoulders while the music builds. His eyes meet the viewer’s for a moment, and then he reels into the chorus.

“She can see I’m wasting all my days—my days, my days—all I’m doing is wasting days. I know I’m wasting all my days—my days, my days—all I’m doing is wasting days.”

Eventually Tanille met Neil, at Shane’s apartment in Victoria, shortly after he’d been released from rehab for the third or fourth time. He looked sleepy and defeated, his eyes twitchily scanning the room at all times, and when he hugged Paisley at the end of the night he broke down into hysterics and fled into a nearby bathroom like a tantrum-throwing child. Tanille waited for nearly half an hour while the pair of them barricaded themselves inside, speaking in lowered voices, while Shane smoked pot on the balcony oblivious. She hated herself for how she strained to hear what they were saying, for how much she yearned to be sitting there on the linoleum with Paisley while she consoled her friend, how much she wanted to know about their shame, about their shared trauma. She couldn’t help how she felt: jealous, left out, untrusted.

Eventually she stood up and went home alone.

***

Paisley neck-nuzzles, purring, and nudges Tanille back into semi-consciousness. She’s back, finally. The tent walls are rain-throbbing around them, her sleeping bag is damp, and the world is made of shadows and silhouettes.

They kiss.

“I went swimming in the harbour,” Paisley says. “Apologies for my briny aroma.”

Tanille breathes.

“You awake, princess?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Is my girl in a bad mood?”

Tanille mind-grapples with the urge to engage, to express her frustration, to sob about her stoned loneliness. She doesn’t want to be this person, this pathetic attention suck, this cliche of the needy female. That’s all gay women do: talk about their feelings, having check-ins and sobby convos. But Paisley won’t go there, won’t let herself be that vulnerable, so she’s trying to match her at the emotional distance game.

“Just sleeping,” she says finally. “Shane puked on Espoir’s backpack.”

Paisley snickers.

“I don’t know why you make me put up with him.”

“Shane?”

“How many women do you know that would be okay with having an ex-boyfriend around constantly?”

“I didn’t date Shane.”

“But you fucked him.”

Paisley sighs. “There’s so many things we could be talking about right now.”

“He’s here, right here, now.”

“But so are you. And who’s tent am I in?”

Tanille huffs. How long has she been awake, even? Her neck bristles, and she rises up on her elbows to face her girlfriend.

“This power dynamic doesn’t work for me, Paise.”

“Power dynamic?”

“This whole I-give-everything-and-you-give-nothing thing.”

Paisley crawls towards her. “I give nothing?” She presses her wet nose against Tanille’s cheek, kisses her cheekbone.

“You know what I mean. I don’t know anything about you. Shane knows more about your life than I do.”

“Shane does not know more than you.”

“What about Neil?” she asks. “Or Amber?”

Paisley’s quiet.

“You bring me around like I’m some sort of pet, leave me unattended while you go off n’ live your life, then you come back whenever the fuck you feel like it. It’s like you don’t trust me to be able to engage with what you’re going through, ” Tanille says. Around them the storm winds hiss. “I’m living in Tent City with you, I’m filthy and dead-tired, but I’m here because I want to be with you, right? You used to include me.”

Outside Tent City campers are still playing guitar, undeterred by the weather, banging on drums and shouting at the night sky. This is one of several conversations within earshot, and for a moment strangers’ voices fill the void between Tanille and Paisley. They’re still intertwined, semi-prone, their faces nearly touching.

“I know I’m fucked up,” Paisley says finally. “I get that.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. You always go for self-loathing first.”

Paisley shrugs, sits back. Is she crying? She paws one of her dreadlocks out of her face.

“I just want to be a part of whatever’s going on in your head.”

Paisley retrieves a joint from a small tin in her chest pocket, takes a long moment to light it. Once the air between them is fogged, once she’s let out a lengthy, pained exhale, that’s when she speaks. She takes a piece of Tanille’s hair and finger-tangles it.

“You don’t need to worry about Shane, okay? What we have has nothing to do with him, or anyone else,” Paisley says. Then she lets go. Tanille sits cat-curled in the silence while Paisley begins to monologue, hitting topics she’d only half-known about, starting with her high school relationship with her first girlfriend Amber, a situation she had to keep covert while attending their church, St. Catherine’s, and their summer camp, Evergreen. She talks about shame, about going to her youth pastor Trent for guidance when she was a teenager. She talks about finding her faith, then losing it after his arrest, about touring and performing and always knowing that Quatsino was waiting for her, Eden-like, though she couldn’t bring herself to return.

