A Delight in Disorder

1:
You know what the problem with the artificial trees is? I asked my mother; who nevertheless had turned her artificial tree at her city home into a creation worthy of Christmas Magazine, resplendent dim white lights and ribbons of muted silver and deep burgundy and dangling clear glass baubles that caught the light and refracted the shape of the evenly green boughs beneath, and constructed yet again with not one gaudy or out-of-place decoration. The problem is that these trees are too perfect; they lack the character of real trees because of the fact that they take all the best qualities of a tree and they smooth them and they sharpen them. And they give you a tree of a perfect shape and a tree with even branches and a tree that will never tip because it has been calibrated and balanced by a computer in a wind tunnel.

Compare this with the tree that we had at the farm, a real tree that we wrapped up with a string of multicoloured lights and that we decorated with every loose bauble and completely tasteless knick-knack we dredged out of the garbage bags and crumbling boxes we rummaged up from the basement. This tree had a top so uneven that the angel tumbled off continually and finally we gave up and left it sitting halfway down the branches, upside down, and who gives a shit? The tree was so uneven that three times in fell right over on some unsuspecting toddler who broke out in a wail of horror from beneath its prickly branches and finally we took a long rope and lashed the tree to the ceiling.

Yes for all of this, I think that the practice of chopping down a tree just to have it sit in the parlour for a week before it is thrown into the street or burned in the fire is a foolish waste and I wish someone would make an artificial Christmas tree that was as defective and unwieldy as a real tree but that could be reused year after year while leaving the real trees to grow in the woods so they could keep on cleaning the air and providing places for animals to nest and helping the soil stick to the ground and all the things real trees do that fake trees don’t.

But who would ever buy a fake tree that was advertised as being effectively defective in certain ways? This tree is guaranteed to fall over on your child at least once. This tree is specifically designed so that your Christmas star will fall off the top of it no matter what you do to keep it up there. This tree has been made with uneven looking branches and bald patches. This tree has special fall off needles that you will keep finding around your house until next July.

I realise that I am projecting a kind of third person effect onto the Christ-masses by thinking that they want anything other than the real deal or a Stepford tree but you have to at least admit that the marketing logistics for an imperfect fake tree would be complicated.

Case in point:
Consider these websites offering “realistic” artificial trees.

http://www.balsamhill.com/Artificial-Christmas-Trees-s/1.htm

http://www.treeclassics.com/

These trees are only realistic in the neo-classical sense of the word. They are obviously inspired by their counterparts in nature, but the human compulsion to make a tree out of all the best elements takes over every time and what we end up with is the Platonic ideal of a tree as it might have been painted by Valenciennes.

2:
Speaking of Stepford, I suppose a similar thing is happening in the world of robotics, as it converges with the world of artificial sex dolls, and you might have been noticing the number of new robots that look like attractive young women. I got a kick out of this article in the Globe and Mail last week:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081223.CROSBIE23/TPStory/?query=robot

I wonder how the imperfect woman android would be marketed? The not so compliant woman with enough personality to fill the Great Lakes Basin. The one who would hog the sheets and snore and one who would refuse to make love to you if you hadn’t had a bath for a few days and the one who would not necessarily answer the phone, even is she knew it was you, because she was in the middle of something and she didn’t want to be interrupted and the one who frankly liked having armpit hair and didn’t give a damn what you thought about that and the one who was like no one else you had ever met and the one that you had to work for months and for years to convince her that you loved her for real and that this was a good thing and the one who tested you intellectually and physically and the one who drove you nuts sometimes because it seemed that she had three personalities and only two of them liked you and the one who, if you offended her, she would not speak to you for weeks or would have enough dignity to never speak to you again and the one who didn’t mind crying sometimes and the one who wanted you to be there for her sometimes not just the other way around and the one who only put as much love into the relationship as you did. That’s the robot I’d line up for.

Show Business part I.

(written in 2001)

After coming come late and going to bed feeling like shit, I was awakened at 10:30am by a telephone call from my friend Sion. Sion’s friends were shooting for a film that day, he wanted me to come and be an extra on the set.

“It’s at some place called the Reverb Room, have you ever heard of this place?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.” My eyes full of snot, my mouth stinking and dry, unshaven, the sunlight causing me to press my face back into my pillow, I cradled the phone against my head and replied in a cracked voice.

“It will be really great, they’re shooting a scene where the lady (she’s a dominatrix/poet in this film) reads some of her poetry live to an audience. There’s free food, cold cuts, it’ll be really cool…well ok, not cool, but I think you’ll have a good time.”

“Arrgh.” I said.

“All you have to do is be a guy in the audience, you can just sit at a table and relax, have a couple of beers, you know.”

“They don’t have any tables at the Reverb.”

“Well you can stand up and have a beer.”

“Fine.” I said. Apparently they were shooting from 2pm until six, so I told Sion I’d be there at two, ready to be filmed.

At 2:51pm Sion called and woke me again, and asked me if I was coming or not. I told him that I had assumed that this was a massive production, and that they didn’t really need me there, but he was adamant that I should come, and I felt kind of like a dickhead for just going back to sleep so I said I would come for sure this time.

There were a few complications. I was out of toothpaste, and I thought I could squeeze a little more out if I cut the tube in half and scooped out some with my brush, but then I couldn’t find a cutting implement suitable and finally I settled on a hacksaw. After that I didn’t feel much like grooming, so I left as I was and went to the Reverb.

When I got there, Sion was just about to leave. He showed me the cold cuts, but they looked pretty nasty: all that curled up ham hidden in a dark corner begging to be laid on a white Kaiser bun and swallowed down between mouthfuls of iceberg salad with orange plastic French dressing.

Sion introduced me to a few people. They seemed nice. He told some lady with a clip board that I was a famous actor.

“Really?” She asked, seeming to believe it.

“Oh yeah,” I told her, “I’m like the biggest star there is.”

Then Sion departed. God love him, he’s my oldest friend, but he left me at the mercy of all these makeup people who dragged me off to their makeup zone because they felt they had to powder me up for whatever it was that they intended me to do.

There were a lot of people in the makeup area who were madeup, looking very artificial with all the gunk they had on their skin. These people were talking in loud voices about how fabulous they were. One girl was talking about how good looking she was, and another guy was talking about all the photo-shoots he had worked on. I guessed that these people were the actors. The makeup lady sat me down on a stool, and made a few comments about how messy my hair was. I told her I’d just gotten up, and that her hair spray had better not mess with my salon perfected do. That apparently wasn’t a funny show-business type joke though, because she didn’t laugh.

Some more people with clip boards and headsets came up to me from out of the tangle of cameras and bodies on the audience floor. One asked me if I was the bartender. I told her I had no idea. Another came up to me and said they needed the back of my head. I told her that was fine, I never used it. Also not funny. Someone wanted to know if I was the big star that Sion had been talking about.

After this they all more or less ignored me for a while. They started shooting scenes where various poets got on stage and read their poetry to the imaginary crowd. It was some of the worst poetry I’d ever heard in my life. It sounded exactly they way you’d expect poetry to sound if it were written by a screen writer. I tried to read a bit of Apvlei Metamorphosen, which I had brought with me, thankfully, but the actors had the microphone, and so I didn’t make much progress.

At one point I looked up and this truly lovely girl, with long blonde hair, was staring back at me from the makeup chair. She looked away though when I looked at her, so I went back to my book. She started talking to the makeup people about how she was going to be appearing in a pop tart commercial.

This went on for a while, but my interest in stardom was waning quickly, so I got up out of my seat, put on my coat and walked off the set, down the steps of the Reverb, and out onto Queen Street, which looked much the same as it had before I became a big shot movie star.

Walking down Queen towards Spadina, I started to feel pretty bad. I mean, I didn’t give a fuck about the movie, but I felt kind of like I was letting Sion down. He really was trying to get things to happen for the people making that flick, and I suppose the least I could have done was stick around and make good on my commitment. But then I though about how much I hate being photographed, how much I hate stage make up, how much I hate actors. I though of how very little I had to do with those people, and I decided that I would go do something else instead.

I went up to College and Spadina and looked to see if the Mongolian Buffet was open, but it was not. I felt like shit. I got on the street car and rode back to Coxwell and then I went into the supermarket.

The girl working the cash was the one who is such a fan of Robbie Burns, or so she claims. I quoted Afton Waters to her and she gave me a smile, that made the day worthwhile. I don’t know how Burns read or was read in his day, but I feel certain that if he were in my place he would be equally unwilling to get himself tangled up in a low budget Canadian film.

A lot of people are waiting for their big break, a lot of people are dying for exposure. A lot of people are busting their asses so that they can become recognized by the general public, and so that they can live by the fruits of their artistic accomplishments.

I think this is noble, in its way. I would far rather live by art than by any manner of unrelenting physical labour, or by the clock in an office tower, dressed in a suit, and wading through stacks of paper. I don’t know if I ever shall, but that is another story.

The one thing I fear, though, is undying recognition. They say that if one wishes for immortality, one must live on in the minds of the following generations. This seems to me to be the worst sort of delusion. To be remembered is to leave a trace of yourself that takes too long to erase, too long to be reabsorbed into oneness. To be forgotten allows one to become nothing, to return freely to the basic and infinite matter of the cosmos. Indeed, to live forever, is to never exist.

Review of Barbarella (a classic revivied)

Clearly Barbarella is intended to titillate its audience, but one thing which struck me even through this was the odd symbolism of each of Barbarella’s four sexual encounters. In the interests of clarity, I imagine the four sexual encounters to be: on the frozen lake, with Marcan, in the Labyrinth, with Pygar, in the secret headquarters with Dildano, and in the Excessive Machine, controlled by Duran Duran. I do not include The great tyrant’s encounter with Pygar, nor the prospective menage a trois which ends the film, as both of these are encounters unrealized within the experience of the audience, and I believe that the depiction of Barbarella’s orgasmic state is intended by Vadim to evoke in the audience a sort of catharsis, and this orgasmic state is only visible after the four above mentioned encounters.

In these encounters there are other common themes, but no theme seems universal to all beyond the orgasmic state—and even this is questionable in the episode with Dildano. In the first three sexual gratification is awarded in return for the rescue of the protagonist from mortal danger, yet in the fourth it is the reverse, and it is through being put into mortal danger that Barbarella is gratified.

The main issues to consider, however, are the symbolic possibilities of the characters with whom Barbarella has intercourse, and the creatures from whom she has just escaped in order to have intercourse. I suggest that there is a reverse parallelism between the attacker and the rescuer which plays out through the film imbibing it with a very pleasant symmetry.

Consider the first encounter, with Marcan. Barbarella has just been rescued from an attacking horde of mechanized dolls, controlled by wild children who live on the frozen lake. Following this, Marcan compels Barbarella to make love to him in his sail ship. Marcan is more beast than man, dressed all in furs, he prefers life on the edge of civilization. When Marcan removes his furs it is seen that he is as furry underneath as is his dress. At the end of the encounter, Barbarella dresses herself in skins, but she soon discards them and changes into the white costume necessary to meet the blind angel Pygar.

In the second encounter, Barbarella is rescued from a Leather Man by Pygar. I imagine this to be a symbolic progression on the part of Barbarella because she has gone from making love to a beast-man in skins to being attacked by a creature that is composed of nothing but skins (in this case leather), to making love to an angel, clearly intended as a bird symbol as well by the fact that the act is consummated in a nest above the Labyrinth. Whereas the first encounter was a liberation for Barbarella from her Earth set ways of having sex only by taking a pill and then clasping hands, the second encounter—while clearly as orgasmic as the first—is more of a liberation for Pygar who suddenly regains his ability to fly, and thus carries Barbarella up to the city.

The rescue from death comes a good deal before the encounter between the rescuer and the rescued. Duran Duran intervenes when the Magmus is about to consume Barbarella, although he alleges that it is on behalf of the Great Tyrant. Duran Duran places Barbarella into a cage full of vampire parakeets at the behest of the Great Tyrant, and Barbarella is rescued by Dildano. Thus we see that another symbolic progression has taken place. Barbarella has gone from making love to a bird creature to being attacked by birds, and she is rescued by a human being.

