Daniel is reading the paper and passing me each half-piece of toast, thinking we're sharing. I'm licking the cinnamon off each one and passing them back. He eats them. Hasn't taken his eyes off the paper or I don't think he realizes precisely what it is that I'm doing to his toast.

Schuyler notices.

Hungry?

Starving.

I can just make you some.

No, I'm good with this. Daniel, do you mind?

Never. (He has no idea what I'm asking.)

Clearly I married the wrong brother. (This gets his attention.)

You said that before about two brothers.

That was a mistake, Daniel. This time I know it's love.

Well, you know, there are other places we could put this stuff if you're in the licking mood.

You're gross.

As gross as Ben?

More gross.

Then you can rest easy with the choices you have made, Angelface.

Daniel?

Hmmm?

Can I have that last piece?

Take it. Jesus. I can't believe I ate wet Bridget-licked toast for breakfast.

Some would call you lucky.

Bring them to me. Let me see them for myself.

No, there are only imaginary men who love my toast cast-offs.

I could probably find some real ones.

Hush, you.

I'm ready now, I'm not waiting for the afterlife.

This post is about Switchfoot, and if you haven't heard of them by now, then well firstly, WELCOME because clearly it's your first day reading my journal, and secondly go seek them out now because when their EIGHTH album drops in late summer, everyone will know who they are at last. Get in early. And now, here's a review of show number#3 for us. Because I'm a fan. A HUGE fan.

Thanks guys, it meant the world. Safe travels!

***

This was to be the chillin' show. At their previous Canadian shows we've done soundchecks/wristbands/meets, greets and VIPs and front rows and treats from the band like engraved picks, setlists and autographs. So this was going to be a sit-back-in-a-seat-and-enjoy show. Expect nothing.

The Reason opened the show with an amazing set. These are five guys from Hamilton with amazing beards and handsome smiles to die for and they covered Fleetwood Mac's Dreams. I am sold. They were amazing live compared to what I could find on Myspace before the show. Alas I couldn't find their CD for sale on the way out in the crush but I'll track it down today. My boys gave them standing applause. That's how good they were. We were very surprised and incredibly thrilled at how good they were. That doesn't happen often, even though I am a huge proponent of asking you to always pay attention to the openers! Always.

The lights went out. Squee.

When the rush down front took place during intermission we settled for moving house a few rows closer, still a good six, seven rows back from the front. After some encouragement I ventured down to the front but came back. Kids are so tall these days. I couldn't see. But the theater goes uphill toward the back. Score! Halfway up it is.

And it was so, so worth it.

I love these boys. The sound was perfect, the lights amazing and we got two new songs that the rest of the country didn't get. Afterlife and The War Inside, which are heavier songs with more licks and hooks than ever. Think Politicians, or even Dirty Second Hands. That kind of heavy. That kind of awesome.

I'm a seasoned veteran of all sorts of genres of concerts but Switchfoot is always a sweeter experience. They truly are the nicest guys you will ever meet and they bend over backwards to make the shows special for everyone, not just for the VIPs. Chad, Tim, Jon, Jerome and Drew are tight, solid. They give their hearts. (And Jon usually does an aftershow in a back alley or coffeeshop near the venue a few minutes after but I have yet to make it to one because kids + schoolnight = RESPONSIBLE PARENT, sigh.)

But the kids were rewarded heavily when Jon jumped offstage and waded into the crowd last night. He headed right for us, stepping into our aisle and climbed up on the seat beside Ruth. Then he jumped to the row in front and worked his way back to the stage. She was thrilled that he stepped on her foot. THRILLED. And she's met all the guys already so she's as jaded an eleven-year-old as one can be, having gone to her first Switchfoot concert at the tender age of seven. Henry? Started at five, naturally. He is nine now and rocked out as all future rockstars do, absorbing every lead and every stage move for future reference.

True to form I did not remember I was holding my camera until Jon was turning away from us. Ha. Same thing happened last time he and I spoke. Only that time I forgot my WORDS, people.


Many thanks to the Vogue Theatre and Every Eye Media for a smooth experience. Vancouver, we made a tiny but loud crowd. So tiny they invited the upper bowl down to the floor. Everyone sang. And yes, I am still a super-keyed-hyperventilating-twee-fangirl when it comes to Switchfoot. I can't help it, they make it easy for me.

The setlist:

The Sound
Stars
Needle and Haystack Life
Your Love is a Song
Hello Hurricane
Restless
Meant to Live
Yet
Afterlife (I have listened to this seven hundred times today.)
Oh! Gravity
Awakening

Encore:

Only Hope
The War Inside (the new favorite. Watch for the next tattoo from this song.)
Dare you to Move

(I will come back and edit the setlist when my brain wakes up.)