“I want to believe we can be better than this, that’s why I’m here,” she says. “But I know it’s not true. The Christians were right: we’re all sinners, and we’re doomed to make the same fucking mistakes over and over again. And if there’s no God, there’s nobody around to forgive us for any of this shit.”

“What do you mean?” Tanille asks. “Forgive us for what?”

***

The title of Paisley’s YouTube channel, Inebriate of Air, was from an Emily Dickinson poem. Tanille looked up the poem online and memorized it before their first sushi date, ultimately reciting it over miso soup. That was three years ago.

“I like the idea of being high on air,” Paisley said, booth-sprawled. “That we’re constantly sucking back nostril-shots of pure energy. This is the stuff that makes us run.”

“The Yoda-style diction. A great poet, she is.”

“Sounds classy, right?”

“Like whoah, dude—I’m so high on this breeze. Man, take a toke of that wind.”

They laughed, wasabi-stirred. “And it’s perfectly designed for that purpose. Like to fill our lungs and pump our blood.”

“Right.”

“So how come you don’t believe in God then?” Tanille asked. “How do you figure the air, the world, got here?

Paisley spent some time chewing before saying anything else. For a moment Tanille thought she’d made a verbal misstep, navigated into a conversational no-go zone. Paisley sang extensively about losing her faith on her album —almost every track had a religious overtone, and sometimes her lyrics were even God-directed—so she thought this was a topic that would get some mileage. Religious people had always fascinated and confused Tanille, in pretty much the same way musicians did: she looked at them like shamans or conjurers who channeled elemental energy from the earth and emanated whitish-blue light from their chests.

“I meet people who didn’t grow up religious,” Paisley said, rolling a dread between her fingers. “And I’m jealous, you know? Is there a God, isn’t there—that shit hasn’t even occurred to them.”

“That sounds like such an empty existence, though.”

She shrugged. “Thing is, being a former Christian is kind of like being a former meth addict. Even if you’re not using, you still remember how it tasted, you still crave that high. Because you’ve been high, normal feels low.”

***

Somebody’s angry.

Tanille jolts up in her sleeping bag as the world erupts with sound. Dogs are barking, men shout, and somebody’s rhythmically banging on a resounding gong. It’s bright out, must be early morning, and through the half-open zipper she can see flurries of movement. Paisley’s gone. Ducking into her sports bra and jeans, and jumping into a semi-crouch, she peers past the tent flaps at a human scuffle in progress on the pavement. A uniformed cop is on his back, grappling with a Tent City kid, his muscled arms straining as he tries to regain control of his baton. His sunglasses are cracked, his face pink and trembling, while he spits out macho mono-syllables, grunting.

“Tanille?” Shane appears in front of her. “Tanille, man. It’s happening. The cops’re raiding the place, arresting people.”

“Where’s Paisley?”

“Everyone’s getting together, linking arms. Photographers are here n’ everything. This shit just got real.”

Tanille pushes her feet into unlaced boots and leans into the day. She’s about to say something, about to ask Shane a question, but then she’s gravel-sliding, a lightning storm of pain blossoming in her face and neck as a panicked man body-surfs her across the ground. He’s surrounded by other runners, people fleeing, and a few of them stumble and crash over top of them. Tanille feels a palm rough on her forehead, a boot crushes her hip, a knee rolls across her ribs. People scream. When she rolls to her side she can see the police officer has fought his way to his feet, and he’s clubbing his opponent viciously. The man curls fetal under the blows.

Shane bats at his fellow protesters, taking Tanille by the armpit, and they’re jostled, body-checked, as people careen wildly past. He drags her out of the crowd’s flight path, up a mud-slicked grass slope, and she stumbles, half-upright, then falls to her hands and knees. There’s blood in her eye, stinging, and her cheek feels cheese-gratered. She fingers the wound, gazes dizzy into the canopy of trees above her. Part of her is fully processing the parade of images flash-dancing across her consciousness, but there’s part of her that’s sauntering through the aisles of a calm grocery store, looking for dinner ingredients. This is nothing but a news story in progress, a Facebook post waiting to happen. Somebody else will eventually spot her fuzzed image in the background of some YouTube video, her face crimson and gleaming, while the police officer kneels on the protesters’ neck and struggles to snap his handcuffs shut. She’s an injured bystander, some hipster kid in the background, and already she can’t blame her imaginary audience for how little they care. She’s not even in the foreground.

