Summer fever

by RAF KATIGBAK

I’m exhausted. I can’t concentrate. I think I’m running a temperature. I wander around in a daze and am never really sure where I am or what’s going on at any given moment and I have the attention span of a high school cheerleader on meth. I would have thought I had the swine flu had I not been sure that I have never eaten bacon off a toilet seat (I heard that’s how you get it). Welcome to summer in Montreal, when it’s pretty much impossible to get anything productive done.

The transition into summer fun times crept in so sneakily that I didn’t even realize what was going on until it was too late. One moment I was a pasty little troll holed up in my office, then suddenly I was out in the street—my skin still translucent from the winter—and wandering into the park, eating sandwiches and getting shit-faced with friends.

But as glorious as summer in Montreal is, it can also be dangerous, and not just for all the bruised knees and scraped hands resulting from that 4 a.m. drunken swerve home on a bicycle. But rather, Montreal can be dangerous if you blow your load too early and get burnt out. Suddenly going outside can be a frightening prospect. That’s what happened to me. We’ve only had a couple of weeks of nice weather and already the city is scaring me. Too many late night parties where you eventually find yourself face-up on the roof of some anonymous building at 7:30 a.m. so wigged out that you imagine you can grab the airplanes out of the sky and eat them will do that, I guess. I have been overly stimulated, saturated and socialized, and now I am paying the price.

So I am forcing myself into exile at home. Not out of choice, but out of necessity since the very idea of walking outside and negotiating the busy downtown sidewalks causes me to baby-puke the Mars bar/yogurt shake I made for breakfast. For the last few days, I have been trapped in my house doing weird OCD things like boiling my hairbrush and combs to remove all germs and slightly weirder things like contemplating putting googly eyes on my cats’ turds and recreating pivotal moments in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in their litter box. It’s a rather unnerving sight. I think this is what people in the medical field call “shack wacky.”

When I’m not making tinfoil sculptures of Canadian prime ministers and singing Weird Al/feline remixes of songs to my cats (every time a song has the word “baby” in it—which is a lot—I replace it with the word “kitty” or “cat face”), I spend most of my time doing what most people stuck at home do: being a nosy neighbour. Since I have no neighbours, I sit on my balcony obsessively watching the construction workers across the street. Every day, I drink coffee and watch them.

I have become so obsessed with their daily goings on, like a primatologist studying silver-backed apes in the wild, I have given each of them names. So starved for entertainment, I have not only given them names, but different voices, and like most anyone would do, I have also embroiled them in a Desperate Housewives-style drama filled with passion and intrigue. Now when the really short one (P’tit Georges) goes to ask the big one with a moustache (Thyroid Tom Selleck) for a tool, I imagine them actually gossiping about the mulleted guy (Longueuil Larry) who is possibly having a torrid love affair with the bulldozer operator Dandy Jacques. I think I need help.

I’d like to be out and about enjoying the sun. I’d like to be squishing my toes in the grass and drinking a weird vodka fruit mix stealthily poured into a Nalgene bottle, but Montreal is scary. Maybe it’s the crazed look in everyone’s eyes. The look they get from too many winters spent in the city. The oozing desperation to party and take advantage of the sunshine.

Maybe I’m just choked that the Jazz Fest is coming and that means my whole front yard will be crawling with aging Vermonters in Dashikis and Tevas snapping their fingers to blues-rock. Or maybe I’m worried that I see the newly built decorative fountains across the street for what they will really become: hobo bidets. Or maybe I’m worried that with all the horribleness of the winter still engrained in my mind, the summer couldn’t possibly live up to my expectations. Or maybe it’s something simpler than that. Maybe I’m just upset that the little paper hat I made for my fallen General Wolfe never stays on its little cat-turd head.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA