As I explained to Dirk 20 minutes ago, I’m running out of things to write about. (About which to write, the grammar judge yells.) I can’t write about work for legal reasons. I can’t write about arguments with the Boy or disagreements with my parents for maturity reasons. I can’t write gossip about my friends or family because I want them to like me. And I can’t write about knitting because it’s so wicked boring that I made up a whole other blog to vent my babbling and spare you. Besides working, sleeping, arguing & occasionally gossiping, I don’t do much these days. I could indulge in long discussions of the 5th season Angel episodes I’ve been watching or my opinions on the new Harry Potter movie, but I don’t feel like I have anything to add to the general discussion. And the Blake anecdotes are starting to seem like a lame cop out from the real meat of my life, like I have to hide behind a “kids say the cutest things” façade just to get through an entry.

That being said, Blake did something real cute last night, which I only mention because it’s entirely out of the ordinary. Blake gets up early; lately we’ve been ignoring him until 5 a.m. but he will get up between 5 & 6 every morning no matter what time he went to bed. Sickness doesn’t affect his rising, nor do our impassioned pleas for mercy. This morning, however, he came into the bed at 5:30 and fell asleep. I worked my arm out from under him so that I could go to the bathroom, walked upstairs in the dark, heard his voice cry out…and then stepped on him on the way down the pitch black steps. Seems that he came after me, but gave up on the bottom stair. He didn’t even yelp when I stepped on him, poor muffin. So I did what I could: picked him up like a sack of potatoes and took him back to the bed, where he proceeded to sleep until 9:30.

I heard today that Siren has closed down. There goes the first big piece of my youth, predeceased only by the local East Side Mario’s. When I was 16, I used to accompany Little Spider, Mr. Shoreleave, Akasha and various others on a shopping tour of Queen Street West. We would get a drive to Yorkdale, take the subway to the Eaton’s Centre, and walk down the street. Siren was the far reaches of our trek, and we were utterly fascinated by the t-shirts, jewellery and accessories we could never find in B-ton. All of our favourite black t-shirts came from Siren, a staple in our teen wardrobes (I also remember a white Bauhaus shirt that LS wore to rags, one I much later had the pleasure of ripping up.) One day we were all lucky enough to pick up store shirts for $2. We wore them to holes and beyond, with our stretch black denim and too much eyeliner.

As our tastes matured, we started getting some of the big ticket items: Mr. S’s prom outfit was a fitted velvet jacket, and that night LS carried a purple leather rose and wore an ankh knife around her neck. On my 21st birthday, I would buy an item that would be known as The Dress: a black velvet lace-up concoction with trailing sleeves and a pointy skirt. This was my first and favourite outfit for nights at the Garden.

In later years I stopped going to Siren. I never had enough money for everything I wanted, I stopped wearing black t-shirts every day, and I finally had my fill of stupid, arrogant salesclerks. It’s hard for me to forget the white-hot reverence we felt for this store. It was, for our 16-year-old selves, the pinnacle of remote goth style. It was a window into a world that was glamourous, dark and pulsing with unknown pleasures. I still wish that the goth scene could match up to my imagined world, the one I constructed from repeated visits to Siren.

- 0 comments/hedgehogs -

- Rocketbride's adventure of 11/26/2005 08:49:00 p.m.