The Literary Goon

[howyoutalktostrangers]

So,

This story is called “Inebriate of Air”.

That’s the name of Paisley’s YouTube channel, and it’s a reference to “I taste a liquor never brewed” by Emily Dickinson. The story is about a woman named Tanille who’s living in a tent city during an Occupy protest.

This is the 6th story in my novel Whatever you’re on, I want some. 

The Kootenay Goon

Inebriate of Air

Will Johnson

SHANE SQUATS over the meal pot, red-lit from the campfire, and dips his pinkie finger into the stew. Shirtless and shoeless, with an ocean-themed full sleeve tattoo on his right arm and a messily scrunched man-bun jutting from he’s skull, he’s the quintessential Victoria hipster: beachy-looking and pseudo-homeless, with a deep Tofino tan and scraggly-looking flannel. He’s the type of white kid who pore-oozes privilege — one percenter progeny — and from where she’s slung her hammock Tanille can watch him finger-slurp, tongue his lips.

“You know I broke my back as a teenager?” Shane asks. “Doctors figured I wasn’t going to walk again. Fell into this off-run crevice in Switzerland, man, like just barely out of bounds, and I ended up in the hospital for two months.”

“Sounds like you,” says Tanille.

Shane continues, too caught up in the rhythm of his storytelling to acknowledge her voice. “I’m carving down this slope, blissed out, right? Time’ve my life. All of a sudden I’m just falling. Like I know I’m falling and there’s nothing I can do about it, right? Then bam, I’m draped over this cleft like twenty feet down, sprawled out on this rock ledge, and when I look around me I’m in this shimmering cavern.”

Shane likes to hear himself talk, but it’s not normally Tanille that has to listen. He’ll find himself a readier audience with Paisley, but she’s been gone all afternoon. Now she’s stuck with some dipshit musician too drunk on groupie love to realize what a fucking idiot he is.

“I could’ve fallen a lot further. I mean that crevice, right, it must’ve been like hundreds of feet deep. There’s crazy light bouncing, like I’m inside a mirror ball, and here I am drifting in and out of consciousness. The rescuer rappelled down and strapped me to a spine board, got me helicoptered out of there, and in every direction all I could see was a white dream. The clouds like ghosts.”

She noisily turns the page of her book.

“I made a promise to myself, right there: I’m not going to waste this miracle. If I get out of here alive, I’m going to do something — I’m going to make music, I’m going to help people, I’m just going to live the shit out of my life.”

Tanille sighs. There’s plenty of proselytizing going on — it seems to be part of the protest camp package — but there’s something about Shane’s particular brand of self-righteousness that makes her feel like wrenching out his fingernails one by one. It’s not that she hates straight men, or white men. It’s not even that she hates rich people. It’s that Shane thinks he deserves everything he’s received from life, including Paisley’s long-term attention. Tanille’s savvy to his barefoot bullshit; his social posturing and faux humility couldn’t be more transparent. She has no patience for listening to him self-aggrandize while he stinks up his parent-bought clothes and pretends to be an activist.

“I bet undergrad girls eat that shit up,” she says. “Carpe fucking diem, Shane? Your emotional depths awe me.”

All around them, conversations like this are in progress. People are praying, preaching, singing — hundreds of social justice warriors coming together as part of an affordable housing protest in downtown Victoria. It’s nearing dinnertime and the sky has turn ashy, the ocean wind buffeting the ragged blue tarp overhead. All day long Tanille smells untreated sewage, rotting garbage, cannabis stink. She’s surrounded by dirt-caked feet and unwashed clothes, and she wishes it didn’t disgust her but it does. Princess Tee, that’s what Paisley’s been calling her even since she dared to question their multi-month participation in this little project. She couldn’t help but be fatalistic, cynical, because what did Paisley actually expect to happen here? Did she figure the Mansion-Landers would offer up their luxurious beachside estates, open their condos to the homeless? Just like that they would embrace gender fluidity, communal living and interracial relationships, right? Did she really think people would happily participate in the dismantling of the social hierarchy that had benefited them for generations?

