/lit/ - Literature

random excerpt from my forthcoming novel based on a cross-country bicycle ride I did with my friends a few years ago. It's about masculinity and mental health, mostly:

At every roadside piss break, Emile jumps on the opportunity to ask me about school, and I pull out everything I can to avert the subject: this heat, this wind, these drivers, these damn birds, the dust in the air, how often we’ve got to spit just to clear our mouths, the neverending freight trains, the Calgary stampede and what it costs and whether it’s overrated, the forest fires we’ve been having lately, the conservative bumper stickers, the cows grazing, the Toronto Raptors, the Montréal Canadiens, the little bodies of water here and there and how one day they will be gone. Anything to take the analytical weight of my mistakes off myself and onto something innocent.


The latter half of the day is spent chasing Ben and Emile, who pull far enough ahead that I'm left to stew in my own anxiety. Passing a billboard of a waterpark resort, with children pictured splashing in the pool, reminds me of how differently I felt only hours ago, feeling joy and freedom upon hearing children playing in the park, and that the tension and unease felt in the present are the consequences of a single line of questioning that exploits a subject about which I feel inexplicably ashamed. The next moments are spent acknowledging this shame as shame without shaming the acknowledgement itself, but I’m unsure whether it's of any use.


I gain on them, eventually crawling up close enough to catch sight of the eagle feather dangling above Ben's rear tire. I had forgotten it was there. It’s wedged in good by the looks of it, tucked inside his rack and pinned between his fender and tent bag. It seems so precariously placed that it should’ve flown away by now.


Already the topography is drying out; the lush prairie fields are thinning into a rocky yellow grassland topped by grain farms and gutted hamlets.


I make the conscious decision to think the best of tonight. “Think positively,” I think, negatively, to myself. I had read about the psychological benefits of deliberate positive thinking before; Kid Cudi said it had changed his life. But I’ve always been skeptical of anything so seemingly simple; such a complex world deserved only complex solutions, so I thought. Without a reason for doing so, I repeat the mantra, “Think positively,” with less self-reproach each time, reminding myself that maintaining optimism and withholding self-judgment, no matter how contrived, is the only answer for helplessness, and that helplessness is only a learned despair. Rather than where I’ve been, I think about who I’m with, where I am, and where I’m going, and it feels like the only real good thing within my scope of action. I commit to this action and take my pledge like a pill, then pedal on; letting the time pass, anxiously, skeptically, as if waiting for drugs to kick in.

random excerpt from my forthcoming novel based on a cross-country bicycle ride I did with my friends a few years ago. It's about masculinity and mental health, mostly:

At every roadside piss break, Emile jumps on the opportunity to ask me about school, and I pull out everything I can to avert the subject: this heat, this wind, these drivers, these damn birds, the dust in the air, how often we’ve got to spit just to clear our mouths, the neverending freight trains, the Calgary stampede and what it costs and whether it’s overrated, the forest fires we’ve been having lately, the conservative bumper stickers, the cows grazing, the Toronto Raptors, the Montréal Canadiens, the little bodies of water here and there and how one day they will be gone. Anything to take the analytical weight of my mistakes off myself and onto something innocent.


The latter half of the day is spent chasing Ben and Emile, who pull far enough ahead that I'm left to stew in my own anxiety. Passing a billboard of a waterpark resort, with children pictured splashing in the pool, reminds me of how differently I felt only hours ago, feeling joy and freedom upon hearing children playing in the park, and that the tension and unease felt in the present are the consequences of a single line of questioning that exploits a subject about which I feel inexplicably ashamed. The next moments are spent acknowledging this shame as shame without shaming the acknowledgement itself, but I’m unsure whether it's of any use.


I gain on them, eventually crawling up close enough to catch sight of the eagle feather dangling above Ben's rear tire. I had forgotten it was there. It’s wedged in good by the looks of it, tucked inside his rack and pinned between his fender and tent bag. It seems so precariously placed that it should’ve flown away by now.


Already the topography is drying out; the lush prairie fields are thinning into a rocky yellow grassland topped by grain farms and gutted hamlets.


I make the conscious decision to think the best of tonight. “Think positively,” I think, negatively, to myself. I had read about the psychological benefits of deliberate positive thinking before; Kid Cudi said it had changed his life. But I’ve always been skeptical of anything so seemingly simple; such a complex world deserved only complex solutions, so I thought. Without a reason for doing so, I repeat the mantra, “Think positively,” with less self-reproach each time, reminding myself that maintaining optimism and withholding self-judgment, no matter how contrived, is the only answer for helplessness, and that helplessness is only a learned despair. Rather than where I’ve been, I think about who I’m with, where I am, and where I’m going, and it feels like the only real good thing within my scope of action. I commit to this action and take my pledge like a pill, then pedal on; letting the time pass, anxiously, skeptically, as if waiting for drugs to kick in.