Everything about Dildano, however is false. His machines do not work, his henchmen are utterly inept, and even the name Dildano implies, clearly, an object which is a replacement for the genuine article. Dildano is a dildo in every sense of the word. It is not surprising, then, that when it comes time for the sexual act to take place, Dildano insists that it be done as it is done on Earth, with a pill, and holding hands, but without under any circumstances penetrating. Barbarella is not pleased by the idea, as she has grown much fonder of the old style of making love, but the consents none the less.

The scene of the orgasm is a funny one, at first Barbarella seems to be taking some pleasure from the act—her hair even goes curly—but then she is distracted by a man entering the room, and from this point on she seems to have little interest in the act, actually breaking the contact with Dildano at one point and carrying on a conversation with the man who has entered the room.

Following the encounter with Dildano, Barbarella again meets up with Duran Duran who takes her and places her in the Excessive Machine. In this case the symbolic progression is from a sexual encounter with a human being to being captured by a human being, and in a sense rescued by a machine even though this machine is intended to kill her through excessive orgasmic pleasure.

It should be noted at this point, as well, that the symbolic progression is also from the half creature to the full as the lover becomes the attacker. Marcan for example is only half skins, but the Leather Men are all skin; they are the absolute symbol of the beast archetype for when they are blown apart there is nothing recognizable to life inside them, no organs, or flesh; they are simply the skin, the thing which becomes a symbol of power when slain, but becomes a symbol of fear when its mortality is removed from it.

Pygar is only half bird, he has the wings and the nest and the flight, but he is not truly a bird in any sense. A parakeet is clearly a bird. Dildano is hardly a man, he does not know how to make love, he is not actually from Earth, and if I may be so bold, no self respecting man would ever wear brown leather underpants with a cape.

Duran Duran, however is all man. He is an ex-astronaut, a citizen of earth, and unlike Dildano, all his machines do what they are supposed to (though he never expected to meet the power of Barbarella). Duran Duran even captures Barbarella at a place where women sit and smoke “essence of man”. This is the masculine overpowering the feminine in every aspect. It is even the case that like the Biblical Moses, Duran Duran has been aged by his exposure to the ruling power of his planet: the Magmus. In every sense, though, Duran Duran is an anti Moses figure for, unlike Dildano who wishes to liberate his people, Duran Duran seeks the role of the pharaoh: to enslave, and he has in his power a plague his gun which can send people to the fourth dimension, never to return. Like the pharaoh, however, hubris consumes Duran Duran in the end, and he and everything he desires are swallowed up by the Magmus, but back to the point.

The fourth encounter is also with a being that is only half of what it seems to be. For while it is described as a machine which can cause death, it proves to be unable to cause death. The dolls, the Leather Man, and the parakeets, and certainly the Magmus all can kill if given the opportunity, but the Excessive Machine can not. It blows apart, leaving Barbarella totally satisfied. It is also only half and half, because while it acts as an attacker, it also acts as a lover.

Thus a certain circle has been completed. I imagine it as something of a psychic journey for while Barbarella in ever other case is not able to reconcile herself to that part of her former lover which is not like herself, in this case she suddenly embraces the complete unknown and but this act is able to complete herself. The mechanical dolls that attacked her at the beginning now become the warm pleasures of the organ and Barbarella has become a complete individual. Witness the fact that she and her opposite: the Great Tyrant are able to become one by the end, carried off into the heavens by the same angel, like two sides of a soul which have been searching and have suddenly found each other.

Künstlerroman:

I killed more sensitive plants than I care to mention when I was a child and only because I could never stop myself from running my fingers over their tiny fern-like leaves whenever I caught them open in my window sill and so maybe they just didn’t get enough light because they were always curled up into themselves when I was near and my fingers were out or maybe it was because they were just touched too much and sometimes every living thing just needs a little time in solitude or maybe it was that I didn’t give them enough water or too much or maybe they are just difficult plants to keep but anyway one by one the sensitive plants I had in my window sill all died. And every time I went back to my grandparent’s place in Goodwood and we’d pass the nursery I’d heave my hand sweaty pennies up to the counter and cart another victim out to the car with its tiny stalks bobbing in the sunshine over the gravel parking lot and then I’d carry it home in my lap, touching the leaves and watching them scrunch up in horror and then uncurl and I’d touch them again and they’d scrunch up in horror.

Goodwood was the world to me in those days, and not just because I got the sensitive plants there, but the ten acres my grandparents had, and the house on it designed board by board by my grandfather to be exactly the place he always wanted to live, was more than enough to contain me and the machinations of my mind when I wanted to go one on one with nature. There were three small pinewoods planted in the dirty thirties and now the long shady rows of conifers with their brown needle beds loomed over me as I crept along the soft prickly ground between the chickadee’s songs and the terrified toads and the woods gave way to long stretches of grass here and there and an apple orchard that I never got to see come to maturity and the old oak tree under which my parents married and then at the very far end of the property, over a rusted cow fence with its ancient wires still twisting up out of the mud was the conservation area; my passage into it marked by an abandoned car with an old curved roof that someone must have abandoned forty years before and now nothing was left by oxidized metal and animal shit stabbing up out of the grass and beyond this the deep woods with scattered stretches of fallen leaf piles studded with odd coloured mushrooms and moss covered rocks as daunting as mountains when I climbed over them and now and then if I was careful and quiet enough a deer would pass me silently, suddenly putting up its head and bounding away into the underbrush as it caught my scent on the wind.

And now’s its all gone, as far as I know, and on one side the old farmer, who used to bring us fresh eggs and who put up a big billboard in is back field, overlooking the highway, to let everybody know that Jesus was the truth and the way, and on one side the old farmer, whose fields full of corn used to tilt up over my grandparent’s land, is gone now and whatever he made in this life is covered over by a subdivision and it’s filled with commuters and flat screen televisions and manicured streets and on the other side it’s the same and beyond that there’s a gravel pit and you can probably hear the trucks constantly grinding gravel up out of the soil and carting it away to wherever gravel is most needed and so now and, as far as I know, everything is gone but I know each one of us who knew the place is still trying to hold onto it in one way or another and in some ways we’re building new dream worlds and in other ways the past is still slowing our steps like we were always trying to walk forward in heavy mud and not tip.

And eventually I gave up on sensitive plants and I moved on to other things but then a funny thing happened to me one time while I was traveling in Southern India. I stayed for two months or three months or more at this village in the South, up in the mountains and one day (it was Christmas day in fact, 1992) a man who lived there, Ravichandran decided to take me with him on a trip. We switched busses a few times and waited for hours in different stations and I remember I was singing Christmas carols on the bus and everyone was looking at me like a madman because no one had any idea about Christmas and they didn’t care about it and at one bus station I remember that at one moment while Ravichandran was off at the toilets or some such thing there was a woman who came up to the window of the bus and I thought she was going to beg but instead she presented her child to me, a child of no more than four or five years old, as I was looking down at them from out of the open bars of the bus window and she lay her child down on the red mud and the child put a piece of wood over his belly and then the mother counted to three and stepped up on the piece of wood on the child’s belly and then stood there playing a tiny tin drum with a pair of broken sticks and singing a slightly unpleasant folk melody. Under the mother’s feet the child grimaced, clearly in some amount of pain. The mother then moved onto the next part of the show, stepping back and forth over the child’s belly while performing some kind of dance and after a few agonizing minutes the show was over and the mother put her cupped hand up to the window, asking to be paid for the show and I refused. It was the worst performance I have ever seen.

After this, in the evening time, we arrived at the place we were destined to go. The last part of the trip was through a stunning and at the same time nerve-rackingly twisted climb up through the jungle on our rickety bus with great and primeval slashes cut out of the earth on one side full to the brim with countless treetops and above us on the other side rose further cliff faces and we kept climbing and climbing through out the darkening day with oncoming traffic swerving round us on the thin road and film music blasting continuously on the buses loudspeaker. Look here, said Ravichandran, do you see this spot? One time ten elephants died here all at once, and he pointed to a high cliff on the other side of the canyon. They were walking along the cliff’s edge, and holding each other’s tails, or so I was told, and thus when one slipped they all lost they footing and down they went. Their corpses are still down there under the broken trees, he told me.

And finally we came to the hill station where we planned to stay and we had just settled in for tea when an ex lover of Ravichandran’s arrived and she was the last person in the world he wanted to see and her husband, who had travelled with her, was the next last and we all got drunk and tried to forget about it and they tried to make me do a little song and dance routine and I refused because I found it humiliating that they laughed at me and then when I went in my room I found that there was a lizard in there that must have been four feet long and chased it all around the room trying to get it out the door and I swung at it with a broom and it bounded up the sides of the walls and fell back down again like a terrified spider trapped in a bathtub with the water rising and finally it found the door and bounded out into the purple dusk and, why were you attacking that lizard? Ravichandran asked me. I wanted it out. Well it is one of the most poisonous animals in India, he said. And after all this, with everyone feeling tense, we all went to bed angry, and the general sense was that the day had been a complete disaster.

The, the next day, with the sun just making its way over the tops of the green hills I stepped out from my room and walked barefoot across the still dewy ground with the air crisp and blanket wrapped around my shoulders. When I looked down at the earth I realised that the entire ground was over grown with sensitive plants, they grew here wild, and they spread flat in ever direction and when I looked behind me I saw that the plants had closed up in the shape of my footprints, recording my passage forward in time and as I stood watching the plants slowly opened up again to the sun and with that my footsteps vanished.

Old Ms. Bishop

‘Twas minus seventeen the day
that old Ms. Bishop came to stay.
A relict in a long black cloak,
who often scowled, and rarely spoke.
Her bony fingers fiercely seized
the handle of her black valise.
“What’s in that case?” The children cried,
as old Ms. Bishop stepped inside.
“Why, in this bag I keep my strap,
so watch your step, or I shall snap
this tar dipped switch upon your hides.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” The children cried.
From her bag she pulled a paper:
“Your wise parents signed this waiver.”
To which the children sulked: “We’ll sue,
and that will be the last of you.
You’ll expire in a dungeon,
if you ever try to bludgeon
even one of our precious pates,
our lawyers will retaliate!”
Ms. Bishop’s blood began to steam,
her face turned white, then red, then green.
“Impertinence!” Ms. Bishop yelped,
“I’ll have to learn you little whelps.
I conferred with your lawyers, too,
and they consent that I’m right to
go with your parents given leave
to thrash your bottoms ‘till you bleed
if ever it pops in your head
to skip your prayers before your bed,
or if you ratiocinate
to leave food on your dinner plate,
or if I find your shoes are dull,
I’ll gladly split your ruddy skulls,
and suck your brains out for a snack,
now run and play—while I unpack.”
And with this she trudged up the stairs,
and left the children in despair.
The children wept, and cried, and sobbed:
“Our parents advertised this job
widely, where are all our options?
Come and save us Mary Poppins!”
The children sobbed and wept and cried:
“Soon enough we will all have died!
It’s us or her, she’s got to go!
‘But how to snuff her?’ –‘I don’t know!’”
The children cried, and sobbed and wept:
“Remember where the guns are kept?
And go and fetch a pointed stick,
and gasoline and arsenic.
Go get sharp things from the kitchen,
anything to do that witch in!
We’ll shoot her, and then stake her heart,
and then we’ll cut her all apart,
and poison every part we’ve cut,
then douse her down, and blow her up!”
So each child tiptoed like a mouse
to scrounge for weapons round the house,
then each child tiptoed up the stairs,
and waited twitching, and prepared.
An hour passed, an hour more,
no sound was heard behind the door.
They stared morosely at the clock,
‘till one child said: “We’d better knock.”
“No one answers,” the knocker sighed,
“Well take a peek!” the others cried.
and so they eased the door a crack,
and there the crone sat, staring back,
the frown still frozen on her face,
but eyes a glaze, gazed into space.
…For sadly, she had just expired,
the stairs were too much for her tired
heart, the exertion left her dead.
The children laughed, and then one said:
“I wonder if our parents care
that this week that’s our third au pair?”
They threw their weapons on the rug,
and shared in a communal hug.
They hugged a while with all their might,
then went to have a snowball fight.

The art of the hand.

1: The Massage Parlour… if, indeed, that is its name.