Tanille’s tent is pitched at the base of a granite plinth with veins of moss sprouting from the dark stone. At some point there were words chiseled into its base, but not anymore. It looms phallic above their semicircle of tents, the tarp tied around its midsection, shielding the meal pot from the ocean breeze. Most of their camping chairs are empty at the moment, leaving only Shane stirring the communal soup while her friend Espoir lazes belly-down on an air mattress,  wrapped in a sleeping bag and scrolling through her iPhone’s Twitter feed.

“Paisley told me you’re a cynic,” Shane says, taking a soup-slurp from his pinkie. “A Doubting Thomas type.”

“And that makes you what, a believer?”

Shane grins. “I’m John the fucking Baptist.”

***

The year before Tanille started herbology school, she road-tripped out to the Kootenays with some friends for the Shangri-La Music Festival. That’s where she saw Paisley perform for the first time, crowd-crammed against the Treehouse stage as thousands of ravers trampled the grass behind her. One half of Paisley’s head was shaved, while the other sprouted tangled dreads that coiled over her shoulder like uncoiled pythons. She had Cleopatra-style mascara, her lips looked like they were bleeding, and her elaborate beaded neckpiece sent splashes of light out in all directions. Below that she was wearing a thin white dress with thick woollen leg warmers. The crowd roiled as she took the stage.

“This is a ditty I call ‘Demons in the pews’,” Paisley said, climbing on to her stool with her banjo. “Wrote this while I was in high school, back on the coast. I grew up in a little town called Garibaldi, up the Sea to Sky Highway, and when I was a teenager we all went to church like good little Christians. Who here went to church growing up?”

The audience answered with one indecipherable voice. She sneered for a moment, looking down. “Jesus loves the little children,” she murmured.

Paisley let her eyes close as she strummed through the intro, her legs hooked around the legs of the stool. She had backup — there was a fiddler, one guy with a stand up bass, another one on percussion — and though Tanille had never had any interest in bluegrass, she was drawn in by the way Paisley whispered and sighed into the mic, cooing the opening lyrics. Eventually the electronic effects built behind her, encompassing them.

“Saved by grace n’ swathed in lace, I came into the chapel,” she sang. “My second life as Jesus’ wife, who wouldn't eat that apple?”

As she neared the chorus, a man carrying a large electronic didgeridoo appeared behind her. She exposed her pale throat to the audience, her voice cherubic yet furious, and as the man let out his first vibrating blast she leapt to her feet and shrieked into her mic.

“In church you showed me God, then fingered me ’til I bled — are the demons in the pews, or are they all inside my head?”

It wasn’t until Tanille was back in Victoria that she got a chance to download Paisley’s album Church Fire and look her up on social media. It didn’t take her long to find Inebriate of Air, her YouTube channel, where she’d posted a capella versions of her songs, interviews with fans and experimental short films. Tanille sat in her residence building and worked her way through the entire playlist, scribbling down choice lyrics in her journal and playing particular music videos over and over again. She felt herself being seduced by the savagery, the feral power in Paisley’s voice, the raw defiance. In one minimalist black and white short, Paisley screams into the camera and claws at her face as images appear of Jesus healing the sick, turning water into wine, walking on water. Tanille had never been especially religious, and didn’t have any particular problem with Christianity, but Paisley’s anger was intoxicating, communal. She was autonomous in a way that Tanille had never seen a woman be.

On one track Paisley’s backed by a children’s choir: “If blackmail’s the price of Heaven, then set me a place in Hell, no matter what you’ve forgiven, this won’t be ending well.”

***

“The cops’re coming tonight,” Shane says. “I can feel it.”

He’s belly-balancing his stew, puffing away at his pipe while his campmates ladle out dinner and gather in the dirt. The sky has gone orange, the horizon burning, while people jostle and gossip. Tanille swabs a crust of bread along the rim of her bowl, reddening it. Paisley still hasn’t returned and she’s still pretending not to care.

“Don’t be such a drama queen. This isn’t Iraq.”

“Not yet.”

“Does it make you feel important, this delusion that you’re in danger?”

