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I Skipped Thursday

The new season’s first month did not have the most auspicious start for me.


August ended pretty well. I don’t think that I even noticed that it was ending. I just continued on the summer path I’d been treading for months. On the penultimate day, I went out to the beach with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while, and they later joined my guitarist and me for one final summer session of street music.


Saturday was a late night too. In the vague proximity of the dawn, I decided that I wouldn’t worry about trying to get to sleep until I actually felt tired, summarily acknowledging that I’d probably get near noon before that started to happen.


My memories of the details of the ensuing hours are slightly fuzzy, though it might be fair to mention that some of that is probably due to what my brain went through on that day. I think that I started to consider sleep around 11:00, but I got distracted and postponed it further.


I awoke in pain and confusion at some point in the evening. I’m still not totally sure about what happened. I know that there was a seizure of some sort, and the fact that a bunch of stuff from my desk was on the floor when I woke up could lead one to assume that I was sitting at the desk when the event happened. However, my clothes had been moved from my bed to my chair, and that’s something that only happens when I decide to go to bed. I’m really not sure about any of this.


These sorts of things always mess with my brain. It does something to my mood and my memory. It makes the preceding days feel less real. Between that, the cold weather that greeted me upon my rise, the actual shift in calendrical months, and the sheer contrast between the good times of the weekend’s beginning and its unfortunate end, I could not have asked for a cleaner break between seasons.


But I didn’t ask for a clean break. A clean break is exactly what I don’t want. I prefer to coast along on summer breezes until the sweet Samhain scent of of Halloween makes its presence known. I rarely know exactly what to do with the intervening time. In fairness, I have come to love autumn in recent years, but that doesn’t make this much easier. The fact that yesterday’s spontaneous stop at the dollar store revealed an entire aisle of Halloween stuff might, though.


There is a bit of symmetry in this. My last seizure was at the beginning of the summer, and it affected my left arm in a way that made it fragile enough to suffer several dislocations throughout the following months. This seizure ended the summer by doing something similarly heinous to my right arm.


I felt quite infirm for most of the week, but Thursday definitely marked a turning point of some sort. I woke up late in the evening, and my return to consciousness was greeted by leg spasms. Upon trying to walk, I found that it wasn’t worth the bother, and I decided to return to bed and try again. After a couple of hours, I awoke again to identical sensations, and these led me to call the whole day off in favour of an early start to Friday.


I’m pleased to say that this actually worked brilliantly. I got up around 4:00 in the morning and sought ways to fill my day. I realised that I hadn’t dyed my hair in a while, and though that fact was partially attributable to a pale desire to wait for greater length, I felt that this particular Friday would be my last completely free day for a while. This Monday marks the start of a particularly busy period at the restaurant where I work, and the end of that period signifies the cessation of my duties for the winter. This weekend was basically the calm before a storm that directly precedes a deeper, more profound calm.


Anyway, I stopped in the middle of writing this to go to the salon, and the results are unsurprisingly fantastic. I also tried something new with my eyebrows.


I don’t know. Maybe that’s a more auspicious start?

Copyright © 2011, Jaymes Buckman and David Aaron Cohen. All rights reserved. In a good way.