For the last little while I have been playing sitar now and then at Studio B. during their Friday night yoga classes. I’ve been playing yoga classes for years at different studios and I enjoy it in a couple of ways: first it’s great to see highly flexible women in skin tight clothing twisting their bodies into unusual positions. Second, because people are not listening that closely but at the same time are picking up on my vibe, I can kind of experiment and practice without too much concern. I rarely stick to any particular raga (and I avoid ones that it would be disrespectful to play in those circumstances) and mostly I just mess around. It is what it is and in exchange for my services the people at B. have been giving me vouchers for one hour massages from their massage parlour downstairs.

Do they call places like this massage parlours? I have no idea. The first thing people always ask me about this whole deal is whether the massage is one of those massages; you know, the ones that happen behind poorly lit storefronts with dusty windows covered over by drab curtains. They want to know if disaffected topless women from mysterious Eastern block countries are working the cum out of my shaft with rough fisted strokes of the right hand while meanwhile the left hand is relentlessly lifting and dropping a cigarette from the curving lipsticked lips. B. isn’t like this at all, though.

Or at least I always assumed B. wasn’t like this because the truth is that until yesterday I had never bothered to use any of the vouchers. It’s not that I was against the massage concept or anything; although I often do have issues with personal space and I don’t always love people getting close to me or touching me; much to the consternation of certain people who became frustrated by the fact that I didn’t want to hold their hands every single second that we were out in public. It’s not that I hate you or that I’m embarrassed to be seen with you in public, it’s just that sometimes I want to not have anyone touching me while I walk… anyhow I digress, as usual.

I had all these massage vouchers and I didn’t know what to do with them and I was thinking about it over the summer and I realised that each one represented a value of almost $100 and that maybe I could barter them for something useful if I put an imaginative ad up on Craigslist.

2: The Slight of Hand… or, getting a lot from a light hand.

Craigslist has been a marvellous venue through which to sell for $100s of dollars various items of furniture that I have found in the street on garbage days. It never ceases to amaze me that people will walk by a thing and refuse to touch it just because it is in the trash and yet if the same item is listed on Craigslist along with a bit of sexy description these same people will come banging on my door with handfuls of cash that they can’t wait to shove into my paws. Well ok, I’m not exactly ready to retire from this business (I’m pretty fucking broke, actually) but I think it’s more because I’m not willing to put in the hours then because it is a bad business venture.

Not only this, but one time I posted an ad on Craigslist in the pets section saying that I was a filmmaker making a movie and that I needed a whole lot of animals for the movie and that if anyone had any unwanted pets they could give them to me and I would “use” them in my film production. I then said that I was sorry but the pets would not be returned, due to the nature of the film. I said, also, that, since I was pressed for time, I was planning to try and pick up all the animals in one day and drive them out in the back of my cube van to my warehouse and so I needed to make pickup arrangements with everyone in advance, and I was looking for suggestions for how to transport horses and cats and gerbils all in the back of the same truck without damaging any too badly before the filming began…etc, etc, etc…I tried to make it all sound a little sketchy, anyhow. So after this I started getting all these e-mails informing me that what I was doing was illegal, and that I was a sick fuck, and that I was going to burn in hell, etc, etc, etc…people were especially vexed by the whole cube van thing. It was quite a laugh…ok if you don’t have a sense of humour you probably hate me right now….but back to the point…

The thing that I really wanted to get during the summer was a sofa, but not just any sofa; I wanted especially one of those old 70s style sofas with the wooden rectangular arm rests and the bad rough woven cloth covering them. I wanted the kind of sofas that sat in every waiting room in every dentist’s office and outside of every school principal’s office in Christendom. This kind of thing, you see, I believed would fit in best with my particular decoration scheme.

Thus, I began searching online for photos of these kinds of sofas by typing in such terms as “waiting room sofa” and “dentist’s office”. The amazing thing I discovered during this process was that most of the photos of sofas I did locate were on pages that resolved back to the government of Canada. I began to browse the government’s websites and I found that there were often pictures there advertising the waiting rooms in different governmental offices. “Just look at our fabulous waiting room” these sites said. This really blows my mind. I mean, who gives a goddamn what the waiting room looks like? It’s not like they call you and then you go up to the desk and say, no actually I don’t want to get my passport renewed/ drivers licence ratified/ parole papers signed/ Canada Council grant reviewed, I actually just came to enjoy your waiting room because I love sitting on these ratty fucking sofas that you haven’t replaced since before I was born!

Look, I’m not making this shit up:

This is the waiting room at the Kingston Penitentiary
http://www.npb-cnlc.gc.ca/victims/Victims_Project_2006/Ontario/kingston_1_e.htm

This is the waiting room at Collins Bay (this blue sofa is really a nice one!)
http://www.npb-cnlc.gc.ca/victims/Victims_Project_2006/Ontario/collinsb_1_e.htm

This is the waiting room at the Kwìkwèxwelhp Institution (nice sofas here too)
http://www.npb-cnlc.gc.ca/victims/Victims_Project_2006/Pacific/kwik_1_e.htm

Here’s a great shot of the cloak room at Libraries and Archives Canada
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/the-public/005-4020-e.html

Here’s a shot from the Frontenac Officer’s Mess in Kingston
http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/ffom/Owl_room_e.asp

Here’re some not too comfy benches at the Supreme court:
http://www.scc-csc.gc.ca/details/gal2-eng.asp

So up went my ad on Craigslist, basically saying that I was looking for a particular kind of sofa and that, if anyone happened to know where one was, I would be willing to exchange some massage vouchers for one (especially of they delivered the sofa to my door). A few responses came back: there is a sofa on the corner of Madison and Sherbrooke in NDG, maybe if you go over there you can pick it up… no thanks. Perhaps the government of Canada has old ones in a warehouse someplace; apparently there is an auction once a year on Montreal and you can buy all kinds of stuff dirt cheap… more useful, but I don’t think the government will accept my massages as payment.

Finally I got the king of all responses: this guy wrote to tell me that a few years back he had been a guest of the Canadian penal system and had been doing his time in New Brunswick. Apparently, he told me, the reason that Canada has all its waiting rooms (especially the prison ones) done up with these sofas is that they are actually manufactured in house (so to speak) by prisoners and then shipped all over the country to government offices. Well, continued this fellow, I used to be a quality control overseer for the manufacture of these sofas and therefore, if you like, I can make you one from scratch but unfortunately the 2-300 dollars worth of massages is not going to cover the cost of even a fraction of the material I will need… never mind labour, but if you give me thirteen massages I will do it for you.

I decided to decline his offer, partially because I didn’t have thirteen vouchers and I didn’t want to have to give him the massages myself (although I believe this was an option). I mean, ok maybe I could have given him the massages… but you just know that if you gave someone thirteen massages it’s going to get to sex eventually and I’m not prepared to whore myself out for a custom made sofa that is going to end up looking like something I found hanging out of a dumpster. Also, I’m not actually gay, despite what I wrote about Superman and also about the chests of teenage boys in skateboard movies and also about the movie 300.

But by all accounts, I should have been gay since both my mother (a former ballerina) has (and my grandmother had) a lifelong association with the National Ballet (Rudolf Nureyev once drank all my grandmother’s vodka and then attempted to have sex with my uncle…but this is a tale for another day) and also my mother forced me to watch musicals as a child and taught me all about interior design and brought me with her countless times on her wedding planning excursions. Lets face it, I could have been the greatest homo of all time… but I just like women too much… plus I look fat in pink.

3: Thinking about Gay Porn… or, how to kill time and have fun doing it.

I will confess to you, though, that I saw a gay porn film the other day and I thought it was pretty hot. I was killing some time before I went to visit my friend Andrea downtown and so I decided to wander around downtown to see what kind of mischief I could get into for a couple of hours.

I went first into the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and mingled my way into a conference, a meeting of people who provide essential services to educational institutions or something like that. I crash conferences whenever I get the chance because, the way I figure it, no one there will be certain that you should not be there because everyone is a stranger to everyone else, thus is it extremely difficult to get kicked out. I ate some strawberry tarts and drank some tea and I had a really nice conversation with someone named Tiffany who gave me all kinds of free stuff (swag, if you’ll forgive me using the term again so soon). She and I will be lovers in our next life.

I went up to the Concordia complex and started to wander around in there for a while. It’s pretty amazing how deep into a building you can get if you locate the right door or elevator. I came back down and slipped into the main lecture hall. There was a film class going and I sat down to watch the movies:

1: It Wasn’t Love, by Sadie Benning

My first impression, while I was watching this movie was that it was a typical example of what happens when you combine a complete lack of talent with a utter lack of imagination. It seemed like the kind of thing the filmmaker’s friends would laugh at hilariously and sycophantically just because their girl made it. Ok I know it problematized gender in all kinds of ways and it used fractured interpretations of popular culture in order to reconstruct concepts of gender and selfhood and all these things are really interesting to talk about, but just because a movie is theoretically rich and just because it is a historical curiosity, this doesn’t make it good. The thumb sucking scene was hot, though.

I was going to put up my hand after the screening and talk but then before I got the chance this other lady in the audience put up her hand and started going on about how she could see why Sadie Benning became the darling of the lesbian community and blah blah blah young genius at work gush gush gush. So I kept my hand down. I’m not even in the class anyhow so it seemed better not to pour a bag of ants into the keener’s picnic basket.

2: Positiv, by Mike Hoolboom.

At first I wasn’t sure about this one. The way that the narrator was reading the text in that halting way that people read when they are trying to represent the natural cadence of spontaneous speech but are instead only serving to highlight just how textual and self conscious their performance is was a thing that was very distracting to me. And I thought a lot (as I did during the first movie) about Ann Cvetkovich’s book An Archive of Feeling…all those disjointed images and mediated realities combining to create a fractured sense of self. What a lovely book that was. I also thought about Susan Sontag’s Aids and its Metaphors. Another book that influenced me a lot. By the end of the film, when the narrator was talking about watching his friends change as he drifted away from them into death I was sold on this move, though. It was very good.

3: A Phone Comes to Jammu, by Nila Gupta.

Once again we are talking about mediated realities. In this case it is a desire to discover oneself and one’s history through old photographs and the narrative is cut with stock footage of childhood days. I think this is part of what Cvetkovich was talking about when she said that the experience of being gay often feels like (or gets treated like) a subversion of the normative narrative of a human life; this is to say that one is made to feel as if one is not acting according to the script. Certain aspects of the script: love, the desire for happiness, the relationship (or lack thereof) to one’s family remain, but all these things become fractured and disjointed and must be reassembled in new ways. These three films can not tell linear narratives or linger on single images because they are aspects of lives that are defined by a constant push against the stream of normality.

So, for example, do you remember when I was talking about how all biopic movies about rock stars all follow the same pattern? Well in the case of a biopic about someone who is somehow forced to the fringes of polite society because the way that desire manifests itself in their heart, they can’t simply just slip their life into the expect narrative; it won’t fit. They can look at photos or film clips that are signifiers for this narrative and then they can try to make sense of their fractured relationship to these signifiers… but this makes the movie complex, non-linear. It doesn’t make the movie good necessarily, but it does make it theoretically rich.

4: Loads, by Curt McDowell

See, now this one was really interesting because it wasn’t all hung up on the confusion and angst and fractured sense of identity that the other three were. I mean, it does come from a slightly earlier (pre-realisation of AIDS) era but it also comes from an era when homosexuality was a lot less normal than it is now (although I guess this was counterbalanced by the fact that it was made in San Francisco, which is, you know, a pretty gay city). Anyhow there is still a sense of mediated reality in this film because the narrator doesn’t just pick up men off the street and suck their cocks. Rather, he picks them up with the pretext that he wants to film them or photograph them and then while he’s doing that he sucks their cocks on camera. Also, the narrative is not linear, and, as the film progresses, the sex scenes with the different men turn into an increasingly confusing montage of cuts and angles and butts glistening with afternoon light streaming through dusty windows and muscle bound pelvises with thick veiny pricks stabbing outward toward the audience, swallowed up my the moustachioed lips of the narrator. Indeed, at a certain point it is almost impossible to tell which cock is which and which body is which and, in the end, at the climax, with the great streams of seamen spurting out over the narrator’s hairy beard, with a single glowing string of ejaculate stretching down the dark furry chest of a body builder from his nipple to his hips, over his gorgeous belly while he reclines on a loft mattress, completely satisfied by what has passed, with the tattooed and bearded man arching his pelvis into the narrator’s mouth and gripping at the very point of explosion into the narrator’s hair, jamming his engorged member further and further down the narrator’s throat, it probably doesn’t even matter which cock is which.