“Did you see that guy they arrested last week? Dude was screaming like they were going to break his arms.”

“But did they?”

Shane shrugs.

“Didn’t he bust somebody’s windshield? Right? It’s not like they’re grabbing randoms, this guy was destroying other people’s property.”

“Some rich fucker’s car.”

“You have no idea who’s car that was. It could’ve been a students. Could’ve been mine.”

“You don’t even have a car.”

Tanille takes a long deep breath through her nostrils. Shane’s not here in Tent City because it matters, he’s here because it’s cool. Because this is the sort of person he wants to be. Earlier she’d caught him taking selfies near the entrance, watched him swipe through various filter options before posting it online. His middle name could be Narcissism.

“Did you see the video King Solomon posted last night?” Shane asks. “The shit he was saying about the God-shaped hole, that was basically what I was talking about the other night.”

Espoir snorts. “I want someone to fill my God-shaped hole.”

Shane ignores her. “He was talking about the basic dissatisfaction, you know? Everybody has it — that impulse that drives us towards sex, towards drugs, towards God. It’s that part of us that can never be one hundred per cent happy, no matter what.”

“Cheerful sentiment,” Tanille says.

Shane ignores her.

“Or did you see the one he did about his youth pastor?” Espoir asks.

That’s another topic Tanille knows something about. Apparently the Garibaldi church Neil and Paisley grew up with had a pedophile as a youth pastor, a guy who ended up in a Tijuana prison called El Cuchillo for molesting a teenage boy. His name was Trent Stonehouse and according to Paisley he’d spent over a decade in Mexico before fleeing to the Yukon. On her last album there was one song, “Conflagration”, which was addressed to him: “Though you taught me well / I’m a scorched out shell / When my soul caught fire / That’s when you fell.”

“King Solomon made this good point,” said Shane. “Like about how we label people—criminal, hooker, junkie—and suddenly we don’t have to care about them. Sinner, stuff like that. And it’s like, yeah, this dude Trent did some horrible shit, but that doesn’t negate everything else, right? Nobody’s one hundred per cent black or white.”

“So you’re a pedophilia apologist now?”

“No, see: that’s exactly the attitude he’s talking about. He who is without sin should throw the first stone, all that.”

“I’ve never raped any kids, Shane.”

“I know you get my point but you’re just being a bitch about it.”

***

Tanille isn’t quite sure how to feel about King Solomon, this guy Neil that grew up with Paisley back in Garibaldi. She’s subscribed to his channel, Fellowship, where he releases music videos and meandering pseudo-sermons, never failing to mention the affordable housing crisis or whatever particular social justice cause happens to be most fashionable that week. At first she couldn’t take him seriously: in his videos he wears giant aviator sunglasses and shaggy headgear, black shirts with white-slashed words across the front: “Forgive yourself first”, “All of us are seekers, none of us are found”, “Only one believer”. In one, “Whatever you’re on, I want some”, he monologues about his time living as an addict. In “This is how you talk to strangers” he describes how Paisley has helped him funnel his spiritual pain in a positive direction, how they collaborated for one track on her album Church Fire. Then there’s the one that describes his experiences performing at the Shangri-La Music Festival for the first time — that one’s been shared over 600,000 times.

Solomon’s catchiest track, the one that went viral during Tanille’s undergrad, was called “Wasting Days”. It was upbeat, with ska elements, and an endlessly repetitive chorus. Solomon’s vocals were animalistic, Cobain-esque, tortured-sounding.

“She comes round like a virus, like a hustler on the run — asks me ‘you want to have some fun?’” he sings. “Like a bigtop freak drifter tryin’ to eke a living from this chaos, it’s useless and fruitless and nothing can be done!”

A children’s choir, their voices distorted, then chant: “Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done! Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done! Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done!”

Solomon’s on his knees in front of a silhouetted church, steam rising from his shoulders while the music builds. His eyes meet the viewer’s for a moment, and then he reels into the chorus.

“She can see I’m wasting all my days—my days, my days—all I’m doing is wasting days. I know I’m wasting all my days—my days, my days—all I’m doing is wasting days.”