Uncomfortable.

This is not about the gardens.

All is not lost
All is not lost
Become who you are
It happens once in a lifetime

In this needle and haystack life
I found miracles there in your eyes
It's no accident we're here tonight
We are once in a lifetime alive

The cursory inspection of the garden and thirty-minute weed-pulling session yields a single impending bloom on the tea roses in the corner of the yard by the gate but a much better spread of buds on the new roses that I planted all along the wall, looking to maybe erupt the first of next week if it warms up a little. The lilacs seem finished for now, the other shrubs are greening in and the grapevines have silver-dollar leaves at last. They definitely don't like the cold mornings, unlike the weeds. In the front gardens absolutely everything is blooming and the ivy is growing like mad. Figures. Last year it was the other way around. Do gardens take turns? They must.

There is one rogue tomato plant coming up from where I grew fantastic heirloom tomatoes last year only to see the squirrels abscond with them when they were finished stealing all of the grapes. Bah. I'm going to let it grow. If it looks hearty enough I will go get netting, maybe a padlock and a shotgun and I'll sit in the shady part of the yard guarding it from the freeloading, fur-covered neighbors in the woods.

Or maybe I'll blow out all the windows on the back of the house to get someone's attention.

Things are changing. Again. I don't like change, but I gather you know that. In the twelve months we have been here I bought a few plants and I painted the teeny-tiny guest bathroom and yes, that's it. August moved out and I made him come back. Because I hate change. Nothing ever looks familiar, nothing feels familiar, I don't know anything anymore and it's so much more difficult than I thought it would be. Gone is the resiliency of the daughter of the midway, replete with the blanket I knew so well overnight and the ocean in the morning. Gone is any sort of habit, routine or cognizant sight short of the faces but those all grow older so they change almost daily.

It's hard. It's hard to be settled but not know the street names. I can't tell you how to get to my house from four blocks away. I don't know where to get a watch battery save for that place in the valley that seemed so capable but isn't convenient, even though I will tell you I found a place, so proud of myself, I am. I don't know why there aren't more beach days and less of everything else and I don't do well with news. Because in the end everything always turns out okay but still my brain wants to go to all the awful what-ifs or oh-noes before I can even wrap it around the positive side of something.

And I'm aware that I do this and frustrated by it to no end. The other day I looked into the sea and she refused to keep my secrets, pushing me away, a stranger with no claim to know her so well as to assume she would take my thoughts and keep them safe.

Her sister Atlantic would never do such a thing. I scolded her and she laughed.

She laughed.

Hum.

If you could feel my fire reach for you
flames draw high out to you
streetlight shines through my window,
it trembles for you
take my heart, there you go.

He never listened to anything much harder than Tool, and tends to look vaguely pained when I twist up Sepultura or Motorhead, squinces a little for Breaking Benjamin and kind of wonders aloud where he went wrong in raising me when Type O Negative pounds a steady beat through my skull.

He tried.

He drew on what I was born listening to-The Eagles, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, CCR, and then when I was more sophisticated (at a whole ten years old), he and Caleb began to feed me a steady diet of Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Queen.

You can blame Lochlan for my musical quirks. He sings new songs or plays them in the truck until I follow him around begging for the artist name or even title and then off I go to memorize the words. Like my intense love for all things Switchfoot. Like Toto's song Africa. Like for this freakish new attachment to The Midway State's Atlantic.

(Such a tiny pleaser, if you will but loathe to let anything new slip past her because don't forget her hearing is set to a timer that is counting down the precious years left. She is still working away diligently filling up her head with the most poignant music she can find, be it hard OR soft. She doesn't care, though she is very specific if she doesn't like something, and incredibly possessive if she does. So every band she loves is her favorite and every song she likes is the Best Song In the Universe.)

Little changes decades later. He is even still characteristically pissed at me every time I mention the 'terrible' circus portion of my upbringing in public. Which is funny because it wasn't terrible. Well, most of it wasn't but now when he grates against my personality landmines or intensive shortcomings it's never clear who he is more disappointed in, me or himself.

He beams with pride when I do something well, or something surprising, but he is the most impatient teacher when it comes to reiterating things I can't retain at all because I don't really care. Why work at swimming long distances when I can put my arms around his neck and get a lift into shore? Smooth shifting in a standard? Never going to happen. Why get street directions when I can just wait for him to take me there and then I have my favorite company along for the ride? Survive a day without trying to stick myself to him like a barnacle when he's very very busy? Nope. Give up already.

