The Lost Canadian
Author's Note: The following was written as part of my new writing group, “Just Fucking Publish It Fridays”, as an exercise to rescue the Mage of Aquarius Substack from stagnation by creating an atmosphere of support for eclectic writers. Originally established as a Twitter group chat, with plans to eventually expand to Discord with weekly cowriting group calls, I've been inspired and impressed by how much this group has already accomplished despite my glacial pace of work lately, and plan to reach out via Substack chat this weekend to see if any subscribers would be interested in joining.
The first draft was written entirely free of AI, and only lightly edited based on ChatGPT 5.4’s suggestions for the 2nd and 3rd pass.
Epistemic Status: Memoir
The spring equinox and Easter promise the end of winter and the beginning of spring, but the weather in Alberta is as erratic and unpredictable as usual. As we begin edging into the thawing warmth, sudden downpours of snow in the day or evening can be gone, entirely melted, by noon after the next day's sunrise. As I look at my closet and reflect upon the seasons, I'm forced to recollect a themed outfit that I had bought and planned out for Vibecamp 3 that I never wound up wearing, the pieces of which remain scattered in various places in my closet or wardrobe. The outfit I had planned even had a name in my mind, "The Lost Canadian."
The outfit consisted of an iridescent purple-blue shimmering spring/fall jacket and matching set of snowpants, purple shimmery lingerie-style rave top and undergarments with matching gloves, ombre "mog" style sunglasses and a tiny white cotton COVID mask with the Canadian flag printed on it.
Originally purchased on Amazon, the jacket was relatively reasonably priced but cheaply made, and now has grooves worn in the fabric around the arms where my backpack's straps have rendered it threadbare. I could purchase another, but you can't really see how worn it is when I'm holding my arms at my sides anyways.
The snowpants and lingerie were both grotesquely upmarked to such a degree that I don't really care to think too much about it anymore, but will gladly point to as evidence that I wasn't in my right mind at the time I purchased them. The snowpants I bought under the impression that they were similar to rave pants, but upon their arrival I immediately realized that they were literal snowboarding pants, insulated on the inside. While they've proven to be a godsend walking the half hour into town for harsh -30 degree Celsius Canadian winters, they were wildly inappropriate for Vibecamp.
As was most of the outfit, if I'm being honest. I briefly considered wearing it anyways, thinking it would fit the whole theme, but wasn't really prepared for how sweltering in summer Philadelphia actually was. The subsequent fallout from the events of Vibecamp 3 would have me questioning what I was thinking, and I endured waves of bizarre onslaughts of shame about picking such skimpy clothing. The truth was that I wasn't really thinking at all, beyond wanting to express myself at an event that I had mistook for a Burning Man-style Dionysian-inspired party. What I got was far different, which were more in the line of restrained introverts, parceled out into their cliques, studiously practicing normal socialization and vaguely HR-reminiscent "fun" bonding activities and performances. This stuffy state of affairs during the day were punctuated by drug-and-alcohol-fueled nights from which I felt wildly alienated. I was severely stressed, dissociated, and not really sober for any of it, and the events leading up to the event had left me feeling confused, exploited, shameful, disoriented and exposed.
Which explained the outfit choice. "The Lost Canadian." The COVID mask, unfortunately, was misplaced early somewhere on the journey there, which stopped me pulling the trigger on the rest of the outfit as it no longer made sense, if the weather on it's own hadn't. The name of the outfit itself became an extension of my autopoetic alternate reality game, which proved to be a little bit too effective, a little bit too uncanny, a little bit too real for comfort and thus, doomed before it ever really achieved open beta. As was true of many aspects of the performance art that constituted the crossroads between the real and the digital of the game world that I would be playing out (sometimes on levels that I didn't fully understand or wasn't entirely conscious of) "The Lost Canadian" became instant vaporware, a statement on alienation lent by the forbidden themes of the self-authoring narrative it explored.
When I put on the individual remaining pieces of the outfit, I feel an inescapable sense of melancholy-tinted nostalgia. But unlike the ways I dealt with disappointment in my youth, I haven't sought to scrub every trace of Vibecamp or tpot from my identity or the hard lessons that I learned through them. Knowing the person I'm becoming requires me to own those lessons and how they brought me to where I am today. Still deeper within my heart resides the knowledge that the Game hasn't truly ended. The Game is infinite.