The salient comment from the crowd was that if the film would have been made with women instead of men, if it would have been a shameless and completely self-confident exploration of heterosexual lust from a male perspective instead, then maybe all kinds of power issues that didn’t feel like they were there with the men would have been painfully present. This is a shame because, as turned on as I was by seeing all those frankly gorgeous men blowing each other, I would have much rather seen something close to what I see when I go to play for those yoga classes but with a lot less spandex covering the good bits

Anyhow, even if the yoga gig isn’t the kind of celebration of lust that I pine for, I do get the free massages and, thinking that I had best take advantages of what few advantages I have in this life, I decided to forget about ever finding a good sofa and go in and get my first massage yesterday.

4: Palmistry and Palm Artistry, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the balm.

The massage itself was just what I suspected it would be (and I mean this in a good way). I lay down on the table and the masseuse worked at my muscles for an hour and after I felt better and more loose. There were some things that I was a little dubious about, for example, she told me that for the most part she was going to give me a Swedish massage, which is working the muscles and doing different things to them with her hands. This was good. But, she said, I’m also going to do something called an inter-cranial-something-or-another, which is a more unusual method and not everyone appreciates it right away. It turns out that this was the part right in the middle of my massage when she stopped massaging me and just held my head in her hands and didn’t move at all for about ten minutes. Inter-cranial-something-or-another my butt! I figured she was just taking a break on the job, but she insisted after that it was actually a real technique and that it would have positive benefits for me. Anyhow, I often find people’s bullshit charming and what the hell it was a free massage so how can I complain?

The one part that really interested me, though, was that while I was being massaged (for real massaged, not during the fake part) was that I suddenly had a flashback to something that happened to me years ago. I believe this kind of thing is normal with good massages because certain tensions get released when the muscles open up and, when these tensions go out, the body reverts to a prior state of being or something…I can’t really explain it right now but trust me I think this kind of thing is normal.

Anyhow, what I remembered was this:

When I was twenty years old I was living in Andhra Pradesh, India and working there on a rural development project. One day, one of the project workers, an interesting fellow who was almost always in sunglasses and open silk shirts and who went on endlessly about this or that lady that he was planning to “enjoy with” and who buzzed around the dusty rural roads on his old Yezdi 250 Classic sounding like a bumblebee with a Marshall amp tied to its back, came to me and told me that he wanted to take me to see something.

I sat myself on the back of his bike and we rode for probably three hours away from the project through the low rocky hills and the long dry plains and scattered roadside villages of the area. Finally we arrived at a place called Thimmamma Marrimanu… well it’s not a place so much as it is one single tree; the world’s largest tree, in fact, a single banyan that covers more than five square acres of land. This tree, which is hundreds of years old, is actually a forest unto itself and within the forest is a small temple and people go there and worship. The project worker and I went to the temple and made a puja and then sat down in the forest and ate lunch.

After lunch, on the way back, we stopped in to look at some small agricultural projects that the NGO I was working with had set up and it was sitting here, under the small shade of some saplings, with a massive hillock studded with great brown boulders brilliantly illuminated in the afternoon sunlight, that he began to interrogate me.

Have you ever been with a woman? he asked. Yes, I have, I told him. He looked into my eyes. You’re telling me bullshit, he said. What do you want me to say? I can’t prove if I have or not. He took out a piece of paper and a pen and he handed it to me. Draw me a picture of the lady’s sexual organs, he said. I took the paper and I carefully sketched out a vagina, first making an elongated almond shape and then filling out its sides with an elegant labia that fluttered away from the inner slit like a slender butterfly. After this, I worked my way up from the bottom, drawing the butthole just below the almond and then filling in the vaginal opening, then the urethra and then making a little clitoris at the top of the almond. I thought it was not a bad rendition, all in all, but when I handed back the picture to the project worker he examined it for a moment and then looked up and me and said: you are bullshit.

Next he took my hand and gave me a palm reading. He ran his fingers over the lines of my hands and he explained to me what each line meant.

You are a very interesting fellow, he said. No matter what you are doing you will always think about it too much and be stressed about it. If we were climbing that hill over there, for example, you would worry that the rocks were going to collapse on you, and when you are on the bike you always worry that you are going to fall off the bike. You spend too much time in your own mind worrying.

Also, he said, you will have whatever you want in this world but you are going to have to work for it and you are going to have to suffer for it and nothing will ever come easily to you. And you are going to have a lot of lovers, he said, because ladies will fall in love with you, but you will find it hard to be settled because you think too much. I’ve already had some lovers, I told him...

He looked me in the eyes. You are bullshit, he said.

Review of every part of Superman Returns other than the first 19.01 minutes.

I know I have to start being more social and so on and so forth. I mean I don’t have to be more social and so on and so forth, but I want to be more social and so on and so forth and so I paused Superman Returns and I went over to see someone I know dancing in a belly dancing cabaret earlier this evening. Anyhow, it was only three blocks away from my house and so on the making-a-big-effort-to-be-social scale this one was going to be nearly swag for me.

I went over to this place, this Moroccan place, or whatever it is with its pictures of Morocco on the walls and those brass tables held up by those fold up table stands that look like they would collapse with a great clang into a pile of shattered glass and spilled candle wax and scattered foodstuffs if even my foot were to gently graze against one of the legs as I shifted my weight as I was dining and there were fake what I assumed to be typical Moroccan doors on the wall with little coloured lanterns hanging beside them, just as though we were all sitting around in Morocco waiting for a belly dancing show to start and there was a kind of dance-beated up music blaring on the stereo and all kinds of lyrics in Arabic about love and heartbreak (or so I assumed since that’s what every song in every language is pretty much about, although I don’t speak a lick of Arabic) and they brought me a little dish with some yummy olives in it that I ate with a toothpick while I was trying to decide what to order.

Finally I ordered a vegetarian couscous and a vegetarian salad, but I never did get my salad which was good because the couscous was enough by itself and I ordered a kind of tea made with mint leaves and lime essence and orange flowers and something else I’d never heard of and the lady poured it in a long cascading pour down into my little glass cup like the ones at the lime green Iranian restaurant in Halifax that I ate in with Laura that day in the pouring rain before maybe we went out to Lunenburg with everything we owned soaking wet and I don’t remember what order things happened in back in those days but I thought again of those little glass cups anyhow.

This tea that she poured me was maybe the best thing I had ever tasted because before I put my mouth on the rim of the glass I had never imagined that there could be a tea that tasted like this one and after I couldn’t imagine going a long time without drinking this tea again and all in all I was happy that the place was only three blocks from my house.

Still, as my tea was dwindling, and as the belly dancing aficionados began to shuffle in, tossing their heavy coats and scarves and mitts and hats behind them on the sofas and settling into the menus and into their merry conversations, I began to realise that I didn’t like this restaurant at all and actually I didn’t feel much like watching belly dancing, so I got up, paid, and walked out into the night.

I walked down Beaubien for a while and finally I bought some bagels at the Beaubien Bagel factory. There was one miserable man shovelling bagels into the ovens and he scowled at me as I came in and then sold me a six-bag of sesame bagels. This is just where I wanted to be. I went to the IGA in the St. Hubert plaza. I bought cheese and cream cheese and smoked trout and green beans then I thought about what I wanted to do with my life and settled on a few bottles of booze. I walked home in the cold, picking up an old cabinet door, ripped free from its rusty hinges, that was painted a strange colour and nearly rotted on the bottom. You will be my next canvas, I said to it.

I never did watch the end of Superman Returns, but I’m sure that the good guys triumph in the end. I’m sure that a lot of things explode and that Superman earns his keep by catching heavy objects in mid air before they fall on crowds of terrified civilians. I’m sure superman poses in mid-air, muscles bulging and straining, the crowds below him cheering his name.

Unlike most men who are forced to pretend to be boring wankers in order to keep down jobs they don’t really care about, all the while fantasising about flying around the city in red capes and crotch revealing tights looking for action, Superman is living the dream. He doesn’t need my support. Unlike Batman, however, Superman still seems to feel the need to pretend things are not what they seem by courting (and ultimately never being able to satisfy) Lois Lane. At least the caped crusader has the courage of conviction to go out in public with his boyfriend.

Review of the first 19.01 minutes of Superman Returns.

Superman returns to Earth, in Superman Returns, after a long hiatus; both in the fictional and the actual world. Where has superman been all this time? He’s been in outer space indulging himself with personal introspection while the world he has sworn to protect has been smouldering, always that much closer to consuming itself in a ferocious fist of crackling fire.

Consider this image: Superman’s iconic burning pod lands again on the idyllic Midwestern farmstead where he was raised. He surrogate mother, who has been busy baking apple pies for the union since Superman left, sees the fireball streak over her house and land in the distant field. She goes out to greet her child and there he is, sitting, as buff and delicious as ever, beneath this sculpted mass of burning mud and grain. How very much the tripartite erection resembles the charred remains of the World Trade Centre.

While Superman has been gone the world has never needed him more. He has come home for no more significant reason than to save the world from its exhaustion with postmodernist disaffection. We need grand narratives to believe in because we need to believe in ourselves if we are going to fight something as unflagging and unambiguous as evil. There can be no shades of grey at the tips of our bullets, men. Superman is back.

I haven’t watched the whole movie yet (it’s the kind of thing that is only manageable in small doses) but I have been struck already by the power of the pure country versus the impure urban imagery that pervades the film; and is in effect the entire underpinning of the superman mythology. Superman, after all, (following his arrival on the planet) becomes an American where it counts: out on the prairies under the big sky, raised with simple traditional values of goodness and morality and it is with this psychological equipment that he makes his journey into the urban centres of the world. It is always the city that needs saving, mind you; it is always the city that dabbles with sin by indulging the whims of the evil, industrially minded, money hungry Lex Luthor.

Luthor, the anti-Superman, espouses a kind of evil that is insidious not only because of the fact that it is self-motivated and indifferent to the suffering of others, but because it is a rejection of the rural simulacrum from which Superman’s morality emanates. The city is a tangle of capitalist desires and complex emotional entanglements, the way forward in the city is never clear; for every route is blocked by buildings and hidden from the sun. How easy it is for urban dwellers to become lost in the jumble of towers and alleys and dead-ends and noise and madness. Superman, raised in the clear air and able to see for miles, swoops easily between the buildings and keeps his attention on everything. Superman reminds people, after they have been appropriately spanked for worshipping yet again at Luthor’s golden calf, what really matters in this world.

How different Superman is from Batman (who is by far the more popular of the two characters, I believe). Batman is a product of the city, a product of wealth, a product of the very system which he wishes to cleanse. This makes Batman complex and troubled, it makes him essentially a character who can only do good by doing evil to himself; and this kind of thing is the basis of every great identity crisis. With Superman, though, there is no identity crisis. Superman is as alien to the city as he is to the planet itself. Superman’s citizens to be saved are like sheep who have strayed from the path of righteousness, they are like the citizens of Sarah Palin’s true America who have nevertheless ended up in the city of the Sirens and forgotten the way their lives used to be. Superman, country boy, brings them home again. For Batman, though, there is no home, there is only another night of unresolved darkness.

Of lovers spurned and goodly ghosts.

My goodly ghost; and I’m always surprised how nice he is to me, given the animosity that we shared before they dropped him in the mud, visited me two nights ago and provided me yet again with a little bit of useful guidance …but you know it’s hard for me to follow his advice because I’m not good at saying no to things. I’m not good at saying no to things and so I always end up doing all this shit that I’d really rather not do.

My goodly ghost blew the fog off a couple of affairs that I ought to have divested myself of months ago …but somehow I can’t let go and they just keep on lingering and lingering and growing more and more dysfunctional and perverse. Of course I tell myself that I don’t mind the perversity because, after all, the most fucked up emotional states usually lead me to some sort of inspirational thing or another in the long run; after all the requisite boozing and months of lost productivity and probably a few bouts of insufferable madness to exasperate those around whose stable and enviable lives I seem to orbit.