Failure is not an option. Now turn up the music and just pretend I'm not even here, okay? Well, maybe just move over a little bit. Yup. There.

Preoccupied.

I wrote cheques for yearbooks today, following cheques written for field trips, school supplies and the dentist. We didn't order yearbooks last year, since the kids had only been in their new school for a couple of weeks when the order forms came home.

Now they are firmly entrenched: band, track & field, floor hockey, french club, and fistfights in the schoolyard at lunchtime (well, Henry anyway, but the good (okay, well not so good) part is he took the punch. He did not throw the punch. I know, surprise!). They eat pears while they mentor the younger grades and they plan afternoons at friends' homes without asking first, leaving me scrambling to find addresses, moms and good pick-up times. They have learned chess, and not just basic chess but kick-ass chess. They have worked their way through all of the clothes we bought in the fall, every bottle of sunscreen and band-aid in the house and all of the food the boys didn't finish yet. I can no longer keep up. With anything.

Suddenly classmate crushes, puberty, Katy Perry and Warcraft have replaced Bugs Bunny, Lego and the biggest thrill in life being fresh blueberry muffins when they get home from school. They regularly steal any headphones they can find and disappear with our devices to listen to music on Youtube. Thank God for 6gb data plans.

Who in the hell are these teenagers and what have they done with my children?

They want me to watch TV with them but leave them alone too. They don't want to be nagged to check for cars or to wear their jackets. They want to go up the hill for slices of pizza or candy at the store but they don't want me along (yes). They want to watch the Saw movies (no). They want to ride bikes in the rain but they don't want to walk the dog or put away their laundry or set the table. They still want their allowance for the chores they don't do, and they want to spend it the moment we step inside the doors of the shopping center. On junk. Chocolate bars, video games, Hello Kitty stuffed toys.

They are all over the place with feelings, fashion and personality and every now and then I get a glimpse of the younger child they used to be along with a preview of the adult they will be in the not-so-distant-any-longer future. It's exciting and a little scary and a wonderful welcome distraction for all of us.

It's really weird too. I keep looking at them and seeing how violently different their lives are from mine when I was that age, and I thank my lucky stars that we are in this place where their biggest complaints are that they have nothing to do.

They are typical. Healthy, privileged, stimulated, active, responsible, caring and adventurous too. Everything I wanted, everything I could have hoped for and more.

(I know you must be so irritated that I'm not currently telling you anything remotely dramatic. Kiss my ass.)

(Bear with me, here. I need to drop out of order for a spell. The upside for you is getting to find out what happened, or didn't happen, as it were.)

Don't act like an angel
You've fallen again
You're no superhero
I found in the end

So lie to me once again
And tell me everything will be alright
Lie to me once again
And ask yourself before we say goodbye
Well goodbye, was it worth it in the end?

He even used the word.

Intel.

What the fuck, are we spies now? And please please please pinch me. This is not what I hoped for and I'm not even going to make stabs at sanity anymore. I have the meat hammer out and I've beaten it to a pulp. So excuse me if I don't reply to your fucking emails and excuse me if I get all of this out of order. I still can't feel my eyes.

The 'intel' Caleb gathered (motherfucker) was that he was living in a tiny outpost, fishing and looking after a church without a congregation, and that he does not speak when spoken to, only growls at those who come too close, and that for purposes of mail, whiskey and food deliveries he goes by Thom Finn.

Because Jacob Thomas Finnian Reilly would have been obvious.

And if you've been paid off no one cares, you're still perpetuating a fraud and you still can't just check out in this day and age, even though if anyone ever was good at that it was Jake, who traveled the world for months and years at a time and is somehow adept at existing on nothing.

Maybe you get what you wish for. Especially when there are children involved. Ones that cry for you night after night. What a risk. What an asshole. So many nights I wanted to drag that razor right across my life and cut off the access to it and that would be it. Somehow I didn't and this is such a bad joke. Such a bad time.

I found the church first. An old man was painting the railings and I went past him and tried the door and it was locked. So I kicked it in because I swear only the bolt was holding the outside from the inside. The old man started yelling but I couldn't hear him and Ben managed to tell him it was an emergency. I don't think Ben's hands have stopped shaking since Toronto. That was around the time I stopped speaking.

The old man points down the hill further. On the water side, there's a tiny little white house. I don't even think it's a house. I thought it was a storage shed for lobster fishermen or something. There are hundreds of them here. That one isn't with the others.

