girlfriend in a coma.

douglas coupland is my favorite author. 

i used to hate morrissey. 

a house on westcott street in the summer of '97. smiths vhs of videos playing in someone's bedroom. i tried to leave the room. was literally pinned down and made to watch. 

i was still at that stage where everything was taken at face value as far as music went. hardcore and punk didn't, to me, have a correlation to this whiny british dude. 

even though i was a fan of the other melancholy brit, the one with the crazy hair. but he hooked me through the pop efforts. "hot hot hot" and "why can't i be you" are still two faves.

wasn't until i lived in maryland, college park to be exact, and heard quicksand's cover of "how soon is now" that i gave them a whirl. bought "greatest hits disc 1". (i am a greatest hits junkie. poverty in college will do that to a person...) 

then i found a vinyl copy of "the queen is dead" in a thrift store down the street from my house. along with a vintage polaroid camera. i lived in a not so great area. to me this was some kind of wonderful find. the camera i still have, the vinyl got thrown out accidentally along with all my other records.

the more i lived, the more i read, the more that moz made sense to me. echoed my own sentiments. "cemetary gates" has a few lines that are eeriely similar to a poem i wrote in high school that got published somewhere. but his are universal themes. life, loss, love, longing... 

after i moved back to syracuse in 2000, i wandered the public library. wishing for the 80's library of my youth, with its gargoyles, rickety ladders and old book smells. the newer library was all slick and modern, not really the type of place to play amongst the pages of history. 

a brightly colored book beckoned me to a low shelf. that's how i stumbled across douglas coupland "girlfriend in a coma". i got the reference, but i didn't really get the reference. his writing hooked me and i devoured everything of his within a couple weeks and waited impatiently for his next book to be released. 

crazy morrissey fan i am not. but crazy doug fan? possibly. i'm not the type to go to functions alone. side effect of being an only child. his book signing, his movie release, both of these i rolled solo. and happily. no one would get the giddiness i felt. no one that i knew anyway. 

douglas and steven. two gay men, my mom's age, who speak to my experience more than any female author i've read. 

wikipedia, on this new information superhighway thingy, isn't too accurate on some things. but i checked out my astrological sign, after never believing in that stuff. 

a coworker did my "star chart" a couple months back and announced i was in "saturn's return". all i knew was that was the title of a no doubt album where she sang a bunch about not being married. and could care less about not being married. i shrugged his saturn's return proclamation off as hippie talk, but then the gears were put in motion. before i knew it i semi-paid attention to my horoscope. and it was usually right. i'll have to check with tina turner to see if she agrees. 

wikipedia says as a sagittarius i'm supposed to be a masculine persona. which explains this punk rock nonsense, i guess...

"if you must write prose and poems, the words you use should be your own." 

everybody rips off someone else, even if it's on a subconscious level. 

-mjm