But I apologize for nothing, fuck. I apologize for nothing at five twelve am with my body drained completely of its juices and my back rifted with claw marks and my lips swollen from kisses and my bed reeking of lust. I apologize for no moments wasted yet again on desolate highway sides in the pouring rain hitching my way into oblivion and I apologize not at all for banging on your door drunkenly in the middle of the night and telling you that I loved you or that I hated you.

How can I apologize for telling my heart to you? How can I apologize for hurting you so badly and then winning you over again knowing full well that I was just going to hurt you again? How can I apologize for telling you I wanted you to be mine, knowing full well it would drive you away? I cannot stop myself. I am intoxicated by the prospect of tragedy.

I am a devil and I have a heart made of stone …or so someone told me today.

I am tender and the heartache is too much for me sometimes.

My goodly ghost, in this dream I had, did me an interesting service. He showed me one lover; one for whom I would have given everything if only she would have wanted anything. This one, he told me, is no good for you. He took her by the hand and he led her away, leaving me standing along. He then showed me another lover; one from whom I tried to run more than once, but somehow I always seemed to circle back into her arms. He took her by the hand and he led her away from me. This one, he said, is no good for you. He left me standing alone.

These two figures in my dream, symbols of two directions, physically divided, and yet winding round each other, are inseparable to me. When one bends one way I bend with her and the other then bends with me. Then when the other bends I bend back and the first then bends with me. And though they have never met they bend each other. It is madness, my ghost told me, get away from it.

I reflected as I lay in the early daylight on how some days I was the weak one, constantly pedalling my silly heart as quickly as I could toward each hopeless climb that one lover threw before me …and each time that I barely made it to the top, gasping and wondering at my own stamina, I would suddenly espy with dismay another, steeper, hill rising up before me in the distance. Other days, though, I was the puissant one, throwing up mountains with an effete flick of my wrist and watching my other lover bounding up each climb, never seeming to tire of the labours I set before her. And as I witnessed her suffering and breathless at the crown of each miserable ascent, I looked upon myself and saw myself reflected in my lover. I was as her but only when I was not with her. I wish I could understand how all of this worked, how we seem to magnify our desire in inverse proportion to the seeming retreat of desire in the object of our affection.

Then my ghost led me to another figure, an unexpected one. This third figure leaned into me and delivered me a message that I have been thinking about ever since. There was sense in it.

My annual remembrance day rant

The last television I owned ended up being tossed off the roof of my house (by me) during a complicated spring during which my roommate at the time agreed (for reasons that I can still not entirely fathom) to allow the woman I had just broken up with to undertake an extremely large and complex installation art project in his room. This project involved her constructing a giant frame out of wood (inside his room) and then affixing numerous buttons that she had cast herself onto springs and levers and all sorts of other things and then attaching them to the frame. The project was massive and required her to be in my home every day hammering and drilling and just basically being around, which was highly annoying because we had already agreed to stay the fuck away from each other until our fucked up and embittered hearts were mended and as far as I was concerned she was doing a crappy job of respecting my space and need for time. Not only this, but I was trying to complete my master’s degree and the time and the combination of someone I was still in love with but who didn’t want to be with me being in the same house but ignoring me and at the same time making continuous hammering noises was a little too much for my sanity to take. A lot of dramatic exchanges happened and during one of them I threw my television off the roof. I don’t miss those times at all and I don’t miss my television, either.

In the end, things got much more fucked up because I ended up falling in love with my ex-roommate’s ex-girlfriend and she and I started dating, we became lovers, even while my ex-roommate was still in the same house. He didn’t like this at all. She and I (his ex-girlfriend that is) ended up traveling together, moving in together, sharing a TV, being together for almost four years, breaking up, and then over a period of a year or so becoming dear friends and we still talk every day more or less. When she moved out, though, the took her television with her and that’s the last time there was a television in my home. My ex-roommate, meanwhile, ended up moving in with my ex-lover the artist and they are still living together and I have no idea what the they do with their lives and I really don’t give a damn.

Back to the television, though, I used to watch a lot of hockey on the television but over the last little while I’ve almost completely lost interest in the sport. It’s not just not having a TV has precipitated this loss of interest, though; I can certainly watch as much as I like on the internet with streaming TV and the nature of the internet is to give the consumer more of the product than ever before, thus enflaming addictions rather than cooling them, but all the same my interest has waned.

I think the main problem for me is the increasing notice I have been taking of the interconnection between the culture of hockey and the culture of militaristic nationalism that seems to dominate a lot of the rhetoric that occurs off the ice. In the first place, as with every sport, I don’t understand why it is that fans and players are required to stand for the national anthem at the beginning of every game. There is as far as I can ascertain no tangible connection between the sport of hockey and love for one’s nation and so it seems to me that the efforts made to create connections in the minds of fans between the great swell of collective energy they are feeling and the swell of energy that the drum banging patriots tell us we ought to be feeling for our nation (whichever nation it is) are at best disingenuous and at worst sinister acts of brainwashing.

Hockey, of course, is a celebration of youthful masculinity (yes, I know there’s a women’s game, too) channelled through a collective team effort against a hated foe (who is ironically not at all different from one’s own team except for the colours of the jersey). It is, in this respect, a fine metaphor for the jolly good wars of yesteryear where everyone gave it their sporting best and everybody killed everybody else by the gentlemanly rules. There is no asymmetrical warfare in hockey and, while certain strategies may change, there is always a higher paradigm to which all participants must adhere.

I realise that my above statement in and of itself is a false parallel when taken on its own. Just because young men play hockey in uniforms on teams and just because young men fight in wars in uniforms on teams this does not mean that one is a symbol for the other. Yet the parallel becomes stronger when the element of national pride and all of the rhetoric of sacrifice for the nation attached to anthems is attached to the excitement of the game. Not only this, but the broadcast culture surrounding hockey (and here I have chosen to pick particularly on the CBC) adds greatly to the dulce et decorum est pro patria mori mentality that we see in hockey.

I’m reflecting on all this because it is November 11th today and this is the day we are supposed to remember WWI; and, particularly in Canada, to remember the battle Vimy Ridge when we ostensibly became a nation. Vimy Ridge is in and of itself a big nothing. A bunch of Canadian teenagers ran up a muddy hill during WWI and when they got to the top they murdered a bunch of German teenagers. Some people like to say that it was a big strategic victory for the allies but it really wasn’t. A few days later the Germans attacked again in another spot a few miles down and killed a lot of French teenagers and the war went on.

The entire war, in the long run, was really a big nothing. The was all kinds of imperial bluster and militarism at the time and it can’t really be said that any one nation was any better or worse than any other. They all sucked and they all were responsible for a lot of needless death and suffering.

Sometimes when I say this to people (especially in hockey chat rooms where the patriotic fervour runs high) they get angry and tell me I don’t understand the sacrifices that those kids made in WWI and that I’m enjoying the life I have today because of these brave soldiers. I personally don’t believe this. Because of the way that WWII went, with the Nazis and everything, and also because of the massive dose of guilt administered by the winning side to the losing side after WWI in the treaty of Versailles, it may seem like the Germans were villains in WWI, but they were not any more evil than the French, Italians, British, Russians, Turks, or anyone else participating, and I personally believe that had Germany won WWI, things would not be much different for Canada now. Well, actually, maybe things would have been better if Germany won WWI because there would have been no opening for Hitler to get in power…but there just would have been some other asshole, I guess.

So anyhow, Vimy Ridge. Those kids didn’t die to defend democracy or freedom or anything like that. If they died for anything it was for guts and glory and the Empire. This is shit that I don’t happen to believe in. I’m also pretty leery of claims that democracy and freedom are being defended in today’s wars, but this is a story for another time.

There was a big push by the Harper government last year (and it was echoed continuously on CBC and on Hockey Night in Canada) to contextualize the Vimy Ridge battle and what it meant to Canada. The thing that trouble me most about all of this was that the perfectly reasonable claims that war was senseless and should be avoided and that way too many people had already been killed by war already and all the other perfectly reasonable claims that made me used to want to wear a poppy were being conflated with stories about individual glory on the battle field and great patriotic sacrifice for the nation and so on. The latter sentiments do not make me want to wear a poppy because the message suddenly becomes, yes war is senseless, but we do it well and we’re braver than anyone when it happens. This isn’t talking people out of war, it’s talking people into war.

Since Harper was (and still is) pushing his own government’s completely pointless and misdirected war in Afghanistan at the same time as the Vimy celebrations were going on the emphasis on a continuing tradition of great bravery on the battlefield made me just a little sick to my stomach.

The CBC meanwhile, has been completely complicit in this regard by mixing in stories of war heroes (as if there is such a thing) of today and yesterday with stories of heroism on and off the ice. I’m running out of energy here and hitting too scattered a target, but I’m glad I don’t have a goddamn TV (youtube is great, though!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM7rwvjoQw0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6373IRqSeU

les enfants

.

Hello say I
to the tangle of hair
and then face
that emerges from the knots of coverings
by way of a good morning
how are you feeling?
I am fine how are you feeling?
Stretching kissing sleep is rubbed out from the eyes lazily
in the squinted at late morning light.

I am feeling ok
but at moments like this I can not help thinking of the children
and this makes me sad.
What children do you mean?
I mean the children;
les enfants, if you prefer to hear me say so in your own tongue.

The children of the world.
I can not but think of them at these times
in all their darling sufferings, those poor little orphans.

The poor little street urchins with their faces covered in soot,
lowered down chimneys
and suffocating on the collected ash,
then beaten soundly by their sweep keepers
and send off to sleep in the draughty attic
with not more supper than a crust of bread,

and little dears marched off in their thread bare coats,
barely keeping out the cold winter wind
and the snow coming in damp
through the cracked leather of their boots

while they file in long lines up to the doorways
of the blacking factories
and brick works
that still run today despite the long distance we have travelled
since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

How many of these sweet angels have been accidentally tangled up
in the works of the giant throbbing roaring machines
and shredded like plates of pork
between the gargantuan tines of the threshers
then left in fleshy bloody ribbons
for the horror of all to see
along the floorways of the factory?
Just think of those terrible ribbons of gore,
still punctuated with the darling buttons that once decorated the child’s duffel coat,
just think of those rosy cheeks
and golden curls
flattened and mixed in with sizzling brain matter
beneath the fallen and shattered
but still molten red iron core
that dropped so suddenly
and so wretchedly
from the upper galleries of the foundry.

Nay, imagine (why I shudder to even say such things)
all of the little ones burning down into piles of ash
as a radioactive bomb detonates over their city,
the wild flowers they had just gathered
bursting suddenly into little plumes of flame
in the instant before
their tiny hands and their precious fingers melt away.

Imagine, if you will, a bomb blast,
and then among the rubble
and the wafting smoke you discover a single miniature hand,
severed by the explosion from its owner,
the body indeed completely vaporized,
but still those fingers are wrapped round the wrist of a tiny
now utterly charred doll.

And a tongue runs playfully from my exposed hipbone up to the base of my neck
and then scattered kisses make their way back down to my hips.
Do you want me to shut up about this?

I may not now be so easy on the eyes

I may not now be so easy on the eyes
with my chestnut locks toppled

but the velvet clearcut
that runs the length of my skull
feels so fine under my fingers

I spent another night in that old familiar hallway.
I spent another night wrapped in blue
and writhing curled on my cot
until they finally dripped a little relief down my arm
and into my belly.

I spent another holiday being folded into the machines
and being dissected by lights
and being entered into charts
and waiting

I got wheeled through another foyer
filled with the aches and groans and tears
and gashes and boredom
and I got wheeled back again.

I spent another cold morning
set free and hobbling in the crisp sunlight
up the road and wondering if anything would ever change for me.

I spent another night
doubled on my bed
rising in and out of the familiar intoxication
like a child with a pharmaceutical rattle

I took thanksgiving with friends
and I harvested my crown

I may not now be so easy on the eyes
but I feel right to my fingers

So long, kitty.

