Hi everyone,
I’ve been wanting to record myself reading something aloud for some time now, and I finally gave it a go.
Please forgive the exceptionally bad camera quality (built-in webcam from my 5-year-old laptop) as well as the exceptionally bad film editing skills.
I hope you enjoy my first-ever online reading of my own writing!
A wise man once said, “I don’t care if The Rolling Stones are playing, the ghost of Elvis and the ghost of John Lennon. Hell, even throw in Yoko Ono. No festival is worth missing the big grad.”
“Don’t commit yourself too much to just one thing just yet.”
* * * *
This year, a certain special music festival in the Scottish Highlands was scheduled for the weekend of June 17 2011. I was scheduled to graduate from the University of Toronto on June 16.
Most transatlantic flights that go from west to east operate on a “red-eye” routine. This means that you leave your North American destination in the evening and arrive at your European destination the next morning. Well, it’s supposed be the next morning but it still feels like the middle of the night. If you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, it feels like a parallel universe where time is meaningless and you eat and eat and never sleep. Then you’re expected to go through customs and, in some cases, onward to your connecting flight. I’m sure people get used to this, but I haven’t yet.
My point is that on a red-eye flight, you leave on one particular day and arrive the next calendar day. This makes it more or less impossible to be at two different events on two different sides of the Atlantic Ocean on the same day. However, it does allow you to be at two events on two different continents on two different consecutive days.
But just barely.
Because even if you walk directly from your graduation ceremony to a parking garage that contains your mother’s car, you will inevitably encounter the worst rush hour traffic the city of Toronto has ever seen (or so it will seem). This same rush hour traffic will make your flight’s cabin crew late getting to the airport, which will in turn cause your flight to depart an hour and a half late. This will, in turn, make you panic about missing your connecting flight because you haven’t allowed very much leeway for your stopover. Your connecting flight will, of course, also be delayed, which will make it difficult to quickly disembark, grab a taxi from the airport back to your flat, shower, and then immediately jump in a tour van that’s headed up north for a weekend of festival-ing and rainy camping, all in under an hour.
I tell you, there were some major forces at work that did not want me to leave Toronto on that particular afternoon in June. Traffic jams aside, these include: family members who support me unwaveringly, friends who understand me at my very core, and my desire to flourish within my comfort zone.
I know why I want to stay in Canada, I don’t know why I want to be in Scotland.
Half a year ago, I wrote In/out(sider) part one. It was about a music festival, which for me, in June 2010, embodied the crux of my experience both in and outside of a certain Scottish music scene.
This year, the same festival weekend symbolized my experience both in and outside of something else.
* * * *
One year later, I am standing in a crowd of people in a field near Aviemore. I’m wearing a pair of my mom’s wellies and they are the newest boots I own. I was standing, and now I am dancing, mobilized by a very specific sort of adrenaline that comes from combining jetlagged delirium with Thistly Cross cider.
At the end of their set, Washington Irving come back on stage to begin their encore: their cover of Dick Gaughan’s Tom Paine’s Bones.
The same revolutionary I studied in an advanced literature seminar months ago while I waited for this moment.
I tell my friends next to me, “This is really going to be something.”
For the first few lines, I fight unexpected tears. What if this is the last time I ever see them play? What if I leave again and don’t come back? Will I miss this?
Less than a minute later, and I am dancing a jig with Rory’s parents. Less than a minute after that, and I am headed for the stage. This was Jenny’s idea and we must have acted quickly. At the last second, Rory’s mum declines or comes to her senses. I’m dancing and singing between Rory and Kieran (who just laughs) except for a brief moment of panic when I think I’m the only stage-crasher.
An hour later, I’m sitting on the ground, in a strangely-secluded lime green spotlight behind the stage. In one of three directions, electronic bagpipes are playing. In another, a DJ plays Jump Around by House of Pain. I wipe my face with my tear-stained skirt.
“Why can’t this be easier?” as we collapse into the grass and surrender to the cosmic flow.
A few hours later, while the sun rises, we’ll sit in someone else’s tent and enjoy ham sandwiches.
Two days later and we’ll have this conversation again.
Photos via Cheryl McIntyre.
This is the story of me being both an insider and an outsider in the Scottish music scene.
I got off a plane, exhausted, and went home with this boy. To see where he lived. We went to see this band, Sparrow and the Workshop, and they were brill-ee-yent (Canadians can’t pronounce that word with two syllables).
