Miscellaneous, etc.

I spent a good chunk of this weekend in Peterborough, on the road to Peterborough, or on the way back from Peterborough, which might make you think that there’s a lot that one can say on the subject of Peterborough, given the amount of time that I had invested in it.

There is, in fact, not a lot to be said. Peterborough is remarkably like every other Central Ontario university town you might come across. It is blessed with a cute, quaint little main street that features a healthy mix of slightly scary old businesses and hip little shops that cater to students. It offers cleaner air than the city, and a slightly more clear view of the stars at night. There are an awful lot more people around between the months of September and April, most of them attractive and unwashed, in that paradoxical way that university students have. The campus is yet another of the squat, concrete horrors carved into the face of Ontario during the university building booms of the 60s and 70s. There is a water tower, and… grass.

Yes, not much to be said.

We went up there to attend the Head of the Trent, an annual rowing regatta that’s run on the Otonabee river, which flows through the Trent University campus. Apparently more than two thousand participants show up to the races throughout the weekend, and more importantly, the entire campus is shit-faced hammered from Thursday night until Monday morning.

“This is the best weekend of the year,” said my friend Dave, who we met there. He sipped his beer as we stood out in one of the campus parking lots, surrounded by hundreds of students in varying states of toxicity. “Everyone gets out, has a great time, drinks loads of beer. The bars downtown are always packed from wall to wall.”

Sham and I nodded, impressed by the intensity of the partying.

“After that,” he added, “it sucks.”

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I went and bought a commemorative mug and complimentary drink ticket. It cost me about twelve bucks, and it was worth it to walk around outdoors with a beer, free of the usual government constraints against public alcohol consumption. It’s not actually that thrilling to drink outside, especially when all you’re wearing is a Gap football tee and the windchill is reducing the temperature to roughly 5 degrees Kelvin — only slightly above what it would take for all atomic motion in my body to cease completely — which does keep the beer cold, but also your soul.

Plus, you know how when you get up close to thirty, and you start feeling nostalgic for your university days and all the stuff you wish you’d done? Which in my case is “hang out with people more” and “date more women”? Actually attending a university event, or hanging out in a college town on a party weekend, is not going to help out with that. This is for a few key reasons:

1. Amazingly, seeing people anywhere from five to ten years younger than you, having more fun than you, does not help you feel more vibrant and youthful. Sure, you can go home and check your bank balance and feel better about life, but it isn’t going to help you right then.
2. You are old, and the university kids aren’t going to hang out with you.
3. The girls all look the same.

I don’t mean this in a discriminatory way, but if you go to an Ontario campus and walk behind five girls on their way to class from their dorm rooms, you’re going to have a hell of a time telling them apart. Scrunchies, greasy hair, sweat pants and tee shirts have a habit of blurring all together. Maybe things are different on pub night — when they’re all wearing tank tops, hip-hugger jeans and sandals — but somehow I don’t think so. It’s challenging to revisit your vigorous collegiate sex drive when you can’t remember what was so alluring about college girls to begin with.

I wasn’t alone.

“This is… this is kind of boring,” Glenn said to me, catching up to us after he was chatting with some old friends. Glenn is an actual Peterborough resident, about as easygoing a guy as you could meet. He’s like a combination of Little John, in that he towers over me and is good-hearted, and Will Scarlett, in that he is a redhead and has a cool goatee. He slept through the majority of the recent flooding in Peterborough, and was getting ready to go to work when someone called and told him the office was flooded. He played XBox all day, instead. Such is Glenn’s powerful mellowness.

“I mean,” he went on, “I’ve talked to everyone I would want to talk to, plus some other people that I didn’t really want to talk to. And now it’s kinda dull.”

And then something miraculous happened. We left — no, not that, that’s hardly miraculous, though I think God must have intervened to keep my body temperature above sixty degrees — and ended up back at Glenn’s apartment, watching movies and playing Top Spin tennis. Dave, Chris, Glenn and I smoked Dominican cigars on his back deck, chatting about work and plans and apartments, blowing smoke in lazy white clouds that shone in the dark. We ordered pizza, a lot of it, and watched it go from hot and gooey to cold and solid in the evening chill.

When none of us could take any more smooth, smooth Dominican flavor, we went back downstairs to join the girls while they watched X2, talking about whether Cyclops or Wolverine was hotter. And while I listened to the girls agree that yes, in fact, Wolverine was hotter, I had a clear little moment. Yeah, we weren’t out getting hammered alongside the university students; no, I was not enjoying the same energetic alcoholism and ass-gropery that was likely transpiring on dance floors across Peterborough.

But!

But I didn’t really want to. I wasn’t disappointed. I found that I wasn’t even looking forward to it. I had more fun making a late night grocery store run, raiding the 24-hour Sobey’s for cookies and Fruit Gummies, expressing genuine hurt and outrage at the lack of Cool Ranch Doritos that I had sworn I would bring back for Dave. I got more enjoyment out of winning at Top Spin tennis. I let out more stress by periodically choking on cigar smoke.

And I can credit it all to my old friends. Even the newest of the people in that apartment are ones I’ve known for a couple of years; at the longest, I’ve known some of them since high school, which I was terrified to learn was 10 years ago this fall. We know how to irritate each other, and crack each other up, and avoid each other when we’re being stupid, and go on tiny adventures when we’re in the right mood. We have a shared history that goes way back, and reminds me of how valuable all of my old friends — those I saw this weekend, those I see every day, those I don’t get to see much at all — really are.

That doesn’t mean I always win when I stack my life up against that of, say, an unshaven first year university student hanging out with a bunch of easy dorm chicks; however, it does make me feel better. You can’t really have old friends when you’re nineteen, because you haven’t been around long enough to have any — and even if you’ve got some, there’s a good chance that when they hit grade twelve, they are definitely not the same people that you knew in grade six.

Me, here, at twenty-seven, I’m starting to realize the benefits of old friends. I’ve got a litany of sordid stories and a library of inside jokes. I’ve got dramas. I’ve got secrets and embarrassments and triumphs. I’ve got moments to be proud of, when I can say I was a good friend; I’ve got moments to be grateful for, when I can say I have had good friends to help me. It feels like an accomplishment, even though I don’t know how I managed it, aside from dumb good luck. It’s something I’ve built, either by accident or design, and of all places on earth, I realized that in Peterborough.

Which I guess means that there really is a lot to say about it.