Contents of my backpack today:

A pad of yellow legal paper and a pen (evidently free with my employment in a communication studies course!). I love yellow legal paper so much, I don't know why.

***

1: Eulogy.

I write this, still slightly damp, after my first successful bath in this apartment. I’ve been here for a year and, because of the fact that I was constantly struggling with the clean up after a completely and unrepentantly incontinent cat, before this week the bathtub wasn’t fit for anything better than a quick shower.

People who are not as sentimental as I am might well wonder why I held on so long to an animal that made it impossible for me to ever place an article of clothing on the floor without it getting pissed on the moment I left the room, an animal that pissed regularly on the furniture, who once pissed on the stove element right before a dinner party so that when I turned on the element to start cooking the entire house filled with the stench of burning cat piss and the whole soiree had to be evacuated. At my old house the floorboards in the bathroom, were given over to a permanent warp from the layers of piss that soaked into them, and more than once on a date or, worse yet, between the sheets with a lover I would be subject to a sudden uncomfortable pause followed by the inevitable question: “is that cat piss I smell?”

Every form of discipline I could imagine from the most harsh to the most gentle was a complete failure with Gangus. He was going to piss wherever he wanted to and that was all there was too it. This meant that for years I was constantly mopping piss off the floors, scraping up wet scattered litter, suffering the taunts and complaints of family members and friends who just assumed that I was a slovenly person (well ok I am, but the cat made things seem way way worse) and other indignities too many to list now.

And the epicentre of all of this misery was always the bathroom; a toxic hellhole reeking of urine and crunchy underfoot with cat litter. No cat was ever as messy as mine. Here at my present apartment, where Gangus reached the highest levels of his artistic expression, I often found myself mopping the bathroom floor, and the hallway outside the bathroom, and the kitchen floor to the right of the bathroom, four, five times a day. I started putting down newspapers sheets and once a day I would have to heave them in the trash because they were soaked through with urine. If I left the sheets for more than a day the piss would soak through to the floor and these strange jumping bugs and also tiny moths would start breeding in the wet paper. Horrible!

…anyhow I could go on with this, but I want to get to the point, which is that I put up with his behaviour because I felt a great deal of affection for that cat. I raised him up from the time that he could fit in the palm of my hand, and I nursed him through all kinds of troubles and worries. In his way, too, he was a good cat. He was very affectionate and used to sleep with me under the blankets. He was very nurturing and he used to sleep close to me and nuzzle me when I was sick (or too drunk to stand up, which I suppose seemed like the same thing to him).

Gangus was a champion mouser, and for this alone he more than earned his keep. I even forgave him all the baby birds and snakes he dragged into the house because of the number of mice he executed in his time. Gangus, too, was a tough sonofabitch and he once killed a stray tomcat that had been hanging around outside the house. I remember he came in one day, tracking blood everywhere. He was bleeding out of his paws and sides and I figured he’d been fighting because I had heard all kinds of screaming and hissing out in the street. The other cat (I’d been seeing it around) was slinking away, half of its face was missing. It didn’t live long after this.

Gangus twice (that I know of) fought dogs, too. Once he went toe to toe with a Doberman and cut its nose wide open before thinking better of it and going up a tree. I had to get a ladder to retrieve him from the highest branches. While I was shimming along a high branch to grab him he casually ran down the tree and left me stranded up there. He had quite a large tooth puncture wound in his head that day, but he lived. Another time, a large mutt was chasing his sister, Bathsheba, down the street. With all his fur erect he went after the dog, four sets of claws flying, and sent the beast yelping away.

Gangus, too, knew love; however briefly. When he was very young he fell for a grey Persian who belonged to my then girlfriend, Michelle. The Persian wanted nothing of this young buck, though, and even one time turned in a rage and swiped a chunk out of his ear. But then one time before I got Gangus fixed and while the Persian was in heat the two cats got together and fucked each other’s brains out. No kittens got formed, thank goodness.

…but back to the point: the bathtub was always a place for me to keep the mop and often it was just to revolting to contemplate sitting in but, now that Gangus has passed away, I’ve gradually been cleaning the house and trying to come to terms with my new (potentially less malodorous) lifestyle.

First among my life changes was the bathroom. I’ve actually put a bathmat down on the floor for the first time ever. I’ve actually cleaned the tub. I’ve actually taken a bath in the tub. I’m actually damp; though less so than when I began writing this.

2: Apology

So the truth is that even though I loved that cat a ton, and even though (knowing how sick he was) I tried to take him to the vet four different times to have him put to sleep before turning back and going home again almost on the verge of tears about the whole thing, with the words that I had to say in order to have him exposed to the needle sticking in my throat and unable to come out over my tongue, and even though I have to admit that I miss having him around in certain ways, I also have to admit that I’m relieved to be through with this whole pissing ordeal that has defined my life over the last…well however many damn years I had that cat.

3: Elegy

I went today to the bulk spice store and I spent an hour looking at each little bag of spice and reading what each bad did when it was brewed up in a tea. Wormwood and St John’s Wort and marigold leaves and everything else and everything else: everything that you can pull up out of the ground. This one is good for insomnia, one warned, but not to be taken if you are depressed. This one is to help evacuate your system, said another, and this one is a laxative. This one will give you sexual energy. This one will help you kill your boring wife.

I made my way through the big plastic boxes of chopped dried apricots and powered chicken soup stock and crunched up walnut bits and coffee grounds and pasta types and dried beans and lentils. This is the way to live, I thought to myself, vowing to come back and get a whole lot of dried things; a whole lot of dried beans. I don’t know why I’ve been wasting my money on the cans because between this store and the Jean Talon market I think I could eat and eat well for so much less than I’m paying now…and probably be healthier, too.

The whole place smells heavily of powder and I wonder if it all must get into the shopkeeper’s lungs after a while and he coughs up mucusy cakes of cumin into his white handkerchief when he awakes in the morning, I wonder if he always smells vaguely of curry and cinnamon and so people are strangely attracted and repelled by him at exactly the same time. I was once like this myself, strangely covered over with the musk of cat urine; a vile stench in and of itself, yet somehow I still managed to find lovers mad enough to want to be by my side all the same.

But whose lips will I kiss now with my smell neutral and my bearing much like everyone else’s? Perhaps I should roll in the excrement stained grass like a dog in order to make my scent more dashing? Well, anyhow, I know whose lips I want to kiss right now and when I do kiss them lips it just entirely makes my day and all in all I feel pretty happy to be clean today and when I got out of the tub I didn’t want to drain the water even because the silence under the surface was so lovely and the flickering red candle made everything seem so sacred. This is my farewell to my cat and I hope he is happy wherever he is now.

Urban Ecology: An Old Rant Revisited

Contents of my backpack today:

pesticide (for mealybugs), paper towel, four squash balls.

***

The following text is unedited from its original version, but for the fact that I divided the paragraphs to make it more web friendly. I don't know how to handle footnotes per se (ok, I do but I'm lazy right now) so the original footnotes are at the end. It's interesting to see how much my writing style has changed since then, but perhaps you won't notice.

***

A Small History of a Lot

Behind the house where I live is a small rectangular lot. The law says the lot belongs to me. Despite this claim of ownership, I have never quite felt that the lot was mine. The lot was around long before I was, and notwithstanding the little fence round it, I still think of my lot as being an ancient participant the larger expanse of dirt that stretches round the entire planet. Before the crust of the planet cooled I suppose my lot was bubbling up and down in the magma, and before this I suppose it was probably a fiery aspect of the sun, or some space matter or something—but I don’t know anything about that (1) .

In the future, long after I’m gone, the fence may come down; I’m sure it will, and maybe eventually the planet will be pulverized, and then my little lot will skitter away as dust into the vacuum of space—but I’m not qualified to comment on this either. I can only tell you my own history, dull though it may be in comparison with the grander revolutions of the universe (2) .

My tale begins with what I was told. First in a lawyer’s office some place on Bay Street. “We’re obligated to inform you,” said the lawyer, leaning across his desk, “that there was a very serious domestic situation with the previous occupants of the house. Is this going to be a problem for you?”

“I don’t see why it would be.” I said.

“Well some people like to be informed about these things.”

The previous occupants, I later discovered, were a family of four. The father was a carpenter who had made all sorts of improvements to the place. He had built a deck in the back yard, and across the gravel roadway, in the lot, he had built a tree house on stilts for his two children. The mother, meanwhile, had filled the garden with flowers; irises, and tulips, wild roses, and dark purple morning glories. In the lot, beneath two fruit trees; a crab apple and a sour cherry, which one after the other in the early spring bloomed and then dropped their white petals onto the soft lawn, there grew raspberries, blackberries, rhubarb, and other delights.

Yet at the same time (as I learned gradually from my new neighbours) there had been nothing pleasurable about living in or around this house. The father had taken to drink. He beat his wife, and whenever she was away he would fill up the deck with obnoxious friends and young lovers. The parties would go on all night, every night. Finally the father disappeared, or was thrown out, the mother and children moved away, and I arrived.

The most land I had owned before my arrival was a single pot on a windowsill, which, though intended for my poor spider plant, also doubled as a pincushion for my incense and an alternate pee station for my cats. But this said, I did arrive on the land with the expectation that I would make something of it. My mother after all is a floral sorceress. Studied in both the Western and Japanese techniques of flower arrangement, she routinely used to win contests across the continent. My youth was spent ducking round stacks of cut flowers about the house, boxes of Oasis, bushels of eucalyptus, dogwood, and berried juniper.

My mother’s garden is the model of order; perfectly placed stones, finely trimmed bushes, tiny fountains, only the most tasteful of statuary; neo-classical cherubs, bronze toads, and fountains with Neptune spouting burbling water over his greening beard. And before my mother, her father, may he rest in peace, was most often represented in my memory as a man ambling up from his garden in the country, his thick hands black with mud, and a shovel over his shoulder. My father, meanwhile, while he probably has never grown anything in his life, certainly was and is an advocate of the square lawn, and in the city he was always out with the mower, in the country he was always out with the tractor. And together all these people, when I arrived on my lot, went on at length about how wonderful it was to have a little patch to work on, and how extensively they planned to contribute to the beautification of my yard.

It was the winter, though, when I arrived, and so any talk of what would happen to the lot, and to the front yard, and generally speaking to the house, were put on hold until the spring finally came around. My position was that I would prefer to wait, to see what the previous owners had left to pop out of the ground before I went ahead and cut the soil. I had come from hard times when I arrived; work in a dark basement where endlessly boxes fell down a black belt and bounced along until they came to the spot where I stood, and then I would lift them and stack them on a skid, and when the skid was full they would bring me another skid, and I would fill that one.

Each box looked exactly the same, yet contained something different; sometimes six in a row would be filled with cans of beans and I would nearly break my back lifting them. Then after the six heavy boxes there would suddenly be box filled with toilet paper and when I strained to lift it I would suddenly tumble over backwards—much to the amusement of my coworkers.

Sometimes the boxes would be filled with leaking bottles of industrial bleach and when I lifted them the bleach would burst through the cardboard and spill all over me, destroying my clothes.

The only thing that kept me alive in those days was the thought of my girlfriend, who worked the nightshift to my day shift, and whom I saw twice a day: once in the evening when I came home, usually as she was running out the door, and once in the middle of the night, when she came home, and dangled a few beer flavoured kisses onto me in my sleep.

But we did snatch a few happy moments out of all this misery, and it was enough to keep me sane. Apparently it was not enough to keep her sane, though, and after she ran away I cracked too, quit my job and lived on fifty cents a day, eating a single Danish and drinking tap water. At this point I inherited the house. I got a new job, I moved across town, and to help me pay the bills I rented out a portion of the house to a friend of mine. After this, things were pretty decent for a while. My friend and I discovered that we shared certain sensibilities about lawn care. He liked to mow the front, and we had the odd barbeque in the back, but other than this, nothing. No real gardening. I got a lot of lectures from my family about the joys of planting flowers, and I admit that I felt a few pangs of guilt about the matter, but I never did anything about it.