Eventually Tanille met Neil, at Shane’s apartment in Victoria, shortly after he’d been released from rehab for the third or fourth time. He looked sleepy and defeated, his eyes twitchily scanning the room at all times, and when he hugged Paisley at the end of the night he broke down into hysterics and fled into a nearby bathroom like a tantrum-throwing child. Tanille waited for nearly half an hour while the pair of them barricaded themselves inside, speaking in lowered voices, while Shane smoked pot on the balcony oblivious. She hated herself for how she strained to hear what they were saying, for how much she yearned to be sitting there on the linoleum with Paisley while she consoled her friend, how much she wanted to know about their shame, about their shared trauma. She couldn’t help how she felt: jealous, left out, untrusted.

Eventually she stood up and went home alone.

***

Paisley neck-nuzzles, purring, and nudges Tanille back into semi-consciousness. She’s back, finally. The tent walls are rain-throbbing around them, her sleeping bag is damp, and the world is made of shadows and silhouettes.

They kiss.

“I went swimming in the harbour,” Paisley says. “Apologies for my briny aroma.”

Tanille breathes.

“You awake, princess?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Is my girl in a bad mood?”

Tanille mind-grapples with the urge to engage, to express her frustration, to sob about her stoned loneliness. She doesn’t want to be this person, this pathetic attention suck, this cliche of the needy female. That’s all gay women do: talk about their feelings, having check-ins and sobby convos. But Paisley won’t go there, won’t let herself be that vulnerable, so she’s trying to match her at the emotional distance game.

“Just sleeping,” she says finally. “Shane puked on Espoir’s backpack.”

Paisley snickers.

“I don’t know why you make me put up with him.”

“Shane?”

“How many women do you know that would be okay with having an ex-boyfriend around constantly?”

“I didn’t date Shane.”

“But you fucked him.”

Paisley sighs. “There’s so many things we could be talking about right now.”

“He’s here, right here, now.”

“But so are you. And who’s tent am I in?”

Tanille huffs. How long has she been awake, even? Her neck bristles, and she rises up on her elbows to face her girlfriend.

“This power dynamic doesn’t work for me, Paise.”

“Power dynamic?”

“This whole I-give-everything-and-you-give-nothing thing.”

Paisley crawls towards her. “I give nothing?” She presses her wet nose against Tanille’s cheek, kisses her cheekbone.

“You know what I mean. I don’t know anything about you. Shane knows more about your life than I do.”

“Shane does not know more than you.”

“What about Neil?” she asks. “Or Amber?”

Paisley’s quiet.

“You bring me around like I’m some sort of pet, leave me unattended while you go off n’ live your life, then you come back whenever the fuck you feel like it. It’s like you don’t trust me to be able to engage with what you’re going through, ” Tanille says. Around them the storm winds hiss. “I’m living in Tent City with you, I’m filthy and dead-tired, but I’m here because I want to be with you, right? You used to include me.”

Outside Tent City campers are still playing guitar, undeterred by the weather, banging on drums and shouting at the night sky. This is one of several conversations within earshot, and for a moment strangers’ voices fill the void between Tanille and Paisley. They’re still intertwined, semi-prone, their faces nearly touching.

“I know I’m fucked up,” Paisley says finally. “I get that.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. You always go for self-loathing first.”

Paisley shrugs, sits back. Is she crying? She paws one of her dreadlocks out of her face.

“I just want to be a part of whatever’s going on in your head.”

Paisley retrieves a joint from a small tin in her chest pocket, takes a long moment to light it. Once the air between them is fogged, once she’s let out a lengthy, pained exhale, that’s when she speaks. She takes a piece of Tanille’s hair and finger-tangles it.

“You don’t need to worry about Shane, okay? What we have has nothing to do with him, or anyone else,” Paisley says. Then she lets go. Tanille sits cat-curled in the silence while Paisley begins to monologue, hitting topics she’d only half-known about, starting with her high school relationship with her first girlfriend Amber, a situation she had to keep covert while attending their church, St. Catherine’s, and their summer camp, Evergreen. She talks about shame, about going to her youth pastor Trent for guidance when she was a teenager. She talks about finding her faith, then losing it after his arrest, about touring and performing and always knowing that Quatsino was waiting for her, Eden-like, though she couldn’t bring herself to return.