I take off in a run. Fuck the rental. Fuck everything. I know he will be there. Halfway there I can't run anymore. My side has a stitch. I'm coughing. Ben catches up and tries to somehow lend support. He pushes a water bottle in my face and holds me still. I take a drink and then he motions that we go. There are no last minute instructions, there's no comfort I can give to him.

I am at the door now, it is weathered and unmarked.

And I don't even bother knocking, I just grab the knob and push.

Inside is a man sitting at a table fixing nets. But it isn't Jake and I don't know who it is and I ask him for Thom, and then I ask him for Jacob and he just shrugs and I ask him if he's blind and can't he talk out loud but Ben is pulling me back out and he pulls me all the way back up the hill to the truck and I am fighting him and crying and trying to get away. It must have looked amazing. City people.

Maybe she's being kidnapped.

Yeah, well, maybe she just lost her mind. Along with someone she loves so much it still hurts.

I tore that village upside down and I didn't find my Jake. I tore the neighboring ones up too and I went to places that looked like they might be places Jacob would go and I went to places that were nothing like places he would go, just in case and then Ben pulled me up the steps and onto the plane and we were home. Home where Caleb's lies unraveled once again, sending me in a different direction. Lochlan wasn't Ruth's father. Maybe Jacob isn't real anymore. Maybe I have become the game, and I don't like it. Not one bit.

Forty-eight hour vacations require forty-eight hour adventures. See you Tuesday afternoon!

Lead-lined lip gloss.

This morning sees Bridget poking one little black-stockinged foot out from inside her black cloud, testing the temperature, seeing if the fabric of the sky might hold her after a week of sunshine drove her inside in all her pink-tinged, sunburnt glory. Overwhelm choked off the smile and she frowned, retreating to the curtain from where she peeks out now, unsure, hesitant.

I see you.

You don't see me.

Oh, yes I do.

Well then what do I look like?

Like a beautiful scowl with legs.

Dammit, you do see me.

I told you so.

Stop looking!

But still she smiles slightly. A little light escapes from around the curtain itself, spilling into the black, turning it shades of saturated, nuclear grey. The smile threatens from behind the facade of grumpy, bringing hope and possibilities to petulant nonsense, the stuff of invisible problems and wow, to be in her shoes proclamations. She takes it to heart. All of it. Every last thing.

Her heart is huge and fractioned now, crammed full, up to the rafters. More space needs to be rented but nothing is suitable and so they turn and press their backs up against the bulk, pushing with their legs, shoving it in and then slamming the doors tightly, the lock threatening to burst open, bending metal, straining bolts until the squeeze liquifies solids and they begin to run down her sleeves. She wipes her little hands on her cloud and pretends she can't see her heart but it's there, and boy does that ever bring relief on a dark rainy day like today.

Red for the clown.

Sweetheart, sweetheart are you fast asleep? Good.
'Cause that's the only time that I can really speak to you.
And there is something that I've locked away
A memory that is too painful
To withstand the light of day.

Sitting on the edge of the cliff, the wind roaring through my head, it occurs to me that my lipstick, bright red for a fresh change, is not grabbing the long curling tendrils that have already worked their way loose from my ponytail like the candy-pink lipgloss usually does. But the mascara is hurting my brain. Due to an incredibly busy day on Ben's part, I'm only going to get about another twenty-minutes to see him today and I want to make that event a little nicer than the twenty-minutes we had this morning, me in my dog-walking clothes from yesterday, complete with the most incredible bed head you've possibly ever seen. He might have been horrified when he left, that's how amazing my hair was, but don't ask him about it because he is too busy to tell you one way or another anyway. He will not work on Victoria's birthday and I am looking forward to that with the uncanny grasp of someone swinging a thousand feet in the air without a net but only a hand up.

I am alternating between watching the sea and watching Lochlan practice. Take away this house and we would be circa 1984 right this moment. My stomach rumbles, and I have to look away every six minutes or so when the black dots start to dance in my eyes because the sun is directly behind him.

He is working on his farmer's tan. He won't ditch his shirt until the bitter end of this afternoon and then his pale Scottish skin will reflect the light like a mirror until at least mid-June. Then he will change, almost overnight into a toasted Virgo with blonde curls instead of red. I believe he might be the only shape-shifter in the group, come to think of it, and that's okay too. He looks good in his summer form. It's what I am used to most, I think.

He is using five batons now and I can feel the heat on the back of my head but I am afraid to look up in case he drops one on me and I burn to a little crisp on contact.