I met his friends for the first time, and his family. I was wearing the wrong clothes. At home in Toronto, TNA parkas were trendy. So were Hunter boots. The same brand as the Queen wears. The Queen. I don’t think that anybody in Scotland wears wellies unless they’re in the country. I didn’t know that nobody wore parkas even in minus ten weather plus the damp-chill. (Does damp-chill exist? It should. It gets in your bones). In urban Scotland everyone wants to look attractive and un-utilitarian, which conflicts with my commonsensical Canadian approach. (That is probably the first time I ever felt commonsensical before in my life, ever).
The next day I went on tour with his band. It was a whirlwind, and it was all these people I was meeting for the first time. They all spent all of their time together, and they were best friends. From an outsider’s perspective, if I thought about it later (which I did and have a million times), I felt excluded and not a part of this secret magic world that creates brilliant art.
I said to all of them, while we were in the tour van, “If it were my friends, we’d be listening to, and singing along to rap music, not indie rock…”
And I shared a bedroom with most of his friends on that first night. Not even that strange, I just changed under the bedsheets.
I had no choice but to feel connected to all of them. The connection was thrust upon me. It’s that same sort of connection I feel when I see inexplicably amazing live music performed. It transcends any conception I have of “good art”. I don’t feel like a passive, or even an active audience member.
I feel like a part of something bigger.
Please go listen to live music while you can. Played by people that you know. Try to travel with them. Nothing will be like that experience.
There is a part of me that wants to be a practical person. This practical person would earn perfect marks in university. She would probably attend graduate school. She probably wouldn’t spend all of her money flying back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean with no clear goals for the future.
But I am certain that if I pay too much heed to my practical head, I will wake up one morning a very long time from now, and be very, very unhappy.
In 2005, Steve Jobs gave a speech at a graduation ceremony at Stanford University entitled “How to Live Before You Die”. At the end of the speech, he offers some very simple, but rarely-followed advice:
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
I hope that at some point you have a chance to live the way an artist does. Because if you don’t, you’ll never get to sit around a campfire in the brilliant bluey-green sunlight in the Scottish wilderness, surrounded by other artists and a love of something intangible. You won’t travel up north through a country you don’t even know in a 1960’s Beetle that might not last the journey.
You won’t snuggle in a sleeping bag with the one you love, weathering out the freezing temperatures.
You won’t crave a shower, after 3 days as a dirty (drunk) hippie. You won’t jump into an ice cold, freezing cold, colder than anything that YOU have ever jumped into river. You won’t bathe in it, and be numb for an hour afterward, because you could have caught frostbite.
You won’t sit out in the wilderness, with fires burning, midgies biting, doesn’t-even-matter what you’re wearing or what-you’re drinking, cheap Tesco red wine, brilliant music playing and surrounded by brilliant people that you love.
You won’t dance the world’s craziest jig with a group of all the other crazy jig-dancers, legs kicking and arms flailing, bodies hopping every which way. Until you are grabbed by a group of friends and strangers, who hurl you around the stage with them in a tight circle. Faster and faster until you are powered not by your own limbs, but by the pulsating energy of the people by your sides. When you can’t possibly have any energy left, like a marathon runner, you just keep going. Lungs bursting and visions blurry, hearts pounding together at the same rate, in one great force of coronary circulation.
Coronary encircle-lation. Hearts that come together, form a circle and surround.
You won’t be stuck in between brilliance and fear and isolation and a deep deep connection to the people that surround. Those lost souls that strive for nothing more than to create and to experience.
I guarantee that you won’t feel like you belong as much as you will at a small music festival across the Atlantic Ocean. It’s called Insider. It’s a festival of outsiders.
The people, those artists, who don’t have so much of a ready-carved-out-niche in ordinary society all band together. They form bands and they take pictures and they write words.
And even if I feel like a bitterly-segregated, don’t-know-how-to-talk-to-anyone, don’t-know-if-anyone-cares-a-bit-that-I’m-Canadian-and-all-lonesome-far-from-home, like I’ll-never-have-a-real-and-true-good-close-sisterly-friend-again, like I’ll be his dutiful wife for the rest of my days because there’s no more interesting prospect for me across that vast ocean or tiny pond, so segregated, separated, lonely even-though-I’m-in-love…
I love it when I’m an insider and I love Scotland. I’m making words about it, and if you make music about it then I
probably
love
you.
Both photos are by Ingrid Mur.
Caitlin Vernon Writing 