drowning the holiday roast
a report on the 2024 fiscal year
For My Shareholders
In early Q4 2024, I finally got around to reading 100 Years of Solitude. I also turned 30 and — as if on cue — started falling asleep within 5 mins of opening a book before bed.
I woke up one November morning to a neighbourhood Wi-Fi outage and my work plans kaput. In the ensuing 2 hours, I did my best reading in recent memory. I have since started every morning this way. Reading first-thing transforms the remaining rectangles on my calendar into little fictions; inhabiting someplace else minimizes the inflated seriousness of the hours in a day. Safe to say that 2025 will not see an improvement in my sense of purpose or punctuality.
In mid-Q2, I started writing welktober. I signed a publishing deal for my first short story collection and cautiously entertained the romance of working for myself, forever.
With things to share, I returned after a near 10y hiatus to social media. Reinstating Instagram brought the peculiar and contradictory sense of being a real person again. This was not just observed by me: I suddenly got invited to more things; people I lost touch with texted me out of the blue. I found myself sensitive to the sharp uptick in oughts which are native to social content – how I ought to sleep, exercise, date, communicate. I placed myself in opposition to the oughts, but this, too was an unnecessary stance and thus a disturbance. I fell further in love with art because it almost never has oughts.
At the end of Q3, I discovered the work of Plum Cloutman in a 100-years-old building overlooking Mont Royal Park. I was hungover and gravitated to one painting — a living room scene, a girl dancing with a plate of eggs & bacon, dancing with a mug of wine, dancing with a couch — as a sort of path of least resistance.
Under the newish lens of welktober, I was distinctly aware of my sometimes-forced attempts to contextualize and appreciate art, now aggravated by the allure of engagement. It was this painting which wordlessly helped me to abandon the effort. I walked down the hill from Pangée with the pleasant assertion that I like those things.
Some months later, I encountered an art piece at Contemporary Calgary titled I wish I am fish by Paola Pivi: a ~5-minute film showcasing the inside of an airplane with 84 seats and 84 goldfish as passengers, buckled down with seatbelts, during a three hour flight over New Zealand.
Writing this in late December, I feel certain that Pivi’s work is talking to Cloutman’s which is talking to Márquez’s, an inexplicable living-room jaunt between aimless documents. I failed to capture the conversation in an earlier draft of this essay, but know I am better off for having tried to parse the garbled words.
At the start of Q2, I was freshly back from 6 months in Argentina and feeling repressed by the antisocial Canadian habit. Perhaps in response, I started adding sticky notes to the things I leave out on the curb.
I put out a Hair record and the note said get this abomination off my curb. I drew Wall-E eyeballs on my faltering Dyson and wrote a sad poem in the first person about no longer feeling like the newest, most exciting thing. I spent far too long refining 1-sentence reviews for each book left out. Once the items were on the curb, I would work at a table overlooking it, watching people pause on their way to work, smiling at the notes, taking pictures. In a temporary sickness, I wondered if there was some viral potential in filming and sharing these moments on TikTok.
In 2024, I wrote more than I have in any year; accordingly, I mused more than ever on whether a life spent witnessing is lesser than a life spent in action. I regretted, at least a hundred times, having failed to strike the balance of being available to friends / family and doing good work that my calendar so easily theorized.
In 2024, I revisited all 5,200 photos I had amassed since the invention of smartphones; my intention was to clean and categorize them, but past versions of myself offered no evidence of the progression or order I sought. The activity became unfocused and nostalgic. I added hundreds of things to festering watch / read / listen lists, knowing that the decision on what I watch / read / listen is always sourced from chance encounters and never from said lists.
In 2024, I kept documenting everything and found, amongst the countless aimless and un-actionable words, a great many practical wisdoms on what a 30-year-old man ought to do and how he ought to be. I separated these pages from the rest, bundled them tightly together, and drowned them in the tub.
