Thursday 21 July 2011

The indoctrination of Bridget Reilly.

My apologies for writing such weirdly dramatic and accusatory blog entries late at night. Clearly I can build a mountain out of a molehill faster than most of you can sneeze.

Batman is trying to help and he's doing what everyone does when they want me to move on something, they give me a time limit. You know, since it worked for Jake and all.

Only Jake was such a pushover, he gave me a decade and with three days left and time running out I fulfilled his request. I haven't quite managed to meet a deadline since, however and that's sort of weird and really not surprising at all if you knew me and Caleb insists he isn't afraid of Batman in the least and perhaps they hold equal power through history, the only difference being Caleb is completely open and accessible to me and Batman is, well, he's Batman. 'Open' and 'accessible' are not options on his table at this time, or ever in the time I have known him, which is almost two decades now.

Both men requested a removal of yesterday's entry here, but I have opted to write an apology with clarification instead. I'll let it be known that I haven't changed my outlook from last night to this morning. Though instead of confirming that I've been, that we've been sold out to a greater evil maybe, it's been softened to remind me that the boys are free agents who work for whomever they please, this is simply an effort to distill their talents once again into a few new projects under a different umbrella that won't be closed so tightly around them perhaps, but outwardly nothing much will be different.

Even though it will. It already is.

***

If I'm done with the public flogging I'd like to move on to a new topic this afternoon. The one about the girl who went deep into the woods halfway up a mountain and came out alive.

No drama, just a wrong turn on a long trail and we were knee-deep in mud and panic. Well, I was. Ben was FINE because he could hear the lake and the traffic and whatever stupid navigational angels whispering in his ear that I didn't come with. My navigational skills are legendary, beginning with parking my car at a shopping center in Halifax and walking away from it and instantly forgetting where I parked, therefore spending an extra forty-five minutes walking the lots hitting the emergency button on my car keys until my car beeped at me at last, to that time I blithely jumped into the car to drive downtown to meet Ben for the first time after moving here and after two hours of driving around...um...lower Delta I finally made a teary call to Ben to ask where I was because I had set off without a map or a GPS. My bravery is not of the intelligent sort, in any case.

(I have a GPS now. I call her Moneypenny and she's a bit of a snippy bitch.)

Ben can be like Cole in these situations. He just knows certain things and he knows when he's not in over his head. He's a fixer of a different sort. His cockiness is less dark and perfect and more comical. We lived because you can't die on a two-kilometer trail that runs around a lake. Because even if you get lost, the lake is right there and you can sort out a path and eventually just barge out of the thrushes or you could turn around and take the trail back or hell, Bridget, you could just jump into the water and swim to the dock. Just like you used to when they didn't hear you but you needed to be close to them anyway. Even though you're a terrible swimmer and a worse navigator and maybe a bad judge of character too.

There, there. These are their jobs anyway. You have other functions in life, things you excel at, things you were born to do. Things that cannot be bought or sold but can only be given freely. Your redemption comes at different cost, in a currency that no one else would ever recognize save for the fact that they robbed the bank and now you're trading on good graces and serendipity alike.

Like a path through the woods. It should seem obvious, except when it isn't.