But he won't drop any. The second time he ever picked them up he dropped one and then he collected the errant one, said something to the effect of, oh, that's it, then and never made a mistake ever again.

I'm sure PJ and Daniel and Duncan, Gage, August and maybe New-Jake are all standing up in the kitchen at the window swearing blue streaks and cringing at this but someday maybe they'll stop that. Someday they will be used to it like I am. There's just such a huge gap between the show days and the now that this is still an incredible treat and it never bothers me that he practices right over my head. I was never allowed to stray very far from him, always sitting in front of him and a little to the right, so he could keep an eye on me while I daydreamed off steep ledges and into forbidden places, places where Lochlan's fire did little to push back the shadows.

It works now, mind you, but now is clearly too late.

Louis Vuitton at the thrift store.

(In spite of all of the changes in the past year financially, I still have an anticonsumerist (and minimalist) streak a mile wide.)

I popped into a few vintage, antique and thrift shops on my travels today. The only thing I bought was a set of teeny-tiny feng-sheeshish (NEW WORD) wooden primitive celestial mirrors for the children's bathroom upstairs and a honey pot. No, really. It's a little ceramic pot with a matching lid and the lid has a built-in honey dripper. It's perfect for when Ben and I have our late-evening tea and then I am forever not having to deal with sticky jars of honey from the cupboard.

But that isn't the cool part.

Oh no, the cool part was the Louis Vuitton handbag at the thrift store. That was freaking amazing. It was a black Multicolore Alma satchel, I believe. I don't even know what they retail for, I've never had the guts to actually go in to the store all the way. I like to loiter in the vestibule an awful lot though. In case I wind up liking something that costs more than my car, I should just stay out. Besides, I have issues with paying what things are worth, and that is why I top out at $25 for a lipgloss and $300 for a handbag. Not three thousand. Holy sweet Jesus.

I can't even believe I said that but in all honesty, I am not the one buying the handbags for myself. Ben is buying them for me, because he says I have spent enough years without anything nice. I'm sure that's a massive slight against the other boys I have dated/married/killed/maimed, but really the bags are SO PRETTY.

(The $25 gloss was a huge mistake anyway. It dried out my lips. FAIL.)

But anyways, there I am, perusing the shelves of goodies and I saw the Multicolore and I snatched it off the shelf and sort of squeeged a little but then I realized the condition of it was terrible. It was ruined, all of the piping broken, a huge hole in one corner and the inside lining was shredded. But it seemed to be real and I thought, maybe I should get it and then send it back to LV to have it repaired. Then I got with the program. Probably fake. How would *I* know? I don't know anything. I passed it to Daniel wordlessly. Daniel will know these things. He's gay! It's on the test!

Daniel's eyebrows went up to the roof and then beyond. Oh, Bridget, what do you have here?

I have no idea. Is it real?

I think it is. Just in case we should get it.

It's destroyed.

I'd carry a battered Louis Vuitton any day.

Then you buy it and it can be your manbag.

In the end we opted to leave it in the store. As far as I know it's still there, and if it's real someone gets a treat, if it's fake then someone got their money's worth! In any case, I was thrilled with my mirrors and the pot and I spent a whole $6.50.

***

A postscript to last night: I did not 'attack' my brother-in-law, I merely possibly lunged in his direction and Duncan was anticipating my every move so basically I was thwarted before I could even put together in my mind the damage I might do, which would be none at all. Caleb works out, I do not. I cannot high-five people so that they feel it. You only think I'm kidding.

I acted out of frustration. I don't get mad easily, and this was going too far. Don't think he didn't keep and then trot out that painting on purpose, oh no. Caleb is measuring out his revenge on me piecemeal. The only reason I was even there was because he invoked some clause in our custody arrangement that requires us to pre-approve the environments in which the children will be spending time in advance. I didn't think painting a room and moving some furniture qualified as a new environment but I am not the lawyer. I do have it duly written in my notes for when I do see my lawyer next so no worries.

And Ben brought the painting home with him last night. He asked Caleb very carefully if Caleb had any more pictures/paintings/surprises/bullshit to throw at me and Caleb, not surprisingly, said no. What, is he going to say yes with Ben breathing down his neck? I doubt it.

This is one piece I am happy to have. I don't have a place chosen for it to hang, however. PJ said he would like it for his bathroom. I said I was tired of being shit on. He said he would put it in the shower then. I didn't get that for just long enough to spent the entire rest of the evening at the wrong end of most of the jokes, just so you know. PJ is gross like that.

But she's back.

I'm back.

Yay.