Eventually things turned bad with my tenant friend. He had always had a heart condition, and had undergone several operations to correct his condition, but in defiance of life he had always consumed alcohol like a maniac. Eventually this practice caught up with him and his body began to retain water; he swelled up to twice his usual size, and could not sleep lying down because he felt he would suffocate. Finally I, and some others, talked him to the hospital. He spent two months, first in the ICU, then in a ward.

When he was released he stayed sober for a week or two and then went back to the booze. He went in the hospital for another two months, and then again went back to the booze. About this time he began to bring all kind of people home with him in the night, bikers, maniacs, these people will fill the living room every night of the week, blasting loud music and stealing my personally property. Next my friend brought home a fifteen-year-old girl who had run away from home; the two apparently intended to live as lovers. I called children’s aid and had her removed, and then things turned bitter. The last straw came one night when I came down from my room and found an ambulance crew working on my friend on the living room floor. I told him after this that I loved him, and that we had been friends since childhood, but that he didn’t love himself, that he was driving me crazy, and that I wanted him to leave. He left, we never spoke again, and two years later he died.

Following this I rented the basement out to a woman with a two-year-old girl. I was hoping that a single mother would make a more stable tenant, but this was wrong. What she didn’t inform me before she moved in was that she was a smoker. The tobacco smoke wafted up day and night, and the house always smelled terrible. Not only this, but the woman cooked with nothing but Crisco and refused to open her windows so in addition to the tobacco, three or four times a day the stench of the oil will fill up the house.

Once again I began to unravel. The woman stayed home all day and watched the shopping network at full volume. Whenever I went down stairs I was dismayed to discover filthy plates everywhere, mountains of unwashed laundry, toys and endless shopping network paraphernalia strewn about on the floor. The breaking point came one day when she called me down to complain that there were mushrooms growing in her bathroom.

“You must be kidding, I said.” But she was serious. She wrote me a letter complaining that the carpet around the toilet was a breeding ground for mushrooms, and that I was a lousy landlord for letting them grow. Truth be told, there were mushrooms, I discovered; their stems began behind the toilet and stretched out (I kid you not, dear reader) three and a half feet into broad caps. Not that I don’t love mushrooms as much as anyone, but this was repulsive. I wrote my tenant a letter in response stating that had there not been a chest high mound of damp filthy laundry on the bathroom floor—including soiled diapers—there would not have been mushrooms growing around the toilet.

Later that night I heard my tenant screaming at the top of her lungs at her child that because she, the child, had not picked up her toys, Adam was now furious. The whole situation was getting very demented. I was beginning to suspect that perhaps I should have listened to my lawyer about concerns over serious domestic problems. I resolved then and there to use the only legal recourse open to me to unload a tenant: claiming that the space must be given up for an incoming member of one’s own family.

The only relative I had a remote chance of talking into cohabitation was my sister. She was tree planting at the time, and planned to take the money she made and take off to India for a while. “Why don’t you meet me over there?” She said. Ok. We ended up at a leper colony in the North and I ended up spending a whole lot of time up to my waist in a container full of cow manure, shovelling the shit into the back of a truck—but that’s another
story.

When we got back to Canada she moved into my basement. The carpets had to be pulled up because I discovered after my old tenant left that she had been locking the bathroom door and not allowing her daughter to use it. The little girl had been peeing on the bedroom carpet instead. This was an unpleasant discovery, to say the least. Things got better after my sister arrived. She had more of a hand for the garden than I did, and she filled the soil with herbs and flowers, generally under the tutelage of my mother. My sister’s friends began to come and help her plant. They began to have garden parties where people sat on the grass and ate picnic food, and let their children roam about, they played the drums, and generally it was a good atmosphere. Things were a lot better in the house at this time. People took crayons and drew butterflies on the walls, and some of the neighbours even began to speak to me again. All in all it was pretty nice.

The neighbours and I had not always seen eye to eye on the issue of gardening and home care. I suppose the worst case of disagreement came with a husband and wife who lived two doors down. The husband used to ignore me entirely, and the wife used to scowl when I walked by—which at least was some acknowledgement of my existence. One time one of their children, who, as I usually leave my doors wide open when the weather is nice, had been inviting herself into my house and hiding in my cupboards with her friends, told me that she had been told by her mother that she wasn’t allowed to come over anymore because I was a monster who ate children.

That same summer I found the husband standing on my front lawn (which I never mow) with his mower. He didn’t have the mower on, of course, he was just standing there glaring at me. “What is your problem?” He yelled at me. I wasn’t sure I knew which problem of mine he wished me to identify. “Why don’t you do you’re share and mow your goddamn lawn?” I shrugged and kept going.

Since then the other half of my lawn—the half belonging to the C. family has been mowed, but my remains untouched. The C. family have been much more tolerant than I deserve. Especially considering that they shared, for a couple of months, a semi-detached home with the worlds greatest/worst Death Metal Band—the name better left out of this story—and considering that they bear the brunt of my madness, they complain very little.

On the other side of my house is V. A woman from Tennessee, who listens full blast to country music, and who always has a very large dog barrelling round the flagpole replete with American flag in her back yard. V. claims that she keeps the dogs because she once caught a man peeping over her back fence from the rail tracks. It seems reasonable to me. V. also has a perfect lawn, and she keeps those black face lawn jockeys on it. She’s mad right now because the city is building housing for native families one street over from us, and she mourns the fact that the neighbourhood will now be filled with “drunken Indians”.

In spite of all her questionable views on this life—she keeps telling me, for example, that she’s just waiting for the socialists to ruin everything for Canada, and then she’ll move back to the USA. Her definition of a socialist is Mike Harris, “he’s too soft on those bums, she’ll say”—but in spite of her views on life, she is the only person on the street who was ever supported me in my totally out of control gardening habits, my penchant for loud obnoxious music, and my latest adventures in lawn decoration—but I’ll return to all of this.

It’s a coin toss, I suppose. Some people may have views that I simply could never hold myself, but I still have to live with them, and if they offer me friendship then I wonder where I, needing friends, should stand morally. I personally feel that the entire Canadian and American military should be disarmed and transformed into a giant disaster relief force, ready at a moment’s notice to fly all over the world and dig people out of all the natural catastrophes that we should expect shortly. I also snuck on the Downsview Air Force base recently and spray painted peace signs on the tanks (quite an adventure), but when I tell V. about such things (I admit I didn’t tell her about the tanks) she gets very upset and frustrated with me. I can’t say who is right or wrong about life. Right now, though, my conscience feels ok.

Back to the story though: The neighbour my sister liked least was J., who lives in the other half of the house from the husband and wife who seem to believe I am some sort of demon. J., ignoring the fact that my sister’s name is Alexandra, insisted on calling her Dina. I often tried to correct him, but he would get mad at me and say I was lying, claiming that my sister had told him that her name was Dina. Dina, I mean Alexandra, denies the conversation to this day.

I like J., he seems like a peaceful guy to me. He grows vegetables in his yard, and various sorts of flowers, and on the odd occasion that I have stuck my fingers into the sod he has been there with useful advice. He talks a lot about living in Italy as a youth and having a cherry orchard. I have one cherry tree in my yard, and he always gets mad that the birds take more of the cherries than I do. I don’t like cherries that much. I tell J. he can have them, I don’t know if he takes any, but the birds take a lot. My sister claims that she caught J. peeping in her window one time when she was making out with her boyfriend on her bed. She thinks he’s creepy. J. has a wife and he seems to have three or four daughters and sons, all of whom are in their middle to late teens. He invites me up on his front porch to drink wine with him sometimes, but I haven’t yet accepted.

My sister stayed for a year or two, throwing parties on the solstices, and building mosaic tabletops out of the plates my mother gave her as a housewarming present. During this period I returned to University to finish a degree I had given up on in the early nineties when I ran away to India to become a sitar master. University has been good to me, but the
studies left me with little time to bother with the garden. After my sister left things began to grow a little wild again in the back. Unwanted weeds began to overpower the wild strawberries, the creeping vines she had planted began to curl up the back steps of the deck and wind round the patio furniture. The wild roses began to spread into impossible thickets and from out of their canopy maple and oak trees pullulated into the sun.

Things got ugly with the neighbours again. Sometimes I would find J. in my back yard trimming things for me, Mr. C. next door caught me one time in the back and suggested that the best way to clear up all the weeds would be to pour buckets of bleach over everything. “Then you’ll just have nice flat dirt back there.” He advised. I admit that I did feel a little guilty about letting everything go, but I was also super lazy, and preoccupied with schoolwork, and I never got around to anything.

At the same time I began to notice something a little different about the yard as I let it go. It wasn’t just that V. had doubled the size of her back fence so that she did not have to see my mess anymore—she said it was to keep the dog in (and maybe this is true, as that dog was always hopping the fence and running amok), but I still took it as a bit of a slight. “I would never tell anyone how to live their life,” She said, “if a person wants to keep their yard wild that’s their business.” This at least was some kind of a positive response. But, as I said, things seemed a little different.

When I went back there now and then to poke around I started to notice a new energy to the place. I don’t know how to define it, but it felt strong, and it felt pleasant to be there. It was a little bit like walking in a forest; maybe the sense that I could discover things there that were a little unknown, a little untouched by human intervention. Mind you this sensation was often muted a little by passing freight trains, the unique rhythm of hammers on wood, children screaming, and people blasting their radios.

In the winter this sensation was somewhat muted by the scraping of shovels against the cold cement, but it was still there. I began to find curiosities in my yard: in the summer a pair of quails bobbing through the underbrush, in the winter a fox who bounced away through the back fence as I crunched towards it. And I must say my cats never complained about the new state of the yard. I knew when I called them that they would be found lounging in the shade under the tangled rose bushes.

Still, my mother’s garden was on the Toronto Garden Club’s official tour of beautiful gardens of the city, and perhaps I still harboured dreams of having the ladies over for tea one day in the garden, chattering about azaleas, clematis, boxwoods, and seeded junipers, but my mother, looking at my mess, didn’t like my chances.

I had visions of finally taking command of my yard, building stone path with exotic thymes and Scottish mosses softening the spaces between the stones. I dreamed of a rock garden with Greek oregano cascading down, and sage bursting upwards. I thought of the wild flower gardens I would have liked with tiger lilies and nasturtium blossoms, and marigolds changing its colours throughout the year, but knowing me it didn’t see like it was going to happen.

About this time, for reasons that I cannot now possibly explain, I was swept away ay reading I was doing about the Neolithic Age in Europe—not just the Neolithic age, and the whole concept of the original agricultural revolution, but with the archaeologists, or anthropologists, or perhaps simply flakes, who dressed up in pseudo-Neolithic clothing and attempted to reconstruct the live of the first farmers, using reconstructions of their original stone tools. I found the idea of attempting to clear massive untouched forests with small, sharpened, rocks to be oddly compelling. I looked at my yard, and I thought of my tea-sipping dream, and I wondered if the two fantasies could not somehow be merged into a reality that would somehow suit my particular worldview.

It was also the summer and I was out of school and unemployed, and I thought that regressing 25, 000 years would be a lot more fun than pounding on doors with an armload of resumes. The first task was to fashion a hand axe. I didn’t want to bother with all the stone chipping, and plus the flakes say chipping is not nearly as simple as it looks, so I went to Canadian Tire and bought a small hatchet. It was about the same size as a stone axe and I imagined that it would do pretty much he same job in pretty much the same way. Armed with my hatchet I ventured out into the bush and began to flail indiscriminately and every growing thing in sight.

As I became more proficient I began to actually aim at the stalks of certain plants trying to fell them. Some plants had become trees a couple of inches thick, and though I could eventually bring them down, I discovered that the hatchet was little use for removing their roots from the ground and so I returned to Canadian Tire to find something that approximated a stone that could be used for digging. The staff there suggested that digging stones had been out of stock for some time, but that I might try a trowel. It was close enough, but even with the trowel and the hatchet I was still making poor progress bringing down the thickest areas of growth. Plus, while the hatchet worked well on thicker stalks, it was no good on all the thinner, more thickly allocated growth—particularly the wild rose bushes, which had been leaving stinging spines in my hands every time I attacked them.

