The following is a piece of fictional non-fiction by Ryan Stromquist. Illustrations provided by Brett Rieger.
Carpe Diem wasn’t just my motto, it was an ideal to aspire to. Like that rock scream falsetto that falls a little short, I was the AC/DC of seizing the day. Thus, the difficulty of my adolescence: we want so badly to be what we say we are (Magnum condoms turn a profit, after all) that we use quick-setting cement to glue the masks on. So, when I say I wasn’t into having my picture taken, it went a little farther than your run-of-the-mill hubris. I didn’t just cover my face, I made sure my baby photos went “missing,” I gave the family albums to the neighbour’s Rottweiler, and I carried around a fake French mustache anytime I smelled the approaching Saskatoon Berry smelling yearbook committee walking towards me. As it turns out, the mercury poisoning that is love was finally able to cure my irrational distaste for photography.
I was 18, and just starting to come out of my fog of idiocy (otherwise known as being a 17 year old). She was 25, suave, and had literally accomplished everything I had ever wanted to do in my life (though, at 18 that wasn’t much). We lived in a 40’ x 12’ trailer in Midfield Mobile Home Park in Calgary. While drinking a Cherry Coke and Pina Colada flavoured Slurpee that was swimming in four fingers of Alberta Premium, I was busying myself trying to find room for my collection of pleather flared pants when I opened a closet in a hallway that was devoted to housing her thousand or so Polaroids. She kept the photos in those cardboard boxes you get from buying a two-four of Black Label. The Polaroids had no dates and nothing written on them, save for the occasional, “Hey Charity, same time next year?”
I remember holding this photograph in my hand and thinking, I have nothing to show her. Nothing for anyone to know that I once caught a full bottle of beer with my foot without spilling a drop. No evidence of the time I threw a tennis ball filled with 500 match-heads at a brick wall and had it bounce back and explode all over me–other than the scars. It was then that I decided to make a change. I started taking pictures of everything. I’d take blurred shots of album covers and invert the colours, I took macro shots of various cracks in the sidewalk, but mostly I just took shots of my friends–all the time–which was decidedly uncool. We wanted to be Rock N’ Rollers, which meant living in the moment not documenting it. Interestingly, Rock and Roll would become the historical markings of our lives. Appetite for Destruction, an album I bought twice (once from wearing it out in my 97’ GMC Caravan), was, I thought, my middle finger to mainstream society. Now it’s an auto-skip in my playlist; it is, after all, the clearest photograph I have. Little did I know that mine and society’s middle fingers look peculiarly similar when they’re raised in solidarity.
I’ve never had a great memory, but I often try to remember the zeitgeist of that Rock N’ Roll attitude from my youth without feeling embarrassment (I’m still working on that). I usually do pretty well at remembering the smells of the leather jackets and cigarettes, but then the pang of regret hits like an over-sized pill stuck in a dry throat. I used to think my musical tastes were diverse; after all, I listened to B-Side tracks on obscure Jethro Tull and Uriah Heep albums. But that choking feeling comes when I remember making fun of a friend for listening to Townes Van Sandt. What kind of idiot makes fun of someone for listening to one of the greatest song-writers to have ever lived? Carpe Diem.
In the office across from mine is an accounting firm’s office. We share a washroom between the two offices, and when I walked into the washroom one day, this guy was talking on the phone in the can. At first I was disgusted (does he wash the phone after?), then I started thinking that this guy was a real Rock n’ Roller. I mean here he is, knowing full well that someone’s going to walk in on him in the can and he’s just like, “Screw it. Man’s gotta make a phone call.” I took a picture of the bathroom stall door to recount the memory. Carpe Diem good sir. Carpe Diem.