“I want to believe we can be better than this, that’s why I’m here,” she says. “But I know it’s not true. The Christians were right: we’re all sinners, and we’re doomed to make the same fucking mistakes over and over again. And if there’s no God, there’s nobody around to forgive us for any of this shit.”

“What do you mean?” Tanille asks. “Forgive us for what?”

***

The title of Paisley’s YouTube channel, Inebriate of Air, was from an Emily Dickinson poem. Tanille looked up the poem online and memorized it before their first sushi date, ultimately reciting it over miso soup. That was three years ago.

“I like the idea of being high on air,” Paisley said, booth-sprawled. “That we’re constantly sucking back nostril-shots of pure energy. This is the stuff that makes us run.”

“The Yoda-style diction. A great poet, she is.”

“Sounds classy, right?”

“Like whoah, dude—I’m so high on this breeze. Man, take a toke of that wind.”

They laughed, wasabi-stirred. “And it’s perfectly designed for that purpose. Like to fill our lungs and pump our blood.”

“Right.”

“So how come you don’t believe in God then?” Tanille asked. “How do you figure the air, the world, got here?

Paisley spent some time chewing before saying anything else. For a moment Tanille thought she’d made a verbal misstep, navigated into a conversational no-go zone. Paisley sang extensively about losing her faith on her album —almost every track had a religious overtone, and sometimes her lyrics were even God-directed—so she thought this was a topic that would get some mileage. Religious people had always fascinated and confused Tanille, in pretty much the same way musicians did: she looked at them like shamans or conjurers who channeled elemental energy from the earth and emanated whitish-blue light from their chests.

“I meet people who didn’t grow up religious,” Paisley said, rolling a dread between her fingers. “And I’m jealous, you know? Is there a God, isn’t there—that shit hasn’t even occurred to them.”

“That sounds like such an empty existence, though.”

She shrugged. “Thing is, being a former Christian is kind of like being a former meth addict. Even if you’re not using, you still remember how it tasted, you still crave that high. Because you’ve been high, normal feels low.”

***

Somebody’s angry.

Tanille jolts up in her sleeping bag as the world erupts with sound. Dogs are barking, men shout, and somebody’s rhythmically banging on a resounding gong. It’s bright out, must be early morning, and through the half-open zipper she can see flurries of movement. Paisley’s gone. Ducking into her sports bra and jeans, and jumping into a semi-crouch, she peers past the tent flaps at a human scuffle in progress on the pavement. A uniformed cop is on his back, grappling with a Tent City kid, his muscled arms straining as he tries to regain control of his baton. His sunglasses are cracked, his face pink and trembling, while he spits out macho mono-syllables, grunting.

“Tanille?” Shane appears in front of her. “Tanille, man. It’s happening. The cops’re raiding the place, arresting people.”

“Where’s Paisley?”

“Everyone’s getting together, linking arms. Photographers are here n’ everything. This shit just got real.”

Tanille pushes her feet into unlaced boots and leans into the day. She’s about to say something, about to ask Shane a question, but then she’s gravel-sliding, a lightning storm of pain blossoming in her face and neck as a panicked man body-surfs her across the ground. He’s surrounded by other runners, people fleeing, and a few of them stumble and crash over top of them. Tanille feels a palm rough on her forehead, a boot crushes her hip, a knee rolls across her ribs. People scream. When she rolls to her side she can see the police officer has fought his way to his feet, and he’s clubbing his opponent viciously. The man curls fetal under the blows.

Shane bats at his fellow protesters, taking Tanille by the armpit, and they’re jostled, body-checked, as people careen wildly past. He drags her out of the crowd’s flight path, up a mud-slicked grass slope, and she stumbles, half-upright, then falls to her hands and knees. There’s blood in her eye, stinging, and her cheek feels cheese-gratered. She fingers the wound, gazes dizzy into the canopy of trees above her. Part of her is fully processing the parade of images flash-dancing across her consciousness, but there’s part of her that’s sauntering through the aisles of a calm grocery store, looking for dinner ingredients. This is nothing but a news story in progress, a Facebook post waiting to happen. Somebody else will eventually spot her fuzzed image in the background of some YouTube video, her face crimson and gleaming, while the police officer kneels on the protesters’ neck and struggles to snap his handcuffs shut. She’s an injured bystander, some hipster kid in the background, and already she can’t blame her imaginary audience for how little they care.