The original cave farmers had used a kind of curved stick into which they placed small stone teeth with sharpened edges thus creating the original scythe. I went back to Canadian Tire, but they didn’t have scythes. They said they would have plastic ones come Halloween, if I wanted to dress as death, but no real ones. I called my friend Jennifer, who lives in the country, if she knew where I could get a scythe but she denied that she knew. She said they were using some kind of machine now to cut hay. It might have just been her concern for my sudden interest in scythes that stopped her from assisting me, but what do I know? I went back to Canadian Tire and bought a kind of thing on a pole with a hoe on one side and a forkey thingy on the other. This tool turned out to be really good. The hoe side was great for slashing down big sections of the bushes, and the forkey thingy allowed me to claw them away without getting stabbed by the thorns (as much). And so in this way the land began to be cleared.

A funny thing began to happen as I worked away in my yard. Suddenly my neighbours began to stop and converse with me. They expressed interest in my plans for the garden and offered to give me all kinds of help. They’re really not such bad people, I thought. I mean if I’m sitting in my house all day with the blinds drawn, and I only emerge after nine at night to return at six in the morning, of course they are going to accuse me of wanting to boil their children alive, but hell, out here in the sunshine, everything is beautiful.

I was becoming a part of the neighbourhood again. J. started offering to give me tomato shoots to plant in the dirt next spring, and the C.s next door stopped talking about pouring bleach all over my plants. Soon, after a lot of sweat, and chopping at root systems under the ground, and discovering fifty five thousand new varieties of insect, I had a section of yard that was essentially ready mud. The rest of the yard, everything past archway of the cherry tree and the crab-apple tree, I left as it was: wild and shaded. The thickets had not grown up there because of the heavy shade, I guess, and so that part of the yard was a little like a forest clearing: just low growing plants, and the odd twisted branch that had fallen down from the oak. I never had any intention of messing with this area. I began to think of it as a little sacred, actually. I had visions of making it into a religious space and inviting young witch girls over to dance with me round a mad bonfire—but I haven’t worked out all the details of this one yet. The main problem being large open fires in the city—apparently they are illegal , but I digress (3).

So I had this mud, and now I wanted to build a rock garden. The problem was that I didn’t have any rocks. Where did people go to find rocks in the Stone Age? This wasn’t a good solution. They certainly didn’t go to Humber Nurseries, where medium size rocks go for sixty-five bucks each.

I went to the Sun-Yat Sen Gardens in Vancouver, and there they had rocks that they had dredged up from the bottom of some lake in China and shipped over to Canada, because only those rocks would do. They also had to get a special licence to import some super rare type of wood over to build the posts of some of the buildings inside the garden. My friend Anthony used to walk around the outside wall of the garden and take pictures of the crack-heads scrounging around on the pavement. In a way it isn’t all so different from some gated Disney community down in Florida, but in another way I thought of the large Hindu temples I had seen, and I liked the idea that one could make a big stone wall and shut the outside world out, that one could create a little but of meditative solitude in the middle of a lot of madness.

As I said, I felt a little something sacred about my space and I would have loved to build a wall, but I thought I should start with something modest and create a rock garden instead. If things got complicated later then the vines from my rock garden could climb up the new wall and dangle deliciously out into the outside world, but first I needed to find the rocks. The most budget conscious solution (as I refused to pay for rocks) was to go down to the Leslie Spit, where the constructions companies dump all their broken concrete on the beach and collect a whole lot of that stuff to take back to my garden. It quickly became clear, though, as I picked about on the beach, that I wasn’t going to be able to carry much concrete in one go, and anyhow it was a forty minute walk back to my house, all up hill, and it was one hell of a muggy day.

The obvious solution to this, of course, was to take a shopping cart from Loblaws, fill it up with concrete, and push that back up to my house. It occurred to me as I began to heave the cart along the bicycle trail by the lakeshore that a shopping cart full of concrete is quite a bit heavier than I had anticipated. Another problem was that no small number of uber-fit bottled water sucking roller blade people were flings sarcasms at me as I advanced, like Sisyphus, my shoulder against the cart, and I was not yet off of the flatter part of the journey.

My cart, which had once runneth over, now began to shed stones along the way. My breaks of exhaustion began to increase and I lurched forward under the sun. More fearsome than the sun, I discovered, as I began to ascend up Coxwell Avenue, past the donught shops, and the hair salons, and the bingo halls, the heads of patrons turning as though they were soldiers turning up from their shaving and their tin plated meals to watch an enemy stride boldly down the centre of their camp, more fearsome than the sun was the difficulty I had crossing curbs.

The cart, which of course had a bad wheel and always veered to the left no matter how hard I tried to control it, was not easy to manage over the edges of curbs, and I had terrible visions of the thing flipping and the contents spilling out into the street just as a car came round the corner. How would I ever explain what I was doing to the police? Somehow, though, I made it back to my yard, collapsing in the mud with only eight concrete stones to show for it—all the rest having been dropped en route—and I never did go back for more, and I never did get that rock garden going.

I also never got back to gardening again, and the next year the mud sprouted all new sorts of weeds, grew unmanageable and my neighbours stopped talking to me again. I’ve had a few roommates since this time. Sahar, who didn’t seem to care much for gardening, but who parked her car in my back lot. Sahar brought a lot of good energy to the house, though. Larry and Anthony who used to fence with pop bottles on the front lawn, and who drove the neighbours nuts, and lastly Evan, who lives here now, and who is the only roommate I’ve ever had who shares my passion for houseplants. Ok, maybe he isn’t as bad as me—I’ve set up grow lights under my stairs so I can grow lavender and basil under my stairs in the wintertime—it refreshes the air and it makes the place smell great.

I got the idea from my mother, who told me that the worst thing about flying was the recycled air on the long international flights. If they would just put a bed of moss in the bottom of each of the drink carts enough oxygen would be produced to keep the people on the plane breathing fresh air. I don’t know about you reader, but I hate flying and I’d like my senses to be as dull as possible when I’m up there, but I must return to my point, as I’m drifting again.

I was planning to clean up the garden again next year, but I think that I won’t bother. I liked it best when it was wild, and if anything has changed for me it is that where once I might have listened to the people who complained about the way the place was kept, now I feel comfortable about letting it keep itself. It’s not any kind of revelation that has brought me to this pass; it is more like a gradual accumulation of life experiences. When I was a little kid I used to have to walk past this one house in North Toronto that had the strangest yard—they had all kinds of home made statues in there, and wild bushes growing up around them, the house was painted in magnificent colours, and to be frank the place terrified me.

Truth be told I’m getting to be a little dotty that way myself now. I’ve recently started hanging up pieces of scrap metal, and forks and bits of electrical equipment in the front of the house for reasons that I don’t really think I can explain. I don’t feel bad about it, I just can’t explain it. I was sitting and having dinner with my father this evening, and he was listing all the ways that he thought I did things differently from everyone else—this is a favourite topic of his. The manifestations of my yard were high on his list. He asked me what ever happened to the lawnmower he bought me.

“It’s sitting in a shed on top of the other lawnmower I already had.” I told him, “why, did you want it back?”

I asked my father if he’d ever done any gardening. “To be fair,” I told him, “I wrote that you didn’t garden and I want to make sure I was telling the truth.” It wasn’t true though. He reminded me that back in the 1950s he had planted a tree in Edmonton in his back yard. He took me to Edmonton a couple of years back and he was pleased to see that the tree was still growing. As far as I know he drives by and visits it every time he goes out West. “I don’t garden, but I do trees.” He said. So maybe his philosophy and mine aren’t so different after all. I’m not putting any seed in the ground, but I think I might just let my little lot go and see where it takes me (4).

***

footnotes:
(1) This is kind of a frivolous addition, but I started thinking about the expanse of time when I read Rachel Carson’s ‘The Gray Beginnings’. I have to say that I included my section on Neolithic farming as a reference to the long history of the world, as well. Obviously I was purposely mixing up some of the actual facts about the Neolithic for the sake of fun, but I still want to give some impression of the expanse of human history no matter how demented it may seem on paper.

(2) Epiphany is a pretty strong word, but a couple of recent discoveries inspired not only this story, but also the way that I plan to approach my back yard in the future. The first, Lawn and Order, inspired me by showing me that there were diverse ways in which one’s yards could be kept, and that people were comfortable in their diversity. I would try in my own life to be more tolerant than many of the people in the film were to the ways that my neighbours kept their lawns, but in return I would like them to be tolerant of the way I kept mine. I’m the odd one out though because as it stands now—as I say at the end of this tale—my yard is turning into quite a spectacle. Nevertheless Lawn and Order made me realize that there were other people out there simply living as they chose, and it made me feel good. It made me feel like what I was doing was not unnatural (even if it was anti-social), and in its way this movie meant a lot to me.

The sensation was further cemented, I would say, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s The Faithful Gardiner. There were two concepts in this book that stood out for me: first, the idea that the land can have a memory and that the people on the land can have a memory of the land. I have tried to convey something of this in my story. That this place doesn’t just have a static history, but that as the faces that live over this land changes the face of the land changes. The two parts are inexorably linked. I believe that there can be a strong connection to a certain place. Even though I love to travel, I get a certain sentimental twang when I return to Ontario and I see the landscape here—the black mud that I miss so very much when I am in Asia, even more so perhaps the pink granite walls on each side of the highway in Northern Ontario. I don’t know why but these elements of place mean a great deal to me. I think that it is possible to fall in love with a new place, but that as one does so the new place must grow towards the person as much as the person grows towards the place. I believe that only after six years of my living on this spot of land have I, and the land really come to understand what it is that we want from each other. A flight of fancy perhaps, but for the first time ever I feel completely comfortable with the way that I live. Even if I’ve been rejected by the neighbourhood, I feel like I’ve been accepted by my lawn. This brings me to my second point about The Faithful Gardiner, I loved the idea that a plot of land could be left to grow and become whatever it decided to. I want to say that the land can be left to its own devices, but my current roommate, Evan, has trouble with “devices” he says that land doesn’t have devices, that it just is. Of course, his opinion shouldn’t matter to my story, since it’s my story, and it’s ostensibly about me getting comfortable with my own worldview, but I’m taking his advice anyhow and merely saying that the land being left to grow without my (or anyone else’s if I can help it) intervention is a beautiful thing. The Faithful Gardiner with all it’s optimism about the world makes the untended patch of land transform into a luxurious forest, and all I’ve been getting thus far is a lot of weeds and bushes, but I’m still very happy with the result.

(3) Goats, apparently, are illegal to keep in the city, too, which is too bad because I really wanted a goat.

(4) David Abram, in ‘The Ecology of Magic’ discusses the fact that we can never truly understand the thoughts and feelings of another form. Everndon, in The Natural Alien, expresses this too in his discussion of the worldview of a woodtick. I get a couple of things from this, first that it should be noted that even between humans we can not exactly understand the worldview of another. I live next door to V. and so in terms of environment and influence there is little that divides us, yet we couldn’t possibly see the world in a way that is more different.

The same thing applies to my father. Essentially we are of the same genetic stock, and I spent my entire life being exposed to him and his views (about mowing the lawn, and other things) yet we have come to vastly different conclusions about the way that life should be lived. He says to me that this is not just a matter of viewpoint, but also of time, and that when I arrive at his age I may well see the world as he does. It is quite possible. Nevertheless, I don’t think he saw the world I do now when he was my age, so how can I possibly respond to his claim? Time will tell I guess. The second point is—and this comes out more in Everndon—though the passage about feeding ants (I know I mention it a lot, but ants fascinate me) on the plantation in Bali in Abram is also apt—is that humans being are a part of their environment, as much as everything else. We contribute, and we are indivisible from the whole. I truly feel that the yard and I are coming to some kind of an understanding about things. Whether the yard had this understanding when the other people lived here I don’t know. The abusive husband who used to live in this house came back to visit one day when I was out, according to J., and when he saw the condition of the back yard he was disgusted. All of the work he had put into it was gone, swallowed up by my apathy for/ resolve not to engage in yard work. So that was too bad for him. The yard had moved on and become something else for somebody else. I would rather try to live as a decent person (whatever that is) and have a messy yard then be a wife beater and keep a neatly trimmed garden, but this is hardly the point. The point is that the land isn’t anything and we aren’t anything—we mould it and it moulds us, we are part of the same larger entity and the changes of the universe are reflected in us both.